i i. \V CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library PR 6015.I38O5 The diary of a lobker-on. 3 1924 013 626 324 PI Cornell University fl Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013626324 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON BT TBS BAHZ AUTHOB LIFE'S LITTLE THINGS LIFE'S LESSEE MOODS ADVENTtlEBS AMONG PICTUEE6 DATS WITH VELASQUEZ THE EDUCATION OF AN AKTIST DAYS IN COENWALL ETC., ETC. THE DIAET OF A LOOKER-OJN^ BY C. LEWIS HIND NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMVIII DEDICATION TO THE DISCOURAGER OF HESITANCY QHALL I still hide your identity under those modest words of "your own choosing — The Discourager of Hesitancy — ^you, who have been, and are, so much to me ? Ideas have come to fruition through your sympathy : you have encouraged what may be good in this book, and dis- countenanced what was bad. It was to please you that this " Diary of a Looker-On " has taken shape. Such a book is the result of keeping a Diary. The battered Diaries lie before me— fourteen pocket- books closely written, a day to a page, records of things fancied, seen, felt, that seemed worth preserving. " There's husbandry in Heaven," so why should not I, a writer, utilise impressions of the hour, as occasions arise, in the columns of journals and periodicals ? In one form or another, in part or in whole, these pages were published, in the Daily Chronicle (through whose generous columns the Looker-On was allowed to meander), the Nation, the Academy, the St. James's Gazette, the Evening News, the Reader, the Studio, the Bookman, and the Pall Mall Magazine. Here they are collected, amended, extended or curtailed as seemed necessary — grouped in the months when they were written, and in the order of their origin, as the Diary vi DEDICATION of one who amused himself by imagining that he was a Looker-On at the pageant of life and art. You will like the book, I know. But the others, the many others ? Some will say that it lacks unity. It does. The only unity in a Diary is the personality of the Diarist. Some day I shall write a sad book' to explain why one writes a book. Meanwhile here is this, for better or worse — done. We are now starting forth, dear Discourager of Hesi- tancy, on a greater adventure, toward farther horizons than any I have ever watched. For it is our purpose to wander out into the world. The Diaries will continue ; but there will be no need to mail you the journals where the amplifications of day-by-day impressions are published, for we shall be together. C. L. H. CONTENTS JANUARY PAGE Those Who Watch 3 What's Past is Prologue 6 Megaphones and Ideals 9 Reading "Don Quixote" 12 Leonaedo the Seeker 16 The Pensee Mere 20 Light 23 FEBRUARY At a Maeterlinck Matinee 29 A Mission Service 32 A Vision on the Rhone 37 Thomas Hardy 40 Danes 46 Modern Dutchmen 50 Old Dutchmen 52 MARCH A Practical Mystic 59 Music and Daffodils 63 viii CONTENTS PAGE Musical Pictures 66 Jonathan and the Tree 69 Useful Death 71 "An ExauisiTE Little Master" 74 " Three Parts Woman — One Part Artist " 77 The Child in Art 80 APRIL Italy Under Snow 83 A Spartan's Home-Coming 88 The Guardian of the Acropolis 91 A Greek Boy Who Laughed at the Rain 94 Dawn at Nauplia 98 Last Glimpses of Greece 101 MAY Bedside Reading 108 The Apparition 110 The Nightingale 113 Two R.A. Presidents . I. Reynolds 116 II. Lord Leighton 120 East and West 124 The New Sculpture 127 May in Paris 130 CONTENTS ix PAGE Feance Knows 132 Gaston la Todche and a Comparison 136 A Little Aet Journey on the Continent 138 JUNE Paddington oe Lyonesse 147 The Man Who Took No Risks 150 The Open Gate 153 Faith 156 A Paintee at Woek 160 Sunshine in the Guildhall 168 An Old Mastee in Whitechapel 167 " Old Ceome was England " 170 A Geeat Sea Paintee 174 JULY Impeessions of Travel: The Fog 181 The Launch 182 The Kid 184 Religious Experiences: Happiness 186 Pilgrims 188 Consolation 189 The Creature in the Cottage 190 Entering London 196 b JANUARY X CONTENTS PAGB Ingres, Rembrandt, and a Modern 199 An Academy Soiree 204 AUGUST Chateau Gaillard and a Song 209 Climbing a Mountain 212 My Friend the Failure 217 Ruskin's Plans and Scaffoldings 220 Millet's Moments 224! Colour 228 SEPTEMBER When the Tide Turned 233 Emotions or Interest 236 The God of Sleep 240 A Florentine Lady and Raphael 243 A Happy Artist 246 Brothers in Art 248 A Minor Poet Talks 251 A Beauty Book 255 OCTOBER Ancient and Modern 261 Episodes Recalled : Unearthed from Piccadilly 266 The Preacher 267 CONTENTS xi PACE Episodes Recalled (contimoed) A Poor Man's Cube 268 The Sport of Killing 269 Tramps 270 An Impression of Oxford 276 An Impression of Cambridge 277 Ethical Art 281 The Missing Word 284 NOVEMBER A Photograph and a Volcano 291 Education 294 A Journey on the Thames 296 A House in Red Lion Square 299 The Brotherhood 303 Wings and Stars 306 Mystery in Marble 308 DECEMBER A Dream-Haunted Room 313 Toys, Peas, and a Star 317 In Postman's Park The Painter of Silences The Old Quest 327 The Year Ends JANUARY JANUARY THOSE WHO WATCH A S I walked meditatively through Cheapside on the first "^^ day of the year, my heart disowned the bustle, and I thought of those who watch. They speak rarely ; stars and the sky are their companions; their home is the' moor and the sea. Mostly they are sailors and shepherds, and, being inarticulate, they are near to the heart of things. As I walked through Cheapside I saw one who has left the sea twenty years ; but the habit of watching remains. He will trudge ten miles on a Sunday, just to sit for an hour on the Lizard Cliffs watching the homeward-bound vessels rounding the land, so close that he can distinguish the air the band is playing. When no vessel is in sight he watches the void, as if he sees and recognises things not revealed to others, thinking vagrant thoughts, till the sun settles upon the sea, and sinking below the water, hastens him off on his ten-mile trudge home. But his eyes do not lose the vision of immensity. As I walked through Cheapside I saw the grey sea churn- ing on the sands of Sennen Cove. I climbed the path, marked by white stones, to the little storm-swept hut where the coastguard watches. On one side it is but a short wild walk to the Land's End ; before him is the ocean, and on a clear day he can see the Isles of Scilly, 3 4 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON clustering, like fairy islands, on the horizon. He watches, and happenings almost tragic accompany his watching. For he is an Official, and must only report Government boats ; but all homecoming vessels try to make him flash the news of their approach to England. Poor, buiFeted, travel-stained ships, striving like unborn souls to make themselves known! He sees them pass, pleading for recognition, is motionless, and watches. As I walked through Cheapside I saw a sailor-man standing on Plymouth Hoe, peering into the night. He is quite alone ; the rain beats on his muffled figure ; nothing seems to be left of him but his gleaming eyes. He is watching for the first glimpse of the American liner, that pauses a little outside the break-water at Plymouth to take up passengers for Cherbourg. There he watches all night, all next day, if necessary, till he sights the vessel. Then he runs to his hut, speaks a few words through the telephone, and the passengers dozing in the hotels, start, grasp their rugs, and say one to another, " Quick ! the tender leaves in half an hour ! " And the watcher, whom they have never seen, his duty done, walks home from Plymouth Hoe to bed. He watches in his dreams. As I walked through Cheapside I saw a great ship sailing through the night a thousand miles from land. And I heard in the darkness that cry, strange, sad, and comforting, of the watching sailor, just relieved : " All's well ! Lights burning brightly." As I walked through Cheapside I saw the dim folds of the downs and the shepherd who throughout the night has been befriending the lambs. It is early spring, cold WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE 5 and inclement. Dawn is breaking. The shepherd pauses, and we stand together a moment to watch the light herald- ing the day. The shepherd's deep eyes see things that I cannot see. He does not speak ; but when I have passed on he waves his lantern. The yellow glimmer mingles with the dawn. I wave in answer to his signal. And just then, by the corner of Wood Street, in Cheap- side, a voice addressed me. It proceeded from a cabman who had driven up to the kerb, where I had paused to wave farewell to the shepherd. " Where to. Captain ? " asked the cabman. " I have not engaged you," I answered. " Well, Fm jiggered ! " said the cabman, addressing the crowd which had collected. " Here's a bloke as stands waving his umbrella to me fit to break his neck, and then says that he ain't engaged me." I glanced around, and realised that I had to explain to a crowd of young merchants, stout policemen, and innumer- able knowing boys, that I was waving my umbrella not to a cabman, but to a shepherd at dawn on the Sussex Downs. It was impossible. So, sighing, I entered the cab, and was driven in the. direction of Threadneedle Street. WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE llyTY eyes fell upon these words — " What's Past is Prologue." I had skimmed the evening and the weekly papers, and as it was near midnight I was thinking 6 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON of walking home, when I saw that quotation printed upon the fly-leaf of a new anthology. Those words stayed with me for two miles of my home- ward walk, and would have remained in neighbourly consola- tion until I reached my doorstep, and afterwards perhaps, had not one of London's night scenes distracted me. It happened in a wide deserted street — noiselessly. That was the interest of this night piece. It began silently. The street where I overtook the distraction was wide and still. A sprinkle of rain had fallen and was now drying, leaving suggestions of moisture on the pavement like the trails of snails. A quarter of a mile ahead, I had seen the group, and wondered what it portended. Draw- ing near, it resolved itself into a hansom cab and a police- man ; but this particular conjunction was uncommon. The cabman had released the reins, and was settled in his perch as if it. were an armchair. The policeman, looking upwards, asked a question at intervals — " Are you coming down ? Are you coming down when I tell yer .-' " To these requests the cabman made no answer. He was fuddled with drink, but not entirely oblivious of the pass- ing show and the grufi' voice of the law, for, at the tenth or eleventh time of asking, suddenly he heaved himself from his perch and descended heavily to the road. As he did so, the horse screwed its mild head round, curious to know the meaning of this interlude in its workaday life. No sooner did the cabman touch earth than the instinct to run stirred in his muddled brain. He lurched a few feet, flopping like a seal. Three strides, and the policeman's hand fell heavily upon his shoulder. " If you do it again," he said, " I'll knock you down," which was an unintelligent WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE 7 remark, as it was with great difficulty that he succeeded in holding the cabman up. Meanwhile, the horse moved forward a few steps, and elongated his neck, probably searching for grass. The policeman heard the move- ment, and, realising his dilemma, blew his whistle three times. The call brought a diminutive m^in, horsekeeper or ostler, to the spot. The policeman repeated his threat to the muddled failure, whose shoulders shrunk into his big palm. " If you do it again," he said, gruffly, " I'll knock you down." Then the ostler man intervened. Advancing, he said, " You mustn't do that, constable. You mustn't knock him down." The constable asked the ostler man, frequently and forcibly, who he was, and what he meant. The ostler man proffered no information. He merely wanted fair play. He represented justice. It was fine. With one eye on the cabman, and the other roaming between the ostler man and the horse, the constable again blew his whistle three times. The call was not answered. I waited. The hour was opportune for reflection. The fuddled cabman was an unemployable in the making. There is no hope for a man who drinks to drunkenness while on duty. He must descend to the ranks of the un- employable unless a miracle happen. He is already one of earth's failures. Above the head of this earth failure somewhere in the smoky sky great Jupiter hung. It was the week of his opposition. Telescopes were being directed to that vast, cloud-wrapped gas and heat bubble which, in the course of ages, may harden into a planet like our own, but vaster, perhaps destined to produce a magnificent race of men and 8 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON women, for which we are but the prologue. And this in- competent cabman, this elderly failure, what of him and his fellow incompetents in the Jupiters of the future ? " Love will redeem him," I hear one say. That may be. All things are possible to the power that controls Jupiter, and gives to man hope and faith. Will this fuddled failure, made perfect, ever jlook back on his blundering and tinkering here, and know that the past was but prologue ? More squeaks from the whistle restored me to the present. A policeman appeared from a side street running quickly ; then another, followed by a third. One folded the cabman's rug and placed it within the vehicle. Another seized the bridle of the amazed horse. A third clutched the unattached arm of the incapacitated cause of this hitch in the working of midnight London. The constable who was leading the horse stepped out, followed by the cabman who had failed, dragged along by his escort. That just man, the ostler, walked in the rear with determination on his perky face. Slowly the mournful procession dwindled out of sight. I was left alone with the memory of the great news from nowhere — What's Past is Prologue — ^that Shakespeare heard and passed on to us. MEGAPHONES AND IDEALS nr^HE London elections are over. Quiet folk can now return to quiet thoughts and quiet topics. The streets and the newspapers are normal once more. The MEGAPHONES AND IDEALS 9 tumult and the shouting have ceased. The captains and the kings are, one hopes, resting. I take up the little book again and re-read that arresting tale of the Ideal. On this day last week — the night of the declaration of the poll in my constituency — I was tasting, with infinite pleasure, an extract from the dedicatory preface that Charles Baudelaire wrote for his "Petits Formes en Prose." " Who of us," he asks, " has not dreamed, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, subtle and staccato enough to follow the lyric motions of the soul, the waver- ing outlines of meditation, the sudden starts of the con- science ? " I read and rejoiced. Such writing stimulates and gives wings to the imagination. A flush of gratitude to Baude- laire for this communication swept through me, and I was about to abandon myself to reverie, when my emotions were rudely disturbed by wild shouts and the martial sounds of fife and drum. I closed the book. Who can resist a fife-and-drum band and a shouting crowd whirling down the street ? I left the house, and joined them. We swept into the main road, and there, outside a large stone building, I became one of a hot and swaying mass of humanity. The hour was half-past ten. It was superfluous to ask what this concourse meant. They were waiting for the declaration of the poll from the window of the dark, stony ofiicial building. At the end of a quarter of an hour I asked myself if I should return home, and surrender the rest of the evening 10 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON to the charm of Baudelaire's poems in prose. Procrasti- nating, I was lost, or, rather, found myself still waiting in that din, when, at a quarter to twelve, suddenly the singing and shouting and the fifes and drums ceased. A thousand fingers pointed towards a light that had appeared in the dark stone building. The window was thrown open, and against the space of the lighted room, we saw the silhouettes of the flushed faces of the candidates, their 'supporters, and an elderly, plump, important-looking man. He, I suppose, was the returning officer. Looming large, he stood in the centre of the group. It was his moment — the climax of his official life — and , he was determined to enjoy it to the limit, to drain the intoxicating cup of fame. Every line of his figure, the contour of his face, the emphasis of the raised hand, said : " I am Authority. Me you shall hear. This is my hour. Come rain or snow, it shall be all Mine." He stood magnificently in view, and in his two hands he held an enormous megaphone, looking like the funnel of a steamer, but shining, and reflecting the lights. " Ladies and gentlemen," he began, in a full round deep voice, " I have the honour to announce to you " The rest of his exordium was lost in a storm of shouts and angry injunctions to come to the point. But he would not curtail one instant of his triumph. His right hand flapped condescendingly in the air a^ if saying, " Be patient, children, and in good time I will tell you all." ^ " Ladies and gentlemen," he began again, " I have the honour to announce to you ^" Again he was interrupted, and a cadaverous man at MEGAPHONES AND IDEALS 11 my side cried in a horse voice, " Give us the figures governor.'" " Ladies and gentlemen ' "We ain't ladies and gentlemen," shouted a dozen voices. The returning officer placed the megaphone on the window-sill and raised his hands deprecatingly. Just then an excited individual broke through the crowd waving a piece of paper, and screaming, "We've won Birmingham." " 'Oo's we ? " said the cadaverous man at my elbow. " We've won Birmingham, 'ave we ? 'Oo's we, may I ask.?" The fight that followed was free and frank. I saw an old gentleman hit another over the head with a cotton um- brella and while they fought, the returning officer shouted, " Ladies and gentlemen," &c., through the megaphone. Edging away from the battlefield I recalled that little prose poem by Baudelaire, named " Which is True ? " How, when Benedicta died (she who filled earth and air with the ideal), her lover buried her with his own hands. How a little person singularly like the dead Benedicta suddenly appeared on the fresh grave shrieking with laughter, and saying, " Look at me ! I am the real Bene- dicta ! A pretty sort of baggage I am, and to punish you for your blindness and folly you shall love me just as I am!" Then the man was furious, and shouted, " No ! No ! No ! " and stamped on the ground so violently that his foot and leg sank up to the knee into the earth of the new grave. 12 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON And now, adds the teller of the Tale, "Like a wolf caught in a trap, I remain fastened, perhaps for ever, to the grave of the ideal," Can you wonder if, through many dreams, that night Baudelaire's little story of the real and the ideal Benedicta was thundered at me through a megaphone by a plump, distracted man ? It is only now, a week later, that Baudelaire, himself, bhrough this little book, whispers it again. READING "DON QUIXOTE" "CI OR days the invitation-card had rested on my mantel- board, balanced against the angle of the clock — Tercentenary Dinner in Celebration of the First Publica- tion of " Don Quixote." A week before the dinner my conscience whispered this question : " Can a man of honour eat and drink to the immortal memory of Cervantes— =-who has not read 'Don Quixote ' ? " I paused in the act of re-lighting my pipe. " Have I read ' Don Quixote ' ? " I asked myself, with seiious emphasis. " Of course I have. As a child I read it. Every- body does. Why, I remember Dore's illustrations perfectly well, and Maclise, or somebody, painted Sancho Fanza's interview with the Duchess. I remember Rosinante and Dapple and the windmills that Don Quixote tilted at. Of course I've read it. Evei-ybody reads ' Don Quixote ' and the novels of Dumas once a year. Cervantes lost the use of his left hand at the battle of Lepanto. Of course Fve read ' Don Quixote.' Why, it's a classic." READING "DON QUIXOTE" IS All the next day my conscience reiterated the annoying question, " Have you read ' Don Quixote ' ? " About four in the afternoon I paused outside a book shop, and thus addressed my conscience: "To be perfectly frank with you, I haven't read ' Don Quixote.' " " Then you mustn't go to the dinner," remarked my conscience. " Oh, come ! come ! " said I. I entered the shop and bought a copy of " Don Quixote." That evening from nine imtil half-past eleven I wrestled with the classic. In the last half-hour I examined my watch four times. The next evening at nine o'clock I again seated myself in my armchair before a pleasant fire, found the place with some difficulty, and, and . When I awoke the hands of the clock pointed to eleven. " Dear me ! " I reflected, " two evenings of steady reading, and Don Quixote hasn't yet met Sancho Panza. How many pages are there in this fat book ? 607 ! Whew ! How many words on a page? 650! That means 400,000 words altogether. Why, it would take me a month of evenings to finish it, and in five days the dinner takes place. I think I'll read it after the dinner is over — at leisure. It's wrong to hurry through a classic." But I could not banish " Don Quixote " from my mind. In those intervening days I regarded humanity in a new light. I wished that the world had one gi-eat ear into which I could whisper the question — "Have you read 'Don Quixote'.''" Into several ears I did whisper the words, and the replies I received salved my conscience. " Great book," answered a journalist, " In Lord Ave- bury's list I opine. There have been 300 editions of it. J 4 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Translated into fourteen languages. I once made a collec- tion of Sancho Panza's proverbs. Capital stuff! Cervantes lost a leg at the battle of Lepanto." " But have you read ' Don Quixote ' ? " " If you mean right through from beginning to end, I haven't. No time to read books. But I know all about it. A classic, if ever there was one." " How beautifully it's written," said a girl of Spanish birth, domiciled in England. " The Spanish language was like wax in the hands of Cervantes. We're very proud of him at home. Poor man ! he lost his wife — or mother was it .'' — at the battle of Lepanto. " But have you read ' Don Quixote ' ? " " Not since I left school ! We read the first six chapters in class, and I shall never forget them. Such beautiful Spanish prose. I never see a windmill without thinking of Don Quixote. He died the same year as Shakespeare." "All Cervantes sought," said a snuffy old gentleman, who, amid a zareba of books, was writing a preface to the " Exemplary Novels " in the British Museum Reading Room—" all Cervantes sought was to cure his countrymen of their passion for chivalry romances. (]!oleridge truly said that ' Don Quixote ' is a rare combination of the permanent with the individual. The first edition was most carelessly written, crowded with misprints and errors. He even called his characters by virong names. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra never recovered from a wound in the head he received at the battle of Lepanto. I do wish they would take the hairs out of the ink bottles in the Reading Room." " But you have read ' Don Quixote ' .? " READING "DON QUIXOTE" 15 " Not with the attention such a classic deserves. But it comes within the scope of my present scheme of study. It' s perfectly scandalous how the lights in the Reading Room flicker.'' I discovered a father of a small family who acknowledged at once that he had not read " Don Quixote " ; but he had read Jaccaci's volume " On the Trial of Don Quixote." " Uncommon interestin' ! You remember the bull-fighter Jaccaci met, , who knew the book by heart, and found it droll reading, and said there was somethin' in it that he couldn't get hold of, which makes priests and the like read it over and over again. No, sir, books don't die like men do. I'm a great reader. Ever come across 'Pigs in Clover'.?" " I wonder," said I, " if it was just the idea at the back of Don Quixote, the undying ideal represented by the word quixotic, the forlorn hope in us all that, emptied of self, God-directed, yearns out in longing brotherhood to the Knight of the Sorrowful Figure ? " " 'Oo knows ? " answered the father. " P'raps you're right ! Wonderful man Cervantes. Hadn't any hands I'm told. Had 'em chopped oiF at the battle of Lepanto. Must have written the book like that artist fellow who paints hold- ing the brushes in his mouth. No ! I haven't read ' Don Quixote ' myself, but I gave it to my eldest boy at Christmas, ' The night before the dinner I was slowly reading the Chrysostom chapters, finding them wise and beautiful, realising that if I gave heart, brain and leisure to " Don Quixote," it might become one of those intimate and inspiriting friends that fail not, when the journalist bustled 16 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON into my room unannounced. "I say," he cried, "I've arranged that we sit together." " But," said I gravely, " will your conscience permit you to attend a dinner to commemorate the tercentenary of the publication of ' Don Quixote' when you haven't read the book ? " " Why certainly ! " said the journalist gaily. " A dinner's a dinner ! It don't matter what it's for. I'd dine with the Additional Curates Fund if it asked me." LEONARDO THE SEEKER fTlHOSE who delight to spend leisure hours duiing the winter months wandering through the South Kensing- ton Museum know the glass-case of autograph treasures just without the Constantine lonides collection. It contains a poem by Keats, a letter from Scott, a despatch from Napoleon, and — and three small note-books in parchment covers.. The ink is faded, the handwriting is indistinct, running from right to left, and the language is Italian. On three of the open pages are geometrical designs com- plementing the crabbed, back-hand calligraphy; two are blank, and one has a drawing of a man's head verging to caricature. These three note-books once hung from the girdle of Leonardo da Vinci, the " myriad-minded," whose habit it was, for forty years, to transcribe his thoughts which ranged over everything — the whence, the why, the whither, but chiefly the Now. It would be easier to list what he was not than what he was. Painter, sculptor, architect, author, LEONARDO THE SEEKER 17 musician, mathematician, botanist, geologist, astronomer, maker of belles-lettres. Some of these arts he practised ; all were potential in him. He learnt the way, if it did not please him always to hoist the copestone. This we learn from the twenty note-books and bound manuscript volumes bequeathed by him to his friend Francesco Melzi when he, who had been a wanderer so long, lay dying in the chateau of Cloux, near Amboise, the guest of Francis I. When Ruskin said of Leonardo, " He debased his finer in- stincts by caricatiure and remained to the end of his days the slave of an archaic smile," we can only sigh to think that such a seer as Ruskin should have seen so little when his sympathy was not evoked. Did Ruskin ever examine the manuscripts in Milan, Paris, London, and Windsor ? There are few experiences so moving as to sit in the Royal Library at Windsor turning the priceless sheets of the Leonardo drawings and manuscripts. The myriad-minded becomes a reality. This peer of Shakespeare and Goethe is a living man. The holiday-folk strolling on the terrace outside are shapes and shadows ; the Eton boys, playing far below in the meadows, are gnats in the sunshine. The words of Antonio Billi, his earliest biographer, come to mind : " His spirit was never at rest, his mind was ever devis- ing new things. " Leonardo the painter we all know. Leonardo of the di-awings some know ; but Leonardo who counted painting and drawing but episodes of the vast business called Life can only be realised by those who have examined the manuscripts. Only thus can we grasp the fecundity of 18 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON this mind which renounced the practice of painting through sheer intellectual compulsion to study its laws, passing from those laws to the quest of the laws that govern the world. The small drawings which accompany the pages of manuscript are generally self-explanatory. He could convey his meaning by a design, the description is complementary. His Fables, the Treatise on Painting, the Prophecies, the inquiries, " Why water is salt ? " " What is Force ? " that beautiful passage wherein he imagines Helen, old and wrinkled, gazing into her mirror, weeping, and wondering why she had been twice carried away ; the aphorisms, the allegories, the cries on life and death — these reveal Leonardo the Man, the Seeker. He had no time for regrets or griefs. He looked out, not within ; this wise man knew that joy lies in mental activity, in being always at school, even during playtime. Let me give a few extracts from his note-books and volumes and sheets, a selection of which Mr. McCurdy has newly translated. It is from these note-books that we must reconstruct the life of Leonardo, not from the legende, in Pater's phrase, that gi-ew up around the myriad- minded : " Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labour." " Our body is subject to heaven, and heaven is subject to the spirit." " Nature never breaks her own law." " In art we may be said to be grandsons unto God." " The artist is the son, not the grandson of Nature." " The painter ought to strive at being universal." LEONARDO THE SEEKER 19 " There are many who hold the faith of the Son and only build temples in the name of the Mother." There is humour, too. This of shoemakers : " Men will take a pleasure in seeing their own works destroyed." This of feather-mattresses : " Flying creatures will support men with their feathers." The Fables, his experiments in belles-lettres, could be published next Christmas and few would know that they had not been written within the year. A love child himself, there is no record that he ever loved woman. Yet this is the man who has produced in painting the most haunting of all the female types. Close the eyes, and Mona Lisa rises with her inward, subtle, ageless smile ; close the eyes, and the imagination flies through the riot of Piccadilly, up a dark staircase to that quiet room where Saint Anne smiles on the Mother and the Mother smiles on the child. He, the celibate, in whose mind the man of science outran the artist, has above all other artists depicted in religious pictures the human side of the Mother's love. Leonardo did not confuse and bemuse him- self with his passions or with his material ; he sought truth with brain, hand and heart, but in detachment always. He dissected thirty bodies, and he wrote : " A good painter has two chief objects to paint — man and ^ the intention of his soul ; the former is easy, the latter hard." Leonardo is the Seeker, not interested personally in mortals, but profoundly interested in the laws that under- 20 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON lie and outlive their material existence. I see him child- less, the whole world his family, striding through Italy, wandering in the East, returning to Italy to contest with Michael Angelo (that would have been enough for most men !), desiring no permanent roof ; no ties, nothing that would intervene between him and his quest of knowledge ; using his talents one by one, and then exploring them to observe the germs of life within ; seldom bringing any scientific prevision to fruition, but working mole-like, laying foundations, building scaffoldings, wrestling eternally with his adversary, eternally clying, " I will not let you go unless you tell me," and passing hence still unsatisfied, those note-books near him, in one of which he had written, " When I thought I was learning to live, I was but learning to die." THE PENSEE MERE rpHE environment was perfect. There was no crowding of pictures, and the spectators were few. Silence, a clear, frosty January morning, and fifty-three landscapes roaming round _the walls of the gallery, all on a line with the eye, easily seen. No clashing of temperaments, no discords. Only six men exhibiting — mature and capable painters — united in aspiration and intention. It must be so, because in the forefront of the catalogue issued by this Society of Six, is printed that fine reflection by Jean Fran ^ois Millet, the sum of his spiritual vision — " Every artist ought to have a central thought, une pensie ndre, which THE PENSEE MERE 21 he expresses with all the strength of his soul, and tries to stamp on the hearts of others." I perambulated the gallery, inviting the pensSe mire of any or of all these fifty-three landscapes by Messrs. Pep- percorn, Austen Brown, Aumonier, Allan, Leslie Thomson, and Hill to sink into my understanding. The experiment was worth making. These men are all painters who take their work seriously. They are sound and straightforward, unaffected by the side gusts of fashion ; they are in the best sense British. Not for them the wilfulnesses and horrors of some of the exhibits at the International Society. They are not whim- sied with their talent. They are no believers in surprise packets. They offer no thrill. I received none. But from two of the landscapes, at least, something passed from painter to spectator. / One was The Cliff, by Mr. A. D. Peppercorn. I imagine that ^epensiernere in his mind was solemnity and solitude. There is no hint of the joy of life, of gaiety, sunshine, or lyrical beauty in this picture of brooding nature, which is typical of all Mr. Peppercorn's work. A barren and rugged cliff rises above a desolate ocean, upon which there is one small sail. Of moisture and atmosphere there is nothing. Sad cliff, sad sea, sad sky loom out yellowy-brown, merged, as it were, in a mahogany glaze, eternally simple, eternally forlorn. It is the kind of land- scape that a Hebrew prophet would have admired The other was Mr. Leslie Thomson's A Dorset River. His pensee m&re was also solitude, but a solitude bathed in grey light, not in golden brown. Manet said that the light should be the principal person in a picture, and Mr. Leslie 22 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Thomson makes light dominate his Dorset river country j not the effulgent rays with which Turner materialised his dreams, but pearly light issuing from a sky rising over two-thirds of the picture and reflected in the estuary of the river. The sheen of the water ends abruptly against the dun bank. To the left rises one scraggy tree, on the right looms a punt. All is simple, grave and instinct with that particular loneliness ^that only a river far from a town has. These are gallery pictures out of reach of the average man. I walked round the room, amusing myself in trying to select a smaller picture that I should choose for my own apartment. Thirteen had been already sold, showing that thirteen people had found the irresistible thing. But I could not make up my mind. They had so many qualities, but not — beauty, sheer beauty that will not be denied. In the mood of that biting cold day I wanted something that would open a window, give a lilt to the moment, make it lyrical. These pictures by the Society of Six were too autumnal, too suggestive of the outlook of the poet who called his volume " In Russet and Grey." Thus reflecting I descended^ the dark stairs, passed out into, the bleak street, crossed the road, and there, in the window of a print shop, was for me the irresistible thing, a reproduction in, colour of Whistler's nocturne in blue and gold, now in the Tate Gallery, called Old Battersea Bridge. He had no pensee mere when he. painted this lovely vision. Whistler painted it because he had to ; because the LIGHT 23 impulse to express his vision of the beauty of that twilight by old Thames was overwhelming. Think of it ! How strange it is ! The ecstasy of the moment when Whistler first saw the blue-black bridge rising in the blue night, the glow of creation, the insults heaped upon him in that shameful trial in the law courts about this very work; gradual recognition ; fame ; death ; immortality. LIGHT XT is nearing four o'clock on a January afternoon. Figures are crossing the court-yard of Burlington House; but although the Old Masters' exhibition is open, these wayfarers are not hurrying thither. They pass the turnstile, walk through bare rooms, and enter the lecture-hall. In the summer-time this apartment is utilised for sculpture ; now benches rise in tiers from the floor almost to the roof, and facing them is the lecturer's desk and lamp. TTie benches are crowded with students — youths and girls — for the lecturer is popular. Indeed, no professor of painting for many years, if ever, has aroused such interest and enthusiasm as has Mr. George Clausen. He has something to say, much to say, and he says it simply and unafiFectedly. and in a way to flatter us that we are being talked to by a comrade, not lectured at by a steel-faced Olympian. Each student feels that the lecturer is a fellow worker — one who has never dropped, through lassitude, into a convention ; one who is always searching and exploring M THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Nature, and continually establishing his foundations by considering and re-considering the best works of the past. Over these lectures broods the personality of Reynolds, his grave and wise words are quoted, until the voice of the dead becomes a living voice, and we seem to hear him saying — "The rules which this theory, or any other teaches can be no more than teaching the art of seeing nature." Remembering the many years I have enjoyed Mr. Clausen's pictures, the beauty and the interest of them, and his incessant pursuit of the most magical and the most elusive of all things — light; recalling his Girl at the Gate, in the Tate Gallery; his little landscape pastels, notes of effects, never of facts ; his pictures — The Green Fields, A Winter Morning, The Bam Door, light, atmosphere, and sunshine wafted into a room, I listen for sentences that show the brain of the student, working into xipeness, behind the vision of the eye : " What we find in the greatest works, that which keeps them still living to us, is the artist's perception of nature, expressed through his material. And the greatest men see farthest. "As usually happens in an artist's work, he tells us more than he intends." I listen, too, for preferences, and hear that the Ilyssut is perhaps the most beautiful of all the Parthenon marbles; Giorgione's Fite Champitre is one of the most beautiful pictures in the world; the Annunciation by Rossetti is among the finest of the pre-Raphaelite pictures ; some of LIGHT 25 Watts's landscapes, such as The Dove that Returned NoU are as fine things as have been done. The conviction that he returns to again and again is the warp and woof of Mr. Clausen's art life. Here it is in his own words : " Light seems to me the governing thing, as far as the painter is concerned ; it redeems anything that is capable of redemption." This pursuit of light is the glory of and the excuse for most modern painting. On light Turner and Claude soared into immortality. It obsessed Rembrandt, and thi'ough it he made undying things. Light gave him victory, even when he painted such repellent subjects as the flayed carcass of a bullock. It directs modern land- scape painting ; the knowledge of the ways of light made Rousseau say : "All the formal majesty of a portrait of Louis XIV. by Lebrun or Rigaud will be overthrown by a tuft of grass clearly lighted by the sun." The wonder of light makes Mr. Clausen say : "The development of painting has been a gradual progress towards the knowledge of light, and how things are revealed by it." He is with Rousseau, who said that the representation of a subject is of no value except through the understand- ing of the universal agency of the air. To some of the audience this awakening to light may be the chief gift that the lecture had to offer, teaching them 26 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON to track the ways of light as they wander to and fro in the world : on a white tablecloth seen through the chinks of a door ; on rushes blown by the wind ; in barns, and by the round pond in Kensington Gardens ; on the body of a eat dozing on the grass, and on a bunch of flowers in a hospital ward ; on a table laid for breakfast, and on the faces of friends. Let me end with a flash of wisdom from the lips of Reynolds. Some one came to sit to him in a very ugly hat. "Never mind," said the great man, "there's light and shade on it." FEBRUARY FEBRUARY AT A MAETERLINCK MATINEE /^N a crisp February afternoon, when the sun was bright and the streets enticing, I sat in a chilly theatre. Arriving betimes I chose an isolated seat near the end of the last row of the pit, and watched those who were willing to pay two-and-sixpence for a performance of Aglavame and Selysette. Mostly they were women approaching maturity ; not one had the air of being a hockey player. Large hats shaded their faintly troubled faces, not always well drawn ; some wore long cloaks, which they drew close around them, as if they wished to hold their souls secluded from the world. Before the curtain rose a girl entered hurriedly through the pit swing doors. She wore a black sailor-hat and a dark jacket, and might, not unjustly, have been diagnosed as an employee of the Aerated Bread Company with a disturbing inclination towards spiritual adventures. She doubled, somewhat breathlessly, into the row where I sat, pushed past me, and settled herself two seats away. A minute later the swing doors were again opened to admit a party of three. They were not typical Maeterlinckians : they were just ordinary joUy animals, two men and a girl, who, seeing a theatre open on an off afternoon, hurried in with congratulatory cries. The men had curly-brimmed 29 30 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON bowler hats tilted a little to one side, and the chest of the taller of the two shone with a vivid scarlet woollen waist- coat. From the folds of his neckwear — which was also conspiciious — emerged a i-unning greyhound composed of imitation diamonds. Their little lady — plump and smil- ing — whose hat was of false ermine, and blouse the wrong shade of dove- white, divided her archness equally between her two cavaliers. They seated themselves in the centre of the back row of the pit. Then the curtain rose, knd Meleander proceeded to read Aglavaine's letter. The house was very still. Ethereal soul-waves flowed from the stage and found harbourage in the eyes that glowed beneath the isolated pictiure hats. Halfway through the first act I glanced at the youth with the scarlet waistcoat. It was at that place in the dialogue where Meleander says to Selysette : — " Her beauty is difl^erent, that is all . . . stranger and more ethereal ; it is never the same — one might almost say it was more manifold . . . it is a beauty along which the soul can pass unhindered . . . " Here the youth in the scarlet waistcoat looked towards his companion, and said audibly : " Hot stuff, eh ?'" The play proceeded. Meleander had just remarked, " I doubt whether a woman can ever deserve to be unhappy," when the girl in the black sailor hat suddenly slipped from her seat and sidled towards me. " Can you tell me, please," she whispered, " what this play is ? What does it mean ? " I answered, " Listen, and you will find out what it means." But as the mystical drama unrolled itself, she becam« AT A MAETERLINCK MATINEE SI more troubled, more affected by its incomprehensibility. Her fingers entwined themselves one with another; her eyes, the tip of her nose, and her chin, projected outwards as if drawn forwards by invisible threads from the stage. Her small, pale face gre.w agitated when Meligrane said: " No ; do not kiss me to-night. . . . The pain is worse than usual. Selysette is the only one who can touch me without hurting." She drew still closer to me, as if she had lost her bearings and found in companionship a directing-post. " It's very strange and queer," she pleaded. " It's like Ibsen, isn't it[? " I mumbled something which was meant to be consolatory. Perhaps I was considering the advisability of changing my seat. If so, I was spared the trouble, for when Agla- vaine uttered the words, " We are waiting for the silence to speak ..." the girl in the sailor hat burst into tears and ran to the door. " Hush, hu-s-h " sounded through the house ! The man with the scarlet waistcoat looked up from the pink news- paper he had been reading, and saw the girl run past him with tears streaming from her eyes. His face expressed nothing but the blankest amazement, and he said but one word, the word " Criky ! " Then, like one moved to investigate a matter further, he rose in his seat, beckoned to an attendant and whispered, " Miss, book of the words, please." He turned to the title-page, perused it carefully, and indicated something with a heavily-ringed finger to his companions. 82 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON In the interval I took the air in Sloane-street, trying to recover the Maeterlinckian frame of mind which the in- terruptions had somewhat disturbed. As I was returning down the pit steps the man with the scarlet waistcoat sud- denly appeared at the lower landing. He bounded up, and said eagerly to me, " I say, Guvnor, is this Maeterlinck alive or dead ? "" " Alive," I answered. " Good bis ! " said he, " then I've won half a crown." A MISSION SERVICE TN Kensington Gardens, on my way to the Albert Hall, I met an acquaintance looking miserable. This indi- vidual buttonholed me. " Yesterday afternoon," he said, " you might have seen me standing in the centre of the arena of the Albert Hall, tears suffusing my eyes, loudly singing ' A little talk with Jesus makes it right — all right.' My emotions exhausted me. At tea I ate two pieces of almond cake. That cake spoilt everything. Look at me now ! " I passed on. " Any chance of a seat .'' " I asked a policeman. " Try the balcony." A wild crowd of ticket-holders surged before the main entrance. I passed them, and took my place in the line of Londoners waiting outside the balcony door. Anxiety was written upon their faces ; but I think it arose from a fear that they might not secure seats. We struggled up the stairs. Through the open doors of the centre section A MISSION SERVICE 33 of the balcony I observed that it was already packed. The mariner in the story, having kept ferrets all his life, reckoned that he knew something about women. I, know- ing something abput public meetings, avoided and evaded the crowd, ran round the corridor, pushed open the pen- ultimate door, and clambered over benches and iron bars, until I reached the best position in the Albert Hall — the corner seat overlooking the platform. A youth tumbled into the adjoining seat. Having recovered his breath he addressed me : " Speaking as a Christian man, I object strongly that some people," indi- cating the arena, " should be given tickets for a religious service." I turned my back upon him. Others scrambled past us. At half-past three the hall was full. How many ? Call it ten thousand ! It was a strange sight, in the lessening light of a winter afternoon, to see that vast assemblage gathered together for a mission service. London loves a new thing, or a venerable thing focussed in a new light. A superhuman task for one man to communicate his personality to that audience. Even from my seat the faces in the arena were a blur. Four details drew my eyes* The word " alto " 9n a huge white placard in the choir ; the crescent of intent faces, frowning, peering, that swept round the front row of the balcony; a soldier in the middle of the arena, a vivid red note ; and in the front of the stage, a small, dizzy platform reached by steps. Behind, below, everywhere I saw that amorphous blur of ten thousand silent souls. Who were they? Why had they come ? The Torrey- Alexander gatherings 34 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON are unemotional. That is their distinction. They are conducted by two shrewd, hard-headed Americans, who, instead of devoting their brains to railways, or wheat, have given themselves heart, body and soul, to Christ. They use no symbols ; they have no theology ; they have one desire only — to save souls. One cry only — the joy of the redeemed, and the unfailing love of Christ. What are they like? Mr. Alexander's resemblance to somebody troubled me. Ah ! the clue ! He is like Mr. Pinero, but half a foot taller. Bald, straight as a tree, he wears, like Mr. Torrey, a frock-coat, closely buttoned. The shoulders of both men are square ; they speak well out from the chest. They are types of the new revivalism. Mr. Alexander is a bom musical leader, fertile in ideas, quick on the trigger. " Only those in the top gallery sing the first verse," he said, and they obeyed. The voices of women — very few — in the top gallery began, " When I survey the wondrous Cross." It moved us. Mr. Alexander knew it would. In appearance Mr. Torrey is like that agreeable type of Englishman, the elderly, well-preserved banker, who travels from his estate in Kent every morning by the 10.35, and returns by the 4.5. His sermon was precisely the kind of sermon that an irreproachable banker would deliver if he were suddenly possessed with the desire to save souls. The passion of this elderly, well-groomed American is to bring the world to Christ. Nothing else matters. He is per- fectly straightforward, conceals nothing. He told us that when he found he could not cry in his sermons, and con- sequently could not save souls, he prayed " O God, give me back my tears." His prayer was answered. A MISSION SERVICE 85 I was too far away to observe if he cried, but I was near enough to be impressed by the simple gospel of love that he preached. The differences of Churchmen, the bewilder- ment of creeds do not trouble him. That was what I gathered from his sermon that afternoon. Love is the magnet. Christ's love for us. Our love for our fellow creatures that must bring all to Him. " Ever heard Spurgeon ? " said the Christian at my elbow. " He 'ad winged words and salty stories. I don't call Mr. Torrey an evangelist." I escaped. As I clambered back over the seats the choir were singing, " When we all get to heaven," not very well, and Mr. Alexander was waving his arms at them like an angry windmill. Before descending the stairs I returned to the balcony to see how the hall looked from the central section. A blind man, painfully sightless, was being pushed up the steps by a tottering old woman. Feeling forward with his poor hands, he prepared to descend the three stairs into the corridor. It was not easy for him ; he paused irresolutely on the top stair. Then happened a thing that I think made more impression on me than anything I had seen during the afternoon. One of the Stewards, upon whose face was that inward illumination shown by those who have found peace in Christ, sprang up the stairs, clutched the blind man firmly by the arm, and led him down the steps with a cheery " Now then ; one, two, three, and there's the carpet." The blind man's face brightened. The Steward returned blithely to his task of collecting hymn-books. I don't think that I was the only looker-on who envied that worker for Christ. He had the instinct 36 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON to do the kind thing, the real, right thing, at the right moment, for another. If the Torrey- Alexander mission produces such essential Christians, its mission is fulfilled. Many — ^perhaps the majority — of this vast audience did not come to the Albert Hall to be converted, nor yet entirely from curiosity. They were representative of the great multitude throughout the world to whom the Unseen brings, in varying degrees, a mystical message : they came on the vain quest of hearing that interior message con- firmed from a platform, knowing in their hearts that the mystery of faith is and must always be wordless and secret. To them such missions as this are splendid failures. For them rather the message on the Temple of Isis : " I am whatsoever has been, whatsoever is, and whatsoever shall be. And the veil upon my face no mortal hand has ever raised." But to the initiate — that is, to the pure in heart — the veil is sometimes transparent. In the street, men with hoarse voices were selling " The Glory Song " ; the same broken-down waster type that sold " Crossing the Bar " when Tennyson died ; that sold " Tommy make room for your Uncle " when I was a boy. All down Kensington High Street boys were whistling " The Glory Song " ; the same pinched, perky, amusing typethat whistled Chopin's " Funeral March " after Queen Victoria's funeral ; the same type that whistled " Pop goes the Weasel " in the days of our fathers. London loves a new thing ! And mighty soon she for- gets it. Yet — and yet ! The shepherd knows his sheep. The ground knows the seed that in it is darkly germinating. A VISION ON THE RHONE 37 A VISION ON THE RHONE T MISSED my opportunity of seeing Provence. The Man of Leisure was ready to start ; he had mapped the route ; he desired my companionship ; but I thought I was busy — and refused to accompany him. He went alone, and I have seen Provence only in dreams — her vines and sunlit fields, her ancient towns and the tumult of the Rhone. Yesterday I walked London humming a snatch of song I had somewhere sometime read : " Fancy ymCvejowrneyed down the Rhone, Fancy yov^ve passed Vienne, Valence, Fancy you've skirted Avignon — And so are come en pleine Provence.'''' I thought as I walked by Thames-side, of the poem that Mistral wrote on the Rhone, the third of his series of long works in twelve cantos. I cannot call this unrh)T3ied " Poem of the Rhone " a masterpiece, as I have never read it, and never shall so long as tongues and dialects exist ; but I have read about it. The mere bald analysis of the scheme of Mistral's Rhone poem stirs the imagination. It sings the end of the old way of river life, the life lived and loved before steam : it tells of the voyage of a fleet of seven boats from Lyons down to Beaucaire and back. They were hauled by eighty horses ; think of it! There is a collision with a steamboat, symbol of the new power, the tow-lines break, the old boats are wrecked, the cargo scattered^ the eighty horses plunged 38 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON into the water. The steamer continues, the river flows on, the ancient castles soar above her banks ; but the slow boats and the eighty draught-horses are gone. That collision typifies the end of the old days that the poet Mistral loves. Yet he still hopes, still peers forward. " Ah, how good it is to sail on ceaselessly toward one's desire, even though it is but a dream." With the name of Mistral one has indeed " come enpleine Provence" — modern Provence that winds about her the threads of the Old. His is the most adored name in Provence ; one of the most honoured in France. How does he stand in England .'' Of course he is famihar to the small literary circle who know everything, and I have some acquaintance with him, because when, in 1904, the Nobel prize of £1S9,5 for imaginative literature was divided between him and Jose Echegaray, I wrote a thin but enthusiastic article on Frederic Mistral. For two days it amused me to ask this question of unliterary acquaintances, "What do you know about Mistral ? " They knew surprisingly little. One thought he was a wind ; another thought he was a place, like the Weald of Kent ; and a third, a foolish fellow, remarked " Ah ! we don't produce men like Mistral now." He was stirprised to hear that Mistral's first long work, the epic poem in Provencal called " Mireio," which Lamartine god- fathered, was written in 1859 ; that Gounod's opera founded upon it was performed in Paris in 1864 ; and that Mistral, chief of the seven who founded the Felibrige and created a language out of a dialect, is alive to-day, writing verse and declaiming it to his friends at Maillane, and accepted as the greatest man in Southern France. If the A VISION ON THE RHONE S9 land of the Troubadours is now the land of the Felibres it is because Mistral and his companions made their songs in the Proven9al language, so that their mothers and sweethearts could understand. And France, listening, said : " Well done, children of the South ! Henceforth you are in us, of us, and honoured." No writer in Erse has yet heard that welcome call from London. Mistral is Provence as Thomas Hardy is Wessex. Wes- sex was bom with Thomas Hardy, but Provence stretches away behind Mistral like ancient London beyond Aldwych and Kingsway, Fi-agments of her history recurred to me while I was receiving picture postcards marking the pro- gress of my friend the Man of Leisure through the land of the Troubadours. He would see Avignon, where, for a hundred years, seven Popes lived, until that day when Catherine of Siena turned the face of the last Avignon Pope to Rome. He would see that place " at the foot of some hills " between Avignon and Vaucluse, where Laura lived ; being a man of sentiment, he would doubtless seek " the sweet plain where she was born," and long, with Petrarch, to see " her tresses loosened to the breeze." He would see the meadow where Aucassin walked that morning in May, when " the daisy flowers that brake beneath her as she went tiptoe, and that bent above her instep, seemed black against her feet and ankles, so very fair was the maid " ; and perhaps he would hear legends of the kindly old man calling himself " a prisoner," who wrote " Aucassin and Nicolette," sometime in the twelfth century. He would see the beauty of the women of Aries, see Tarascon, that town of handsome men, and with 40 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the name of Tarascon he would think of Daudet, and buy a copy of that delightful book, " Lettres de man Moulin^ and read it in trains, and on the crests of sunny, flower- perfumed hills ; and perhaps, while looking over the sunlit land of Provence, which loves the life of the imagination, and does not care a button about efficiency, he would recall those words of Felix Gras, another Provencal : "JTavme mon village phis que ton village: faime ma Provence plus que ta province ; jfaiime la France phis que tout:' THOMAS HARDY A RE not chance snatches of a page or two, filched from "^^ the between-whiles of other occupations, among the delights of reading ? To know that it is but a quarter of an hour to the Bank Station is to read intently, feverishly, to break off eager, and to go forth with the page or two drumming in the head. I have carried the pocket edition of Mr. Hardy's " Tess " with me for a fortnight, and am grieved that dressmakers will not permit women to do like- wise. A chapter of this story of a great passion gives a background to the day's trivial happenings. Like the thought of death, it calms. "... Poor wounded name ! My bosom as a bed Shall lodge thee.'''' That magical line of Shakespeare's stands as of old on the title-page. Ill-starred Tess ! Heartsick we watch the arms of the Minotaur gathering round this innocent, THOMAS HARDY 41 knowing the end, the bird crushed as in Watts's picture. And all the while the rich and spacious background of English rural life unfolds before our eyes — the vast lush remoteness of the dairy farm at Talbothays ; the meaner side at Marlott ; the incisive characterisation of all the folk from the dairymaids to Clare's brothers ; the humour of old Durbeyfield — " I'm thinking of sending round to all the old antiqueeruns in this part of England, asking them to sub- scribe to a fund to maintain me " ; the worldly wisdom of