Masques & Phases Part 9

is pure Viollet-le-Duc, I am a.s.sured by a competent authority. A more serious error of Pater's, for it is adjectival, not a fact, occurs in _Apollo in Picardy_--'_rebellious_ ma.s.ses of black hair.' This is the only instance in the _parfait prosateur_, as Bourget called him, of a cliche worthy of the 'Spectator.' Then it is possible to differ from Mr.

Benson in his criticism of the _Imaginary Portraits_ (the four fair ovals in one volume), surely Pater's most exquisite achievement after the _Renaissance_. _Gaston_ is the failure Pater thought it was, and _Emerald Uthwart_ is frankly very silly, though Mr. Benson has a curious tenderness for it. One sentence he abandons as absolute folly. The grave psychological error in the story occurs where the surgeon expresses compunction at making the autopsy on Uthwart because of his perfect anatomy. Surely this would have been a source of technical pleasure and interest to a surgeon, much as a b.u.t.terfly-collector is pleased when he has murdered an unusually fine species of lepidoptera. Speaking myself as a vivisector of some experience, I can confidently affirm that a well- bred golden collie is far more interesting to operate upon than a mongrel sheep-dog. Nor can I comprehend Mr. Benson's blame of _Denys l'Auxerrois_ as too extravagant and even unwholesome, when the last quality, so obvious in _Uthwart_, he seems to condone.

Again, _Marius the Epicurean_ is a failure by Pater's own high standard: you would have imagined it seemed so to Mr. Benson.

Dulness is by no means its least fault. In scheme it is not unlike _John Inglesant_; but how lifeless are the characters compared with those of Shorthouse. Both books deal with philosophic ideas and sensations; the incidents are merely ill.u.s.trative and there is hardly a pretence of sequence. In the historical panorama which moves behind _Inglesant_, there are at least 'tactile' values, and seventeenth-century England is conjured up in a wonderful way; how accurately I do not know. In _Marius_ the background is merely a backcloth for mental _poses plastiques_. You wonder, not how still the performers are, but why they move at all. Marcus Aurelius, the delightful Lucian, even Flavian, and the rest, are busts from the Capitoline and Naples museums. Their bodies are make-believe, or straw from the loft at 'White Nights.' Cornelius, Mr. Benson sorrowfully admits, is a Christian prig, but Marius is only a pagan chip from the same block. John Inglesant is a prig too, but there is blood in his veins, and you get, at all events, a Vandyck, not a plaster cast. The magnificent pa.s.sages of prose which vest this image make it resemble the _ex voto_ Madonnas of continental churches--a shrine in literature but not a lighthouse.

I sometimes wonder what Pater would have become had he been a Cambridge man, and if the more strenuous University might have _forced_ him into greater sympathy with modernity; or if he had been born in America, as he nearly was, and Harvard acted as the benign stepmother of his days. Such speculations are not beyond all conjecture, as Sir Thomas Browne said. I think he would have been exactly the same.

On the occasion of Pater's lecture on Prosper Merimee, his friends gathered round the platform to congratulate him; he expressed a hope that the audience was able to hear what he said. 'We overheard you,' said Oscar Wilde. 'Ah, you have a phrase for everything,' replied the lecturer, the only contemporary who ever influenced himself, Wilde declared. How admirable both of the criticisms! Pater is an aside in literature, and that is why he was sometimes overlooked, and may be so again in ages to come. Though he is the greatest master of style the century produced, he can never be regarded as part of the structure of English prose. He is, rather, one of the ornaments, which often last, long after a structure has perished. His place will be s.h.i.+fted, as fas.h.i.+ons change. Like some exquisite piece of eighteenth-century furniture perchance he may be forgotten in the attics of literature awhile, only to be rediscovered. And as Fuseli said of Blake, 'he is d.a.m.ned good to steal from.' If he uses words as though they were pigments, and sentences like vestments at the Ma.s.s, it is not merely the ritualistic cadence of his harmonies which makes his works imperishable, but the ideas which they symbolise and evoke. Pater thinks beautifully always, about things which some people do not think altogether beautiful, perhaps; and sometimes he thinks aloud. We overhear him, and feel almost the shame of the eavesdropper.

