Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (671 page)

And the public certainly took its share, too. The good, indolent public of that day was not too indolent to take an interest in pictures, and it certainly very hotly disliked anything that had P.R.B. attached to it, perhaps because it was used to things with P.R.A. (Who
was
Grant, P.R.A.?) People in those days, like people to-day, had tired eyes. They wanted nice, comfortable half-tones. They wanted undisturbing pictures in which flesh, trees, houses, castles, the sky and the sea alike appeared to have been painted in pea-soup. Consequently, hay that appeared purple in the shadows, and flesh that seemed to have been painted with strawberry jam, upset them very much. They were simple, earnest people, those early Victorians, and had not yet learnt the trick of avoiding disturbing thoughts and sights. Perhaps it was that the picture postcard had not yet been invented. It is incredible nowadays to think that any one would be in the least disturbed if a painter as great as Velasquez should come along and paint you a scarlet landscape with a pea-green sky. We should care nothing at all. Only if he pushed himself really well he would find himself elected A.R.A at the third attempt, and his pictures would be bought by a doctor in Harley Street. He would be celebrated in a small afternoon-tea circle. But the great public would never hear of him, and would never be disturbed by his scarlet grass and green sky. We should not indeed really care two pins if the President of the Royal Association should declare that the grass is bright scarlet and the sky green. We should just go on playing Bridge.

But the public of the Pre-Raphaelites was really worried. It felt that if these fellows were right, its eyesight must be wrong, and there is nothing more disturbing! It desired, therefore, that these painters should be suppressed. It didn’t want them only to be ignored. They were disturbers of great principles. If they began by declaring that flesh looked like strawberry jam, when all the world knew that it looked like pea-soup, they would begin next to impugn the British Constitution, the morality of the Prince Consort,
The Times
newspaper, the Nonconformist conscience, the bench of Bishops, and the beauty of the crinoline. There would be no knowing where they wouldn’t get to.

And indeed the worried public was perfectly right. Pre-Raphaelism may or may not have been important in the history of modern art; it was all-important in the development of modern thought. The amiable muddle-headedness of the crinoline period was perfectly right to be horribly worried when Millais exhibited a picture showing Christ obedient to His parents. You have to consider that in those days it was blasphemous, indecent and uncomfortable to consider sacred personages at all. No one really liked to think about the Redeemer, and Millais showed them the Virgin kissing her Son. According to Victorian Protestant ideas the Mother of Our Lord was a person whom you never mentioned at all. But Millais dragged her right into the foreground. You couldn’t get away from her. She was kissing her little Son, and her little Son was obedient to her. Adolescence, family affection, subjection to His Mother and father, or early occupations — all these things were obviously logical, but were very disturbing. They meant all sorts of revisions of judgment. It was not only that flesh looked like strawberry jam, but that the Saviour was a man with the necessities, the craving for sympathy, and the vulnerability of a man. These facts Millais forced upon the attention of the public.

And not being of the stern temper of Mr. Hunt, Millais bent before the storm of popular opinion. He was afraid that Charles Dickens would get him imprisoned. He changed the figure of the Virgin so that no longer does she comfort her Son with a kiss. Millais could alter his picture, but nothing in this world could ever have forced Mr. Hunt to bend. In consequence, Millais, a very great painter, climbed an easy road to affluence, and died in the chair once occupied by Grant, P.R.A. Mr. Hunt pursuing his sterner course, seeking avidly for truth as it must have appeared, was for long years shunned by patrons, and hard put to it to live at all. There have, I think, been few such struggles in the cause of any conscience, and never with such a fierce and iron determination has any painter, in the teeth of a violent opposition, fettered his art so to serve the interests of religion and of truth.

