"Fred.
"If Gussy did want to be a charitable Christian, she would copy in her pretty handwriting five lines a day of my horrid scrawl, for I am ashamed that my Pebbles should remain in such a state."
"Bath, Sunday, November 29, 1852.
"My beloved Child,—I need not tell you how close an account I keep of the day of the month, nor how my heart beats as the foreign post hour approaches, because you know how tenderly I love you, and what it cost me to part from you, and consequently how anxiously I look for the consolation for your absence which your letters afford me, and I had hoped you would supply this balm liberally. Of course while you were actually travelling I made every allowance for weariness, &c. &c., but if you have carried out your intentions, you must have been in Rome quite ten days, and though I said in my last I hoped for the future you would leave only three weeks between each of your letters home, it is now more than a calendar month since I had last the great happiness of seeing your handwriting. I would not, my love, be unreasonable, but you must remember that, in addition to the natural desire to hear how you manage for yourself, my maternal anxieties have been awakened by the indisposition you spoke of as not serious, it is true, but which has started up before me, explaining your delay in writing, and which, in spite of reason's suggestion that a slight illness would not hinder your work, whilst Gamba would prevent the addition of suspense to the trouble a serious attack would cause us, has brought the evil of separation very bitterly before me. The goodness of your heart, my child, will teach you how you can soften this to me; it is one of the few occasions remaining to you to exercise self-denial, as you live alone and have no one to please but yourself. I now and then wonder a little anxiously whether you ever think of my exhortations, so much have I wished that you should be in the retirement of your house as gentlemanly as you are in company. But then I recollect sentences in your letter, proving such right views in important matters, such a clear understanding of your responsibilities, that I resolve to believe that you will strive to do right in small matters as well as in great ones; indeed, my child, I have remarked with deep satisfaction your appreciation of the blessings that are allotted to you, and indeed you do right to enjoy them with all humility, for I cannot flatter you in opposition to the dictates of my conscience that you are so well deserving of happiness as your poor sister. She is deserving of the highest respect of all, bearing all her trials with admirable patience. The persevering rain, which has caused a great deal of illness in Bath, has had a very bad effect on her, throwing her back just as she was beginning to mend, so that she has a great deal of rough ground to go over again. We revel in literary abundance, even German and French books are in the circulating libraries, and I often wish the days longer to read and to work. Gussy says she hopes you will not think her ill-natured if she declines copying your letters, for, indeed, were she willing to undertake this difficult task, I should forbid it, as her eyes, always delicate, are unusually weak; whether this comes from too long confinement to the house, or from crying, I cannot say; the latter is produced by Heimweh! what do you think of this for an English girl? Thank God, she employs the best remedy against regretful feelings, as she is occupied from morning till night. Are you equally industrious? I read the other day the following assertion by Southey, which I copy for you, in case you should still have the habit, so common amongst young people, of wasting during the day occasional quarter-hours or ten minutes, because, they ask, only such a few minutes, how often have I heard that excuse. This is the portion: 'Ten minutes' daily study, for seven years, will give the student sufficient knowledge of seven languages to read them with ease, and even to travel without an interpreter in the respective countries.' Is not this an encouragement to industry? We imagine you by this time settled in your lodging and beginning to feel at home. God grant that you may have your health there and meet with kind friends; we are curious to know what your letters will do for you. In the meantime you will, I doubt not, have met some old acquaintances—the Henry Walpoles, the Laings, Mr. Petre, the Isembourgs, and Princess Hohenlohe; to what amount the latter will condescend, I know not, but remember, I entreat you, my advice. The two former families you will most likely have first met at church; let me hope at least that you will not abandon the habit; it may at last bring a blessing upon you. The intentions of your Frankfurt acquaintances we learnt in a letter from Mme. Beving; she had heard from M. Fenzi that he had given you a general invitation to his villa, and that you had dined with him, or been asked to do so; I do not know whether he made any comment on you. Did your organ of veneration do its duty? Forgive my hints, dear son; all your good qualities are pictured in lively colours before my eye, but I do not even try to forget your faults, lest I should neglect my duty to you; with the best resolutions we all occasionally require a fillip to our conscience. Next Friday is your birthday. It will be the first on which you have not received your parents' blessing in person. We shall not forget you, my darling. God bless you, my own dear Freddy; in this prayer your father joins most fervently; think often of the advice and love of your devoted mother,
"A. Leighton."
COSTUMI DI PROCIDA. Rome, 1853[ToList]
1 Brock Street, Bath,
December 13, 1852.
