The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

My acquaintance with Ruskin lasted with varying degrees of intimacy, and some interruptions due to his sympathy with the South during the civil war and bitterness against our government, till 1870, when it was terminated by a trivial personal incident to which his morbid state of mind at that time gave a false color. We separated more and more widely in our opinions on art in later years, and the differences came to me reluctantly, for my reverence for the man was never to be shaken, while my study of art showed me finally that, however correct his views of the ethics of art might be, from the point of view of pure art he was entirely mistaken, and all that his influence had done for me had to be undone before any true progress could be made. What little I had learned from the artists I knew had been in the main correct, and had aided to show me the true road, but the teaching of "Modern Painters," and of Ruskin himself later, was in the end fatal to the career to which I was then devoted, for I was unable to get back to the dividing of the ways.

But the first mistake was my own. What I needed was practical study, the training of the hand, for my head had already gone so far beyond my technical attainment that I had entered into the fatal condition of having theories beyond my practice. My execution was so far in arrear of my perceptions of what should be in the result, that instead of the delight with which I had, untaught, and in my stolen hours, given myself to painting, I felt the weight of my technical shortcomings so heavily as to make my work full of distress instead of that content with which the artist should always work. Everything became conscious effort and the going was too much uphill. I had always been groping my own way, scarcely as much assisted by the fragmentary good advice I received as laid under heavier disabilities by the better knowledge of what should be done. In art education the training of the hand should, I am persuaded, always be kept in advance of the thinking powers, so that the young student should feel that his ideal is just before him if not at his finger's end. That this is so rarely the case with art students in our day is, I am convinced, the chief reason of the technical inferiority of our modern painters and the root of the inferiority of modern art. The artist does not begin early enough. I was already belated, and every advance I made in the study of the theory of art put me farther behind, practically.

The hope of getting much technical instruction from competent masters in England was speedily dispelled. Lessons in water-color I could get at a guinea an hour, and to enter as a pupil with one of the better painters was impossible. Pyne received from his pupils £100 a month. I had calculated how far I could mate my fifty pounds go and put it at six months. By the advice of Wehnert, I applied to Charles Davidson, a member of the New Water-Color Society, for instruction, and went down into Surrey, where he lived, to be able to follow him in his work from nature. He lived at Red Hill, and in the immediate vicinity John Linnell had built his then new home. In the few weeks I lived there I saw a great deal of the old man, one of the most remarkable examples of the old English type I have ever known, and to me as interesting a problem from the religious point of view as from the artistic. Barring differences of the creed, of which I knew and cared nothing (for my own religious horizon had always included all "good-willing men," and I had no conception of the distinctions of creed which would send on one side of the line of safety an Established Churchman and on the other a Nonconformist), we agreed very well, and in the general impression I set Linnell down as a devout Christian of the Cromwellian type, and he certainly was a man of remarkable intellectual powers, both in art and in theology. His Christianity might have taken a form of less domestic sternness, but I remembered my own father too well to find it inconsistent with genuine piety, though not even my mother ever inspired the awe Linnell and his religious severity excited in me.

Linnell's landscape seemed to me the full expression of a healthy love of nature, possible only to a moral sanity in the man—a cheery Wordsworthian enjoyment of her, which as a rule I have never found in perfection out of the English school and its derivatives; the outpouring of a robust nature which prefers to see the outer world with the spectacles of no school, and through the memory of no other man; not self-taught in the sense of owing nothing to another mind, but in the sense that what he had learned he had digested and forgotten except as a chance word in the universal gospel of art; technically weak, slovenly in style, but eminently successful in telling the story he had to tell. Even then, with my limited knowledge of painting, he seemed to me to furnish the antithesis to Pyne,—one too careful of style and running to excessive precision, the other too negligent and running into indecision; and this judgment still holds. Of Davidson, my immediate teacher, there was only to be got certain ways of doing certain things, limited to the elements of landscape; how to wash in the sky, to treat foliage in masses, and those tricks of the brush in which the English water-color school abounds; but no larger views, or more individual, of art itself. What he taught was, perhaps, what I most needed to learn, but I was already too far on the way to learn it easily.

I made a visit of ten days to Paris and saw with great profit the work of the landscape painters and of Delacroix, the other figure painters in general not interesting me much. I carried a letter of introduction from the Wehnerts to Mademoiselle Didot, the daughter of Firmin Didot, the famous publisher, then an old blind man, but one of the most interesting Frenchmen I ever knew, as Mademoiselle Didot was the most brilliant Frenchwoman. The old man was much interested in what I had to say of America, and he paid us the national compliment of saying that we spoke English more intelligibly than Englishmen in general. As I spoke no French, our conversation was in English, and he understood me perfectly, though he said he rarely could follow without difficulty the conversation of an Englishman, while Americans in general he understood readily. To accomplish all that I did with my fifty pounds it may be easily understood that I had to cut my corners close, and in fact they were so closely cut in my Continental excursion that I landed at Newhaven on my return with one shilling in my pocket, and when, at the end of my stay in England, I took the train for Liverpool, I had only sixpence (my passage being provided for), and my good friend Delf, who saw me off, on finding the state of my purse, insisted at the railway station on my taking a sovereign for contingencies.

