The life, letters and work of Frederic Leighton. Volume I

by Mrs. Russell Barrington

EARLY PICTURE OF BOY RESCUING SLEEPING BABY FROM EAGLE
Leighton House Collection[ToList]

Belonging also to the intuitive, more emotional side of his nature, was the curiously strong influence places exercised over him, certain localities affecting him and exciting his sympathies with a strong power.

In 1857 he wrote to his elder sister: "If I am as faithful to my wife as I am to the places I love, I shall do very well!"

In order to seize fully Leighton's complete individuality, an understanding of Italy, his "second home," is perhaps necessary—a conception of the nature of the unsophisticated Italian life which fascinated him so greatly when as yet no invasion had been made of cosmopolitan, so-called civilisation. As a magnet, Italy drew Leighton to her.[6] Under the influence of her radiant beauty, breathing such a life of charm and colour beneath sunlit skies, he felt the sources of happiness in his own nature expand and his powers ripen. In the fertility of her soil, the vitality of her people, the superb quality of her art—fine and gracious in its perfection, and distributed generously throughout the length and breadth of her land—he experienced influences which intensified his emotions and vivified his imagination. The child-like charm of her people, so spontaneously happy, enjoying the ease and assurance of nature's own aristocracy, because enjoying nature's generous gifts with unabashed fulness of sensation, in whom are non-existent those sensibilities which create self-consciousness, restraint, and an absence of self-confidence, aroused in Leighton an interest deeper than mere pleasure. It was to him like the joy of a yearning satisfied, as of those who, having had their lot cast for years with aliens and foreigners, find themselves again with their own kith and kin, surrounded by the native atmosphere which had lent such enchantment to childhood. Again and again he returned to Italy to be made happy, to be revived, to be strengthened by her. Her influence became kneaded into his very being, not only nourishing his sense of beauty and rendering more complete the artist nature within him, but touching the sources from which his artist temperament sprang, inspiring his very personality and changing it into one which was certainly not typically English. His rapid utterance, his picturesque gesture, his very appearance, were not emphatically English.[7]

Certain Englishmen who knew Leighton but slightly felt out of sympathy with him for this reason, experiencing a difficulty in recognising him as one of themselves. It was, however, only on the surface that a difference existed. Once intimate with Leighton, he was ever found to be au fond English of the English. After the age of thirty it was in England Leighton fought the serious battle of life—Italy was but the playground, though a playground of such fascination to him that the glamour of it was spread over the working hours no less than over the holidays. In these days we have to go into the smaller towns and villages to discover the typical Italian characteristics; but when Leighton, as a child, was taken from the gloom of Bloomsbury to this, to him a magic world,—syndicates, building-companies, tramways, and modern things generally, had not as yet invaded either Rome or Florence. When grown up and master of his own actions, he wandered into unsophisticated haunts—villages and towns off the beaten tracks, where with abnormal facility he learned the distinctive pâtois of every district, listening with delight to local folk-songs, and watching the peasants and the aborigines of the soil. In early sketch-books we find records of visits to Albano, Tivoli, Cervaro, Subiaco, San Giuminiano, and to even smaller and less known villages in Tuscany and Veneziano, where he enjoyed the unalloyed flavour of Italy and her people. Those who pay only flying visits to the country after they are grown up would find a difficulty perhaps in realising what Italy was to Leighton; but any one visiting for a few weeks even such a well-known place as Albano, without other preoccupation than to watch the natives and wander in the beautiful scenery to the sound of the many flowing fountains, could still catch something of the true national spirit which fascinated him so greatly. The typical Britisher might regard the ways of these natives of the Provincia di Roma as irrational, idle, semi-savage. Doubtless the streets and piazzas abound in noisy inhabitants, gesticulating with wild dramatic fervour, who appear to have otherwise little to do in life but to loiter and "look on"; sociable groups of women sit round the doorways knitting; but it is the talk, accompanied by excited action, which is engrossing them. Charmingly pretty children are playing everywhere—idle, troublesome, but so happy! To the accompanying sound of running waters,—night and day,—cries, yells, and songs ring out through the ancient little town.[8] High up on the side of the mountains it overlooks the Roman Campagna, the tragic strangeness of those land-waves rolling away, flattened and stretched out, for miles and miles, under the dome of light and shadowing cloud, a network of bright gleams and violet lakelets, to the far-off brilliant shine on the sea limit.[9] This noise, dramatic action, gesticulation, all ending apparently in nothing in particular, but filling the little town with such amazing vitality—what is it all about? The typical Englishman does not know—does not care to know, despising the whole thing as beneath his notice. But Leighton knew well what it meant. From experiences in his own nature he realised that it was but an innocent outlet, through voice and gesture, of an excitement resulting from an imperative dramatic instinct, a vital force in the emotional nature of the Italian. He recognised the necessity for such an outlet in such temperaments through his sympathy with the glad exuberance of physical vitality enjoyed in this sunlit land; anti-puritan though it may be, this exuberance is none the less pure and innocent.

The holy Saint Francis in his ecstasies of spiritual illumination would, it is said, break out into song from the natural impulse to find an outlet and to throw off the excess of excitement, that thrilled through his being.[10]

Leighton knew that to suppress the vitality which needs such an outlet was to minimise the forces necessary for life's best work. He himself, in the working of his mind, was possessed of a magnificent facility—a facility which left the strength of his emotions fresh and free, to enjoy the ecstasies of admiration and delight which the choice gifts of nature and art had given him; but there are many among modern men and women, taught by much reading, who overweight their physical vitality in the effort to develop intellect and to forward self-interest, till all simple physical enjoyment is lost, and the natural man becomes repressed into a mental machine incapable of any spontaneous emotions of joy, and blunt to the fine aroma of life's keen and pure pleasures—

"My nature is subdued to what it works in."

To Leighton the simple joyous child of nature, in the form of the unsophisticated Italian, was a preferable being. To the end of his life he retained much of the child in his own nature, and had ever an inborn sympathy with the love for children so evident everywhere in unspoilt Italy; for the gracious caressing of them by the poorest of the poor—old men in the veriest tatters and rags showing a complete and beautiful submission to the dominating charms of babyhood.

The memory of the hideous, gruesome stories of baby-farming in England strikes indeed a contrast with the scenes that abound at every turn in any old, dirty, picturesque Italian village, and assuredly settles the question, Is our English development of civilisation an unalloyed benefit?