  HOLIDAYS A happy chapter this: for though Joe always had so many irons in the fire that lengthy holidays were not only very few with him but actually avoided and disliked, he made merry so well by the wayside that many a memory falls into a category scarcely enshrined in a longer period than a summer afternoon, or at most, a week-end trip; he made holiday for other folk all the time, and in so doing made it for himself. Of week-end visits none were more joyous than those spent under the hospitable roof of our friends Sir George and Lady Lewis at Walton-on-Thames, where Sir Edward Burne-Jones was a constant visitor. Neither of those friends were knighted or baroneted then, so that perhaps we might all have been said to be—using Joe’s own words—“of the lower middle class, to which I am proud to belong.” Oscar Wilde was often of the Walton party—fresh from Oxford then, and considerably esteemed as a wit himself, though not, as Joe shows in his Reminiscences, always above the suspicion of borrowing. In this respect he somewhat resembled Whistler; but the latter was more honest in his plagiarism. One day Whistler accused Joe of making a joke at the expense of his friend—a false accusation in reality, though sometimes lightly true—to which Joe quickly answered: “Well, I can make a friend most days, but I can only make a good joke now and then:” assuredly only half a truth, too. “Ha! ha!” laughed Whistler with his shrill cackle, “I wish I had said that myself!” “Never mind, Jimmy, you will,” retorted Joe. And the cackle broke forth again whole-heartedly, whereas Wilde might possibly have been offended. But very few folk were ever offended at my husband’s fun. One of the members said to him one day at the Garrick Club, in a whimsical and deprecating manner: “These fellows tell me that I have the reputation of a wit, my dear Carr.” To which Joe replied: “Don’t worry! you’ll live that down in an afternoon.” And I am told that the friend was wont to repeat this against himself. Again, the mother of a pretty young girl, whom he was openly flattering, asked him, laughing, whether his intentions were serious, to which he replied: “Serious, but not honourable, madam.” But if this lady was not offended perhaps it was because he had known her since the time when she was fourteen years old herself. An evening in Lady Lewis’ pretty drawing-room at the Walton cottage comes vividly back to me. We were playing some geographical game with the children, in the course of which Oscar Wilde—with The children looked blank. “Why, in Behring Straits,” said Joe promptly, and I remember old Sir George Lewis’ smile, for it was at the time of the famous city crisis when, but for that capital, the great firm of Baring might have stopped payment. Even in that most precarious form of fun, the practical joke, Joe was never known to hurt even the most thin-skinned. One day he and Mr. HallÉ, his co-director at the New Gallery—made an excursion to Sir Edward Burne-Jones’ home—The Grange, Kensington—and sent up a message to the artist asking if he would receive two gentlemen who had called to ask whether he would take shares in the Great Wheel. The maid must have been sore put to it to keep her countenance, for the rage with which the painter viewed the monstrosity that climbed the sky above his garden wall was well known in his household. He rushed downstairs, palette in hand, only to find “little Carr,” as he affectionately called him, waiting demurely in the hall on quite other business. At the sweet Rottingdean home a similar joke was played: Burne-Jones’ loathing of the “interviewer” was a very open secret; so one summer evening Joe crept up to the front door and sent in an audacious name, purporting to be that of an American who hoped for a few words with the distinguished artist. From the shade of the porch he peeped into the dining-room window, and had the satisfaction of Of course, the practical jokes of which he shared the invention with his good friend J. L. Toole—a master of the craft—were the most cunningly devised. He has related the choicest in Eminent Victorians, but I could tell of many a family laugh over them, and “One more Tooler, father, before we go to bed,” was a common request. One of the favourite stories was told of him when travelling down with Joe to the beautiful old moated house at Ightham, which our American friends, General and Mrs. Palmer, had made their English home. Stopping at a wayside station above which a lordly mansion stood among the trees, Toole beckoned a porter and, in the gibberish that he used so glibly at these moments, pretended to utter the name of its owner. “Oh, you mean Mr. So-and-So,” said the porter. “Of course—I said so!” retorted the shameless comedian. “Well, here’s half a crown. When the train’s off, run up to the house and say ‘we shall be seven to dinner and the game will follow.’” The whistle went as the porter, holding on to the door, enquired: “Who shall I say, Sir?” But the train moved on and Toole returned to the reading of his paper, leaving a gaping man on the platform. This same Ightham Mote was the scene of many of our happiest hours. Its charming hostess was a dear friend whose rare gifts of sympathy and true hospitality enabled her not only to attract to her house the brightest of spirits, but also to draw from them their best. Children, too, to whom she was a fairy godmother, were welcome as friends in their own right. Our daughter and younger son were specially dear to her in their different ways, and many was