Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (670 page)

I haven’t the least idea of where Madox Brown’s fame as an artist to-day may stand. It is impossible to form an estimate. I am certain that he is far better known in France and Belgium than in the United Kingdom. The other day an American art-critic, who did not know who I was but was anxious to impress me with the fact that British art was altogether worthless, said vehemently — I had been trying to put in a word for Constable, Gainsborough and Turner — said vehemently:

“There was only one English painter who could ever paint. His name was Brown, and you probably never heard of him. He painted a picture called ‘Work.’”

I retired from that discussion with decent discomfiture.

On the other hand, when I was hanging the pictures at the Madox Brown Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, the late R. A. M. Stevenson came in and, clutching my arm, proceeded to whirl me round in front of the walls. He poured out one of his splendid floods of talk — and I think that he was the best talker that ever was, better than his cousin Robert Louis, or better even than Henley, many of whose expletives and mannerisms “Bob” Stevenson retained. He poured out a flood of words before each of the pictures, going to prove in the most drastic manner that Madox Brown ought never to have been a painter at all — he ought to have been an historical novelist. On the following day, which was Press Day, I was doing my best to explain the pictures to a crowd of journalists when I was once more seized vehemently by the elbow, and there was Stevenson. He whirled me round the galleries and poured out a flood of talk before picture after picture. This time he proved as completely, as drastically, that Madox Brown was the only real English painter since Hogarth — the only national one, the only one who could paint, the only one who had any ideas worth the snuff of a candle. And pointing to the little picture called “The Pretty Baa-Lambs,” with the whole of his brown being, his curious earnest, rather beaver-like face illuminated by excitement, he exclaimed:

“By God! the whole history of modern art begins with that picture. Corot, Manet, the Marises, all the Fontainebleau School, all the Impressionists, never did anything but imitate that picture.”

So that Mr. Stevenson left me in a confusion that was odd and not so very unpleasant. I considered him at that time — and perhaps I still consider him — the finest critic of art that we ever produced. On the one day he said that Madox Brown “could not paint for nuts”; on the next he asseverated that Madox Brown was greater than all the Italian primitives, French modernists, or than Prometheus who first brought fire from Heaven. And as I cannot imagine that Mr. Stevenson had any particular desire to please me I can only leave the riddle at that.

Shortly after the death of Madox Brown I left London only to re-enter it as a permanent resident when twelve or thirteen years had gone by. And, gradually, all that “set” have died off, along with all the Victorian great figures. Ruskin died, Morris died, Christina and my aunt Lucy died, and Burne-Jones; only Mr. Holman Hunt remained of the painters. And yet it is odd how permanent to me they all seemed. Till the moment of Swinburne’s death, till the moment of Meredith’s, I had considered them — I found it when I heard of their deaths — as being as permanent as the sun or the Mansion House. Thus each death came as a separate shock. So it was with the last death of all which I read of — only a few days ago whilst I was travelling in a distant country.

It had been a long and tiresome journey, in a train as slow as the caravan of a Bedouin. We had jolted on and on over plain after plain. And then with a tired and stertorous grunt, in a sudden and how much needed shaft of sunshine, the train came to a standstill, wearily and as if it would never pluck up spirits again to drag along its tale of dusty carriages. The station was bright pink, the window frames were bright emerald green; the porters wore bright blue uniforms; and one of them a bright scarlet cap. In the background — but no, under the shafts of sparkling light there was no background; it all jumped forward as if it were a flat, bright pattern covering a high wall — there was a landscape in chequers of little plots of ground. The squares of bare earth were of brighter pink than anything you will see in Devonshire; where the newly cut fodder had stood, the green was a pale bright emerald. The patches of tobacco were of a green more vivid; the maize more vivid still. The very cocks of hay, dotted about like ant-heaps, were purple. The draught oxen, bright yellow, stood before the long carts, painted bright blue, and panted in the unaccustomed heat. Peasant women in short green petticoats with blue velvet bodices and neckerchiefs of bright green, of sky-blue, of lemon yellow, bore upon their heads purple baskets, or beneath coifs of sparkling white linen raked the purple hay on the green fields, or lifted up into the blue wagons bundles of fodder with forks that had bright red shafts. And all this colour, in the dazzling, violent light was hung beneath an absurd blue sky. It was the colour of the blue houses one sees in the suburbs of Paris, and contained, blotted all over it, absurd pink and woolly German clouds.