Mr. Benson has approached Walter Pater, the man, with almost sacerdotal deference. He suggests ingeniously where you can find the self-revelation in _Gaston_ and _The Child in the House_. This is far more illuminating than the recollections of personal friends whose reminiscences are modelled on those of Captain Sumph. Mr. Humphry Ward remembers Pater only once being angry--it was in the Common Room--it was with X, an elderly man! The subject of the difference was 'modern lectures.' 'Relations between them were afterwards strained.' Mr.

Arthur Symons remembers that he intended to bring out a new volume of _Imaginary Portraits_. Fancy that! Really, when friends begin to tell stories of that kind, I begin to suspect they are trying to conceal something. Perhaps we have no right to know everything or anything about the amazing personalities of literature; but Henleys and Purcells lurk and leak out even at Oxford; and that is not the way to silence them.

Just when the aureole is ready to be fitted on, some horrid graduate (Litterae _in_humaniores) inks the statue. Antic.i.p.ating something of the kind, Mr. Benson is careful to insist on the divergence between Rossetti and Pater, and on page eighty-six says something which is ludicrously untrue. If self-revelation can be traced in _Gaston_, it can be found elsewhere. There are sentences in _Hippolytus Veiled_, the _Age of the Athletic_ _Prizemen_, and _Apollo in Picardy_, which not only explode Mr.

Benson's suggestions, but ill.u.s.trate the objections he urges against _Denys l'Auxerrois_. They are pa.s.sages where Pater thinks aloud. If Rossetti wore his heart on the sleeve, Pater's was just above the cuff, like a bangle; though it slips down occasionally in spite of the alb which drapes the hieratic writer not always discreetly.

(1906.)

SIMEON SOLOMON.

A good many years ago, before the Rhodes scholars invaded Oxford, there lingered in that home of lost causes and unpopular names, the afterglow of the aesthetic sunset. It was not a very brilliant period. Professor Mackail and Mr. Bowyer Nichols had left Balliol. Nothing was expected of either the late Sir Clinton Dawkins or Canon Beeching; and the authorities of Merton could form no idea where Mr. Beerbohm would complete his education. Names are more suggestive than dates and give less pain. Then, as now, there were 'cultured' undergraduates, and those who were very cultured indeed, read Sh.e.l.ley and burned incense, would always have a few photographs after Simeon Solomon on their walls--little notes of illicit sentiment to vary the monotony of Burne-Jones and Botticelli. When uncles and aunts came up for Gaudys and Commem., while 'Temperantia' and the 'Primavera' were left in their places, 'Love dying from the breath of l.u.s.t,' 'Antinous,' and other drawings by Solomon with t.i.tles from the Latin Vulgate, were taken down for the occasion. Views of the sister University, Cambridge took their places, being more appropriate to Uncle Parker's and Aunt Jane's tastes. More advanced undergraduates, who 'knew what things were,' possessed even originals.

Now the unfortunate artist is dead his career can be mentioned without prejudice.

Simeon Solomon was born in 1841. He was the third son of Michael Solomon, a manufacturer of Leghorn hats, and the first Jew ever admitted to the Freedom of London. The elder brother, Abraham, became a successful painter of popular subjects ('Waiting for the Verdict' and 'First and Third Cla.s.s'), and died on the day of his election to the Academy! Rebecca a sister who was also a painter, copied with success some of Millais's pictures. At the age of sixteen Simeon exhibited at the Academy, though beyond a short training at Leigh's Art School in Newman Street he was almost self-taught. He was an early and intimate friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, with whose art he had much in common, though it is only for convenience that he is included in the school. Like Whistler, he was profoundly affected by the genius of Rossetti. Racial and other causes removed him from any real affinity to the archaistic moralatarianism of Mr. Holman Hunt. For obvious reasons the Pre-Raphaelite memoirs are silent about him, but Burne-Jones was said to have maintained, in after years, 'that he was the greatest artist of us all.' Throughout the sixties Solomon was one of those black-and-white draughtsmen whose contributions to the magazines have made the period famous in English art. He found ready purchasers for his pictures and drawings, not only among the well-to-do Hebrew community, such as Dr.

Ernest Hart, his brother's brother-in-law, but with well-known Christian collectors like Mr. Leathart. He was on intimate terms with Walter Pater, of whom he executed one of the only two known portraits; and in the _Greek Studies_ will be found a graceful reference to the 'young Hebrew painter' whose 'Bacchus' at the Academy obviously contributed to the 'gem-like' flame of which we have heard so much.