Mrs. Durbeyfield — " Tess, I say, between ourselves, quite private but very strong, that on no account do you say a word of your Bygone Trouble to him." Every one knows this book ; pens have been active for years analysing and appreciating the art of Thomas Hardy. He offers no moral: he beckons no converts; he has no private information about the ultimate destiny of man. He has desired to state but his vision of the world. In none of his books has he so plainly foreshadowed his sense of the impitying and unmoral attitude of the President of the Immortals to the mortals who prank about his feet. Even love does not save them. The President of the Immortals has no pity for love that lacks wisdom. " Tess " is the prologue to Mr. Hardy's great work, " The Dynasts." Is " Tess of the D'Urbervilles " true to life ? Not true, I think, to the life that the average modern knows. A Tess, living to-day, could have broken her fate at a dozen points, so long as she was not the Tess of Mr. Hardy. Ageless Puck would have cut in and severed the cords. Wisdom could have helped Tess from the slough ; but true she is to the character evolved by Mr. Hardy. Admit his concep- 42 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON tion of Tess, and nothing could have sta)'ed her steps, inci- dentally so blithe, to the scaffold at Wintoncester. She budded like a flower, and, unfolding, was harshly plucked. ..." Poor wounded name ! " All is not right with the world in Mr. Hardy's philosophy. His prose wails with magnificent moumfulness from the ruins where the broken gods lie. Yet his pessimism does not depress. He stirs the mind, and when the mind is stirred depression flees. Moreover, the world is not as sad as Mr. Hardy thinks. I decline to believe in " the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilised races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power." Mr. Hardy really induces cheerfulness. To follow the working of his mind, with its store of material and ever- new, closely-packed knowledge of Wessex life, and his curious and fascinating power of expression, make for en- joyment ; but sometimes the detail is so particularised that I fail to see the picture owing to the vividness of the pig- ments. Thus : " She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle- milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made blood-red stains on her skin." Sometimes there is a hint of unreality in the dialogue, as when Clare says, " Tess, fie for such bitterness." Could he, could he have used the word " fie " ? But the flashes of reality and beauty ! How many they are: THOMAS HARDY 43 "You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes." " The occasional heave of the wind became the sigh of some immense sad soul, conterminous with the universe in space, and with history in time." " Why was it that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive ? " " Previsioned by suffering. " " I don't mind that ; no woman does when it comes to agony-point, and there's no other way." How refreshing, too, is his use of words that are not worn by constant traffic — " accusatory horror " ; " the ironical Tishbite " ; " a plume of smoke " ; " grassed down and forgotten "; " the stopt-diapason note "; " an untenable redemptive theolatry " ; " the geocentric view of things " ; " boreal light " ; " autochthonous idlers " ; and many more. What a life's work is here ! Creator of Eustacia Vye ; author of the Poems; of "The Dynasts"; of "Tess"; and of that penetrating and haunting study of the uncom- fortable way that the artistic temperament works in man —"The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved." The appeal of most novelists is to the heart : the authoi- of " Tess " drives from the heart to the head. The story of the pretty flesh called Tess, the awakening in her of that viewless thing we call the soul, is considered and weighed by a dispassionate Observer, and told, not as an episode, but in relation to the unseen Forces that encom- pass kings and dairymaids — ^you and me. 44 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON I see that Observer moving here and there in a large building, in every room of which is life in flux and flow, the little infinite troubles of the heart fluttering against ambition and cruelty, joy and grief, with the other pursuits of mortals at tea-tables or bedsides. And all the while the thunder growls monotonously, sometimes crashing overhead, when the folk at the tea-tables look up and are frightened. The Observer hears all, sees all, and writes on* Some one rises, passes out, and cries at the street comer, "Little children, love one another." Another murmurs, " Fear not, little flock." The Observer dockets the inter- ruptions, and writes on. Mr. Hardy will write no more stories ; but his readers are not without consolation. His brain is as keen as ever ; his intuitions as acute ; his command of words, such right words, remains as firm and far-reaching as his mastery over sentences. In the peace of his home in Dorchester he broods, as of yore, on the undiscoverable ways of the " Wilier masked and dumb," and His handling of the chattels that are called men and women. But Mr. Hardy has changed his method of expression, or rather he has sought out an old love, a first love, and told her that she, although long slighted, still holds his heart. That first love was poetry. Through all the yeai's of his allegiance to prose, it was in poetry that he really desired to express himself, and the Muse-Mother he favom-ed was Melpomene, rather than Euterpe. While writing novels he allowed himself an occasional intimacy with poetry. The dates of the poems proclaim that. THOMAS HARDY 45 Now it is to be all poetry, or poetical dramas, such as " The Dynasts," with racy prose passages interwoven. In his verse, as in his prose, Mr. Hardy is entirely him- self and original. His poetry is rarely lyrical ; no glint of the ^'oie de vivre lightens it, although there is humour, mordant and ironic. His themes are cax"ved from solemn, deep things ; the thunder-thought rises from gloom, like a storm-cloud in a Ruysdael landscape, pregnant with pity for humanity, struggling beneath the awful sway, blind and heedless, of an Immanent Will. Hear him in " The Dynasts," where he makes his Spirit Ironic say : " The groping tentativeness of an Immanent Will (as grey old Years describes it) cannot be asked to learn logic at this time of day ! " To which the Spirit Sinister answers : " Come, Sprite, don't carry your ironies too far, or you may wake up the Unconscious Itself, and tempt It to let all the clockwork of the show run down to spite us," Mr. Hardy's verse refuses to be forgotten. It haunts. His effects are not gained by biting into his theme as with an acid, but by his power to vivify a psychological aspect of his subject that has stirred his imagination. Sometimes he simply states his story in dark lines, leaving the moral to the winds, as in "A Tramp Woman's Tragedy." This is a novel in a few pages ending, as was inevitable, in disaster. Yet it does not depress. Like all true poets, he distils beauty from tragedy. There must be many to whom the horror of the Boer War is almost condoned by the mental pictui-e given in his poem called "The Souls of 46 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the Slain," that vision of the dead " sprites without mould," rushing home, eager with questions. And the astonishing reply they receive ! Is it not most natural ? The poet sees the particular in the general, and makes it vital. In a poem called " The Ejected Member's Wife," Mr, Hardy picked an incident from the unwieldy history of the last General Election, moulded it into his strange, unpoetical verse, and that incident, the wave of a hand, became, for some, the core of the election. It was merely a heart-cry, and began so simply : " We shall see her no more On that bdkmiy^ Many of the poems have this arresting baldness, the one called " She, to Him," for example, which opens : " I will be faithful to thee ; aye, I will." DANES QTROLLING round the collection of Danish pictures at the Guildhall, I noticed a gentleman, with the complexion of a vegetarian and the eyes of a fanatic, shep- herding a flock of men and women. Listening, I discovered that he knew little about art, and less about the Danish painters whose works he essayed to interpret. But he was a kind man. Unselfishly he was giving his time and energy to enter- tain and uplift an assortment of dwellers in mean streets ; but he was a shepherd ignorant of hillside and fold. He meant well, but he was a useless guide to the Danish DANES 47 pictures, sandwiching the visit, I have no doubt, between an expedition to the Tower and an exploration of the Zoological Gardens. Is there a better way ? What method should a guide to such a collection adopt ? At the Guildhall was pre- sented for the first time in London the art of Denmark from the eighteenth century ; but there was no hint on frames or in catalogue to indicate which were the early indigenous pictures, and which were the productions of the modern Danes, who took wing to Paris and became cosmo- politan. The shepherd, with his flock from mean streets, began in the first gallery, obviously the most modern and least Danish of all, and went steadily through to the fourth gallery, which was essentially Danish, and contained curious examples of eighteenth-century Danish portraiture. He paused before each picture, and by the time he reached the last the impression of Danish art in the minds of his flock must have been as chaotic a blur as the impression of America or Switzerland in the minds of country cousins who emerge gasping into the street after a lightning trip in a Hale's tour railway carriage. Is there a better way ? I think I should have taken the flock straight to Gallery Four, which contained two works by Pilo, portrait painter, who was bom before Sir Joshua Re3molds, and who died in the same year, 1792. Pilo would make them laugh, so pompous and pretentious is he. Then I should have in- troduced them to Eckersberg, father of the Danish school, who was nine years of age when Sir Joshua died ; then to Jensen, who was the best of the lot, the prize boy of eighteenth-century Danish portraiture. 48 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON It was not a great school, but it is interesting to reflect that in the mighty period of English portraiture a school, infantile compared with ours, but nevertheless a school, rose and, so to speak, flourished in Denmark. And I do not suppose one Englishman knew of its existence. Having finished with Pilo, Eckersberg and Jensen, I think I would have been content to show my flock the works of two painters, and temporarily to ignore all the rest. These two, Kroyer and Hammershoi, are typical — Kroyer of the cosmopolitan Danes, Hammershoi of the home-loving art Danes. The work of Kroyer I should choose for examination is the huge canvas called The Committee of French Artists for the Exhibition in Copenhagen in 1888. Denmark is justly proud of this tremendous eflbrt of handicraft from the brush of her foremost painter. It is marvellously clever, and very interesting, but it is not Danish, and although a swagger example of painting in the style that is familiar at the Paris salons, nobody would call it a great work of art. Whistler would have tucked his monocle into his eye, gazed at it, and, turning away with that inimitable shrug of the shoulders, would have uttered one word, his pet word, " Amazing ! " Kroyer, the painter of it, has a European reputation, and has long outsoared the confines of little Denmark. Probably no living man coidd have succeeded better than he in grouping thirty-one personages round a table, show- ing each face, giving to each proper prominence, and making the spectator feel that such a sardine-packed gathering is possible in Copenhagen or anywhere else. These eminent French painters and connoisseurs must feel DANES 49 very uncomfortable ; one cannot move without jostling his neighbour ; yet they Jook perfectly happy : they are sitting for their portraits, they have been made immortal. I see here for the first time the faces of great men whose names have been familia,r to me from childhood. Kroyer has done his best, and the reflection of his fame illumines Denmark. Only a Rembrandt or a Frans Hals could make these Guild or Corporation pictures into works of art. Kroyer stands for the painter who leaves the parental roof, casts the home influences away like doffed raiment, and learns strange and not necessarily better lessons in the wide school of the world. Wilhelm Hammershoi stands for the painter who remains beneath his father's roof, and paints through the long years, lovingly and very beautifully, simple themes in which he sees ever more and more wonder. Somewhere in Denmark there is a house built as our quieter forefathers knew how to build, austere and spacious, and furnished with the simple charm of an interior in a Dutch picture. In such a house Hammershoi has watched the grey light of day transform surfaces and walls, and the sunlight stream through tall windows over swept and garnished floors. He has painted these interiors under the magic influences of light. Yes, Wilhelm Hammershoi is a stay-at-home, and no wonder, if his own living-rooms have the beautiful simpli- city of furniture and walls in the interiors that he paints. He has sat in these rooms day by day, month by month, perhaps year by year, watching and loving the stealthy light, as Vermeer did, creeping through the tall windows. 50 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON touching walls and surfaces to beauty and making the still shadows steal out, hide themselves, and peep forth again. Sunlight too ! Those were great days when he saw the beams feeling their way beneath severe couch and table, the particles of dust dancing in a straight shaft of sun- light, the grey light stealing through the doors opening from a room, and the feel of the rain outside seen through muslin curtains. Like Le Sidaner, he does not worry us with " human interest." The back of one girl in shadow is enough. And when he goes walking his per- sonality remains with him. He saw the two landscapes he exhibited through his own eyes — not through the convention of M. Didier-Pouget or Mr. Leader. They may not be the landscape that I watched yesterday above the valley of the Chess, or last week from a Cornish hill ; but they are his landscape, his impression of Nature as selected and seen through a temperament. Yes, for me the Danish Exhibi- tion meant the advent of Wilhelm Hammershoi. MODERN DUTCHMEN TS there in the whole history of art another instance of three inembers of one family who have attained the eminence reached by James, Matthew, and William Maris ? Their father was a printer who lived at the Hague, and spent an arduous life bringing up a family of five children — three sons and two daughters. The girls married and died, the three sons have made the name of Maris famous. James, the eldest of the brothers, who stands in the fore- front of the modem school of Dutch landscape painters. MODERN DUTCHMEN 51 died at the Hague in 1899, at the age of sixty-two ; William, the youngest, and the least distinguished of the three, resides in Holland, " aware, no doubt, of his own importance in the world, but too sensitive and modest to assert himself unduly." Matthew lives in retirement in a London suburb. He is not a popular painter ; no flag ever waves above a street announcing ani exhibition of his pictures ; there is no work by him in any public exhibition in London, and yet I do not suppose any other living painter is held in such esteem by his " few but fit " admirers. The titles of his pictures convey but little — Feeding Chickens, Souvenir of Amsterdam, He Comes, The Flower, TTie Christening, The Four Mills. Yet when you look at them you feel that the man has something to say — something more to say than other men. He paints a girl holding a saucepan over a fire, and this small picture becomes the abiding memory of the Mesdag collection at the Hague. He paints the OutsJcirts of a Town, merely a view of no- man's-land rubbish heaps with its frontier huddle of mean houses, and political waverers are disposed to vote Liberal because the Prime Minister became the owner, some years ago, of this lovely suggestion of the spirit of place. For years I have known the work of Matthew Maris. Now, in the pages of Mr. Croal Thomson's monograph, the man is revealed in certain letters, human documents, written to Mr. Thomson. I almost wish I had not read them. The dim picture of Matthew, the mystic, using paint in the magical way that Keats used words, is bitten over with the hard lines of Matthew the letter-writer, 52 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON troubled about money, prattling of his "pot-boilers/ I am content to let the life pass: it is the work that coimts. No wonder that the Dutch were and are great landscape painters. The infinite distances, the pearly light, the brim- ming waterways, the moistiu:e and the pale sunshine, are a daily inspiration to every child of nature. And the flowers ? They lie in bands of brilliant colour across the meadows, and in the foreground you see a Boer farm-house enfolded in trees, and the black kine advancing to the call of the blue- bloused milkman. James Maris died in landscape land, William lingers there ; but Matthew, that strange Matthew, has long left it to follow the gleam of his inward visions near Lord's cricket ground in St. John's Wood. Strange are the ways of men ! OLD DUTCHMEN ■'trOU may see the masterpiece on presenting a visiting -■- card, any morning between 10 and 11.30 ; but a stranger should take a cab from Amsterdam station. By his own efforts he will hardly find this solemn Dutch man- sion on the Heeren-Gracht, where the descendants of Bur- gomaster Six, Rembrandt's friend, live. The name Six is painted upon the lintel of the basement doorway ; you ring, enter, and are taken upstairs to the small pictin:e-gallery, then down through the various apartments to the parlour facing the street. Until the moment of entering the parlour I had not been OLD DUTCHMEN 5S conscious of any excitement save the pleasurable emotions of Seeing fine, pictures in a venerable Dutch house. But the sight of Burgomaster Six dominating the room was as thrilling as seeing the sun suddenly break through the clouds on the morning of a holiday. Most of the great Rembrandt portraits are familiar to me, but here was something different, something added to his achievement, another laurel to his crown. In this portrait he challenges Velasquez and Frans Hals, those great masters of the technique of painting. There is no elaboration about the workmanship ; it is crisp and clean cut as a prism, quick as the crack of a whip, seeming as if Rembrandt painted his friend right away, the work of a few hours. He knew the face so well; he had nothing to learn from watching it, and there was no one who could tell him anything he did not know about his craft. One day Rembrandt was standing in the hall of Six's house in Amsterdam, perhaps waiting for his friend to join him in an art treasure hunt. Jan Six descends the stairs dressed in his fine clothes, the pale grey doublet and the short red mantle with its trimmings of gold braid. He is leisurely pulling on his buckskin gloves, his long, crimped, tawny hair falls upon his plain collar, and the large, medi- tative face is crowned with a black hat. I do not think that he sees Rembrandt, but Rembrandt, peering up from beneath, watches him, while the light from the hall window falls full upon the tawny face and sump- tuously garbed figure. Rembrandt knows that this is the moment. Did Jan Six consent to pose on the stairs where Rem- 54 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON brandt first saw him, or did he walk over to the crowded studio in the Jews' quarter where Rembrandt painted his masterpieces and helped to ruin himself collecting pictures and bric-£i-brac ? That we shall never know ; but we do know that in this portrait Rembrandt for a few hours was carried beyond himself, and painted the thing as it is with unerring skill ; and, as regards the hands and the clothes, with a mastery that only Frans Hals could have rivalled. The head is pure Rembrandt ; the alert, nervous, swift brushwork of the hands, gloves, and clothes, each stroke set down and left, easily and finally as the ribs of sand upon a sea shore, are Rembrandt in an hour when, by some happy fusion of well-being and sympathy, he struck out of his genius a faculty that helped him once and not again. The bare right hand is slowly drawing the glove over the left, accommodating the fingers to their compartments ; the slight tension of the efFort is marked on the knuckles of the bare hand. The quick painting of this movement, which still seems to be going on, contrasts with the quiet strokes of paint that make the gold braid of the mantle, the shadows in the creases of the doublet, and the blobs of pig- ment becoming, at a little distance, buttons. The technique is extraordinarily modem — the perfection of swift impressionist painting long, long before the word was invented. Were I writing a story around this portrait I should pretend that Rembrandt painted no more than the head, and that Frans Hals amused himself and the Burgomaster by adding the hands and clothes. Possibly Rembrandt considered the hands unfinished and wished OLD DUTCHMEN 65 to work upon them ; but Jan Six, expert and connoisseur, said "No." Wise Jan Six. I stood in the old Town Hall of Haarlem gazing, asto- nished, at the seven groups of men, and the group of women by Frans Hals. The painting of the accessories — clothes, sashes, banners — of these members of the Dutch Doelen or shooting-parties are as fine as anything that has ever been done in the realm of art, but never do they dis- tract the eye from the characterisations of the men them- selves. These proud Dutch burghers gathered round the supper-table, or ready to march forth to the wars, seem alive. A tailor could cut his cloth from their dresses ; an armourer could fashion his weapons from their halberds ; an historian could write the self-indulgent life of Michiel de Waal as he appears painted by Hals in 1616, one of the group of the Archers of St. George, and as he looks in the group of the Archei-s painted twenty-three years later. Frans Hals seems to have painted without effort. What his eye saw his hand could set down, and from all we know of him it is plain that he regarded his gift merely as a means of living, as a carpenter regards his capacity to make a good chair. Hals had no fancies about the sanctity or the responsibility of genius. He never painted a religious, classical, or historical sub- ject. There is no hint of a moral motive in any of his works ; he painted merely to live. To us a Frans Hals in any exhibition stands out as a feat of craftsmanship so 56 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON superb that the word genius is the only word that can be used. It is always so. Who can forget his Admiral de Ruyter at a recent Old Masters' exhibition at Burlington House ? I hear some one say " Yes, but Time has dignified those Doelen Haarlem pictures." That may be ; but there are acres of corporation or Doelen pictures in Holland painted about the same time. Time has not been able to vivify their varying degrees of woodenness. His work sometimes fell short of perfection ; but the cause was not advancing years. At eighty- two he applied to the municipality for relief, and at eighty-four he painted his masterpiece — the prim old women manageresses of the Haarlem almshouses seated round a table. Amazing ! James Northcote, R.A., said a good thing about Hals : " He was able to shoot the bird flyitig — so to speak — with all its freshness about it, which Titian does not seem to have done." MARCH MARCH A PRACTICAL MYSTIC /^N Sunday morning a child passed the house holding ^^ a dove pressed to her bosom. That was the third time, within a week, I had seen a child carrying a white bird. I told the doctor, who is half chemist, half visionary, about it. " Three times in a week," I said. " What do you make of it ? " He passed my question, and continued to quote Vaughan. When he had murmured the climacteric lines — " OJbr that night ! where I m Him Might live invisible aiid dim I " he proceeded, in his quick way, to sort into three classes the inhabitants of this sea-girt isle who inherit from the holy men of old time. " There are those who have the full spiritual vision like Vaughan," he began, " divisible into the articulate and the inarticulate ; those like myself, who give up thinking about the unthinkable, and forget the gulfs in work ; the third class is the largest: my brother, the vicar, is an example. They must have the strings of dogma neatly tied round the package of their faith. The rest of mankind are either advancing to or returning from one of these three classes. They don't count. They are the Laodiceans of life." 59 60 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Presently I said — " But what about the child and the white bird ? Ifs bothering me. It connects with some- thing ; but I can't remember. Three times in the week, mind you ! " "Ask my brother, the vicar," said the doctor, "he'll know. You'll catch him on his way back from church." Then he smiled and returned to his microscope. I set out to seek the vicar. In life things happen casually like this. Therein it differs from fiction. That ridge of table-land, where the church stands, bordering the common and the swan-pond, stretches across the county ; at either end is a small straggling town. A white road runs over the ridge, fringed by grass, and midway are the swan-pond and the vicarage gates. Below, to right and left, is a vast vallfey ending only in the haze of infinity. When I had climbed the hill from the eastern town, where the doctor lives, I again passed the child with the dove wrapped in her shawl, and I wondered vaguely how long she would take to walk the three miles to the western town, and whether, when she bent her head to whisper to the bird, she would escape the peril of the motors which rushed from town to town in a few minutes. As I walked Mozart's Religious March from "The Magic Flute," which the doctor had been playing the night before, wailed to my steps, and Vaughan's lines returned. I rememberM the exact intonations and intensity of the doctor's voice, and his remark that such spiritual vision was far beyond the reach of mere theology — ^new, old, or transitional. "But the two can go together," he added. A PRACTICAL MYSTIC 61 " There is m God — some say — A deep hut dazzling darkness ; as men here Say it is late and dusky, because they See not all clear, O for that night ! where I im Him Might live invisible and dim ! " London and man seemed far remote. Those who were walking from the eastern to the western town were detached, removed as by death. They talked, but no words reached me, those animated figures seemed infinitesimal under the arch of sky and the distances stretching either side of the ridge. Even the motor-cars, their flash and trail of odour, made no impression on the serenity of the day ; but, strange to say, that child walking with the bird in her bosom seemed to be of it ; all else was alien. Then the " Religious March " began again ; again I heard the doctor murmuring Vaughan, and so I came to the swan-pond, where three men were fishing. I walked round to the gate, leaned against it, waiting for the vicar, and looked at the water. The wind blew the ripples outward from the bank, and each small wavelet moved so quickly that one could never say, " Now it is here, now there," but each was part of the parent water, in minute but conscious union, dim, but not invisible when the sun lighted the water. Then the doctor — that insistent doctor — was again visualised before me. I saw his white hands at the piano, but now he was playing the " Nachtstiick " of Schumann, not crisp and ad libitum, in the pro- fessional way, but slowly, cajolingly, as one often does 62 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON when playing for personal pleasure ; and I again heard his quick voice distinguishing between natural and spi- ritual vision. I wondered if that was the difference between the faith that depends upon evidence and the faith that rests upon — ^faith, and if there was not some simple form of belief that the wayfarer through this world could always hold in secret, as if the science of theology had never been, as if each child and man stood alone beneath the sky, unbeholden to any predecessor — saint, or casuist, or official Christian. As I reflected, watching the water, the child passed the gate, onward to the western town, and behind her walked the vicar. He pressed me to stay to luncheon, and told me what I desired to know. " The idea is in Bede," he said ; " the Venerable Bede, to whom we are indebted for so many fine and uplifting thoughts. It was used by Pater very charm- ingly. Allow me to read you the passage : ' A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom across a crowded public place — ^his own soul was like that.' " When I left the vicarage, late in the afternoon, I walked to the western town, but did not see the child again. The day seemed complete ; yet something remained. I called at the cottage of an old friend, who keeps a greengrocer's shop, and manages also a husband, two sons, a daughter, and a house — manages all perfectly. I told her about the white dove and the crowded public place of the world, and asked her if she did not think that bird-soul was enough — all the beacon the wayfarer needs. She looked at me, the lines of her face puckered. " Lor ! " she said, " what things you flighty gentlemen MUSIC AND DAFFODILS 63 do think of. When I used to go to places of worship and heard their talk all about words, and authorities, and in- terpretations, and their quarrels, I got to think their 'aint no 'eaven at all. They couldn't tell me how to keep Lizzie a good girl, could they ? but I knew. I'm an old woman now, and I know, too, that Faith don't depend upon evidence like a murder trial, or what's written in books. It's in we, and we ought to show religion in our lives, and not always be jawin'. And now, Sunday or no Sunday, if you'll kindly move I'll get on with my work. You're sitting on the duster ! " Is she, I wonder, a Practical Mystic, that rare flower of religion .'' MUSIC AND DAFFODILS T STOOD in the vestibule of the Queen's Hall and watched the arrival of the musical enthusiasts. The type is as definite as the soldier or barrister, but far re- moved from their set forms. The face of the musician is mobile, his eyes eager ; emotion has lined and pale-coloured his complexion. But, above all, he has the air of a listener, of one whose greatest joy is in detachment from everything but sound. The ear initiates him to ecstasy. He asks no companionship but the wings of his soul. As I watched the musical enthusiasts pressing forward to the symphony concert, suddenly there wa^s a break in the moving throng, and the Blind advanced, their sticks tap- ping the pavement as they felt their way to the staircase. Slowly these afflicted — six of them — passed through the 64 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON lane that the musical enthusiasts made. Three, quite sightless, were led by their companions, whose eyes still saw a glimmer of the world. Soon, to these Blind, one who was deaf would bring consolation, and upon their ears would fall the opening slow movement, that forlorn, lovely melody of Beethoven's " Leonora " overture. He was stone deaf when Fidelio was rewritten in 1814, and some can never hear Beethoven played without recalling that scene when a tumult of applause followed the dying cadence of a symphony he had been conducting. Beethoven stood motionless, hearing nothing, except, perhaps, some in- terior harmony that worked behind the useless ears. So he broods, segregated from the mass, in the bust by M. Bourdelle. The heavy hair, clustered like folded wings, presses upon the head, as if only the armoury of that massive bronze could contain the weight of thought and emotion in the drawn-down face. On the pedestal of this bust the sculptor has carved " Moi je suis Bacchtis qui presse poti/r les hommes le neciar delicieux.'''' M. Bour- delle has shown the essential Beethoven, as M. Rodin showed the essential Balzac. I wonder why a woman, a stranger, after looking at the Beethoven bust, said audibly —"Horrible thing!" It would be a real pleasure to permit those six Blind, who are now seated, waiting for " Leonora No. 3 " to begin, to pass fingers slowly over the Beethoven bust, and watch the wonder on their faces. That small consolation should be granted them, for, strange to say, it was sight as well as sound that drew musical Lbndon to this symphony con- cert. The Blind, poor things, could not see the novelty — a great conductor, discarding the baton, and using his MUSIC AND DAFFODILS 65 hands and arms only to control and encourage his orchestra. They could not see this tall and burly Russian, waiting in the silence that preceded the opening of the " Leonora " overture, rolling each hand, quickly and nervously, turn by turn, in the palm of the other ; they could not know that M. Wassili SavonoflP is quite unlike the musical type — a definite exception. He stands like a soldier, he looks like a soldier, and it has been said of him that Russia lost a great general when Savonoff became a conductor. This soldier-musician has magnetism. Tyrannical and cajoling, quick as rifle-fire, and wheedling as a woman. Why has no one discarded the b^ton before ? The stifi" rod, severing a conductor from his musicians, cuts the electric current that, from first note to last, should flow in lightning circles ; but the magnetic fluid passes unimpeded by baton through M. SavonofTs fingers, pointing, outstretched, clenched ; through his arms darting, waving, gathering the melody in falling cadence, and storming it up- wards ; through head and body moving in unison to the movements of arms and fingers — why, it was a living picture, a bioscope, of the personalities of Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky that the Russian evoked from his musicians. Somewhere in the dim hall sat those six Blind, seeing nothing, but they heard the forlorn melody of the " Leonora " gather strength, soar to hope, burst out into the trumpet-call, and end in the rushing passage for strings, and the final paean of joy ; they heard the spring loveliness, dainty as porcelain, of Mozart's " Serenade in G " for strings, and at last Tchaikovsky's tremendous 66 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON " Symphony No. 5," where Russian met Russian, the living man — artist barbarian if you will — tingling his musicians, exciting them, and racing them on to the Finale, arms and hands acting the music with incredible swiftness, throwing it into the void, and crashing to the end amid thunders of applause. * And yet it was not Tchaikovsky, but Beethoven, who remained with me when the flushed musical enthusiasts trooped out — Beethoven speaking from the deep, not the thunder-rage of Tchaikovsky. Tap ! tap ! went the sticks of the Blind upon the stairs. Over them I felt the presence of deaf Beethoven, and from somewhere seemed to come ancient words telling of a time when the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Tap ! tap ! went the sticks upon the pavement, where daffodils, bunches and baskets, were being offered for sale. The solitary place shall be glad, and the desert shall blos- som as the rose. And a highway shall be there Tap ! tap ! through the traffic, by the daffodils. MUSICAL PICTURES TI/TEMORY stirred and opened. I saw, in visual pictures, -^ past scenes of music that I imagined had long gone to oblivion : I saw that night at Trouville when I entered the casino while the orchestra was playing Mozart's Adagio and Fugue in C Minor for strings, and beneath a red- shaded lamp perceived, with the sudden shock of pleasure that one has in suddenly sighting a rainbow, a yoimg MUSICAL PICTURES 67 woman exquisitely dressed, sitting erect and tense, her lips tightly pressed together, her piquant, sensitive face hardly able to bear the emotions with which the adagio over- whelmed her. By her side, curled up in a deep chair, a child slept peacefully, her long, black-stockinged legs lying across her mother's pink Paris frock. It was a vision of Classical Music, its effect upon the mondame and upon innocence. I saw an emotional eddy in the gallery of Covent Garden Theatre during the great love-duet in the second act of Tristan and Isolde; a German, standing in front of me, swung slowly round as on a pivot, moving his hands as he did so until they clutched ther ailings behind his back and a little spurt of blood issued from where the nails dug the flesh. I saw the silent highly-trained audience, the aristocracy of musical London, at a Joachim quartette recital at vanished St. James's Hall. There was little abandon about that assembly : they showed an almost painful appreciation, a palpable fear of losing a shade of the supreme interpreta- tion by that matchless four, oblivious of self, working together, eager only to merge and tell their sublime tale in perfect harmony. I saw a large music-room in Switzerland, snow without, warmth within. A woman entered, and, thinking herself alone, cried aloud, " I feel like Chopin to-day." Seating herself at the piano, she began to play, and one by one the guests at the hotel, hearing the music, entered noiselessly, and I do not think she realised how man/ the magnet of her execution had drawn to that Alpine music-room until she ceased playing, gazed around, started and flushed. 68 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON I saw the interior of a theatre. I have forgotten the name of the piece, and I know not whether it was tragedy or comedy or buflfoonery ; but I do know that between the second and third acts the orchestra played selections from Gounod's Mireille, and lo ! there was Mistral, and I was in Provence, with song and dance, sunshine and the vine, and the Rhone rushing tumultuously to the sea. I saw the musical pictures that the French have painted so often in recent years — saw that scene in the vestibule at a Lamoureux concert, showing those who were unable to gain admission huddled in groups upon the floor, caught in the very act and attitude of musical emotion, oblivious of discomfort, listening fascinated. I 3aw a room where Beethoven was being played. A pale girl sat near me. Beethoven's solemn harmonies swept around us. We were rapt to silence, inner joy. Then suddenly our emotions were confronted with the desolation that followed the last chords. The pale girl sighed. " I must hear more, more, more ! I shall return to town to-morrow. Find me a I^ondon paper. I must see the programmes of the concerts." With some difficulty I unearthed a two-days-old London journal from beneath the couch. She ran her finger down the programmes of concerts announced on the front page. " Ah ! ' Mon cetur s'oeuvre a ta voix^ by Saint-Saens. That's the limit," she said emphatically. " More than that song says can't be said. It's the limit." She appeared to make it a personal matter. Having nothing else to say, I said "Oh ! " Then, feeling iJiat ejaculation was too curt, I added "Ah ! " and was on JONATHAN AND THE TREE 69 the point of extending my remarks to " Indeed ! " when she rose suddenly and swept towards the Musician. JONATHAN AND THE TREE TT was long since I had seen the old man. How had the winter served him ? If, as I feared, rheumatism had held him to his cottage through the wet weeks, then my news would cheer. For as I walked through the woods I had seen signs of spring — here a crocus just pushing through the earth, there a primrose, and in a cottage garden a splash of yellow aconite. Spring was coming. That was something to tell him. But the cottage was empty, so I climbed the hilJ, sure that I knew where to find him. He was sitting on a log, but there was that in his face that checked speech. In truth it was an ill-pleasing sight that met my eyes. Trees littered the ground on every side : some lay undisturbed where they fell, on others the saw had already been at work, and in the midst of the clearing a great excavation was being dug for the new reservoir. The men had ceased work for the day, but their paraphernalia for digging was scattered about, and everything was smirched with the oozy yellow clay. That clearing in the wood was like a battlefield, with fallen trees instead of men, and Jonathan, who had known those trees all his life, felt their death as if they had been comrades. Time, of course, would make all seemly. Far below I could see other reservoirs, three of them, that had been finished many years, and already new trees were growing about their banks. Very beautiful, 70 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON from that height, looked the still blue water that filled those old reservoirs. This I hinted to Jonathan, but he was too old to permit the future to atone for the present. " I've known them trees," he said, " for seventy years, and to see them now lying there, and the saw going at them, why — it's cruel. Water, more water, what do simple folk want with a constant supply .'' I've drawed all the water I want from the well since I was a boy, and I've sat under them trees all my life. Now they're being cut up into planks ; and folk will forget that there were ever any trees here. There was a piece of poetry you once read to me about asking the earth not to forget." I humoured him : " Forget not, Earth, thy disappointed Dead J Forget not, Earth, thy disinherited! Forget not the forgotten ! " " Go on," he said — " Imperial Future, when vn countless train The generations lead thee to thy throne, Forget not the Forgotten a/nd Unknown.'" He rose and led the way through the wood where here we saw a primrose, and there a crocus, but the old man was not in the mood to welcome spring. On he strode making for the Father of the Forest. I knew whither he was going. He paused before the oak, and gazed mutely at the great trunk. " You can't tell how old this tree be. Five hundred years gi'owing, five hundied years standing still, and five hundred years decay. This one's waiting. He hasn't growed for a hundred years." USEFUL DEATH 71 The old man looked, then said quietly — " He endured as seeing Him who is invisible." USEFUL DEATH T HAD been reading about Turner. He was a silent and lonely man, preferring his dreams to the talk of his contemporaries. One day in his latter years an artist, entering a public-house, found the great old man seated in the corner with his glass before him. " I didn't know you used this house," he remarked ; " I shall often drop in now on the chance of finding you." Said Turner, scrambling to his feet, " Will you ? I don't think you will." Reading on, reading on — presently I had the impulse to visit the Tate Gallery, where four valedictory pictures by Turner are displayed among those beautiful works by him recovered from the cellars of the National Galleiy. Above them is a tablet bearing this inscription : " These four pictures were the last works sent by J. M. W. Turner to the Royal Academy. They were exhibited in 1850, the year before his death." I examined them, first singly, then in the mass, and an idea that erstwhile had been vague became coherent. These pictures have classical titles ; the subjects are con- cerned with Mercury, iEneas, and Dido ; but that counts for nothing. For years Turner had lived in di'eamland, with nature as his intimate companion, and in these pic- tures I perceived the last triumphant failure of the man 72 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON to report the wonder of the visible universe with the inadequate means at the disposal of even the ripest genius. His eagle vision soared in those last years above his power of expression. He saw the portal^ of Infinity, dreamed incommunicable dreams, and had only a white canvas and a few paints, at his service. What Mercury, ^neas, and Dido are doing in these scenes of splendid failure I have not the remotest notion, and I do not want to be told. I see only an ethereal shimmer of opalescent colour, golds, blues and reds mingling in rainbow mists; and always there is a pathway — faint, fair, and lovely — sweeping out- ward to the sea, and arching luminous sky. They are pictures of release, of the open fairy gate, mundane attempts, final attempts, to express the inexpressible before the silence fell. " They all look the same, don't they ? " said a visitor in my hearing. They do. They are Turner's swan-song of the beauty of the world. Four canvases! One song ! I looked at no more pictures that day. Walking home along the Chelsea Embankment, I came in time to that little muddled, muddy, unimproved section of Thames-side between Grosvenor Road and Westminster, where hay barges unload. Wondering why the Embank- ment has not been driven through this mess, dodging waggons, avoidingcranes, thinkingof Turner's self-sufficiency, suddenly three lines from Wordsworth's " Prelude " came to my lips. They are not great words ; but they fitted my Turnerian thoughts. "... How vain A correspondence with the talking world Proves to the most."" USEFUL DEATH 73 Wordsworth, towards the end of his life, found words all too inept for his rarefied thought, as Turner found colour too material for his lovely dreams. Mortal tools could not fashion their glimpses of immortality. Words and paint lagged behind thought and vision, until Useful Death eased theit mystic agonies. Drawing near to Westminster I tried to recall the fine passage where Professor Raleigh treats this subject in his book on " Wordsworth " : " He pressed onward to a point where speech fails and drops into silence, where thought is baffled, and turns back upon its own footsteps." As I repeated these words I became aware that wretched ragged men were passing me and crossing the road. They halted in front of a great bare Salvation Army shelter, one of those gaunt buildings where, in the words of Mr. Bram- well Booth's advertisement : "Six thousand persons sleep under our care ^nightly; where thousands are assisted by work and food ; where 1500 unemployed find work daily; where 900 homeless wanderers are fed at two o'clock each morning ;' where hundreds of slum children are relieved ; where " many are turned away through lack of means ; where J'lO will re- lieve hundreds." The applicants stretched in a long line down the street waiting — waiting. On the great wooden, closed doors were scrawled in chalk letters the words "Full Up." Screened by a lamp-post, for one cannot be seen prying at such destitution, I watched these unhappy failures, waiting 74 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON and shivering, hungry and hopeless. I had been near to the height of vision and thought. Here was the depth of physical distress, numbed and dumb, pushed to its limit. I walked on. And as I walked a friend and consoler seemed Useful Death, impersonally relieving the intolerable strain of penury, vision, and thought. "AN EXQUISITE LITTLE MASTER" X^ATTEAU died of consumption at the age of thirty- seven. Somewhere in the world is a portrait of the afflicted man, drawn by himself, called " Watteau Laughing;'''' and described as "frightfully thin, almost deathlike." There you have the real Watteau — attenuated form, emaciated face, himself drawn by himself — laughing. Consumptives with creative gifts are never normal. Watteau laughed at the pageant of life, was amused. Beardsley, another consumptive, was more bitter : there was a terrible irony in his amusement. Keats found relief in the music of words, Mozart in melody. All try to escape from the world of realism and hard facts, seeking relief in a land of the imagination where^ it is always summer, where love neither changes nor fades, and the silken-sailed boat is always ready to sail for Cythera. I do not think my friend Mr. Tibbits, of Mincing-lane, would find much entertainment in the pictures of Watteau, or in his marvellous drawings. " Pretty," he would say, " very pretty and dainty, but they tire me. They're pictures for the boudoir. I want more backbone and force — something I can get my teeth "AN EXQUISITE LITTLE MASTER" 75 into." I can quite understand that Watteau's silken, doll- like woman and beribboned men, reclining in glades, toying with flowers, listening to love whispers and music with the same languid interest, never satiated because their thistle- down inclinations never sui-ge into desire : I can quite understand that these pretty powdered ladies and feminine cavaliers bore Mr. Tibbits of the healthy lungs and sound digestion. Shall I try to explain to him what an exquisite draughts- man Watteau was, or the still more difficult matter that this son of a master tiler was the first to practise the de- composition of tones, and that he has been called the inventor of impressionism, and the link connecting Claude and Ruysdael with Turner and Monet ? No, I will not attempt the task just now. I will turn to another aspect of the effect of Watteau's life. A painter paints because he would rather do that than anything else. He rarely asks himself why he paints or analyses his methods. He has no conscious soul-states. He does his work, dies, and his pictures, if they be good, live. Then enters the creative critic who reads himself into the pictures that he criticises, and explains, often with delightful psychological art, the intentions and aspirations of the painter. No one was more surprised than Turner when he heard of the wonderful things that the imagination of Ruskin saw in his pictures. And if Watteau could revisit this earth and read all that has been written about him he would be dizzy with amazement and vanity. The latest sensitive critic is his countryman, M. Camille Mauclair, who urges with great eloquence that this charm- ing painter of sophisticated pastorals was no " little master," 76 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON but that underneath the decorative exterior was " a great soul " that had been stricken by the " malady of the infinite." Well, well ! It was, of course, Walter Pater who began this idealisation of Watteau in his " Imaginary Portraits." The beautiful writing dates from him. There was nothing about the " malady of the infinite " in the grudging appreciation of Watteau read by M. le Comte de Caylus before the French Academy in 1748, and sound sense and live writing marked the essay by the brothers de Goncourt. What could be better than this : " Roguish prisons of tight-laced bodies, silken baskets for rosy- blooming flesh ! Oh ! beribboned scissors of Watteau, what a dainty realm of coquetry you cut out of the Maintenon's realm of prudery ? " How far superior this little master was to his followers. Ohly Fragonard approached him. Watteau had really but one motive. In Les Amuse- ments Champitres it is beautifully displayed and repeated — the statue, the green sward, the gay, indifferent figures, the sunlight through the trees, the distance, the sparkling, broken colour. And the ironical, elderly dandy looking on — all Watteau. A little master, yes ; but an exquisite Jittle master. Our Mr. Tibbits judges by facts. " My dear sir," he will say, " you can''t call a man a little master when a picture from his brush, 17in. by 21 in. sells for 2500 guineas at auction in London. No, no ! " "THREE PARTS WOMAN" 77 « THREE PARTS WOMAN— ONE PART ARTIST." A FTER the death of Kate Greenaway, in the autumn of 1901, her friend, Mr, Austin Dobson, wrote a little eulogy — six lines — which began : " Farewell, kind heart. And if there be In that unshared Immensity Child-Angels, they will welcome thee."" Another line from that same poem lingers in the mind — the line that calls her " clean-souled, clear-eyed, unspoiled, discreet." That was Kate Greenaway, the modest, busy maiden lady whose destiny it was to live in retirement, and to achieve a European reputation by doing slight things, by expressing with her pencil beauty as she saw it in the prettiness of children — their frolics, their graces, and their squirrel ways. She was not a great artist. Kate Greenaway was just her- self, succeeding because she trusted to her own vision. " She dressed the children of two continents " might well be her epitaph. Wise she was, too. She held to what she could do best. No vaulting ambition ever rose to topple her into the pit of failure. A gentle path-breaker in her chosen hedged field of the delineation of child life and child millinery, she really hated what she believed to be the ugly in art as the 1897 exhibition of the New English Art Club— « such productions ! " Of the International Exhibition of 1898 she wrote to Ruskin : 78 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON " Some things I liked, but the greater number I felt wrong and not clever, and some I felt loathsome." Hardy's " Woodlanders" was spoilt for her by "coarse- ness and unnaturalness,'" and she found the end " hate- ful." We like the artist of The Almamacks, The Alphabets, and Under the Window none the less for her candour. Of course she was narrow ; and she was fearful of the gulfs into which stronger and more experimental natures peer ; but what there was of her was all fragrant and wholesome, and she took no ready-made opinions from others, but stood fast and firm on the clear promptings of her own individuality. It is amusing to read that Max Nordau considered this typical English maiden lady, who loved the nursery and laughter, and at the age of fifty had stayed in an hotel but twice in her life, a "degenerate" and a " decadent." The naivete of her letters is delightful. She has been reading Mr. Mallock's " New Republic," and is much troubled because authors are so unlike their books. She cannot understand that a man can take various points of view about the world in which he lives, the people he meets, and himself. Mr. George Moore's work on " Modem Painting " made her " cheeks bum." She evades criticism of Aubrey Beard sley, and bluntly asks Ruskin what he thinks of these " modern drawings." When Mr. Locker Lampson told her that " a real new poet," called John Davidson, had written a poem called " A Ballad of a Nun," she retorts, "Perhaps I shan't think him a poet. I like them of the sort : "THREE PARTS WOMAN" 79 ' When daisies pied and violets blue. And lady smocks all silver-white. . . . ' " That preference reveals Kate Greenaway better than a whole chapter of analysis. And is there not real huma- nity in this cry of a soul three parts woman, and one part artist ? "Sometimes I almost wish I were shut up by myself with nothing to do but to paint — only I'm so dependent on people's affection. I'm not lonely by myself, but I want the people I like very much sometimes." Perhaps it is wrong to liken Kate Greenaway to the typical English maiden lady. Her mind was too indepen- dent to be classed in that category. She loved goodness and she hated wickedness, but she was far from being orthodox. Cowslips and apple blossoms gave her the feeling of trying to remember, as if she had known cowslips and apple blossoms in another world ; but she held no definite religious opinions. There is plain, sincere speaking in one of her letters on this subject : " I think Death is the one thing I can't reconcile with a God. After such wonderful life, it seems such a miserable ending — to go out of life with pain. Why need it be ? " She did not bemuse her mind with fanciful theories. Her thought was as practical as her pencil. Life was a wonderful and beautiful thing entirely worth living, and beyond loomed the horrid enigma. " Why, one tries to be good simply because you must — are so unhappy if you don't." She could not believe in any of the 80 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON known religions. Yet hers was a real religion, and a beautiful one. More subscribe to it than Kate Greenaway guessed. THE CHILD IN ART Tl^NDLESS books are extant containing reproductions of sacred pictures showing the child in art; but bow seldom is the child natural or well observed, or really like a child. One of the most impressive in the long series is a Fresentation m the Temple, by Mantegna, who avoided the diificulty of indicating the softness, freshness, and rest- lessness of the child by swathing him in the bands of linen that Italian mothers used and sometimes still use, making the infant look like an undersized mummy. The old masters were not adepts in the representation of children. To them the life likeness of babes was a secon- dary motive, like landscape, and the painters were usually content with a conventional rendering of the Holy Child. Even the children painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Gainsborough, charming though they be, have an air of sophistication, as if they had been dressed for the operation, and were on their best behaviour. The helplessness of a baby, the flower-like complexion of a little girl so serious in her play require consummate skill and knowledge for their portrayal. If a prize were ofiFered for the two best modern pictures of child life I know for which I should vote. They are easily accessible — no farther away than the Tate Gallery. THE CHILD IN ART 81 One, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, is by Mr. Sargent, the other, The Flower Girl, is by Mr. J. J. Shannon. Mr. Sargent's picture brings fairyland and fragrant beauty into the long room where this radiant spectacle of flowers framing childhood hangs. Two little girls, em- bowered in lilies, roses, and carnations are lighting Japanese lanterns at twilight in preparation for a garden fete. The reflections of the candles glow upon their delicate faces, flaming above the lanterns, and their pinafores are iri- descent with the lights that illuminate that garden of flowers. Two things are here displayed for our delight — children and flowers. The picture makes a beautiful decorative pattern. It is far away from realism ; it is a glimpse of that fairyland where the life of the true child passes. In Mr. Shannon's Flower Girl the portals of fairyland have not yet been reached by the baby ; her life has still to unfold, and it is that very helplessness of infancy that the painter has expressed with such charm and naturalness. The sun, falling through the leaves of a plane-tree, transfigures the cheek and neck of the mother and her cotton gown ; the sun, a symbol of the mother's love, that will nurse the infant into the individuality of childhood. Having enjoyed myself with these two pictures of chil- dren, I bethought myself of him who has justly been called the supreme painter of children — Velasquez. I longed to be in Vienna to see again his amazing portraits of the little son and daughter of Philip IV., or in Madrid looking a,t his great picture. The Maids of Honour, containing 82 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON that matchless child portrait, the Princess Margarita Maria. Suddenly it occurred to me that the portrait of the Prin- cess with a portion of the picture copied by John Phillip, a marvellous copy, is permanently on view in the Diploma Gallery in the right wing of Burlington House. So I climbed the dark staircases and saw again the vision of this pretty, petulant daughter of Spain, with her attendant maid of honour, rouged, but still a child. In the same room are other children by Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci — priceless possessions. The Michael Angelo is a relief in marble of the Mother, Child, and St. John ; the Leonardo da Vinci is that haunting cartoon for the Louvre picture of the Mother, St. Anne, the Child, and St. John. I stood there in the fading light, and these children of