Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (663 page)

“Time the moths had it!”

This shed such a light upon the garment from the point of view of tailors that I never wore it again. It fell, I am afraid, into the hands of a family with little respect for relics of the great, and I am fairly certain that I observed its capacious folds in the mists of an early morning upon Romney Marsh some months ago, enveloping the limbs of an elderly and poaching scoundrel called Slingsby.

But indeed, the grey frieze apart, there was little enough in externals about the inner ring of the Pre-Raphaelites that was decorative. Rossetti wore grey frieze, because it was the least bothersome of materials; it never wanted brushing, it never wanted renewing, there it was. Madox Brown wore always an eminently un-Bohemian suit of black. Christina Rossetti affected the least picturesque of black garments for daily use, whilst on occasions of a festive nature she would go as far as a pearl-grey watered silk. Millais, of course, was purely conventional in attire, and so was Holman Hunt. I remember meeting Holman Hunt outside High Street, Kensington Station, on a rather warmish day. He was wearing an overcoat of extremely fine, light-coloured fur. To this he drew my attention and proceeded to lecture me upon the virtues of economy, saying with his prophetic air:

“Young man! observe this garment. I bought it in the year 1852, giving a hundred and forty pounds for it. It is now 1894. This overcoat has therefore lasted me forty-two years and I have never had another. You will observe that it has actually cost me per annum something less than £3 10s., which is much less, I am certain, than you spend upon your overcoats.”

And here Mr. Hunt regarded Rossetti’s garment, which was then aged thirty-three, and had cost £6 10s when it was new. I did not, however, interrupt him, and the great man continued:

“And you will observe that I still have the coat, which is worth as much or more than its original sum, whilst, for all these years, it has enabled me to present a flourishing appearance whenever I had to transact business.”

These are not, of course, Mr. Hunt’s exact words, nor, perhaps, are the figures exactly right, but they render the effect of this dissertation. I never could understand why it was that whenever I came near Mr. Hunt he should always lecture me on the virtue of economy, yet this was the case. Nevertheless, in those days, following what I considered to be the rules of Morrisian Socialism, I certainly dressed with an extreme economy and I doubt whether all the clothes I had on could have cost so much as the £3 10s which Mr. Hunt allotted for a yearly expenditure on overcoats. There was Rossetti’s garment aged thirty-three, there was a water-tight German forester’s pilot jacket, which I had bought in the Bavarian Spessart for four-and-sixpence, there were some trousers which I imagine cost eighteen shillings, a leather belt, an old blue shirt which, being made of excellent linen, had already served my grandfather for fifteen years, and a red satin tie which probably cost one shilling. But these facts, I imagine, were hidden from Mr. Hunt, who had no particular sympathy with the æsthetic movement or with advanced ideas. Mr. Holman Hunt, of course, was a Pre-Raphaelite of pure blood, and anything more hideous, anything more purely early-Victorian than in their day the Pre-Raphaelites put up with in the matter of furniture and appointments I do not think it possible to imagine.

Holman Hunt and Millais separated themselves early from the other Pre-Raphaelites, and their furniture remained normal, following the fashions of the day. And this remained true for all the disciples of the first Pre-Raphaelite group. Thus if you will look at Robert B. Martineau’s “The Last Day in the Old Home,” you will perceive a collection of the horrors of furnishing as it was understood in the days when Victoria was queen — a collection rendered by the painter with a care so loving as to show that he at least had no idea of salvation having to be obtained by curtain-serge and simplicity.

The first impulses towards the new furnishing came when Rossetti acquired, during a visit to Oxford, two disciples called William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. These two young men made Rossetti’s acquaintance whilst he was painting the frescoes in the Union — frescoes which have now almost disappeared. Swinburne, and more particularly Morris, must have exercised the most profound of influences over Dante Gabriel, and later over Madox Brown. For I have no doubt whatever that it was these two who pushed this great figure into the exaggerated and loose mediævalism that distinguished his latest period. I do not mean to say that Rossetti had fallen under no mediæval influences before this date, since obviously he had been enormously impressed by Sir Walter Scott. I used to posses a yellow-bound pamphlet entitled
Sir Hugh the Heron
and printed by Rossetti’s grandfather when Rossetti himself was seven or eight.
Sir Hugh the Heron
contained the following spirited verse, which always lingers in my memory:

“And the shrieks of the flying, the groans of the dying

 
And the battle’s deafening yell,

And the armour which clanked as the warrior rose,

 
And rattled as he fell.”