In a short-lived magazine, the _Dark Blue_, of July 1871, may be found a characteristic review by Swinburne of Solomon's strange rhapsody, _A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep_, his only literary work, now a great rarity. This is the longest, and with one exception the most interesting, tribute to Solomon ever published. 'Since the first years of his early and brilliant celebrity as a young artist of high imagination, power, and promise,' Swinburne says, 'he has been at work long enough to enable us to define at least certain salient and dominant points of his genius . . . I have heard him likened to Heine as a kindred h.e.l.lenist of the Hebrews; Grecian form and beauty divide the allegiance of his spirit with Hebrew shadow and majesty.' It would be difficult to add anything further, in praise of the unfortunate artist, to the poet's eloquent eulogy of his friend's talents. An interesting piece of autobiography is afforded in the same article, where Swinburne tells us that his own poem of 'Erotion,' in the first series of _Poems and Ballads_, was written for a drawing by Simeon Solomon; and in another number of the same magazine there appeared 'The End of the Month,' to accompany a new design of Solomon's, the poem appearing later in the second series of _Poems and Ballads_. Very few English artists--not even Millais--began life with fairer prospects. Thackeray wrote in one of the 'Roundabout Papers' for 1860: 'For example, one of the pictures I admired most at the Royal Academy is by a gentleman on whom I never, to my knowledge, set eyes. The picture is (346) "Moses," by S. Solomon. I thought it finely drawn and composed. It n.o.bly represented to my mind the dark children of the Egyptian bondage. . . . My newspaper says: "Two ludicrously ugly women, looking at a dingy baby, do not form a pleasing object," and so good-bye, Mr. S. S.' This beautiful picture, painted when the artist was only nineteen, is now in the collection of Mr. W. G.

Rawlinson, and was seen quite recently at the Franco-British Exhibition, where those familiar with his work considered it one of Solomon's masterpieces. Very few students of Thackeray realised, however, that the painter thus singled out for praise formed the subject of a sordid inquest reported in the _Times_ of August 18th, 1905.

That Solomon's pictures were at first better known to the public than those of his now more famous a.s.sociates is shown by Robert Buchanan confessing that he had scarcely seen any of their works except those of Solomon, which he proceeded to attack in the famous _The Fleshly School of Poetry_. As a sort of justification of the criticism, in the early seventies, the extraordinary artist had become a pariah. He was imprisoned for a short while, and on his release was placed in a private asylum by his friends. Scandal having subsided, since he showed no further signs of eccentricity, he was, by arrangement, sent out to post a letter in order that he might have a chance of quietly escaping and returning to the practice of his art. He returned to the asylum in half an hour!--a proceeding which was almost an evidence of insanity. He was subsequently officially dismissed, and from this time went steadily downhill, adding to his other vices that of intemperance. Every effort was made by friends and relatives to reclaim him. Studios were taken for him, commissions were given him, clothes were bought for him. He spent his week-ends in the lock-up. Several picture-dealers tried giving him an allowance, but he turned up intoxicated to demand advances, and the police had to be called in. He was found selling matches in the Mile End Road and tried his hand at pavement decoration without much success. The companion of Walter Pater and Swinburne became the a.s.sociate of thieves and blackmailers. A story is told that one afternoon he called for a.s.sistance at the house of a well-known artist, a former friend, from whom he received a generous dole. Observing that the remote neighbourhood of the place lent itself favourably to burgling operations, Solomon visited his benefactor the same evening in company with a housebreaker. They were studying the dining-room silver when they were disturbed; both were in liquor, and the noise they made roused the sleepers above. The unwilling host good-naturedly dismissed them!

Though a very delightful book might be made of his life by some one who would not s.h.i.+rk the difficulties of the subject, it is unnecessary here to dwell further on a career which belongs to the history of morbid psychology rather than of painting. After drifting from the stream of social existence into a Bohemian backwater, he found himself in the main sewer. This he thoroughly enjoyed in his own particular way, and rejected fiercely all attempts at rescue or reform. To his other old friends, such as Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, there must have been something very tragic in the contemplation of his wasted talents, for few young painters were more successful. Any one curious enough to study his pictures will regret that he was lost to art by allowing an ill-regulated life to prey upon his genius. He had not sufficient strength to keep the two things separate, as Shakespeare, Verlaine, and Leonardo succeeded in doing. At the same time, it is a consolation to think that he enjoyed himself in his own sordid way. When I had the pleasure of seeing him last, so lately as 1893, he was extremely cheerful and not aggressively alcoholic. Unlike most spoilt wastrels with the artistic temperament, he seemed to have no grievances, and had no bitter stories or complaints about former friends, no scandalous tales about contemporaries who had remained reputable; no indignant feeling towards those who a.s.sisted him.

