CHAPTER XXXIV

1874

THE BLACK OPAL

“Ibam forte viâ sacrâ, sicut meus est mos, Nescio quid meditans nugarum, totus in illis, Accurrit quidam.”

Horace, Sat. I. 9.

One fine day at the end of April I was walking down the “sacred street” of St. James, as usual thinking of I know not what trifles, utterly absorbed in them, when I felt a tap upon my shoulder. I turned round—Gloster, by all that was unexpected! Colonel Gloster, to whom I had bidden farewell at Point de Galle nine years before! It was a happy meeting, and we stopped to chat for a moment, but he had a business appointment, so we agreed that he should come to dinner with me in my rooms in Victoria Street that evening. As we parted I said: “What a pity that Overbeck should not be in England! We could have such a delightful talk over the days of the Lion’s Den on board the _Simla_!” I hailed a hansom and trotted off to order dinner: on my table was Overbeck’s card! “Only in London for two days—when and where can I see you?” I lost no time in going to look him up; found him by great good luck, and so it happened that we three came together again on that April day after nine long and strenuous years, during which neither of us had met, though we had corresponded fitfully.

Overbeck came to dinner in morning clothes, as he had parted somehow with his heavy luggage, and I noticed that he had a curious stone, unknown to me, mounted as a pin in his cravat. I asked what it was. “A black opal,” was the answer. I had lately been hearing all sorts of tales about the bad luck which opals are supposed to bring. White opals he admitted were known to be unlucky, but the black opal, on the contrary, was the luckiest of stones. He insisted that I must buy one, and promised to call the next morning and go with me to hunt for one.

We spent a merry evening; in the discussion of the happenings of nine years there was much to ask and much to tell, for we had all three led pretty busy lives in the interval, and it was late when we separated, wondering over the chance that had so strangely brought us together again.

The following morning Overbeck turned up, quite determined that I must go and buy a black opal, as to which my enthusiasm had had time to wane during the night; however, he would take no denial, and so off we went to my old friend, Mr. Phillips, in Cockspur Street, the man who was really the first to introduce the artistic feeling of the sixteenth century into the modern jewellers’ craft. He was a man of the most consummate taste and culture, qualities repeated with additional intensity in his distinguished son, Sir Claude, the great critic, the accuracy of whose judgment and historical knowledge in all that concerns the fine arts is undisputed.

I knew that the best chance of finding anything a little out of the way would be in Mr. Phillips’ hands, and so it proved to be, for he at once showed me the gem that I wanted, mounted as a pin with tiny sparks of diamonds round it. He told me that he had shown it to the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh; both admired its beauty, but neither of them would buy it, on account of the evil reputation of the white opal.

It was a strange, weird stone, with a mysterious spark of fire in the centre, which seemed to gleam fitfully, almost capriciously. Overbeck looked at it for a moment, trembling with excitement, and then hissed in my ear: “Buy it! Buy it! It surely brings you luck.” I laughed at his eagerness, but I bought the pin for its beauty’s sake. As we left the shop Overbeck, who was greatly excited, stopped on the threshold, and said: “In ten days you’ll get a letter, mark my words; in ten days, more or less.” We parted in Cockspur Street and he went abroad that evening. I went home, delighted with my pretty new toy, and thought nothing more about the famous letter which I was to receive, when on the evening of the 9th of May, exactly ten days from the visit to Mr. Phillips, I received the following note:

“10, Downing Street, Whitehall. May 9th, —74.

“DEAR MR. MITFORD,

“If you like to become Secretary to the Board of Works I shall have pleasure in appointing you.

“Faithfully yours,

B. DISRAELI.

“Bertram Mitford, Esq.”

That letter changed the whole course of my life.

I wrote and congratulated Overbeck on his prophetic powers. His answer was, “You will get anything you wish.”

One night at a party I told my future wife, Lady Clementine Ogilvy, the story, and when three months later we were betrothed, I sought all over London for a black opal for her, but there was not one to be had; the fame of my stone had somehow or other been spread abroad and everybody was mad to buy its fellow. When she went to Paris with her mother, trousseau buying, I commissioned her to hunt for a black opal, which she did, and brought home a beautiful specimen which she still has—and on the day that she bought it I concluded the purchase of the house in Chelsea, where we were to spend so many happy years.

We are old folk now, the ink of Dizzy’s note, which I treasure, has faded almost into nothingness, and my poor black opal was stolen some seven years ago by burglars—but not before it had well and truly done its appointed work.

We were married on the 31st of December, 1874, in the little chapel of Cortachy Castle. Had the wedding been fixed for a day later there would have been no bridegroom, for all the trains in Scotland were held up by a terrific blizzard, and the New Year’s hampers were looted to feed the passengers, who were starved with cold and hunger.