This first-printed poem of Rossetti’s has always seemed to me symbolical of what, by himself, he did for mediævalism. Scott made it merely romantic, he suggested — I don’t mean to say that he ever gave it as such — but he suggested that William Wallace went into battle in black velvet short hose, with in one hand a court sword and in the other a cambric pocket handkerchief. Rossetti before he came under the influence of Morris and Burne Jones went much deeper into mediævalism than ever Scott did. He looked as it were into the illuminated capitals of missals and so gave the world little square wooden chambers all gilded, with women in hennins, queer musical instruments, and many little pretty quaint conceits. Madox Brown, of course, in his peculiar manner carried the quaintnesses still further. With his queer knotted English mind he must give you an Iseult screaming like any kitchen wench, a Sir Tristam expiring in an extraordinary stiff spasm because armour would not bend, a King Marc poking a particularly ugly face into a grated window; and of all things in the world, a white Maltese terrier yapping at the murderers. This picture was of course designed to
épater les bourgeois
— touch them on the raw. And as such it need not be considered very seriously. But between them, Madox Brown and Rossetti invented a queer and quaint sort of mediævalism that was realistic always as long as it could be picturesque. Morris, Swinburne, and Burne-Jones however invented the gorgeous glamour of mediævalism. It was as if they said they must have pomegranates, pomegranates, pomegranates all the way. They wanted pomegranates not only in their pictures but in their dining-room and on their beds. I should say that Rossetti was a man without any principles at all, who earnestly desired to find some means of salvation along the lines of least resistance. Madox Brown on the other hand was ready to make a principle out of anything that was at all picturesque. Thus whilst Rossetti accepted the pomegranate as the be-all and end-all of life, Madox Brown contented himself with playing with a conventionalized daisy pattern such as could grow behind any St. Michael or Uriel of stained glass.

Neither Rossetti nor Madox Brown had the least desire to mediævalize their homes. Rossetti wanted to fill his house with anything that was odd, Chinese or sparkling. If there was something gruesome about it, he liked it all the better. Thus at his death, two marauders, out of the shady crew that victimized him and one honest man, each became possessed of the dark lantern used by Eugene Aram. I mean to say that quite lately there were in the market three dark lanterns each of which was supposed to have come from Rossetti’s house at his death, only one of which had been bought with honest money at Rossetti’s sale. Even this one may not have been the relic of the murderer which Rossetti had purchased with immense delight. He bought in fact just anything or everything that amused him or tickled his fancy, without the least idea of making his house resemble anything but an old curiosity shop.

This collection was rendered still more odd by the eccentricities of Mr. Charles Augustus Howell, an extraordinary personage who ought to have a volume all to himself. There was nothing in an odd jobbing way that Mr. Howell was not up to. He supported his family for some time by using a diving bell to recover treasure from a lost galleon off the coast of Portugal, of which country he appears to have been a native. He became Ruskin’s secretary and he had a shop in which he combined the framing and the forging of masterpieces. He conducted the most remarkable of dealers’ swindles with the most consummate ease and grace, doing it indeed so lovably that when his misdeeds were discovered he became only more beloved. Such a character would obviously appeal to Rossetti, and as, at one period of his career, Rossetti’s income ran well into five figures, whilst he threw gold out of all the windows and doors, it is obvious that such a character as Rossetti’s must have appealed very strongly to Mr. Charles Augustus Howell. The stories of him are endless. At one time whilst Rossetti was collecting chinoiseries, Howell happened to have in his possession a nearly priceless set of Chinese tea-things. These he promptly proceeded to have duplicated at his establishment, where forging was carried on more wonderfully than seems possible. This forgery he proceeded to get one of his concealed agents to sell to Rossetti for an enormously high figure. Coming to tea with the poet-artist on the next day, he remarked to Rossetti:

“Hallo, Gabriel, where did you get those clumsy imitations?”

Rossetti of course was filled with consternation, whereupon Howell remarked comfortingly: “Oh, it’s all right, old chap, I’ve got the originals, which I’ll let you have for an old song.”

And eventually, he sold the originals to Rossetti for a figure very considerably over that at which Rossetti had bought the forgeries. Howell was then permitted to take away the forgeries as’of no value, and Rossetti was left with the originals. Howell, however, was for some time afterwards more than usually assiduous in visiting the painter-poet. At each visit he brought one of the forged cups in his pocket and whilst Rossetti’s back was turned he substituted the forgery for one of the genuine cups which he took away in his pocket. At the end of the series of visits therefore, Rossetti once more possessed the copies and Howell the genuine set which he sold, I believe, to M. Tissot.