This was an amiable, inartistic trait in his character, though it may be a trifle negative; and for a positive virtue, as I say, he enjoyed his drink, his overpowering dirt, and his vicious life. He was full of delightful and racy stories about poets and painters, policemen and prisons, of which he had wide experience. He might have written a far more diverting book of memoirs than the average Pre-Raphaelite volume to which we look forward every year, though it is usually silent about poor Simeon Solomon. Physically he was a small, red man, with keen, laughing eyes.

By 1887 he entirely ceased to produce work of any value. He poured out a quant.i.ty of pastels at a guinea apiece. They are repulsive and ill-drawn, with the added horror of being the shadows of once splendid achievements. Long after his name could be ever mentioned except in whispers, Mr. Hollyer issued a series of photographs of some of the fine early sanguine, Indian ink, and pencil drawings. The originals are unique of their kind. It is very easy to detect the unwholesome element which has inspired many of them, even the t.i.tles being indicative: 'Sappho,' 'Antinous,' 'Amor Sacramentum.' One of the finest, 'Love dying from the breath of l.u.s.t,' of which also he painted a picture, became quite popular in reproduction owing to the moral which was screwed out of it. Another, of 'Dante meeting Beatrice at a Child's Party,' is particularly fascinating. To the present generation his work is perhaps too 'literary,' and his technique is by no means faultless; but the slightest drawing is informed by an idea, nearly always a beautiful one, however exotic. The faceless head and the headless body of s.h.i.+vering models dear to modern art students were absent from Solomon's designs.

His pigments, both in water-colour and oils, are always harmonious, pure in tone, and rich without being garish. We need not try to frighten ourselves by searching too curiously for hidden meanings. His whole art is, of course, unwholesome and morbid, to employ two very favourite adjectives. His work has always appealed to musicians and men of letters rather than collectors--to those who ask that a drawing or a picture should suggest an idea rather than the art of the artist. Subject with him triumphs over drawing. He is sometimes hopelessly crude; but during the sixties, when, as some one said, 'every one was a great artist,' he showed considerable promise of draughtsmans.h.i.+p. His pictures are less fantastic than the drawings, and aim at probability, even when they are allegorical, or, as is too often the case, _odd_ in sentiment. He is apparently never concerned with what are called 'problems,' the articulation of forms, or any fidelity to nature beyond the human frame.

Unlike many of the Pre-Raphaelites, he showed a feeling for the medium of oil. His friends and contemporaries, with the exception of Millais, and Rossetti occasionally, were always more at ease with water-colour or gouache, and you feel that most of their pictures ought to have been painted in _tempera_, the technique of which was not then understood.

Since Millais was of French extraction, Rossetti of Italian, and Solomon of Hebrew, I fear this does not get us very much further away from the old French criticism that the English had forgotten or never learnt how to paint in oil. It must be remembered that Whistler, who in the sixties achieved some of his masterpieces, was an American.

It is strange that Solomon did not allow a sordid existence to alter the trend of his subjects, for these are always derived from poetry and the Bible, or from Catholic, Jewish, or Greek Orthodox ritual--a strange contrast to the respectable, impeccable painter, M. Degas, the doyen of European art, nationalist and anti-Semite, who finds beauty only in bra.s.series, in the vulgar circus, and in the ghastly wings of the opera.

How far removed from his surroundings are the inspirations of the artist!

I believe J. F. Millet would have painted peasants if he had been born and spent his days in the centre of New York. With the life-long friend of M. Degas--Gustave Moreau--Solomon had much in common, but the colour of the English Hebrew is much finer, and his themes are less monotonous.