the three masters seemed to have passed from marble, paint, and crayon into the sanctuary of eternal youth. APRIL APRIL ITALY UNDER SNOW ll/TY last thoughts as I addressed myself to sleep in the night train from Paris were : " Day will bring Italy and sunshine ; I shall see the almond in blossom, white roads, small villages on little hills, the vine, and a blue sky." But dawn came dim, with flakes of snow, and when we reached Modane all the land was white, and the cold pierc- ing. Beyond Mount Cenis the snow lay deep, and Turin railway station was like a picture of Christmas in England in the olden time. The snow had drifted far along the platform, the carriage roofs dropped with it, and guards and officials, powdered from head to foot, ploughing their way though the heaped-up whiteness, talked. How they talked ! I wonder the train ever started. And this was springtime. The Italian spring ! A shepherd, an old wrinkled man, dressed in a suit of the cloth that Capuchins wear, entered the compartment, and sat shivering, staring only at the white land. The water trickled from his cap, dripped along his nose, and, I think, down his neck ; but he did not care so long as he could sit thawing in the warmth. Well might he thaw ! The heat of the carriage was like the tropical house at Kew Gardens, and all the windows were shut. I opened one an inch, but soon closed it, unable to bear the courteous 85 86 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON but piteous reproaches of companions, most unhappy Italians, who had mislaid their spring. Then I slept, and was awakened by one of them plucking my sleeve, and murmuring, "Do you like that so ? " He indicated a puddle that had formed in my lap from snow-water dripping through the roof of the carriage. But we were travelling South, outracing winter, and near Genoa the snow thinned, ceased, and the rich colour of the Ligurian earth, tender greens and glowing russets, revived. The sun gleamed out, and there were the almond blossoms, the white roads, the goats and oxen, and the lines of blue hills beyond. Italy ! In Genoa I saw the orange-trees and oleanders in roof- gardens above the street of palaces ; marble fa9ades whose perfect beauty of proportion weans one from Gothic ; and the wide, arcaded thoroughfare with a stupid modem name, that United Italy has driven through the corpse of the ancient Via Julia, a brilliant, modern commercial road that will lead you, if you walk steadily for some days, into Rome. In Rome, wonder of wonders ! The great bronze doors of St. Peter's were thrown wide open, and for once in generations we could peer straight through into the dim heart of Christendom, where that tremendous declaration encircles the dome : " Tu es Petrus, et super banc petram sedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi dabo claves regni cae- lorum." But Rome was looking not at those vast letters in blue mosaic, not at Michael Angelo's haunting Pietd in the Capella della Pietii,but at the colossal marble thing, swathed ITALY UNDER SHOW 87 in cloth, the shape of a man, that was being dragged, a score of men turning the winch and straining at the hawsers, slow inch by slow inch, through the open bronze doors. I did not wait to see this statue of St. Bartholomew, the latest Papal art acquisition, unswathed and hoisted to his alcove in St. Peter's among the athletic and flamboyant companion statues by Bernini and other mediocre craftsmen, for I was bound for the Parthenon of Athens, and could not, would not, wait. That night as the train crossed the Campagna, dark and wild, the hail rattled against the windows, and all the night the rain pattered so that I expected when I stepped out in the small hours at Capua to find the land again white with snow. No ! Floods only. The guards, hooded and top-booted, talked of the brutal weather, groaned, and waved their lanterns. With dawn came the real Italy. At Trani there was sunshine, a butterfly flitting over the blossom, and the Adriatic sparkling and blue — yes, blue ! All the miles to Brindisi there were glimpses of that sunlit ocean, and here I sit by the blue waters of ancient Brundisium, the gate of Greece and the East, the town where Virgil died, in whose harbour the ships of the Crusaders gathered, and the coast end of the Appian Way, which drove straight here from Rome, ending only with the sea. I sit and wait for the steamer Bosnia out of Venice to finish loading. At midnight we shall weigh anchor for Greece, and at dawn the outlines of Albania wiU rise from the violet sea (I hope it will be violet) ; then Corfu will tower up, and when we sight Paxos we shall repeat to one 88 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON another the old legend that will never be forgotten how on the night of the Crucifixion an Egyptian pilot heard a voice from Paxos crying, " Pan is Dead ! " And how other mariners in these seas also heard that voice moaning, " Pan is Dead," and wondered. A SPARTAN'S HOME-COMING CO still was the Adriatic that we were an hour out of Brindisi before I knew that we had started. My watch marked one a.m, and, looking through the port- hole, I saw the rushing water, gleaming with phospho- rescence, and above walls of fog. It was as if we were burrowing through the under-world. Shuddering, I re- turned to my bunk and slept. At four o'clock the running out of the anchor awoke me again, and for an hour we rocked, like a derelict, on the outskirts of the Isles of Greece, enveloped in a white mist. At dawn we moved again, and I went on deck to find the vessel feeling her way through a narrow channel close to an islet capped by a lighthouse, on one side Albania, on the other the northern coast of Corfu. The captain had waited because he could not discern the Ught through the fog, and dared not attempt the passage without its guidance. The mist still hung about the land, and had I been dropped on the deck from an airship and asked to name the country, I shoxild have hazarded a guess that we were cruising among the islands of Scotland. With breakfast came the surprise of the day. My A SPARTAN'S HOME-COMING 89 neighbour was an alert youth, with bright beady eyes and an indifferent complexion, who addressed me in a strong American accent, on the prowess of the modem Greek in athletics. So enthusiastic was he about the gymnasium, and such trivialities as hurling the hammer and climbing the rope, that I asked him if he had entered for the race from Marathon to Athens in the Olympic Games. He smiled, and said that if the Games were open only to Greeks, as in the ninth century b.c, he could have entered, even as now. " But you are an American ! " said I. " I am a Spartan," said he. " I was born in Sparta. I went to America when I was twelve, and now, sir, I am studying law in Syracuse, New York State." My astonishment was such that I nearly dropped my cup, for here in the flesh and a ready-made suit was the noble youth with the fox lurking in his cloak-folded bosom that had been one of the cherished pictures of my boyhood. Here was Sparta with an American trunk, and an American accent, smoking American cigarettes, master of the latest American slang, returning to the city of Leonidas. And the chances of travel had made me a witness of his home-coming. He wore black kid gloves, and a dog-coUar. At Corfu we went ashore together, and the touch of Grecian soil quietened him. He looked dazed, like Ulysses when he returned to Ithaca, and he was pathetically anxious to be civil to me, and to arouse my enthusiasm for Greece. In the end I was hustled into a carriage, and he gave the driver a direction which was Greek to my understanding. He waved adieu with a coloured hand- 90 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON kerchief, and we drove, "and drove, and drove, passing fantastically-garbed Albanians and a bearded priest of the Greek Church riding side-saddle on a mule. Corfu was one vast carpet of spring flowers and interminable groves of olive-trees, with barcrfooted children collecting the fallen berries. I saw orange-, lemon-, and fig-trees ; and hedges of dusty giant aloes, and always the bbie sea, ranges of hill, and the cloudless sky of Greece. When we returned to the quay, there was the Spartan youth — waiting. Very silent was the night when we had loaded up with our cargo of barrels of olive-oil. The mystery of the moment hushed the quick tongue of the twentieth-century Spartan, who was returning home. I tried to make him talk of Ithaca, which we should pass in the night, but he preferred the subject of athletics. So I retired to bed, and knew no more until we had silently passed Missolonghi, and were anchored off Patras. He was still a little nervous in speaking Greek when we landed, but he speedily recaptvu-ed the way of it, and the last I saw of him he was sitting at a cafe table in the square at Patras, surrounded by his countrymen, talking and gesticulating, happy and confident. As the train toiled slowly forward on that marvellous journey from Patras to Athens, which is Italy and Switzer- land combined, I saw him still, in the mind's eye, making that difficult expedition through Arcadia to Sparta. Saw his joy mount as the sights, sounds and scents of his birth- land encompassed him ; saw America drop from him as a garment, and this Spartan youth, with his Syracuse, U.S.A., trunk, descend into the famous town that Homer and THE GUARDIAN OF THE ACROPOLIS 91 Thucydides knew, rival and conqueror of Athens, still beyond railways, and all its greatness passed away like smoke. The gods, too, are gone. Pan no longer wanders in Arcadia ; but Olympus remains, and the tumbled splendour of the Parthenon. THE GUARDIAN OF THE ACROPOLIS TXE wears a blue military cloak falling to his feet; a peaked cap shades his eyes, and he spends the day, from sunrise to sunset, on the most beautiful site in the world, watching the most wonderful buildings that have ever come from the hand of man. Yet I fancy they are all one to his indifference — Parthenon, Erechtheum, the little Temple of the Wingless Victory, Propylaea and the broken marbles that lie gleaming on the plateau of the Acropolis. For he is a modern Greek, and his eyes follow visitors, not marbles. We soon knew each other well, for in Athens the Acro- polis draws one each day like a magnet ; the ruin of the Parthenon haunts one increasingly with the perfection of ts solemn beauty, and always the guardian is prowling on the plateau. I say I know him well in his blue military cloak and peaked hat half hiding his face, and yet for me he has no individuality. I see him in the mass, as I see the columns of the Parthenon, such as remain from that wretched day in 1687, when the Venetian artillerymen fired the Turkish powder magazine and blew this white wonder sky-high. Strange it is that the Venice of Titian should have destroyed the Parthenon of Iktinos and Phidias 92 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON — brother maiming brother. There are thirty-six columns of the Parthenon standing, but I see them as one form, so perfectly does each minister to the whole ; there are a dozen custodians of the Acropolis, but I see them as one man — ubiquitous, inquisitive, and prying. Yet it is not difficult to avoid him, for a blue cloak shows against white marble. When he advances over the broken marbles I hide behind a ruin. In a corner of the ramparts one may lurk a long morning, hidden from his vigilant eye, dreaming of Attica, sur- rounded by these mementoes of her greatness. Athens, ancient and modem, basking in the plain, lies outstretched beneath. From the north door of the Erechtheum, which has long stood as model to the world of a classical doorway, I see the Sacred Way winding through a pass in the hills to Eleusis, whither those Athenians travelled, those happy Athenians, to whom the doctrine revealed in the mysteries brought the idea of a life beyond the grave. Was not Cicero an Initiate, and has he not said that the mysteries taught the Athenians not only to live happily but to die with a fairer hope ? That slight road, trod by so many feet, long, long at rest, still gleams out from the gateway of ancient Athens and loses itself in the hills. Beginning at the ruins of the Dipylon gate far below, now lost to sight amid the white roofs of the modern city, I picture another road, lined with sepulchred monuments, that stretched away to the gi'ove where Plato taught, and to the home of Sophocles. Near yonder line of cypresses is the site of the olive-groves of Academe, and there is — THE GUARDIAN OF THE ACROPOLIS 93 " Gleaming Cohnos, where the 7iightingale, In cool green covert, warhleth ever clear. "" Far below, rising from the base of the Acropolis rock, is the theatre of Dionysus, where the masterpieces of iEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were performed, and not very far away, near the modem, marble-seated Stadion where the Olympic games are held, I see the bed of the river Ilissus, the scene of Plato's " Phsedrus," and recreate the figures of those Greeks reclining on the turf, listening to the song of the cicadas, and feeling the sea breezes. " Oh, thou, our Athens, violet-wreathed, brilliant, most enviable city ! " Oh, Athenians, your wisdom reaches us across the cen- turies ! We hear your murmured messages, " Know Thy- self" — " Nothing in Excess ! " We who have travelled so far, and yet so little, we who still are scaling the heights you reached, Athenians, we salute you ! Alas ! I have no salutation for the blue-coated guardian of modern Greece who watches over the Acropolis. Yet I have been grateful to him — twice at least. One hot morn- ing, powdered with Athenian dust, and parched with climbing the rock of the Acropolis, and the scramble up the steep steps of the Propylaea, I found him by that hall which Pausanias saw hung with paintings, waiting to oiFer me a glass of sparkling water he had just poured from an earthern jar. Late in the afternoon a storm of rain descended upon the fallen columns and the fragments of the forest of statues that now litter the Acropolis plateau. I was running for shelter when the custodian waylaid me, directed me to a 94 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON chamber beneath the Propylaea, and pointed to a cube of marble which some slave of Pericles had roughly fashioned. We talked in dumb show about the weathei", and, peering out to see if it had cleared, I looked down upon the rock, the Hill of Mars, where St. Paul stood and began, " Ye men of Athens '" In dreams I shall return often to the Acropolis — to the lovely northern doorway of the Erechtheum, to that perfect little Temple of the Wingless Victory, to broken columns whose beauty catches at the throat ; but oftenest I shall be gazing at that miracle called the Parthenon, shattered but invincible, grown yellow with the iron of ages, very solemn. And always among the ruins I shall see those prying, blue- coated custodians typical of modem Greece, which at last guards the creations of her great craftsmen who made Attica glorious when London was a forest swamp. A GREEK BOY WHO LAUGHED AT THE RAIN X SHALL not soon forget Nicolai, the brown Greek boy who followed us up the mountain and laughed at the rain. The day really belonged to the gallant Thrasybulus (b.c. 403), but Nicolai, in his goatskin shoes, tripped in, and I have a clearer picture of Nicolai than of Thrasy- bulus, in whose fortress, high above Athens, we huddled from the snowstorm. The fame of Thrasybulus is safe in the history books, and Phyle, his fortress, on a spur of the pass that leads from Attica to Boeotia, is marked op all the maps, A GREEK BOY WHO LAUGHED 95 Nicolai is unknown, and his deeds are yet to be unrolled ; but he could find his way to Phyle by the stars, and perhaps he has heard of Thrasybulus : how when exiled from Athens by the Thirty Tyrants, he made his lair at Phyle, gathered comrades, swooped down upon the Piraeus and delivered Athens. We met Nicolai by chance. At the inn of Chasia, two hours below the fortress, he was introduced as a suitable vehicle for carrying our luncheon, including the magnum of resinous wine, which I would sooner go tongue-dry than drink. He wore a sheepskin coat and goatskin shoes ; he was brown as a nut ; his teeth glistened like Parian marble ; there was always a smile in his quick eyes ; he was about the height of a Newfoundland dog, and his small feet tripped over the rocks like a chamois. The walls of the fortress still stand crumbling, and the view that Thrasybulus looked upon more,, than 2000 years ago, met our eyes for a brief half-hour of glorious sun- shine. There was Athens far below shrinking in the Attic plain, iEgina rising from her blue waters, the coast-line of the Peloponnesus, great Hymettus sloping to the sea, and encompassing us the peaks and ravines of the wild pass that leads into Bceotia. We munched our luncheon and some of us sipped the wry Greek wine, while Nicolai, sitting apart on a stone, nursing his goatskin-clad feet, watched us with a smile dancing in his brown eyes. Repeatedly we begged him to share our meal; but he would eat nothing save a crust of dry bread. It was Lent. He was fasting. This small, hungry Greek boy encoun- tered his remmciation with a smile. Then the snow-storm swooped upon the stronghold of 96 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Thrasybulus, iEgina merged into the grey sea, all Attica was blotted out, and Hymettus vanished in the whirling flakes. We huddled under the fortress wall those who could, finished the resinous wine ; but Nicolai would not drink. When we started forth to descend, bending before the storm, stumbling, staggering, he capered over the rocks, always a little way in advance, his sheepskin coat unbuttoned, and only a thin vest between the elements and his brown skin. The snow turned to rain, and by the time we reached the isolated monastery called " Our Lady of the Defile," we looked and felt like scarecrows. The monks piled high the wood fire in the guest chamber, and served us with coffee and the liquor called masticha ; but Nicolai would not partake. He stood in the doorway, far from the fire, smiling. Once he laughed outright. I was seated upon a couch supported by what I imagined to be a heap of skins. Suddenly they moved, and a corpulent, black-bearded monk slowly rose from beneath me, rubbed his sleep-dazed eyes, and stared around. Then he placed his hands dolefully upon his stomach, sighed, and asked a question, of which the interpretation was : " I am ill. Is there a doctor here ? " I offered him a cigarette, and when I added a quinine tabloid he sighed again, and said : "You place a bui'den of gratitude upon my shoulders, which all the years of my life will be too short to remove." When, warmed and tolerably dry, we passed to the little chapel to drop our thank-offering into the treasury be- neath a picture of the Virgin encased in a metal-plaited robe, Nicolai knelt. There is no trouble about an Education Bill in this country. The Greek peasant child takes to religion as naturally as the English child to tops. A GREEK BOY WHO LAUGHED 97 It rained steadily throughout the rough descent to the inn at Chasia, The water trickled into my boots until it seemed as if I were dragging armour along with me ; but Nicolai had no trouble with his goatskin shoes. He still smiled ; but he looked like a water-rat. At the inn the peasants, gathered around the charcoal pan, made way for lis. We drank more coffee and masticha, and again dried our surfaces. Some one said, " Won't Nicolai come to the fire ? " He was asked, but shook his head and smiled. So he was given his small fee and told to speed home and dry himself. He seized the hand that gave the money, kissed it, pressed the fingers to his forehead, threw an embracive smile round the room, bobbed his head, and ran through the door as if he were a rabbit making for its burrow. The last stage of the walk to Ano Liosia, whence we would take train for Athens, was a little lonely without Nicolai. I missed his small brown figure pattering about like a conipanionabledog. At the station we were told the train was due in a quarter of an hour. Forgetting that the Greek locomo- tives arrive early or late as the whim takes them, I squelched into the waiting-room, cast off my boots, removed my stockings and wrung them out. An official was contemplating the large puddle I had made on the floor when the train entered the station. I caught it; but I missed Nicolai's laughter — brown Nicolai of the hills in the rain, with his conscience and his goatskin shoes, who has quite eclipsed Thrasybulus. 98 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON DAWN AT NAUPLIA T HAD seen Mycenae, the most ancient city of Greece ; had passed under the Gate of Lions ; had climhed the rugged height; and, standing among ruins, had looked down on the valley where Agamemnon held sway before the dawn of history. The Christian era found Mycenae desolate. Desolate it still is, save when travellers stay an hour in this inountain recess on their way from Corinth to Nauplia. All is gone but the vast Royal tombs, defying time, and the poor rem- nants of palace and city, "abounding in gold," which under Agamemnon ruled the Greeks of the mainland and the islands. I stood among the rubbish thrown up by the excavators. Empty and open to the day are the tombs. Gone are the treasures of gold and silver found by Dr. Schliemann in 1877. Athens holds them now. Desolation broods. Yesterday the sign of life was a raven circling above the ruins ; the sound that lingered in my ears was the hum of bees droning in the enormous bee- hive tomb of Agamemnon. Buried in the hillside for thousands of years, it is now open to the light of the twentieth century, and the bees, flying under the lintel, which weighs 113 tons, have made this beehive tomb, 50ft. high, their playground. Leaving Mycenae, I descended to Nauplia, and all through the night in dreams I heard the buzadng of those bees dron- ing the death-dirge of Agamemnon. A time came when that monotonous dirge broke into a cry of triumph, as if a trumpet had heralded an awakening from sleep. I rose to DAWN AT NAUPLIA 99 find dawn spreading into the room ; and to see, from the window, soldiers patrolling the streets of Nauplia playing the Festival March. I remembered the signification of the day. It was the anniversary of Greek Independence, and this Festival March greeted the dawn in honour of the new kingdom of Hellas, seventy-six yeaxs old. It hushed the dirge of Agamemnon. Round Nauplia at dawn the soldiers marched playing that cheerful air. Then silence fell, Nauplia slumbered again. I, too. Once more I heard the drone of the bees, and with the recurrence of that dirge I saw, with closed eyes, that strange scene that I had witnessed more than once in Greece — the carrying of the dead through the streets, richly clothed, flower-garlanded, with uncovered faces, to their resting-place, while the mourners chant the ancient hymn, as they offer the last caress. " Seeing me speechless and breathless, oh ! weep over me, all my brothers, friends, kindred, and acquaintance ; for yesterday I was speaking to you. Give me the last embrace, for I shall not walk or speak with you again." But such solemn thoughts did not long endui'e ; for again that Festival March broke cheerfully over the sleeping town ; again I started from my bed, and, leaning to the window, heard the soldiers repeat their greeting to the dawn. Again and again that paean of joy roused the citizens. Between the serenades we tried to sleep, for it was early to be astir. I had no more dreams of the uncovered faces of the dead. The gaiety of that march turned my thoughts into a livelier channel, and into a brief di'eam came a different 100 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON fragment of music — the sound of a shepherd playing his pipes on the walls of the citadel of Corinth. From new Corinth we had driven out to the old city, had climbed to the summit of Aero- Corinth on a day when sky and sea were blue and still, and all that classic land was bathed in sunshine. The panorama from the summit was famous before Caesar refounded the Corinth that St. Paul knew and reproved. Think of the eyes that have looked upon the view we saw that brilliant day — Parnassus, snow-clad, across the gulf; Salamis, ^Egina and little islands floating on the fairy water ; Athens and the Parthenon in the dis- tance, and aboVe them the sheen of the marble that Phidias quarried, gleaming from the slopes of Petitelicus. And while we looked, speechless, at the beauty, a shepherd on the crumbling walls of the citadel, his legs dangling over Corinth, played upon his pipes, and the melody rose faintly to us through the hot air. It was the music of his pipes I heard while dreaming through that restless dawn in Nauplia, perhaps the self- same tune that Pan played in Arcadia ; and I should have continued to hear, I think, that soothing air in dreams, for mind and body were still weary, had not that Festival March, the town band nbw augmenting the military enthusiasts, again broken out over annoyed Nauplia. So putting Agamemnon and the bees, the shepherd and his pipes away, for the da,y cleai'ly belonged to George I. King of the Hellenes, I rose and threw wide the window. The sun had risen. The town was abroad. Flags waved. Modern Greece was beginning to rejoice. I went out into the street, and was at once surrounded by a bevy of boot-blacks clamouring for employment. LAST GLIMPSES OF GREECE 101 They follow you like men at midnight in Chancery Lane with bird-seed for sale. Boot-blacking is the most popular peripatetic occupation in modem Greece. Customs have changed since Socrates and Phaedrus walked along the bed of the Ilissus, and cooled their bare feet in the running water. Views have changed since shoeless Socrates, addressing Beloved Pan by the Ilissus stream, be- sought the god to give him beauty in the inward soul. But dawn at Nauplia — in silence — does not change. LAST GLIMPSES OF GREECE rpHE night was still, the stars clear, and the water in the harbour of Patras was unruffled. I stood upon the bridge of the steamer, seeing sadly the last of Greece. Seaward was Missolonghi, which we should pass in the dark. Landward were the lights of Patras, reflected in the water. The shadowy figures of Greeks moved upon the shore. AH was over. I had seen Greece. It was the moment for reflection. The world was silent. Even the vessel was quiet. The cargo was aboard, the crew resting, the captain frowning from the bridge at the boat that had just pushed off from the quay with a dilatory passenger. In those still moments episodes of my days in Greece rose before me, and I wondered which was the dominant impression. Was it the first glimpse of Olympia which I had seen that morning ? No town, no shops ; just a few cottages straggling along a white road, an inn upon a hill, and a museum which contains, in a secluded room, that white 102 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON wonder of chiselling — the Hermes of Praxiteles — cold and virgin as the untrodden snow upon Parnassus. I stood upon the hill above Olympia soon after dawn, and looked down overi;he sacred precincts whither for over a thousand years the steps of the Hellenic world reverently turned ; where Plato was honoured ; where the ambition of the young Thucydides was fired by hearing Herodotus read his works aloud ; where the olive-wreath was bestowed upon the victor in the games. All I saw was a waste of brown ruins in the plain, low-lying, hardly discernible, the refuse cast up by the excavators, a gorge, a bridge, and the waters of the Alpheus and Kladeos still guarding, and occasionally submerging, these recovered symbols of the piety and glory of Greece. Also spring flowers, and the young green of many trees. I descended to the plain, sought the Stadium, found it not, because much still lies buried, and then suddenly, at the foot of the Kronos Hill, touched a rough direction- board pointing to a stony upland path, and on it was written " Route to Arcadia." Was the memory of three words on a rough notice-board the dominant impression.'' Or was it the sea-line of Marathon seen from the summit of Pentelicus — an Italian landscape, sunshine and azm-e, in a land of marble — such a landscape as Titian would have flashed into the background of some grim altar- piece ? It was a day of terrific wind, clouds of dust, and glare. With difficulty we had climbed the mountain still scarred with the quarries from which. Phidias dug the Parthenon marble ; we had been blown off our feet by the wind; we had crawled to the shelter of an overhanging rock, and, peeping over the edge, had seen, miles away. LAST GLIMPSES OF GREECE 103 far, far below, beyond the wind, unmoved by it, the curve of the bay, blonde against an azure sea. So we looked on Marathon, a blue, sickle-shaped curve, against a desolate shore — Marathon in peace. Or was it the idea of Delphi that shadowed us, when we embarked at Corinth, and sailed across the gulf through the night, to awake in the harbour of Itea, to walk through the vast olive-grove, and upward, every step of toil draw- ing nearer to Parnassus, and to all that remains of Delphi, laid bare on the slopes of mighty cliffs ? Was it the first draught, that parched noon, of water from the Castalian Fountain, beneath the plane-trees, by the Sacred Way ? Or was it the sight of the Acropolis of Athens, as we drove one day from the Piraeus through the tedious, dirty, dust-laden suburbs, sign-marks of New Greece, strangely content with these shanties straggling over her classic soil ? Always before us rose the Aci-opolis, eternally beautiful, purple against pink Hymettus, the columns of the Parthe- non glowing golden in the rays of the setting sun. We picked our way through a camp of gypsies, brown as the earth, and, winding upward, passed through the Pro- pylaea, and stood for the last time on that marble-strewn plateau. The long shadows were blue, the Parthenon was gold, and turning, we saw through the gate of the Propylasa the sun, an orb of fire, sinking to Eleusis. We stood in a vapour of light. The marble had taken on life. It seemed as if the Parthenon had awakened from the sleep of cen- turies, and was prodigally scattering her stored sunshine. That was a moment of wonder, ineffable, ending when the voices of the custodians cried, " Closing ! Closed ! " We descended the marble steps of the Propylsea. The 104 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON gate clanged behind us; but the light remained. The Odeion of Herodes Atticus, that vast music-hall open to the sky, seemed to be peopled with shades of light. The marble seats of the theatre of Dionysus shone, and when I stooped to feel the carvings on the chair of the High Priest, I thought, in that magic hour, that the beauty of the crouching figvu-es in low relirf had never been excelled. Suddenly the colour left the marble. The sun had dipped behind the hills, and looking up, I saw that dead thing, the Parthenon, all the glory gone from it, grey and cold. But next morning, when I left Athens, it lived again. The first beams of the sun vivified the marble, and the columns stood proudly out — the glory of Hellas. Yes ; the Parthenon is the ineffaceable impression of Greece — maimed, but immortal. The late passenger came aboard. We steamed slowly out into the darkness. The lights of Patras dwindled, disappeai'ed. Slowly we moved through the silent sea towards Ithaca — and home. MAY MAY BEDSIDE READING /CHEERILY the doctor entered the room. Has a patient ever been deceived by that unnatural cheeriness ? He laid a towel across my bare back and placed his ear against it. " Say ninety-nine ! Again ! Again ! Again ! Take a deep breath ! Another ! Another ! Say one, two ! Again !" The silent operation of temperature-taking followed. " You must go to bed at once," said the doctor. Such was the beginning of it. That night, feeling amazingly unwell, I reached out for my private thermometer, which, with a glass of milk and an uneatable health biscuit, stood by the bedside. An exami- nation of the thermometer by the light of a flickering candle showed a rise in temperature. I tried to sleep, but my eyeballs seemed to be on fire : the lids burnt when I attempted to close them. Straight and still I remained, with eyes wide open, breathing uneasily, emitting sounds from my lungs not unlike an automobile trying to start, all the while staring at the bobbing and jumping reflections that the dying fire cast on the ceiling. " How strange if I were to die," I said to myself. " I never thought it possible." But, oddly, the idea of dying did not trouble me. Why should it ? The sensation of 107 108 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON lying there in bed was so extraordinarily comforting. I would not have exchanged that delicious feeling of being at last in the right place, at the right moment, for anything the world had to offer. "This is the heart's desire," I thought. About the hour when the hall porters of the clubs lock the doors on the last members I again took my temperature. It seemed to be a point higher. I fell back upon the pillow without extinguishing the candle. There was now only one pattern on the ceiling from the dying fire. The house was very still. I had no pain ; indeed, I was extraordinarily content with my lot. I tried to frame a sentence or two describing my sensations. The words composed themselves without effort — thus : " Immortal longings ? No ! It is, as I have long sus- pected, that Death is simply a wise and kind old Nurse, who has had so many children under her care that she knows exactly what to do. My case is quite ordinary. Nurse is performing her duties most satisfactorily. I recommend her." Then I closed my eyes, and the fire on the eyeballs did not hurt. Some days later I described all this to the real nurse while she was painting my back with iodine. She told me not to be silly, and that it was greedy to eat a pound of grapes in one afternoon. That evening — it was a Saturday — I felt much better, and was aware of some curiosity to know what had been happening in the world. Nurse volun- teered to go out and buy an evening paper. When she BEDSIDE READING 109 returned with a rustling sheet, she said, "Now, you lie quite still, and Til read you out all the news, beginning with the headlines. '"Arsenal score twice in the first half against the Blades—' " " Read the news, please, nurse, on page 3," I said. " This is page 3. Til begin at the top of another column, if you like. ' Brentford play pluckily with a ragged team against the Spurs.' Is that more interesting ? " I passed my hand anxiously over my brow. " There's something wrong either with me or the paper," I said. " Please turn to page 1 and read the leading article." Not very graciously nurse began : " I raised the necessary bob last Saturday and hied me to Tottenham. I have read very many accounts of the game. A goodly number award the glory to the Geordies, to McCombe, Andy Aitken, and other Novocastrian notabilities ^" " I do not think that can be the leading article," said I. " Be so good as to try the leaderette notes." The amiable nurse at once began to read, in a clear, high voice : " My old friend, Mr. E. W. Nuttall, sends me a line that it is too long since we have seen each other's face, and asks me to the Wasps' smoker." « Thank you. That will do." Then (to myself) : " My brain is affected. I am going mad ! " !tl * * * * Next morning the doctor made an early call. "Say ninety-nine ! Again ! Breathe deeply ! Say one, two ! Once more ! You're going on beautifully. You may get up for an hour on . Is that the Football Star ? Many thanks." 110 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON "Wolves 4, Notts County S," murmured the doctor. " How disappointing ! Why, Notts County . Let me see the tongue. No, not chops. A little white meat and a rice pudding. Why Notts County "" THE APPARITION rpWICE during that long luncheon at the Brighton Hotel had the Apparition passed along the sea- front, and each time I nearly asked the waiter who and what he might be. But I refrained. Far out at sea a sun-ray pierced through the clouds, and, falling on the wave, illumined it, giving to that spot in the grey ocean a brief loveliness, the pure beauty of water moving in light. It drew my eyes, drew all of me, so that it was as in a dream that I heard the waiter say, cajolingly, " Hab a nice slice of cold meat, sare ? No .'' " He was distressed to think I had eaten only three of the seven courses, and he had learnt, I suppose, that an Englishman will eat cold beef even when he seems unhappy. I waved him away, and again sought that splash of jewel-like light in the grey ocean (we all have our weak- nesses), and as I looked there rose above it the vision that had been subconsciously with me all the day — the head of Nelson and those gyrating letters of the alphabet. It sounds commonplace, does it not ? It was the Gi'ail that ought to have risen from the mystic wave : but listen. It was at a cinematograph entertainment in the pavilion THE APPARITION 111 at the pier-head. The rest of the programme I forget, but Nelson and those amazing letters remain. The darkened hall was filled with children and women ; but even amid the chatter and upholstery, the winter millinery, and the marine circulating library novels, one had the feeling that outside, all around, was the sea ; so when the small, grey head of Nelson moved upwards over the screen it seemed right that he should thus rise from his element to the strains of a hornpipe played by a piano and a comet. No sooner was Nelson settled upon the screen than there began to push their way over the edges detached letters of the alphabet, sideways and upside down, twisting and turning, edging one another out of place, gyrating round the head of Nelson. The audience began to titter ; to laugh ; they supposed that the apparatus was misbehaving ; but even while they were laughing, a co-ordinating impulse, an influence, voice- less but ubiquitous, such as bees feel when they swarm, seemed to direct those whirling letters of the alphabet : they slipped towards their appointed places; one stood firm, then another, then a third ; suddenly all had fallen into order, and the words stood motionless, haloed around the brow of Nelson : " England expects that every man will do his duty." Silence fell. Not often at a casual entertainment does the vision of the perfected whole follow so quickly the riddle of the apparently piurposeless parts. All I saw from the hotel window during luncheon was in part, and so long as the gleam of light on the sea lasted 112 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON it seemed possible that some of the letters of the world might shape themselves into a meaning, perfectly clear, shiningly fair. Even that Apparition who was now passing, for the third time, along the sea-front! He had flowing hair falling upon his shoulders ; he was clad in a long garment of camel's hair ; on his feet were sandals ; in his hand he carried a staff that towered above his head ; and he never passed a child without a smile and a wave of the hand. A half- turn of my head, and the waiter was at my elbow. He understood. It was not the first time the question had beeti addressed to him. " AJbu, a crank ! He wants everybody not to eat meat, and to drink nothing. He sells a little book about it. He eats nuts. " The waiter glanced towards the Boar's Head and the Partridge Pie on the sideboard. He seemed to be really amused. I went out, overtook the Apparition, talked to him, and wondered. Could it be that he, one of the alien letters, had found his rightful place, and was now waiting till others should feel their centre and group themselves in obedience to the immortal scheme ? Absurd ! Yet he went his ha.ppy way, singing, and talking to the children. Over-clothed, over-fed folk, care-lined in the pursuit of excitement, looked at him, smiled, and passed on. Yet it was he the sky seemed to arch over — ^not they. Again, how absurd. He sold me his book for a shilling, and told me his heart's desire: to save enough money to be able to gather around him a small class of children, who would be his disciples, and carry on his work. " The world needs THE NIGHTINGALE 118 healing," he said. " I am here to heal. If the Great Healer, the Lord Jesus, were living on earth to-day, He would live as I do ! Yes ! " He smiled, and passed on cheerfully, the happiest man on the parade, throwing kisses to the children, drawing in vast inhalations of air, nourished by nuts and heavenly manna. The spot of light again fell on the ocean. Did I really see his letter settling in its place, while our letters were dizzying round ? I do not know. Sometimes nothing is hidden. THE NIGHTINGALE "MT'HEN, at one a.m., I tried to compose myself to sleep ' ' it was not the song of the nightingale that hindered, but that question of my bibulous host as he handed me a candle: "J'ever hear a thrush singing in the rain.?" The landlord spoke as if that sound o'ertopped the night- ingale's song and all else in the world. His fuddled brain clung to it, as a man clutches at his hat in a gale of wind. Why not .'' It is essential poetry, that simple sentence of six words — " A thrush singing in the rain." But it had been a night of nightingale song and talk, and this persistent thrush singing in the rain was an in- terloper. The nightingale causerie had begun at sundown beneath a gorse bush by the Sussex sea, and the participa- tors were Papa, Mama, the Child, myself and some Others. We were seated on rugs on a green place by the 114 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON sea, shivering and sneezing, pretending tbat summer began in May. Papa opened the causerie by remarking that the birds had arrived on the Sussex coast that day. The Child dropped her doll's cradle to listen. Papa restated the miracle, ever new, ever wonderful, that the nightingale and its companions find their way to England from North Africa and Asia Minor ; that the male night- ingales precede the females ; that the little brown bird with the rusty-red tail only alights in certain parts of east and south-east England; that it disowns Scotland. " Some people say," added Papa, " that this is a sign of the Creator's dislike of the Wee Kirk." After supper, when the Child had been put to bed, we walk edinland, stealthily, and heard the nightingale. It is the most silent moment in the lives of most. Even motor-cars have been known to stop when the nightingale is singing. Returning to the cottage by the sea each told where, and when, and with what depth of emotion he had first heard the nightingale. O, but there were sumptuous confidences . in the jewelled night, with Orion walking high, and Dunge- ness light flashing from immensity. One of the company had heard the nightingale first at Oxford, an orchestra of melody, lusty, abundant, pervading as youth itself ; another had retired to bed hopeless of hearing the nightingale^ and had awakened to a night alive and pulsating with liquid notes ; another had heard mate calling to potential mate one magical midnight in the weald of Kent ; another (that, of course, was myself) had taken a second-class return ticket from King's-cross to Finchley-road Station, had THE NIGHTINGALE 115 inquired of a rural policeman the way to Hampstead, and in a damp wood which I believed to be the wood where Keats had heard the nightingale, had heard a sound which I believed proceeded from a nightingale. Anyhow, it was not a corncrake. " Darkling Ilisten Thou wast not bom for death, immortal Bird."" Another, a Cheshire man, spoke thus : — I must have been a boy of about nine years of age when one evening at the end of dinner the butler came hurriedly into the room and whispered to father. " Impossible ! " said father. " Roger have heard it hisself, sir," said the butler. We all rushed out, and there, sure enough, in a sallow by Wankyn's pond was a nightingale singing. The whole village was present, and father talked about putting a plate on the willow. There was as much excitement as when the butcher's shop caught fire. Hush . . . ! The song began again^ — " The same that ofttimes hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."" At eleven o'clock I left Papa, Mama, the Child and the Others and.prepared to step out on the four-mile tramp to the Sussex inn near Hastings, where I was passing my villeggiatura. Some enjoy a midnight walk through a desolate country, the impalpable night, ominous, mysterious all around, cottage windows dark, lanes with banks so high 116 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON that the stars are nearly hidden, fuiTy things darting across the road, the long drawn-out wail of a dog winding from some remote farmhouse, the moan of the wind in trees, and that torture of the imaginative wayfarer, the sound of foot- steps somewhere behind, that stop when you stop, and patter again on the silent road when you step breathlessly forward. Amid these foolish fears, four times as I walked an unseen nightingale sang : — " Perhwps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth .....'" The inn was dark when I reached it. I rang, a light moved behind the glass inner door, and the landlord, smil- ing the smile of the sleepy sot, admitted me. " I've walked from Chickbody-on-Marsh," said I proudly, " and I've heard the nightingale four times." The fuddled man stared. Then a smile of remembrance broke over his face and he said slowly : " J'ever hear a thrush singing in the tain ? " TWO R.A. PRESIDENTS I. REYNOLDS X DOUBT if the modem art student derives much from Sir Joshua Reynolds' " Discourses " except encouragement towards noble living and thinking. Sir Joshua is always on the side of the angels ; but the student wants experiences, views gained from work, practical advice, not theories — .such a book as William Hunt's "Notes." Little enough, I imagine, Charles Furse gained from Sir TWO R.A. PRESIDENTS 117 Joshua Reynolds' Discourses. His debt to Sir Joshua's pictures was enormous. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood did not revolt against Reynolds' portraits, but against the pictures that were produced in succeeding generations by men who weakly or lazily followed his advice, and founded what they termed their style on the work of man, instead of Nature. Whenever Reynolds came [face to face with a fine Vero- nese, Tintoretto, or Rubens, all his theories about the grand style of the Bolognese evaporated in the heat of his enthusiasm. When he confronted life, as in his superb Lord Heccthfield or his bewitching Nelly O'Brien, or in that picture of profound sensibility called Portraits of Two Gentlemen at the National Gallery, or in a score of beauti- ful things, his theories about the grand style scattered before the revelation of his eyes that God, not one of the Caracci, had given him. Sometimes, in a happy hour, he fused the two, as in The Graces Decorating a Terminal Figure of Hymen; but if I want to know the real Sir Joshua, I go to the pictures mentioned above, and to Lady Betty Foster, at Chatsworth, and Captain Orm£, on the staircase of the National Gallery. I do not seek The Death of Dido, at Buckingham Palace, or A Mother and her Sick Child, at Dulwich. What a picture ! What a warning against theoretical painting ! A student turning to the Twelfth Discourse, and reading this passage : " I again repeat, you are never to lose sight of Nature," might be disposed to convict Sir Joshua of inconsistency ; but a few lines further down he will dis- cover that " the art of seeing Nature " is defined as " the art of using models." It was when he arranged his models 118 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON after the Grand Manner that Sir Joshua''s compositions became artificial ; it was when his painter's eye saw them as they were in some brilliant or personal moment, as in Nelly O'Brien and the Countess of Albemarle, that they became alive. The Age of Innocence was arranged, and the child will always remain — arranged. Nowhere does the nobility of Sir Joshua Reynolds' character stand forth in ampler outlines than in the Fourteenth Discom'se, wherein he discusses the genius of his brilliant rival, lately dead. How strangely the opening words of the second paragraph read to day : "We have lately lost Mr. Gainsborough, one of the greatest ornaments of our Academy." Consider the conditions. Here was a brilliant, wilful, fantastic man of genius — musician as well as painter — who had quan-elled with the Academy, and whose mer- curial, sprite-like character must have been antipathetic to, and unrealisable by, the grave and consistent Sir Joshua : — " I cannot prevail on myself to suppress that I was not connected with him by any habits of familiarity." But Reynolds had the memory of that death-bed meet- ing in his wise, sad head, and the name and praise of Gainsborough run like the melody of a spring song through the Discourse. We can imagine the mild dis- approval in Sir Joshua's eyes when he regretted that Mr. Gainsborough did not venerate the works of the great historical painters of former ages, and when he apologised for Gainsborough's want of precision and handling. To TWO R.A. PRESIDENTS 119 Reynolds the mercurial Gainsborough must have appeared as a brilliant and wilful woman to a serious, con- vention-bound man, fascinating and alluring him in spite of his disapproval. Yet how fair and fine to Gainsborough he is. As I read on to the end of the Discourses I have but one feeling for the old President — a deep and increasing reverent affection. He was so simple-minded, so great, so serious, so overflowing in his love for what is noble and of good report. We read the account of how he ceased painting with the thrill of awe and gladness that we experience when the little things of life suddenly take greatness to themselves. " While finishing a portrait of the Marchioness of Hertford, he felt a sudden decay of sight in the left eye. He laid down the pencil, sat a little while in mute con- sideration, and never lifted it more." A year later he delivered his last Discourse. Through- out it, the name of Michael Angelo appears again and again, as if he is reporting the visits of some god to the scenes of his former labours. The last passage is Reynolds' final communication to the world in which he played so great a part, which he so enriched by his example, as well as by his works. The sentences roll forward like a tide that, moving, seems asleep : — " Were I now to begin the world again, I would tread in the steps of that great master : to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections, would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious man. I feel a self-congratulation in knowing myself capable of 120 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON such a sensation as he intended to excite. I reflect, not without vanity, that these Discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man ; and I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might be the name of^ Michael Angelo." II. LORD LEIGHTON When we recall Leighton it is the splendour of the name not the performance of the artist, that passes dazzlingly across the vision. In him the personality of the individual dominated and out-soared the artist. For years he was the most distinguished figure of the art worlds of England and Europe. Under his president- ship of the Royal Academy art, for better or worse, be- came fashionable, with paragraphs in the society journals. Illustrations of the costly houses of painters became as popular with the magazine public as pictures of the Stately Homes of England. Those golden years are gone. The painter is no longer a personage with the income of an ambassador ; often he opens a school, and is pleased and proud if, at the end of the year, he can pay his bills. In a letter to his father, dated 1861, Leighton wrote : " As for Ruskin, he was in one of his queer moods when he came to breakfast with me — he spent his time looking at my portfolio, and praised my drawings most lavishly — he did not even look at the pictures." There was something more in that " queer mood " of Ruskin than meets the eye. Perhaps one of the secret TWO R.A. PRESIDENTS 121 troubles of some of Leighton's many friends was that they could not praise his pictures as much as they desired to do. Happy, unhappy Leighton ! Yet his first studies for pictures were rich and prodigal. Compare the delightful and impulsive lyrical statements in colour for Captive Andromache, for The Return of Perse- phone, for the Bacchante, with the cold and formal classicism of the finished pictures. One never detects this fatigue, this inability to vivify, this partiality for pose and lack of the vital gesture, in his sculpture. In modelling his tem- perament probably found its highest expression, and in such sculpturesque designs as his magnificent Elisha raising the Son of the Shunamite. I think Leighton knew this. It was what endeared him to friends and acquaintances. How timid he was when he faced the " happy accident " that more painters would welcome as the something, not themselves, that flashes genius into their humdrum labours. Had he had the power he would never have dared to write that wonderful, subtle, uncouth, rough-hewn, and tender story that Mr. Kipling calls " Wireless." It is the man, not the artist, who dominated the art world when he was alive. And within the man there were two men, the President of the Royal Academy, and the Fred who wrote long letters to Papa, and who visited him every Sunday afternoon when the clock struck five. The first time I met Leighton I saw the two men — the President and Fred — within an hour. I had been invited to his house on a Sunday afternoon, the day he received : I passed through the cold splendour of the Arab Hall, ascended the Peacock staircase, and so to the studio, where 122 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON he stood, a magnificent and lonely decorative man, velvet- coated, scented, his grey curls nestling on his brow, receiv- ing guests of all nationalities, conversing mellifluously and with perfect ease in any tongue and on tiny topic. There was the President, urbane, cultured, detached, doing his utmost because he was the official representative of the Royal Academy that he loved. When the last guest had gone he threw himself into a chair and talked. Then I knew Fred who wrote long letters to Papa. How superior and remote from actual life in their honeyed eloquence were his lectures to the students of the Royal Academy. I have listened for nearly two hours hypnotised, and have carried away nothing but the memory of a golden torrent of words, perfectly expressed and per- fectly unintelligible to any healthy student. Yet about the time that he was preparing one of these Olympian discourses Fred was writing to Lina, saying real things, quickly, nervously. " No, I have not yet tackled Nordau. I am looking for- ward to him much, but have so far, except some Pater (Greek studies) mostly fribbled ; two or three Spanish novels ; a few short tales by Hardy, clever, but his figures are talking doUs, taught out of a book ; ' L'Innocente,' dull, but not so coarse as I had understood. ' Tales of Mean Streets ' — now there, if you like, is powerful stuff." He was myriad-minded ; he had a great heart, and quick sympathies. When a lady at a Royal Academy soirde was stopped by the porter for some informality in her ticket, it was Leighton who rushed forward and waved her inward ; TWO R.A. PRESIDENTS 123 when a student, poorly and shabbily dressed, at one of the annual prize-givings, was leaving the building dejected and unhappy, it was Leighton who took the student's ai'm, drew him aside, and sat talking to him, fighting his battles and encouraging him. Leighton had nearly all the gifts, most of the virtues, and many of the vanities ; but nature denied him the supreme gift for which ihe longed of being a great artist. Millais could have put him in his pocket. Watts and Holman Hunt towered above him. If genius really con- sisted in an infinite capacity for taking pains, then Leighton would have been greater than any of his great contem- poraries. As an artist he was the least of them, as a man he overtopped them all. His sumptuous Biography in two gorgeous volumes is the record of a time, now gone, when painting in this country, mainly through the commanding personality of the golden-mouthed Leighton, swaggered into a position which was untenable. Prices rose, painters built palaces, their movements were chronicled in fashionable journals; some wore corsets and others acquired a Fi-ench accent. The ordinary man ceased to buy pictures. What had he to do with a canvas costing two thousand guineas and more, and so large that it could not pass through the door of his house ? Leighton's influence is past. Art is really in a much healthier condition to-day than when he flourished. The painter is more of a craftsman, less of a society lion. The gods who gave Leighton so many talents refused him pre- eminence in any one. He was one of the Olympians of the nineteenth century 124 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON who employed some of his many gifts in painting and sculpture. EAST AND WEST X>OUND for the Royal Academy to find entertainment "^ in seeing which of the popular pictures drew the greatest crowd, I was arrested by a name — ^the name Yoshio Markino — on a bill in a picture-shop window. It was familiar, as I had just read his naive and charming essay on his experiences in London. So I entered and spent an hour enjoying his sixty-nine pictures. This Japanese artist, who has been with us eleven years, here gives his impressions of the life and colour of London. Sometimes the memory of the art of his country subcon- sciously directs his brush, as in the lines of the two very Japanesy young women of the hour who are crossing Piccar dilly in a fog ; but in St. Edrnvrnd's Chapel, Westminster, he has caught the very spirit and tone- values of the English fane. His subject always guides his technique. Feeding the gulls at Blackfriars, the tide running imder the Albert Bridge, and London snow-hidden are Whistlerian in treat- ment, for Yoshio (I hope he, a Samurai, will not mind being called by his first name) loves the artist's vision seen through mists or at the crepuscular hour; but when he paints sport, such as a girl driving at golf (so magnificent an end of a swing I have never seen), and school-girls playing hockey, the Samurai blood quickens. The actions of these English girls are as fierce as those of his own braVe country- men storming a Russian height. EAST AND WEST 125 And while I was studying his pictures, which all show joy in the thing seen and the pleasure of self-expression, I was conscious of a small, dark-haired figure standing in a comer, smiling, and seeming just about as happy as a son of Adam can be. His gladness was quite natural. He had painted beautiful and interesting sights, and he was delighted that others should be enjoying them. I studied him. He was clad in a sort of Academic black gown, open at the front, and his feet were sandalled. I could not resist speaking to him. His outlook as an artist is as happy and childlike as his appearance. Everybody was kind. The ladies were delightful, the policeman most friendly, and he had not the slightest wish to return home. The little ornament on his ham, (the gown) was the family crest, hundreds of years old — a wistaria flower. His father and grandfather had been artists, amateurs ; in their time no Japanese gentle- man would demean himself by selling a picture. Now, all is changed ! Then we discussed his pictures. I hope he sold them all. Had it not been his private view day, I would have begged him to accompany me to the Royal Academy. As I walked towards Burlington House I contrasted the happy and hopeful demeanour of the Japanese artist, who lives on a few pence a day, and sees beauty everywhere, with the demeanour of some of our British painters this week in May. Many of them have had a sorry time. The artist is a sensitive being by nature, yet it is he who must see in one burning week his year's work criticised and commented upon, often flouted or despised. The pictures of one of them — they hang on the line — have been called "poisonous" by an outspoken critic. No other worker in any career has 126 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON to submit to such a swift and public ordeal. If some of the criticisms of pictiu-es I have read had been directed to me, I should have — well, I suppose I should have done what they do^smile and forget. There is something delightfully human about the crowd that throngs the Academy on a fine May afternoon. The higher art criticism has no more effect upon them than the new theology upon a spruce hansom cabdriver. The cha- grined artist, dissembling in a high collar and silk hat, by mixing with the crowd, and listening, may recover his buoyancy. The holiday spectators all wear their best clothes ; they know what they like, and they say it jubi- lantly. A portrait is not considered by its quality of paint, or its fine or emotional drawing, but because it is like Aunt Maria, or that man, you know, we always meet at the Jenkin-Trotwood's. A landscape is interesting, not because of its tone or colour- value, or the loving way in which light has been tracked, but because the spectator thinks he knows the country depicted. " I've walked that very hill," isaid a dear old gentleman after gazing at Sir Ernest Waterlow's A Yorkshire Dak. He beamed as he gazed. " Ah ! that's the sort of thing we have in the Highlands," said another, as he examined, inch by inch, Mr. MacWhirter's A Highland Ravine: Glen Affric, snifiing meanwhile disdainfully the hot air of Gallery III. The hot air ! The headaches ! The dazzle ! Will the wand of the spirit of new London ever pass over Bur- lington House .'' I see in dreams these crowded, confused rooms given over to the Royal Societies, and a vast and airy Palace of Art built in the Green Park, with bands and tea-tables as at the Berlin Salon, groves and spacious THE NEW SCULPTURE 127 breezy corridors for the display of the sculpture of the year, and pictures all on the line in cool, airy rooms. THE NEW SCULPTURE T OOKING through the oriel window, after hunger was assuaged, I observed in the square outside, rising from a mottled base, a statue of an eminent deceased citizen in marble frock-coat and trousers, with uplifted hand, and right boot advanced. I placed a newspaper against the diamond-pane window to hide the thing, and remarked, " How hideous ! " There was nothing more to say. My companions at the luncheon-table smiled. One was a Sculptor, one a Painter (of dogs), and the third, at present, prefers to express himself in writing. " I suppose the poor fellow was following instructions," said the Sculptor. " The committee (there is always a committee) probably wanted an effigy in frock-coat and trousers." " Then he should not have taken the commission," I re- torted. "If it is too much to ask that the passer-by should be thrilled by a street monument, he at least should be spared irritation. In a civilised country such an object as that frock-coated citizen, as the figure of Cobden in Camden Town, as the dreadful memorial to Queen Victoria by St. Mary Abbott's, Kensington, should not be permitted'. I could name a score of statues in London alone that are commonplace, materialistic, insig- nificant. They are eyesores. There should be something of the heroic in public monuments. Something noble. 