Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 892
These tremendous quarrels, in fact, were all storms in tea-cups, and although the break-up of the “Firm” did cause a comparatively lasting estrangement between several of the partners, it has always pleased me to remember that at the last private view that Madox Brown held of one of his pictures every one of the surviving Pre-Raphaelite brothers came to his studio, and every one of the surviving partners of the original firm of Morris & Company.
The arrival of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and his wife brought up a characteristic passion of Madox Brown’s. Sir Edward had persuaded the president of the Royal Academy to accompany them in their visit. They were actuated by the kindly desire to give Madox Brown the idea that thus at the end of his life the Royal Academy wished to extend some sort of official recognition to a painter who had persistently refused for nearly half a century to recognize their existence. Unfortunately it was an autumn day and the twilight had set in very early. Thus not only were the distinguished visitors rather shadowy in the dusk, but the enormous picture itself was entirely indistinguishable. Lady Burne-Jones, with her peculiarly persuasive charm, whispered to me, unheard by Madox Brown, that I should light the studio gas, and I was striking a match when I was appalled to hear Madox Brown shout, in tones of extreme violence and of apparent alarm:
“Damn and blast it all, Fordie! Do you want us all blown into the next world?”
And he proceeded to explain to Lady Burne-Jones that there was an escape of gas from a pipe. When she suggested candles or a paraffin lamp, Madox Brown declared with equal violence that he couldn’t think how she could imagine that he could have such infernally dangerous things in the house. The interview thus concluded in a gloom of the most tenebrous, and shortly afterward he went down-stairs, where, in the golden glow of a great many candles set against a golden and embossed wall-paper, tea was being served. The fact was that Madox Brown was determined that no “damned academician” should see his picture. Nevertheless, it is satisfactory to me to think that there was among these distinguished and kindly men still so great a feeling of solidarity. They had come, many of them, from great distances, to do honor, or at least to be kind, to an old painter who at that time was more entirely forgotten than he has ever been before or since.
The lily tradition of the disciples of these men is, I should imagine, almost entirely extinguished. But the other day, at a particularly smart wedding, there turned up one stanch survivor in garments of prismatic hues — a mustard-colored ulster, a green wide-awake, a blue shirt, a purple tie, and a suit of tweed. This gentleman moved distractedly among groups of correctly attired people. In one hand he bore an extremely minute painting by himself. It was, perhaps, of the size of a visiting-card, set in an ocean of white mount. In the other he bore an enormous spray of Madonna lilies. That, I presume, was why he had failed to remove his green hat. He was approached by the hostess and he told her that he wished to place the picture, his wedding gift, in the most appropriate position that could be found for it. And upon her suggesting that she would attend to the hanging after the ceremony was over, he brushed her aside. Finally he placed the picture upon the ground beneath a tall window, and perched the spray of lilies on top of the frame. He then stood back and, waving his emaciated hands and stroking his brown beard, surveyed the effect of his decoration. The painting, he said, symbolized the consolation that the arts would afford the young couple during their married life, and the lily stood for the purity of the bride. This is how in the seventies and the eighties the outer ring of the aesthetes really behaved. It was as much in their note as were the plum pudding and the roast beef in William Morris’s. The reason for this is not very far to seek. The older men, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the members of the “Firm” had too rough work to do to bother much about the trimmings.
It is a little difficult nowadays to imagine the acridity with which any new artistic movement was opposed when Victoria was Queen of England. Charles Dickens, as I have elsewhere pointed out, called loudly for the immediate imprisonment of Millais and the other Pre-Raphaelites, including my grandfather, who was not a Pre-Raphaelite. Blasphemy was the charge alleged against them, just as it was the charge alleged against the earliest upholders of Wagner’s music in England. This may seem incredible, but I have in my possession three letters from three different members of the public addressed to my father, Dr. Francis Hueffer, a man of great erudition and force of character, who, from the early seventies until his death, was the musical critic of the Times. The writers stated that unless Doctor Hueffer abstained from upholding the blasphemous music of the future — and in each case the writer used the word blasphemous — he would be respectively stabbed, ducked in a horse-pond, and beaten to death by hired roughs. Yet to-day I never go to a place of popular entertainment where miscellaneous music is performed for the benefit of the poorest classes without hearing at least the overture to “Tannhâuser.” Nowadays it is difficult to discern any new movement in any of the arts. No doubt there is movement, no doubt we who write and our friends who paint and compose are producing the arts of the future. But we never have the luck to have the word “blasphemous” hurled at us. It would, indeed, be almost inconceivable that such a thing could happen, that the frame of mind should be reconstructed. But to the Pre-Raphaelites this word was blessed in the extreme. For human nature is such — perhaps on account of obstinacy or perhaps on account of feelings of justice — that to persecute an art, as to persecute a religion, is simply to render its practitioners the more stubborn and its advocates in their fewness the more united, and the more effective in their union. It was the injustice of the attack upon the Pre-Raphaelites, it was the fury and outcry, that won for them the attention of Mr. Ruskin. And Mr. Ruskin’s attention being aroused, he entered on that splendid and efficient championing of their cause which at last established them in a position of perhaps more immediate importance than, as painters, they exactly merited. As pioneers and as sufferers they can never sufficiently be recommended. Mr. Ruskin, for some cause which my grandfather was used to declare was purely personal, was the only man intimately connected with these movements who had no connection at all with Madox Brown. I do not know why this was, but it is a fact that, although Madox Brown’s pictures were in considerable evidence at all places where the pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites were exhibited, Mr. Ruskin in all his works never once mentioned his name. He never blamed him; he never praised him; he ignored him. And this was at a time when Ruskin must have known that a word from him was sufficient to make the fortune of any painter. It was sufficient not so much because of Mr. Ruskin’s weight with the general public as because the small circle of buyers, wealthy and assiduous, who surrounded the painters of the moment, hung upon Mr. Ruskin’s lips and needed at least his printed sanction for all their purchases.