I can imagine many people being repelled by this troubled introspective art, especially at the present day. There is hardly room for an inverted Watts. At the same time, even those who from age and training cannot take a sentimental interest in faded rose-leaves, whose perfume is a little overpowering, may care to explore an interesting byway of art. For poor Solomon there was no place in life. Casting reality aside, he stepped back into the riotous pages of Petronius. Perhaps on the Paris boulevards, with Verlaine and Bibi la Puree, he might have enjoyed a distinct artistic individuality. Expeditions conducted by Mr. Arthur Symons might have been organized in order to view him at some popular cafe. Mr. George Moore might have written about him. But in respectable London he was quite impossible. In the temple of Art, which is less Calvinistic than artists would have us suppose, he will always have his niche. To the future English Vasari he will be a real gold-mine.

(1905.)

AUBREY BEARDSLEY.

Middle-aged, middle-cla.s.s people, with a predilection for mediaeval art, still believe that subject is an important factor in a picture or drawing. I am one of the number. The subject need not be literary or historical. After you have discussed in the latest studio jargon its carpentry, valued the tones and toned the values, motive or theme must affect your appreciation of a picture, your desire, or the contrary, to possess it. That the artist is able to endow the unattractive, and woo you to surrender, I admit. Unless, however, you are a pro-Boer in art matters, and hold that Rembrandt and the Boer school (the greatest technicians who ever lived) are finer artists than t.i.tian, you will find yourself preferring Gainsborough to Degas, and the unskilful Whistler to the more accomplished Edouard Manet. Long ago French critics invented an aesthetic formula to conceal that poverty of imagination which sometimes stares from their perfectly executed pictures, and this was eagerly accepted by certain Englishmen, both painters and writers. Yet, when an artist frankly deals with forbidden subjects, the canons regular of English art begin to thunder; the critics forget their French accent; the old Robert Adam, which is in all of us, a.s.serts himself; we fly for the fig-leaves.

I am led to these reflections by the memory of Aubrey Beardsley, and the reception which his work received, not from the British public, but from the inner circle of advanced intellectuals. Too much occupied with the obstetrics of art, his superfluity of naughtiness has tarnished his niche in the temple of fame. 'A wish to _epater le bourgeois_,' says Mr.

Arthur Symons, 'is a natural one.' I do not think so; at least, in an artist. Now much of Beardsley's work shows the _eblouiss.e.m.e.nt_ of the burgess on arriving at Montmartre for the first time--a weakness he shared with some of his contemporaries. This must be conceded in praising a great artist for a line which he never drew, after you have taken the immortal Zero's advice and divested yourself of the scruples.

'I would rather be an Academician than an artist,' said Aubrey Beardsley to me one day. 'It takes thirty-nine men to make an Academician, and only one to make an artist.' In that sneer lay all his weakness and his strength. Grave friends (in those days it was the fas.h.i.+on) talked to him of 'Dame Nature.' '_d.a.m.n Nature_!' retorted Aubrey Beardsley, and pulled down the blinds and worked by gaslight on the finest days. But he was a real Englishman, who from his gla.s.s-house peppered the English public. No Latin could have contrived his arabesque. The grotesques of Jerome Bosch are positively pleasant company beside many of Beardsley's inventions.

Even in his odd little landscapes, with their twisted promontories sloping seaward, he suggested mocking laughter; and the flowers of 'Under the Hill' are cackling in the gra.s.s.

An essay, which Mr. Arthur Symons published in 1897, has always been recognised as far the most sympathetic and introspective account of this strange artist's work. It has been reissued, with additional ill.u.s.trations, by Messrs. Dent. Those who welcome it as one of the most inspiring criticisms from an always inspired critic, will regret that eight of the ill.u.s.trations belong to the worst period of Beardsley's art.

Kelmscott dyspepsia following on a surfeit of Burne-Jones, belongs to the pathology of style; it is a phase that should be produced by the prosecution, not by the eloquent advocate for the defence. Moreover, I do not believe Mr. Arthur Symons admires them any more than I do; he never mentions them in his text. 'Le Debris d'un Poete,' the 'Coiffing,'

'Chopin's Third Ballad,' and those for _Salome_ would have sufficed. With these omissions the monograph might have been smaller; but it would have been more truly representative of Beardsley's genius and Mr. Arthur Symons's taste.

At one time or another every one has been brilliant about Beardsley.

