BOOKS AND TRAVEL

Of work in volume form my husband left comparatively little, and all the books of his earlier years were on Art. His criticisms on the various exhibitions of Old Masters at Burlington House, chiefly written at that time for the Pall Mall Gazette and the Art Journal, were useful to him in a volume on The Drawings of the Old Masters in the British Museum, upon which subject he was a careful and enthusiastic student; and at a somewhat later period—when he and Mr. C. E. HallÉ organized the famous exhibitions of those drawings at the Grosvenor Gallery—a recognised connoisseur.

It is interesting to note that much of the matter written in those early years upon a subject on which he was always a master was echoed involuntarily in my husband’s swan-song upon the same subject, i.e. The Ideals of Painting, posthumously published in 1917; for although he naturally acquired a deeper knowledge of individual pictures as the years went on, bringing him opportunities of visiting the great collections of Europe, he very rarely changed his opinion of the characteristics of each painter; and his loving appreciation of the subtlest qualities in his favourites was such that I remember a gifted connoisseur saying to him once respecting a fellow art critic: “So-and-so could tell you whether a picture was authentic or not with his back to it, provided he had got its pedigree at his fingers ends; but you don’t depend on books; you know the man and his method and study the painter in the light of them, and if your verdict is sometimes at variance with the alleged pedigree, by Jove, you’re generally right.”

So thoroughly had he steeped himself in the subject that when we went on our belated honeymoon to the towns of Northern Italy, he always knew exactly where every picture was that he wanted to see, and many is the argument that I had in those less enlightened days with Italian officials as to the existence of some particular work of Art which they little knew was under their care, and many lovely things we found in private places which, perhaps even now, are missed by the ordinary tourist.

I recollect the weary trip he made from Milan that he might study the wonderful Luini frescoes at Saronno. Now the little town is on a railway, but in those days it was only reached in a horse-omnibus, slowly jogging, as only the poor starved Italian horses of that day could jog, across the sun-baked Lombard plains. The beautiful lunar frescoes, some of them in sepia, in the sacristy of the Church of San Maurizio Maggiore at Milan, were among the things which we should never have seen if he had not made me insist on the sacristan opening that closed door that he might examine for himself. And a really funny incident occurred at Mantova—a town lying off the regular route, but so picturesque, with its lovely Palazzo del TË raised on arcades built into the marshes—that it is strange it should not be oftener visited by the tourist.

We lodged in a vast but dirty old Inn, waited on by a girl whose beauty compensated, in Joe’s eyes only, for slipshod methods; nothing but my knowledge of the tongue would have procured us even the comfort of a huge warming-pan with which I endeavoured to dry the damp sheets. After a sleepless night and a tiring morning in the Castle looking at the Mantegna portraits of grim Gonzagas and stooping to enter the “dwarf’s apartments,” whence slits of windows peer upon the eerie marshland, I was in no mood for an altercation. Yet an altercation was the only means by which I finally succeeded in inducing the morose custodian of a dark church in the town to do Joe’s will: he had come to Mantova to see examples of Mantegna for some work that he was doing and he was not going away without having unearthed this specially interesting one. He led the way himself to the side-chapel where he believed the painting to be, but lo! a hideous modern daub hung over the little altar and his face fell. Then he had an inspiration: in spite of the man’s remonstrances he went up the steps and peered behind the gaudy painting.

“Tell him I’ll pay him to help me get this thing down,” he said: “I believe what I want is at the back of it.”

Then my altercation began.

We were mad English, and one couldn’t behave in a Church as if it were a shop.

But “mad English” or not we were also “rich English” (in the custodian’s eyes), and a very little English gold won the day: we saw the picture we wanted.

These were only a few instances of the “tonic of a young man’s conceit and obstinacy”—to use Joe’s own chaff of himself—in that never-to-be-forgotten journey through the highways and by-ways of Northern Italy. Everything was grist that came to his mill in this as in each separate field of his activities; but Florence was the real goal of all his desires, and this first visit to it, close on the study which had made him long to see for himself the Masters whom he loved and the fairest of towns which was their home, had a glamour which was never quite reached in later visits. I can see again the poor TrattorÌa della Luna where we lodged and the handsome waiter whom we, in the wild enthusiasm of the hour, persuaded to follow us to England. That he ever arrived at all was the marvel. He might well have spent the journey-money given him on pastimes suggested by his reproach to me in London afterwards as to engaging a cook who remembered the birth of Christ: that he arrived weeping in a November fog and bitterly resenting having been left to come “by sea when we had come by land,” was not wonderful. Joe was patient with him for my sake and many a funny tale did he forge out of the Italian’s vagaries.

