J. Comyns Carr

“ It was in this way that I first encountered that handsomest and gayest of young actors, H. J. Montague, whose charm exercised a widespread fascination upon the play-goers of his day, and who was further, and quite independently of such histrionic gifts as he could boast, a companion of the most sympathetic spirit. If not endowed with absolute wit, he could so infect the recital of the most ordinary adventures that he had encountered during the day with something of the rollicking sense of boyishness that was his own, as to keep his hearers in a mood of unflagging merriment and enjoyment. ”

“ The embodiment of all those fiercer passions that are deemed to be most repugnant to the ideal of womanhood, and moved by a will that is deaf to the pleadings of humanity and inaccessible to the voice of eternal law, she is regarded as the evil genius of her husband, crushing by the weight of her stronger individuality the constant promptings of his better nature, and sweeping him with irresistible force into a bottomless abyss of crime. ”

“ The last time I saw him was at a small dinner-party at my sister-in-law’s house in Paris, where his reputation as a painter was firmly and finally established. Whatever his altered feelings towards England, it had made no change in his relations with his old friends, and on that evening it seemed to me he had in him all the old spirit of gaiety and wit as I had first known it in the earlier days of Cheyne Walk.
In temperament and character, as well as in the chosen ideal of his art, he holds a distinctive place in his generation. ”

“ Very often on these occasions our talk was not directly concerned with painting at all, but strayed away into many worlds of the present or the past. As a painter every artist must stand or fall by his command of the particular aspect of beauty which can be rendered by that art, and by no other. If a picture fails, it is no excuse that its author is a poet. If a poet fails, it is idle to plead in his defence that he is an accomplished musician. What added burdens of the spirit the worker in any art chooses to carry, concerns himself alone ”

“ There is no high music in verse that is not linked with sense, no thought that is rightly a poet’s thought that may not find its fitting melody. And it is because Tennyson, despite his confessed limitations on the side of passion, more constantly than his fellows held fast to the true office of the poet, that he stands among them all as their undisputed master.
In every art the last word is simplicity. There is no phase of thought or feeling rightly admissible into the domain of poetry that the might of genius may not force to simple utterance. ”

“ But it remains, nevertheless, unquestionably true that during that brief season of close comradeship, the supremacy of Rossetti’s genius is very clearly reflected in the work of both. The aftergrowth of talents as great as—and in some respects greater than—his, led each of these men into ways of Art that owned, it may be freely confessed, no obligation to Rossetti; and of the rich gifts of Millais as a painter, extraordinary in their precocity and developed in increasing power almost to the end of his career, no one could exhibit keener or truer appreciation than Rossetti himself. ”

“ I saw Desclée, and greatly admired her; and I remember, long afterwards, when I witnessed Sarah Bernhardt’s performance of Frou-frou, how much I thought it suffered in comparison with the original in those lighter and earlier scenes of the play in which the qualities of the heroine’s temperament have to be exhibited; and yet, when Madame Bernhardt came to the great scene in the third act, the recollection of Desclée, by a single stroke of genius, was almost effaced, and I can only think of Frou-frou as it is recalled to me by that superb exhibition of passion in her encounter with Louise. ”

“ His nature was too gentle for that, his strength of conviction too deep and too secure. No one ever possessed a larger quality of personal sympathy; no one, it might seem, was on that account so much exposed to the influence of others. And in a sense this was so. In the lighter traffic of life his spirit flew to the mood of the hour. His appreciation was so quick, his power of identifying himself with the thoughts and feelings of others so ready and so real, that he seemed at such moments to have no care to assert his own personality. ”

“ It may seem foolish to suppose that any one could derive amusement from a day so idly spent, but those who risk this assumption labour under the misfortune of not having known Toole. His gaiety, when he was in the right mood, was infectious and irresistible, and yet, like all men of such exuberant high spirits, he was subject at times to moods of the deepest depression, moods which grew upon him in those sadder and later days of his life when he was deprived of the constant companionship of his comrades, which meant to him all in all. ”