the grave, childish saying of the latter that she would repeat to the proud father, though perhaps the one he oftenest told himself was said to Alma Tadema when the five-year-old boy remarked that he preferred a gas to a coal fire, because the first went out when you liked, and the latter when it liked. Joe was appreciated of all children and always won their favour easily; but I remember one little lady administering a severe rebuff to him when, after many lures, he said at last: “Well, I don’t care whether you come or not!” to which she replied: “Oh, yes, you do!” But that was an exception; they were usually his slaves, and loved his stories as much as their elders did. He treated them as his equals only requiring that they should do the same; and when his first grandson was born and some one alluded to him as a proud grandfather, he said: “I like the child, but there’s to be no grandfather about it. I’m to be Joe to him as to others.” And so he was to the children of that dear lady in beautiful Ightham Mote. Christmas was a real Yuletide in the fine old wainscoted hall and library, where Joe was always Frederick Jameson, that earliest friend of the days of our courtship, led the carol and song, and played for children and grown-ups to dance; Henry James sat in the ingle nook and told us ghost-stories of his making wholly in keeping with the place; George Meredith watched and made shrewd comments on the characteristics and possible careers of our various children, and discoursed on every topic—always expecting the homage due to him and reserving the conversation, even from Joe, by a long-drawn “Ah—” until he was ready with his next paradox. Yet there was a moment when Joe scored even off Meredith. I think he tells the tale in Coasting Bohemia, but not of himself. Meredith had been criticizing George Eliot, and in a brief pause, Joe put in: “Yes! Panoplied in all the philosophies she swoops upon the commonplace.” And Meredith, laughing, replied, “I wish I had said that myself!” One day we were busy amusing the children in the big Hall with a game of Definitions; one wrote down a word for Subject, the next man defined, and Thus: Subject, Soap; Definition, as made by Joe: The Horror of the East-end multitude. Recovery, Jack the Ripper: the nickname of the celebrated East-end murderer who was then the talk of the whole town. Joe was leaving that day for London, and the man came to announce that the trap was at the door. He rose to go, but the children had begun another definition for his “last.” Woman was given as the word. The Better Half, wrote the next person. “Only just time to make the train, Sir,” said the footman. The children wailed, and we all followed him out of the hall and saw him off; but half an hour later a telegram was handed to our hostess. “Recovery: An Angel once removed”; and nobody needed to hear the signature. The children were always the frame to the picture in that lovable household, and our daughter—the apple of her father’s eye, made in his mould, gifted with his humour and large with his urbane and generous heart—had a very special place there. I remember his pride when George Meredith watching her one day at his feet, said: “Look at the bumps on that child’s head. Always let her pursue whatever walk in life she chooses.” His advice was followed; and she knew what she would choose. I was having her trained for a violinist (for her gifts were several) and her master Joe was generally the centre around whom the children mustered in those good days, and many an extra ten minutes did he beg off their bedtime in the summer twilight or by the big Christmas logs. He used to tell them that he hated going to bed himself, and nothing was more true. “If I didn’t know that your mother always gives me cotton sheets,” he would say on a winter’s night, “I would never go. I’ve no fancy for a country trip every time I turn round in bed.” But indeed he needed no such excuse for sitting up late when he had a congenial audience. He had a wonderful capacity for sound sleep when the time came—a capacity equalled, as he expressed it, for “enjoying” laziness; because, of exercise—save in the pursuit of bird or fish—he would have none; but most of his life he sat up late and his most welcome form of rest was always in talk. In this relaxation he was even more than matched in argumentativeness by the husband of another most hospitable hostess, to whom he addresses the following letter after a long visit when she had housed us in a homeless interval. I may add that our host was an etymologist, and would confront Joe with a dictionary in support of his own view of a disputed word; also that he was an eminent amateur musician and a vehement Wagnerian. “My Dear ——, It seems to me that you and your husband ought to be told that you are excellent hosts—and yet I don’t want the thing to get about. At first I thought that I would declare loudly to all whom I met how pleasant a thing it was to stay in your house; and then I thought I wouldn’t. When one has discovered a really charming place where one can live with exclusive regard to one’s own selfish indulgence, it is perhaps hardly wise to noise it abroad. Some of the snuggest corners in Europe have been ruined by such imprudent chatter; and I feel that I should never forgive myself if I were to be the means of making it generally known that your house is so delightful. But I think after all that I can trust you! You are not the sort of person to gossip about such a thing; and when I tell you that what I