This habit of making no provision for accidents had been a part of my moral training, the faith in the overruling Providence never forsaking me for an instant, so that, whatever I set about to do, I made no provision for accidents. To go ahead and do what I thought I ought to do, and let the consequences take care of themselves, has been the habit of mind in which I have always worked and probably still work. If the thing to be done was right, I never thought of what might come after, or even whether I had the means to carry a resolution into effect, taking it for granted that the means would be provided because the thing was to be done. I retain the distinct recollection of an expression of my mother while I was making preparations for this first voyage to Europe, and she was packing my clothes for the voyage and her lips were silently moving and the slow tears running down her cheeks. She said in her low and murmuring voice as if in comment on her prayer, "Oh! no, he is too pure-hearted," and I knew that the prayer was for my protection from the temptations of that world of which she only knew the terrors and dangers from her Bible, and that she was so wrapt in her spiritual yearnings that she had quite forgotten my presence. Poor mother! I never deserved the great trust she had in me, but the memory of that moment has served me in many devious moments to keep me in the path. But if I had no such virtues as those which she attributed to me, I had what was perhaps more potent, the intuitions which I inherited from her, and such as often take a man out of temptation before he is aware of its strength, and before it becomes a real danger; nor can any man remember such confidence on the part of his mother without, from very shame, if no sterner motive should exist, maintaining a higher tone of life.

I did not leave London without a sight of Turner himself, due to the friendly forethought of Griffiths, who so appreciated my enthusiasm for the old man that he lost no opportunity to satisfy it. Turner was taken ill while I was on this visit, with an attack of the malady which later killed him, and I had begged Griffiths to ask him to let me come and nurse him. He declined the offer, but was not, Griffiths told me, quite unmoved by it. One day, after his recovery, I received a message from Griffiths to say that Turner was coming to the gallery at a certain hour on a business appointment, and if I would happen in just before the time fixed for it I might see him.

At the appointed hour Turner came and found me in an earnest study of the pictures in the farther end of the gallery, where I remained, unnoticing and unnoticed, until a sign from Griffiths called me up. He then introduced me as a young American artist who had a great admiration for his work, and who, being about to return home, would be glad to take him by the hand. It was difficult to reconcile my conception of the great artist with this little, and, to casual observation, insignificant old man with a nose like an eagle's beak, though a second sight showed that his eye, too, was like an eagle's, bright, restless, and penetrating. Half awed and half surprised, I held out my hand. He put his behind him, regarding me with a humorous, malicious look, saying nothing. Confused, and not a little mortified, I turned away, and, walking down the gallery, went to studying the pictures again. When I looked his way again, a few minutes later, he held out his hand to me, and we entered into a conversation which lasted until Griffiths gave me a hint that Turner had business to transact which I must leave him to. He gave me a hearty handshake, and in his oracular way said, "Hmph—(nod) if you come to England again—hmph (nod)—hmph (nod)," and another hand-shake with more cordiality and a nod for good-by. I never saw a keener eye than his, and the way that he held himself up, so straight that he seemed almost to lean backwards, with his forehead thrown forward, and the piercing eyes looking out from under their heavy brows, and his diminutive stature coupled with the imposing bearing, combined to make a very peculiar and vivid impression on me. Griffiths afterwards translated his laconism for me as an invitation to come to see him if I ever came back to England, and added that though he was in the worst of tempers when he came in, and made him expect that I should be insulted, he was in fact unusually cordial, and he had never seen him receive a stranger with such friendliness except in the case of Cattermole, for whom he had a strong liking. In the conversation we had during the interview, I alluded to our good fortune in having already in America one of the pictures of his best period, a seacoast sunset in the possession of Mr. Lenox, and Turner exclaimed, "I wish they were all put in a blunderbuss and shot off!" but he looked pleased at the simultaneous outburst of protest on the part of Griffiths and myself. When I went back to England for another visit he was dead.

I may frankly say as to Turner's art, that I enjoyed most the water-colors of the middle period, though the latest gave me another kind of delight,—that of the reading of a fairy-story, of the building of glorious castles in the air in my younger days, that of something to desire and despair of. The drawings of the England and Wales series in the possession of Ruskin seemed to my critical faculty the ne plus ultra of water-color painting,—especially the "Llanthony Abbey," of which I recall those early impressions with the greatest distinctness[1]. I saw in the Academy Exhibition the last pictures he ever exhibited, some whaling subjects, fresh from his retouching of two days before, gorgeous dreams of color art, but only dreams—the actuality had all gone out. I saw them years after when they had become mere wrecks, hardly recognizable.

[Footnote 1: I saw it again in the Guildhall Exhibition of 1899.]