128 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON mysterious and eternal, like The Sphinx, one of the few per- fect examples of solitary monuments raised by man. A monument should be in mass, not in detail, simple as death, lyrical as spring, never the crude thing itself, but the thing seen through the artist-craftsman's imagination, so that the passer-by, looking at it, may feel that some vision deeper than his own has transfigured the commonplace, dignified the homely, shown the soul pulsing within the ageing body." " Steady ! " said the Painter (of dogs — he also makes pictures of impossible race-horses winning impossible races). I continued undisturbed. " Thornycroft's Gordon in Trafalgar Square has something of this personal vision; it's dwarfed, as Gilbert's fountain in Piccadilly Circus is eclipsed by the mammoth buildings around. I'm not sure that I do not think the Nelson Column the one really satisfactory statue-monument in London. Half-hidden in a fog, dark against a blood-red sunset, the grimy towering shaft, guarded by lions, touches the imagination, suggests, leaves something untold." " You have been talking about sculpture for a quarter of an hour, and you haven't once mentioned the name of Rodin," said the Writer with a taunt in his eye. " Amaz- ing!" " Or Troubetzkoy," interjected the Sculptor. " As to Rodin," I said, " he has arrived : he is unap- proached ; he should be called Master by all the living and most of the dead. He has made marble emotional, brood- ing, terrific ; he has created the art anew, raised it from the slovigh where it was left by the average early Victorian THE NEW SCULPTURE 129 practitioners. As to Troubetzkoy, I think his series of delightful and natural statuettes may really convince the public that a small bronze is a suitable, and, yes! an entertaining decoration for a small room. He has gone straight to Nature ; he has not fobbed us off with some- thing seen through another man's eyes. And there are Englishmen and Australians, young modems, fine sculptors. They—" The dog Painter here uttered the word Rosso, which had the effect of the words " I spy strangers ! " suddenly spoken in the House of Commons. Feeling that the moment could no longer be delayed, I said to the Writer, who is a Rossoite, "Tell us about Rosso." " I skip all the controversial part," he began, " the claims made on his behalf that years ago a work of Rosso's gave Rodin the idea of impressionist sculpture. Rodin would hdve been Rodin anyhow. The question is — does Rosso count .'' Is his work significant ? Assuredly the answer is yes. His theory of sculpture is extraordinarily interesting. It fascinates me. That theory is that a sculptor should look, say, at a man's face in the same way that a painter does, noting only the impression it gives him from a distance, of form lurking in light and shade. Here are his own words. ' Art must be nothing else than the expression of some sudden sensation given us by light. There are no such things as painting or sculpture. There is only light.' " " Good Lord ! " said the dog Painter, " Rosso's work," continued the Writer, " does not deal with the exact shapes of things, but with the sudden, vivid. 130 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON light-illuminated impression starting out from shadow and uncertainty. He gives you the faxie of a woman passing oh the boulevard, the head of an ailing child, a laugh, the figure of a sick man, the impression of pain rather than the invalid himself. You must stand away from his sculptures. They must be regarded as pictures." The dog Painter smiled ; but the Sculptor seemed really interested. " Where are they to be seen ? " he asked. The Writer mentioned the names of certain galleries. We rose to our feet. We called a four-wheeled cab. On the way the Sculptor whispered to me, " The test of a modeller is the way he treats the hands. It's fearfully difficult. I'm told that Troutbetzkoy puts the hands of his little figures of men into their trouser pockets." MAY IN PARIS rpHE sunshine flooded Paris; the bright streets were crowded ; and all through that hot morning the motors dodged and darted between the traffic to the Tuileries gardens, where they were to be weighed, prepara- tory to the great race. One by one they passed through the gates, and the air was full of the shouts of chaufleurs, the odour of petrol, and the cries of dogs; for in the gar- dens a dog-show was also being held. It was Paris at its hottest and noisiest moment, and when a ftdend found me staring at a panting car that refused to ascend the slight incline to the gardens, and said, " I've seen a dog so small that you could slip it into a tea-cup," I felt that trees and glades held more attractions than Paris that day. So I MAY IN PARIS 131 departed by steamer up the Seine, passed under a stone bridge blazoned with a great N, and disembarked at a village where there were trees, a sunny road, and a cafe, with tables on which white cloths were spread beneath an awning. At the table nearest to the road sat a Frenchman drinking absinthe, and under his eyes, and under mine, scenes from the pageant of life passed along that village road. The absinthe drinker dozed and dreamed in the sunshine, looking at nothing in particular, sipping the yellow, clouded liquid, contentedly fiiddled ; but inside the cafe the company of villagers was alert, cheerful, and watch- ful. They sang over their meal, and when two priests passed by they rose to their feet and hooted. Then the soldiers, preceded by a band playing a rousing march, swung down the hiU, bronzed, dusty, and the villagers thumped the tables, ran to the door, and cheered ; but the absinthe drinker gazed dully at the men in red and blue, as uninterested in them as he had been in the priests. After that nothing happened for quite a long time. It was enough to sit and gaze at the sunny road, and to watch two women across the way carding wool. But no French village is long free from the motor-car, and soon it came — a racer, of steel, shaped like a torpedo, one man huddled in the seat, the other crouched on the step. Dust-powdered, hooded, goggled, with heads bent forward, every line of their figures rigid with the tension of that awful rush across the land, the thing under their sway leapt up the hill, gleamed for a moment before our eyes, and was gone, while the absinthe drinker sat in the sun, staring vacantly at the white table-cloth. 132 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Here were the two extremes : those men in the racing motor peering on death lurking at every comer — the extremity of action and excitement ; and that bemused absinthe drinker sitting in the sun — the extremity of sloth. Or to change the picture — that great stone N, blazoned on the bridge across the Seine, and the toy dog in the Tuileries " so small that you could slip it into a tea-cup." FRANCE KNOWS rpURNING into the Rue de I'Universite, where Rodin's Paris studios are situated, I recalled the sharp, brief talk of that morning with a sculptor-student. " I'm going to see Rodin this afternoon," I had said. He shrugged his shoulders indifferently, then looked up from the figure of Pan he was modelling. There was war in his eyes. The wild words that followed are not worth recording ; but it was plain, if my friend may be taken as representing the younger movement, that the inevitable reaction against the extravagances of the extreme Rodin school has already begun. The sculptor-student said finally : " Rodin is a clever craftsman with an instinct for advertisement. Now Jose de Charmoy, the sculptor of Baudelaire, h — "" I cut him short. " Come to-night to the Concerts Rouge ; it's a Beethoven evening, and we'll discuss Rodin in the intervals." FRANCE KNOWS 13S It was late for an afternoon call on a great man when I reached the open ground off the Rue de PUniversite which Rodin's studios face. Twilight was falling, and the great blocks of marble that littered the space in front of the studios had begun to suffer their night change. An elderly man, sturdy, strong-featured, grey-bearded, clad in the silk hat and black coat of respectability, opened the door. It was Rodin. He smiled, grasped my hand, closed the door, and turned again to the guests with whom he had been conversing, swathing, while he talked, a small clay figure in wet cloth. I, well content to be disregarded, slipped away and lost myself among the creations, fashioned into the strange, still life of sculpture, that peopled those vast studios. I was glad to be alone among them : it is not one of my ambitions to pay compliments in French to the greatest living French aritst. It was a loneliness of a new kind, strange and unearthly, among the marbles that emerged ghostlike from the gathering shadows. I hardly dared to walk about the narrow pathways for fear of colliding with some sorrowful figure or group, some indistinguishable thing begun long ago, still retained in the studio, that the master may continue to work upon it when the mood takes him. And, while I crept on tiptoe through the twilight among all these silent revelations of the eternal human emotions — grief, sorrow, pity, love — released from the marble, there, by the door, was the figure of their creator, robust, alert, frock-coated, silk -hatted, talking trivialities and smiling conventional smiles. It seemed so right — this absolute detachment of the artist from his work. Soaring above my head in a corner of the studio I saw a 134 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON colossal hand twined around and growing out from a block of rough marble. In the great palm of the hand was the human family, father, mother and child, resting and nest- ling there. I saw at the end of the studio that Gate of Hell, Rodin's life-work, with the Three Shades, those piteous, drooping figures that are to stand above the door : and below brooded the model of his great Penseur. On the door, and carved all around it, are endless small figures representing the cycle of human tribulation. This Gate of Hell is a life-work in itself. Near the bottom of the gate, so low that I had to stoop to look at it, was one small face, solitary and very sad — a detail, but a detail on which all the powers of the sculptor had been lavished. Again I turned to him. He was still smiling and chattering. The cut of his coat and the shine of his hat would not have disgraced a company promoter. There was Rodin as the world sees him. But Rodin alone with his thoughts — they were around me. "You just look at Nature," I hear him say, "and the rest happens according to your temperament." True. Rodin looked at a man in the attitude of walking, but the thought in his brain, the cry of his temperament, was — News ! Wonderful News for the World ! and the result was John the Baptist proclaiming his news in every line and gesture of his body. Rodin read a description of Balzac's appearance ; but the artist in him said — Invin- cible Will : one man writing with his poor hand the tale of the human comedy, and the result was that leonine head towering from its mortal garment — Balzac ; not the man but the incarnation of Will and Labour. Rodin saw his model crouched on the ground, her head buried in the FRANCE KNOWS 185 comforting earth, her wild hair streaming, and the result was that epitome of hopeless grief — La Dcmdide. The model for Le Penseur posed before him ; but what Rodin saw was Eternity brooding over Time, primal thought rapt in the atmosphere of Eternity, watching the sons of men, each proud of his particular little ray of the primal thought, passing through the dark gate to the grave. And the result was Le Penseur. The last guests were preparing to leave. I made my adieux to the cheery, elderly gentleman called Rodin, who was about to catch his train for the outlying suburb where he lives. He was fidgeting a little at the possibility of being late at the station. 4e 3|G :|e :|e 4c It was, as I have said, a Beethoven night at the Con- certs Rouge, and between the overture to Fidelio and the opening adagio of the Septette (op. 20), I told the sculptor- student about my visit to Rodin. "You see more in his work than there is. Rodin is only Rodin." "How do you know what Rodin is?" I said. "Does he know himself.'' The great artist works in the dark. He writes a letter, tells us of his adventures in the unseen. The words are drab or luminous according to. the light we bring to the interpretation. Just consider Rodin's Genius of War and his Eternal Idol. How wide apart is their appeal, yet how instant ! " " You over-estimate Rodin," said the sculptor-student. " You do not know." 136 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON When we went out into the street during the interval there was a man selling plaster plaques of the heads of great men. They were nailed to a frame, and the frame was propped against the back of a chair. The price of each head was fifty centimes. The first head was that of Goethe, the second that of Beethoven, the third was Rodin's. "Look," I said to the sculptor-student. "France knows." ^h n* n* ■!■ ^F Again I pass in memory through the archway into the circular sculpture hall of the new Salon. For me there was one thing there — one only : Rodin's headless Homme qui marche. It dominated the marbles around. Seeing it I felt the masterpiece thrill, the thrill that was raineyesterdaywhen I stood upon the Pantheon hill and saw his Pensewr brooding over Paris. Just outside the building crouches this solemnity in bronze. Within, Sainte Genevieve watches over the city in Puvis de Chavannes' lovely fresco. And in the vaults beneath are the ashes of Victor Hugo. GASTON LA TOUCHE AND A COMPARISON /^N future visits to Paris I shall obtain admittance, ^^ somehow, to le salon ovale du MinisUre de T Agriculture, for there M. Gaston La Touche's four "panneaUfX de decoration''^ will be deposited. Fortunate Minister of Agriculture! Was there ever such a charming painter, so sensitive and intimate, so humorously and GASTON LA TOUCHE 187 fragrantly human as this Gaston La Touche, bom at St. Cloud ? He stands for all that is light and laughing and daintily feminine in France. With him love is romance, and romance is love. Watteau and Fragonard would dance with delight before his pictures. Ugliness and brutality may exist, but not in the fairy realms where La Touche's fancy plays. It would be like harnessing a butterfly, or cataloguing a sunset, to attempt to describe these four panels. Let the titles speak : Le disir de plaire, La bonte d'dme, La tendresse du cceur, and Uamour matemel, wherein the delectable monkey, who roams the series as a sort of parrot-Puck, is pretending to catch fish with a cane for the family dinner. These radiant La Touches vibrating with fancy and intelligence have, in marked degree, what all the Salon pictures, however extravagant and hideous, possess. Behind the pranks, pretty nothings and acres of prodigious inven- tions, is the well-wrought scaiFolding of mature knowledge. La Touche's drawing is as sure as in the most blatant of the nudes that glare from the walls, offending by their indelicacy, intriguing by their craftsmanship. Jean Veber's loathsome contributions have been for so long part of the show that one accepts them as necessary episodes. The corrupt humour of them ! The stark immodesties of MM. Guillaume and UUman! I hope, pausing before them, that I am admiring their technical qualities. This idolising of the nude has been pushed to its utter- most point of excellence, in drawing and quality of paint, by M. Caro-Delvaille. Accost a painter friend in Paris who knows what good work is : he will say, " Have you seen the Caro-Delvailles .? " His three sumptuous nudes 138 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON were grouped together. Manet's Olymjna is the motive of the largest. No public gallery in London would hang it, and every student of art would rave about its technical accomplishment. If La Touche stands for all that is light and laughing and daintily feminine in Paris, Caro- Delvaille stands for the brutality of her perfect achievement in craftsmanship. The fleshly thing seen is set down resolutely, cynically, and in its way beautifully, for there is much of beauty in Caro-DelvaiUe's pictorial vision. What more can I say .'' The poet in La Touche illumines his craftsmanship. The realist in Caro-Delvaille eliminates all spirituality from his achievement. A LITTLE ART JOURNEY ON THE CONTINENT "PERSONALITY is the vital principle in art. Without it the picture or statue is unproductive as a dead tree in a spring wood. I wiite in the shade of a clump of trees bordering the levels of Holland, within a walk of the town where Frans Hals lived and died. Yonder are the dyke-intersected meadows where roam black cattle with a pedigree of a thousand years. And as I write the cuckoo calls from the copse. Insistence he has, not personality. His note, forcing itself through the moist air, suggests a clamorous and eclectic Salon picture compelling attention. In the intervals of the cuckoo's cry I look gratefully at a bowl of lilies of the valley on my writing table. They do not strive or clamour, yet their personality is persuasive and intimate. A LITTLE ART JOURNEY 139 I review the pictures seen since I left Paris last week, and from the tangle emerge the few that show personality. They abide; they float before me shadowy yet distinct as the figures of Alfred de Musset's creations wrought in M. Moncel's marble panel. I recall the Portraits de Femmes, from 1870 to 1900, that were hung upon the walls of the Bagatelle cottage-mansion in the Bois de Boulogne. Many of them were the sensations of past Salons. Insistent cuckoos ! Their voice is now stilled. But some, informed with personality, are as articulate to-day as the hour they were painted. There is Bastien -Lepage's portrait of his mother, an old woman with weak eyes and sandy hair, quiet as twilight, yet gently touched to life as trees by the evening breeze; there is the study of a woman by Fromentin, who expressed his personality with equal sensi- tiveness whether he held the brush or the pen ; and there is Manet's Madame X., funereal in raiment, dark in tone, yet it dominated the room. Strange it is that this unobtrusive portrait should possess such virile power. Nothing came between Manet and this forgotten Madame X., posing in black silk loose jacket, and fur pork-pie hat with a glint of a green wing. He saw her intently, and painted her sis a man should write a book, without opening another volume ; unerringly he set down the precision of modelling, the nuances of the planes, the reflections visible only to eyes that search ; set all down with clean, unfaltering brush marks, and laid the shadow beneath the chin with the certainty of a mason laying a brick. " There, that is myself," he may have said. " Not necessarily the thing itself; but what I, Edouard Manet, see, and seeing, delight to express in my own way." 140 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON But of all the collections of pictures evocative of personality open in Paris during the month, there was none so arresting as the exhibition of the works of Eugene Carriere at the Beaux Arts. His vision of the world was entirely personal. Two years ago he was alive and working ; to-day we read his letters in these pictures describing all he saw, and felt, and loved. The Carriere convention of sad, dim figures seen through a mist, as if we are looking at a low-toned Maeterlinckian passion through a gauze curtain, does not attract everybody. We have all suffered from hasty painters, who hide their ignorance under an impressionistic blur; but Carriere was an exquisite di'aughtsman and a master of form, who evolved the tender veil that mists his figures from the depths of his personality. He never changed this convention. You see hints of it in his portrait of the sculptor Devillez (1887) and in Ix Premier Voile (1886), that nine-figure New- lynesque subject, which has the sensation of wonder and the mystic vision that the Newlyners always miss. Many painters as they grow old fumble with their visions ; or, tiring of the search into Nature, merely repeat what they saw when the eyes were keen and the heart responsive. Caniere, as the years passed, felt more deeply, and put a more intimate loveliness into the forms lurking in the shrouding mists of his pictures. The outside world became less and less to him, the faces and emotions of his loved ones meant more and more. And so we have themes repeated again and again, each showing a different vision of feeling, under such titles, very eloquent to those who knew Carriere, as Tendresse, MatemiU, Intimite, Caresse, Sommeil. Of this exquisite artist the words of Job may be A LITTLE ART JOURNEY 141 used, " He discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the shadow of death." From Paris I journeyed to Brussels, and hastened to the Grand Place, eager to stand again in that finest of mediaeval squares and watch the setting sun fire the gold of the Hotel de Ville and the Guild Houses ; then up to the stupendous Palais de Justice, which one may, without exaggeration, call the finest modem building placed on the finest site. The sun was setting. Far below me the gabled houses, all beautifully in tone, slumbered on the Netherlands plain. But I went to Brussels to look at modern pictures and sculptures. Constantin Meunier ! Can we wonder that this Belgian sculptor achieved an European reputation .'' The Millet of the artificer and the artisan looms out at Brussels a unique and impressive personality, as in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris, as at Antwerp, where his fine figure of a stevedore, symbolising the Belgian seaport, seems, standing in front of the Royal Museum, more important than the pile of buildings it fronts. Rodin is the sculptor of emotion ! Meunier is the sculptor of toil ! Each entirely himself, the trained hand of each recording the visions seen and felt through the span of working years. At Brussels is Rodin's twining Caryatid, a dreamy thing, but half released from the rough marble; at Brussels is Meunier's piercingly realistic group of a peasant mother finding her son lying dead at the pit mouth. In the Brussels picture gallery I found a superb Lenbach — his half-length of Dr. DoUinger, all brain and asceticism and desire for knowledge ; also a Christ Mocked by La Touche, a gasp of blurred reds, that sways out from the 142 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON canvas like a reproach ; also a sheepfold by the self-taught Segantini, as personal an impression as a pastoral impromptu by a boy Chopin ; and a Constable, a mere sketch of sky and sea and dunes — ^lovely, unforgettable. At Bruges I foimd no modem pictures. In that city, which Le Sidaner painted, one spends the day among the Memlincs in the Hospital of St. John, and remembers that the dear illusion of our youth about Memlinc, the wounded soldier, painting these pictures in gratitude for the care and nursing of the sisters — is a legend merely. There are no documents. Oh ! those documents. At Antwei'p I struck a vein of gold. I had wandered out at twilight, an old joy, to let my eyes travel upwards from the wrought-iron cupola of Quentin Matsys' well (strange that a blacksmith should have painted such delicate pictures !) to the topmost embroidered pinnacle of the cathedral tower, when I noticed an advertisement announcing a memorial exhibition of the works of Alfred Stevens, the Belgian, not the English master. This was the gold, a chance treasure-trove of travel. The Stevens pictures were displayed at the Antwerp Museum. The subjects are negligible. Stevens needed no recondite, religious, or mystical theme for the expression of his temperament. A woman, a moudaine, beautifully gowned, adorned with the feminine fripperies of the day, sufficed. He expresses no deep passion, no delirium of joy. His Parisiennes have their little troubles of love, of loss, of regret ; but, whatever the momentary disillusion or emotion may be, his mondaine is always elegant, whether the pretty creature is considering a love letter, entering a room and wondering ^acefuUy who has sent A LITTLE ART JOURNEY 143 the bouquet of flowers, demurely receiving a visit of condolence, or giving her breast to a baby. But study the painting of the frocks and furbelows, the arrangement qf his dainty interiors, the quality of his workmanship ! The sheen of finest silk, the bloom on a peach, sunlight filtering through muslin curtains, falling on damask, bowls of roses, silver and old glass, could not be more exquisite. Time and change cannot lessen one touch of the beauty of his painting of a muslin dress over a pink petticoat in such a picture as La Da/me en Rose. The flower garden that Stevens tilled may have been small, but he tilled it with incomparable art. It needed a night's rest and the journey to Amsterdam to loose me from the Alfred Stevens obsession. I found the antithesis in the finest picture Israels ever painted — the old Jew seated at the door of his store, eternal longing, eternal sadness. And I found the wave-crest of modem Dutch , art in the clear-sighted pastorals of Mauve, in the seascapes of Jacob Maris, and in a simple view of houses and a road, a perfect thing, by Matthew Maris the Mystic. With that master I was well content to end my journey. JUNE JUNE PADDINGTON OR LYONESSE T>EING a fine morning, I proposed to walk to the -^ British Museum and glance over the Illuminated Manuscripts. I went by way of that unchanging bypath of the metropolis that we call Venice in London, situated in muddy canal-land that confronts you when, wool-gather- ing, you take a wrong turning or two out of Westboume Grove. Once at Venice in London there is nothing to do but to stroll along the banks of the canal to Maida Vale. For he who finds running water in London leaves it un- willingly. Painted barges pass along the canal, and the man at the tiller is a traveller, gliding through London's roots, ever coming, ever going. " Whence ? Whither ? " I ask myself. The Illuminated Manuscripts had tarried so many cen- turies, they could wait a day longer. Moreover, the sun was shining, and that running water, rather muddy, bearing the painted barges, made me think of winding mossy ways, and pleasant, pastoral things. So I returned to Padding- ton and bought a ticket for Uxbridge, knowing that for many miles, even to Rickmansworth, one can follow the banks of this same canal through country places. But I did not walk the many miles to Rickmansworth. I was hindered by a rifle club. It did not mean to dis- commode and disturb me — why should it ? — but the sight 148 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON of those militant citizens swarming out of Uxbridge Station towards some adjacent butts set my mind — well, it must out ! — on the rifle club that I joined in the time of corn harvest last year. Instead of walking to Rickmans- worth, I sat in a green meadow by the banks of the canal, the water here sweet and clear, near to a fisherman, watching the painted barges pass, and hearing occasionally the faint crack of a rifle. It all came back to me — that day, in the time of corn harvest, in a country, always calling, that was once named Lyonesse, not far from the fabled hunting grounds of King Arthur. Having borrowed a Lee-Enfield from a Volunteer, and paid my subscription of five shillings, I purchased three brown paper packets of cartridges, Mark II., each contain- ing ten missiles. Why did I join a rifle club .'' Because every male and female in these islands should learn to ride, to shoot, to swim, to sail a boat, and to appreciate Velas- quez and his parents. After an early luncheon I set forth, tramped over the towans, crossed the ferry, and landed on that wild head- land at the extremity of which, deep below, is the seals' cave, whither at midnight adventurous rope-girt sports- men descend to do battle. I saw no seals that day, no life but the eddying gulls, one tethered ass, and a hobbled sheep, until from a lone hillock I looked down upon a group of my companions in arms firing at the 200 yards range. I settled myself face downwards full length upon the sand, listened to instructions, tried to understand, inserted the cartridge, clicked the bolt home, placed the ponderous weapon against my shoulder and tried to align the front PADDINGTON OR LYONESSE 149 and rear sights on the bullseye. The scheme was pro- found ; but the oscillation of the muzzle of my rifle was prodigious. I held my breath. I pulled the trigger. The bullet pinged forth, then a pause. A flag waved. " A miss ! " cried the sergeant. In the seven shots that followed the marksman registered one magpie, two outers, and four misses. A largerljbullseye is employed at the 500 yards range ; but it looked very sihall, about the size of the mouth of a flower-pot. I fired. A black disc rose and dallied in front of the bull. I was about to lower my head in shame when, to my amazement, the sergeant cried — " A bullseye ! " Let the rest be silence. Rising to my feet I stretched my cramped legs. Shoot- ing at a target should be a reposeful form of exercise. The tethered ass tried to follow me homeward, but I hastened on, and having reached the river hailed the ferry- man. My practised eye told me that there was a man in the stem of the ferry boat nursing a shot gun. As we crossed the river he fired three times at the curlews that were swooping seaward after feeding on the mud flats. When he fired the birds swerved a little eastward as if saying " Bother ! He's at it again ! " I was not ill- pleased to think that this sportsman was not the only gunner who made misses. It had been a glorious day, that day in Lyonesse, and bloodless as the offering of Melchizedek. Then the land of Lyonesse faded into fable again. I was back in the environs of Uxbridge. The sim was sink- ing. The firing had ceased ; but the painted barges drawn by slow horses, with tin pannikins containing their 150 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON food hitched to their heads, still glided along the old high- way. I hailed a man at the tiller, and asked him whither he was going, half believing he would answer — " Lyonesse." The word he shouted back was " Paddington ! " Next day I went to Lyonesse. THE MAN WHO TOOK NO RISKS " T'M going," said the gypsy, testing with his thumb the edge of the knife he had been grinding. " Yes," snapped his old wife, " because you'll get from the rauni 'alf a poimd of tobacco for goin'." " There's the bill of the service," said the gypsy, between the paroxysms of a cough that shook his body. He was eighty-two. The pink bill announced that a Birmingham revivalist would conduct a week's mission at the Primitive Methodist chapel by the cross-roads, within a stone's throw of the gyps es' tent. Members of all denominations were invited, and at the foot of the bill this was printed: — "The Heavenly Father will give the Holy Spirit to them that seek Him." " You're a nice one, James Lovell, to sit on a chapel- bench singin' 'ymns and seekin' the 'oly Spirit," cried the old woman, stripping the skin off a rabbit with the ease of one who has been doing it for three-score years. " A man of your age ! Shoo ! " Then she volunteered the incre- dible news that she had bought the rabbit in a shop. " I'm going," said the old man. He had long ceased to argue with women. THE MAN WHO TOOK NO RISKS 151 I proceeded leisurely on my way. Yonder I saw the route, a glint of road creeping over the shoulder of the hill. The stack and engine-house of a discarded mine stood sentinel against the gash of white road. I paused when I reached the summit, and watched the smoke of the gypsies' peat fire. The smoke, the tent, the piled refuse from the discarded mines, the chapel at the cross-roads, in which a light gleamed, the solemn encompassing hills — that was the landscape. Near by a hawk poised. In my ears was the screech of the gulls, and that irregular monotonous rumble of the mining stamps pounding, not tin-ore newly dug, but barrow-loads of the refuse piled on the earth years ago when Cornwall, eager for copper, was impatient with the humbler metal. I gazed over the land that Wesley awakened, where his influence still broods, holding the miners and mariners in firm, intangible grasp. The Wesleyan Methodists were awaiting with trembling eagerness the coming of the Holy Spirit. They had heard of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Wales, and their arms were open, their faces raised, their hearts burdened. To-night, at six, the week's Revivalist services at the Primitive Methodist chapel at the cross-roads begins. And that godless man, that wise vagrant, Lovell, the gypsy, grinder of knives, maker of clothes-pegs at a penny a dozen, and , and , is to be present. I knew that he would attend the revivalist service, but I did not strike straight to the chapel. In a near valley a slight trout stream raced through a little wood. What would you have ? Angling for trout when all nature is ting- ling with the rapture of re-birth is jointly a part of life with 152 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the fugitive saving of souls at a revivalist service. I spied a young trout in the bed of the stream, noticed that the branches of the ash trees were purple against the loam on the rising hill, and that, as the gulls turned in the air, their wings were grey-blue. Half an hour later, a little troubled by a sore heel, I entered the chapel. Although the first hymn was over, two-thirds of the high wooden pews were empty. The revivalist, a strenuous, shock-headed youth, was devoid of magnetism ; but he had acquired the catch- words — " What a splendid time we're having ! " " O, how we're going to enjoy ourselves this week ! " With the veins outstanding upon his forehead he entreated the Holy Spirit to comfort Cornwall as it had comforted Wales. The children stared at him wide-eyed ; the battered faces of the mariners who sat in rows in the high pews and the pale faces of the miners were sympa- thetic, but critical. Once, once only, when he flung himself half out of the pulpit and entreated the Lord to give them, just for that night, their heart's desire, did his emotion communicate itself to one of the flock — a black-bearded, black-haired sailor, ear-ringed, signed and sealed by his Spanish ancestry. He writhed in his seat, then clambered upon it like one possessed, and, leaning over the barrier, threw out his rough hands, bowed his head, shook and wept, never wiping the tears away. " O Lord give us our heart's desire, grant it speedily, O Lord," groaned the revivalist, and terrible cries went up from the ear-ringed sailor ; but the gypsy-man, Lovell, was silent. He pursed his lips, rubbed his unshaven chin, and immediately the service ended left the chapel. Cleverly he evaded the proflered hand of the revivalist, who, THE OPEN GATE 153 hastening from the pulpit, had stationed himself at the door, crying, as he grasped the extended hands : " O, what a time weVe had, friends ! What a splendid, glorious time ! " It was raining. The gypsy paused in a doorway to light his pipe. I followed him across the common. Very old the gypsy looked, very unfit to be exposed to such weather, very unsuited to sleep in a tent. My heart softened. I thought of nice little almshouses around London, of votes that could be procured by persistent letter writing. Thereupon I hailed the old gypsy, overtook him at the tent door, and said : " Wouldn't it be much better if you and your wife spent the rest of your days in a nice little cottage ? " " Cottage .'' " he echoed. " Four walls and draughts ! No, no ! A man at my age doesn't take risks." His boots quelched through the mud, and his octoge- narian body carrying his unsaved soul stumbled through the flap door of the tent, leaving behind a cloud of rank tobacco smoke. THE OPEN GATE "DEFORE I began the walk across the hills, the Student ■^-^ gave me a twopenny pamphlet called " The Soul of a Nation." " Read it when you see the Open Gate," he said. A day's journey was before me, and the way was solitary ; but the flowers were out, and summer was in the air. Up Trencrom I climbed, that sentinel outpost hill of Western 154 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Cornwall, where the Romans held a camp, and built the fortress whose walls and gates can still be traced on the turf. In fancy I saw the Roman captain, gaunt and hard- visaged, gazing from the ramparts over the barbarous land of his exile, savagely contrasting its inhospitable hills with the emblazoned walls of imperial Rome. I pressed forward, remembering the Student's words; crossed the old road and struck westward, following no path, up and down, making for the height above the open gate. What is the open gate ? Listen. Three leagues out at sea, on either side of the coast of Western Cornwall, the fishermen, looking across the land through a gap in the cliff, discern noj land between them and the horizon. It is as if the sea flowed through the valley, linking the ocean on their side to the ocean on the other side of Cornwall. They call this gap in the cliff, through which they look " the Open Gate." From the summit of Rosewall Hill I gazed down upon the open gate. I saw the valley, with its village and church tower, stretching away to the Penzance coast ; but the men in yonder red-sailed mackerel boat, three leagues out at sea, saw the water seemingly surging like a wide river across the land. It is said that some of the mariners choose this fishing-ground so that the open gate shall be always before their eyes. Presently I began to read the pamphlet given me by the Student. I read to the end of the eleven pages ; then I re- read them. And I read it a third time, wondering as I read. " How strange a thing is this," I reflected. " Here is a philosophy, a code of ethics, a rule of life — call it what you will — that can be traced back for 1500 years in the THE OPEN GATE 155 history of Japan. Through the principles of this philo- sophy, called ' bushido,' Japan conquered Russia. It is the national ideal, followed and practised by millions ; if all the forty-six millions in Japan attain the ideal that the 'bushi' seeks, Japan, having conquered herself, could, if she desired it, conquer the world. ' Bushido ' incor- porates many of the teachings of Christianity. It is not a State religion ; it has neither forms nor ritual, but it is practised throughout Japan. It teaches the soldier and citizen that personal glory is nothing ; that the individual must sacrifice himself for the good of the State and for the happiness of his dead, whose spirits still remain in the world ; that the dead need the affection of the living ; that spirit eyes are always watching, and spirit ears always listening, and that the dead are only happy when the living are fulfilling the ideals of ' bushido.' The ' bushi ' — and each unit of the warrior caste of ' Samurai ' is a ' bushi ' — chooses poverty before wealth, humility before ostenta- tion, self-sacrifice before selfishness.'" " I have been called," said Admiral Togo, addressing the Japanese who had died for their country, " to report our successes to the spirits of those who sacrificed their earthly existence for the attainment of so great a result." " Let every man," said Admiral Yuasa before Port Arthur, "put aside all thought of making a name for himself, but let us all work together for the attainment of our object." Our object ! In peace and war the same. The sacri- fice of self for an ideal. The pursuit of loyalty, courage, poverty, simplicity, temperance, chastity, and charity. As I considered this strange matter — this idealism of 156 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON a pagan nation, strong in the citizen soul-life as on the battlefield — I understood why the student of Eastern re- ligions had bidden me read the pamphlet when I reached the hill above the open gate. When I returned the- pamphlet that night to the Student I said : " I have seen the open gate, and I have read the message. The ideal of Japan is Sparta and Plato's ' Republic ' become one." " It is the dawn of the millennium," said the Student. " Once more the gate is opening from the East." " The West is gazing and wondering," said I. " And listening," added the Student. FAITH rpHERE is no road to the little lonely church, built of Cornish granite, on the edge of the moor ; but I heard the bells, as I descended from the hills past the Cromlech and other prehistoric monuments, steering my course by the lure of the bells. Bridle paths dart here and there. They are now overgrown by gorse and bracken, but in old days the tracks were kept clear by the files of tin-laden ponies driven by the ancient miners down to St. Michael's Mount, where the Phoenicians greeted the black-garbed Cornish, tempting them with bright stuffs and strange ornaments. But I met no Cornish ponies that day, for the mines are deserted — only a child gathering violets : heard nothing but the cry of a curlew and the invitation of the church bells : saw only, when I turned back and faced the hills, the carn-crested heights, the Cromlech where FAITH 157 ages ago some chieftain was laid to rest, and far away on the sky-line, looking like a row of ninepins, a Stone Circle. Soon, deep in the valley, rose the grey square church tower, but I could see no houses. How many farms are there in the scattered moorland church-town, as they call the village ? Perhaps six. Descending, I picked out the congregation walking over the rough ground — yeomen, whose families have worked the soil for centuries : their forerunners' names are fading on many tombs. This remnant of weathered men and pale wives, whom Wes- leyanism has not touched, filled the little granite church. We waited, gazing through the thirteenth-century chancel arch, past the swinging oil lamp, to the plain altar decked with daffodils. The bells ceased ; the four ruddy choir- boys, who knew more about heifers than canticles, shuffled to their places, followed by the vicar in thick boots. They clattered on the flags. He was a typical Cornishman — dark, lank, beardedi lantern-jawed, suUen-visaged. I wondered what sort of spiritual sustenance he would offer this flock in a lonely land, cut off from social intercourse, so dependent upon the church. The Lessons and Prayers did not gain in beauty from his rasping voice ; his intona- tion was discordant, and when he entered the pulpit and an- nounced the text haltingly, with lowered eyes, I felt sorry for that unfed flock. But there came a moment in the ser- mon when he looked up and said : " Before Abraham was, I am .... And, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Then I saw the eyes of faith, faith absolute, dwelling in the innermost. His eyes glowed ; they drew every wandering gaze ; they exorcised every vagrant doubt with their unspoken " I believe," final and 158 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON complete. His words, caught in the searchlight of his eyes, became, for the moment, infallible proofs. The fanciful faiths of the outside world were motes in a sunbeam. In this crowded, steaming, little church on the moor, reeking with the odour of oil and the farmyard, glowed the central light. His formula was as simple as the skyline of the hills. " When you have doubts," his raucous voice whis- pered, "believe all the more." Then he told us of his favourite vision that always came to him in silent hours : the sounding of the trumpet and the Blessed rising and flocking to the Throne ; he tried to picture the ineffable contentment of the multitude. But when he lowered his eyes the spell broke, and I was again a watcher outside the fold, but sure that his sheep had been gathered in. I left the little church, and walked westward by the sea- road under a night of stars. Hanging near the Milky Way was a sun a thousand times larger than our luminary, the star called Arcturus — a spot of dazzling light which astronomers tell us is rushing through space at the rate of three hundred and eighty miles a second. Strange things that I had read about Arcturus flashed through my mind ; that aeons hence he will burn up our system : that this burning has happened again and again : that you, and I, and the man of Faith with the harsh voice and the glowing eyes in the little church on the moor, are but passing incidents in a series of races and empires, extending back through im- measurable ages, ever striving towards perfection, ever, at the appointed time, shrivelled in the magnificence of Arcturus. Above me, as I walked, shone the placid menace in the night-blue sky, a morsel of lovely glow above the shoulder of the cam, Tbep the black moors FAITH 159 opened to my vision, and I saw the Astronomer Priests standing four thousand years ago, within the Stone Circle at Tregaseal, watching for Arctm-us to rise over the Hoot- ing Cam, in perfect faith that he would rise as he had risen before : that their clock-star would never deceive them. Sir Norman Lockyer, and other astronomers of the twentieth century, claim to have read the riddle of these Stone Circles which the Astronomer Priests, having heard the whispered wisdom from Egypt, raised on moor and hill. They had found that there is order in the heavens, as in the procession of the seasons upon the earth : that at a certain minute of a certain day, once a year, the sun would rise and set always in the same place ; that Arcturus, the Pleiades, Capella and other of the heavenly bodies, would faithfully perform their service as clock-stars, rising and setting at the appointed times. When each year the Astronomer Priest, standing in the centre of Tregaseal Circle, gazed to the north, he knew that the moment Arcturus appeared over the Hooting Cam the time for the sowing of certain crops, or the performance of religious rites, had come. Perfect faith on the moors four thousand years ago, the ancient Cornish gathered around the Stone Circle waiting for the Priest to reveal his inner knowledge : perfect faith in the little church to-day, the farmers and miners waiting till the Priest, looking up, shall flash his truth to their expectant souls. So, as I walked westward by the sea-road, Arcturus, hanging over the earn, seemed to stand for the continuity of life, for rule, order, and a plan ordained from the begin- ning. This Menace took on an air of friendliness and 160 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON obedience. For is not gigantic Arcturus in bond to a still greater central force controlling and imperceptibly drawing to itself all the suns and systems ; and that central sun, is it not but one of the workers fulfilling the dream of the Great Architect, who knows the End ? But the darkness of the way, the vastness of the design, and the fugitive and infrequent glimpses of a Father's love ! My feet were lifted from the ground at the thought; my dazed brain broke its confines and floated horribly in icy space. I felt fear and the old need of a compassionate and comprehending mediator, longed for a hand to stretch forth from the awful void, and a voice to say — what ? Then the lights of the village whither I was bound twinkled out. And with that human sight I heard again the voice of the Priest in the little church, reeking with the odour of oil and the farmyard. He was saying : " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." A PAINTER AT WORK rriHE landscape painter was sitting in his wild garden, which lies six miles from the nearest railway station. The June sun blazed down upon his roses (has there ever been such a year for roses .'') and flooded a field of foxgloves with sunlight, that he could see between an archway of trees leading from his garden. It was that field of foxgloves, palpitating and dazzling, that he was trying to paint, and he was finding it very diflicult, for no colour that man has ever found or manu- A PAINTER AT WORK 161 factured approaches anywhere near to the brilliance of sunlight. The painter keyed up his picture to the limit, but it fell far short of the vibrating light on those near roses and far foxgloves, vrhich seemed like live things moving and scintillating in the breeze ; and he was much too sincere an artist to emphasise the darks of the arch of trees in order to accentuate the lights on the flowers. He was enjoying himself immensely, seated under his white umbrella, peering with half-closed eyes at the glory of that sunlight, putting fipots and patches of pure colour on his canvas, seeing the pink roses, the shady arch, and the nodding foxgloves gradually taking shape on the staring canvas, envying nobody in the world ; he was painting for love, not for the market. His conscience was quite at rest. He had been to church that morning. True, he had sat in the last seat, listening to the hum of insects beyond the porch, and watching out ofthetailof his eye the sun flickering through the branches of the old elm in the churchyard, and diaper- ing the turf with jewels of light. Ti'ue he had withdrawn before the sermon ; but he had been to church. Now, as he sat in his garden screwing up his eyes against the light on those foxgloves, two lines of verse came into his head, and he murmured them aloud — " Pan through the pastures oftentimes hath run To pluck the speckled foxgloves from their stem." Suddenly something started across the lawn. He jumped, rubbed his eyes, and laughed. It was not Pan, but it was one of Pan's kindred — a pied wagtail that 162 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON hopped here and there making absurd antics in its endeavour to snap flies into its long beak. For five minutes he watched the bird, and when he turned again to the foxgloves he found, to his annoyance, that they were no longer in sunlight. That is the great difliculty with which the plein air landscape painter contends. The eflfect is never the same for a quarter of an hour, and the sun-painter is in still worse case. So he leaned back in his chair, and ruminated on the development of landscape painting and its history. It was strange to think that landscape painting, which he had always considered as the most delightful branch of art, only began to be regarded seriously in the seventeenth century. Before that period Flemish, Dutch, and Italian painters had floated beautiful peeps of landscape into the backgrounds of religious pictures ; but those were the days when painters were ordered to make manifest in their pictures " to the unlettered and ignorant the miraculous things achieved by the power and virtue of the Faith "" ; and they could only use landscape as an accessory. Little did the Van Eycks and Memlinc think that many men to-day would enjoy their landscape backgrounds more than the saints and sepulchres in the foreground. " I suppose," soliloquised the landscape painter, trying to find a comfortable place in the back of his deck chair to rest his head, " that Joachim Patinir of Dinant, who was bom nobody quite knows when,- but it was before the year 1500, was the first painter of pure landscape. There's a picture by him in the National Gallery, a blue thing called iZiwr .Scerae. It's a joy," "Then comes Titian with his four great landscapes, SUNSHINE IN THE GUILDHALL 163 three of which are lost. And after him, a century later, the mighty, exuberant, untiring Rubens, of the seventeenth century, whom I admire enormously without liking a bit. He painted many landscapes, fruity dark things that suggest the studio rather than the sun. Then Claude, who deserves the title of the first great landscape painter. It was he who inflamed the ambition of the greatest of them all — Turner, parent of the modem sunlight movement, as Constable was the godfather of the landscape movement of last century in France, called after Barbizon, where Corot and his ever-to-be-admired brethren (I'm talking like the Kaiser) worked and produced masterpieces. It's strange to think that the finest living landscape painter, Harpignies, painted with Corot, and is painting now, past his eightieth year, as well as ever. Heigh-ho ! " The landscape painter examined his attempt at roses and foxgloves in sunlight, and tossed it upon the grass, but face upwards. He was a careful man, with an eye to the future even in his moods. " Monet is the only man who could have suggested that vibrating light," he muttered. "I'll try something easier, and call it Now Came Still Evening On.