am going to say is confidential, I simply mean that I would not, for the present at any rate, mention the subject to your daughter; young people are fanciful, and she might misinterpret my meaning—besides why shouldn’t she find it out for herself? No, let this be for you and your husband’s ear alone! And even for you it must be in some sense a barren secret; you cannot stay with yourselves! If you could I should recommend nothing so strongly as a few weeks’ visit to your charming home. It would do your husband all the good in the world—get him out of himself, so to speak—while it would make you a different woman. Not that I think that in any way desirable; I simply avail myself of a phrase Yes! If you could only stay at——! The family is small, but extremely intelligent, with minds well stored with the most varied kinds of knowledge. Your host is a type! Waking—with him—appears to be the momentary interruption of an animated conversation which has engaged the long hours others reserve for sleep. With them a new day seems to open a new volume with cover, title page and preface. Not so with him. The intervening night is simply a semi-colon in an uncompleted sentence—a Wagnerian clause in a melody that repudiates a close. This might seem to argue a too rigid adherence to a single theme with menace of monotony. Yet nothing could be less true. At the bidding of a single word the whole scene changes with the shifting magic of a dream, and you are surprised to find yourself suddenly plunged into quite another conversational sea. I have seen visitors at your house who would turn a deaf ear to these alert exercises of the dawn—moody men who became at once absorbed in the mere pleasures of the table; taking refuge in bacon from arguments to which they could find no auroral reply. They are cowards and I will have none of them! Rather would I emulate the tact of your hostess who finds, and welcomes, in these wide-ranging thoughts of morn, a bulwark that keeps the host from the kitchen boiler. For he is very apt to descend suddenly from his philosophic heights and It is here you may observe the sweet influence of the daughter of the house, whose finesse would almost deserve the name of cunning if its purpose were not so benign. In her skilful hands I have seen disaster averted by a dictionary and an impending storm transferred from a tea-cup to a disputed line of Tennyson. I am painting for you only the lighter moods of life at this charming house; of what else is delightful you must some day go and see for yourself. But I forget; of course you can’t and there is my difficulty staring me in the face. I wonder if it is mine alone? I find it so easy to trace a smile to its source: so difficult to define the lasting charm that lies behind it! And even when the definition is at hand my tongue halts at eulogy. Odd! I love to be praised and remembrance offers no instance when I have been in fear lest appreciation should sink to flattery. But when I try to praise others—even as they deserve—I am overtaken by a feeling of delicacy on their behalf which I have never felt for myself. And so I end dumb on the very threshold of my theme. I should like to say a great number of things of you and your husband, but somehow it doesn’t seem possible. Some day, when I meet a stranger in the train at one of those odd moments when by some irresistible impulse, I am driven to confide to a chance acquaintance secrets that through a long life I have hidden from my dearest friends—I Yours ever truly, J. W. Comyns Carr.” After this epistle it may not be thought partial on my part to state that, from the days of our youthful visits to Balcarres to the end of his life, my husband was a welcome guest at country houses; the following, in reply to a request from Mrs. F. D. Millet of Broadway, that he should relieve the strain of a spell of female society upon her husband, seems to show this. “My Dear Mrs. Millet, I ought not, but I will! And lest I should falter in my bad resolution, I have already wired to you saying I should be down on Saturday. It is a strange thing about duty. I believe there is no one who sees what is facetiously called “the path of duty” more clearly than I do; but we are differently gifted, and I fancy I never was intended to walk in it. Like the criminal who acquires in the end an extensive knowledge of law by industriously incurring its penalties, I believe that if I could recall all the moral maxims I have neglected in practice, I might serve as a veritable storehouse of wisdom and good conduct. And so I can indeed well understand his melancholy. No man can dwell long in the exclusive society of women without being crushed by the sense of his own unworthiness. We are not fit for it. I often wish there were some bad women in the world, with whom we might associate in our baser moments, and sometimes, in a dreary mood, I am apt to wonder what women can have been like before the Fall, they are so perfect now. Perhaps in another world we shall be better and you will be worse; let us hope for the best. And in the meantime let not Frank despair. When I see him on Saturday I will do my best to detach his nose from the grindstone and tune his unaccustomed lips to words that were once familiar to us both. Yours ever truly, J. W. Comyns Carr.” In those earlier days he sometimes pretended that his wardrobe was unfitted for such places, but I think even this was but a shallow piece of mock modesty on his part, for he was well aware that he could shine if he liked in any