I closed my eyes. It was not that it was really painful, it was not that it was really disagreeable. All this richness, all this prosperity seemed so stable and so long-established that in our transient world it suggested a lasting peace. But coming out of our greys and half-tints of London, where nothing vivid ever occurs to disturb the eye, it was too overwhelming. It was — and the words came on to my lips at the very moment — too brave, too Pre-Raphaelite! It was just as if Nature had set herself to do the thing well, and had done the thing so well that the eye couldn’t possibly stand it. Pre-Raphaelite! That was what it all was.

Desiring to rest my eyes, I turned them upon one of those newspapers that are so difficult to read, and there was conveyed to my mind the message:

Es wird uns telegraphiert aus London dass der Mahler Holman Hunt, der Vater des englischen Pre-raphaelismus
,
im
83
ten. Jahre seines Lebens, gestorben ist.

“It is telegraphed to us out of London that the painter Holman Hunt, the father of English Pre-Raphaelism, to-day, in the eighty-third year of his life, is dead.”

I do not know whether there was something telepathic about Nature that she gave this brave Pre-Raphaelite show in Hesse-Nassau to frame for me an announcement that called up images so distant and so dim of a painter — of a set of painters who in their own day decided to do the thing well — to do the thing so well that most beholders of their pictures still close their eyes and say that it is too much. For the odd thing is that these Pre-Raphaelites painted in the dim and murky squares of Bloomsbury. There was nothing Hessian about their environment; if they were not all Cockneys, they were townsmen to a man.

And the most immediate image of Mr. Holman Hunt that comes to my mind is enshrined in a lamp-lit interior. There was Mr. Holman Hunt, resting after the labours of his day, with the curious, vivid, rugged head, the deep-set, illuminated eyes that were perpetually sending swift glances all over the room. There was also, I know, one of Her Majesty’s judges poring over the reproductions of some Etruscan vases; and there may have been other people. It was a tranquil interior of rather mellow shadows, and Mr. Holman Hunt, with the most ingenuously charming manner in the world, was engaged in damning — as it were in musing asides — all my family and their connections and myself. He was talking of the old times, of the ‘forties and ‘fifties, when he was known as Old Hunt and Millais as The Lamp Post, because he was so tall. And uttering many things which may be found now in his autobiography, Mr. Hunt would let drop sentences like: “The Brotherhood used to meet pretty often at Rossetti’s rooms, but, of course, Rossetti was a common thief....”

“Your grandfather was then painting a picture called ‘The Pretty Baa-Lambs,’ but, of course, Madox Brown was a notorious liar...

“These details may be interesting to you when you come to write the life of your grandfather, but, of course, you, as a person of no particular talent, setting out upon an artistic career, will die ignominiously of starvation. And so Millais and I, having discovered the secret of the wet white ground, proceeded to swear an oath that we would reveal it to none other of the brethren.”