'Born Puck, he died Pierrot,' said Mr. MacColl in one of the superb phrases with which he gibbets into posterity an art or an artist he rather dislikes. 'The Fra Angelico of Satanism,' wrote Mr. Roger Fry of an exhibition of the drawings. There seems hardly anything left even for Mr. Arthur Symons to write. Long anterior to these particular fireworks, however, his criticism is just as fresh as it was twelve years ago. I believe it will always remain the terminal essay.

The preface has been revised, and I could have wished for some further revision. Why is the name of Leonard Smithers--here simply called _a_ publisher--omitted, when the other Capulets and Montagus are faithfully recorded? When no one would publish Beardsley's work, Smithers stepped into the breach. I do not know that the _Savoy_ exactly healed the breach between Beardsley and the public, but it gave the artist another opportunity; and Mr. Arthur Symons an occasion for song. Leonard Smithers, too, was the most delightful and irresponsible publisher I ever knew. Who remembers without a kindly feeling the little shop in the Royal Arcade with its tempting shelves; its limited editions of _5000_ copies; the shy, infrequent purchaser; the upstairs room where the roar of respectable Bond Street came faintly through the tightly-closed windows; the genial proprietor? In the closing years of the nineteenth century his silhouette reels (my metaphor is drawn from a Terpsich.o.r.ean and Caledonian exercise) across an artistic horizon of which the _Savoy_ was the afterglow. Again, why is Mr. Arthur Symons so precise about forgetting the date of Beardsley's expulsion from the _Yellow Book_? It was in April 1895, April 10th. A number of poets and writers blackmailed Mr. Lane by threatening to withdraw their own publications unless the Beardsley Body was severed from the Bodley Head. I am glad to have this opportunity, not only of paying a tribute to the courage of my late friend Smithers, but of defending my other good friend, Mr. John Lane, from the absurd criticism of which he was too long the victim. He could hardly be expected to wreck a valuable business in the cause of unpopular art. Quite wrongly Beardsley's designs had come to be regarded as the pictorial and sympathetic expression of a decadent tendency in English literature. But if there was any relation thereto, it was that of Juvenal towards Roman Society. Never was mordant satire more evident. If Beardsley is carried away in spite of himself by the superb invention of _Salome_, he never forgets his hatred of its author. It is characteristic that he hammered beauty from the gold he would have battered into caricature. _Salome_ has survived other criticism and other caricature. And Mr. Lane once informed an American interviewer that since that April Fool's Day poetry has ceased to sell altogether.

The bards unconsciously committed suicide; and the _Yellow Book_ perished in the odour of sanct.i.ty.

Recommending the perusal of some letters (written by Beardsley to an unnamed friend) published some years ago, Mr. Arthur Symons says: 'Here, too, we are in the presence of the real thing.' I venture to doubt this.

I do not doubt Beardsley's sincerity in the religion he embraced, but his expression of it in the letters. At least, I hope it was insincere. The letters left on some of us a disagreeable impression, at least of the recipient. You wonder if this pietistic friend received a copy of the _Lysistrata_ along with the eulogy of St. Alfonso Liguori and Aphra Behn.

A fescennine temperament is too often allied with religiosity. It certainly was in Beardsley's case, but I think the other and stronger side of his character should, in justice to his genius, be insisted upon, as Mr. Arthur Symons insisted upon it. If we knew that the ill-advised and unnamed friend was the author of certain pseudo-scientific and p.o.r.nographic works issued in Paris, we should be better able to gauge the unimportance of these letters. Far more interesting would have been those written to Mr. Joseph Pennell, one of the saner influences; or those to Aubrey Beardsley's mother and sister.

'It was at Arques,' says Mr. Arthur Symons . . . 'that I had the only serious, almost solemn conversation I ever had with Beardsley.' You can scarcely believe that any of the conversations between the two were other than serious and solemn, because he approaches Beardsley as he would John Bunyan or Aquinas. Art, literature and life, are all to this engaging writer a scholiast's pilgrim's progress. Beside him, Walter Pater, from whom he derives, seems almost flippant--and to have dallied too long in the streets of Vanity Fair.

(1906.)

ENGLISH AESTHETICS.

The law reports in newspapers contain perhaps the only real history of England that has any relation to truth. Here, too, may be found indications of current thought, more pregnant than the observations of historians. They still afford material for the future short or longer history of the English people by the John Richard Greens of posterity.