^ SUNSHINE IN THE GUILDHALL rjlHE June sun blazed down upon Cheapside. Citizens, in summer attire, jostled each other on the sidewalks, some venturing now and then to cross the road, where the mass of traffic rolled on at foot pace in the sun- shine, the back of one vehicle brushed bv the bewildered 164 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON head of the horse that followed. The roofs of the omni- buses, petrol and equine, were weighed down by women in bright dresses and showy hats, and through the hurly bin:ly automobiles glided, leaving a trail of oil that consorted evilly with the odour of the sun-softened asphalt. It was a day when the thoughts of the dazed pedestrian fly lightly to Landscape Land, where lie meadows and streams, lazy kine, fields of buttercups, the drone of bees and flights of birds black against the heat haze. Suddenly an explosion, a terrific explosion, broke in Cheapside, and smoke puffed up from the ground. Horses reared, a hansom cab collided against a brougham, and a motor-bus struck a lamp-post. Some one cried, " A bomb ! Run ! " But nobody ran. It was merely a burst tyre, and in ten seconds the traffic was again rolling on sullenly in the sunshine. I did not wait to see the mending of the tyre, for the idea of Landscape Land was in my mind. So I turned down King Street and sought the cool shades of the Guild- hall, eager after a certain Flemish picture in the Corpora- tion Art Gallery that I desired to see again. It is by a painter who lived long, long ago, who saw a sunrise and put the dawn-flush into a picture. That was a rare thing for a painter to do nearly five hundred years ago. He, for the sake of whose landscape steeped in the light of the rising sun I forsook the excitement of a burst tyre in Cheapside, was born long before Titian. He was one of the earliest painters, perhaps the earliest, to see the beauty of nature, to trap his vision, and to realise it beautifully in the background of a picture. It is called The Three Maries at the Tomb of Our Lord. SUNSHINE IN THE GUILDHALL 165 It was No. 1 in the Guildhall Loan Collection, and might have pleased Blake, who in one of his dreams desired to build " Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land." Behind the empty tomb, the angel, and the three Maries rises Jerusalem in a green upland, with mountains beyond, and an overarching blue sky flecked with gold. In the lightening heavens is a flight of birds, soaring through the freshness and the silent movements of early morning. Beyond the upland is a huddle of delicate towers and domes — the city of Jerusalem. But it does not matter what the towers represent. What does signify is that their tops catch the early rays of the sun, and that in this picture, Hubert Van Eyck (probably his brother John helped him) looked at nature, saw her beauty, and pointed the way to the many landscape painters who have followed and have felt the breezes and the sunshine. And the whirligig of time brought his quiet message into the City of London, on a June day in the twentieth century. Brought, too, into the Guildhall a landscape background, by Hans Memlinc, who was just beginning to walk when Hubert Van Eyck died. It is called The Virgin Mother with Donors and Saints. I did not look at the figures of the Saints and Donors, although the badge of the white lion of the house of Marche, appended to their collars of roses and suns, is attractive. I looked beyond the figures to the landscape, and thought how Memlinc must have enjoyed painting it. One may detect a note of sadness in Hubert Van Eyck's upland and sky, as if he were not quite assured that he should allow his heart to be light, and his vision gay, when painting an entombment ; but Memlinc's sunny landscape is happy as larks singing above a heath at mid- 166 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON summer. His fancy has run with his theme, and he has introduced swans in a stream, with a miller on the bank, the reflections of trees in the water, and a knight pricking his way thi'ough the shade ; and all this lovely landscape is sun drenched. These two backgrounds are the begin- nings of the expression of man's joy in Nature. Beginnings ? Yes ! Then I turned to Animals Resting, by Alfred Verwee, painted in 1890, four hundred years later, to find that the wheel has come full circle. No longer is a landscape the background of a picture ; it spreads richly over the whole surface. Cinderella no longer shrinks into the background. She sits at a high table. Here are no figures of men and women, but our brothers of the fields — oxen and birds — great, somnolent beasts that stand or recline in vast meadow-lands, with birds above, while the sun, a ball of fire, sinks. Just the rim is above the horizon, and all the sky is flecked with gold, while night clouds sweep up. Hubert Van Eyck and a modem ! The beginnings of landscape art in the Low Countries, and an example of the splendour of its fulfilment, by a modem Belgian, hanging not far apart in the Guildhall of the largest city in the world. I was glad I forsook that burst tyre outside the late Sir John Bennett's shop in Cheapside. AN OLD MASTER IN WHITECHAPEL 167 AN OLD MASTER IN WHITECHAPEL TT was plain that I had come into a strange country, the country called Whitechapel, so far removed from the dweller in the west of London. That the streets are grey, and that the men and women who hurry along the crowded pavements look pale and eager was no surprise ; nor was I envious to see in shop windows placards drawing attention to "Gents' Neglige Shirts for 2s. 4id." and "Footweai- 4s. 9d. a Pair," for things should be cheap in Whitechapel if anywhere ; but I blinked at the sight of wagons laden with hay standing in the middle of the High-street, marked " Whitechapel Haymarket," and if I was not thunderstruck at the fan- tastic architecture of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, look- ing like the facade of an Art Nouveau demi-palace strayed out of Vienna, it was only because I had visited the gallery before. The Whitechapel picture exhibitions are always interest- ing, always crowded. What the men in cloth caps and hob-nail boots, and the women with shawls over their heads make of it all I cannot imagine ; but they take picture-seeing seriously in the East End. There is little talking. The resident of Old Kent Road or distant Poplar passes silently from one picture to another. He looks intently, but he does not smile. Art is as grim and grave to him as life. What are his thoughts, I wonder, when he passes from a French interior by Chai'din to a Chelsea interior by Mr. William Orpen ; from a 168 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON dainty open-air Watteau to a blood and powder open-air Cohnso by Mr. J. P. Beadle ; from a classical landscape by Claude to an ultra-modern landscape by Mr. Wilson Steer, where everything is subservient to the forlorn hope of fixing on canvas the vibrations of light and the vivid bewilderment of reflecting surfaces ? What would, Claude of Lorraine, that wandering Frenchman, a pioneer of land- scape, think of the modern development of the art ? When he died in 1682, ninety-three years before Turner was born, men thought that landscape had reached its zenith — classi- cally beautiful as painted by the gentle Claude, classically sublime as painted by the egregious Salvator Rosa. There were others, the prolific Foussins, Vandevelde, who made sea-fights for Charles 11. , and Cuyp, with his cattle and sunny meadows. But Claude was the champion. I think Whitechapel likes Claude. A stevedore stood beside me before the three Claudes in the lower gallery. He looked, shifted his feet, and said, " They're a bit of alright. Mister." They are, indeed they are. Here are the Claude lovely skies, distances and blue lakes, set in scenes where there is eternal beauty and peace. The properties, without which no landscape in his day was considered complete, are, of course, there ; but the ruins, the bridges, the drawing-master trees, the stupid figures, are not insistent. Claude used to say that he made no charge for his figures. The stevedore particularly admired A Shepherd Playing on His Pipe, containing one figure only, and I gathered from his remarks that he liked these three Claudes none the less because they were unlike Nature. Since Claude's day landscape painting has passed through AN OLD MASTER IN WHITECHAPEL 169 revolutions. Nature has been assailed. Men have pitted themselves against the dazzling gold of the sun, against the pale silver of moonlight, against the luminous grey of noon. We are infinitely cleverer ; we can do a hundred things in landscape that the old men never dreamed of attempting — ^Turner's visions, of Venice and his Rain, Steam, and Speed; Corot's pastorals ; Monet's haystacks; Henry Moore's seas ; Clausen's light on meadow and in barn ; but we have lost something — the large repose and solemn grandeur that ennobles most of Claude's four hundred pictures. Suppose he could revisit the world he loved, take a 'bus from the Bank to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and spend a morning among the modern landscapes on the upper floor. What would he say ? What would he think of them ? Of Mr Steer's brilliant, unbeautiful, and tantalising experiment in paint called Landscape with Trees and Cows ? It would be as incomprehensible to him as electric traction. Moved he would be, I think, by Whistler's Nocturne. Strange it might seem, but also strangely beautiful. When he saw Mr. Hornel's charming figures in Children on the Sands, he would gasp and say, " I engaged other people to put the figures into my landscapes. Here is a man who makes them fresh and beautiful as the flowers on the seashore where they play." The shocks would be so frequent that Claude would pass from canvas to canvas in a state ofchronic amazement that man should have learnt to see so much more in nature than he ever dreamed of — such loveliness as Mr. Julius Olsson's 170 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON MoonHse and Mr. Adrian Stokes's Moonrise over the Dunes. But when he came to Mr. Arnesby Brown's subtle twi- light, called The Harbour, he would feel the ground firm beneath his feet again. For before it stood a painter copying the picture. Claude could join the crowd, watch the copyist at work, peer into his paint-box, study his palette, and forget his astonishment in the absorption of seeing How It Is Done. "OLD CROME WAS ENGLAND" "f^'HEN the Norwich School of Painting is mentioned ' ' the figure of Old Crome at once uprises with a nim- bus of the light, air, and space he loved about his honest head. He rises leisurely, for the landscape painters of 1795 (the middle year of his life) were never in a hurry. John was his baptismal name ; but he will be known for ever as Old Crome — not in the patriarchal sense, for he was but fifty-two when he died. This little man, with the viva- cious eye, was called Old Crome to distinguish him from his son, young John, and time has given an endearing quality to the epithet. If painters wrote causeries they would make Old Crome the pet of painting as Lamb is of letters. He was a boon companion, but jolly, not humorous ; merry in the inn parlour, but firm and stern about work. He is the star actor on the green sward of the Norwich school ; his leading men were Cotman, Stark, and Vincent, and about them range a vast company of painters. "OLD CROME WAS ENGLAND" 171 The art-historian must treat the lesser men and the camp-followers of a school seriously; but the vital elements, the brain and blood, are the protagonists. Ask any man of average knowledge what he knows of the Norwich school, and he will utter with an affectionate smile the name of Old Crome, adding, perhaps, as he recalls certain delightful pictures and Normandy draw- ings — " and Cotman, wasn't he a member ? " John Sell Cotman is poorly represented in the National Gallery; but the Old Crome feast is a rare one. The room where his two large canvases hang is all aglow with the light that shines from his Mousehold Heath, with the iridescent clouds piling up across the sky, and the golden glamour of the firmament above his Wmdmill. I could do without the miller on a pony and, the two donkeys ; but Crome, when he gave us those great skies, could not wholly sever himself from the traditional bugaboo of " human interest." Nature, not man, was his first and last love. In A View at Chapel Fields, Norwich, he is still trying to work in the manner of his adored master, Hobbema, who saw the cool, grey Dutch day oftener than the sunshine ; but it was when Crome forgot even Hobbema, and strolling about the Norfolk levels, looked at sky, heath, and the flights of birds in the distance, absorbed them, and transferred air, space, and light to his rough canvases, that he became, after Turner and Constable, one of the pioneers of English landscape art. The aim and practice of the Norwich school, with Crome at their head, was the return to Nature, that recurrent pilgrimage from academics and traditions that is ever re- vivifying art. Old Crome put Salvator Rosa and Foussin 172 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON behind him, drew on his stout boots, sniffed the air like a war-horse, trudged over Norfolk, and bade his pupils do likewise. He was not, like Turner, a sun worshipper. He did not dare all ; he did not drench his canvases in sunlight as Turner did in those wonderful pictures that have been recovered from the National Gallery cellars. Crome painted the glow of the sun on heath and hill, and the pattern of the warm rays falling through trees on wood- land paths. Sobriety and dignity were his notes. Division of colours, spot, dash and blob tricks were as alien to him as manufactured tubes of paint. He ground his own colours, and knew just what each was worth. A John- Bullish, sound, slow-moving mind, he took the Wilson fever ; but he never caught the Turner infection. He was a man of the soil — that soil of East Anglia that produced Constable and Gainsborough. When we think of the great landscape painters who sprang from the " Folk Lands of Norfolk and Suffolk," and drew their in- spiration from the large skies and distances, we are again reminded how local a thing painting is,' and always has been. Landscape art has boundaries; it is bounded by the limits of the district a painter feels, and feeling, inter- prets. When Crome had swung into his stride the work of other painters, living or dead, was nothing to him. The Norwich men would never have emerged from obscurity had they worked after the formula of Sir George Beau- mont, who surrounded himself with Claudes, Poussins, and Wilsons, and painted his own picture with a picture by one of those masters on an easel by his side. Old Crome is great because he was a stay-at-home ; because he studied Nature, not Art ; because, like Millet, he was strong. "OLD CROME WAS ENGLAND" 173 large and elemental, and because he had mastered his craft. He painted his MousehoM Heath for his own pleasure, " for air and space," and it was sold after his death for one guinea. The canvas was then in two pieces, and the purchaser used one of the halves as a screen. The join may still be seen. But Old Crome had a considerable measure of esteem during his lifetime. His steady climb to fame after his death was augmented by the splendid panegyric of a fellow East Anglian, George Borrow. Many owe their first introduction to Old Crome to the famous passage in " Lavengro." Borrow's brother, having determined to become a painter, proposed to visit Rome and study " the grand miracle " of art — Raphael's Transfigwration. Then the eyes of the author of " Lavengro " blazed, and he rolled out this counsel to his affrighted kinsman : " Better stay at home, brother, at least for a season, and toil and strive 'midst groanings and despondency till thou hast attained excellence even as he has done — the little dark man with the brown coat and the top-boots, whose name will one day be considered the chief ornament of the old town, and whose works will at no distant period rank among the proudest pictures of England — and England against the world ! — thy master, my brother, thy at present all too little considered master — Crome." Old Crome was England. Turner was a cosmopolitan, a restless soaring spirit content with nothing but the beauty of the universe ; but Old Crome desired only the homelands, lojQg distances, airy and sunlighted, windy Jieaths rolling 174 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON meadows, fat uplands, brooks and woods — ^England. Borrow diagnosed him exactly. The English traits were his ; the love of walking ; hours of solid work, and relaxa- tion at night with boon companions in an inn parlour. He taught drawing for a living, and he painted pictures and made etchings because there was nothing he liked better. Akin to the Dutch landscape painters, and the Barbizon men, he would have loathed the brilliant per- formances of decadent French draughtsmen of our day. Before a Beardsley drawing words would have failed him, and he would have slept peacefully through a Bernard Shaw play. The end of this fine old English gentleman, whose father was a travelling weaver and kept a small public-house, who began life as a doctor's boy and was then apprenticed to a house-painter, was as fine as any in history. Every- one knows his parting words to his son — " John, my boy, paint ; but paint for fame ; and if yom- subject is only a pig-sty — dignify it ! " Later, when almost unconscious, he made movements with his hands as if painting, and said — " There — there — there's a touch — ^that will do — ^now another — that's it. Beautiful ! " His last recorded words were : " Oh, Hobbema ! My dear Hobbema ! How I have loved you ! " Then he died. A GREAT SEA PAINTER TTENRY MOORE died fourteen years ago, and when he -^^ died there died the greatest painter of the sea that our Island race, or any other race, has produced. I do not A GREAT SEA PAINTER 175 write in haste. I have not forgotten Turner, who used the sea in his tremendous way as a setting for his splendid dreams ; but Henry Moore painted the sea for its own sake. He honoured Poseidon as the Athenians honoured Athena. When he had passed through his landscape period, the sea was his sole obsession. He gave himself up to it;ihe studied, without ceasing, the rhythm of the waves, the influences of wind and tide, the vast waters, their salty freshness and their unresting movement. His predecessors, following a popular view, still current, that no sea piece is complete without a snatch of " human interest," gave to Poseidon their second thoughts. To Moore he was all in all. A faint, white sail on the horizon or the trail of a steamer's smoke in the distance was sufficient human interest for him. He allows himself two dim vessels in that beautiful work called Summer Breeze in the Channel, now in the Diploma Gallery ; he introduced two brown-sailed fishing boats, and tower- ing cliffs, in his Cats-paws off" the Land, in the Tate Gallery, but he painted those boats because they were inevitable ; they passed before his eyes : he saw them seeking the catspaws of wind that day when he was cruising off the Cornish coast. He inti-oduced no silly shipwreck into his magnificent Winter Gale in the Channel. Moore painted the sea so superbly because he gave to it a life-long study. He brought to that study science and temperament and a love of the ocean keen as Edison's passion for mechanics ; he learnt how to draw and tp sug- gest waves, the roll of breakers, the lash of foam, and the strange sluggish under-movement of the ocean itself, with 176 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the accuracy and precision that a man acquires from drawing the human figure ; he synthesised that know- ledge, and his temperament gave to the representation — life. He worked quickly; but he never left a picture until he knew that he could add nothing to its quality, texture, reflected light, or shadow. He thought things out. , What wisdom there is in the following fragment of a lecture which he never delivered : " Drawing is the beginning of everything. It is almost like the discovery of a new sense, and from the time we begin to draw objects we begin to discover their beauties ; for we never di'aw without comparing, and the comparing of one thing with another is the beginning of the foundation of taste or judgment." His art life must have been a singularly happy one, for it was spent in doing the thing he loved best — with suc- cess. Disappointments, of course, he had. One was when the hanging committee placed his Rough Weather in the Mediterrcmean above a doorway. Just before sending-in day an incident happened in connection with this picture that illustrates Leighton's artistic discernment as well as Moore's truthfulness of vision. When Leighton, who was not aware that Moore had made a trip to Egypt, saw this pictinre in the artist's studio, he said, " Why, you've been to the Mediterranean." On being asked how he knew, he at once answered, " By the curious milky blue of the water ; one can never mistake it." A happy moment in Moore's life was when his Clearness After Rain and Newhaven Packet gained for him the Grand A GREAT SEA PAINTER 177 Prix and the Legion of Honour at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, a distinction that had been preceded by the deh'ght of the Fi-ench critics in " la note bleu de Moore " ; another was when he received a four- page com- munication from Meissonier inviting him to consider him- self Societaire of the Societe des Artistes Franfais. His fellow artists recognised Henry Moore's genius, and all who saw the collection of his work at the Old Masters' Exhibi- tion after his death realised that a great painter of the sea had passed away. Another happy moment in his life was, I think, that day in the year 1873, when he stepped aboard the yacht Dawn, and first began to paint the ocean on the ocean. It is curious to trace the fascination that the sea had for him — the lure and the call of it to his temperament. Once it conquered him, and for a time fear took the place of love. He found, to his dismay, after being afloat for some weeks,, that, when he landed, the concentration in painting moving water from a moving vessel made objects on land appear to be in movement also. He could not focus. A short rest made trees, farms, and cornfields stable again. This strange call of the sea, as of soul to soul, is illus- trated by a passage in his own writing. " I well remember one wretched day — a gale blowing, the rain a deluge, and I far from the sea. I paced up and down all day like a caged beast, and at last took Bradshaw, and noting the nearest point at which the line reached the sea, fixed upon Seascale, and started about five on a dark November night." 178 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON There is a poem in that line : " And I far from the sea." Those who had not tried to paint the sea may realise by the following extract from his diary how Henry Moore learnt to paint it : " I noticed that the breaking foam coming between me and the west was darker than the trough of the waves, which reflected the green and gold of the sky ; also that the spray flying up from a rock was pui-ple and gold, one part being dark off the sky behind, with flecks and patches of gold . . . reflected or transmitted light when it came off the sea." Henry Moore died at the age of sixty-four. The street accident that disabled him in 1891 was probably the begin- ning of the end. His fine Diploma picture was painted the year before his death, and the final work of his hands was upon the canvas of a student. A girl who was painting upon the beach at Broadstairs was in trouble with her sky. Moore first gave her advice, then took the brushes and showed how it should be done. That was his last piece of work. Like Velasquez, Moore painted what his eyes saw after selection. He did not invent. He just painted the sea, the sky, light and the wind, and the harmony of their inter- action upon each other. The grand manner was as anti- pathetic to him as it is to Monet. He was a pioneer who trod again the old road of a return to nature and sim- plicity : a pioneer because he had the insight to know that the sea should be the essence of a pictiure, not an addition. JULY JULY IMPRESSIONS OF TRAVEL THE FOG T AWOKE suddenly. It was full daylight. My watch indicated four in the morning. We should be Hear- ing the Dutch coast. But why had the boat stopped ? Why had the devastating scrunch of the screw ceased ? I clambered from my berth and withdrew the curtain from the porthole. Sea and sky had gone. We were enveloped in a dense fog. Then the boat moved forward at quarter speed, and at intervals the syren wailed to a vanished world. The wail of the syren roused the passengers. A fog at sea unstrings the nerves of the timid and discountenances the brave. I noticed that the landing platform had been extended, and that two life-lines were coiled upon it. On the bridge were five men. The captain stood in the centre with two of his subordinates on either side. They leaned over the rail peering into the wall of fog. I went forward. Three of the crew were bent double over the bows seeking the black mass that might be moving towards us. I could almost fancy I heard the crash, the shouts, and the rush of feet. The air was dank. I went below. A dozen passengers were gathered around the breakfast table, sipping tea and toying with toast. When the syren wailed, my neighbour, 182 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON a girl, who was about to eat a mouthful, replaced the crust upon the table and folded her hands. A woman cried silently. A Ifirge, flabby man took the seat adjoin- ing mine, rested his elbow upon the table, and covered his eyes. I thought he was praying ; but when the steward advanced and stood inquiringly before him he raised his head for a moment and said, " Ham and eggs." Those homely words relieved our depression. Also the vessel began to move faster. Soon the syren ceased, and when the captain slouched into the cabin and called for a cup of hot coffee, we — well, I think some of us could have danced a jig. I went on deck. There was Holland : the sun was scattering the fog ; we passed the place where the Berlin was wrecked. Pooh ! Who thinks of fear on the morning after, with all the adventures of a new day waiting ? THE LAUNCH At Amsterdam I left the train, and boarded a boat bound for the Helder, the northernmost point of North Holland, where the low-lying islands curve round to the horizon, looking as if they had been appointed ocean out- posts to Friesland. The voyage might take a day, but what of that ? There is only one way to travel in Holland — by water. The boat glides through the brimming canal, passes the clean towns and the many windmills. Life persists; passengers and cargoes come and go, but you are no longer at war with the world or in trouble with it. You are a spectator, idling through a summer day, wrapped in aloofness, content merely to be moving IMPRESSIONS OF TRAVEL 183 through the moist and luminous air. When the environs of Amsterdam are left behind, and the waterside houses give place to the i-eeds that bend as the backwash over- takes them, and the factories merge into vast, bright meadows, the spirit of this land wrested from the sea hypnotises the traveller. I forgot to count the windmills, was indiiFerent to the locality of the hut where Peter the Great studied shipbuilding, listened without emotion to the story of Alkmaar's triumphs, and was content with pretending to choose a habitation from among the pic- turesque houses whose gardens are washed by the waters of this great North Canal. We passed through Alkmaar. Beyond, on one side are Dutch farmhouses, pyramidical, four-square, stretching endlessly along the waterway; on the other side the meadows, and far away, the sweeping line of the dunes. They rise above the North Sea, and on their sandy sides and heights men are for ever on the watch against the en- croachments of the ocean; they plant the shrub called helm, that bijids the sand together, making a bulwark against the rage of the waves. " God made thfe sea, man made the land," says the Dutchman. These flower- fruitful and pastoral meadows that outstretched as we glided northward were once submerged in water. Through these smiling pastures the Rhine, overflowing into a broad estuary, felt its way sluggishly toward the Helder ; but long ago the Dutchmen forced the river to seek the ocean by Katwijk, far south. All North Holland is now reclaimed, and some day, I am told, the waters of the Zuider Zee will be driven back to the ocean. The fight against the sea never ceases. As we moved 184 THE DIARY OP A LOOKER-ON northward the three great dykes loomed out. The outer- most — a mighty fortification against nature — is called the Walcer, the one farthest inland is named the Sleeper, and between the two is the Dreamer. I gazed out at these high bulwarks, patrolled and watched by day and by night, and mused on the story of Little Peter, and the legend that at Amsterdam there is one master key, a turn of which, in times of peril from foreign invasion, will drown the land again. And as I mused there swept past a barge. The great sail was hoisted. The family — a mite of the fifty thousand canal population who live out their lives on these floating houses — were gathered round the tiller, where the father smoked and steered. A barge — the symbol of this sea-conquering people. Below the Helder I landed. Beyond is the fort with the fringe of islands outposting Friesland, the fishing fleet and the gunboats, and the channel between the mainland and Texel apening to the world. As I crossed the bridge I saw the sight of sights. There was no fuss, no shouting, no spilling of wine at that launch. The barge moved from her cradle, shot downwards, took the water in a rush, pretended to capsize, and all at once acquiesced. She had found her master. THE KID That barge meeting the sea so gleefully, spuming it, frolicking, then nestling upon the bosom of her life-long companion, is the symbol of the waterways of Holland. But the meadows that stretch away to the horizon have for me quite a different symbol — a kid, with brown eyes IMPRESSIONS OF TRAVEL 185 and a brown and white coat, tethered to a stake by a ten-foot rope, a foolish friendly little goat, so young, so curious, so interested in the world that he forgets to be harassed by his chain. He alone of all the creatures of the sunlighted meadowiS has personality. He alone seems to welcome intercourse with men. The droves of black kine roaming between the dykes, the sheep and horses, the blue-bloused milkmen, the millers who stand for a moment in the doorways of their mills, the panting dogs drawing the little carts — these are all engrossed in their avocations, but the little goat with the brown eyes has leisure to fraternise with man. His home is on a grass plot in front of a Dutch farm- house bordering upon the narrow paved roeid that winds the landward side of the dunes — those desolate dunes — peopled with wild-flowers. How well I know the way to his home. I approach. He tugs at his rope, his foolish little legs beat the air, he entices me to draw near. Your manner is cordial, my little friend, but you do not deceive me ! Once, was it yesterday or a year ago, I carried a bunch of honeysuckle in my button-hole. When, inveigled by your coaxing ways, I knelt to pat your brown head, you gobbled up the honeysuckle, leaves and all, until not a bit of my button-hole was left. So it has been ever since. I approach you with a bouquet in my button-hole. I leave you munching, wistful and still hungry. Would that a diet of honeysuckle could keep you always a pretty, playful kid. But you will grow into an ugly goat. Then I shall know you no more. But when I climb the highest of the dunes and survey 186 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the level country with its brilliant splashes of flower meadows, its windmills, and roaming black cattle, my eyes will seek the grass plot in front of a certain farm- house where, in your childhood, you gobbled honeysuckle, and pretended that you were the Friend of Man. RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES HAPPINESS "DEING Saturday morning, throughout Holland the "^ clean fronts of the Dutch houses were undergoing their weekly washing. I lingered in the shade of the trees that border the road, and watched the Serving Maid, whose father is a Dutch barge-builder, scouring the facade of the inn with broom, pail, and hose. As she swirled the water she sang. She always sang through her work, and the words were English ; for although this inn was in re- moter Holland, and " KofEjhuis-Biljaxt " was painted over the door, it was frequented by the English colony, and the Serving Maid was familiar with England and America. She was one of those rare creatures for whom the present hour suffices ; she caught joy from the avocation of the moment; she was always cheerful, ever eager to be of service, meeting each new day with serenity and clear aims, and smiling and singing through the routine of her tasks. Her songs were all drawn from one source. A kindly American visitor had affixed a calendar to the white wall of the sanded guest-room, a Flower calendar, with a verse or thought about flowers, flocks, or pastoral toil accom- panying the days of the year — a pretty notion, for RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES 187 Holland is the land of flowers and pastures. Yesterday's quotation was from Herbert : " Farewell, dear flowers ; sweetly your time ye spent. Fit while ye lived for smell or ornament. And after death for cu/res. I follow straight, without complaints or grief. Since if my scent be good, I care not if It be as short as yours."" To-day's quotation is from Elizabeth Barrett Browning : " / will have hopes that cannot fade. For flowers the valley yields ; I will have humble thoughts instead Of silent, dewy fields ; My spirit and my God shall be My seaward hill, my boundless seaJ" As the maid sang, her father, the barge-builder, passed down the road carrying a plank. He paused and smiled. Only four words passed between them; he but said in Dutch " To-night at eight," yet it seemed as if an intimate and comforting communication had been signalled from father to daughter. He passed on thoughtful and happy, anticipating the Spiritualist meeting to be held that night at eight in a cottage by the dunes — just a few gathered together and content, because, understanding, they wait hopefuUy, knowing that all is well. Why not ? Did not V irgil say (there it is under January 1 in the Calendar) " They find it possible because they think it possible. ... If hard the toil this season, the next it will be light." 188 THE DIARY OP A LOOKER-ON The Serving Maid, having re-cleaned the clean front of the inn, went indoors to other blithe tasks, and I, still lingering in the shade of the trees, recalled two other spectacles of religious experiences that, a few days before, I had witnessed with wonderment. One was at Chartres, the other at the church of Notre Dame du Sablon in Brussels. PILGRIMS Grey Chartres Cathedral, so wise, so old, watched from her hill the momentary life of modern Chartres, where the usual fair was blaring around the usual steam roundabout. I walked through the din, sought the west door, and foimd it locked, which was strange ; but the north porch entrance was unban'ed. It opened to the gloom of the vast interior, palely illuminated by the splendour of the purple and blue windows. I saw the columns towering into obscurity, saw a few figures tiptoe down the flags, and heard a low mur- mur as of a great multitude gathered together, but where ? Around the doorway a few shapes flitted ; but all else was incoherent. I walked towards the nave, and was suddenly aware that thousands were wedged between the chancel steps and the closed west door. Suddenly the throng parted, and down the centre of the aisle a bm-nished cross swung high in the gloom, carried by a priest, and on either side of him walked two other priests bearing lighted candles. They moved slowly towards the crypt steps, and, as they passed, the pilgrims pressed forward to join the procession with the burnished cross high above. So they swayed singing downward to the crypt. Each pilgrim carried a candle, and each man, woman, and child shouted, as they RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES 189 pressed onward, " Le Poeme de Notre Dame de Chartres." It has fifty-four verses. Hours seemed to pass while that procession paced through the interminable length of the crypt, and up again into the dim emptying cathedral. In the middle of the nave, and dividing the mass of pilgrims as they crept through the crypt, which was fogged with the smoke of thousands of candles, stood priests, a few yards separating each. They never ceased to sing, and when the pilgrims faltered through sheer exhaustion of the vocal chords, the priests sang louder. Waves of emotion convulsed the multitude. The m)rriad little flames of the candles dazzled ; the din deafened. I ascended to the cathedral, blinking, breathless, bewildered, but sure that here at Chartres Prance has not lost her faith. The pilgrims, who had given a working day to Notre Dame de Chartrps, were streaming through the open doors and setting forth on their long journeys homeward. That hubbub of religious fervour returned, became in- sistent, as I lounged in the shade of the trees in quiet Holland; then the cacophonies of Chartres ceased and silence fell. CONSOLATION I saw a Solitary. It was in Notre Dame du Sablon in Brussels, at twilight after a wet day. The church was empty and very still. I moved towards a side chapel, where one candle gleamed before a Pieta. Carved in front of the suffering figures were these words, " O vous tous qui passez considirez et voyez s'il est une douleur comparable g. mq, doulew.'" That pitiful communication seemed to 190 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON become articulate in the silence and the mystery of the hour. I looked deeper into the dai'kness. I withdrew. In the shadow knelt a woman in weeds, sobbing. ^: * * * * As I lingered one evening in the shade of the trees in Holland, watching a stork meditating a downward swoop from his nest, the barge-builder and his daughter came down the road hand in hand. I saw contentment in their eyes, and spiritual Imninosity in their faces, as if the flesh was rarefied by some interior illuminant. The barge, builder was silent. The Serving Maid, gazing out to the line of sea-dunes fading against the sky, was singing " M^y spirit and my God shall be My seaward hill, my boundless sea."" I watched them enter the door of the farm-house where the weekly meeting of Spiritualists is held. Each of these, how strange it is! — ^the multitude at Chartres, the widow at Brussels, the Dutch barge-builder and his daughter — ^have answered in their own way the questions propounded by Shakespeare through the mouth of Sir Toby Belch : " Wherefore are these things hid .'' Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before them ? " They have lifted the curtain and they have found the gifts. THE CREATURE IN THE COTTAGE "ITTHEN in a single season two pictures of the Landscape ' ' Land were medalled at Paris, and another was bought from the line at Munich, quite a number of lesser men THE CREATURE IN THE COTTAGE 191 hurried to the locality. This exceedingly fair country, they said, is much in favour with the juries of painting. We, too, will go thither and win medals like John Bull and his cousin. So it came to pass that many strange dialects were heard at evening-time in the lone hotel that stares out at the North Sea, and the Dutch fisher children spent many curious happy hours watching ill-dressed little foreign gentlemen striving with their art on the beach or in the hot dunes. They niggled in the most approved fashion ; and nightfall sent them home to the windy hotel, with their pictures changed, but seldom advanced. When, in the course of many seasons, recognition fell not to their share, they decided that the Landscape Land no longer bewitched the juries. Then, with heavy hearts, they returned to their high stools in Continental galleries and set to recopying the Old Masters. All but one. He, a Swede of hysterical temperament — pasty, slack, cursed with extraordinary perseverance — was constitutionally incapable of perceiving his limitations. He had failed at painting the sea, he had failed at flowers ; cows in orchards had evaded him ; the world looked upon his idea of the sun falling upon distant haycocks and saw that it was black. On the top of all these failures he still, like Braddock, promised himselfto do better the next time. Day and night he dreamed of fame, and the very morn- ing after his latest failure he awoke with a gay determina- tion to win a medal with a picture of a windmill stand- ing sentinel over a field of flowers. He went forth accompanied by a companionable mongrel dog that loved him, till he came to a place where stood a windmill by the side of a brimming ditch. A tanned, wrinkled-faced Dutch 192 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON woman, with beady eyes, and a crochet cap tied ovei* her thin hair, was seated by the ditch reading in a book. Of her the Swede, with a low bow, begged permission to fix his easel in the garden, that he might make a picture of the flowers and the sentinel windmill. The woman laid the book on her black apron, stared, nodded, and was about to resume reading when the mongrel that had been skulk- ing at the Swede's heels lifted its head and whined. When the beast whined the woman shivered like a person with ague. " Take it out of my sight ! " she cried, almost choking with the violence of her utterance. As the words left her lips an echoing whine came from the cottage ; which surprised • the Swede, as dog owners are not usually timid of other people's beasts. He tied the animal to a tree that bent over the road outside, arranged his easel, and began to draw in the mill on a canvas about the size of a chess-board. All around him were flowers ; but until the mill was carefully drawn he heeded them no more than he was heeded by the wrinkled woman who had shuffled down to the water-side, there to fill, empty, and refill a child's tin mug, old and battered. She sighed and shook her head as the drops splashed into the ditch. When the outline of the mill was indicated, the Swede retired a few feet; to find himself ill-pleased with the work. The position of the wings was inefifective ; so he glanced towards the old woman, prepared to ofier her a gulden for the trouble of turning them to a more pictorial angle. She was no longer sitting on the stool, and as he had not the ingenuity to distinguish the old body bent over the water, he picked his way carefully through the flowers to the cottage door, pushed it open^ THE CREATURE IN THE COTTAGE 193 and stepped inside with the request framed on his lips. The man's cry awoke the mongrel, who had fallen asleep with his nose on the paved road. He leaped into the garden and licked his master's hand, the only part of the Swede's body visible, a poor trembling hand clutching the door open. At the touch of the dog's tongue he screamed again, and tottered across the threshold into the sunlight, where for some seconds he leaned against the mill in the attitude of an ill man. Recovering, he crushed across the flowers, gathered easel and canvas to his arms, and made off over the land followed by the amazed mongrel. As the tails of his flying coat whisked past the gate, a brown wrinkled face raised itself from the water, and a squat figure shufiled round to the cottage door. She closed it gently behind her, and from the room there came cooings of comfort, moans, and other sad sounds as of a dumb child trying to speak. The sun had sunk behind the dunes before she reappeared. It was strange that the tender light of early evening should daze her ; but, by comparison, the glow was dazzling as the noonday sun, for within that room she moved and did the work of nursing — so far as was possible — with closed eyes. There was a time, years ago when Hope encouraged her now and again to look at the thing lying there ; but that trial had long become too painful. She returned to the stool by the water-side, her thin lips muttering a sentence from her favourite author, " Why is light still given to me whose wayi is hid, and whom God hath hedged in ? " Then, with a sudden irritability, she kicked the book away, and kneeling again, filled the tin mug, gazing into the clear water, her mind at that moment 194. THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON flashing back into the past — back through thirty and more years. * * * * * The season was the same ; the landscape was unchanged, save that the branches rustling above the flowers were thinner and the trunks slimmer. Then, as now, somebody sat by the water-side sewing — a girl, waistless as Dutch peasant maidens should be; but with clear eyes and a complexion such as only Dutch maidens have. The face was seldom without a smile ; it was never without a smile when the eyes rested on a child playing in the tall grass just beyond the ditch. Nearer the cottage the father, in a blue blouse, wide blue trousers, and sabots, was swirling water over the Winkers, polishing them with a broom, and singing as he worked. Each time he clattered to the ditch to fill the pail he kissed his wife on the neck or on the hair. With her, merely to live was to be perfectly happy ; when the child crossed the bridge, lisping that he was thirsty, it was added pleasure to the woman to enter the dairy and dip a cup into one of the large pails of milk. Carrying it dripping from the dim cool room, she suddenly started, dropped the cup, frightened by a prolonged, horrible noise — ^the mingled cries of a man and a child in pain. Dragging the curtain from the window, she saw her husband falling backwards, with a dog leaping at his throat, and the child trying to hide its small blanched face in the rough planks of the windmill. Then the report of a gun rang out, and a bullet pinged through the mad dog's brain. It fell to the ground, and the boer who had fired rushed to the spot, and swung down the butt of his gun on the beast's disfigured head. The bullet had already done the THE CREATURE IN THE COTTAGE 195 work ; but not before the teeth had met deep in the man^s cheek. He died a month later. The child was unharmed ; but the horror of the sight cut into its awakening sensi- bilities, deadening them for ever. Unhappily its physical development was not retarded, but diverted from the normal to the monstrous. Carried to a bed, there it had lain and grown for thirty-three years, an imsightly creature, so pitiable an object that she who had borne it shut its presence from her eyes. 4e He 4: 3|: :H Laughter and a snatch of song roused the old woman's day-long reverie. She slowly emptied the mug, and rais- ing her head blinked at the landscape. Along the cut grass neighbours were passing, laughing, singing, as they tripped to the black kine waiting to be milked in the far comer of the field. The eyes of the wife were alight with mirth at some small jest of her husband's ; the elder son hdd his father's hand, the elder girl her mother's, while the younger children plucked the flowers, and made excursions in search of " tremble grass." They passed : it was the hour of infinite peace ; the old woman was slone with her bitter thoughts. Only when a particularly hearty peal of laughter , broke back to her through the hushed air, she rose angrily to her feet, resentful of such happi- ness. But the mood passed quickly as it came. She collected her little properties, shaking her old head towards the room where the thing lay, and muttering mechanically as if persistent iteration of the words had made them meaningless — " Why, God, why .'' " 196 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON ENTERING LONDON TT was a July niglit in a garden on the northern border of Berkshire, and the flowers were losing their colour in the gathering darkness. But the motor-car looming behind the outer fence reminded me that London called. There was some delay. The chaufiFeur, an alert, peakish youth of eighteen, was in trouble with the great acetylene lamp ; while he wrestled with it, to escape from the noxious odour of the gas, I strolled into the house and turned the leaves of books. A mistress who loved flowers, and tended them so delicately, would be trained to right reading. Yes ! The volumes included " Critical Studies and Fragments," by the late Arthur Strong ; " Giovanni BeRini," by Roger Fry ; « The Wind Among the Reeds," by W. B. Yeats ; and the " Life and Letters of the late Bishop of London," by Mrs. Creighton. I opened the latter at random, aiid taking the book to the lamp, read this sentence : " To me the one supreme object of life is, and always has been, to draw near to God." A tap upon the window arrested me ; I saw the eager, beckoning face of the chauffeur, his slim figure dark against the white blaze of the lamp, making the lane, that twisted through the fragrant coimtry to the distant London road, brighter than day. The automobile groaned, started, found her pace and leapt forward, tearing through the spreading dazzle of light as if she were mad to overtake it. Lovers, strolling through the lanes, suddenly found, for one awful instant, their intimacies blazoned to alien eyes. In the fields ENTERING LONDON 197 animals stampeded ; the air rushed by, and all the while there drummed in my head that recorded desire of Mandell Creighton's. How strange, how revolutionary, I thought, if all the world believed it, and followed the gleam. How simple life would become. ' I glanced sideways at the chauffeur, the new type of man that the automobile has evolved — thin, keen, grimy, fear- less ! How many generations, how many aeons would be needed to persuade him that the supreme object of life is not " pace," but to draw near to God ? I did not pursue the question. A night ride in a motor- car is not the occasion. The sudden cocking of the chauffeur's head caused me to turn and glance behind. There was nothing to be seen but a large, bright lamp rushing towards us, nothing to be heard but the whirr of a motor-car advancing at a terrific pace. It flashed past, showing a man crouched in a long slate-coloured car, every faculty of his being concentrated in his starting, staring eyes. " That's a racer," said the chauffeur in an awed whisper. " He'll get stopped, you see." So it fell out. The church clock was striking half-past ten as we entered the outskirts of a minor Thames village and swept down the empty street. In the narrowest part a small crowd had gathered around the driver of the racing car, who was tendering his name and address to a police- man. " Told you so ! " said the chauffeur, as he put on the brake. "Continue the journey," said I. Quarter of an hour later the racer whizzed past us again. " He'll get caught a second time," said the chauffeur. Probably the law-breaker escaped, as, on the decline of a 198 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON long, easy hill, a man sprang out of the darkness into the road and waved his handkerchief. The chauffeur eased down, and the unknown shouted, " Police trap quarter of a mile ahead ! " " There's something wrong here," said I, but the chauffeur only grinned. Sure enough, quarter of a mile ahead lurked a police trap in the persons of two top-booted constables hiding with bicycles behind a hay- stack. The youthful chauffeur, who was driving at the rate of about two miles an hour as we passed the haystack, saluted, and said to the rural policemen with a pleasant inflection in his voice, " Looks as if there'll be a nice drop of rain afore morning ! " There were few people about when we turned into the London main road ; but for an interminable way our route was impeded by the huge, brilliantly-lighted electric trams, that glided past to and fro in rapid procession, linking the outlying suburbs with the environs of London. Petrol and electricity, the new forces, newly harnessed, and this new man, the alert, peakish chauffeur, eighteen years of age, blinking at the rival lights ! A phase of London ! I descended when we reached Westminster Abbey. And in the shadow of that fane, the motor-car dismissed, I recalled those haunting words, " To me the one supreme object of life is, and always has been, to draw near to God." And I wondered as I walked home. INGRES, REMBRANDT AND A MODERN 199 INGRES, REMBRANDT AND A MODERN rriHE chances of publishing brought to my door, in the -^ same moment, two illustrated books, each nearly a foot and a half high and a foot wide, each profusely illus- trated, each containing a critical essay by a distinguished Frenchman. The subject of one book is Ingres, the cold and formal French artist, who has been dead thirty-nine years ; the subject of the other is Mr. Frank Brangwyn, the youngest Associate of the Royal Academy, whose art has the impetuosity of a Vanguard motor-omnibus running through the orange groves of Seville. Could there be a greater contrast in pictorial art than Ingres and Brangwyn? Civilisation and barbarism, a Cranford tea-party and a bull-fight, the cold elegance of classical formalism and the riot of oriental romanticism. Yet each may be lauded, for each expresses a personality with sincerity. Ingres was a great draughtsman, not such a draughts- man as Degas, whose nervous, living line startles us into admiration, but of the school of the accomplished Raphael. The eye of Ingres just held as much colour as a mariner sees on a grey day in the English Channel. Brangwyn is a colourist, loving colour like Delacroix, seeing it in opulent masses. He is a colourist, even in black-and-white. I feel the colour in his etching of Assisi, and in the light sky hovering above the towering etching of his Building of the New South Kensington Museum, 200 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Ingres seems to have won his way to his style by a laborious study of good models. His working hours, I feel, were spent in galleries and in his studio. Life was eddy- ing and surging around him, crying for his attention, but he shrank from it, preferring to study the gods of other days, the works of painters whom tradition has authorised. Brangwyn is bustling about in the thick of life, seeing with his own eyes, glorying in the vision, singing and laugh- ing as he splashes colour, not caring a button, so long as he is free to wander, to observe and to work, whether the painters who preceded Raphael were better or worse than those who followed him, and never, I am sure, asking him- self whether he is a Classicist or a Romanticist. Every student knows that in Paris, in the year 1824, Ingres was the recognised leader of the Classicists against the Romanticists. Every tourist to the Louvre pauses before his nude, blonde maiden called La Sowrce, kindling or chilling according to his temperament. The drawing of La Source is faultless. The maiden has every grace and quality except life, and I have never desired, after my first examination, to look at her again. Nor in my many visits to the Louvre have I ever paused a second time before Ingres' UOdalisqiie Couchie, another smooth, perfect, and lifeless nude ; nor before his Apotheosis of Homer. Having discovered the iden- tities of Hesiod, ^Eschylus, Virgil, Plato, and the rest, this formal design, of which Raphael would have approved, wholly ceased to interest me. It was not through his pic- tures that I became 'a reverent admirer of Ingres. One afternoon I saw on the wall of a studio in London an exquisite drawing of a woman seated upon a sofa. The INGRES, REMBRANDT AND A MODERN 201 bright face, the lovely hands, the subtle lines indicating her sleeves and gown, were a joy to the eye. It was Ingres' portrait o{ Madame Destouche. Later I became the possessor of a volume containing a selection of Ingres' drawings of men and women. They are a delight. Looking at them, I realise the sincerity of Ingres' remark — " The lines are often broken in the human face to be woven together again and intertwined, like the osiers out of which a basket is made." It is on record that Ingres was discontented with his portrait drawings that we find so alluring. It was his ambition to paint subject pictures, in the grand classical manner, like his idiotic Virgil Reading the JEneid, in the Brussels Gallery, which is dead as Fuseli's Satan Calling his Legions. Ingres' portrait of Monsieur Berlin, which he esteemed so lightly, is as alive to-day as in the hour it was painted. His drawings are cherished by the twentieth century. For forty years Ingres was discredited in France, except by the few who perceived his gift behind his mannerism. The waves of Impressionism and Realism swept over the painter of VOdalisque Couchie, and the cry went up that his art was dead. He was called "a Chinaman lost in Athens, a very French bourgeois with a passion for the ancient Greeks." He was the butt of gibing] tongues. Theophile Silvestre proclaimed that he never put a single idea into his works, nor a soul into his portraits. In 1855 Delacroix made this wise criticism : " Here we have the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence." That sentence seems to me to be true. Nature never called him to be a painter of pictures. The gift of coloiu" was wholly denied to him. His art was delicate and feminine. He 202 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON suffered from over-civilisation. He led a school, but he was never a force. Mr. Brangwyn is a force. The passion for opulent colour, and joy in the bustle of life, surges from his personality, as the love of lovely and delicate lines meandered from the personality of Ingres. Mr. Brangwyn sees life broadly and vigorously in masses and contrasts. He is a painter, never a story-teller, an observer, objective and eager, revelling in such a subject as an Eastern orange market, with its spaces splashed with colour, and the figures mere incidents of the decorative scheme. Such a bloodless abstraction as Virgil Reading the ^neid is as remote from him as his full-blooded Cidet Press would have been to Ingres. No modern artist, I think, has found himself so com- pletely, in so short a time, as Mr. Brangwyn. Time was when he was a painter of grey subjects, such as A Sailor's Funeral ; but restlessness, and the longing to glut his eyes with the wonder and magnificence of the world, seized him, and, being impetuous, off he started to circumnavigate the globe. We hear of him, in 1887 at Tunis, at Smyrna, at Trebizond, at Constantinople. The key of the East was his ; he threw wide the door, and found the immemorial East waiting. I never read that fine tale by Mr. Conrad, called " Youth," perhaps his finest story, without thinking of the first flash of the East in young Brangwyn's eyes. In their youth writer and painter both sought the East, "so old, so mysterious, resplendent and sombre, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise." It captivated, entranced them, and they expressed it so vividly, that the East, as seen by them in words and paint, is part of our lives. ***** INGRES, REMBRANDT AND A MODERN 203 I close my eyes and see again the Rembrandts that waited for the hammer on the sixth day of the Lawson sale. On the mantelpiece stood a brilliant impression, " full of burr," of his magnificent landscape. The Three Trees. A print of it hangs on my wall ; it cost me a sovereign. The Lawson proof fetched ^620. My grocer would probably not see much difference between them. But oh ! that difference to the trained eye — the difference between a threatening storm on a theatre drop scene and Nature stirring herself to anger above the Winchelsea marsh. The sight of The Three Trees, pei-haps the highest achievement in original etching, stimulated me to pay a visit to a collection of Mr. Brangwyn's new etchings. Whistler promulgated a law about etching — that the plate should not be beyond a certain small size, and that the line should have a flower-like delicacy. There Whistler erred. That was the way for him ; but each man in art, as in everything else, must find his own way — fashion the only way for the right expression of his temperament. Mr. Brangwyn's plates are huge. His line is strong al- most to brutality, but what force and virility there are in his men straining at the rope along the towing-path ; what power in his Building South Kensington Museum ; what majesty in his Breaking Up of the Hannihal. Leaning on a chair in the midst of the Brangwyns was an engraving by James War of Rembrandt's The Centurion Cornelius, one of those profoundly spiritual, haunting Scripture scenes that the Dutchmen felt so strongly, and feeling, expressed so poignantly. 