So that whatever Rossetti did possess he never could be really certain of what it actually was. He could not, even, as I have elsewhere pointed out, be certain that the pictures on his own easels were by his own hand. But in any case he went through life with a singular collection of oddments and the catalogue of his effects at his death is one of the most romantic documents of the sort that it is easy to lay one’s hands on.

Madox Brown, on the other hand, had very much of Rossetti’s passion for picking up things. But he cared very little for the wares or the value of the objects which he purchased. He would buy black Wedgewood or he would buy a three-penny pot at a little shop round the corner, or he would buy gilt objects from the palace of George IV at Brighton — in short, he would buy anything that would add a spot of colour to his dining-room. But I fancy the only bargain he ever made was once when he discovered a cartoon in red chalk amongst the débris of a rag-and-bone shop. For this he exchanged two old bonnets of my grandmother’s. Sometime afterwards he observed — I think at Agnew’s — another red chalk cartoon which was an authenticated Boucher. This second cartoon was so obviously the other half of the design he had already in his possession that he had no hesitation in purchasing it for a comparatively small sum. At the sale of his effects, in 1894, this panel fetched quite a considerable price and in the meantime it had looked very handsome upon the walls of his drawing-room.

The Madox Brown sale, apart from its note of tragedy for myself in the breaking up of a home that had seemed so romantic — that still after many years seems to me so romantic — had about it something extremely comic. Madox Brown’s rooms had always seemed to me to be as comfortable and as pretty as one could desire. It was true that they had about them no settled design. But of an evening, many candles being lit, the golden wall paper shining with a subdued glow, the red curtains, the red couch, the fireplace with its Turkey-red tiles, the large table covered with books, the little piano of a golden wood with its panels painted and gilded by William Morris himself — all these things had about them a prettiness, a quaintness. And with the coming of the auctioneer’s man it all fell to pieces so extraordinarily.

I do not think I shall ever forget Madox Brown’s quaint dismay and anger when Mr. Harry Quilter “discovered” him. During his long absence in Manchester, while he was painting the twelve frescoes in the Town Hall — frescoes which were of great size, each of which occupied him a year and were paid for very insignificantly — the frescoes which the Manchester Town Council afterwards desired to whitewash out — after this long absence from London Madox Brown as a painter and as a man had become entirely forgotten. So that when he returned to London, he seemed to have almost no friends left and no one to buy his pictures. The old race of Northern merchant princes who had bought so liberally were all dead, and shortly after his return he sold to Mr. Boddington of Wilmslow fourteen early pictures for four hundred pounds. Most of these were lately exhibited at the Dudley Gallery, where one of them sold for more than half the price that had been given for the fourteen. This picture is now, I believe, in the possession of Mr. Sargent. Nevertheless in his rather dismal circumstances Madox Brown set cheerfully to work to get together a new home, and a new circle of friends. He went about it with a remarkable and boyish gaiety, and having got it together with its gilt leather wall paper, its red tiles, its furniture from the palace of George IV at Brighton and its other oddments, he really considered that he had produced a sort of palace. Then came Mr. Quilter. Mr. Quilter discovered the phrase, “Father of Pre-Raphaelism” which so disturbed Mr. Holman Hunt. He discovered that this great artist whom he compared to Titian, Botticelli, Holbein, Hogarth, and to Heaven knows whom, was living in our midst, and he proclaimed this astounding discovery to one of the evening papers with the additional circumstance that Madox Brown was living in a state of the most dismal poverty. He described Madox Brown’s studio — the only room in the house to which he had been admitted — as a place so filled with old fragments of rusty iron, bits of string, and the detritus of ages that it resembled a farrier’s shop. He described a lay figure with the straw sticking out of all its members, easels covered with dust that tottered and perpetually threatened to let their pictures fall, curtains so threadbare that they were mere skeleton protections against the sun and draughts. In short he described a place half way between the Old Curiosity Shop of Dickens and a marine store in a suburb of Portsmouth. Madox Brown read this picturesque narrative with a face of exaggerated bewilderment. He pulled his biretta impatiently off his snow-white head, and gazed over his spectacles at the bits of string, the fragments of old iron, the tottering easels, the lay figure, with straw sticking out of every joint that in an attitude of dejection hung from its supports, like a man that has been executed three centuries before. With an air of extreme satisfaction he regarded all these objects which Mr. Quilter had so picturesquely and accurately described. Then he put on his biretta once more with great care and speaking solemnly and deliberately, let fall the words: “God damn and blast my soul! What does the fellow want?”