This was brought home to me by perusing two cases reported in the _Morning Post_, that of Mrs. Rita Marsh and the disputed will of Miss Browne. I yield to no one in my ignorance of English law, but I have seldom read judgments which seemed so conspicuously unfair, so characteristic of the precise minimum of aesthetic perception in the English people.

The hostelries of Great Britain are famous for their high charges, their badly-kept rooms, and loathsome cooking; let me add, their warm welcome.

In the reign of Edward III. there was legislation on the subject. The colder and cheaper hospitality of the Continent strikes a chill, I am sometimes told by those familiar with both. The hotel selected by a certain Mrs. Rita Marsh was no exception to the ordinary English caravanserai. It was 'replete with every comfort.' The garden contained an _oubliette_, down which Mrs. Marsh, while walking in the evening, inadvertently fell. On the Continent the _oubliettes_ are inside the house, and you are ostentatiously warned of their immediate neighbourhood. These things are managed better in France, if I may say so without offending Tariff Reformers.

The accident disfigured Mrs. Marsh for life; and for the loss of unusual personal attractions an English jury awarded her only 500_l_. The judge made a joke about it. Mr. Gill was very playful about her photograph, and every one, except, I imagine, Mrs. Marsh, seems to have been satisfied that ample justice was done. The hotel proprietors did not press their counter-claim for a bill of 191_l_.! Chivalrous fellows!

Still, I can safely say that in France Mrs. Marsh would have been awarded at least four times that amount; though if she had been murdered the proprietors would have only been fined forty francs. But beauty to its fortunate possessors is more valuable than life itself, and the story is to me one of the most pathetic I have ever heard. To the English mind there is something irresistibly comic when any one falls, morally or physically. It is the basis of English Farce. Jokes made about those who have never fallen, 'too great to appease, too high to appal,' are voted bad taste. Caricaturists of the mildest order are considered irreligious and vulgar if they burlesque, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury for example; or unpatriotic if they hint that Lord Roberts did not really finish the Boer War when he professed to have done so. After Parnell came to grief I remember the Drury Lane pantomime was full of fire-escapes, and every allusion to the _cause celebre_ produced roars of laughter. Mr. Justice Bigham was only a thorough Englishman when he gently rallied the jury for awarding, as he obviously thought, excessive damages. So little is beauty esteemed in England.

The case of Miss Browne was also singular. She left a trust fund 'for the erection of an ornamental structure of Gothic design, such as a market cross, tall clock, street lamp-stand, or all combined, in a central part of London, the plan whereof shall be offered for open compet.i.tion, and ultimately decided upon by the Royal Inst.i.tute of British Architects.' The President of the Probate Division said _he was satisfied that Miss Browne was not of sound mind, and p.r.o.nounced against the will_, with costs out of the estate. I wonder what the Royal Inst.i.tute thinks of this legal testimonial. It seems almost a pity that some one did not dispute Sir Francis Chantrey's will years ago on similar grounds. I suggest to Mr. MacColl that it might still be upset. That would settle once and for all the question whether the administration of the bequest has evinced evidence of insanity or not. A recent Royal Commission left the matter undecided. I do not, however, wish to criticise trustees, but to defend the memory of Miss Browne (who may have been eccentric in private life) from such a charge, because her testamentary dispositions were a trifle aesthetic. The will was un-English in one respect: '_no inscription of my name shall be placed on such erection_.' Was that the clause which proved her hopelessly mad?

The erection was to be Gothic. I know Gothic is out of fas.h.i.+on just now.

Ruskin is quite over; the Seven Lamps exploded long ago; but Miss Browne seems to have attended before her death Mr. MacColl's lectures, knew all about 'ma.s.ses' and 'tones' in architecture, and wished particular stress to be laid on 'the general outline as seen from a good distance.' This is greeted by some of the papers as particularly side-splitting and eccentric. Looking at the unlovely streets of London, never one of the more beautiful cities of Europe, where each new building seems contrived to go one better in sheer _uglitude_ (especially since builders of Tube stations have ventured into the Vitruvian arena), you can easily suppose that poor Miss Browne, with her views about 'general outlines seen from a good distance,' must have appeared hopelessly insane. The decision of the court is not likely to encourage any further public bequests of this kind. I have cut the British Museum and the National Gallery out of my own will already. And I understand why Mr. MacColl, with his pa.s.sionate pleading for a living national architecture, for official recognition of past and present English art, is thought by many good people quite odd.