At the wedding breakfast I told the story of the black opal to the late Lord Southesk, a famous collector of gnostic gems, perhaps sharing Bartolommeo Scala’s belief in the mystic virtues of precious stones. “Ah! wonderful!” he said. “How little we know about the influence of gems! Perhaps——” Someone interrupted, and to my regret he was prevented from finishing the sentence. People said it was a very pretty wedding—and so it must have been, in that glorious old castle with the richly-wooded river Esk running under its walls, as it had done for seven centuries—but a bridegroom, I take it, does not see much on his wedding-day.

There was a goodly company—chiefly neighbours from such places as Glamis, Kinnaird, Kinnordy, Kinblethmont, Balnaboth. Many Ogilvys and Stanleys, and an army of tenants and retainers. The host looked every inch a scion of the old Mormaers of Scotland, and the stately châtelaine, at whose hands the venerable home had received such loving care, proudly did the honours, a queen among her guests. The sun shone out gaily after the storm, the wild skirl of many bagpipes screamed in the courtyard, pibroch followed by pibroch, as we made ready to drive through the bright, crisp air to Airlie Castle. That was indeed a romantic setting for a honeymoon, and never looked more beautiful than during those sharp winter days. The river was almost entirely frozen over, and on one great ice-block was a dead salmon, half eaten by the otter which had dragged it there; the trees were heavily laden, snow-icicles sparkling with all the colours of the rainbow; the red sandstone walls of the bonnie House of Airlie glowing in the sun—winter in all its glory.

1875

The honeymoon was cut very short, for at the end of five days I was summoned south. There was trouble at the Office of Works, and I must perforce get back into harness with all speed. And so we bade good-bye to Airlie Castle and the year 1874. It had been for me a bright and a joyous year, in which there had not been an hour that was not full of hope, and of happiness which is the child of hope.

For a few months, while our house in Chelsea was getting ready for us, we camped in my old quarters in Victoria Street. We had a bright welcome there, for my dear old friend, Sir Joseph Hooker, had made the rooms gay with flowers, and the dinginess of London was left outside.

On the 3rd of July we migrated into our new home at Chelsea, a delightful house looking over the river, carrying up and down with the tide the brown-sailed barges and all its picturesque movement, with the famous green copper spire of Battersea Church across the water, and the delightful old wooden bridge, now vanished, which has been immortalized in Whistler’s etchings and nocturnes and harmonies. At the time when Chelsea was “a village of palaces” Lindsey House had seen better days. It was built on part of the site occupied by Sir Thomas More’s country place, a site full of memories of the great Chancellor and Erasmus and Anne Roper. Here Holbein, introduced by Erasmus, lived until he had painted the portraits of his host and hostess and the whole family, down to Patenson the jester and the little dog.

Then came a day when Sir Thomas, prudent man, seeing that there was nothing left to paint, began to think that a tame artist was an expensive luxury. How to get rid of him decently? The Chancellor was a man of resource. He gave a great garden-party which the King announced his intention of honouring. Up the river came the royal barge, with banners flying and trumpets braying, a brave pageant. At Chelsea the King alighted, and was received with all due honour just outside my house that was to be. Old Sir John Tyrrell—a famous character at the Carlton Club some fifty years ago, used to say: “Yes! I’ll go and stay with you on two conditions; first, that I breakfast at my own time, and secondly that I am not taken round to see the improvements.” Sir Thomas More spared King Henry VIII. none of the “improvements.” When with royal courtesy he had admired the outside, His Majesty was taken within, and there, like the great judge that he was, he was smitten by the beauty of the glorious canvases and panels which hung everywhere. “Is such a painter yet alive, and to be had for money?” he exclaimed, and Holbein was produced out of a closet in which he lay hidden. The King was overjoyed. The painter’s fortune was made and the Chancellor’s weekly bills were reduced.

Next, in Charles II.’s time, all the way from St. Martin’s Lane came Sir Theodore Mayerne, the confidential doctor of three kings, and he too was a patron of art, for he set up a furnace and worked at enamelling with Petitot the Swiss miniaturist, the excellence of whose flesh tints are said to have been due to the discoveries of the great medicine-man. When Sir Theodore died his house was pulled down and Lord Lindsey bought the property and built himself a home with the river in front and a garden at the back. There is some reason, based upon internal evidence, for supposing that Sir Christopher Wren may have been the architect. There are still remaining some of those ogival chimney-pieces such as he introduced into Hampton Court; and what more likely than that the famous Court architect should have built for the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain? Here dwelt his descendant, the Duke of Ancaster, with his beautiful duchess, whose portrait was painted both by Hudson and by a famous pupil of his, one Sir Joshua Reynolds. The beautiful portrait by Hudson, with shipping in the distance, was painted to record the mission of the Duchess when she went to Germany to bring back Queen Charlotte.