This religiosity which Mr. Holman Hunt, before even Darwin, Huxley, and other Victorian figures, so effectively destroyed, was one of the scourges of the dismal period which to-day we call the Victorian era. And if Mr. Hunt destroyed the image of Simon Peter as the sort of artist’s model that you see on the steps of Calabrian churches, furtively combing out, with the aid of a small round mirror, long white hairs depending from his head and face — these hairs being the only portion of him that has ever been washed since his birth — if Mr. Hunt destroyed this figure, with its attitudes learnt on the operatic stage, its blanket revealing opulently moulded forms, and its huge property keys extended towards a neo-Gothic Heaven — if Mr. Hunt gave us instead (I don’t know that he ever did, but he may have done) a Jewish fisherman pulling up dirty-looking fish on the shores of a salt-encrusted and desolate lake — Mr. Hunt in the realms of modern thought, enormously aided the discovery of wireless telegraphy and in no way damaged the prestige of the occupant of St. Peter’s Chair.

This truism may appear a paradox. And yet nothing is more true than that clearness of thought in one department of life stimulates clearness of thought in another. The great material developments of the end of last century did not only succeed the great realistic developments that had preceded them in the arts. The one was the logical corollary of the other. Just as you cannot have a healthy body in which one of the members is unsound, so you cannot have a healthy national life in the realms of thought unless in all the departments of life you have sincere thinkers, and this is what Mr. Hunt undoubtedly was — a sincere thinker. To say that he was the greatest painter of his day might be superfluous; he was certainly the most earnest beyond all comparison. That we should dislike the vividness of his colour is perhaps the defect of our degenerate eyes, which see too little of the sunlight. And such a painting as that of the strayed sheep on the edge of the Fairlight Cliff, near Pitt — such a painting is sufficient to establish the painter’s claims to gifts of the very greatest. You have the sunlit sheep, you have the dangerous verge of the hill; you have the sea far below, and from these things you find awakened in you such emotions as Providence has rendered you capable of. This, without doubt, is the province of art — a province which perhaps Mr. Hunt, in his hunger and thirst after righteousness, unduly neglected.

Of pictures of his at all in this absolute
genre,
I can recall otherwise only one, representing the deck of a steamer at night. Mr. Hunt, in fact, set himself the task of being rather a pioneer than an artist. His fame, the bulking of his personality in the eyes of posterity, as with all other pioneers, will no doubt suffer. But when he gave Mr. Gambart what Mr. Gambart complained was “a great ugly goat” instead of a pretty, religious picture, with epicene angels, curled golden hair and long night-gowns, Mr. Hunt was very certainly benefiting the life of his day. And, indeed, this is a terrifying and suggestive picture. But this great man cared very little for beauty, which is that which, by awakening untabulated and indefinite emotions, makes, indefinitely, more proper men of us. Had he cared more for this he would have been a greater artist; he might have been a smaller man. Beauty, I think, he never once mentions in his autobiography. But truth and righteousness, as he understood it, were always on his lips as they were always in his heart. In spite of the acerbity of his utterances, in spite of the apparent egotism of his autobiography, which to the unthinking might appear a bitterly vainglorious book, I am perfectly ready to declare myself certain that Mr. Holman Hunt was, in the more subtle sense, an eminently unselfish man. The “I” that is so eternal in his autobiography is not the “I” that was William Holman Hunt. It was all that he stood for — the principles, the hard life, the bitter endurance, the splendid record of young friendships, the aims, the achievement. It was this that Mr. Hunt desired to have acknowledged. In his autobiography he did himself perhaps less than justice; in his paintings, too, he did himself perhaps less than justice; but in the whole course of his life, from his strugglings away from the merchant’s stool to his death, which was “telegraphed to us” in the obscurest of Hessian villages, he never betrayed his ascetic’s passion. It was to this passion that his egotism was a tribute. From his point of view, Rossetti was not a good man because he was not a religious painter who had journeyed into Palestine in search of truth. He never even went to Florence to see where Beatrice lived. If Mr. Hunt called Rossetti a thief, it was because he desired to express this artistically immoral fact, and he expressed it clumsily as one not a master of words. And similarly, if he called Madox Brown a liar, it was because Madox Brown was not a painter of his school of religious thought. His aim was not to prevent other persons buying pictures of Madox Brown or Rossetti; his aim was not to prevent Madox Brown or Rossetti prospering, or even becoming presidents of the Royal Academy. He desired to point out that the only way to æsthetic salvation was to be a believing Pre-Raphaelite. And there was only one Pre-Raphaelite — that was Mr. Holman Hunt. Any one without his faith must, he felt, be a bad man. And in a dim and muddled way, he tried to express it. At other times he would call these rival painters the best and noblest of fellows, or the one man in the world to whom to go for advice or sympathy. And this indeed was the main note of his life, he himself having been so companionable, as fine a fellow, and as good to go to for advice. But being a painter, he had to look for shadows, and not being much of a hand with the pen or the tongue, if he could not find them, he had to invent them. That, in the end, was the bottom of the matter.

