"The Rue de Clichy of which he (Thackeray) speaks was the street in which Miss Foster lived, under whose care both Fanny and Adelaide Kemble were placed, when they successively went to Paris. Then each in turn came out and made her mark, and each in turn married and left the stage for that world in which real tragedies and real comedies are still happening, and where men and women play their own parts instinctively and sing their own songs. Adelaide's short artistic career lasted from 1835 to 1842, long enough to impress all the subsequent years of her life. With all the welcoming success which was hers, there must have been many a moment of disillusion, discouragement, and suffering for a girl so original, so aristocratic in instinct, so quick of perception, so individual, 'De la bohême exquise,' as some great lady once described her. The following page out of one of her early diaries gives a vivid picture of one side of her artistic life: '...Received an intimation that the company who are to act with me had arrived at Trieste, and would be here at eleven to rehearse the music. At twelve came Signor Carcano (the director of the music), and a dirty-looking little object, who turned out to be the prompter. After they had sat some time wondering what detained the rest, a little fusty woman, with a grey-coloured white petticoat dangling three inches below her gown, holding a thin shivering dog by a dirty pocket-handkerchief, and followed by a tall slip of a man, with his hair all down his back, and decorated with whiskers, beard, and mustachios, made her appearance. I advanced to welcome my Adalgisa, but without making any attempt at a return of my salutation, she glanced all round the room and merely said, "Come fa caldo qui! Non c'è nessuno ancora? Andiamo a prendere un caffé," and taking the arm of the hairy man retreated forthwith. Then came Signor Gallo, leader of the band, then the tenor, who could have gained the prize for unwashedness against 'em all—and after half-an-hour more waiting, Adalgisa and the hairy one returned, and after about half-an-hour more arrived my bass, and, God bless him, he came clean!
"'We then went to work. Adalgisa could think of nothing but her dog, who kept up a continuous plaintive howl all the time we sang, which she assured me was because it liked the band accompaniment better than the piano, as it never made signs of disapprobation when she took it to rehearsals with the orchestra. She also informed me that it had five puppies, all of which it had nursed itself, as if Italian dogs were in the habit of hiring out wet nurses....'" And again—
"I can remember her describing to us one of these performances, and her enjoyment of the long folds of drapery as she flew across the stage as Norma and how she added with a sudden flash, half humour, half enthusiasm: 'I have everything a woman could wish for, my friends and my home, my husband and my children, and yet sometimes a wild longing comes over me to be back, if only for one hour, on the stage again, and living once more as I did in those early adventurous times.' She was standing in a beautiful room in Park Place when she said this. There were high carved cabinets, and worked silken tapestries on the walls, and a great golden carved glass over her head—she herself in some velvet brocaded dress stood looking not unlike a picture by Tintoret."
CHAPTER III[ToC]
PENCIL DRAWINGS OF PLANTS AND FLOWERS
1850-1860
No attempt at an appreciation of Leighton's art would be complete were it not to include, and even accentuate, the distinct value of the exquisite drawings of flowers and leaves which he made in pencil and silver point between the years 1852 and 1860.[37] As regards certain all-important qualities these studies are unrivalled. I was well acquainted with the drawings Leighton made for his pictures during the last twenty-five years of his life, and I had oftentimes heard Watts express an unbounded admiration for these; but when, looking through the portfolios of early drawings after Leighton's death, I came upon these exquisite fragments in pencil, it seemed that I had found for the first time the real key to the inner chamber of his genius. As reproductions of the beauty in line, form, and structure—the architecture, so to speak, of vegetation—nothing ever came closer to Nature revealed by a human touch through a treatment on a flat surface.
On December 22, 1852, Leighton writes to his mother from Rome: "I long to find myself again face to face with Nature, to follow it, to watch it, and to copy it, closely, faithfully, ingenuously—as Ruskin suggests, 'choosing nothing and rejecting nothing,'" and it is in this spirit that he set to work when he filled sketch-books with exquisite studies of the flowers and plants he loved best. These records of the joy with which Nature filled his artistic temperament are to some more truly sympathetic than his elaborate work, for the reason that, while enjoying their beauty, we come in contact with the pure spirit of Leighton's genius unalloyed by any sense of intellectual effort. In his diary, "Pebbles," on August 21, 1852, Leighton writes: "Of the Tyrolese themselves, three qualities seem to me to characterise them, qualities which go well hand in hand with, and, I think it is not fanciful to say, are in great measure a key to, their well-known frankness and open-hearted honesty. I mean Piety, which shines out amongst them in many true things, a love for the art, which with them is, in fact, an outward manifestation of piety, and which is sufficiently displayed by the numberless scriptural subjects, painted or in relief, which adorn the cottages of the poorest peasants ... and last, not least, a love for flowers (in other words, for Nature), which is written in the lovely clusters of flowers which stand in many-hued array on the window-sills of every dwelling. The works of all the really great artists display that love for flowers. Raphael did not consider it "niggling," as some of our broad-handling moderns would call it, to group humble daisies round the feet of his divine representation of the Mother of Christ. I notice that two plants, especially, produce a beautiful effect, both of form and colour, against the cool grey walls; the spreading, dropping, graceful carnation, with its bluish leaves and crimson flowers, and the slender, antlered, thousand-blossomed oleander." No exact name has ever been given to the special creed of the artist's religion; to that condition of the soul which Socrates in Plato's Phædrus declares has come to the birth as having seen most of truth together with that of the Philosopher, the Musician, and the Lover. The artist penetrates further than others can, into the mysteries of Nature's marvels as revealed through the eye, and he therefore comes in closer union through the sense of sight with the spirit of the artist of the infinite, and can gauge better the immeasurable distance which exists between Divine and human creation, and this is felt more distinctly, more reverently, when the artist simply copies Nature than when his own dæmon is taking a part in the inspiring of his inventions.