To the Ancasters succeeded Count Zinzendorf, chief of the Herrenhuters, whose burial-ground was at the back where the Moravian preacher’s pulpit was not so very long ago still to be seen—indeed perhaps it may be there yet. After that the glory of the great house departed. It was divided into five and was known as Lindsey Row. In the first of these in 1874 lived Whistler, in the next, which had once been owned by Martin the painter, the illustrator of Milton, dwelt a Mr. Boggett, a great grower of chrysanthemums; then came Mr. Nassau Senior, who married the beautiful and charming sister of Tom Hughes (“Tom Brown’s School-days”), and the last two were empty. Those two I bought and threw into one with the help of Mr. Devey the architect. And here we lived for many happy years.

If in London the last person with whom you are likely to make acquaintance is the man who is living next door to you, in Chelsea it was quite different; we were very neighbourly; the Nassau Seniors were most friendly—she, unfortunately a great invalid, hardly leaving her sofa, but always a ray of sunshine, brightening all the lives with which she came in contact; as for Whistler, he was perpetually in and out of our house, and always welcome for the spirit of fun and devilry which he brought with him. He would come in of a morning with a whole budget of papers, letters, of which many were afterwards published in “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” which he would read out to us, exploding with laughter over his own witticisms. It was generally at some “art patron” that he loved to gird—the owner of the famous blue room being a favourite victim.

There was one batch of correspondence, however, which was never made public—with eating appetite had come, and in these letters Whistler had fed himself to bursting-point. The law of libel stopped even his mouth, and only a very small number of friends was allowed to listen to those masterpieces of demoniacal satire. It was an unfortunate thing for art that during his life-time—except so far as his etchings were concerned—Whistler’s genius was not recognized. The result was that many of his finest paintings were destroyed. His financial difficulties were no secret.

On one occasion, I went to see him and found him boiling over with anger surrounded by masterpieces which he had just cut to ribbons in a storm of mad fury lest they should fall into the hands of the bailiffs; and all for a miserable debt of thirty pounds, which, for the moment, he was unable to pay. There they lay in strips—portraits, nocturnes, harmonies, symphonies, gems which now, after a lapse of from thirty to forty years, would be worth many thousand pounds. Any one of his friends would have lent him the money over and over again, but he was as proud as Lucifer, the devil entered his soul, and the art tragedy was consummated. The blow hit me cruelly, for he had just finished a beautiful portrait of my wife; what it must have meant for Whistler himself nobody ever knew; but when he cooled down among the ruins it must have been misery, for he was as confident as Thucydides himself of the value of his own work. But how lucky it was that neither the Mother nor the Carlyle were included in that massacre of the innocents—surely two of the most reverent portraits that genius ever produced.

Whistler’s hospitality was great—his Sunday luncheons (breakfasts he called them) were perfect; he had an excellent cook, who, with her husband, made up the household, and there were constant little surprise dishes over which he would chuckle and linger till late in the afternoon; as Amphitryon, he was the embodiment of human happiness—sitting at the head of his table dispensing quaint cates and still quainter sayings—barbed arrows sometimes—he was a sight for gods and men; the talk was always good, for he had the knack of surrounding himself with all manner of clever people—but, as was once told of Kinglake, no matter how many good things might be said, his were sure to be the best. The lightning flashes of his wit—his epigrams—were matchless. They were like the sting in the tail of his emblematic butterfly, an insect unknown to mere vulgar entomologists.

I once or twice met Oscar Wilde there, and a set-to between that big fat man and the little gnome-like Whistler was certainly good to listen to—but the lightweight always carried off the belt. Charles Keene, whose black and white sketches for _Punch_ were Whistler’s admiration, was a frequent guest. He was a tall, solemn-looking Don Quixote who used to wander through the suburbs dressed as a _rapin_ should be in a loose jacket and slouch hat, with a black cutty pipe always in his mouth, and a satchel hanging from his shoulders. He had a dry, racy humour of his own, which worked in well with the salad of wit at the table.

One day the conversation turned on health and nostrums; “Well,” said Don Quixote, “I think that if a man is ill there is only one thing for him to do; he must give up smoking for a fortnight.” “Yes! but supposing he don’t smoke?” asked I. “Then I don’t know what he is to do.” Having uttered these words with pious gravity Charles Keene retired behind his pipe and once more became a listener.