I permit myself these words upon a delicate subject, since Mr. Hunt’s autobiography, which must necessarily be his most lasting personal memorial, does so very much less than justice to the fineness of his nature. This hardly all his hardships and privations could warp at all. And I permit them to myself the more readily since I may, without much immodesty, consider myself the most vocal of the clan which Mr. Hunt dimly regarded as the Opposition to his claim to be regarded as the Founder of Pre-Raphaelism. But I think I never did advance — it was never my intention to advance — any suggestion that the true inwardness of Pre-Raphaelism, the exact rendering, hair for hair of the model; the passionate hunger and thirst for even accidental truth, the real
caput mortuum
of Pre-Raphaelism, was ever expressed by any one else than by the meticulously earnest painter and great man whose death was telegraphed from the dim recesses of London into the chess-board pattern of sunlit Pre-Raphaelite Hessian harvest lands. May the fields to which he has gone prove such very bright places where, to his courageous eyes, his Truth shall be very vivid and prevail!

Madox Brown has been dead for twenty years now, or getting on for that. I would not say that the happiest days of my life were those that I spent in his studio, for I have spent in my life days as happy since then; but I will say that Madox Brown was the finest man I ever knew. He had his irascibilities, his fits of passion when, tossing his white head, his mane of hair would fly all over his face, and when he would blaspheme impressively after the manner of our great-grandfathers. And in these fits of temper he would frequently say the most unjust things. But I think that he was never either unjust or ungenerous in cold blood, and I am quite sure that envy had no part at all in his nature. Like Rossetti and like William Morris, in his very rages he was nearest to generosities. He would rage over an injustice to some one else to the point of being bitterly unjust to the oppressor. I do not think that I would care to live my life over again — I have had days that I would not again face for a good deal — but I would give very much of what I possess to be able, having still such causes for satisfaction as I now have in life, to be able to live once more some of those old evenings in the studio.

The lights would be lit, the fire would glow between the red tiles; my grandfather would sit with his glass of weak whisky-and-water in his hand, and would talk for hours. He had anecdotes more lavish and more picturesque than any man I ever knew. He would talk of Beau Brummel, who had been British Consul at Calais when Madox Brown was born there, of Paxton who built the Crystal Palace, and of the mysterious Duke of Portland who lived underground, but who, meeting Madox Brown in Baker Street outside Druce’s, and hearing that Madox Brown suffered fron gout, presented him with a large quantity of colchicum grown at Welbeck....

Well, I would sit there on the other side of the rustling fire, listening, and he would revive the splendid ghosts of Pre-Raphaelites, going back to Cornelius and Overbeck and to Baron Leys and Baron Wappers, who taught him first to paint in the romantic grand manner. He would talk on. Then Mr. William Rossetti would come in from next door but one, and they would begin to talk of Shelley and Browning and Mazzini and Napoleon III, and Mr. Rossetti, sitting in front of the fire, would sink his head nearer and nearer to the flames. His right leg would be crossed over his left knee, and, as his head went down, so, of necessity, his right foot would come up and out. It would approach nearer and nearer to the fire-irons which stood at the end of the fender. The tranquil talk would continue. Presently the foot would touch the fire-irons and down they would go into the fender with a tremendous clatter of iron. Madox Brown, half dozing in the firelight, would start and spill some of his whisky. I would replace the fire-irons in their stand.