"My child, your manners are very faulty, and I am consequently much disappointed. You take so much after me, and my nearest relations had such refined manners, that I made sure you must resemble my father and brothers. There is, however, nothing on earth to prevent your becoming the gentleman I wish to see you, and remember to write ineffaceably on the tablets of your memory, 'Too much familiarity breeds contempt.' You remember how seriously young ——'s forwardness has been commented on. Well, it is true, you have never, as far as I know, spoken as he has done; but as I have seldom seen you in company, nor your father either, without observing some want of politeness, is it not probable that other people have their eyes open also?"
These admonitions received, Leighton started on his journey to Rome. At Innsbruck, on August 18, 1852, he began to write a Diary, in order that his mother should hear the details of his travels, and to serve "as a clue" by which he might one day recall the "impressions and emotions of the years of his artistic noviciate."
Leighton's utterances on paper in these early days display the same intense exuberance of vitality which, during the whole of his notable career, served to spur on his mental and emotional powers to perform with great completeness all the various kinds of work which he undertook; a vitality which conquered triumphantly the effects of indifferent health and troubled eyesight. In the diaries and letters is also to be traced the existence of that Greek-like combination of qualities so characteristic of Leighton—namely, explicit precision in his thought and expression, and a subtle power of analysis, united with great emotional sensitiveness and enthusiastic warmth of temperament. His feeling for beauty was an intoxicating joy to him. Heartfelt and genuine joy engendered by beauty in nature and art is not a very common feeling among the moderns, though so much fuss is made by many in our day in their endeavours to become "artistic"; but, as a ruling guide, beauty has gone out of fashion. The accounts that Leighton gives of his ecstasies in the presence of beautiful scenes, enforce the belief entertained by those who knew him best, that it was the power which beauty exercised over him that developed his exceptional strength in all artistic directions. What force in the over-riding of difficulties does not passion give to the lover! No less a force was engendered in Leighton by the inspiration of the beauty of nature.
In the letter to his mother, which accompanies the Diary, referring to the joy he has been experiencing, Leighton adds: "I feel almost a kind of shame that so much should have been poured down on me. I will put my talent to usury, and be no slothful steward of what has been entrusted to me. Every man who has received a gift ought to feel and act as if he was a field in which a seed was planted, that others might gather the harvest." The purity of purpose which guided Leighton's life to the end, generated first by the precepts of his mother in the fertile soil of his own beautiful nature, subsequently developed by the teaching of the high-minded Steinle, and finally established later by other elevating influences, chastened the emotional side of Leighton's passion for beauty, and disentangled it even in the earliest days from lower and purely sensuous contamination. The puritanical attitude of mind towards beauty appeared to Leighton absolutely impure and desecrating, in that it associated influences and feelings which are of the lowest with the appreciation of God's most beautiful creations, and some of man's highest aspirations with sensations entirely degraded and unworthy.
Fun and humour abound in the family letters, and in the Diary. Leighton was never guilty of being sentimental, and when referring to the word ideal in one of his letters, he writes he "hates such stuff." After he died, it was written of him: "He was no idealist; needless to say, he was no materialist, no one less so; nor does the term realist seem to recall his nature. He was—if such a word can be used—an actualist, the actual was to him of primary importance. But the actual meant a great deal more to Leighton than it does to most of us. Life and its vivid interests was spread over a much wider area; so many more of its various ingredients were such very actual entities to him."[17]
And when Leighton started, at the age of twenty-one, to begin his independent life, we feel that it is with the actual that he grappled—the actual in his sensations, his feelings, his impressions, his conditions. An unmistakable note of reality rings through his description of all these. He has no tendency, even unconsciously, when under the glamour of the most entrancing impressions, to colour the picture other than he actually saw it. In the strength of his own real nature he goes forth on the journey of life.
DIARY
Innsbruck, August 18, 1852.
I contemplate the life and adventures of Mr. Thumb.