There was another very agreeable scoundrel, the sort of man who has done everything and been everywhere, a capital foil to the others. But one fine day he disappeared. Whistler had found him out. There are not a few men of that sort who contrive to make a living in some way out of art and artists. But they seldom last long. I shall never forget that man’s account of the recovery of Rossetti’s poems. When his wife died the great artist in his misery had laid the MS. in her coffin as a last loving gift—they were hers, he said, and she should keep them. Always being urged to regain them, he in the end yielded. The needful authority was obtained, and in the dead of night Rossetti with a friend went to the cemetery. The coffin was exhumed and opened, the lovely hair which his paintings had made famous rippled out in waves. The MS. all stained with the horrors of death, lying on her bosom, was reverently secured and the coffin fastened down again. A weird story, but the poems were saved.

There came a day when, to my great regret, Whistler made up his mind to leave the old house in which he had lived for eleven years and to build the “White House” in Tite Street, mainly prompted, as he told me, by the wish to show what he could achieve in decoration. E. W. Godwin was the architect and it was not long before they quarrelled over the work, in commemoration of which Whistler caused a stone to be inserted in the front of the house, engraved with the words, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it—E. W. Godwin F.S.A. built this house.” The stone has long since disappeared. Godwin died in 1886 and in 1888 Whistler married his widow. A quaint ending to an artistic feud.

Unlike the great plagiarist Oscar Wilde, Whistler was always original. He was himself, he imitated nobody. The other man, brilliantly clever as he undoubtedly was, never hesitated to copy. Both were startling and audacious in their dress; but Whistler in his long coat, playing with a slender Wanghai cane as tall as himself, his little white plume standing up in the midst of his black, or blackened, hair, was unlike anything or anybody else. He was delicate, playful, whimsical, a creature of fancy.

Wilde, the last time I saw him, was got up like a low-comedy caricature of a Tom and Jerry “Corinthian.” That day he was minded to be Georgian, and was swaggering in the King’s Road dressed in a brown frogged coat, trimmed with cheap fur; on his head was an extravagant hat with a brim as much curled as the roof of a Chinese pagoda; the size and flatness of his huge splay feet were accentuated by being forced out of a pair of tight trousers carefully strapped over a pair of aggressively varnished boots; Whistler might be vain, but it was the vanity of Puck. The other man was Caliban.

When Whistler made his famous answer, “Why drag in Velasquez?” he was in his sly way laughing at himself, just as he was full of malicious fun when on somebody praising Leighton’s versatility as musician, linguist, orator and what not, he said, “Paints a little too sometimes, don’t he?” How came so bright an elf, so gay, so mischievous, into the world? He must have been a changeling brought by some wanton sprite straight from the realm of King Oberon.

Lindsey Row, with all its traditions, soon became absorbed into Cheyne Walk, and the very name would have been forgotten and lost had I not had the audacity to call my two-fifths of the old building Lindsey House.

A little further to the east, past the quaint old church so full of ancient monuments and thoughts that were sermons in themselves, was the home of Thomas Carlyle. He and his wife had been friends of my family and of my wife’s for many years, and when I went to live in Chelsea he sent to bid me go and see him. Having known him from childhood I was not afraid of him as most people were, though of Mrs. Carlyle I used to stand in considerable awe; but she had now been dead eight years, and the old wise man was always kind and gentle to me. So I often used to go and see him on Sunday afternoon when he sat in his dressing-gown in the little room at the back, smoking his long churchwarden, and he even allowed me to light a cigar—a rare privilege, I was told—for, as a rule, in that sanctum nobody might smoke but himself.

Sometimes he would put away his pipe, don his long brown coat and soft wide-awake hat, grasp his cudgel and come out for a walk on the Embankment or in Battersea Park. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a great friend of Carlyle’s and afterwards his executor, was a pretty frequent companion on these Sunday walks. During these outings Carlyle used to cross-examine me about Japan, which greatly excited his curiosity. He made me very proud once by saying that he had “read my ‘Tales of Old Japan’ from Alpha to Omega.” He did not like the stories; there was too much blood and murder in them—but that was not my fault—at any rate, I felt that to have been read “from Alpha to Omega” by Carlyle was a bright feather in my cap. Occasionally, if the weather was bad, Carlyle would go for what he called his drive. This meant taking the omnibus in the King’s Road as far as the Bank and coming back in a return bus. I only once bore him company on one of these expeditions, but it was a memorable occasion.