And so distractedly — so amiably, for the matter of that, were these damning “of courses” dropped into the great man’s picturesque narrative, that it was not until after I had for two or three hours left the dim and comfortable lamplight of the room that I really realized that Mr. Hunt had stated that he considered Rossetti a thief, my grandfather a liar, and myself doomed to an infamous and needy death. How Mr. Hunt had arrived at this last conclusion, I do not know, for this happened twenty years ago, between the death and burial of Madox Brown, I having been sent to ask this friend of my grandfather’s early years to attend his funeral. I was just nineteen at the time, so that I know quite well that what the great painter meant was not that he perceived traces of incipient villany upon my countenance or of decadence in my non-existent writings, but that he really desired to warn me against the hardships of the artistic life, of which in middle life he tasted for so long and so bitterly. Similarly, when he said that Rossetti was a thief, he meant that the author of
Jenny
had borrowed some books from him and never returned them, so that they were sold at the sale of Rossetti’s effects. And when he called my grandfather, not yet in his grave, a notorious liar, that signified that he was irritated by the phrase, “grandfather of Pre-Raphaelism,” which was applied to Madox Brown in his obituaries. These had been circulated to the halfpenny evening press by a news agency. An industrious hackwriter had come upon this phrase in a work by Mr. Harry Quilter, no other writer at that date having paid any attention at all to Madox Brown’s career. The phrase had afforded Madox Brown almost more explosive irritation than its repetition thus caused Mr. Holman Hunt. For, rightly or wrongly, just as Mr. Hunt considered himself the father and grandfather of Pre-Raphaelism, as well as the only Pre-Raphaelite that counted, so Madox Brown considered himself much too great an artist to have been mixed up in a childish debating society called a Brotherhood, and invented by a set of youths very much his juniors. But now, indeed, with the announcement,
Heute ivird aus London telegraphiert,
which the wires so generously flashed to the ends of the civilized earth, the Father of Pre-Raphaelism had passed away. For of all the Pre-Raphaelite brothers, Mr. Hunt was the only one who fully understood, who fully carried out, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, the canons of Pre-Raphaelism. It was Madox Brown who first painted bright purple haycocks — yes, bright purple ones — upon a bright green field. But he painted them like that because he happened to notice that when sunlight is rather red and the sky very blue, the shadowy side of green-grey hay is all purple. He noticed it, and he rendered it. It was a picturesque fact appealing to an imagination that looked out for the picturesque. Mr. Holman Hunt rendered things with the avid passion of a seeker after truth; it was a hungry desire; it was a life force pushing him towards the heroic, towards all of the unexplored things in human experience that are as arid and as bitter as the unexplored fields of ice around the Pole. Just as the explorer, robbing these august regions of their mystery with his photographs and his projections, is inspired by the passion for those virgin mysteries, just as he earns at once our dislike by penetrating mysteries that should remain mysteries, if we are to remain comfortable, so with Mr. Holman Hunt. Inspired with the intense, unreasoning faith of the ascetic for the mysteries of revealed religion — inspired, too, with the intense and unreasoning desire of the ascetic for the rendering of truth, since he believed that truth and revealed religion were as much identical as are the one in three of the Trinity, so Mr. Holman Hunt supported the fiery suns of the desert, the thirsts of the day, the rigours of the night, the contempt of his compatriots, and the scorn of his time. He was endeavouring to prove that our Lord was a Semitic boy or an adult Jew inspired with the ecstasy of a modern French anarchist, that His Mother was a Bedouin woman of no particular distinction, or that the elders in the Temple were a set of Semitic sheikhs dressed in aniline-dyed, Manchester goods, burnouses, packed together in wooden tabernacles beneath a remorseless sun. This was the message of Mr. Holman Hunt to his generation, a message surely very salutary and very useful. For of its kind, and as far as it went, it meant clearness of thought, and clearness of thought in any department of life is the most valuable thing that a man can give to his day. The painter of “The Light of the World” dealt a very hard blow to the fashionable religion of his day. This the world of his youth understood very well. It declared Mr. Hunt to be an atheist, and, with Charles Dickens at its head, cried to the government for the imprisonment of Mr. Hunt and his Brethren.

These things are, I suppose, a little forgotten now — or perhaps they all repose together on that hill where grows the herb Oblivion. I don’t know. But round the romantic home of my childhood, the opponents of Pre-Raphaelism seemed still to stalk like assassins with knives. There was a sort of Blue Beard called Frank Stone, R.A. — God alone knows nowadays who Frank Stone, R.A., was! But Frank Stone said, in the
Athenæum
of the year of grace 1850, that the flesh of Pre-Raphaelite pictures was painted with strawberry jam. There was a veritable Giant Blunderbore called Grant, P.R.A. — who in the world was Grant, P.R.A.? — who, with forty thieves, all R.A.’s, immolated the innocent pictures of Holman Hunt, Millais, D. G. R., Brown and Collinson — who sent them home ripped up with nails, who never returned them at all, or who hung them next the ceiling in gloomy rooms one hundred and forty feet high. That, at least, was my early picture of the horrors that the Pre-Raphaelites had to endure.