Dear Frederic,—I need not say that we had all of us great pleasure in receiving your letter from Rome, though not before your dear mother had suffered great anxiety from the delay—the greater, because your former letter did not give a very encouraging account of your health. It gave us also great pain to hear of the vexatious disappointments which have attended your first entrance into the Eternal City, but this was, perhaps, to be expected, as the sanguine expectations of youth are seldom realised, and we may hope that by this time you will have found in other advantages and opportunities for improvement a sufficient compensation for the loss of those you had expected. What you say about the weakness of your eyesight is far more serious, and, indeed, would have occasioned us alarm if we did not hope and believe that you meant no more than we already knew at Frankfort, that your eyes were weak, and not that they had continued to grow weaker. But when I consider that your only means of acquiring an honourable independence and gratifying your laudable ambition depends upon your eyesight, I surely need no arguments to urge you in the strongest manner to use all those precautions for its preservation which your own good sense must suggest—to throw aside your brush or pencil the first moment that your eyes begin to smart or water, not to draw on white paper or by candlelight (or lamp or any artificial light), nor read except large print, nor small print even by daylight, except for a few minutes occasionally in a book of reference, and to acquire as much knowledge as you can, independently of books, by conversation with well-informed men, if you are so fortunate as to meet with them; when you cannot paint, talk, or observe, exercise your memory, it will store and cultivate your mind more and try your eyes less than reading, which in your case cannot be systematically pursued. You may perhaps meet some well-informed young men amongst the German artists. Above all, draw your compositions as large as possible (or rather as necessary for your eyes) and not such as your architectural drawings, "Four Seasons," &c., which contain so many objects minutely drawn. I suppose, likewise, that chalk and charcoal must be better than pencil, and the paint-brush better than either. You have no reason to complain either of want of ideas or of power of expressing them (at all events with your pen), however deficient you may think yourself in a command of language for conversation; but the fact is that, considering the distance that separates us, it is of much more importance to us to know how you are, what you do, and what you observe, than what you think. Your letters remind me of my friend, Dr. Simpson of York, who, when we sat down for dinner, would enter into some abstract discussion, say, of the nature and varieties of fish, or, à propos of the aitch-bone, on the homologies of the skeleton, while in the meantime fish and beef were growing cold and my appetite impatiently vivacious; so in your letters, while we are burning with impatience to know how you are, what progress you are making, or at all events what are your opportunities of progress in the art, you indulge us with abstract reflections on the theory of art in general. Your last letter, it is true, begins and ends with interesting matter, but with an interpolation of some three pages of disquisition on the nature of genius in art, &c., &c., which, however well thought or expressed, would be more in place in an essay than in your letter to us who are so much more interested in what immediately concerns yourself. The consequence is that, although with a praiseworthy wish to please us you have tried your eyes with a long letter, you have omitted much we were anxious to know—whether, for instance, you were conscious of having made any progress, or derived any advantage from the many pictures both in art and nature you have had so many opportunities of seeing; whether you had been making many, and what sketches or copies, for we are quite convinced that you have not been losing your time; whether you have been comparing what you can do with what other artists of about your age and standing in Italy can do, and whether the result is satisfactory; whether there are any among them from whom you can take any useful hints; whether Overbeck or any other competent artist is willing to assist you; whether, above all, you saw Power at Florence, and what he thought of your compositions; whether you find in Rome the material advantages you expected in the way of models, &c., and whether you will think it advisable to draw from the antique—the Apollo, Torso, &c.; in short, I cannot too strongly impress upon you that one fact is of more value to us than a volume of reflections. Of course, I would not have you infer that the progress of your mind, your thoughts and feelings, are by any means a matter of indifference to us, but after all they can be only imperfectly shown in occasional letters, and must necessarily exclude information of a more positive and, for the present, of a more important nature. Let me caution you, too, against reading any of the modern German works on æsthetics; they can be only imperfectly understood without a knowledge of the philosophies, of which they form a part, and any advantage you may derive from them will not be at all commensurate to the time and trouble, especially for you who have so much positive knowledge to acquire. If, however, any of your German friends can convey to you in conversation any clear ideas on the subject (and if they have them themselves there is no reason why they should not), well and good, but do not let them impose upon you, as they so often do upon themselves, with words either without any well-defined meaning, or one different from, or even the direct contrary, of the usual one. According to Hegel, for instance, 'das Schöne, ist das scheinen' (Schöne from scheinen) 'der Idee durch ein sinnliches Medium.' Now every artist knows without Hegel that his idea, or, if he prefers to think so, nature's idea within and through him, appears or manifests itself in the sensuous material, in colours if he be a painter, or stone if he be a sculptor, but this would be worse than trite, it would be intelligible to a plain understanding. Idee has a far deeper meaning. If you hear a German flourishing away with the magic word, ask him what he means. He will tell you, perhaps, that it is das Absolute or der objective Geist as distinguished from the Begriff or subjectiver Geist, or rather the indifference of both, and that is neither one nor t'other, but potentially either, or the an sich, or an und für sich, or rather the an, für, über sich; at last after much hin und herreiten you get some faint glimmering of what is meant; perhaps what some people call the soul in nature, or in still plainer English, nature, or the unknown cause of all we see, not an abstraction but a real entity, impersonal, however, and therefore not a god, acting according to certain laws, unconsciously in external nature (in ihrem Anders'sein) coming to itself—acting consciously in man, but more reflectively in science, more instructively in art. Well, you have caught the Idee at last (perhaps!) through its many Proteus-like changes and recognise an old friend after all—scratch your head, and ask whether you are any wiser than before. 'Das scheinen der Idee durch ein sinnliches Material'—in the Madonna of Raphael, for instance—'ist das Schöne.' Why then, says Punch, not equally so in the pork-pie and the mustard-pot, since the Idee manifests itself equally in both. The German solves the difficulty by "Sie sind ein practischer Engländer, und haben keinen speculativen Geist." In the meantime, let us hope that nature will use you as her tool to carry out in colours and canvas some of her beautiful ideas, and leave it to the German to find out how the practical Englishman who has not read Hegel's "Æsthetics" has set about it. That you may accomplish this to the utmost extent of your wishes is the sincere wish of, dear Fred, your affectionate father,