It was at the time of the Bulgarian atrocities when Mr. Gladstone was goading the country into fury with his eloquence, till Delane once said to me, “Upon my word I verily believe that Gladstone thinks that Dizzy himself had a hand in those outrages upon women and children.” Carlyle was as hot upon the subject as Gladstone himself. When we got into the omnibus the old man began lashing out. “Hoo! Sir!” he said, “there’s that Disraeli or Beaconsfield, or whatever he chooses to call himself; he thinks himself the wisest man on earth, and he’s just the foolishest thing that crawls upon the face of it”—and so he went off at score, rattling out the most fantastic invective against the Tory Government and “the unspeakable Turk”; accusations to make one’s hair stand on end, for he was as great an artist in adjectives as Dizzy himself—witness the “sea-green incorruptible” and the “French Revolution” _passim_—and when he had spent himself in his indignation, real or feigned, then would come a loud guffaw of laughter as much as to say, “See what a sad dog I am!” There were a few people in the omnibus who listened in open-mouthed amazement—but the conductors all knew him, and were used to his wonderful ways.

I call attention to those bursts of laughter. They were very characteristic and very significant. Those who from Froude downwards have recorded much of Carlyle’s conversation have given the impression of an ill-natured, discontented man carping with no little spite at the rest of mankind. That was not Carlyle. That he held violent opinions expressed in violent language is a fact. But much of his so-called cynicism was, I am convinced, misunderstood.

Where he suspected fraud of any kind he was pitiless—but half his utterances were redeemed by a loud laugh, a laugh which impressed me as being quite as much directed against himself as against his victim—and that laugh took the sting of cruelty out of his speech. He did not suffer fools gladly, and he could not brook being lionized, but during all the years that I knew him—from before the year 1850 to the time of his death—he was always kind to everybody with whom I saw him—kind and, in his rough way, considerate.

The downright nature of the man was well shown by what he said of the Duke of Wellington’s speeches in the House of Lords: “He was no orator, but he was the best man there, for he had something to say and he said it.” To the gewgaws and tinsel of oratory he paid no respect; so the cloth were good he cared not for the embroidery. His great admiration of the old warrior was fully shared by Mrs. Carlyle. Is it not recorded in one of her letters or writings that on one occasion, happening to meet the Duke at some party, she contrived to brush up against him in order just to be able to say that she had once touched him?

Like everybody else who held Carlyle in reverent affection I was shocked by Froude’s publications. No falser portrait of a great man was ever handed down to posterity than that which he has painted. Would Carlyle’s friends have loved him as they did had he been the snarling, spiteful, inhuman monster that he represents, without one scintilla of the rare geniality and of the power of friendship which he possessed?

That he was a good hater—such a hater as Dr. Johnson would have loved—no man will deny; much of his hatred was political; in regard to social life—the life of man with his kind—I have known him to melt into a tenderness that was all the more touching coming as it did from the rugged Scottish peasant nature. I have walked with him and sat with him by the hour, without hearing him say an ill-natured word of man or woman.

Above all it is a pity that the veil of sanctity which should mask the wedded life of even the humblest individual should have been lifted in the case of two such remarkable personalities as the Carlyles. Froude has done it, greatly to the prejudice of the friend who trusted him, but who was careful to express the feeling that the papers which he confided to him would need judicious editing, and that at a time when the one person fitted to edit them would be no more. In spite of my great admiration for Froude as a writer of English prose, I am bound to say that his treatment of Carlyle must always remain a blot upon his reputation not only as a man of letters but as a friend.

It is certain that the Carlyles were an ill-assorted couple. She considered from the beginning that to marry him was an act of condescension on her part. The daughter of a country doctor at Haddington had descended from the skies like Diana to Endymion to marry the son of a stone-mason! I feel inclined to say “Poor Endymion!” But he loved her and was happy in his love. Not so she! Jealous of him she was—furiously jealous—not as a lover, for there she knew she was safe. But she could not bear to think that if she was famous it was as his wife, whereas she, knowing herself to be brilliant, would fain have had him to be known as the husband of that wonderful Mrs. Carlyle. It was his success, social and literary, that she resented; it irked her to be in the second place, and she could not forgive it.

That she entertained any sentimental feeling about Carlyle’s intimacy with Lady Ashburton is an absurd supposition hardly worthy of contradiction. Harriet Lady Ashburton was an ideal _grande dame_, accomplished, well read, with a strong spice of Irish wit inherited from her mother Lady Sandwich, who was a Corry, a daughter of Lord Belmore; I knew her from my childhood up, indeed it was at the Grange that my father and aunt made the acquaintance of the Carlyles, who met there a whole galaxy of famous people, Thackeray, Charles Buller, Fleming, Monckton Milnes, Dickie Doyle, Titania’s favourite painter, and a host of others, all of whom were like the Ashburtons, hearty admirers of Carlyle’s genius. Mrs. Carlyle was always welcome either at the Grange or at Addiscombe, but he was the sun, she the moon—the satellite.