204 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON To turn from this to the Brangwyns was — well, it was to be whirled from a quiet age of faith and unquestioning belief to the rushing and outwardly materialistic twentieth century. But Mr. Brangwyn is quite right ! He lives in his own age ; he draws his inspiration from life, not from books. He is strong enough to be himself, and therein lies his power to impress you and me. We may prefer the Rem- brandt temperament ; but Brangwyn remains — a force. AN ACADEMY SOIRlfiE X\0 pictures look well or ill by artificial light ? It depends upon the picture. There were troubled hearts at the Royal Academy soiree. Every exhibitor was invited, and all, I suppose, visited their pictures during the evening, sometimes to find them woefully changed under the blaze of the electric lights. The reds remain firm, but the fierce glare of the incandes- cent lamps washes the colour from blues and yellows, and hurries twilight over grey, low-toned pictures. The well or ill aspect of the canvases under such condi- tions depends upon the choice of pigments and the method of the technique. Some greens are forced out of value, others remain as harmonious as by daylight. The sculptures certainly gain in dignity and impressive- ness at an Academy soiree. Mute they stand above the chatter and the strains of the Royal Artillery band ; immobile amidst the gleam of the tender dresses of girls and women, the white waistcoats of success, and the AN ACADEMY SOIREE 205 decorations of diplomats and mayors. Above the hub- bub, like some god knowing all things now that he is resting from his labour, brooded Mr. George Frampton's vast seated statue of the late Marquess of Salisbury — thought made bronze, the great brow furrowed but quiesr cent, head and figui'e a symbol of eternal repose. And in front of him, at the head of the stairs, a symbol, by vii'tue of his office, of eternal restlessness, was the President of the Royal Academy, doomed from nine o'clock until midnight to tether himself to a few steps of carpet, to advance to every guest with hardly a second's rest, and to give to every right hand the grasp of welcome. Eternal repose ! Eternal restlessness ! I passed &om the interminable kaleidoscope to the Lecture Room, where the majority of the sculptures were displayed. Although the lips of the guests seated there were closed, it was far from being a place of silence ; but the noise was melodious. Scattered over the floor like chessmen were the members of the Royal Artillery band, and the music they played were those wild Hungarian waltzes that fire the heart and set brain and feet dancing with a mad longing for an intenser life to which the episodes of everyday seem prologue. Here again the mute statues took to themselves a new meaning. Above the conductor's head — strange and arresting contrasts ! — yearned Mr. Pomeroy's kneeling figure of the late Bishop Ridding, his ascetic head stretched forward, his hands thrust forth in prayer — to what ? The bishop's eyes, peering over the heads of the musicians, rested upon Orpheus, that strange and attrac- tive mythological Greek, about whom centred, at one 206 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON time, a monastic order believing in the migration of souls and other mystic doctrines. Here, in Mr. Swan's group, he stands as the first musician, touching his lyre, charming and vexing the panthers that slither up the pedestal to the in- different boy god, while the bandsmen of the Royal Artillery race on with their wild music, oblivious of the strange, wordless drama that is being played above their heads. The present seemed far removed. Nearer to my con- sciousness, more real, was Mr. Gilbert's Death the Gate of Life. Panoplied and adorned for death, garbed in gold and colour as for a triumph, a man and woman, embracing, sit above the sarcophagus, clutching still at the idea of human love ; he is dead, she is living. Eros as a child flutters beneath, and in the arms of the mourned and the mourner is a reliquary with love sleeping on the lid, destined for the man's ashes. Also near to my conscious- ness, and real, seemed the memorials — palettes, portraits, annotated catalogues — upstairs in the private rooms, ot painters long, long dead. From Orpheus to the Conductor of the Royal Artillery band ; from the first President of the Royal Academy to the present President still grasping hands at the top of the stairs ; from the bustling pictures of the year crowd- ing the walls to those mute tools of passed artists — dead but unforgotten. The continuity of it all ! The endless acting and re- acting one upon another. Lessons filtering down from generation to generation, and all around the vivid present — that whirling music, satin shoes beating to it on the polished floor, and a merry marble statue of a dancing elf posturing before Mr. Gilbert's magnificent solemnity. AUGUST AUGUST CHATEAU GAILLARD AND A SONG npHE watering-places of Normandy are not beautiful — -*- just steep, stony beaches between chalk cliffs, with half the sea front filched by jerry-built casinos wherein, at the ridiculous game of petits chevaux. Innocents lose a week's hotel bill in an evening. " Yes," said the croupier, after he had covered up the little steeds with brown holland for their night's rest, "the bank wins in the end — always. It must. The little horses pay the expenses of the casino. The play here is pastime. I go to Nice or Monte Carlo in the winter. Ah ! the money on the tables there. It is beautiful, beautiful ! " What is beauty .'' To the croupier it was a gaming- table piled with money. To me last week it was a castle perched upon green hills above a noble river — Chateau Gaillard, built by Richard Cceur-de-Lion ; the outpost, ; " Saucy Castle," that protected Normandy from the French monarchs, sailing hither by France's immemorial highway — the Seine. The sea has no memory ; ever changing, it is changeless ; but a river remembers for a thousand years. If you would know Normandy woo the Seine as Turner did — the Seine, that from the beginning of time has borne oceanwards the secrets and triumphs of Paris and Rouen. She saw the smoke of the burning of Joan of Arc ; she carried on her 210 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-O:^ roomy bosomthe dead body of William the Conqueror to burial at Caen ; she flows still a broad, swift, bright stream, washing fields, skirting villages, where once dwelt the families who became the ancestors of the new nobility of England. Still gazing down upon the Seine stands Chateau Gaillard, once the key of Normandy, now an excursion from Rouen. To Chateau Gaillard, on the Seine, tired of mushroom bathing resorts, last week's white dresses and multifarious millinery, I journeyed, and passing through Petit Andely, came soon to a bridle-track, steep and narrow. At the foot was a sign-post upon which was inscribed in tall letters, " Rue Richard Cceur-de-Lion." France loves such magnificent pranks. Upward I climbed, upward, and saw unfolding before me all the fertile, sun-drenched land, with the Seine shimmering and rippling in her broad curves as if she had never washed a care away or drowned a tragedy. Petit Andely basked beneath, and up the valley Grand Andely lurked between hills, the church dating from the thirteenth century, the hotel from the sixteenth, with its memories of Victor Hugo and Sir Walter Scott. Here was peace. Nature, the bounteous and forgiving had covered with her golden meadows and clover fields all trace of man's naughtiness. The sun shone. The Seine flowed silently by tree-embowered islands and verdant banks. Gleaners moved slowly across the meadows : a white building caught the sun ; church spires, dark and slender, shot up into the blue sky. All was wrapped in silence. The world had recovered its primordial peace. CHATEAU GAILLARD AND A SONG 211 Neither Union Jack nor Tricolour waved in this place of eternal summer and eternal repose. On the slopes of Chfiteau Gaillard, lulled to languor by the beauty of this lotus-land, I lingered. Why go farther ? Why return to the monotonous sea, to casinos where croupiers were blinking in the sunshine awaiting the moment to tinkle the bell that calls the Innocents to the gaming-table? Why jostle with the crowd on the gritty plage, dodging the kites of children and the leading strings of shaved poodles, unwillingly following corpulent mistresses? Why again urge the bicycle along those interminable Rues Nationales, where one may travel for fifteen miles and never pass a village or meet a human face? Why not Yes ! Down there in Petit Andely is a white inn, old and rambling, facing the Seine, a sylvan spot, beloved of fishermen, with Chateau Gaillard slumbering overhead to remind the wayfarer that there had been periods of conten- tion before this era of universal peace. At that white inn bordering the Seine I will stay. I descended. It was the hour for tea ; it was also the moment to perform a duty — that of discovering if the Entente Cordiale had spread to the hamlet. I asked for tea, promising myself that I would discuss the Entente after the first cup. Tea ! They were ignorant of the beverage. Nom de Dieu! What was the use of discussing the Entente in a village where the word " tea " is unknown ? Drinking sour cider as a substitute, I heard music, harsh, but valiant, smite the peace of the afternoon. Rising, I looked along the dusty road at an approaching piano-organ drawn by a donkey. A woman turned the THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON handle as the machine of melody progressed; a man sang a ballad to the accompaniment, and two children, ragged, bare-footed, black-pinafored, ran hither and thither selling sheets of ballads for a sou apiece. Villagers peered from doorways, the fisherman left his rod, and I, who had fared forth to encourage the Entente, found myself joining in this chorus, from the ballad called " Pauvre Mere Alsacienne," beneath Richard Cceur-de-Lion's proud castle : " Pauvre mere Akacierme, Loin de moi tu te Tnevrs ; — Ah ! cruelle est ma peine — Dit-elle avec des pleiirs ; Quand done lesjils de France Iront-ils en vavnqueurs Pour punir rinsolence, De nos vils oppresseurs ? " CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN T HAVE climbed my last mountain. Last Thursday afternoon I stood in a meadow at Sulden, and, staring skyward, blinked at the sunshine on the mighty head of the Ortler. It is the highest mountain in the Eastern Alps — the highest. The next day, at four in the afternoon, I started with a guide. For an hour we scrambled over moraines and dSbris until we reached the foot of the Tabaretta rocks. There, had I been alone, I should have stopped, for those gigantic rock cliffs looked about as accessible as the facade CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN 213 of St. Paul's Cathedral. Without a word the guide began the ascent, the earth receding horribly as we climbed. For two hours I, panting, watched his back. There was not a crease of sympathy in it. He did not turn even when the winding, nearly vertical path changed to a flight of crumbling steps, protected from the abyss by a wire rope. I clutched it, swayed, fought the vertigo, and almost cried with joy when, half an hour later, raising myself on my hands, I tumbled like a sack of coals upon the tiny grass plateau bordering the glacier from which the Ortler towers. Close by was the Payer-Hiitte, where we proposed to sleep. It was eight o'clock, and indescribably cold. I regained my breath, muttering between the gasps, " Never again ! " I peeped over the edge, and recoiled. I looked again. Yes ! Somebody was ascending the path. He was a native. I gazed a,t him wide-eyed. On his left shoulder he balanced 10ft. of zinc piping ; his right hand carried a bag of tools, and his left nursed the bowl of a huge hookah pipe, from which he blew contempla- tive spirals against the sunset. He swung himself over the crest of the rocks, threw the zinc piping upon the plateau, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and said, " So ! " After supper I tried to sleep in a room which I shared with fourteen burly Germans and Austrians. The windows were closed. An evil oil lamp swung from a rafter. Before dawn heavy forms, one by one, raised themselves, generally with groans, from their couches, and heavy hob- nailed boots tramped out into the unpeopled night. I, too, rose silently, with a white face. There were two small tin washing basins and two towels. But it did not matter. 214 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON There was that awful mountain outside — waiting for me. I drank my coffee shivering, and watched the dawn surprise an icy world. Presently a figure, whom I recog- nised as my guide, beckoned through the window. He coiled the end of the rope around my waist, and I knew what a turkey feels when it is about to be trussed. And — and — while I was being trussed over my left shoulder I saw the path. It was our path, for far beyond, spots of ink on the white snow, I saw the unfortunates who had preceded me moving across the glacier. How tiny the path was ; how huge and ghostly the glacier ; and how teri'ible the slope that went sheer down to death. I felt a tug at the rope, and stepped out upon that path, trampled with the feet of my predecessors. Was it a foot wide ? I doubt it. Inclining my body toward the land- ward side until my ear tingled at the touch of the snow, with eyes half closed to shut out the sight of the depths into which a false step might plunge me, I followed my guide up the mountain, passing from one dread danger to another. Anxiety, call it fear if you like, became chronic. I thought of nothing except that every step brought me nearer to the summit ; but with that encour- aging thought came the reflection — " True, but you've got to return, little cellular thing ! " The route was honibly diversified. There are things they call crests, and shoulders, and ridges, and sometimes you hear an awful sort of booming movement somewhere, and the guide cries " Boulder ! " Then the rope tugs you forward, and you both run and cower behind a rock. I CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN 215 know that sometimes, seeming hours at a stretch, my eyes never dared raise themselves from my guide's footprints in the snow. Once one of the preceding parties dropped an ice axe. Warning shouts set us crouching, horribly appre- hensive. We watched the axe bounding down the moun- tain side, leaping higher at every bound. It flashed past us a few yards away. And once I was left alone ! We had come suddenly upon a gulley several feet wide. Beyond it was a wall of ice with rough steps hacked in it. A wooden ladder was balanced across the gulley. You could have pitched a flock of sheep into that gulley, and the gulley would have swallowed them all. The guide uncoiled several yards of rope. " I go up, up," he said, " you rest here tranquil • When you feel rope tug you walk up ladder. See ? " I watched him ascend the ladder, and continue on all fours up the wall of ice. I was alone in eternity. I tried to light a cigarette. Hopeless ! Matches and cigarettes were soaked by my frequent falls in the snow. Then came the warning tug. I crossed the ladder, embraced the ice slope, and was hoisted up like a bale of merchandise. " Dat is gut," said the guide as he received my body into his arms, dusted it, and replaced it on its feet. " The summit lies at the highest point of a sharp arete of snow." That guide-book description must suffice for the last five minutes. I prefer to blot that arete from my memory. But the summit ! Ifs tremendous to look out upon a world of untrodden snow, peaks rising from every desolate field ! The utter loneliness of it hurts. It's like standing on the North Pole. AH arouud the sky touches the horizon. 216 THE DIARV OP A LOOKER-ON There's no hint that man ever existed. You, a foot-sore dot, with a heart beating like a mining stamp, are the centre of the universe. You are the first man and the last man — encompassed by the beginning of things. Ifs the creation of the world, and you have a seat in the gallery. The oppression of immensity, of awful, unutterable forces, of -the eternal laws from which man can never escape, draws body and soul into the chilly soul of the Cosmos, and the toys of life — love, friendship, adventure, art, books and ri^teousness — are as if they never had been. Standing there on the summit I saw a thousand feet below three specks, men, roped together, gliding like serpents over a jagged ridge. Then the mist descended and I saw them no more. They were making the ascent by a route " diffi- cult and dangerous." I had come by the " easy way." Then we began the descent. The mist cleared and I saw where I should fall if I fell. * * * Hf * In the afternoon I limped into the hotel garden at Sulden — worn, wasted, but triumphant. Luck was still with me, for sipping his coffee at a table was a member of the Alpine Club whom I knew. " I've just been up the Ortler by the Tabaretta Rock," said I. " Oh, the Ortler ! " said he. " Then you've had a nice walk!'- MY FRIEND THE FAILURE 217 MY FRIEND THE FAILURE X CAME to this seaside village for quietness after a foreign ramble, also to paint two small pictures. From where I sit I can see across the bay, half a mile distant, three rafts, to which the bathers, whose tents are pitched on the opposite shore, swim out. Beyond rise the hills, and in a fold of them is a wooded village, with an old church, where my friend, Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, is holding his twenty-third annual summer sketching class. Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky has failed in art ; but he does not know it, and I would not for the world tell him so. He has a class of twenty-three -girls, all pretty, whose fathers or guardians pay him a good round sum for his three months' instruction in art. And I shall give him a fiver for an occasional criticism of the two pictures I am trying to paint. One will be a representation of the bay in the sunshine, with the belt of golden sand on the farther shore as the highest light, and a yacht with a white sail, or perhaps a red one, skimming across the dancing water. The other will be a nocturne, seen in that wonderful quarter of an hour which is neither day nor night, when the reflections of the lamps shimmer criss-cross on the water, and for a few minutes the sea is a sheet of burnished silver ; you can distinguish the three rafts, dots in the silver, half a mile away. I shall call it The Rafts. Nobody will be able to see them. That will be my secret. Mr. Happy- Go-Lucky says they will be mistaken for porpoises. No matter. 218 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON He is painting an immense picture, a seven-footer, which will be another failure. It is not a paintable subject. One might make a pretty religious poem on the theme ; but he is set upon painting it, and will carry the thing through. Why shouldn't he? He makes enough money by his summer pupils to keep him through the year, and by doing without a new dress-suit, which he wants badly, he can pay for the canvas and colours. He saw the motive the other afternoon. The small south door of the church was open. We passed from the cool, dark building into the sunlight, and toiled up the steep graveyard, which clings to the side of a hill, to an old cross at the summit, with only a stone wall between it and the moor. The ascent to the cross was worn by many feet, and on either side were battered sixteenth-century tombs and ancient elms. When we returned to the church we saw, carved on the stone lintel of the doorway, the words " Via Crucis," and beyond in the sunlight were the worn steps leading up to the symbol. " Here's my picture," said Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky. " What a noble motive ! " It has been difficult to write or paint during the past week, as last Saturday a camp of 2000 Volunteers pitched their tents in a meadow between the village and the bay. You walk along the roads and tumble over a scout hiding behind a haystack with his riiie cocked at a brood of ducks ; you choose a quiet place in a rutty lane and settling your- self beneath a white umbrella begin a sketch, when a de- tachment of armed cyclists come scorching down, and the landscape is lost in clouds of dust. Then the many bands, fife, drum, and brass, are never silent. If only they would not play " It don't seem right to me." MY FRIEND THE FAILURE 219 Yesterday evening Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky and I struck over the moors to the farther chfFs, and after we had exhausted our epithets in admiration of the view, headland after headland sweeping away into the haze of infinity, a sea bathed in light, and a distant liner churning through what looked like a lake of sunrays, we sat down, talked about art, and drifted into a discussion of the commercial side, and the value of pictures and sculpture as a national asset. " Governments should encourage art for the sake of posterity," I said. " Look at Italy ! Why is she so flourishing ? Why are her national stocks so high ? Because of the horde of tourists who visit her towns to see her works of art. The same with Paris, Athens, Madrid, Amsterdam, and many other cities. It is the wisdom of dead Kings and forgotten Governments in collecting works of art that makes hotel-keepers and tradesmen rub their hands. It's art that fills their pockets ! England is awaking to this. I raise my hat to the Government, because they refused to allow the new Stationery Office to be built at the back of the Tate Gallery, knowing that the Tate must soon want additional room. If only they would pull down the barracks at the rear of the National and Portrait Galleries, and add additional rooms to those institutions, we should be the greatest tourist-gathering nation in the world. Perhaps they will." At this point I stopped, for Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky had fallen into a gentle slumber. You might think from the above references to my friend the Failure that being a Failure is not a bad occupation. Perhaps it isn't; but Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky has his troubles. THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON His grizzled beard protects him from heart flutterings, but he has no end of anxiety about the love affairs of his pupils. I overheard one of them say the other evening, a girl with fluffy fair hair and eyes like stars — " If I can't get the man I want, I shall take up art seriously." RUSKIN'S PLANS AND SCAFFOLDINGS rilWICE in the course of my peregrinations round the picture exhibition of the moment I heard a lady remark : " I hate to be reminded of unpleasant things. Why do men paint horrors ? "" The especial objects of her aversion were the Spaniards, Zuloaga and Anglada- Camarasa; Louis Legrand, painter of Svr la Canape, and the set of six masterly etchings by Max Klinger, particularly the one called A Mv/rder. She interested me. She was typical of the English temperament, which, for better or worse, cannot dissociate the subject from the treatment. The workmanship goes for nothing if the theme is unpleasant. Watching her, noting the disgust with which she pursed her delicate lips, I fell to thinking what Ruskin would have thought of this show. Not much, you may be sure. He who found the negative ugliness of the Dutch painters dis- tasteful would have deemed the positive ugliness of the ultra French and Spanish school horrible. I am just re-reading " Modem Painters " in the pocket five- volume edition, and am once more adrift in the magical prose of that wizard pen. It is the fashion nowadays among the younger art students to sneer politely at Ruskin, RUSKIN'S PLANS AND SCAFFOLDINGS 221 But what have we gained ? In technique we have advanced. In sheer cleverness of execution there are a thousand ' modern painters whose work would astonish Ruskin and the Old Masters ; but the only branch of art where there is any real progress is landscape. In the philosophy of art, in the explanation of the intention of the artist, we are like scattered sheep, each uttering its cry to the un- answering heaven. " The point is," murmurs the modern philosophic art critic, " whether the painter has stated an emotional mood of life or nature in terms of colour, line, and form, so that we have that emotion aroused in us." Now hear Ruskin ! " Adoration to the Deity, revelation to mankind " — that is the aim the painter should nurse in his heart. Have we gained by outgrowing Ruskin ? Is the new definition wiser, truer, or more helpful ? Try ! The modern schools of scientific art critics are so level- headed, and so concerned with archives and attributions, that there is no room in their books for mere eloquence and ideals. And in truth the world has moved since Ruskin penned his art flights. He contradicted himself, some of his opinions are splendidly wrong. Indeed, he was always willing to change them when the change betokened growth. But Ruskin was much more than an art critic ; he was a critic and interpreter of life itself, a preacher without a pulpit, a poet who wrote in prose, a painter whose medium was pen and ink. He gilded plain words with heavenly alchemy. The irony is that he, a man whose life was de- voted to the delivery of his message, is esteemed now more for the style in which the message was delivered than for the message itself. He conjured with the English language, and gave to 222 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON hislong, winding sentences the magic of poetry and the rhythm of music. He begins a clause quietly, but as he reaches the climax the pinions unfold, the bird swoops and soars, the full stop comes only when the last gleam of the wings has vanished in the blue. His love of words led him on a dance away from his thought — and yet, this is the difficulty of writing about Ruskin, he was so many-sided, he wrote so much, that any criticism of him can be dis- proved. " The Two Paths " (it cost 6d.) which lies before me isalmost conversational in its simplicity, and half an hour ago I read the "because" passage from "Fors Clavigera," wherein he defends himself against his critics. The effect was like going out of a dark house into the sun- shine, A child could understand that " because " passage ; only a Ruskin could have composed it. I know no writer who has such power to stimulate instantly. He opens a window. It may be to joy, it may be to sorrow, but it is always to something better than what one has been thinking about or doing. Last week I saw a collection of 227 water-colours and drawings by John Ruskin. It was an exhibition which produced a startling effect the moment of entering the room. I was content to stand still, looking and wondering. It seemed as if that crowded life, passed in the quest of beauty and of the soul behind the substance, was flashed from the outer vanished world into that room. Those draw- ings, years of patient labour, were but the plans and scaffold- ings that enabled him to rear the edifice of his written works. That flower-like drawing of Rosslyn Chapel, that intricate rendering of a comer of the Ducal Palace of Venice, that vision of Ckammmi, what do they tell ? That only inten- RUSKIN'S PLANS AND SCAFFOLDINGS sity of feeling and intensity of love, those ingredients of greatness, could have lavished such a passion of diligence on work that was merely preparatory to self-expression in writing. When I wonder again at such a passage as that which leads up to " those grey heaps of deep-wrought stone " in " The Seven Lamps of Architecture " I shall remember these drawings, and understand. He himself looked down from the walls. In one, a por- trait by George Richmond, he sits on a terrace above a lake, a bright, bird-like figure, tall and slim, the blue eyes out- gleaming the blue necktie. He is twenty-four, the first volume of " Modern Painters " has just been published, the world is all before him. In the other, a photograph, his great life has been nearly lived through. He sits upon a seat, an old, shaggy, bent man, with a leonine head, and by his side sits another veteran, Holman Hunt, talking to him. All around in the room were evidences of Turner — his idol. Water colours and drawings by Ruskin that were modelled on Turner ; a rough pencil sketch of The Swi of Venice Going to Sea, which Ruskin made at the Royal Academy in 1843, and for copying which he was turned out of the gallery ; and the first edition of the " Stones of Venice,'" with the inscription " J. M. W. Turner, R. A. — with the author's affectionate and respectful regards." I do not suppose Turner read a word of it. He did not understand literary enthusiasm. Paint, not words, was his medium. All he said to his young champion when he was starting off on one of his foreign tours was : " Don't make your parents anxious. They will be in such a fidget about you." THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON MILLET'S MOMENTS OTRANGE it is that Millet, the peasant, who drew his *^ wife cutting cabbages in their cottage garden at Barbizon, and his sons carrying a calf into a shed — finding in such simple themes perfect expression of his genius — should now be enshrined in a limited edition at four guineas a copy. But Millet, if he still has cognisance of mundane affairs, must have long passed the limit of amused surprise at the ways of man. That must have been reached when his Angelus, by no means his best work, which he sold with difficulty in his lifetime for .£'40, fetched 30,000 guineas in a French auction-room. Even the pastel of The Angelus is now priced at d&SOOO. Why, a certain draw- ing tossed on one side in the studio when Millet, with " his deep chest and grave head," seated himself at the clothless kitchen table to fill earthen plates with the children's dinner, is valued now at ^£"600. But the prices do not matter a penny piece except to sellers and buyers. Our concern is with Millet, the man and the artist. Whether Millet was happy or unhappy does not really signify. No man who sees and feels as deeply as Rem- brandt and Millet saw and felt can be uniformly happy. But they have their moments of ecstasy. Such moments Millet had when he wrote thus to Sensier "Everything dances together in my brain . . . the glory of God dwelling upon the heights, and other heights veiled in darkness," MILLET'S MOMENTS 225 Also when he wrote : " Oh, how I wish I could make those who see my work feel the splendours and terrors of the night ! One ought to be able to make people hear the songs, the silences, and murmurings of the air." Do not these heart-cries show the kind of man Millet was, better than pages of description ? It is because Millet felt deeply that he is able to touch and impress us deeply. No mere technical power in drawing the peasant figure, however accomplished, could have achieved this. No Ingres of the fields could so move us. The fleeting foolishness of " Art for Art's sake," that had its little span of hectic life a few years ago, has gone the way of all fads and fashions. The figure of Ruskin, haloed in idealism, shot with bril- liant wilfulnesses, is again a force ; and Millet, with his adoration of God in Nature, his cries of " I am a peasant — a peasant," and " I am the man my native place has made me," looms forth as the apostle of a new religion in art. His life stands out clear and simple, in broad mass, like the great oak-tree his friend Rousseau painted. Sprung from a family of peasants, he lived the life of a peasant boy, ploughing, sowing, hoeing, reaping, noting the courses of the seasons, and deriving from his parents and relations spiritual and aesthetic sustenance, and the example of fine lives, religious in the true sense. His father would say to him: "Look at that tree — how large and beautiful! It is beautiful as a flower." THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON And on another occasion : " That house half-buried' by the field is good ; it seems to me that it ought to be drawn that way." To the Bible, which he read with delight and not as a duty, was added Virgil, introduced to the boy by the Cure of Grdville. The "Georgics" and the "Bucolics" made a pro- found impression upon him, and it is said that the beauty of the world first became real to him after reading Virgil's line, "It is the hour when the great shadows descend upon the plain." Everything seemed to conspire to lead Millet firmly towards his true hfe-work. That hateful time in Paris, his forty days in the wilderness, when he made his living by painting Boucher pastiches, and classical and so-called religious pictures, showed him by practical experience the work that he did not want to do, work that left his heart and pulse dull. Somewhere in the Vatican, strange to say, is an Immaculate Conception that he painted to order for the Pope's private railway carriage. But such things were fugitive. They were details. The keynote of his life was struck when he sent TTie Winnower to the Salon of 1848. He settled at Barbizon in 1849, and there he lived, for twenty-seven years, a patriarchal life, painting, drawing, dreaming, thinking, and, as his family grew, the cottage of three rooms was gradually enlarged to meet their requirements. In those years many of his drawings, his second wife and children serving as models, were made. They astonish and delight each time they are seen. Truly they are epics of the soil — the sower, the gleaners, the charcoal-burners. MILLETS MOMENTS 227 Millet re-stated, in the art which was the readiest means of his self-expression, the ol4 truth, forgotten by so many of his predecessors, that " one must be able to make use of the trivial for the expression of the sublime." Old Crome was of the same mind. The homely becomes epical, according to the vision and power of the seer. A woman pasturing her cow and the Eternal creating man are one in the scheme of things, parts of the unity. Millet's Sower, or Peasants Going to Work, has the same effect on our emotions as Michael Angelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Millet, after he had passed through the period of probation, tossed the past of art with its traditions away, as we doff our raiment at night. He went back to Nature and was himself. That was all. Very simple. It leads to success — after you are dead ; and the reason that more men do not tread that path is because great souls combined with great powers are rare, and few of us are prepared to make the sacrifices that the " Via Dolorosa of immortality " entails. It was probably np sacrifice to Millet. He did what he desired, to the world's great gain. He took the path of least resistance and found poverty and immortality by the way. A millionaire lately dead also took the line of letist resistance, the difference between the two men being that the life of one multiplied his own wealth ; the life of the other increased the wealth of the world. 228 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON COLOUR rriHE medium of water-colour has a fascination for artists with delicate, swift perceptions, and the impulse to realise them sWiftly. The rapid changes of light, colour, and movement, gone almost before they have been visualised, can be best portrayed by the rapid colour notes that the worker in water-colour makes from nature. Turner is the parent of these flashes of colour that retain on the paper the moist illusion of atmosphere, holding the sun so fugitively that one almost fears it will vanish even as one gazes. I am aware that the artists who hold that the province of water-colour is the rendering of atmospheric effects, notes of aerial colour, luminous tones, in a word, the transitory beauty of nature, are few in number. In water-colour, as in all the other branches of art, the man of genius or strong talent may, and does, over-ride tradition and theory, and convince us that his method is the right one for himself. But Sir John (xilbert has not convinced me that water-colour was the right method to adopt for his Guy Fawlees before James the First. Neither does Charles Green persuade me that the elaborate detail of A Fascmatmg Volvme is suitable for water-colour. But before Whistler's Little Sea Piece — all atmosphei-e and light — hints of boats sailing under a suggested sky, on the slightest indication of a sea, there I feel at home again. Water-coloiur has been used to express an aerial effect, wet and wide, loose and large, that only water-colour was able to express. Turner, happily, has his followers now, and those who COLOUR 229 feel that the art of water-colour should be but staining the paper with the pearly lights of a dawn, the running hues of a sunset, or the fairy world that is reflected in still lake and trembling wave, acknowledge his august father- hood. Turner when he had passed through the early stages of his development would not laboriously and conscien- tiously reproduce in water-colour yonder pinafored child feeding a puppy by the lock gate. His quick eye roving around would have caught the flash of that kingfisher's wing against that pink cloud, and he would have made it immortal with a splash. Colour in water-colour, as in oil painting, is an inspiration. Impressed by the subtle quality of a sky, you ask the painter how he produced it. He cannot tell. Or, attempting a reply in words, he may say — "Let me see, a touch of vermilion and pale chrome in a lot of white, and some rose dorie and a little cobalt, and perhaps a speck of orange chrome. But really I don't know." It was his eyes that did it, not the re- flective brain — his eyes and the obedient hand. Colour is the confessional of personality. Like the wind, is there and here at once. It comes from unknown storehouses, dififering in glory, finding expression in Velasquez's silver greys and flights to red and blue, Titian's autumn opulence, and the hasheesh dreams of Monticelli. The pursuit of it, assisted by absinthe, drove Monticelli crazy until he believed he was a reincarnation of Titian. SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER WHEN THE TIDE TURNED X ATE in the evening the hill-men descended from the uplands to the studio by the harbour, bringing with them bunches of tamarisk, picked from the ocean border of their parish, and boughs of wild fuchsia. These grey-green sea-shrubs and dropping red flowers were the oifering of the hill-men to their patrons — ^the girls who were giving a dance that evening. The hill-men marched singing down to the studio by the harbour ; and when they were not singing they debated the disposition of their gifts around the bare walls of the vast studio, the floor of which had been swept and polished for dancing. There they found the fishermen who had brought the oil lamps from their boats. These feeble lights hanging from the rafters were dim against the three Japanese lanterns that stretched in a line from the dark stairway, descending like afoc'sle ladder from the street, to the wide-flung doors of the studio. Outside was the harbour. The tide was receding and the air still. All the world seemed exhausted and inert, after the burning heat of the day. The girls, dressed in white, looked like slight ghosts against the figures of the hill-men, as they flitted round the dark purlieus of the studio, festooning the tamarisk and fuchsia branches on the walls. The north-east end of the studio, open to the night and 234 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the sea, was flooded with silver light; there we waited while harp and violin felt their way to a melody. Between as and the chUdish waves, so small that they made hardly any sound, was a stretch of sand ; in the harbour white yachts, gigs, fishing craft, and black seine-boats swung with slow, gradual movement ; and beyond, out in the bay, were the lights of two ketches, home-bound from the North Sea, waiting for high-water to creep into the harbour. Imperceptibly the trial notes of the harp and violin merged into a waltz ; the sailors tramped away to their homes ; but the hill-men grouped themselves in a corner by the side door, squatting on the floor like so many figures of Buddha, watching. They did not move ; their eyes followed the movements of the dancers; they were ab- sorbed, but they never spoke. All through the hours of that still night they remained motionless in their lone corner of the studio, while the tide oozed lower and lowei-, and all the land and all the ocean slept ; nothing moved in that hot night save the flash from the lighthouse, five seconds of glow, five seconds of dark- ness. Just before the tide turned I looked out into violet starless space, and then to the east, where the first grey tinge of dawn was breaking in the sky. Siu:ely no night had ever been so comatose, so airless, so suggestive of a dying world. But that light in the sky was the harbinger of the world's reawakening, not its viaticum. For then, just then, the tide turned. The moment of reawakening I could not fix ; but so imperceptible was the change that the wind was blowing upon my face and the boats in the harbour were moving WHEN THE TIDE TURNED 235 in the same instant. The night became vocal. I heard the swish of waves, the creaking of cordage, and the plash of water on keels. The freshening breeze rustled the skirts of the girls ; a man turned up his coat-collar ; the lights of the two ketches in the bay oscillated, and figures moved upon the decks. With the turn of the tide a wind had blown in from the sea, rousing and animating the world. The musicians played to an empty floor. All the dancers were watching the night, wondering at the trans- formation, and rejoicing. And the hill-men, from their dark corner, felt the influence, although they could not see the incoming tide rolling over the sand. They rose and passed out into the street. Their curiosity was ex- hausted ; the new day had magnetised them ; their hills called. In imagination I followed them, knowing so well their route. They would pass through the narrow, cobble-paved street and up the long hill, where the moors begin. Then they would wind up by bracken and gorse, higher, ever higher, until they reached their own land of lore and romance, passing on their way one of those mysterious monuments of antiquity, a cromlech, erected by some vanished race of neolithic men, ages before the astronomer- priests used the stone circles and menhirs to tell the hour by the rising of the sun and stars ; ages before the ancient Cornish, clad in long black cloaks, with staves in their hands, ran out from their beehive huts to sell tin to the Phoenicians anchored off St. Michael's Mount. The hill- men would look askance at the cromlech, weathered by the storms of three thousand years, for they are a superstitious THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON race, and some believe that the old cromlech builders may still be seen moving at break of day among the grey stones that mark the burial-place of their neolithic chiefs. But with the rim of the sun rising above the horizon their fears vanish, and they hum a snatch of a waltz of yesterday that they heard in the long night hours before the tide turned. EMOTIONS OR INTEREST ^HE articulated the words so clearly that those im- ^^ familiar with the poem could follow the meaning; and the accompanist used the piano as an aid, not as an antidote. So flute- like was the singer's voice that it pene- trated above the roar of the wind and the thud of the waves. Through the open window of that studio by the sea I could discern the lighthouse at the end of the jetty, and once the foam sprinkled my cheek. That did not trouble me, for I was under the influence of a poem by Christina Rossetti and the sympathy of the singer; amused, also, by the incongruity of the audience. The regular members of the club — ai-tists, writers, and musicians — were in the picture. To them this epithala- mium of a lonely woman, no longer living, to whom the marvel of marvels was that she might behold her " King in his city of gold, where the least of lambs is spotless white in the fold, where the least and last of saints in spotless white is stoled " : to them, with something of the feminine in their equipment, the words of that song seemed EMOTIONS OR INTEREST 237 natural — perhaps affecting. But there were others present — burly golfers. One of the artists, by some curious freak of nature, is a plus 2 man on the famous links above the towans, beyond the next bay ; in the club-house, after the medal round, he had issued a general invitation to this gala night at the club. When a plus 2 man has just won the medal round, and beaten the professional's score, he can say and do what he likes. To strugglers with high handicaps his word is law. So the golfers, having been told that the evening was sans cirimonie, trooped into the studio in astonishing homespvms and friezes, ruddy of face, and wearing dreadful boots. They grouped themselves on the window side of the room, away from the pink-shaded lamps hanging from the rafters. These jolly-looking men wanted air, not feminine society. For the sake of change I sat among them. And after a while the girl sang Christina Rossetti's poem, beginning " My heart is like a singing bird," and so on, through that ripple of intense joy — founded on what.? Probably on no stronger a base than that on which most of the beautiful and deathless things in life are built — just the imagination working on a longing. I thought of her who made this song, and so many other sensitive, elusive, and delicate poems ; of her cloistral life) and the phases that sum up its progression — secluded days, weak health, family affections, religious thought and practice, sure and certain hope ; and then I thought of the emotional and spiritual turmoil that must have worked behind that smooth brow, and in the heart beneath the. bodice of the plain dress. And, as the singer sang, I saw 288 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the dais of silk and down, where this prim little lady would fain enthrone herself, broidered in doves and pome- granates and peacocks with a hundred eyes ; worked in gold and silver grapes, in leaves and silver fleur-de-lys. Why? " Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me." Then the voice ceased, and the feeling in the room, the murmur of commendation, hushed but intense, was of the kind that compels the singer to continue. And while she sang the poem again, I glanced at my neighbour, a 12 handicap man. We had played golf together that day, and we were still friendly. His eyes were fixed upon the ceiling. His pipe had gone out ; much of the ash rested in a fold of his chequered Harris tweed ; he was in a dream, lost to the world. When the song ended for the second time, touched by the idea of a golfer who is also a man of sentiment, I said to hira : " You find those words aflt'ecting ? " He started, looked at me as an eagle might look at a lamb, and said : " Affecting — affect 1 was recalling the extraordinary fact that .£3,000,000 was spent on golf- balls last year." I capitulated — ^humoured him. We talked golf inani- ties. " Ah ! if only I had taken my lofting iron at the eleventh," I murmured. But he had no memory for my play. " I allowed for the wind at the third," he said, " and yet I was tucked up under the churchyard wall." Suddenly he turned and faced me. " I ought to have played back," he cried fiercely. EMOTIONS OR INTEREST 239 The singer began again : " / took my heart in my hand (0, my love, 0, my love,)"" And so on, to the triumphant close : " / take my heart m my hand — / shall not die, but live.'''' But I discerned on the face of the 12 handicap man, in his eyes, words and sentences that were plain to my understanding. Those words and phrases were " Niblick ! " " Brassy ! " " Confounded hard luck ! " " Avoid patent putters ! " . . . Yet I misjudged him. I had seen only a bit of his life. The next morning the golfers went out to the links by train at an hour when the singer was probably still dozing in bed : slack and sad after emotional excitement. The golfers were alert as the gulls, rosy as the sun. The night with Christina Rossetti had left no more impression upon them than the Archbishop of Canterbury's rescript on the observance of Sunday. I entered their compartment, and sat among them, looking at the sea which the metals skirted, eager to talk, dubious about a subject, inclined to return, with a hint of scepticism, to the money spent on golf-balls per annum. Suddenly the 12 handicap man said : " Look at that old shag on the rock — see him ? I saw two seals there last Sunday. I watched them all the morning." The pleasure of the recollection made his hard, tanned fkce quite attractive. " Have you ever seen the Cornish chough ? " I asked. 240 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON " Oh, yes, but they're rare. I've watched them on the South Coast. You can tell a chough by its hoarse cry. The other day, walking along the beach, I heard a kind of croaking noise. No, it wasn't a chough ! The croaking came from beneath my feet. I removed some stones and there, a foot and a half beneath the surface, was a stormy petrel, sitting on its nest. No, the bird didn't lift the stones. It gains its nest by some kind of underground passage. . . . Look ! there's an oyster-catcher ! See him ? " An elderly gentleman in the comer, with a box of golf- balls upon his knees, mumbled something. " Oh, yes, there are rare birds in Cornwall. I've seen the golden oriole. Woodcock ? I've killed 125 woodcock in one season. There are plenty on Goonhilly Downs, by the Lizard. Hullo ! here we are." The train drew up at the golf station. I was left alone in the carriage — reflecting. In ten minutes I had learnt, from a golfer, more about Cornish birds than in all my days in the Duchy. What if Christina Rossetti bored him ? Why shouldn't she ? To which am I most in debt ? She aroused my emotions, he my interest. She took her heart in her hand, he his gun. I, who do neither, encounter them, look on, and enjoy both. THE GOD OF SLEEP npHE small hours were hot and still. I could not sleep. -*- But the waking dream that obsessed me was soothing and continuous : it compensated for the loss of a summer THE GOD OF SLEEP 241 night's oblivion. Through that long, conscious dream moved the white form of the god of Sleep that a Greek craftsman made 2000 years ago, the young Hypnos, striding delicately over the land, with averted head and enigmatic, smiling face, a swift-moving noiseless presence, closing the eyes of men, and hushing their quick brains. So individual is this statue of Hypnos that even in the crowded halls, white with casts, at the British Museum, where he takes his silent way, he seems to be alive and conscious of his beneficent mission, in the wilderness of craftsmen's dreams in plaster. The vision of Hypnos stayed with me imtil near sunrise, when a forlorn cow, in a meadow beneath my bed-room window, awoke to realise the loss of her calf, and announced her woe in a long-di'awn-out plaint repeated at irregular, but frequent, intervals. Her grating moo of anguish drove Hypnos from my waking dreams. It was day. His spell of power was broken. Hypnos, who closes the tired eyes of men, rested till nightfall should entice him forth again. I left the house and climbed the hill — a long, steep ascent, where one may see all the world, as it were, ocean, moorland, and the distant downs, outstretched. For the idea of that white god, fleet of foot, gentle and compre- hending, still possessed me; he was still more real than the presences of the living, and it was on that hilltop at sundown on the previous night that I had felt the nearness of the god. He came, as the sun dipped, at the hour when the long shadows creep over meadow and moor. From a long shadow, at that mystic hour, Hypnos glided stealthily, but with conscious grace, timidly, like one new 242 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON to a world, with a secret mission. Bom from a long shadow into a twilight, half golden — so I see Hypnos. He came to find a task awaiting him. For when the shadows began to lengthen a cavalcade appeared round the brow of the hill, three men following a van drawn by two horses, tandem-wise, and beneath the hill, above the sea, they stopped, drew a white tent from the van, which was a market cart covered with a green tarpaulin, and pitched their camp by a brook. I saw the smoke from their fire ascending in a thin spiral to the sky, and heard their laughter. The hour of the coming of Hypnos was near. He is never hurried, for all men need him, all welcome him sooner or later. Hypnos came, smiled on the weary, and passed on. The tent was silent when I reached it ; the fire was out ; I heard the regular breathing of the amateut gypsies. Hypnos had blessed them. Of Hypnos and the gypsies I thought as I climbed the hill that morning. The sun was in the heavens. The gypsies had been long astir. One was striking the camp, the others had mounted the horses, and were galloping to a farmhouse for butter and eggs and a pint of milk. The joy of life went with them. It was the hour of Pan. I could almost think I saw the goat-foot playing his pipes by the brook, footing it to a gay measure that jocund summer day. Hypnos was hiding, waiting for the long shadows. Nature was awake, forcible and joyous, tingling with life. Below in the bay a large steam yacht was moored against the jetty. Figures moved. White bodies A FLORENTINE LADY AND RAPHAEL glistened as they dived into the water, and the spray splashed over the white deck. One of the bathers, with a rope fastened round his waist, swam far out into the bay. Then he waved his hand ; a companion started the donkey- engine, and he came churning through the water back to the vessel's side. Again and again he swam out with the rope, and was flashed home in a welter of foam through the blue sea. I heard his laughter. The sides of Poseidon must have shaken with mirth at the antics of man that summer morning. And yet, joyful and inspiriting as was the sight, with the land sunlighted, a warm, fresh breeze playing over the hill, and the two horsemen racing back across the plain, leaving a trail of new milk on the herbage, I could not shake myself free from Hypnos, the silent bestower of the greatest blessing of all : " Aiid Love it was the best of them. And Sleep worth all the rest oj them.'''' A FLORENTINE LADY AND RAPHAEL rr^HE position of this alluring portrait of a Florentine -*- lady at the National Gallery is unique. No other work in the gallery is so honoured, merely because it is a double portrait rising and revolving from a pedestal. On one side a lady, on the other an angel. You can swing them round, and watch the light change the lady and the angel. The lady is more attractive than the angel. We have 244 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON seen the type many a time in Florence, and art historians have given her a high-born name; but that does not matter. You will see this sweet, untroubled Florentine lady or her double often in Botticelli's pictures, and in Ghirlan- dajo's frescoes ; now receiving gifts from the Graces, now paying a visit to the orderly bedroom on the occasion of the birth of John the Baptist. You will see her lurking in the enigmatic features of a Venus, a Flora, or a Spring ; for this was the type, some living woman, that the Florentine painters knew, admired, or loved, so that she has become fixed, immortalised, the ideal of a day, as Lady Hamilton became centuries later. She is no suffragist. She asked for nothing because she received everything. There are brilliants in the brown crimped hair that circles her pale, refined face. About her long neck is a pearl necklace, and silver braiding shows on the fading pink dress billowing above the elbow. Her face is in profile ; the lips parted, and I think when the painter saw her, she was gliding in her stately way along the corridor of her Florentine palace one night ; and as she moved the candles threw golden reflections on hair and jewels. When she passed a window, and her head was framed against the blue night, then the artist saw his picture ; so he painted her, brown curls against the blue twilight, and the parted lips which seem to be saying " Must I really stand quite still ? " It is not a great picture, perhaps the painting of the sleeve is the best part of it, and the name of the painter has not even been recorded. " School of Botticelli " is all the experts dare aflBrm ; but it is a lovable picture, and A FLORENTINE LADY AND RAPHAEL 245 Florence and this daughter of the City by the Amo become very near again as I look at her. Turn the sweet, still head round a little on the swivel, and the Florentine lady is gazing towards the room where Francesco Guardi's Santa Maria della Salute towers above the Grand Canal. Not the opalescent mists of Turner's rainbow-hued dreams, but an actual Venice of clearly-defined architecture and moving, well-articulated gondola life, that this Florentine lady, born before the era of Impressionism, would perfectly understand. Turn her again and she will be looking demurely towards a Cavalier by Moroni, just such an attractive and enterprising stranger as must have hurried many a time from the city on the lagoons to woo this pale flower in her frowning Florentine palace. No diffident poet-man he. This cavalier by Moroni, who painted that tailor which some think is the frankest portrait in the National Gallery, is a man of arms and afiairs. Full-lipped, full- blooded, his sword at his side, he looks out upon the world his prey. The dark tunic slashed with ' gold suits his tanned face pulsing with life. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that this cavalier and the Florentine lady, so real they seem, have long, long ago gone the way of all valour and beauty. Man passes, the scene remains. Cavalier and lady have vanished ; but Venice is lovely still, lovelier thtin ever Guardi could make her. 9|G 3|C 0^ 3|C ^ I turn to the new Raphael. I pause — astonished. I ask myself: Can this beautiful picture, so tender in feeling, so subtle in line, really be a Raphael .'' It is a privilege to be able to walk into the National Gallery at 246 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON any moment and linger before this lovely Mother and Child, with the little landscape behind, and the faint tower that gives the name to the picture peeping forth. It has marks of the restorer and cleaner upon it; but neither they nor Time have impaired its beauty. It seems to have passed through a golden cloud, which has left on it a flush of tenderness obliterating all the hardness that we find in so many of Raphael's pictures. I have seen them all, or nearly all, and of the vast number this Madonna of the Tower is the one that makes the greatest appeal to me. Compare it with his harsh and hard St. Catherine of Alexamdri,a that hangs close by, and you can see how wide a gulf there is between the achievements of a painter who does a thing to order, and for love. TTie Madonna of the Tower was painted in his Florentine period, before the gifted youth had become famous and the friend of Princes and Popes. Once it was the most treasured possession of the poet Rogers. That humdrum forgotten poet assumes a new interest, because he lived with this masterpiece and saw it daily. A HAPPY ARTIST rpHE small drawing, signed John S. Sargent, fascinated -*- me — so alive, so sensitive is this sketch of an elderly man with watchful eyes and a determined chin. It is an education to study the fret- work of lines making the lapel of the coat, the faint markings that build up the model- ling of the head, and the way the collar digs into the old A HAPPY ARTIST 247 neck. There was no need to look at the superscription. Here to the life, drawn by his friend and enthusiastic admirer, is Hercules Brabazon Brabazon, who died two years ago at the ripe age of eighty-five. While I thought of Brabazon, and recalled his water- colours, those lovely expressions of his temperament, certain lines ot Wordsworth's " Happy Warrior " drummed in my head : " Who compreheiids his trust, and to the same Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim. . . . And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw^ Brabazon was spared the conflict of competition, of earning his living by his brush ; but there are other con- flicts in the interior life of the artist in which many are beaten. That Brabazon triumphed no one who passed an hour at the memorial exhibition of his works could doubt. He kept faithful with singleness of aim. Judging from the outside, I do not suppose any artist ever had a happier life. A country gentleman, rich, well- educated, for seventy years he did his duty as a landlord, and gave his leisure to the arts, and to travel, producing water-colours that were his personal impression of the beauty of the world. Why not call them letters that he wrote, for those who care to read, from Italy, from Spain, from Holland, from his own flower-garden at Oatlands .? When, on his travels, he saw a picture that impressed him, he made a water-colour interpretation, not a copy, of it, and so we have his beautiful suggestion of a little sea- 248 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON piece after Bonnington ; of a princess after Velasquez ; of drawings and pictures after Turner. His early work shows that he began, as all must begin, by carefully drawing the forms of objects; but as the years hastened, bringing with them increase of knowledge, he grew confident, fearless, and painted the effect, not the fact. I jght and colour became the essence, the reason of his pictures ; he was content to suggest the construction of buildings and boats, with the same success as Mr. Sargent suggested the construction of the coat lapel. He passed his life working and enjoying, and at seventy, suddenly, his achievement became known outside his private circle. Those who understood, placed him at the head of his school. In 1891 he was elected a member of the new English Art Club, and at each of its exhibitions until he dSed the Brabazon water-colours on the screen were among the joys of the collection. His fellow water- colourists bought his works, and one of them said of a Brabazon water-colour : " Exquisite as a flower ; it is not like a thing that has been made ; it has grown." He died working and eager, seeking beauty and com- municating it, the perfect type of the Happy Artist. BROTHERS IN ART "Y^ES ; that lithograph called The Modeller is one of my prize possessions. When I look up from my desk, the intensity and intimacy of the representation is always an encouragement, more eflicacious than a doctor's tonic. BROTHERS IN ART 249 What does this lithograph contain? Merely a deal table, a bucket of water, a lump of modelling clay, a small Mercury dawning into life, and the figure of the modeller. He has been kneeling upon the floor, but in the ecstasy of creation he has half risen ; his body is tilted forward ; his forearms clutch the table ; and fingers, eyes, and brain are focussed upon the work that is being shaped from the clay. The great moment in an artist's life — the act of creation, the instant eternal — is suggested with an emotional vigour that is perhaps only possible in the subtleties of lithograph. Mr. Charles Shannon made it, and the figure of the Modeller can be none other than his comrade, Mr. Charles Ricketts. These two names are inseparable. Messrs. Shannon and Ricketts do not perform the amazing feat of painting pictures together in the way of Messrs. Henry and Hornel some years ago, but they live and work under the same roof, collect rare and beautiful things in consultation, and they often exhibit together. Like the brothers de Gon- court, they are "deux vies insepar^es dans le plaisir, le labeur, la peine." At a recent exhibition Mr. Shannon showed ten large oil pictures. The motive of the winged Hermes toiling through the waves with wide-eyed Bacchus nestling on his shoulders he has also used as a lithograph. Realism is as alien to him as it was to Watts : the vision of his eye is resolved by his imagination and compounded into a sump- tuous decorative scheme. In his work, to-day is as yester- day, or as a thousand years ago. Even when he paints themes that are really of the hour, such as The Fisher- man's Family or TTie Listen Bleachers, they have no actu- 250 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON ality. They are such things as a man, with a gift of pictorial vision, might see with closed eyes at nightfall, when the sights of daylight hours, and the memory of things read and heard, settle themselves in the mind. He is of those who paint the fourth dimension ; but few moderns have Mr. Shannon's power of realising the quiet splendour of their dreams. The art of Mr. Ricketts is more dramatic, and his ener- gies cover a wider field. He knows the history of art better than many art historians ; he is a forceful and picturesque writer ; he designs stage scenery and effects, and he turns easily from painting to sculpture. His imagination plays in a world of fancy. He studies the horse, but it becomes a Centaur. The idea of that fabled beast, so pathetic, half-man, half-animal, intrigues him ; but he takes no interest in a Derby winner. Like the men of old time, his chief source of inspiration is the New Testament. In The Holy Women he reaches, I think, the highest point of his rendering of drama and emotion. The colour scheme is blue. A great rock rises above the sepulchre. In the foreground are the shrouded, disconsolate women, but the eyes pass from them to the figure of the angel pointing upwards, and seemingly streaming skyward from the earth. It would be interesting to have the opinion of a foreigner on the art of this rainy island, whose knowledge of British art was derived entirely from these works by Messrs. Ricketts and Shannon — so significant and so un- British. A MINOR POET TALKS 251 A MINOR POET TALKS " T^HAT do you know about Max Nordau ?'' I asked " ^ the Minor Poet. "He is the Budapest Jeremiah; but Jeremiah with a bludgeon. He is often violent ; but I cannot think that the Eternal speaks through this Jeremiah. He is known as the author of ' Degeneration,' which tries to prove that workers in the arts who are not of the Max Nordau clan are degenerate and disserviceable to Nature's plan. I who write poetry and make floral designs in the manner of Mr. Walter Crane : I who am fond of birds, and word- games, and who keep by my bedside a copy of ' Blessed be Drudgery,' am a degenerate." " What a shame ! But how about Max Nordau's new book?" " I began by thinking it was very interesting ; but when the masterful author proceeded to whip and bludgeon artists whose vision he cannot or will not understand, the book began to annoy me ; all the more because Nordau is a strong man. He has a good brain, it works well, but his book suflFers from having been written in detachments for serial publication, and what the author thought about Art in June does not always agree with what he thinks in December. He is a man with a recurring grievance. I don't see the use of expressing ypur dislikes in art. It probably only means want of sympathy and lack of imagination. Indeed, 1 think criticism should only be interpretative and appreciative — constructive, not destructive. It is much more difficult to discover an 252 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON artist's intention, to follow the dim expression of his personality, than to hit him because his work seems antipathetic." " You have a lot of thoughts for a. minor poet ? " " I don't call them thoughts. I don't think I ever think. They're intuitions. What I mean is that when a man attacks what another man has written or said or painted, he seems to leave things just as they are. Of course, if he is witty, or if he has a fine command of language, I am titillated or impressed for the moment; but nothing comes of it. But when a man writes from his heart, from a core of belief in something that is more than man, the deep, unvexed note he sounds endures. It remains with me, helps me to live, sounds through my days. Am I clear ? " " Not very ! " "That's often so. Well, look here! I belong to a reading club. We meet once a month, and in turn declaim chosen passages. The other evening one member read portions of Milton's ' Areopagitica,' another read selections from Sir Thomas Browne's ' Religio Medici.' I am quite aware that the ' Areopagitica ' is among the finest prose writings in the language ; but it left us wrangling about the definition of Truth, and the measure of Milton's sincerity. We should have quarrelled had not coffee appeared. The passages from the 'Religio Medici' left us with a vision of truth, a sort of grasp on Eternal things, which called forth no words, only a gratified silence. When I hear for the first time, quoted by Sir Thomas Browne, that 'Light is the shade of God,' something is added to my life. When Max Nordau tells me that Rodin's Gate of Hell ' is an illustration of hystero-epilepsy and feminine Sadism ' ; A MINOR POET TALKS 253 that Puvis de Chavanne's ' great allegorical frescoes are cold, dead, sprawling, pretentious subtleties'; when he writes of ' toadies ' and ' poison-boilers,' and refers to some ' ass of a critic ' (that isn't pretty, is it ?), I want to get away from him, and feed my canaries and re-read that chapter in ' Modern Painters ' called ' Peace ' — ' though my hope may be as Veronese's, the dark -veiled. Veiled, not be- cause sorrowful, but because blind.' Or that passage where he apostrophises Turner, the light-giver. That's the kind of writing that nourishes me." " I trust you have not suffered from the critics ? " " Alas ! I have had my share. I have published one volume of poems. Perhaps you remember it. The title was ' The Morning Stars who were Too Shy to Shout for Joy.' One reader liked it unreservedly — my old nurse — who, thank God ! is still alive. Of my three critics, one wrote a facetious article to show how clever he was ; another quoted two of the poems, and put at the top ten lines of biographical italic from ' Who's Who,' but un- fortunately it was the life of another man, a mining engineer, whose surname and initials are the same as mine ; the third complained that my little bed of violets were not tuberoses. That is a common failing of criticism. You write as Smith, and the critic trounces you for not being Shelley. You express your gratitude to Claude Lorraine for his ' Enchanted Castle,' and the critic smothers you with abuse because you have not correlated Claude with Turner and Wilson. The editors of some learned journals seem to think that a man can only write well when he is suflFering from diabetes or something. They distrust light- heartedness. Ah, well ! Toid casse, tout passe, tout Ume ; Vamour seul est etemel.'" 254 . THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON " True, or perhaps I should say, ' Be that as it may.' Anyhow, we have wandered a little from Max Nordau. Is his hook, ' On Art and Artists,' one that you would recommend ? " " In parts, yes. His opening chapter on ' The Social Mission of Art' has grit, and it is suggestive ; but he spoils himself for me when he speaks of the ' hateful and tedious reality of Bastien Lepage.' Fancy calling Bastien's Joan of Arc hateful and tedious ! He is good on Meunier and Sisley. I admire the passage contrasting the poignancy of the figure of a woman, by Meunier, who has gone to the mouth of the shaft of a coal-mine after an accident, to find her man dead, with the inefiectuality of a second group Meunier made of the same subject, but with the dead man lying at her feet. The mere fact of the corpse being there, Nordau points out, checks the imagination and dries the tears. That's good criticism. And I admire the pages about Sisley, who does ' optically what an ear would do acoustically which was capable of feeling purely all the tones of a chromatic divided, perhaps, into sixty- fourths.'" " That sounds rather scientific." " Does it .'' Max Nordau never forgets that he is a scientific philosopher of sorts ; but no one who was really scientific could publish in one volume so many contra- dictory opinions. Perhaps if he was very happy for a year, and discovered that people only yawn when he is violent, and if he wrote only about painters he likes, he might produce a book that aunts would buy in half- dozens to give away as Christmas presents. Some of his sentences are wonderfully fruitful in suggestion. Hi§ A BEAUTY BOOK 255 picture of the original cave-man artist, who scratched the mammoth on the tusk to ease his emotional tension ; of the nameless craftsmen who tossed off those little lyrical poems — the Tanagra figures ; of the Netherlanders who made art a free " " Pardon me ! I hear the motor- bus. We have had a most interesting conversation." " Thank you. I have never met anybody before who seemed really anxious to hear what I had to say." A BEAUTY BOOK TT is a truism of the auction-room that the portrait of a -* pretty woman, by an esteemed master, is worth double or treble the price of a handsome man from the same brush. Nobody complains. We are all human, and it is a picture dealer's business to understand wealthy humanity. Of all painters who have been gifted with the power of transferring to canvas the vivacity, the charm, and the note of pathos in a beautiful face, of touching the strings of personality into melody, Gainsborough — the vivacious, the impulsive, the quick and generous Gainsborough — is unrivalled. His women are as fresh to-day as recurring springs. A typical Beauty Book could be made from his portraits alone. At this moment the streets of London are brightened by the oval face set in auburn hair, with the blue eyes peeping side-ways, of his Mrs. Sheridan, one of the lovely daughters of Linley, of Bath. Gainsborough painted her seated on a bank in a butterfly landscape, as 256 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON if she had fluttered to the sward to rest a moment, a favourite device with him ; but the vandal with an eye for beauty who made the coloured reproduction has cut her ofi^ just below the blue sash. She is lovely still, although truncated. Esteeming Gainsborough and certain painters of the Italian Renaissance as the most alluring interpreters of the beauty of women, I took up Mrs. Steuart Erskine's volume called "Beautiful Women in History and Art," predisposed to praise. For, on the cover, a Gainsborough greets us, the buoyant, merry, bright-eyed Lady Mulgrwve from the National Gallery. It is plain that Mrs. Erskine admires her, for Lady Mulgrave appears again , on the title page, and a third time in the text. But when I turn to the first plate, containing engravings of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland, Katherine of Aragon, Jane Seymoiur, and Mary Tudor, Queen of France, I realise how opinions as to what is beauty can differ, Catherine Howard has a page to herself; but nothing can ever persuade me that she is beautiful. Nor the Countess of Southampton (by Van Dyck), who looks like Nero; nor the wooden and phlegmatic Joan of Arc, by Ingi-es. If one must introduce Joan of Arc into a gallery of beauties, the choice should have fallen upon the uncouth, inspired figure of Bastien Lepage. But I cannot but be grateful to Mrs. Erskine for including a portrait of Helene Potocki, the pretty Polish girl who married Prince Charles de Ligne and left him for Count Vincent Potocki. She was married to Prince Charles from the convent at the age of sixteen : " She had seen him once in the Parlour, on which A BEAUTY BOOK 257 occasion she had kept those beautiful liquid eyes fixed on the carpet, and had described him accurately to her companions afterwards." But charming as Helene with the liquid eyes is, the man who is not a hermit may see girls as prei^y, a dozen in the week, in England of to-day, to say nothing of Ireland and Scotland. And as for Madame de Pompadour by La Tour, to whom a page is also given, a well-trained male eye would not throw her a second glance. La Tour could not paint her wit, or her manner. But Lady Jane Grey, by Lucas van Heere, is charming. She might have stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite picture by Millais. This volume should have included only the loveliness of faces as seen through the beauty-haunted eyes of such painters as Gainsborough, Romney, Botticelli. Their models may or may not have been beautiful in life, but they certainly became so when seen through the person- ality of the men who painted them. Why is not Botti- celli's Spring here .-' and his Venus ? and that little head of an angel high up in the comer of his Coronation of the Virgin ? And Filippo Lippi's pouting, discontented, ador- able Madonna, and Ghirlandajo's Giovanna with the fair hair ; yes ! and Velasquez'^ Virgin, and Leonardo's inward- smiling woman ; and Perugino's pale Umbrian peasant girls, and Van Eyck's iS". Barbara ? Why complain .'' The compilation of a Beauty Book, like an anthology, is a matter of personal taste. The faces portrayed are Mrs. Erskine's choice, and if I think that many of them would not have launched a thousand ships, that only shows that the author and the present writer disagree. The ideal of a friend of mine is Henrietta 258 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Maria, and Sir Peter Lely was not the only man who ad- mired Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. In this book she looks like Britannia on a penny. Perhaps she was pretty when she smiled. But one may have opinions as to the form a Beauty Book should take. First, the pictures should all have a whole page allotted to them. Beauties should not be in bevies unless they are dancing at a music-hall. And they should not be printed in a heavy brown ink that makes Lady HamUton as Nature look as ponderous as an iron girder. Second, the text of a Beauty Book should go with a lilt ; it should have gusto and be Elizabethan in its fervour ; should be glamoursome and fugitive as beauty ; in a word, should suggest the song of a lark rather than the solemnity of a historian. Mrs. Erskine takes the latter course, and as we are a prosaic nation, no doubt many readers will welcome her facts. But what have facts to do with beauty ? The model, I submit, should be Mr. Maurice Hewlett, whose prose, when he is writing of dead Florentine ladies, caresses them from afar. OCTOBER OCTOBER ANCIENT AND MODERN A S the train sped thi'ough Kent that golden day of -^^ late summer I saw that the outing of the poor was ending. Many of the hopiields were cleared, the poles standing bare in the sunshine, but here and there figures crouched dark amid the remaining greenery. So momentary was the sight of this remnant of hop-pickers, so remote and small they looked in the rolling landscape, that hop-picking seemed but a picturesque incident in the optical gathering-in of the day. Their figures were far away ; they had less individuality, as we flashed past them, than yonder herd of sheep nibbling their way over the down. Speeding through that golden land, it was with almost a shock that I recalled a sight of the previous night in Whitechapel — a, wagon-load of returning hoppers, a boisterous, roysterous medley, packed on the floor of the van, the discord of whose songs was intensified by the creaking of the wagon-wheels. But that was in the past of yesterday ; the hoppers were now merely a tone, a value in the landscape, a flying blur, not a part of life. When we reached the marsh country, where innumer- able animals graze by innumerable little streams, imtil their forms fade in the blend of sky and land at the far horizon, all thought of hop-pickers faded. For there, perched on hei* arable and wooded rock, was Winchelsea, 262 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON very old, very content, very sleepy, and almost unchanged. A shop, the shop, has been pulled down and rebuilt else- where, and on the site has risen a white house, pretty as a flower, with linen curtains fluttering in the breeze like leaves. That was all. Winchelsea — she is really New Winchelsea, although she is 600 years old — was dozing as she has dozed every Ikzy summer since the stream of history left her. Empires may crumble ; hops may cease to be grown, the electro-bus may become common as a cab ; but ancient Winchelsea will never awake from her dream. Kings march through that dream, and armed hosts ; ships of war sail through it, and the spirits of queens stream palely. In her dream Winchelsea sees battle-grimed French and Spaniards scale her walls, and, without a tremor, she views herself going up to the heavens in smoke and flame. She sees Edward III. and the Black Prince, captaining the Winchelsea squadron, drive twenty-three Spanish galleons into her harbour. But what does it all matter now ? Nothing remains but her dream, the blue, unvexed sky, and the sea, her old companion and foe, which drowned Old Winchelsea, and ended her struggle for existence down there on the marsh, where Camber Castle sprawls and crumbles. I sit on the ramparts in the shade of a windmill that has long shirked work. I see, two miles away, the glint of the sea that once washed the walls of Ne'fv Winchelsea. I gaze out upon ranging fields and corn-lands, sun-flushed brooks, innumerable animals, and uplands stretching away to the folds of the hills. All is spacious, still and pastoral as a landscape chapter in the Old Testament. I watch an automobile racing along the ribbon of white roeid, going ANCIENT AND MODERN 263 somewhere, eager only to be there, so many miles on- ward, before nightfall. Winchelsea must smile at that ambition. She reminds me of the old lady in a railway carriage^ who, after watching the antics of a party of children for some time, said gently : " Oh, my dears, if you only knew how much nicer it is to sit still ! " Winchelsea dozes, and there are no discordances in her dreams. She lives her own brooding life ; she demands nothing of the world, but she gives peace to those who ask. Like the early mystics and the stars, she is unlinked to companions; she seems to derive the beauty of her repose from some hidden source, and if a poet spoke a verse in the shade of the windmill on the ramparts, look- ing down upon the pastoral and onwards to infinity, I think he would say : " Sometimes on a sudden all seem^ clear. Hush ! hush, my Soul, the Secret draweth near. Yes ! Som^tmes on the instamt all seems plain. The simple sun could tell it, or the rain.'" And, as the poet turned towards the railway station — for an end comes to all things — he might add : "I go ; Fate drives me : but I leave Half of my life with you.'" Winchelsea would make no response. She is too tired to be pitiful, too ancient to be interested in the present. I doubt even if she knows that on certain afternoons small bare-legged children sit on three-legged stools in one of her cottages learning to make lace — Winchelsea lace. 264 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON From Spanish galleons to pillow-lace ! What a drop ! But Winchelsea is too sleepy to care. On the long railway journey home I saw the ghostly hopiields stretched out under the light of the full moon- Once I sighted a fire where belated pickers were bivou- acking, and as the train ( awdled at the station I realised that we were picking up detachments of home-returning hoppers. The guard locked the door of my carriage. " You don't want hoppers in here," he said. At London Bridge I tumbled into the midst of them. The platform was a pandemonium. I stood still waiting imtil the tangle had disengaged itself. Surrounding me was a family — a father without a hat, who looked like a stage burglar, a wife nursing a baby, and children of various sizes. One carried a small sister, another grasped a pail, a third clutched a kettle, and in their midst was a perambulator in which a wizened baby and an a.iling child were tucked. It was plain that the perambulator served in lieu of a four-wheeled cab. Everything the family had taken upon its hop-picking jaunt was in turn piled into the perambulator, until the wizened baby and the ailing child were hidden under a mountain of impedimenta. They uttered no murmur of reproach: they were the youngest philosophers I have ever encountered. Indeed, had they protested no one would have heard them in the din of songs, shouting, and chaff. Every one was good humoured : the faces of these derelicts were sunburnt, and their eyes were bright. The hot, hatless father had cer- tainly indulged in beer, but he was in the genial stage, and he worked vociferously to bring his flock into line^ and to marshal them towards the wicket-gate where a ANCIENT AND MODERN 266 group of ticket-collectors and policemen strove to organise the surging mass, and to sift the ticket-holders from the others. I waited while a jovial sexagenarian strove to persuade the collector that he had given up his ticket to a gentleman in a peaked hat at New Cross. Then the per- ambulator was pushed with cheers through the barrier. I presume the father explained that his two extra tickets were for two children hidden under household utensils. At the end of the incline beyond the barrier the friends of the hoppers were waiting, and, as they recognised one another, shouts and jovial greetings were exchanged, sur- charged with a fire of twentieth-century argot that demands an appendix in the slang dictionary. From wonder I parsed to amusement, and then to something that was neither wonder nor amusement. In brief, I turned faints One loves the poor, or should love them, but to be enmeshed for a quarter of an hour in a crowd who have worked for a hot week, bathless, requires a strong physique. But the bathless are kind to those in distress. A path was pushed for me through the crowd, and I leaned miserably against the telephone box near the air. Presently feeling revived, I raised my face from my hands just as the family party were passing out. The father pulled the perambulator up short, eyed me genially, sym- pathetically, and said : " We've both 'ad a drop too much, guv-ner ! " S66 THE DIABY OF A LOOKER-ON EPISODES RECALLED UNEARTHED FROM PICCADILLY "piCCADILLY was blocked. We waited five minutes in the tangle of vehicles ; then the omnibuses and cabs began to crawl along the narrow passage that the road-breakers had left for London''s traffic. Unearthed from the channel dug for the laying of more electric wires were certain strange-looking objects, caked with loam, that had been undisturbed for centuries. Now they rested by the roadside. Passengers upon the omnibuses craned their necks to look at them, and if tree trunks could blink, those battered trunks, so long lost, would have blinked in the sunshine. Through each a hole, the size of the mouth of a small pail, had been bored. Their particular service to man was obvious. Here, lying in Piccadilly, on an October afternoon, were the first conduit pipes that brought the water of the New River to London — just elm trunks, sound as the day they were fitted one into the other, and laid in the earth ready for the cool water to gush through them into old London. Americans, I was told, are buying them from the contractor. Had I my will I would send two of them down into Wales, to a valley, or rather a series of gigantic cups in the hills, through which a river runs. Some day, it is said, those cups in the valley will be converted into a vast reservoir which wiU supply London with water. And I would erect those two faithful elm trunks on a hill over- looking the reservoir. So the Old and the New would meet. EPISODES RECALLED 267 THE PREACHER That remote part of wild Wales where I spent a few days last month is ten miles from a railway station, and because Welsh ponies are plentiful, one never walks. There are a dozen ponies in the paddock beyond my host's flower garden, but I could not canter up the hills alone^ even if I wished, for Llewellyn I., my pony, would not permit himself to be caught unless Llewellyn II. was bridled at the same time. As the rider of Llewellyn II. is an intimate friend, the arrangement served. One day the rider of Llewellyn II. suggested that we should visit the Preacher. He lives high in the hills, and on Sunday he mounts his pony, prays and preaches in three chapels, many miles apart, and returns at nightfall to his desolate cottage. We walked the last mile to cool the ponies after their wild canter over the shoulder of the mountain, and Llewellyn I. pressed against his companion, warm flank to warm flank, as if saying, "We are old friends, you and I ! " On a knoll in front of the Preacher's cottage we drew rein. I shivered at the thought of the loneliness of his life. Hills all around, the trees dripping rain, the miry roads desolate, the clouds leaden, and a wild river brawl- ing before his study window. There was his) open Bible on the ledge. " How does he stand the monotony .'' " I asked the rider of Llewellyn II. " Is it faith or fear that supports him ? " The rider of Llewellyn II. looked towards the cottage. "That Bible is to him the Word of God — every word. 268 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON He lives to preach it. There is no monotony when all life is one great desire." A POOR MAN'S CURE The Welsh village has grown tinto' an ugly town. Everything — Chouses, shops, inns — ^looks cheap and ugly, and the men who crowd the narrow, muddy streets are under-sized and ill-looking. They wear cloth caps. I wondered what could be the attraction of this inland straggling town, where nothing happens save the gleams of fair weather between the pitiless rains. Soon I found that twice a week the pale, under-sized men trooped out to a glade through which a river runs. There, in a wooden pump room, bai'e and comfortless, they drink the waters, hoping to be cured by saline, sulphur, chaly- beate, and faith. A servant-maid waits behind the counter of the pump room, and over all hangs the nauseat- ing odour of sulphur. The miners pay their copper and drink ; then they troop back to the ugly town, where they sleep four in a room for fourpence a night, cooking the provisions they have brought with them from their homes in the black Welsh mining country. I thought of Homburg, where the rich take the cure as an aftermath gaiety of the London season. Almost the only amusement provided at the Welsh Spa is a penny- in-the-slot machine. Stay ! I have heard that of an even- ing they form themselves into choirs, appoint conductors, and practise choral singing. Come to think of it, can Homburg offer anything better — to feel well and brisk, and to go bedward singing ? EPISODES RECALLED 269 THE SPORT OF KILLING He was a peaceable man, gentle in demeanour and per- suasive in conversation, who spent the mornings in his study and the afternoons playing croquet or gardening. Between whiles he managed his estate, and after spending a week with him, I felt that his was the ideal life of a country gentleman. It was pleasant to hear him discuss- ing the improvement of a farm with his agent, delightful to see him with his dogs. One afternoon, an hour before sunset, he threw down his croquet mallet and said suddenly : " I'm going to have a pop at a rabbit. Will you come ? " I did so, for, strange to say, I had never seen anything killed in the open, and I wondered how the sport would affect my friend, so gentle in demeanour and so persuasive in conversation. It transformed him ; the primitive man leapt out with the quickness of the report of his own shot-gun. For an hour I followed him. He had one desire — ^to kill. Old and young alike he blazed at. One bimny he shot while it was sitting up as if pleading for mercy : another, badly wounded, escaped to its burrow and was killed when only its tail was visible. And his face grew fiery, and in his eyes there was the gleam that men have in battle when they meet the enemy. " Enough," I cried ; " I'm going home." He tossed three rabbits to my feet. " You might take these with you," he cried with a laugh. They were still warm, and their blood dripped on the wild flowers and seemed to mock the quiet-coloured end of day. 270 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON TRAMPS "l^riTH the first fog, the tramps who roam southern England during the summer and autumn months track into London and take up their winter quarters. Tramping the country they look cheerful ; scuffling through London streets they look miserable. One longs for the summer and their retiu-n to the life of the open road. I know not the numbers of these brown-faced, weather- beaten, shifty, sore-footed itinerants, but I do know that on the white marsh highways between Dover and Hastings never an hour passes but one meets a tanned and limping, palm-outstretched brother, eager for fratertiity. That first ache of man for a roof, and belongings, is unknown to them. Carrying their goods, they solve the problem of the superfluity of possessions. They eat their infrequent, digestible meals by the roadside, and they experience the luxury of hunger. Blots on the green grass, they sleep where they fall, and awake ravenous. Where they pass the night they alone know ; probably the majority just tramp from one casual ward to another. They are never bored. Hourly to finger the trigger of collapse makes life an intense game. Last summer a lean, soldierly-looking tramp located me at the window of an inn in Winchelsea. " I ask your pardon," he said, " but would you help an old chap, who's spent his life in the stable, on his way ? " I made the retort of untempted virtue. Removing his hat he said, with an ingratiating smile, " Do I look like a man who drinks ? " TRAMPS 271 He did not. He cost me a shilling, and we talked. This ex-stableman had the power of give and take, parry and ripost, in conversation, unusual in tramps, unpractised by two tatterdemalions I passed on the hill above Guest- ling Green. One was saying that his feet hurt him bad. The other replied, " Knock the nails down." The former, ignoring his companion's contribution to the symposium, repeated his remark, and the other answered,. "Knock the nails down." So, up the hill, the dialogue continued. Neither desired extraneous illumination. Tramping tends to individualism. That afternoon I was leaning on the wall at the end of Watchbell Street, Rye, gazing over the marsh, when a tramp slouched up the path from the river, plucked three inches of leather from his boot, borrowed some tobacco from an ancient rheumatic mariner in a newly washed smock, who was sunning himself on the wooden bench, and invited me to help an old chap on his way. « Whither ? " said I. "To Dover. I'm a docker, that's what I am, and I hope to get a job at Dover." " Why should I help you ? " I asked. Would you believe it — ^he apologised, and turned away. His charming manners cost me sixpence. Together we gazed out over the marsh towards Camber Castle. " It's what I call isolation," he said. " You know what I mean, it's isolated, all by itself as it were." He repeated the word, proud of it. "That castle is isolated, that's what it is, 'Tisn't like Pevensey. That's 272 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the oldest castle in England^ Lemmesee, I passed it Sunday morning.'" My lips were moving with encouragement to make him continue when two more tramps panted up the hill, followed by a third, who carried a brown-paper parcel. He flung it open upon the gi'ound, disclosing a muddle of skate, plaice, mackerel, eels, dog-fish, and so forth. " Bought 'em for a bob," he said, " down there," jerking his thumb to the river, where a steam trawler lay. " Now I'm going to share 'em. The Lord loveth a cheerful giver. What 'o ! Here you are." He dipped a great fist into the heap, and gave to each tramp a handful of the slimy things. " There," he said, " there's supper for you all. I'm not a mean man ; Fm the i oiliest fellow that ever sailed salt water." He focussed me, and held forth a dog-fish and a plaice. I edged away and withdrew, yet was sorry afterwards, for this altruist, who boasted of being the j oiliest man on salt water, who had blue eyes and grey hair, and compassion, might be worth knowing By good luck I met him the next day in a third-class smoking carriage. Just before the train started he tumbled in and amazed the solemn occupants by asking if they objected to smoking. Receiving startled answers in the negative, he filled the remnant of a discoloured clay, removed his hat, scratched his head, rolled in his seat with most infectious laughter, and said : "Lord, Lord ! Won't the missis be glad ! Bill Bailey's comin' home to-night." I was just finishing my luncheon — ^the luncheon ordained by an arrogant railway company that times a train to TRAMPS 273 start at 1.5. " You offered me two fish last night," I remarked. " May I offer you a sandwich this afternoon ? " He recognised me, slapped my knee heartily, thrust the sandwich into a huge mouth, and said, " You're a good 'un, governor." It was difficult, in spite of his copious talk, to ascertain the precise troubles that troubled him so infinitesimally. He was a diver, I gathered, also a travelling showman ; also, on occasion, a tramp ; also a hawker ; but his latest appointment had been to some subordinate position on an unattached steam trawler, to which an accident had lately happened. " Ever done any trawling, captain ? No ? They wanted me to stay and look after the boat, offered me fifteen shillings a week. Not me ! Wasn't good enough. I've a wife and kid at Dover, and Fve been away for a month. It's all right, mind you ; there's somebody there looking after her. Care ? Not I, so long as I can keep the old woman going. I'm all right ; I'm the j oiliest chap on salt water, or on land either. Ever done any trawling ? I'm not a superstitious man, but do you know" — here his voice sank to a whisper — " that the trawl can't pass a dead body, I've seen lots of 'em — scores of them. Lord! Lord!" He refilled his pipe and gazed around the compartment. Every eye at once fell upon book or newspaper. "Always reading," he said, "always reading. Well, well ! I give my sons a good eddication, and what do you think they did ?" His body shook with laughter, and his hand wrung his nose. " Why they both went for a soldier. Lord love me ! Thought I should die o' laughing. What's 274 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the good of their eddication now, I say ? That's all right ; I'm always jolly, whatever happens. I'm going to sleep in a bed to-night, the first time for a month. Bill Bailey's come 'ome. What 'o ! I've got a little kid at Dover ; adopted her when the missis lost her baby. Thought she would have gone off her onion when the kid died. You know what women are. So I adopted this one. Look here — see?" He drew from his coat pocket a rubber doll, then another, held them up, squeezed them, and attempted to make the figures dance upon the carriage seat. " Lord, what fun we'll have to-night, me and the missis and the kid. And, look here ! I've got something else." He fumbled in his side pockets, and produced two cups and two saucers, carefully wrapped in scraps of newspapers. " Look," he said ; " that's one for the missis and one for the kid. What 'o ! Bill Bailey's come 'ome. I'm the j oiliest chap that ever tramped Sussex. Look at me, not sixty, and grey as a badger. What's it matter ? I'm not a&aid of work. There's my 'and. Does that look like the 'and of a man what's afraid of work ? " He thrust out a big, stained, grimyj, raw, oily hand, and I was glad to grasp it. " Good old pal ! " he shouted ; " we'll 'ave a pot of beer at Ashford." it: * * * * At Ashford I managed to evade him, and secluded myself in the London train. As we steamed &om the station I was vouchsafed a last glimpse of him, in- viting the attention of a young clergyman to the rubber dolls. AN IMPRESSION OF OXFORD 275 "I wish they squeaked," he was saying, and laughter wrinkled his jolly face. AN IMPRESSION OF OXFORD A N unseen clock chimed the quarter before six. I was "^^ early for the service in Magdalen College Chapel, so I wandered through the quadrangles, loitered in the dim cloisters, and invited the salient impressions of that day in Oxford to visualise themselves. Here, in this place of repose, and memories of Wolsey, Addison, and Gibbon, dominated by the Founders' Tower, where the Latin hymn is sung on May morning, the new and the old buildings united by the darkness, I was again conscious of the insistent impression that the stranger feels as he roams Oxford : the young life moving blithely against the grey and often peeling walls — ancestral buildings fostering infinite generations of children. You cannot escape the undergraduate. You do not wish to escape him. He is the butterfly of a day against an immemorial background. He is ubiquitous; ever busy, ever lively. He dresses carelessly and roughly as for a country walk, all but his waistcoat, which is always almost outrageous. Yet there must be a dandy set. Else how explain the vivid scarlet socks and the rainbow dressing-gowns in shop windows. The solemn night gloom of Magdalen cloisters shrouded all colour; but life persisted. Beyond the arches, now here, now there, figures flitted, their gowns blown out by the wind, their feet skirting the lawns (those wonderful Oxford lawns) ; above them the old trees, and everywhere 276 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the spirit of the place brooding in the secrecy of the night. To the last frontier of Empire, Alma Mater breathes her benedictions upon her sons, remaining as much a part of them as their childhood. And here am I, a stranger, trying to give an impression of Oxford in a page. Why, one college would overflow the space ; one Hall of portraits ; one wing of the Bodleian ; one room of the University Galleries ; one night at the Union ; one dinner in Hall, when the Eight, a little late, bounce in so vivid with vitality that they startle you like the shower of rockets at the end of Henley Week ; one sight of a piece of venerable and lovely tapestry (" It was given to the College by Henry VIII.," remarked my informant casually) ; one grave Professor, with a European reputa- tion as a philosopher, seated at the High Table of his Hall at eight in the morning, solemnly checking the butter, milk, and bread bills of his undergraduates. The choir boys, a long, sinuous line of small figures in cap and gown, wind through the quadrangle into the chapel. I follow, am given a seat in the choir, and methodically count the fifty-four candles. The roof is dark, the picture over the altar is dim ; but above the faces of the choristers those candles flare. Canticles, psalms, the Amens even, take on a new meaning carolled by those young voices, with the rumble of the bass under- tone. The bodies of the boys fidgeted, their hands were not lily-white, but I heard the young-eyed cherubim choiring beneath the morning stars. " O sing imto the Lord a new song," ran the psalm of the day, and the song was new that night in old Oxford. It was a wrench to return to High Street, and to jump AN IMPRESSION OF CAMBRIDGE «77 upon a tram-car ; but the full moon hung over Magdalen Tower. Those voices still sounded in my ears as the train rushed towards London. I could not easily shake off the memory of Oxford. When we stopped at Ealing I knew that at that moment a very learned man was lecturing in his study on " Justin Martyr : His First Apology " ; when I picked my way through the bustling streets of London, Great Tom was pealing the curfew, and the College gates were swinging into their locks. AN IMPRESSION OF CAMBRIDGE rpOWNS have personalities. Oxford has the aroma of -^ crusted wine, but Cambridge — well, I can never evade the idea that there is water in her wine. Generations of Cambridge men will disagree heartily, but so it is. The word Oxford conjures a hundred pictures — ^lost causes, lost faiths, dreaming spires, dreaming poets, and a street — that is Oxford. The " High " is known all the world over. Who, not being a Cambridge man, has heard of King's Parade and Trumpington Street ? I have never been to Oxford without crossing Christ Church meadows to the river. In all my visits to Cambridge I have never once seen the University boat-houses. They are away some- where in the beyond, across the town ; but Cambridge has " the Backs " and the loveliest interior — dare I say in the world .'' — King's College Chapel. A map of Cambridge lies before me. The river, serpent- like, winds round two sides of the town, the head sprawl- ing on the flat country above Mill Pool, where the stream 278 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON is called the Granta, the old name of the Cam. On one side of iiie neck of the serpent most of the colleges clustei" ; across the river stretch the college gardens, meadows, and sports grounds, connected by bridges, and shadowed by great trees. Outlying from the old colleges are Newnham and Girton. The thick tail of the serpent, known as the Lower River, which curls round the north of the town above Jesus Green and Midsummer Common, is the scene of the boat-races. Thus I pictured Cambridge as the train rushed towards the fen country, and noted, as places to visit, Peterhouse the oldest college; Trinity the largest, and the Fitz- william Museum. The well-paved road, bordered by detached villas, lead- ing from the station was utterly foreign to the idea of a town renowned as the seat of an ancient University. It might have been Dulwich or Streatham, were it not ibr the hansom-cabs. Soon the monument to Hobson, carrier and benefactor to the University, proclaimed that this was Cambridge. To him the English language owes the phrase, "Hobson's choice"; to this good Hobson, about whom Milton wrote two poems. When he let hacks to the students, he made them take the steeds in rotation, and the students who wanted to pick and choose soon learnt that it was " this, or none." Hence " Hobson's choice," the origin of which is duly set forth in the " Dictionary of National Biography." Next I proposed to seek Trinity, but the gateway of Queens' invited. I wandered by the Tower where Erasmus lodged, through Cloister Court, and lo ! there was the wooden bridge spanning the Cam, and beyond shone the AN IMPRESSION OF CAMBRIDGE 279 College grounds in sunlight. Through them I wandered, and just across the river saw rising from the smooth lawn the slim twin towers of King's College Chapel, with the nave enfolded between them, the glory of Cambridge and of some unknown architect who worked for Henry VI. and VII. A toy canal divides Queens' from King's, so I had to retrace my steps and seek the chapel from the college grounds. The interior is a marvel of grace and symmetry. The clusters of slender columns which spring from the ground do not end abruptly with the roof, but spread out fan-like, as if the stone had flowered and stretched branches and blossoms to touch the branches and blossoms bending out and upwards from the other side. From the clustered pilasters emerge boldly the Tudor portcullis and rose. Whether you look at this perfect specimen of the Perpendicular style from the river, from, the floor, from the King's Parade where the east end rises between twin towers, it is always beautiful. I spoke of it to a stranger at the luncheon-table, and asked him which was the best way to see the nest of colleges between King's and Magdalen. " Take a boat at Mill Pool," he answered promptly, " and row to John's." That little journey on the slow, winding river is a vision of essential Cambridge — calm, cloistral, and instinct with a sad and mellow beauty. The buildings of Queens', grey stbne rising from green lawns, glide past; King's College Chapel towers above Clare; Trinity Hall stands modestly forth, then the bridge of vast Trinity comes in sight, and after a little, the Bridge of Sighs, which connects St. John's with the New Court. I landed on the lawn, returned through the Bridge of Sighs, wandered S80 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON about the ancient home of Ben Jensen and Wordsworth, and stood in the plum-red brick Second Court, which Ruskin said was the most perfect in the University. Then I roamed on to the King's Gateway of Trinity, and entered the Great Quadrangle. The sun was setting, and the fountain in the centre of the Quad seemed afire. In that fierce light the eye of fancy might imagine the forms of Byron and Macaulay, Tennyson and Thackeray. In the Library the eye of fact can look upon the manuscript of "Lycidas" and "Comus," and the first sketch of " Paradise Lost." In Trinity Street the life of modern Cambridge passed briskly. There were motor-cars and motor-bicycles, and undergraduates walking in pairs. The Cambridge taste in waistcoats is less aggressive than that of Oxford ; but the coat and trousers law is Draconian. The coat must be a Norfolk jacket, and always of a different material from the trousers. The trend of opinion, judging from the subjects of forthcoming debates posted in two of the colleges, is advanced. One was : That this House would welcome the separation of Church and State in this country. The other was : That in the opinion of this House the Battle of Waterloo was not won on the playing-fields of Eton. I missed the express back to London, and was told by the porter that I must wait an hour for the slow train. His voice ceased. There was a moment's pause. I waited. But neither of us said, " It's Hobson's choice," ETHICAL ART 281 ETHICAL ART A DISTINGUISHED critic of literature, winnowing the true meaning of the word " adventurers " from the false, remarked, " It is an adventure — an immense adventure — for me to write this little article." To enter an artist's studio, to see on walls and easels the work he has been preparing, through many months, for an exhibi- tion, and to realise in those first few, fresh moments of quick comprehension the quality and trend of his person- ality is also, to the critic of art, an adventure, possibly an immense adventure. One morning I knocked at the door of the gaunt studio where Mr. Cay ley Robinson was work- ing eight hours a day. The pictures that I saw in that first impressionist glance roxmd the walls told me that the author of them was one of those inward-looking brooders, seeing things sympathetically in soft neutral shades, living their own interior life, not minding much whether they are in the twentieth century or the fifteenth. The pictures were small, wrought carefully and minutely, recalling the pre- Raphaelite days of Rossetti and Millais, not in the least reflecting the vivid, ever-shifting present of Mancini and Zuloaga. They were grouped temporarily in sections, under such general titles as Night, Manners, A Winter Evening, The Little Child Found. Under the first section I saw a small drawing of a star- sown sky. Beneath, seated on the ground, silent, motion- less, gazing up in rapt and reverent wonder, were three figiu-es clad in Eastern robes, possibly Chaldaeans, express- 282 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON ing that emotion of dumb wonder before the mysterious laws of the universe that unites all the centuries, the last with the first. In the tempera painting, Mariners, I saw an old seaman, the personification of those who, from age to age, go down to the sea and conquer her, salt-encrusted, his beard blown by the wind, his keen eyes peering ahead, while he steers the boat with firm hands. He knows the seaman's craft, he typifies ripeness, a life that the world has fashioned into a hardy fearlessness ; while the young sailor by his side, a bandage round his head, anxiety if not fear in his eyes, personifies youth that has still to learn that dangers are born but to be overcome, and that the nettle of life can best be conquered by grasping it firmly. Close by was a picture representing the idea of labour, three men in heroic attitudes taking in ballast, while a fourth stoops to lift a bale from the ground. Under the section, A Winter Evening, my attention, pleased, soothed, wandered from one small subject to another ; but the general idea was the light of fading day mingling with firelight in rooms, delicately felt, with grave, sweet women pausing in that hour that is made for reflection, or preparing the evening meal for children who are tired and ready for bed. The forms are all peaceful, the lines of the figures unemotional, the furniture and the objects in the rooms all beautiful and austere, without a fleck of modernity. The idea of The Little Child Fovmd is implied in the title. In one drawing it is a small Roman child, in another a child found in a London street by a London policeman, but the idea is always the same, a helpless creature lost, found, restored. The past and ETHICAL ART 28S the present are one to Mr. Cayley Robinson. He sees the simple, elemental motives that move the human heart and mind, motives that are the same in all climes and ages. Wonder, endurance, labour, joy are his themes, and in the picture called Dawn, formally and archaically beautiful, he suggests the restlessness of man, who must ever be moving on to new pastures. They push oif in the grey morning from the old dwelling, and as they leave the shores of this Cayley-Robinson land that lies east of the sun, and west of the moon, the lantern lights them over the water. So it becomes plain that Mr. Cayley Robinson allies painting with literary and ethical ideas. He is not in the least afifected by the anathemas that have been hurled at the conjunction. Cloistral, mannered at times, lapsing occasionally into forms that lean to the bizarre, he has the distinction of being quite himself. His work touches the imagination ; it arouses interest ; it expresses a talent that is always striving to relate, by means of the paint- brush, man's ethical and emotional contribution to the world that he sees with the inner eye. It is not the business of the critic to say to the artist, " Be this or that ; do this, or that." The artist, looking, according to his light on life, gives us news of what he sees through his personality. We do not say to Velasquez, " Be like Smith," or to Smith, " Be like Velasquez." We take the manuscripts they write for us, study the caligraphy, the style, the method, the colom: — above all, the news they give — judge, and then receive them, in part or in whole. Life is so large and complex that there is room for all — the optimism of Browning, the loveliness of Keats, the 284 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON organ notes of Milton, the dreams of the dreamer — some- times inspired, sometimes half-realised — and the fugitive misery of the minor poets. We are none of us original. The fingers of the great ones of the past are always stretching dimly out and pressing our brains. All we can expect is that a time may come in our lives when, having passed from the more active influences of the Masters who have formed us, we " find ourselves," and add our spark of originality to the glowing fire. THE MISSING WORD lyrR. ALBERT ABENDSCHEIN is tired : he is now resting, "somewhat spent by the wayside." But the "lifelong technical thorn" is no longer in his side. He has discovered the secret of the Old Masters. The thorn is out ; but twenty-five years of labour went to the extracting of it. Now, glad but panting, he points the way whither " the Masters have gone over the horizon." Fortunate Mr. Abendschein ! He has discovered their secret. In a little book, wherein labour is spelt " labor," and centre becomes " center," he offers his discovery to the woi'Id at the absurd price of four-and-sixpence. How many things we owe to America ! Lest there be any who were unaware that the Old Masters had any secret except the brains with which they mixed their colours, knowledge of their craft, and trade methods handed down from master to pupil, I now ex- plain what Mr. A. Abendschein means by the secret. THE MISSING WORD 285 Certain old pictures, chiefly Venetian and Dutch, have kept their colour and luminosity. They seem to be as fresh as the day on which they were finished. Others, painted long afterwards, have cracked, gone yellow, black- ened, and bubbled. Examples will occur to every reader. The water in Turner's early Buttermere Lake, now at Exeter, has evaporated ; Leighton's Last Watch of Hero, at Manchester, has gone into half-mourning; Professor Legros can study the deterioration of one of his large pictures at South Kensington ; Sir Joshua Reynolds has suflered with lesser folk. The frescoes in Oxford Union have softly and silently vanished away. Mr. Abendschein claims to have discovered why certain pictures of the Old Masters have remained to gratify mankind. He hopes "that great mass of new blood," meaning eager art- workers, will profit by his book. There is a story told of a millionaire with artistic tastes who was determined to discover the secret of the Old Masters. He bought a Titian for d6'50,000, and proceeded to peel the masterpiece in the cause of modern artists. Imagine his delight and excitement when he discovered beneath the Bacchus an underlay of a silvery tint, and beneath that a red foundation upon which the design was incised. Breathlessly he removed it, and disclosed a full- length portrait of George III. ! No such bitter experience befell Mr. Abendschein. His way is that of the patient chemist rather than the im- patient millionaire. He is learned in mediums, grounds, and varnishes, and he knows, as all know, that the ten- dency of oil is to darken and yellow. Every artist is an experimenter, and every practitioner has a diiferent theory 286 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON about grounds, pigment laying, oils, and varnishes, owing to the curious fact that the craft is not taught in the schools. We learn to draw, and our paintings of the model are criticised ; but the student must fend for him- self as to methods. In the old days a pupil worked in the studio of his master, ground the colours, prepared the grounds, and painted replicas on which the Master laid the touches that give life. So he learned the secret, to the discovering of which Mr. Albert Abend - schein, artist and benefactor, has given twenty -five years. Here a question of conscience arises. Ought I to reveal the secret, which is so simple ? It could go into one page of the book. Indeed, it might be betrayed in one word. For 146 pages Mr. Abendschein plays with the subject learnedly, simply, but exasperatingly. For we want to know ! We want that word ! On page 146 there is a hint of an after-process that takes from oil its power to darken. The oil must be ex- tracted from the first painting, that dead coloxn* used by the Venetians as a basis for their after-glazes and veils of paint. How did they dry or bleach that dead colour.? Merely with . Guess the missing word. It is a very cheap commodity. Using it, Mr. Abendschein assures us that success attended "nearly" all his experiments, I like not that word " nearly." Chapter XI., which follows, is a paean of triumph. Having learnt the secret, Mr. Abendschein sought for corroboration in the works of the Old Masters — and found it. If you want a thing very badly (not something that can be bought in a shop), you always find it. THE MISSING WORD 287 Titian wrote from Venice saying that before dispatch- ing certain pictures to the Town Hall of Brescia, they must first be exposed in the . The wily Rubens had "enclosed places" for the treatment. Giorgio Vasari begged that his portrait of Pope Paul HI. should be dried in . I wish that Mr. Abendschein had quoted some corroborative evidence from the Old Dutchmen, some of whose pictures are as fresh and luminous and as ageless as their own skies. They were good workmen ; they knew their craft ; they worked slowly and well. Most modem painters are in a breathless hurry. But it is a scurvy custom to look a gift horse in the mouth. Mr. Abendschein has laboured for twenty-five years. Now he lies "somewhat spent by the wayside." What can we do for the revealer of the Secret .'' A Nobel prize occurs to me. It is a fine morning ; I go out into the to consider. NOVEMBER NOVEMBER A PHOTOGRAPH AND A VOLCANO T STIR the fire, close the curtains, and withdraw the -^ large photograph from its portfolio. It is the head, in relief, of a woman with closed eyes, affixed to an oval slab. She has experienced terrible things, and the memory of her agony troubles her dieams ; but the indomitable face has not been conquered by suffering. It is in a state of transition to something finer and rare. This immortal mortal will awake, and the horror of the past will have been but the prelude to a new life. Beneath the photograph are the words " Furia Addor- mentata." So she remains, more than two thousand years after the craftsman carved his dream in Pentelic marble — a Sleeping Fury. Who was the craftsman ? No one knows. Did he fashion her a body and limbs ? No one knows. Maimed yet complete, she is a survival from the first half of the second century b.c. Her history is un- recorded. Perhaps she was hidden for hundreds of years in the earth, till the day of her recovery when she was placed among the treasures of the ViUa Ludovisi. Came a time when modern Rome needed the Villa and the grounds for new streets and a new quarter ; so the Villa Ludovisi was hustled away and the Sleeping Fury was removed to the peace of a little room by the cloister of the Museo delle Terme in Rome. THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Her name ? That was lost in the centuries, but some learned antiquary of insight, remembering ^schylus and the myth of the awful Erinnyes and the benign Eumenides, called her, he being a Roman, " Furia Addormentata.'' What we know of Greek mythology from delving into books, the craftsman who carved this head learnt, maybe, from his mother, as we absorb fairy tales and the idea of God. Perhaps to him the Agamemnon, the Chocephori, and the Eumenides of JEschylus were as real as Shake- speare should be to us ; perhaps he had long pondered the old myth telling how after the acquittal of Orestes the avenging Erinnyes, frightful winged women with serpent- twined hair and eyes dropping blood, became changed into the Eumenides, the well-meaning, the soothed and benign goddesses, guardians of Attica, symbols of the new spirit of justice, who were bidden to a shrine beneath the Areopagus ; perhaps this nameless craftsman, knowing and loving the myth, carved this head to show the transi- tion, while sleeping, of the Erinnyes into the Eumenides — vengeance into justice. It is metamorphosis made marble. The snakes of her hair are changing to tresses, agony to repose, contempt to compassion, wildness to wisdom. I replace the photogi-aph within its portfolio. The day I first saw the original of the photograph comes back to me. I had been in Greece — Greece in the spring — flowers, a cloudless sky, blue waters, and infinite distances. I had stood for the last time on the Acropolis looking down upon the cleft in the Areopagus, which tradition indicates as the shrine of the Eumenides. Then I bade good-bye to Greece, and all the way to Brindisi, A PHOTOGRAPH AND A VOLCANO 293 three days of sunshine and warm, spring airs, the vanished life in art and ethics of that perfected people kept me company. The dream lasted through a sunrise at Brindisi ; but soon the train rushed into a pall of noisome dust, and the sun and the memory of Greece vanished. The land was powdered with that horrible lava ; the leaves of the trees sank beneath its weight, the station roofs were inches deep in it, although we were hours away from Naples. I remember trains caked in lava dust, standing in rows on sidings, peasants stretching from the carriage windows shrieking, weeping, shaking their fists at the poison-heavy sky in which the fiery cone of Vesuvius was hidden. Greece was merely a bright memory. Art was something in a past life. The terror of annihilation was upon southern Italy. I fled to Rome. The sense of calamity haunted me the next morning. I was in no mood for crowds and sights. So I stroUed through the doorway of the Museo delle Terme and into the grounds of the deposed Carthusian Convent that Michael Angelo adapted from the buildings of the Baths of Diocletian, wandered by the cypress trees that he planted, and seated myself within sound of the fountain. The menace of Vesuvius had gone, the quiet joy of Greece returned. The garden is surrounded by the cloisters that Michael Angelo designed, and when the noon sun became too powerful I strolled towards their shade, and turned, by chance, into one of the small rooms. There, on the wall, was the Greek craftsman's dream, metamorphosis in marble, a Fury sleeping, who will awake to peace, her auger gone, her eyes clear. 