Madox Brown was the most benevolent of men, the most helpful and the kindest. His manifestations, however, were apt at times to be a little thorny. I remember an anecdote which Madox Brown’s housemaid of that day was in the habit of relating to me when she used to put me to bed.
Said she — and the exact words remain upon my mind:
“I was down in the kitchen waiting to carry up the meat, when a cabman comes down the area steps and says: ‘I’ve got your master in my cab. He’s very drunk,’ I says to him” — and an immense intonation of pride would come into Charlotte’s voice—’My master’s a-sitting at the head of his table entertaining his guests. That’s Mr. — Carry him up-stairs and lay him in the bath,’”
Madox Brown, whose laudable desire it was at many stages of his career to redeem poets and others from dipsomania, was in the habit of providing several of them with labels upon which were inscribed his own name and address. Thus, when any of these geniuses were found incapable in the neighborhood they would be brought by cabmen or others to Fitzroy Square. This, I think, was a stratagem more characteristic of Madox Brown’s singular and quaint ingenuity than any that I can recall. The poet being thus recaptured would be carried up-stairs by Charlotte and the cabman and laid in the bath — in Colonel Newcome’s very bath-room, where, according to Thackeray, the water moaned and gurgled so mournfully in the cistern. For me, I can only remember that room as an apartment of warmth and lightness; it was a concomitant to all the pleasures that sleeping at my grandfather’s meant for me. And indeed, to Madox Brown as to Colonel Newcome — they were very similar natures in their chivalrous, unbusinesslike, and naïve simplicity — the house in Fitzroy Square seemed perfectly pleasant and cheerful.
The poet having been put into the bath would be reduced to sobriety by cups of the strongest coffee that could be made (the bath was selected because he would not be able to roll out and to injure himself). And having been thus reduced to sobriety, he would be lectured, and he would be kept in the house, being given nothing stronger than lemonade to drink, until he found the regime intolerable. Then he would disappear, the label sewn inside his coat collar, to reappear once more in the charge of a cabman.
Of Madox Brown’s acerbity I witnessed myself no instances at all, unless it be the one that I have lately narrated. A possibly too-stern father of the old school, he was as a grandfather extravagantly indulgent. I remember his once going through the catalogue of his grandchildren and deciding, after careful deliberation, that they were all geniuses with the exception of one, as to whom he could not be certain whether he was a genius or mad. Thus I read with astonishment the words of a critic of distinction with regard to the exhibition of Madox Brown’s works that I organized at the Grafton Gallery ten years ago. They were to the effect that Madox Brown’s pictures were very crabbed and ugly — but what was to be expected of a man whose disposition was so harsh and distorted? This seemed to me to be an amazing statement. But upon discovering the critic’s name I found that Madox Brown once kicked him down-stairs. The gentleman in question had come to Madox Brown with the proposal from an eminent firm of picture dealers that the painter should sell all his works to them for a given number of years at a very low price. In return they were to do what would be called nowadays “booming” him, and they would do their best to get him elected an associate of the Royal Academy. That Madox Brown should have received with such violence a proposition that seemed to the critic so eminently advantageous for all parties, justified that gentleman in his own mind in declaring that Madox Brown had a distorted temperament. Perhaps he had.
But if he had a rough husk he had a sweet kernel, and for this reason the gloomy house in Fitzroy Square did not, I think, remain as a shape of gloom in the minds of many people. It was very tall, very large, very gray, and in front of it towered up very high the mournful plane-trees of the square. And over the porch was the funereal urn with the ram’s head. This object, dangerous and threatening, has always seemed to me to be symbolical of this circle of men, so practical in their work and so romantically unpractical, as a whole, in their lives. They knew exactly how, according to their lights, to paint pictures, to write poems, to make tables, to decorate pianos, rooms, or churches. But as to the conduct of life they were a little sketchy, a little romantic, perhaps a little careless. I should say that of them all Madox Brown was the most practical. But his way of being practical was always to be quaintly ingenious. Thus we had the urn. Most of the Pre-Raphaelites dreaded it; they all of them talked about it as a possible danger, but never was any step taken for its removal. It was never even really settled in their minds whose would be the responsibility for any accident. It is difficult to imagine the frame of mind, but there it was, and there to this day the urn remains. The question could have been settled by any lawyer, or Madox Brown might have had some clause that provided for his indemnity inserted in his lease. And, just as the urn itself set the tone of the old immense Georgian mansion fallen from glory, so perhaps the fact that it remained for so long the topic of conversation set the note of the painters, the painter-poetc, the poet-craftsmen, the painter-musicians, the filibuster verse-writers, and all that singular collection of men versed in the arts. They assembled and revelled comparatively modestly in the rooms where Colonel Newcome and his fellow-directors of the Bundelcund Board had partaken of mulligatawny and spiced punch before the sideboard that displayed its knife-boxes with the green-handled knives in their serried phalanxes.