There was something else of which the lady was jealous, and that was the agony of concentration which her husband’s work meant for him. At moments her _sæva indignatio_ against “that Carlyle,” as she would somewhat contemptuously call him, passed all bounds.

One day my aunt went to call upon her and found her in one of her tantrums—what was the matter, she asked: “Oh! my dear, it’s just that Carlyle! Would you believe it, I have had a headache for three days, and he’s only just found it out. ‘I’m afraid you’re not quite well, my dear,’ he said—and all the time he has been working, working! I just threw a tea-cup at his head.” Petruchio had a bad time of it that day.

Another time “that” Carlyle was in great disgrace and Mrs. Carlyle in tears because the poor man had resented the presence of a dead mouse embalmed in his porridge at breakfast.

Poor Mrs. Carlyle was much to be pitied, not for any wrong that he did her, but because she was one of those people who make themselves wretched and pass on their misery to those near them. My aunt was one of those sympathetic people to whom others carry their troubles, and Mrs. Carlyle spared her not a moan. Carlyle’s self-reproaches after her death were a delusion, born of her own shrewish complaints, which in his sorrow he schooled himself into believing to be well founded. That she was not an easy woman to live with is shown by the fact that she had been just as cantankerous with her mother at home as she was afterwards with her husband. Her letters to him are the witnesses of that.

In society Mrs. Carlyle certainly shone. Her conversation was bright, witty and stimulating, but when she went home to the privacy of her journal, thanks to Froude’s indiscretion, we see another woman. She was ready enough to accept favours and hospitality from great people; then she would hie back to Cheyne Row and write down little petty unkindnesses about them.

To a house where she had been received with much cordiality she was invited with other friends to go and see the bridal trousseau of one of the daughters; out comes the journal, and with fluent pen she gives her friends full measure of spiteful satire because the linen is marked with a coronet. Perhaps she would have found equal fault had the coronet been omitted. She was in her inmost heart a discontented woman in whom the milk of human kindness had been turned sour by praise that was not always destined for her alone, and she had been much encouraged by her friend Miss Jewsbury, the novelist, a very clever woman whom I sometimes met and did not like.

Much is said in Froude’s volumes about Mrs. Carlyle’s beauty. When I knew her she was an elderly, even an old woman, but I could see no trace of good looks—and people who had known her when she was young laughed at the idea. However, love is blind, and in Carlyle’s eyes she was all that is beautiful. If it be true that in her youth she had so many suitors, it must have been her wit, and perhaps the _beauté du diable_, that attracted them.

When the end came in 1881 and the lovable wise old man died full of honour, Chelsea, and yet not Chelsea alone, mourned his loss. It was sad to think that we should never again see the lonely, pathetic figure in his long brown coat and soft hat slouching along swiftly, stick in hand, with his peculiar shuffling gait. His face was a picture of hale old age with its ruddy cheeks streaked like a russet apple, and his strong white hair and crisp beard. It was a figure that might have stepped out of a painting by Raeburn, a thing of the past with a nobility which was all its own—the sturdy, rugged independence of the northern peasant. Everybody in the Village of Palaces knew him, and everybody was proud of him.

Among the notables in Chelsea at that time was old William Bell Scott, poet and painter—not one of the giants in either capacity, but yet a man of some merit, for after all, to have achieved the honour of being a crony of such men as Rossetti and Swinburne—who wrote a sonnet on his death—means something. He was a delightful, kindly old gentleman, who was always welcome in a society the entrance to which was difficult indeed.

Rossetti, who had a way of chastening his friends, chaffed him in one of those sets of nonsense verses in which he delighted.

There is an old person called Scott Who thinks he can paint and can NOT. Shall I call him a poet? Oh! not if I know it! This curious person called Scott.

Rossetti himself lived at Tudor House further east, a remnant, as it is said, of the old house where Catherine Parr was visited by the Lord High Admiral Seymour before their marriage was made public; for some time George Meredith and Swinburne shared the house with him. It is a matter of regret to me that I never knew Rossetti. He was much interested in Japan and in Japanese art, and when I published my “Tales of Old Japan” in 1871 he took a fancy to the book, and it was arranged that I should go and see him with Lord Wharncliffe, who was a friend of his; but for one reason or another the visit never came off, and when I went to live near him chloral had done its work, and his health was no longer such as to enable him to make new acquaintances.