environment. A letter to my sister, which I have just found, may illustrate this: 19, Blandford Square, N.W. “My Dear Alma, Many thanks for the brushes. When my hair is gone—“which will be short,” as Pellegrini says—I can use them for sweeping a crossing. In the meantime they make a most excellent parting. Seriously they are beautiful. I have never before had brushes in a case—it seems to lift one’s social status. Hitherto my brushes have lain in my portmanteau cheek by jowl with my boots, or have mingled their tears with my sponge. Now all is changed; I feel I could stay at a country house and meet the footman on equal terms. Of course, I don’t mean that seriously—no man could hope to be the equal of a footman. I am a democrat but no revolutionist, and I have always felt that so long as liveried servants keep their supremacy the throne is safe. Compared with this the land question is a trifle. “Dieu et mon drawers” is the loyal but terrified sentiment with which I always awake on a visit, and see the footman turning my tattered underclothing inside out. But now my brushes will save me. Yours, Joe.” In the later years of his life, as his friends multiplied far and wide and his social gifts became famous, he was pressed into circles unknown to me, and our country-house visits together became fewer; so He only needed an audience; and he had it every hour of the day in those two Armenian boys, who would stand for hours watching him throw his line over the lake and coax the fish out—just, they used to say, as he would coax the children to him in the roads or the visitors in the lounge—“sans se donner de la peine.” I am not sure of the justice of that last remark. Perhaps he never purposely gave himself trouble, but he amused others because his love of his own kind was such that he must always needs be in touch with them, be they peasant or peer, and at the end of his life he preferred to lounge in the road and chat with the convalescent soldiers in a quiet village than to sit comfortably in the seclusion of a lovely garden. It was because he was always alive that he was not dull; but I must admit he needed plenty of human interest to keep him so. And I think, for this reason, that the life of a good hotel, preferably a foreign one, afforded him the best opportunities for fun; he knew just how much or how little the applause of such kaleidoscopic society was worth; but it tickled his appetite for the moment and was the required sauce to his holiday rest. The following letters to his daughter variously illustrate this aspect of him: Eden Hotel, Monte Carlo. “My dear Doll, Our little hotel at Monte Carlo is a cosy place, containing among its visitors some odd and rather lonely females, both English and American. I overheard a conversation the other night between four of them—two English and two Americans—at which your mother would like to have assisted. They evidently did not know that we were English, and let themselves go on the subject of the male sex. The leader of the band, an American lady, whose hips described a circle about as big as the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, was especially vehement in denouncing us, though I can hardly conceive she had ever received any other cause of resentment than neglect. To an English lady, who could not compete with her in size but fairly distanced her in ugliness, she held forth at great length on the superior advantages which women enjoyed in “But see now,” she said, “we’ve still got to fight the law even in our country. I said to an American man, ‘do you love your wife?’ ‘Why, of course,’ he said. ‘Do you love your mother?’ I said. ‘Just don’t I,’ he replied. ‘Do you love your sister?’ ‘Why sure,’ he said. ‘Well then,’ I said to him, ‘Do you know the American constitution declares that every living citizen should have a vote except children, criminals and women.’ And then she turned to the English woman and added: “Do you know, Madam, the thought of that American law just makes me blush all over when I go to bed at night.” I confess as I looked at her, I couldn’t think of the unrighteous law, for my mind was filled with the idea of what a wild and billowy tract of country that blush would have to traverse. Fancy the Round Pond turned into the Red Sea with a single blush. Yours, J. Comyns Carr.” Bellagio, May, 1903. “My dearest Doll, We are in the midst of a thunderstorm that is tearing and raging round the mountains; for the moment it is like Mr. Chamberlain in the earlier part of his campaign—very loud and very near, but I think it is taking itself off to the Gotthard. I don’t think I have told you of the two little bits of American character I encountered at my hotel. One evening three ladies of that country were set beside me at table d’hote. They were not pre-possessing or young, but I noticed with just a momentary flush of flattery that there was an obvious struggle going on as to which of them should occupy the chair next to me; the struggle ended, and then the next but one turned to the victor and said, ‘Couldn’t you see, my dear, that I just wanted to protect you in case you might be addressed in a manner that might offend you.’ Poor dears! they didn’t know that God had protected them against any attack of mine. Later, two rather nice girls and their mother took the same places; and one evening after dinner, when the terrace was full of people, the mother looked up to where one of the girls was standing at the window of the room above, and called out: ‘Don’t let him kiss you, dear.’ We all turned to look up, and there stood the girl with a parrot on her shoulder. There was naturally an audible smile among the spectators, and the girl herself was in fits of laughter. Best love from your father, J. Comyns Carr.” Bordighera, April 1909. “My dear Dolly, We are very comfortable in our little hotel here, with two nice Italian brothers to cater for us. The Italian village children please me mightily, and I hobble about in their language with just enough understanding to enable me to amuse myself. We are an odd society: nearly all women, American and English. They are mostly nice people in their way, but not exciting, and of the place generally it may be said that whatever other attractions it may possess it does not seem to be a health resort for beauty. The air apparently is not recommended for pretty people. In the streets and on the hills the German is more or less in evidence, and sometimes as I pass them by I am inclined to side with Balfour and to demand that four more Dreadnoughts should be laid down at once. Their admiration of nature somehow always makes me feel shy, and I can almost see the landscape making an ugly face after their loudly proclaimed WunderschÖn. However, they really don’t trouble us much—the neighbourhood is so genuinely beautiful. Yours, J. Comyns Carr.” He often touched on the beauties of nature as related to art when writing to his artist daughter, and I find this keen little bit of criticism in a letter to her from Bellagio. “This place is beautiful, and makes one wonder little that the Italians thought of landscape as a thing of design before the Northerners found a new beauty in the empire of cloud and sky. Certainly these mountains have great enchantment of form, and the Southern light defines every detail.” And this longer letter of varying interest also rings the same note. From Wengen, Bernese Oberland. “My dear Doll, Here is a line from me whom I daresay you thought hopeless in that matter. But such a little thing will sometimes provoke a sinner to virtue. Two strangely fashioned men share the room adjoining mine, divided from me only by a washed deal partition held together by French nails. They spend the day in moody silence and in grey frock coats which if they were well cut would suit the Cup Day at Ascot. But they return at nine and chatter unceasingly till 10.30. It is now only ten and it has occurred to me that instead of tossing about on the sea of their incoherent conversations I would write a line to you. This is a beautiful place which I should admire even more if nobody else admired it. But it is made too fair to go scot free of praise, and so I must fain clap my hands with the rest. You see we are exclusive in our emotions as the society of a country town and do not wish to share them with our inferiors. That is a part of it, but I think my reluctance to hear nature applauded has a better reason too, though it is hard to give it words. I I went for an early walk the other day up to the Wengern Alp; all the mountain in shadow and the pines blacker than their own fallen image on the grass. I was alone and met no one on the path but the lads laden with their washed deal milk-pails as they came singing from every green hill. And as they passed I felt sort of shamefaced. I was out for beauty, a kind of dilettante wandering in search of impressions, and I knew deep down in me that they must one day and another have won impressions I could never gain. No one can be really intimate with a strange land, can ever really read the face of a hillside as it is read by those however simple who were born to see it coloured by the changing fortunes of their life from childhood to manhood. Nature is so shy, so reluctant to speak if she thinks she is overheard, but she will sing to herself when she thinks we are busy. For us who are not artists I think beauty is only really captured in that way. It is trapped unawares, stolen in the silences of night or dawn, or burnt into the brain by the fire of some passionate moment to which it remains as an unforgotten background. Of course the artist, the poet or the painter, has other rights and other penalties. ‘He that would save his life must lose it,’ and the artist is always giving up for himself what he re-fashions for the joy of others. He is like the cuckoo that sojourns But this is a digression. We were talking of Switzerland, and I do believe this is one of the choicest spots in it, but of course we don’t discuss its merits all day. On the contrary, I think we talk most of the food, comparing the veal of yesterday with the mutton of to-day, wondering from what strange waters, remote or near, come those strange fish that masquerade under the titles of the dwellers in Northern seas. And then we pry into the lives of other lodgers, making up imaginary relationships among families that are as normally related as our own—taking a curious interest in characters in which we have really no concern, and exchanging cards warmly with parting guests, knowing that we shall see their faces again no more. And all the while the air is so good, when the weather is not so bad, that we feel well, which is a long way on the road to feeling happy, and we are sometimes pointed at as distinguished, and then vanity covers the rest of the road and we are very jolly. Yours ever, Father.” His preference for a foreign holiday—unless one in his own country, could be allied to fishing or shooting—did not, as will be understood from stray remarks in his correspondence, extend