294 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON EDUCATION QH£ was one of those old ladies of whom you say, thinking of Whistler's portrait of his mother : " How beautifully she would paint 1 " Her son was by way of being a notable person, and on Sunday afternoons, in his wife's well-lit and well-warmed drawing-room, men and women who thought they had something to say, and were in the habit of saying it, would foregather. They were malcontents, altruistic busybodies, with views about everything, especially education, and the naughtiness of Great Britain. But Education was the enduring topic of conversation. I listened with lapses of interest and accesses of irritation, but I continued to spend my Sunday afternoons in that drawing-room, for the sake of that old lady who, in her white cap and black silk gown, sat so quietly in the comer of the couch by the fireside. She was a wonderful listener. Nothing escaped her. On that kind, intelligent face, comprehension and charity played like a flame. She was patient with fools, courteous to extravagance, encouraging to modesty and sincerity, and a lamp to wisdom. I always knew she was in the room, and always watched for her eloquent, wordless commentary on the talk. The others chattered about Education ; she showed its soul working unceasingly in a fine nature, ripening it, informing it with tolerance and a charity that never failed. Sometimes she spoke, and when she spoke she always used the right word ; not the effective word or the as- EDUCATION 295 tonishing word, but the right word ; never the easy word. It was sometimes the word that the dictionaries mark " obsolete," but it was always the fit word. It was the word that Milton would have used. She had beautiful manners. For everybody she had a smile, and I am siu-e that each man interpreted that smile as meaning " I am very glad to see you." I did, and was conscious of the effort I made not to say anything cheap or insincere in her presence. In her quiet way, and quite unconsciously, she gave tone to those afternoons ; she was the General, under whose watchful eye' the troops strove. Sometimes her intense but unobtrusive spiritual watch- fulness seemed to me the embodiment of George Eliot's invisible Teacher, The others argued the theories of Education threadbare, and strove with each other on the religious " problem." She showed in her frail self what Education was. I wondered who had taught her. The day came when I understood. We were alone, and she told me, not knowing how much I wanted to know. As a child, as a little girl, as an older girl, it had been her custom to sit every evening on her father's knee while he read some wise book. As a little girl she would read a sentence, and then fall asleep on his shoulder. As she grew older she read a little more, and when she did not understand, she would place a small finger on the page, and her father would explain. So it went on till they were able to read together, he still explaining, she growing in understanding under his tutelage. And when he died she was old enough to read and think alone. 296 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON But he did not die. And she will not die, although she is very old. A JOURNEY ON THE THAMES rPHINKING of that vision of blue loveliness — Whistler's Old Battersea Bridge nocturne — that shimmers upon a wall in one of the rooms of the National Galleiy of British Art, I came out upon the Chelsea Embank- ment. Before me flowed the old grey river — ^London's ancient, spacious, dirty highway — speckled with refuse, bearing on her toy-waves bits of cork and fragments of spars. I leaned against ugly but useful new Battersea Bridge that no artist paints. A policeman was stamping warmth into his feet. "This is not old Battersea bridge that Whistler painted," said 1. He regarded me as if I were an importunate child. " Old Battersea Bridge was pulled down in 1890," said he, and turned to frown at a milk cart. I descended to the Carlyle pier, and waited (the derelicts were running then) for the L.C.C. steamboat. The mist was already beginning to disguise Battersea Park. Three passengers shivered on the pier. There was a moist nip in the air, and a cutting wind. Leaden clouds hid the sun, and although it was still two hours to sundown, lights were glimmering in many windows. Pedestrians walked briskly, muflled up. London was meeting the winter half- way. TTie officials were sad and civil like Malvolio, con- scious that the shadow of adversity was imminent. They A JOURNEY ON THE THAMES 297 knew that London was demanding the withdrawal of the unremunerative service during the winter months. I waited for the boat and visualised, on the grey, damp day dying on the grey swollen river, the vision of blue loveli- ness that the master had suggested upon a small canvas — a perfect moment made eternal. His blue and gold noc- turne hung, like a fairy mirage, between me and three laden barges moving somewhere through the mist. With difficulty the King Alfred came alongside. I embarked for Blackfriars. We, the few Londoners who chose to travel to our destination by iwater, stood upon the deck, silent, cold figures, and I wondered whether London would flock to this winter highway if the boats contained large, spacious, warm and cosy cabins, such as the Rhine steamers pro- vide. I peeped below. Ugh ! Linoleum, marble-topped tables — and desolation. " Now, if this were an express boat," I soliloquised, "darting to Blackfriars, I should not mind standing on deck for " " All change ! ■" shouted the skipper. It was too, cold to complain. We changed at Cadogan Pier, and embarked upon the Chaucer. I had read that in each boat is a tablet upon which is inscribed a commemorative appreciation of the great Londoner whose name she bears, with perhaps a snatch from his works. It would be pleasant to read Chaucer's " Yonge Fresshe Folkes." I peered about, but found no tablet. I descended. The solitary occupant of the cabin was a jolly mate engaged in clerical work. Him I interrogated. " I have heard," said he, " as some of the boats has tablets ; but there's none here." 298 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Shouts from above hurried me on deck. We were drawing near Nine Elms, and the pier-master was asking down the wind if any passenger wished to land. Why ? Where is Nine Elms ? What do you do when you are marooned at Nine Elms ? The mist grew denser and more fantastic. Banks and buildings seemed sceneiy in a Maeterlinck play, and the bridges looked like causeways of giants in a twilight land. Approaching one we eased in mid-stream to permit the tug Fwn/ to race past, panting, low in the water, impatient of the huge vessel she was drawing. She was followed by the Charles Lamb L.C.C. steamer. Very forlorn looked the Charles Lamb. Elia liked company. Abreast of Westminster the sun gleamed out, and I saw another black tug with her white charge against the sunset. It was but for a moment, but in that moment there flashed before me the vision that Turner had, when he immortalised The Fightimg Temiraire Tugged to her Berth at Rotherhithe to be Broken Up. That magnifi- cent picture, with all its memories, rose before me, and I visualised, against the dim towers of Westminster, Turner's sunset on the Thames, red mounting into yellow, the black tug, and the stately ship that fought under Nelson at Trafalgar. We steamed through London, and on the stone arch- way above the Temple Pier my eyes met that colossal head of Neptune — smiling, knowing, discoloured — carved in stone, watching Thames. We passed Somerset House, and at dingy Blackfriars I landed, feeling like one who steps into a new country. It seemed strange to enter a tea shop ; but the warmth was agreeable. A HOUSE IN RED LION SQUARE 299 Yes ; the voyage was worth twopence. I had been in touch with those who go down to the sea in ships. I had caught at the emotion that the poet felt when he sang : " Sweet is the scent of Baltic wood, of oak and teak and pifie. The tarry smell of oozing decks when hltxziing on the line ; Give me a ship, a long, long ship, with raking masts sky-high. And one lone star swung overhead will do to steer her byr And I had recaptured, seeing them on the grey day, visions of the eternity of art that were not soon to fade : at the beginning of my journey the waft of blue loveliness that a few devoted lovers of art gave a year or two ago to the nation ; beyond, by Rotherhithe, the splendour of Turner's sunset picture ; and midway that smiling, knowing, dis- coloured head of Neptune, carved in stone, watching Thames. A HOUSE IN RED LION SQUARE " XT is the first of the many squares, or breathing- places, that stretch westward from the City," said the Man who Knows his London. " Stand with your back to the boundary-wall of Gray's Inn, and step out towards the setting sun. But why do you want to see Red Lion Square .? " 300 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON That was my secret. About six o'clock on a sombre November evening, an hour foggy and chill, I backed against the boundary wall of Gray's Inn, and wondered where the sun was wont to set. A milk-cart rattled past. " Where's Red Lion Square.?" I shouted. Through the fog cut the answer. " Follow your nose along the passages, and you're in it." Half-way through Red Lion Passage, I remembered it was here, at a shop, " dirty and full of account-books," that Rossetti gave the order for the scrap-book that was so late in delivery. Suddenly I emerged into Red Lion Square — a little tarnished breathing-place, with tall sooty trees, hard seats, and greenless evergreens ! — and sought No. 17. There it was, dim and discoloured, a tired private house, crouching between a prosperous sponge warehouse and an alert agency for addressing envelopes. A light bvu'ned faintly in the memorable first floor, the inspiration of many pages in many books. Yes : there was the tall centre window, facing north, heightened to the ^ceiling to adapt it for use as a studio ; and within, whither I penetrated, were the old panelled walls, and the wide staircase, up which skipped, fifty years ago, William Morris, Rossetti, Bume-Jones, Ford Madox Brown ; where plodded Red Lion Mary, the serving-maid of genius, whose deeds are told in books, and whose face is perpetuated as one of the attendants in Rossetti's Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Florence. Ruskin, their " hero," came here, too, to the delight of the coterie, every Thursday. " Isn't that like a dream.?" wrote Bume-Jones. "Think of knowing Ruskin like an equal ! " But I could not see the interior of the large room on A HOUSE IN RED LION SQUARE 301 the first floor where Morris and Burne-Jones lived ; where Rossetti sat painting before his clouded days, for ever humming a tune, or crooning lines of poetry. "It is occupied by an old gentleman who is very ill," said the housekeeper. "You are quite right. Mr. Morris lived here with somebody else, whose name I have forgotten. It's a beautiful large room," she added. " You could turn a carriage and pair in it." That large first-floor room is a room of memories and of significant interest. There the modern movement in decoration, handicraft, and the love of lovely colours originated. There William Morris — poet, artist, manu- facturer, socialist, author of "The Earthly Paradise," who, as a boy of seventeen, had settled down upon a seat of the Exhibition of 1851, declining to see anything more because everything was bo " wonderfully ugly," made concrete his dreams of making modern life beautiful, and set the seal of his personality upon the world. It began, like all great movements, quite simply. That first floor was unfurnished when Morris and Burne-Jones engaged the flat in the year 1856, and proceeded to hunt Tottenham Court Road for fmrniture and decorative ac- cessories. They found nothing in shops that they could like or approve — not a chair, table, or bed ; not a cloth or paper hanging. So Morris designed the furniture they required, Burne-Jones painted the panels of the wardrobe, and Rossetti the doors and sides of the great settle. Thus began the modem movement towards beauty in design and decoration, and the planting of the seed of the firm of Morris and Company. Dim and gloomy looked No. 17, with a light dimly 302 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON burning behind the tall studio window. Busy with com- merce and carts and very indifferent to beauty looked Red Lion Square on that November night. The fog had fallen thicker. I could just see the Union Jack hanging from the clergy house of St. John's Church at the west end of the square. It was the hour of vespers. I entered. A lamp burned in the chancel, a few lights pierced the fog wreaths, darkness hid the roof and the faces of the congregation — two lonely women. From a side chapel I heard the drone of the ancient and consolatory invita- tion : " Wherefore I pray and beseech you, as many as are here present, to accompany me with a pm-e heart and humble voice unto the throne of the heavenly grace. . . ." The immemorial words rose and rolled through the Gothic church, that upward-streaming Gothic, the romance of architecture, the poetry of devotion, that Pugiu, Ruskin, and Morris loved. Denser wa,s the fog when I emerged into the narrow street, thinking I would proceed by the route that Morris and Bume-Jones followed when they set out to seek furniture in the Tottenham Court Road. But all was changed. I saw only a brand new electric power station, the dynamos intolerably active, and a few steps farther found — Kingsway. Amid these terrific material changes the immemorial invitation I had heard in the Gothic church still lingered like the cadence of fine music re- membered in a silent hour. I remembered, too, a passage that Burne-Jones, recalling the time in Red Lion Square, wrote long, long afterwards : " There was a year in which I think it never rained nor clouded, but was blue summer from Christmas to Christmas, and London streets glittered, THE BROTHERHOOD 303 and it was always morning, and the air sweet and full of bells." THE BROTHERHOOD ^OME sixty years ago three young men met in a London studio, and decided to be — themselves. Incidentally they formed a society, the name of which was to be kept a profound secret. Troops of young men had done that before. Troops have done it since. Why, then, has the name of that society or brotherhood, lived ? Why have countless books been written on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.'' Why did artistic London flock to the Galleries where the life-work of Mr. Holman Hunt was displayed ? Because those three young men happened to be men of genius. It did not matter in the slightest whether their sympathies were with the painters who lived before Raphael, or with those who lived after him. Had they called themselves pre-Adamite, they would have painted just as well and made as great a mark in the world. Others joined them, but those others never rivalled the brilliant Three. Their names were Rossetti, MiUais, and Holman Hunt. Rossetti, poet, painter, and mystic, was the man of ideas, the dreamer, a source of inspiration to the brother- hood, an intellectual wanderer, who could no more be con- trolled by the bonds of a society than a bird by a fence built around its nest. He roamed off, writing and painting beautiful things, always his own wayward, gifted self. 304 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON The history of Millais is nearer to us. One wonders if he, the greatest of the Fre-Raphaelites, really felt the stirrings of the movement, seeing that in after years he cast off the P.R.B. ideals like an old cloak. To his companions it was for evermore skin and sinew and life's blood. But Millais ! Was the real man he who painted The Blind Girl and Ophelia, or he who painted Speak! Speak ! and Bubbles ? The most accomplished painter of them all, the finest workman, he tired of the trammels, followed other gods, and became the most popular painter of his time, and President of the Royal Academy. He, too, was himself. Mr. Holman Hunt, also, is vigorously himself. But, unlike the companions of his youth, he has never wavered. His art ideals and his practice of them are the same to-day as they were sixty years ago. Schools of painting have arisen, new men and new methods have budded and blossomed, Paris has opened her arms to the art students of the world, the character of exhibitions has utterly changed, but Mr. Holman Hunt has not stirred a hair's breadth from his path. He is like some old grey river which flows to-day as it flowed a thousand years ago. In 1857 he made a drawing of The Lady of Shalott for an edition of Tennyson's poems. His magnificent, be- wildering, erudite, symbolistic picture of The Lady of Shalott was only finished four years ago. The design is virtually the same as the drawing made in 1857. The idea that presented itself to him then was the idea that he worked out in the twentieth century. This picture will take you an hour to absorb and understand, Indeed, it needs a guide. THE BROTHERHOOD 305 The advanced wing of criticism has cried persistently that painting must have nothing to do with literature. Mr. Holman Hunt is deaf to all such commands. Every picture he has painted is inextricably mingled with a literary motive. His masterpiece, The Scapegoat, illus- trates one of the best known and one of the most haunting scenes in literature. I defy any one, whether he be advanced critic, Sunday-school teacher, or weary gentleman of the Press who has seen everything, to look at this picture unmoved. The literary motive and expert painting unite. Take another of his masterpieces, Tlie Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. No Paris-trained modern could draw better than this. I doubt if any living man could ge^ the sparkling quality of the Saviour's robe, or the sense of race in the faces of the Hebrews seated in this court of the Temple. Certainly none but Mr. Holman Hunt could have given to the scene the air of deep sincerity that pervades it, the certainty that it happened thus and in no other way. And for sheer beauty look at the sheep in sunlight in the little picture called Strayed Sheep. But Mr. Holman Hunt's work is not always on this high level. He ever aimed high, but he did not always hit the mark. His picture. The Beloved, owned by the King, is almost repulsive; many of his portraits are unattractive ; the limbs of the children in The Triumph of the Innocents have the muscles of giants ; May Morning on Magdalen Tower is positively ugly ; The Distribution of Holy Fire in the Church of the Sepulchre, Jerusalem, is a nightmare of con- fusion ; there is no atmosphere in any of his pictures ; the colour is often harsh ; details are painted with the same strenuousness as the important passages — and yet what an 306 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON amazing achievement it is ! What a life's work ! In an age of doubts he has been faithful to his convictions and ideals. I like to recall a certain story — hovir the owner of one of his early pictures removed the frame and found scrawled in boyish handwriting, in letters a quarter of a century old, the words, " Neither, O Lord, pass me by." WINGS AND STARS ^U"HEN Gladstone wrote to Burne-Jones offering him a baronetcy, his first trouble after accepting the honour was the choice of arms and a motto. " I don't sup- pose I have any," muttered the painter, remembering, and proud of the fact, that his father (whom he describes as " a very poetical little fellow, tender-hearted and touching, quite unfit for the world into which he had been pitched ") had been a Birmingham carver and gilder. So he must choose his own arms and motto. And he chose Wings and Stars, with the motto, Sequar et attmgam. That choice was like Burne-Jones. He could never have been anything but what he was, the painter of Xing' Cophetua, Love Among the Ruins, and The Briar Rose. He loved one vision only — the interior vision ; he liked one kind of painting only — the pictures by the old Italituis, works by Rossetti and those who were of their kinship. For all that great modern school, so daring, so ebullient — ^impressionism that dates from Turner; " plein air " painting ; the wind blowing, and the rain wetting that dates from Constable — he cared nothing. The modem movement did not exist for him. His heart WINGS AND STARS 307 was with Fra Angelico in the 'convent of S. Mark at Florence, and with the early painters of the Rhine Valley — ^those mystic, nameless masters. He did not think of becoming a painter until he was twenty-three, because " I hated the kind of stuff that was going on then." Not until he saw the works of Fra Angelico and Rossetti did he discover that he liked painting. He was really a mediaeval student, with a passion for illuminating manu- scripts. And he had all the recluse's power of withdraw- ing into the fastnesses of his own mind. Certain ancient pictures set him on fire ; he was always homesick for Italy ; art that had not mediaevalism in it left him cold ; the system of exhibiting pictures for sale in galleries was repugnant to him. For success he cared little ; but misfortune or sorrow in others always drew his sympathy. He grudged the drowsy, sleepy parts of long poems, but loved "little things, not many lines long, that make me tingle every time I say them." Conquest, Imperialism, the competition of the market- place were anathema to him ; and this dreamer, such is the irony of life, was Mr. Rudyard Kipling's uncle. We know what be thought of his nephew's " Plain Tales from the Hills." But we have yet to learn what the author of " Stalky and Co." thinks of The Merciful Knight Who Forgave His Enemy. I never walk through Bloomsbury without remembering that the marigolds in that haunting picture were painted from a garden in Russell Square. Like all true artists, he was modest about his work. " How poor and faint my beginnings were — a httle twitter at dawn." At thirty he could write : " I work daily at Cophetua and his maid. I torment myself every day — 308 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER ON I never learn a bit how to paint " ; but he did learn how to paint in his own circumscribed way, supremely well, and he learnt how to live. Sequa/r et attmgam. Wings and Stars. MYSTERY IN MARBLE A UGUSTUS SAINT GAUDENS was never common- -^^ place. Like Rodin, he was able to quicken his material to wonder, mystery, and pathos ; but some hinder- ing gravity of temperament, stern and sane, restrained him from attempting the extremes of emotion that Rodin has surprised sculpture into betraying. Perhaps the work by Saint Gaudens that would make the most universal appeal, if all could see it, is the seated figure called variously Grief, or Death, or The Peace of God, in the Rock Creek Cemetery at Washington. This " modem expression of Nirvana — a soul returned upon itself" — ^has a setting in accordance with its eternal significance. Hidden in a mass of evergreens in a secluded part of the cemetery, beyond paths or guide-boards, is this bronze figure of a woman seated on a roughly carved block against a great slab of granite. She is draped from head to feet ; her eyes are closed ; her chin rests upon her right hand ; she is dreaming the eternal dream, and the closed eyes perceive futurity. There is no inscription on the monument. It is known merely as " a memorial to a Mrs. Adams, a woman who lived and died." Even in the photograph, this figure, which has something of the unfathomable mystery of Leon- ardo's Mmia Lisa, arrests and lingers in the memory. MYSTERY IN MARBLE 309 It stands as a poignant and compelling example of Tolstoi's definition of art — ^the communication of emotion from the artist to the observer. What Saint Gaudens felt when he made this strange, contented symbol of grief that looks beyond, is passed on to us. Some nameless person wrote of her : " She appears to know all there is to know, and is a positive and negative to every sentiment one can suggest concerning the unknown." DECEMBER. DECEMBER A DREAM-HAUNTED ROOM TTITALK north, south, east, or west for many hours and you will reach a point where trivial cottage- villas are rising on the outskirts of green fields ; there London begins, for the moment. But I like to think that her real beginning is at her great gateway on the Thames — the Tower Bridge. There is no place in London from which that gateway can be seen more vividly, yet as in a dream, than from the bay-window of the King's House in the Tower. Far beneath flows the grey and sullen river, and to the left rises the Great Bridge, towering above the vessels that have converged from all the world over to the heart of London. In that historic chamber in the King's House I stood peering out through December mists upon .the gateway to the City. No sound penetrated those thick walls. The tugs and steamers passed noiselessly ; the sleet pattered on the window-panes ; now and then a figure huddling from the bitter wind hurried along the parapet above the river ; and, in the warm room, only the crackling of the fire broke the stillness. I was alone with my dreams, and with the ghosts of those who said good-bye to life when they entered the Tower : 314 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON " Uii peu de rive Et puis — boryour ! " Small chance was there of forgetting them, for along the wall of the room is a row of portraits, with the axe, ghastly symbol, engraved beneath. Youth and age swept into eternity because chopping the head from the body happened to be the penalty for what they had done, or left undone, in England in those shameful days. Three queens were among the killed, and brave men and women, who bared their comely heads to the block without a tremor. Those were the days of faith, when death was held but as an incident in the soul's progression. What was the axe to a man like Philip Howard, son of the Duke of Norfolk, who believed, and believing cried, " The more suffering for Christ in this world, the more glory with Christ in the next " ? He and they kept the undiminished gladness, the undeparted dream. She too, the Lady Jane Grey, who, like Jenifer, had many dreams, but they all came to one dream. On this same grey river she looked during her imprisonment in the Tower, seeing one day her husband led forth to execution, and hearing, as she gazed, the hammering pi'eparations for her own scaffold. Seventeen years of age, she who had been ten days a Queen, and one hundred and twenty-three days a prisoner, made a good end, saying at the last, " I die a true Christian woman " : " Unpen (Tespoir, Et puis — bonsoir.^ Hope and a dream ! One wonders what were the A DREAM-HAUNTED ROOM 315 thoughts of this young creatui-e hustled, so much against her will, to a throne ; led forth on a dazed day to the block, and laid to rest with the others in the grim chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, within the precincts of the Tower. That quick brain had absorbed so much during its seven- teen years of traffic with the world. The page of her life in heavy encyclopedias is like a flower blossoming from the mortar of an old wall. She endeared herself to her tutor, Aylmer, afterwards Bishop of London, by her gentleness ; not only did she excel in needlework and music, she had also thoroughly mastered Latin, Greek, French,, and Italian, besides acquiring skill in Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic. This strange girl found a refuge from home unhappiness in reading Demosthenes and Plato. Her parents failed to understand the ways of this great-grand- daughter of Henry VH., for she was living a life within herself, seeing clearly, but misunderstood. She submitted patiently to the " pinches, nips, and bobs " with which her parents punished her petty faults. Roger Ascham understood her, and one of the ephemerals of history which wiU remain when battles are forgotten is that story told by Roger : how one day, when the others were hunting, he found the Lady Jane reading Plato in the original. What was she reading from the lips of the wise Socrates ? This.? " Never fear, Simmias and Cebes, that a soul which has been thus nurtured and has had these pursuits, will at her departure from the body be scattered and blown away by the winds and be nowhere and nothing." Or was it this ? 316 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON " Yes," replied Socrates ; " and yet all men will agree that God, and the essential form of life, and the immortal in general will never perish." Or this? " But then, O my friends, if the soul is really immortal, what care should be taken of her, not only in respect of the portion of time which is called life, but of eternity." These are dreams ; but that room in the King's House looking out upon the spot where London begins, and where the ten days' Queen, and student of Plato, ended, is a place of dreams. Her face rose before me as de Heere painted her, clad in the black dress with ermine trimmings that she wore at her execution. It is an oval portrait, a small thing surrounded by kings and queens, hanging on the topmost floor of the National Portrait Grallery. She is fair, and looks older than her years. The ample, tidy hair is light brown, with a space of parting showing beneath the plain black coif; the eyes are of a darker brown, reflective, content, one might almost say amused at a world that had no power to control, or even to touch, the hidden life of the spirit. The brow is high and un- ruffled, holding thoughts that the closed lips for ever retain. Then twilight came, the vision passed, and the Tower Bridge became one with the shadows. I turned to go, and as I moved towards the door, this dream-haunted room made a last appeal. I saw over the fireplace, above the leaping flames, this sentence, carved by some for- gotten hand, in the woodwork, " Vivre sans Reve, qu'est- ce?" TOYS, PEAS, AND A STAR 317 TOYS, PEAS, AND A STAR Tj^UMES of incense filled the Hall. The Morality play was ending. A red curtain had been drawn before the altar concealing penitent Youth from our eyes. Riot, Luxury, and Pride, having been discomforted, were now changing their Queen Mary costumes in the dressing- rooms, and wondering whether the omnibuses would be running through the fog. Charity and Humility, modestly triumphant on a darkened stage, were looking very beau- tiful against sa4 tapestries. Then " Amen ! Amen ! " was intoned. The hushed audience stirred. " The Interlude of Youth " was over. On tip-toe I crept to where a child of my acquaintance, a little dazed, was sitting with her mother. The child was silent. It was her first play. Wonderful things she had heard about the delights of the theatre, and now she had seen her first play. I was a little disappointed too, because in this Morality there were no shepherds watching their flocks by night, or sheep-folds, or superb kings wandering about the country, longing to rid themselves of superb crowns. " You must let me take you to a pantomime," I said to the child. But she did not respond. Once bitten, twice shy. She knew now what a play was like. Her troubled eyes and white frowning brow conveyed that intimation. So I changed my approach of attack to her affections, and said: " Look here, now ! I'll walk to St. Paul's Churchyard, 318 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON and I'll walk close to the gutters all the way, and every penny Christmas toy I see, I'll buy for you." The day was won. Her eyes danced ; she clapped her hands. Ludgate Hill in December was then still the flourish- ing market for penny toys, so thither I turned, pro- ceeding by Great Turnstile to Lincoln's Inn Fields ; but there the fog was thick and blinding, and there I twisted and doubled like a hare in a quarry-pit. Three distant flaring naphtha torches drew me away from the Fields into side streets — ^three torches held aloft by three keen coster-boys standing in line upon the kerb, who offered, in xmison, to conduct me anywhere. Withdrawing from their clamour, I watched the effect of the flames leaping upwards through the fog, illuminating a poster of " Peter Pan " on the hoarding background. There was the nestling red-roofed town, stars above, in a clear sky, and the white road winding up over the hill, with one star beckoning the pilgrim. As I looked there rose before me a hill-side on the borders of Kent and Sussex, just the place that " Peter Pan " would know, where falls not fog, or soot, or any gloom, nor any torch bums blindingly. So I called one of the vociferous boys and said, "Cannon Street Station, by way of Ludgate Hill." As it was comparatively clear in Ludgate Hill, I dis- missed the link-boy and paused before the first gutter penny-toy merchant, who was stationed just beneath the railway arch. I bought a draught-board and pieces for a penny ; then a papier-mache champagne-bottle, life-size ; a trombone ; a bunch of violets that turns into a long blue snake when you blow upon the flowers ; a complete TOYS, PEAS, AND A STAR 319 set of kitchen-furniture for a doll's house ; a battalion of tin soldiers, and a bladder that becomes a flying machine. Then I stopped — ^weary and laden. The pavement of Ludgate Hill was almost impassable. All the world seemed to be buying penny toys, and no one was ordered to move on. Between the railway arch and St. Paul's I counted one hundred and sixty-one men, women, and children standing in the gutter, shoulder to shoulder, offering their multifarious wares. There seemed to be as many merchants in the gutter on the other side, and I saw only one policeman. " Would you not call this obstructing the traffic ? " I asked modestly. " They'll all move off by Christmas," he answered genially. Upwards I walked, through the din and mirk, reflecting uneasily that if I kept my compact with that child I must procure at least six sacks and hire at least two four-wheel cabs. Beyond this present trouble floated the comforting thought that soon I should be climbing that hill in Kent, beneath a clear sky, onwards towards the beckoning star — just such a Star of Hope as led the shepherds and the kings to the door of Eager Heart's cottage on a clear frosty night. On such a night the Be£u:ded King, with the fillet of the philosopher about his brow, wrapped his mantle around the cold body of the shepherd, and envied the Initiate Dead. Why, ages ago, that might have happened on the very spot where St. Paul's now stands. Here shepherds once watched their flocks by night, gazed up in wonder at the stars, and knew that far below in the eastern valley, beyond the sheep runs and the moors and the lagoons, was home — in the mud huts about Tower Hill, or by the western ford of Westminster. Those shepherds THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON knew the heavens, and chose the star of their destiny. We choose our star — ^the pilgrim's star — which moves not east or west. Meanwhile I had barely time to catch the train for Kent, and between me and that hill rose the face of an expectant child, the mouths of six empty sacks, and the bare roofs of two four-wheel cabs. Life is not easy even for the pilgrim with good intentions. I recalled the story of two pilgrim ancestors who, for penance, were ordered to walk to the Holy Land with peas in their shoes. One parf'ormed the journey without difficulty, but the other was crippled. The sufferer asked his companion why he was so nimble, and he answered, "I boiled my peas." Should I boil my peas ? Before Queen Anne's statue I paused irresolute. IN POSTMAN'S PARK TT is not a park, and I have never seen a postman loiter- -^ ing there, or elsewhere, for the matter of that. One no more expects to see a dallying postman than a dawdling fire-engine, or a reflective evening newspaper cycle-boy. Postman's Park is merely one of those sad little graveyard survivals in the heart of London which have been spared because they are so small, and because our dead were laid there. Their tombstones have been piled reverently against the boundary wall ; hard paths have been made, hard seats provided, and dingy shrubs. All day the City traffic dins and surges around. Errand-boys slink in here IN POSTMAN'S PARK 321 to eat hard apples, to read " bit " papers, and sometimes to spell out the names of the unconcerned dead. Mer- chants find it a short cut from Aldersgate Street to King Edward Street, and I suppose on Sundays parishioners attend the unpretentious chiurch of St. Botolph, of which Postman's Park is the ancient churchyard, to listen to the Word, to blink before the glare of the many painted windows, and to rest their eyes on the heavy monuments to departed citizens. This orderly churchyard, this grey oasis fighting for existence, hemmed in by giant buildings, is rightly called Postman's Park, for, were it not for the blind wall of St. Botolph's Church, the graveyard would be as encompassed by Post Office buildings as is the bull-ring by spectators on a gala day at Seville. The windows of the Postmaster-General's department stare down, like so many eyes, upon the graveyard, and soon more stone walls will surround it, more window-eyes will peer down upon the tombs and blackened shrubs, for already additional Post Office buildings have risen on the site of old Christ's Hospital. In increasing numbers wayfsu-ers will visit this quarter, not to see the Post Office, but to visit the humble cloister that extends across Postman's Park, to read some simple legends engraved on a row of tablets, and to think of the great Englishman, half painter, half teacher, who inspired the idea of these tablets. Here is the one place in all London where the heroic deeds of obsciure citizens are commemorated. Their com- memoration dates back only to the year 1863, and their number is few ; but the tablets sweep along the whole S22 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON length of the cloister wall, and occasionally a few silent figures visit the cloister and read the names and deeds of the unforgotten who, to save another, esteemed their own life well lost. From fire, from flood, from perils on the railway and in streets, from runaway horses, from scald- ings, from diphtheria, these men and women delivered their comrades. In the middle of the tablets stands a small statue of G. F. Watts. Beneath is this inscription : " In memory of G. F. Watts, who, desiring to honour heroic self-sacrifice, placed these records here." Above the cloister is engraved in bright letters his favourite motto : " The utmost for the highest." So vivid is the lettering that a Post Ofiice clerk with good eyes could almost read it from his high window. I sat in the cloister one chill afternoon in Decembei*, watching the merchants huiTying through to King Edward Street, the errand boys eating apples, and the traffic in Little Britain passing noisily on the other side of the churchyard railings. What a piece of work is London ! Why, it was in Little Britain that Izaac Walton met Dr. Robert Sanderson " in sad-coloured clothes, and, God knows, far from being costly." It began to rain, you will remember, and the fisherman and the doctor stood up in a corner under a penthouse for shelter, and finally adjourned to a cleanly house, " where we had . bread, cheese, ale, and a fire for our money." It was in Little Britain, then the chief book-market of London, that " Paradise Lost " was published without making the smallest commotion. It was in Little Britain that the Earl of Dorset, browsing among the books for sale, dipped into " Paradise Lost " and bought it. He THE PAINTER OF SILENCES 323 sent it to Dryden, and Dryden said, " This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too." In the yard of Christ's Hospital, just over the way, very early on dark, winter mornings years and years ago, just before each Christmas, ancient knifeboard omnibuses of London would rumble into the school precincts. The sergeant stands with lantern and lists calling the names of the hatless boys, and packing them within the omnibuses for Paddington, Euston, or Waterloo. Then he waves his lantern, slams the door, and the omnibus disappears in the dark for Paddington, Euston, or Waterloo. Some of those boys are now perhaps aldermen. It was in Aldersgate Street A voice cried a command. It was the hour for closing Postman's Park. THE PAINTER OF SILENCES TN Western Cornwall, where I am spending the remnant of the old year, we were surprised to read that England had been under snow. While Hampstead and Highgate were tobogganing on the northern heights I met a small Cornish boy of my acquaintance walking out to the violet farms at Lelant, with a basket slung on his arm. He hoped to bring it back full of violets for the decoration of his mother's dinner-table ; but he returned disconsolate, flowerless, and snow-powdered. For that very afternoon the heavens began to pretend to snow in Western Cornwall. Not real snow, but enough to make the children bom since 1891, 324 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON the year of the last great fall, understand what a land wrapped in a white mantle is like. The next morning, after a night of great winds and raging seas, the distant hills were sprinkled with white, and the herring fishermen, returning home, slithered through a slush that had certainly been snow in the small hours. Rounding a comer I was almost knocked over by a painter, burdened with easel and canvas, who was hurry- ing to the station. " Steady ! " I cried ; but as he only smiled, I shouted, " Where are you going .'' " " To Lost- withiel," he answered ; " there's three feet of snow in the valley." It's an ill wind, &c. He has made a reputation as a painter of snow. His chance had returned. He was delighted to stand out in the open and freeze till dusk for the sake of covering three or four panels with studies of Lostwithiel under snow. I knew the kind of picture he would produce for the next Academy from these panel studies — a large, capable, masterly canvas, that will look well on the wall of a public gallery. Thinking of him and the misery he would endure that day at Lostwithiel in the pursuit of excellence in his profession, I turned into the little Arts Club, sat before the stove, and turned the pages of an album of photographs of modem pictures. I knew what I wanted. Aleis ! it was not there. I wanted to see again a reproduction of the most beautiful picture of snow that I know. It is by Henri Le Sidaner, and although it may not be literally like Chartres Cathedral, it is the impression of Chartres as Le Sidaner saw it one silent winter night THE PAINTER OF SILENCES 325 of deep snow. Having once seen this beautiful dream of Chartres, this mute mingling of fresh snow with old weathered stone, carved by men who chiselled immortal figures because their faith was boundless, I cannot forget it. Can I describe it.' Ko. It is too simple, yet too subtle. Here are the externals : Day is fading ; a few windows glow with lights, the reflections fall on the snow. It is a picture of silence ; of to-day and centuries ago ; all white and still outside ; and within those ancient walls the lighted candles and the moan of man's immemorial petition. Le Sidaner is entirely himself. He belongs to no school. So individual is he that some call him monotonous. One might as well call twilight monotonous. This, however, is certain — that a picture by him is always beautiful. He is the Maeterlinck of the painting world, a practical visionary adrift in the twentieth century. The hard, ugly facts of life fade before him or he does not see them. His favourite hour is the half-light between the close of day and night, when the lighted lamps throw their reflections on water, snow, or rain-drenched pave- ments. He sees the world through half-closed eyes in a blur of beautiful mystery, and sights that you have seen a dozen times witliout emotion become, under the magic of his brush, as haunting as a favourite poem. He has lingered in Venice, and in seven large pictvu-es he has given his impressions of the city on the lagoon at twilight. Venice herself can be very disappointing. I have seen her in fog, rain, and as ugly as a biting wind can make her. In these seven pictures she is eternally lovely. You can hardly believe that it is a city built by man. 326 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON You sit and gaze. The vision of this beauty-intoxicated Frenchman becomes yours; the walls lift, and you are dreaming in Venice. Yet the pencil drawings and sketches that he made for these pictures are as careful and con- scientious as students' performances. Only by such spade- work was he able to suggest the blurred brilliancy of these visions of Venise du CHpuscule a la Nuit. Facts are contained in his pictures, but under the magic of his brush they become effects. His themes have been painted a hundred times — twilight and lighted windows, with old houses rising above slow-moving rivers eloquent with reflections ; fishing-boats in harbour, with again the lighted windows, the huddling, mysterious houses, and the myriad scintillations on the water. Yet they are like no other pictures. They move the emotions ; they call up mystery ; they ask questions. Such a temperament should ignore the human element. When he does introduce figures, such as the group of girls in Le Printemps, or the pale and shadowy figure in Bruges la Morte, Le Sidaner almost fails. The figures intrude. They are a discord in the vision of his eye. But there is nothing to break the exquisite harmony of La Table au Clair de Lune — a table covered with a white cloth set in a garden flooded with summer moonlight. The silver coffee-pot, the white cups, the vase of flowers, the two white chairs pushed away from the table, the dim house in the background with its faintly illuminated win- dows, imply humanity ; but it was the moonlight relating the tones of the white objects one to another that Le Sidaner felt. The moon, not man, was here the theme of this painter, who makes the intangible seem real. THE OLD QUEST 327 Born in Mauritius, he is a blend of Breton and Creole — the result a Le Sidaner. Does this ancestry explain any- thing to students of heredity ? THE OLD QUEST T HAVE just re-read « The Hearts of Men," by Mr. H. Fielding. It is, in its way, a rare, an exceptional book. It is sincere from cover to cover, the work of a lonely, brooding, introspective, but not unhappy man, on whom the riddle and mystery of existence has pressed heavily, and whose inner life-task has been to discover what he believes, and what is the meaning of the world'^s many religions. It is the search for a new faith, by a man " who did not find it, because he knew not what he sought." With this author the child was father to the man. As a boy he was of those (unenviable, unhappy few !) who take things hardly, who must for ever be asking why, who are not content with conventional theories from earthly elders, who will not be fobbed off with specious explanations. The curious, rebellious mind of this child was not dulled by contact with the world, as so often happens. The same questionings pursued him as a man, and it almost might be said that Providence or Fate worked with him, so that he might win through, helped by an exceptional environment, to his goal. Not for this seeker after God the distracting life of cities, competition, and the exhausting struggle to pay the way. His career sent him to the East, whence has come " all our light," 328 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER ON the birthplace of religions, the home of those whom Max Miiller has called " the most spiritual race the world has ever known," the country, conquered, and yet in vital matters all unconquered, by us, where " they carry their religion about with them," where " they are proud of it," where "they desire all men to know it." There, in a house half-way up a mountain side, he lived many years, much alone, with his books, his thoughts, and the marvel of the dawn, continually asking of himself and of nature : " What is the truth of things ? what do you mean ? And I — what do I mean ? What is the secret of it all ?" Old questions ! The libraries of the world are dark with books that have attempted to answer them. Shall we listen to this inquirer for a little ? He comes with good credentials. Many quiet lives have profited by his former book, " The Soul of a People." That was an 'attempt to understand a people, the Burmese; to understand a religion, that of Buddha. But he could not rest in Buddhism, although its rule of Law — unalterable, un- changeable — known by the Buddhist " long before our scientific men found it in the stars," held him with a firmer grasp than any other religion. He must pursue his Quest. It is a simple narrative, the work of one who feels rather than of one who thinks : mystical if you like, never philosophical. The sentences are short, the style candid as a child's face. He has nothing new to tell. Who, outside science, has ? In the course of his inquiry tradi- tion and authority are gi-acefully returned to their graves ; creeds and other inventions of subtle minds are gently dis- carded ; and in the hearts of men and women alive to-day. THE OLD QUEST 329 whose personal religion, whose daily conduct of life, rises above their creeds, he finds his answer. But his path was long and tortuous. Let us follow him a little. I pass over his boyhood, and the agony he endured from being unable to reconcile the week-day code as shown in the daily life of a public school and the Sunday code as taught in chapel and at prayers ; I pass the awakening that came from reading the " Origin of Species " and the " Descent of Man," and come to the ego who is, for better or worse, committed to his Quest. It will not be denied. He must find his way or perish. Surely, he reflects, not an impossible task. In this Empire of ours all the great religions are to be found. " It is the home of Brahminism, and of the mystical forms of Hinduism. There are more Mohammedans here than under the Sultan of Roum. There are the Parsees here, fugitives long ago from Persia on account of their faith, the only sun- worshippers who are left. There are Jews who came here no one can tell how long ago ; there are Christians who date back may-be eighteen centuries ; there are Armenians and Arabs." He bought shelves of books, and read them intently, hope always lurking in the pages. Books on Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Judaism, Parseeism, Confucianism, Jainism he i-ead, and on many other strange faiths. But most of all he read about Buddhism. Several years of his life were thus spent. Then he collected certain ideas from various faiths, correlated and compared them ; and, after endless labour, he had advanced no farther, I gather, than the conception that " God is the Big Man who causes things." One by one this 330 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON Solitary rejected the faiths of the world, till there were left to him but two — Christianity and Buddhism — and these in time went the way of the others. He found neither in Christ nor in Buddha the models men follow, " because men are sure that, though there be truth in their teachings, yet it is not all the truth ; though there be beauty, yet are there other beauties as great, nay greater than these." And so, by slow degrees, always simplifying, he began to feel his way towards his goal, getting his first glimpse the day he realised that " God arose, never out of reason, always out of instinct." Finally, he turns away from the creeds that the spiritual geniuses of the world have formulated, puts his books aside, and steps down into the life around him, saying : " Man and his necessities are the eternal truth, and all his religions are but framed by himself to minster to his needs. I will now go to those who know because they know, not because they think. My books shall be the hearts of men." There Part I. of "The Hearts of Men" ends. In Part II. he tells how, following this clue, he found the path that led to peace. He had learnt "never to be deceived by theories or professions " ; that " the desire for immortality is one of the strongest of all the emotions; but the ideal which the theologian offers to the believer to fulfil his desire has no attraction. The more it is defined the less any one wants it. . . . Dogmas and creeds are not religion. . . . Never mind what the creeds say ; watch what the believers do. . . . Who are the happy men and women in the world ? They are the people who have religion. . . . Religion is not what you say, but what you feel ; not what you think,* but what THE OLD QUEST 331 you do. . . . The creeds are but theories to explain re- ligion. . . . No matter where you go, no matter what the faith is called, if you have the hearing ear, if your heart is in unison with the heart of the world, you will always hear the same song. . . . Religion arises from instincts. . . . There is no ' evidence ' in religion ; you either believe it or you don't. . . . The great doers have always been religious, the great thinkers rarely so. . . . The faiths are all brothers, all born of the same mystery. . . . They all come from that fount whence springs the life of the world." Which is to echo St. Paul's words that the Spirit of God dwells in every man, the Spirit of that one " God who is above all, and through all, and in you all." Many are certainly inclining to some such simple faith, carrying with it simple rules of conduct. It is the business of living in this world, the duty of cheerfulness, the neces- sity of discipline in pleasure as well as in work, with which men are at last beginning to concern themselves. Some are even beginning to ask whether they desire immortality. The following questions, not long ago, were sent out ' broadcast by the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research : I. Would you prefer (a) to live after " death," or (6) not ? II. (a) If I. (a), do you desire a future life whatever the conditions may be ? (b) If not, what would have to be its character to make the prospect seem tolerable ? Would you, e.g., be content with a life more or less like your present life ? THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON (c) Can you say what elements in life (if any) are felt by you to call for its perpetuity ? III. Can you state why you feel in this way, as regards Questions I. and II. ? IV. Do you now feel the question of a future life to be of urgent importance to your mental comfort ? V. V. Have your feelings on Questions I., II., and IV. undergone change .'' If so, when and in what ways ? VI. (a) Would you like to know for certain about the future life, or (b) would you prefer to leave it a matter of faith ? A sign of the times. It is the life that tells. Who . chooses a friend or a clerk for his creed .'' It is a man or woman's religion that makes and holds friendships, religion being (it is Mr. Fielding's definition) " the recog- nition and cultivation of our highest emotions, of our more beautiful instincts, of all that we know is best in us." In the outward expression of his own hardly-won inner life man rises above his creed. The Newman who lives is not the subtle dialectician of the " Apologia," but the man who wrote : " One secret act of self-denial, one sacrifice of inclination to duty, is worth all the mere good thoughts, warm feelings, passionate prayers, in which idle people indulge themselves"; the Paul who holds the hearts of men is not the Paul of the "there are also celestial bodies,, and bodies teiTestrial," but the human heart which broke through the fine meshes that the intel- lect had been weaving, in that great outburst : " Though THE YEAR ENDS 333 I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, . . ." THE YEAR ENDS A S the looker-on was musing the fire burned ! Being the last night of the old year, he allowed himself the joyless luxury of retrospection. Everything favoured sentiment — the lonely hearth of the hotel coffee-room, the chimes of the village bells, the companionable cat that had curled itself upon his knees, and the song that a party of North-country singing-men were chanting in an adjoining room. It was that haunting Canadian Boat Song : " Listen to me, as when ye heard our fathei S'mg long ago the song of other shores — Listen to me, and then in chorus gather All your deep voices as ye pull your oars!" The chorus did gather all those deep voices ; but when the voice of the singer dropped tenderly at that line, " And we in dreams behold the Hebrides," the looker-on saw — the Hebrides. Then the vision passed and he was left alone with the dying year. He trimmed the lamp, coaxed the fire, and opened the book that he had chosen as the companion of his vigil. It was the last work of F. W. H. Myers, that eager, tireless soul who spent his life endeavouring to peep behind the folds of an impene- trable curtain, thinking he had seen the Unseen, when all he saw was a glimmer of Time's candle reflected on the raiment of Eternity. 384 THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON The looker-on read, sighed, and was made happy by the beauty of the dead man's thought ; but when he came to this verse he closed his eyes and dreamed : " / wailed as one who scarce can he forgiven, But the good God had ^tyfrom afar. And saw me desolate, and hung in heaven The signal of a starJ" The night was very still, and imsought thoughts roamed through the dreams of the looker-on ; but although his body drowsed, he himself chased the spirits of the Dead. He walked, in fancy, the stages of the Via Mystica, along the worn paths of Purgation, Illumination, Contemplation ; he sat in the meadow with^the Quietists, and mingled with the souls of those who at last had escaped the ache of resisting the Divine call. Then silence — sleep, peace, and awakening to a New Year. Printed by Ballantyne &° Co. Limited Tavistock Street LondoD I