Whistler’s excellently told stories of his wild eccentricities were amazing. The tale of the pet bull kept in the little back garden and the alarming vagaries of the beast and its master was inimitable; but funniest of all was that of the five-barred gate. It seems that Rossetti walking in some by-street saw a little model of a five-barred gate fixed in the window of a humble dwelling. This for some reason caught his fancy, and he was fired with the desire to have all the windows of his house decorated with miniature five-barred gates. With him to have a wish was to gratify it. In a few days the windows were fitted with their new ornament, and Rossetti was enchanted. Life was now worth living. After a day or two the house began to be besieged by carts bringing baskets of dirty linen. The poet was at his wits’ end and gradually became furious. Was he a laundryman? At last the mystery was revealed. The five-barred gates were in the poorer suburban localities a washerwoman’s sign, meaning, “Washing is taken in here and linen carefully attended to.”

Those were the palmy days of the Monday Popular Concerts. They were a great weekly pleasure. Every Monday evening my wife and I found ourselves among the crowd of real lovers of music listening to the masterpieces of the great composers, given out by such artists as Joachim, Madame Norman Neruda, Piatti, Lazarus, Hallé, Clara Schumann. The audiences were always the same and in the same groups; there were even familiar figures amongst the unreserved shilling seats that regularly occupied their own

## particular places—did they come hours beforehand to secure them or was

there some such law of courtesy as governs the reservation of certain seats in the House of Commons?

Close to us sat Mrs. Sartoris, Leighton and Robert Browning and scores of other devotees of lesser note. It was the perfection of Chamber Music, but it was even better heard at those delightful concerts which Sir Frederic Leighton used to give in his studio in Holland Park. There we had the same artists and met the pick of their admirers; but the space was just what the music was suited to, and not the most delicate shade, not the tenderest phrasing was lost, as it sometimes was in the huge concert hall. And then Leighton himself was such an admirable host, so instinct with that finest of all courtesy which springs from kindliness of heart and the honest delight in giving pleasure. I first made Leighton’s acquaintance in 1855, the year in which the picture which made him famous, the procession of Cimabue’s Madonna, was exhibited. He was then a young man of twenty-five—handsome, accomplished, a musician, speaking French, German and Italian in great perfection, with what probably was a unique mastery of the different Italian patois from Venetian to Neapolitan.

One great charm that he possessed and retained to the end, save only under the paroxysms by which his heart was being tortured, was the look of happiness—a rare gift; whether he were painting a picture, listening to music, or presiding in his royal way, lounging in the great armchair at an Academy dinner, he seemed to radiate happiness. To his friends he always gave a glad and genial welcome, to young artists a helpful hand and sound advice. His charity was boundless, and it may rightly be said of him that he obeyed the precept of the sermon on the mount, “When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”

There was one side of Leighton’s character which perhaps few people suspected. Underneath the soft, willowy, rather effeminate manner which he affected in general society there lay a foundation of chivalry worthy of a Bayard. For his beloved Academy, as its chosen champion, he was ready to do battle in the most literal sense of the word. The removal of the Duke of Wellington’s statue from the top of Decimus Burton’s arch at Hyde Park Corner, to which I shall refer later, led to a debate in the House of Commons, when Sir Robert Peel the Second took the opportunity to deliver an attack on the Royal Academy whose members he declared to be “people of no very good taste.” He then singled out the President as a target to be shot at in the most vicious manner, quoting Leighton’s evidence in the famous case of Belt v. Lawes, and arguing therefrom that the Royal Academy “was not worthy of consideration in this House;” and he wound up with a rather risky pun, not in the best of taste, which, roared out with a voice which was perhaps the finest—certainly the loudest—that ever electrified the House, convulsed the faithful Commons with laughter.

The next morning Leighton came to my office in a fury—his rage at white heat. The affront to himself was nothing, but the Academy had been insulted and as President he must take up the glove, and he was there to consult me as to the propriety of calling out Sir Robert, at the same time suggesting that I, as an old friend and largely concerned in the Hyde Park Corner scheme, should be the bearer of the message.

I succeeded in calming him, arguing that after all abuse of the kind was nothing more than a wasteful expenditure of carbonic acid gas, which according to the law of the diffusion of gases would be absorbed and forgotten—nobody being the worse. Nothing came of it, and Leighton went away only half convinced; the argument that duelling was out of fashion carried no weight with it; on that morning he was full of fight and as eager to go and buy a case of pistols as any fire-eating Sir Lucius O’Trigger of the eighteenth century. I did not tell this to Sir Robert Peel, who was a friend of mine, and he died unaware of the terrors from which I had saved him.

The honours list of New Year’s Day, 1896, contained Leighton’s name as a peer. His patent was signed on the 24th of January and on the 25th he died, having been a peer for one day, without taking his seat in the House of Lords, and without signing the roll. His funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral was attended by all sorts and conditions of men from the great Lord Salisbury downwards. A notable feature in the service was the chorale of trombones which was written by Beethoven for his own funeral and had never been heard since. The pealing of that solemn dirge, the great sound-waves rolling through the aisles, was soul-stirring. A nobler requiem could not have been chosen.