“ To those who do not instinctively feel it, my reference may mean nothing, but to me, to whom the whole achievement of the Victorian Era, in art as in literature, stands high, it means everything. It is not my purpose in these pages of personal recollections to dwell upon my intimate association with men who are still living, but in Mr. Meredith I feel I may make an exception. And Browning has reminded me of him because there is in both a kindred quality—the quality of a superb reverence for life, an undying faith in its ultimate beauty. ”

“ And it was, indeed, a fitting tribute to the dead artist; for Tadema, while he lived, had an absolute passion for flowers. As a painter he would linger with untiring devotion over each separate petal of every separate bloom, and yet with such a sustained sense of mastery in the rendering of their beauty that when the result was complete the infinite mass of perfected detail was found to be firmly bound together by the controlling force of a single effect of light and shade. ”

“ Of the countless thousands who can enjoy Molière’s incomparable humour, how many are there who would pause before Leonardo’s Monna Lisa in the Louvre? How many again in our own country, of those who are familiar with the tragedies of Shakespeare, ever find their way into the British Museum or the National Gallery?
And yet the prejudice against the public support of the theatre endures, and can only, I think, be broken down by the demands of the democracy. If a national theatre is to be established in England, it must realise that it has a national mission. ”

“ They forgot that: forgot that something of a feminine, not an effeminate spirit enters into the re-creation of all forms of beauty; that an artist, by the very nature of his task, cannot always be in the mood to pose as an athlete. And, even if they had desired to define the special direction of Burne-Jones’s art, or to mark the limits of its exercise—limits that no admirer, however ardent, would seek to deny—they need not surely have been so angry. ”

“ And yet to us, who view the whole picture with the poet’s larger vision, the process of development moves in obedience to inevitable law. For at such a crisis it is natural in a man to anticipate: in a woman to remember; on the eve of action he looks forward with apprehension: on the morrow she looks back with regret; and while his nature is stronger in restraint, hers, on the contrary, surrenders itself more completely to the passion of remorse. [183] The finer moral feelings of a woman are retrospective, for her imagination feeds and broods upon the past. ”

“ Perhaps the secret of Toole’s charm lay in an entire absence of pretence either social or intellectual. Something deeply human in his nature left him always at his ease in whatever society he might find himself; and, in a sense of humour which appreciated and detected without resentment the foibles of all whom he encountered, I think there are few men of his generation who could claim to be his equal. He laid no claim to any largeness of education, and I suppose there were few men who had read less, but in that knowledge that could be won without the aid of literature he was a genuine scholar. ”

“ It was therefore a delight to find in Rome in the spring of two years ago how enthusiastic was the welcome accorded to a man who, while he ranks so high among English painters, owned in his veins the blood of Italy and from whose painters, at that bewitching season when the spirit of the Renaissance was in its youth, he had drawn the inspiration which was destined to kindle his own genius. ”

“ Swinburne over the younger men of his generation was of a widely different kind. That new music of which I have spoken, already announced in the Atalanta, and presented with even greater variety and exuberance of expression in the Poems and Ballads, set us all thinking. It seemed at the first as though music in its fullest sense had never before entered into the arena of poetry, and his inexhaustible invention of new metre and rhythmic phrasing set the mind in wonder for a while as to whether all that had gone before was not the mere preface to this final achievement. ”

“ But with this revolution is born a new kind of enjoyment, that carries richer recollections. The limitless world of illusion shrinks to a narrower kingdom, but its triumphs are more vivid and more enduring: the sense of assumption and disguise is no longer so complete or so convincing, but the message of revelation, when it comes, brings with it a higher pleasure.
Nothing lives longer in remembrance, or pictures itself more vividly, than the first impression of the performance of a great actor. ”

“ I knew nothing of the literature of the art when I first learned to fish at the age of twelve, and it has often amazed me since to note what wondrous feats of skill can be performed—in books. How to cast in the teeth of a facing wind, how to avoid the sagging of the line in a swift stream, how to clear a spreading bush immediately behind you—there are exact and precise receipts for all these accomplishments, but they do not always serve you by the water-side. ”