But when this unkempt Adonis had demoralized our maid, smashed our pretty wedding gifts in fits of gloom, during which he would shake his fist at the fog and say: “Goo’ nigh’,” and finally taunted us with not providing sufficient wine at a humble entertainment to excuse one of the guests for having left his hat behind, we felt it best he should return to his native land—though not before he had inadvertently half poisoned us with dried mushrooms sent by his relatives.

Well, badly as Mario behaved subsequently in Great Russell Street he was one of the features of our happy Florence holiday and directed our steps towards many out-of-the-way places which Joe thirsted to explore in search of Art treasures unknown to guide-books.

My husband’s knowledge culled from many old books was of great value to him, and with his bump of locality, joined to my knowledge of the speech of the people, we penetrated into many lovely corners and met with as many amusing adventures.

Strange food did we eat too on that weird trip, for here, as elsewhere, Joe insisted on exploring.

“Tell him I’m a judge of the cuisine,” he would say, “and only want the best.” And—with an instinct that the rewarding tip would not be wanting—as it never was—cooks hastened to concoct the spiciest of their national dishes for his criticism.

The publication of Joe’s first book was quickly followed by an illustrated volume on the Abbey Church of St. Albans from articles written for the Art Journal; plenty of study on architecture and on monkish lore was done for this in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Later in life Joe used to say that, after the period of ravenous and enthusiastic boyhood, he might never have opened a serious book again—so much more enthralling to him was the daily intercourse for work or play with living men and women—had it not been for the necessity of boiling the pot; and that all that he read for a special purpose stuck to him as no desultory reading did and became stored in his mind for use and pleasure for the rest of his life.

I can see myself how true this was in respect of the whole range of Arthurian legend, on which subject he became an authority; he devoured everything in English and French that he could find when he was writing his plays of King Arthur and Tristram, and never forgot any of it.

The Abbey of St. Albans was too special a subject to make a popular book, and the first volume of Joe’s work which attracted attention was Essays on Art, gathered together in 1879.

I remember that, just as among his published work in verse he held that his Tristram and Iseult was his best, so he considered the Essay—practically on Keats, who held, I think, the highest place with him among the nineteenth century poets but entitled The Artistic Spirit in Modern English Poetry, he judged to be among his most satisfactory prose; with the exception of the Essay on Macbeth, written as a pamphlet at the time of Henry Irving’s production of the play, and now re-published under the title of Sex in Tragedy in his book Coasting Bohemia.

A letter which he wrote me later from France, when he was studying the provincial museums there for a series of articles in the Manchester Guardian, bears out pleasantly the criticism in the article on Corot and Millet in Essays on Art.

In respect of Blois he writes as follows in another letter: “This town is more picturesque than any French town I have yet seen; most of it, or the older part of it at any rate, is high up on a hill, and the steps that mount up between the different streets are very beautifully contrived.

Tell Phil I should like him to read the parts of his French history connected with Blois, particularly about Henri III. and the Duke of Guise, and I will tell him about the wonderful castle when I get back.”

I remember he brought home some excellent photographs of that castle and the lovely outer staircase of the tower.

Another letter written during this French journey brings in a more humorous note: “Toulouse is a real city of the south, its market place covered with big red umbrellas reminding one of Verona, and the old hotel having a pleasant shady courtyard with pots of oleanders.... It is difficult to give you much news. I was thinking this morning how funny it was how little I had spoken English since I left home, once with the manager of a travelling English panorama at Limoges and yesterday at Montauban where I met a Frenchman who insisted upon speaking my native tongue to me. He declared that he knew English ‘au fond,’ but his mastery of the tongue was not complete. ‘Good voyage, have distraction,’ were his parting words to me.”

These good wishes were not entirely fulfilled. The day after his arrival at Toulouse Joe had been overcome by the August heat and mosquito bites, and had been obliged to take to his bed for a day in the fine old inn, where he was admirably nursed by the motherly landlady; and, as he sat in the cool courtyard next day he was vastly amused by the discomfiture of a fat commercial traveller, awaiting his dÉjeuner with napkin tucked in ready under his chin, when a one-legged old stork, who perambulated the garden, suddenly uttered its raucous note: “Quel cri Épouvantable!” exclaimed the poor gentleman, and jumping up he overturned the small table on which a succulent Southern dish now steamed ready for his consumption, and wept afresh at the sight of gravy and red wine trickling together down the coarse clean tablecloth!