Leighton did not marry. With his good looks, which had something that belonged to an archaic type, his varied talents and the success which always appeals to women, he might have been irresistible, yet no one ever saw him pay more attention to any woman, however beautiful, than was justified by the most chivalrous courtesy. He was in love, but it was with his Art—she was his mistress and to her he was faithful to the end.

In these days when rough sketches and mere hints are extolled as works of genius it is the fashion to decry Leighton’s work. The new men shirk all that makes the painting of a picture difficult. Leighton boldly faced all the great obstacles that stand in the way of the man who would fain be the exponent of the highest art. Sometimes—indeed, often—he failed. His flesh tints were apt to be waxy and his drawing in parts weak, though no man ever painted flowing drapery more beautifully. Still, there are paintings of his which will live. To name only two, the Daphnephoria seems to me to be a most nobly imagined picture, full of dignity, movement and life, and the portrait of Richard Burton in the National Portrait Gallery is not only a speaking likeness but a masculine and vigorous work. Those are not the only ones. But whatever he did showed distinction and grace and a loftiness of aim of which he never lost sight.

When Leighton was elected to the Dilettante Club, of which I was then a member, he whimsically enrolled himself as their sculptor, “with permission occasionally to relapse into painting.” This was a playful allusion to the fine piece of classical sculpture which he had produced in 1877—the “Athlete wrestling with a Python” in the Tate Gallery—of the first sketch of which he gave me a replica.

A constant guest at Leighton’s parties was Robert Browning who, unlike not a few poets—Swinburne and Tennyson to wit, who had not the gift of tune—was a fanatic lover of music and never failed to seek it where it was at its best. So it happened that we often met him, and once he honoured us by dining with us.

He was very pleasant and agreeable, handsome in a rather leonine way, but his conversation lost some of its charm owing to his rasping, grating voice. I once heard him read one of his poems, “The Ride to Ghent,” at the house of Lady Stanley of Alderley. There were only about a dozen people present; it was not a pleasing performance; the effect of the poetry was marred by that hoarse croak, like that of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, and though he read with intense emotion he failed to touch. Had he possessed the attraction of a musical speaking voice he would have been irresistible.

The friendship between Leighton and Joachim was close and real, and no wonder; the two personalities so artistic, so refined, were eminently suited to one another. Both were above all, quite apart from their art, charming companions. They were of about the same age; Joachim, who survived Leighton by nine years, was one year younger. At dinner at our house one day Joachim told us how it was that he became an artist. When he was a tiny boy of about four years his father, who lived at Kittsee near Pressburg, went one day into the town to attend a fair and brought home as a fairing for the child a little sixpenny toy fiddle. Little Joseph seized upon it eagerly, it became his constant companion, he contrived to coax a tune out of it, and his destiny was fixed.

There can be no doubt that as an exponent of the highest masterpieces of classical music he was the greatest violinist that ever lived. There have been other artists full of technical accomplishments, fired by the most intense musical passion—but for the power of throwing himself, as it were, into the very inmost soul of the great masters and reverently realizing their intentions he never had an equal. That he had all the fire of his rivals, all their passion, he could show upon occasion, as, for instance, in his wild, corybantic rendering of the Hungarian dances which he and Brahms adapted; but when he was dealing with the more serious school of music he proved that he had something more. There, tender and true as a lover should be, he exercised the most supreme self-effacement, and became the very voice of the tone poet at whose shrine he was at the time officiating as high priest. So great was his sympathy for his composer that when he played it was not Joachim who was speaking to you but Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms.

He was one of the most amiable of men, and would often carry his violin with him to the house of a friend, never weary of giving pleasure. In that he was unlike some artists who resent, as I must say I think they are justified in doing, any attempt at making use of them. Arthur Sullivan once told me how at an evening party the hostess went up to him and said: “Oh! Sir Arthur, it would be so sweet of you if you would play us something.” The answer was characteristic. “My dear lady, there is John Millais. If he will sit down and make a sketch for you, I will play. He has been painting all day, I have been working at music all day, so we are both in the same boat.”

The highly-strung nature of artists is accountable for many misunderstandings, few more unintelligible than that which arose between the large-hearted Joachim and Brahms, the friend whom he admired and to whose fame he did so much to contribute. It all arose out of the performance or non-performance of a work of Brahms in 1873. It was a trifling matter which might probably have been set right with ease. It must have embittered the long years of life which remained to both, each conscious of the worth of the other. Brahms died in 1897; Joachim ten years later. The separation from his wife, whom he adored, and the loss of his friend, were cruel blows. There are other men besides Job who might well say, “I have lived too long!”

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