“ There is hardly a remembered day on a Scotch loch, or beside a southern stream, which has not stamped upon it some unfading image of landscape beauty. It was not for that we set forth in the morning, for then the changing lights in a dappled sky counted for no more than a promise of good sport; during those earlier hours there is no feeling but a feeling of impatience to be at work; and the splash of a rising trout, before the rod is joined and ready and the line run through its rings, is heard with a sense of half-resentment lest we should have missed the favourable moment of the day. ”

“ To those who knew and loved Sullivan, and I think he was loved by all who knew him, the extraordinary charm of his personality will be unreservedly acknowledged.
There have been few men in our time in any walk of life who have possessed an equal measure of social fascination. His manner, always sympathetic and sincere, suffered no change in whatever company he found himself, and there was added to this finer quality of sympathy a quick and delicate sense of humour that made closer comradeship with him inspiring and delightful. ”

“ Henceforth it was not possible to think of painting as a thing of mere dilettantism, serving only to minister to the trivial demands of the taste of the hour. He proved to the world that at every season when art has held a dominating place its spirit has been fast linked [126] with the heart and life of the people; and the deep earnestness which in Modern Painters he brought to the task of historical criticism found a ready reflex in the more serious and concentrated intensity of feeling which coloured the work of men of the younger school. ”

“ Of his talent as a caricaturist there can never be any question. He had the rare power of finding an equation for every face, summarising in a few lines its salient points of oddity. And this same power he exhibited in his shrewd judgment of character. At a dinner-table little that was characteristic escaped his humorous regard. Though alien born, and almost jealously retaining to the end of his life amongst us his individuality as a foreigner, he possessed a quick and just appreciation of our national characteristics, more especially as they lent themselves to humorous portrayal. ”

“ His imagination is thus both the source of inaction and the spur that urges him to morbid activity: it is at once the friend of conscience and its bitterest foe: at one moment the lamp that reveals to him his hideous design and all its attendant train of evil, in the next a lurid flame that lights up a thousand avenues of danger, only to be guarded by the exercise of a relentless cruelty and an unflinching courage. In nearly every utterance of Macbeth after the murder we are allowed to see how clearly he himself apprehends the danger of his position, and the sinister policy which it demands. ”

“ As literature has fallen since under the conduct of later hands, I find that it seems in some sense shattered in subdivision. There are, on the one hand, writers who seek to be artists and no more, men who pet and polish their rhythmic phrases till they may be said to have reached perfection, and on the other hand there are pamphleteers, eager and sincere, but still pamphleteers, who are content if they can coerce their readers into the belief that their chosen gospel for the regeneration of humanity is a fair equivalent for the larger vision of life itself. ”

“ His instinct was so sure, his sympathy so finely tuned, that he never missed his footing: his sense of harmony in friendship, as in art, so absolutely irreproachable, that he never struck a jarring note.
A great simplicity and generosity of nature lay, I think, at the root of the rare social charm he possessed. In all my recollections of our companionship I cannot recall a single ill-natured word towards friend or acquaintance, or any bitter criticism of a comrade in art. In another man such restraint might have seemed insipid: in his case it was instinctive and obviously sincere. ”

“ By degrees, however, my growing love for Form made me intolerant of the restraint and exigencies of costume, and led me more and more, and finally, to a class of subjects, or, more accurately, to a set of conditions, in which supreme scope is left to pure artistic qualities, in which no form is imposed upon the artist by the tailor, but in which every form is made obedient to the conception of the design he has in hand. ”

“ The more violent forms of sport, which exact the devotion of a day, or of a series of days, require the enforced cessation of all forms of literary toil; but if the angler is fortunately located, work and play are by no means inconsistent and—granted that he is strong enough to resist during the earlier hours of the day the alluring call of the gentle south-west breeze with its alternating changes of sun and cloud—the morning may still hold him chained to his desk, sure of the reward of his industry in the evening ramble by the stream. ”

“ And yet, once a measure of mastery is won, fishing remains for those who love it an abiding passion. Time leaves undisturbed the keen excitement of the first adventure, and with each return of spring the longing to be out beside a stream sets the pulses newly beating. One day when we were trudging through a field of turnips in Fifeshire, the late Sir William Harcourt, as though pierced by sudden conviction, turned to me with the remark, “Carr, what a bore sport is!” ”