to Germany. He always disliked the race, and I can He was always just as hard on the German “frau” as on her husband, and his description of them on the mountain paths at Gastein, with skirts looped up like window blinds and waterproofs strapped across their shoulders in case of a storm, could only be equalled by the whimsical words he had for the red necks of the men bulging over their collars. He was not a Central Europe man; the French or the Italians were always first with him after his own people. Romance for him lay in the North; I have often heard him insist that those most deeply possess it who dwell in the mist and dream of the sun, and he would cite “The Wizard of the North” and the Scottish Land in proof of his theory: yet the South stood for gaiety with him, and he sighed for the sun even as I did who had been bred in it. It is curious that Rome he only saw for the first I shall quote a private appreciation of the written part of his work from that acute and sympathetic critic, Edward Russell of the Liverpool Post. Naples, April 28th, 1911. “Dear Comyns Carr, I cannot refrain from congratulating you on your Introduction to the Roman Catalogue of British Paintings, etc. Not only its literary felicity, but its fine and illuminating judgment; the choiceness of the language; and the apt biographical illustrations; the humane diplomacy of occasional gentle, but searching suggestions of censure; the insight of the aperÇus; and the contribution of several original maxims to the sterling floating currency of criticism, make it one of the most memorable of such pieces. Yours, Edward Russell.” But Rome as a city he loved not, as he loved the Tuscan and Umbrian towns; its vast antiquities oppressed him, its medieval structures he disliked, and the race that had left its impress there bored him; even in the natural surroundings he found too much melancholy—definitely contrasted in his mind with that Northern sternness which breeds Romance; but he shall speak for himself. “The archeological side of Rome I can only gape at as a tourist: I have no learning that way: though, of course, there are scenes of the old world which touch the imagination without the kind of knowledge that must, to those who possess it, make the place deeply interesting. The more modern Rome—the Rome of the Renaissance, scarcely makes a single appeal and creates no such satisfying atmosphere as Florence. The Sistine I must see again; the light was bad to-day and the effect at so great a height did not immediately leave the tremendous impression of Michael Angelo’s power that comes of the more intimate knowledge given by our photographs. The colour, however, yielded more than I had expected. Tell Fred if he is by you that I am wholly at one with him about the Stanze of Raphael. They gain in site, and although I knew the compositions well, I found them better than I knew with a charm of colour unexpected and superior to any of his easel pictures, except perhaps the Madonna at Dresden; truly a marvellous genius, using all the resources of style with the freedom and ease of a painter of genre—and here, which is not always so in his later work, absolutely free from rhetoric in gesture: I must go back to them again. “In the general style of Roman Renaissance building I have no delight—and never thought to have; but, of course, there are separate things to discover that I have as yet not had time to see. But St. Angelo makes a great barbaric pile that is mightily impressive. St. Peter’s seems to me much less noble in general effect than St. Paul’s, and its interior ornament, painting and sculpture, seemed, Yours, Joe.” “Dearest, I lunched with BarrÈre again to-day, and afterwards we went in his motor to the lakes of Nemi and Albano. It was a very interesting drive, and the lakes are really beautiful, though in a grave and sombre way. Of course it was not bright sunlight, but in any case the landscape here has a peculiar character. It has an ancient and desert look, hardly joyous and not very fruitful, different entirely in this respect from the landscape around Florence. But it has character, and what one may call style: and the remains of ruined buildings, aqueduct or tomb, which cut the sky at every turn, seem to belong to these surroundings. The landscape is of their date, seems almost to have remained of their date, and not to have found the renewed youth which mocks antiquity in other kinds of scenery. A certain gravity is the prevailing sentiment—impressive but touched with sadness. I am seeing isolated bits of Rome little by little. If I were settled here for long I think the sculpture would attract me as a study—but like everything else in the way of art in Rome one has to be constantly sifting and sorting the good from the bad. Here as elsewhere there is a mass of indifferent achievement, a mass of work either poorly copied Yours, Joe.” Touching this last criticism he made us laugh when he got home by saying that he longed to cry to the crowds who patiently paced the Vatican galleries, guide-book in hand: “Go out into the sunshine, dear people, and enjoy your lunch—this is all bosh.” It was delightful to me the other day to find a perfect echo of these sentiments in the letters of the late Mr. Stopford Brooke to his daughters. But it is not the only instance in those enthralling volumes where I noted a remarkable likeness in many of the views, and even in the method of expressing them, of these two brilliant Irishmen. |
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