I think merriment must have hampered Joe’s offers of assistance, and his French was not then as fluent as he made it in after years.

Anyhow the commercial traveller appears to have been less genial than was a gentleman in the train later on who thought to flatter him by comparing him to the then Prince of Wales: “Les mÊmes traits, la mÊme barbe, le mÊme Âge!” said he pleasantly, not thinking that he was speaking to a man years younger than Edward VII.

But if there was a momentary annoyance it was immediately forgotten by Joe in a lively, if halting, conversation on the merits of a trout stream which the train was skirting—Joe vehemently describing how different was our view regarding poachers with the net, and mentally despising his fellow-traveller for upholding the equal merits of perch, gudgeon and trout.

When they reached Lourdes the traveller again afforded Joe a fresh cause for wonder—unfamiliar as he then was with what later he called “the Frenchman’s unfailing desire to place himself in a category.”

The station was crammed with pilgrims to the Holy Wells, and Joe, innocent of this, asked for what event the crowd was gathered; whereupon the Frenchman, turning his head contemptuously from the window, said loftily: “Monsieur, dans ma qualitÉ d’AthÉe je ne connais rien de tout cela!”

Even in those early days he loved the French; their joy of living appealed to him as it did in all the Latin races, and their wit—more subtle and polished than the Italian’s child-like though not childish high spirits—was akin to his own, and it was often wonderful how swiftly he would “get the hang of it” even when sometimes he would appeal to me for translation of a word; while their shrewd and clear common-sense found an echo somewhere on another side of him, perhaps in his Border ancestry.

Yet I have heard him say that, in his opinion, the deeper courtesy of an unspoiled Italian—were he peasant or peer—came out of a further and finer civilization.

These travelling conversations, even in a foreign tongue, were entirely in keeping with Joe’s intensely human temperament. He had none of the aloofness of the Britisher of that day; and I remember his amusement at the talk of a party of English shop-keepers in a second-class railway carriage on the Paris-Calais route.

“To see them working men forced to sit and smoke their pipe in the street for a breath of fresh air on a summer evening fairly flummoxed me,” said one. “Why the poorest of us ’ave got a bit of a backyard.”

Though he was the most reserved of men as regards deep, personal matters, he found that sort of sentiment was utterly ridiculous to his Irish sense of humour.

I recollect hearing Joe whimsically tell a friend once that he would far sooner confide his most intimate concerns to a man in a train than to his nearest and dearest; and then he would recall (or invent?) the most humorous conversations which he had overheard or in which he had taken part, chiefly on the physical ills of life during long journeys in dark railway carriages. I don’t suppose he went these lengths in French; probably his vocabulary was not equal to it.

He said he missed my help on that Loire journey although I think he liked learning for himself too. I certainly, sitting in a tiny cottage near Witley with my sister and the two children, missed my opportunity and sighed to be with him, especially when his letter home contained a passage like this:

“Marseilles is a city with something of romantic suggestion about it. One feels that it is one of the Avenues of the East, one of the places also that connects the old world with the new. It was terribly hot, but the sea tempered the sun and the sea-bath in the evening was a delicious revenge for the heat of the day. The view over the Mediterranean at sunset is delightful, with an atmosphere that seems to be stained with rose colour floating over a sea of real aquamarine.”

I had to solace myself with taking Phil to sit for his portrait to Edward Burne-Jones—delightful occasions when that most lovable of great men would talk of my husband and of their kindred enthusiasms, chaffing me gently as well for the “wicked travesties” of classic myths with which I tried to keep quiet the “worst of little sitters,” who would innocently ask why his standing pose was called “sitting.”

And at last Joe came home, only about a week before our son Arthur was born.

These travelling memories are a digression induced by their bearing on my husband’s first published volumes. As to his subsequent contributions to permanent literature I may mention his Papers on Art—a sequel to the Essays on Art—published in 1885.

After that, until the last years of his life, his many vocations so entirely filled every hour of the day—and often of the night—that he had no leisure for any more such ventures, excepting the publication of his verse-plays as they appeared on the stage.

And it was not until 1908 that he once more came before the book-reading public. Then he wrote his two separate volumes of personal recollections under the titles of Eminent Victorians and Coasting Bohemia; but these are of recent enough date to need no comment of mine, for they are still before the world, as is also his posthumously published volume, The Ideals of Painting.