But, for the matter of that, Madox Brown’s own sideboard also displayed its green-handled knives, which always seemed to me to place him as the man of the old school in which he was born and remained to the end of his days. If he was impracticable, he hadn’t about him a touch of the Bohemian; if he was romantic, his romances took place along ordered lines. Every friend’s son of his who went into the navy was destined in his eyes to become, not a pirate, but at least a port-admiral. Every young lawyer that he knew was certain, even if he were only a solicitor, to become Lord Chancellor, and every young poet who presented him with a copy of his first work was destined for the Laureateship. And he really believed in these romantic prognostications, which came from him without end as without selection. So that if he was the first to give a helping hand to D. G. Rossetti, his patronage in one or two other instances was not so wisely bestowed.
He was, of course, the sworn foe of the Royal Academy. For him they were always, the members of that august body, “those damned academicians,” with a particular note of acerbity upon the expletive. Yet I very well remember, upon the appearance of the first numbers of the Daily Graphic, that Madox Brown, being exceedingly struck by the line engravings of one of the artists that paper regularly employed to render social functions, exclaimed:
“By Jove! if young Cleaver goes on as well as he has begun, those damned academicians, supposing they had any sense, would elect him president right away!” Thus it will be seen that the business of romance was not to sweep away the Royal Academy, was not to found an opposing salon, but it was to capture the established body by storm, leaping, as it were, on to the very quarter-deck, and setting to the old ship a new course. The characteristic, in fact, of all these men was their warm-heartedness, their enmity for the formal, for the frigid, for the ungenerous. It cannot be said that any of them despised money. I doubt whether it would even be said that any of them did not, at one time or another, seek for popularity, or try to paint, write, or decorate pot-boilers. But they were naïvely unable to do it. To the timid — and the public is always the timid — what was individual in their characters was always alarming. It was alarming even when they tried to paint the conventional dog-and-girl pictures of the Christmas supplement. The dogs were too like dogs and did not simper; the little girls were too like little girls. They would be probably rendered as just losing their first teeth.
In spite of the Italianism of Rossetti, who was never in Italy, and the mediævalism of Morris, who had never looked mediævalism, with its cruelties, its filth, its stenches, and its avarice, in the face — in spite of these tendencies that were forced upon them by those two contagious spirits, the whole note of this old, romantic circle was national, was astonishingly English, was Georgian even. They seemed to date from the Regency, and to have skipped altogether the baneful influences of early Victorianism and of the commerciality that the Prince Consort spread through England. They seem to me to resemble in their lives — and perhaps in their lives they were greater than their works — to resemble nothing so much as a group of old-fashioned ships’ captains. Madox Brown, indeed, was nominated for a midshipman in the year 1827. His father had fought on the famous Arethusa in the classic fight with the Belle Poule. And but for the fact that his father quarrelled with Commodore Coffin, and so lost all hope of influence at the Admiralty, it is probable that Madox Brown would never have painted a picture or have lived in Colonel Newcome’s house. Indeed, on the last occasion when I saw William Morris I happened to meet him in Portland Place. He was going to the house of a peer, that his firm was engaged in decorating, and he took me with him to look at the work. He was then a comparatively old man, and his work had grown very flamboyant, so that the decoration of the dining-room consisted, as far as I can remember, of one huge acanthus-leaf design. Morris looked at this absent-mindedly, and said that he had just been talking to some members of a ship’s crew whom he had met in Fenchurch Street. They had remained for some time under the impression that he was a ship’s captain. This had pleased him very much, for it was his ambition to be taken for such a man. I have heard, indeed, that this happened to him on several occasions, on each of which he expressed an equal satisfaction. With a gray beard like the foam of the sea, with gray hair through which he continually ran his hands, erect and curly on his forehead, with a hooked nose, a florid complexion, and clean, clear eyes, dressed in a blue serge coat, and carrying, as a rule, a satchel, to meet him was always, as it were, to meet a sailor ashore. And that in essence was the note of them all. When they were at work they desired that everything they did should be shipshape; when they set their work down they became like Jack ashore. And perhaps that is why there is, as a rule, such a scarcity of artists in England. Perhaps to what is artistic in the nation the sea has always called too strongly.
