The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

o go to present a letter of introduction given me by G.P. Putnam, the publisher, to his agent in England, Mr. Delf, who at once took me to a lodging-house in Bouverie Street, in which I g

e true Christian Sabbath, and to fellowship with the congregation of Millyard. I was admitted to honorary membership in the church, and the listening to the two dry-as-dust sermons was compensated for by the cordial friendship of the pastor, an invitation to dinner every Saturday, and the motherly interest of his wife and daughters. My childhood's faith and my mother's creed still hung so closely to me that the observances of our ancient church were to me sacred, and the Sabbath da

he hawthorn bloomed. After an early dinner we passed the afternoon in talk on art and artists. Pyne was one of the best talkers on art I ever knew, and a critic of very great lucidity; his art had great qualities and as great defects, but in comparison with some of the favorites of the public of that day he was a giant, and in certain technical qualities he had no equal in his generation except Turner. He had the dangerous tendency, for an artist, of putting everything he did under the protection and direction of a theory-a course which invariably checks the fertility of technical resource, and which in his case had the unfortunate effe

conventions and tricks of the brush repelled me, and generally his work left me cold and discouraged, for this is the effect of wasted cleverness, that it disheartens a man who, knowing that his abilities are less, finds the achievement of cleverer men so poor in what satisfies the artist of feeling. In it I saw an exaggeration of Pyne's defects and the caricature of his good qual

xton's, the most pathetic. His native abilities were of a very high order, and his education far above that which the British artist of that day possessed. He was a pupil of Paul Delaroche, and the German blood he had from his father gave him an imaginative element which the Englishman in him liberated entirely from the German prescriptive limitations, while there was just enough of the German poet in him to give his design a sentiment which was entirely lacki

. The sisters were women who had been of the world, clever, accomplished, and with a restricted and most interesting circle of friends; but over the whole family there rested an air of tragic gravity, as if of some past which could never be spoken of and into which I never felt inclined to inquire. Among the memories of my first stay in London the Wehnerts awaken the tenderest, for through many years they proved the dearest and kindest of friends. And the hospitality of London, wherever I found access to it, was unmeasured-

fered which would make him dispose of some of them. Griffiths told me that in his presence an American collector, James Lenox, of New York, after offering Turner ￡5000, which was refused, for the Old "Téméraire," offered him a blank check, which was also rejected. Griffiths's place

s if he had not himself come to a conclusion on the subject of conversation. A delightful and to me instructive conversation ended in an invitation to visit his father's collection of drawings and pictures at Denmark Hill, and later to spend the evening at his own house in Grosvenor Street. After the lapse of forty-eight years, it is difficult to distinguish between the incidents which took place in this first visit to England in 1850 and those belonging to another a little later, but my impression is very strong that it was during the former that I spent the evening at the Grosvenor Street residence, at which I met several artists of Ruskin's intimacy, and amongst them G.F. Watts. I t

he wine." This was to me the most perplexing problem of all that Ruskin put before me, for it was the first time that the doctrine of Calvin had come before me in a concrete form. Another incident gave me a serious perplexity as to the accuracy of Ruskin's perceptions of nature. Leslie had given me a card to see Mr. Holford's collection of pictures, in which was one of Turner's, the balcony scene in Venice, called, I think, "Juliet and her Nurse." It was a moonlight, with the mo

n our opinions on art in later years, and the differences came to me reluctantly, for my reverence for the man was never to be shaken, while my study of art showed me finally that, however correct his views of the ethics of art might be, from the point of view of pure art he was entirely mistaken, and all that his influence had done for me had to be un

comings so heavily as to make my work full of distress instead of that content with which the artist should always work. Everything became conscious effort and the going was too much uphill. I had always been groping my own way, scarcely as much assisted by the fragmentary good advice I received as laid under heavier disabilities by the better knowledge of what should be done. In art education the training of the hand should, I am persuaded, always be kept in advance of

k from nature. He lived at Red Hill, and in the immediate vicinity John Linnell had built his then new home. In the few weeks I lived there I saw a great deal of the old man, one of the most remarkable examples of the old English type I have ever known, and to me as interesting a problem from the religious point of view as from the artistic. Barring differences of the creed, of which I knew and cared nothing (for my own religious horizon had always included all "good-willing men," and I had no conception of the distinctions of creed which would se

her mind, but in the sense that what he had learned he had digested and forgotten except as a chance word in the universal gospel of art; technically weak, slovenly in style, but eminently successful in telling the story he had to tell. Even then, with my limited knowledge of painting, he seemed to me to furnish the antithesis to Pyne,-one too careful of style and running to excessive precision, the other too negligent and running into indecision; and this

h interested in what I had to say of America, and he paid us the national compliment of saying that we spoke English more intelligibly than Englishmen in general. As I spoke no French, our conversation was in English, and he understood me perfectly, though he said he rarely could follow without difficulty the conversation of an Englishman, while Americans in general he understood readily. To accomplish all that I did with my fifty pounds it may be easily u

ed because the thing was to be done. I retain the distinct recollection of an expression of my mother while I was making preparations for this first voyage to Europe, and she was packing my clothes for the voyage and her lips were silently moving and the slow tears running down her cheeks. She said in her low and murmuring voice as if in comment on her prayer, "Oh! no, he is too pure-hearted," and I knew that the prayer was for my protection from the temptations of that world of which she only knew the terrors and dangers from her Bible, and that she was so wrapt in her spiritual yearnings that she had

I was on this visit, with an attack of the malady which later killed him, and I had begged Griffiths to ask him to let me come and nurse him. He declined the offer, but was not, Griffiths told me, quite unmoved by it. One d

walking down the gallery, went to studying the pictures again. When I looked his way again, a few minutes later, he held out his hand to me, and we entered into a conversation which lasted until Griffiths gave me a hint that Turner had business to transact which I must leave him to. He gave me a hearty handshake, and in his oracular way said, "Hmph-(nod) if you come to England again-hmph (nod)-hmph (nod)," and another hand-shake with more cordiality and a nod for good-by. I never saw a keener eye than his, and the way that he held himself up, so straight that he seemed almost to lean backwards, with his forehead thrown forward, and the piercing eyes looking out from under their heavy brows, and his diminutive stature coupled with the imposing bearing, combined to make a very peculiar and vivid impression on me. Griffith

nd despair of. The drawings of the England and Wales series in the possession of Ruskin seemed to my critical faculty the ne plus ultra of water-color painting,-especially the "Llanthony Abbey," of which I recall those early impressions with the greatest distinctness[1]. I saw in t

again in the Guildha

the exhibition of the Academy, that if ever English figure painting rose out of mediocrity it would be through the work of the P.R.B. My impression is that the picture was the "Christ in the Carpenter's Shop," but of this I cannot be sure, though I am certain that it was in the exhibition of 1850. The Rossetti was in the old "National Society," and was either the "Childhood of the Virgin Mary" or the "White Lady." Beautiful as it was, it did not imp

he other half going for a bottle of Rhine wine, to return the compliment of my next neighbor at the table, who had invited me to take a glass of wine one day. Thus, as usual, I landed penniless from my venture, but fortunately found my brother on the wharf expecting the arrival of the steamer, her trips having been made with such precision that the hour of arrival was gene

ture, the fidelity and completeness of them, even in comparison with Durand's, was something which the conventional landscape known then and there had never approached, and to the respectable amateurs of that day they were puzzles. In one of them, a study of a wood scene with a spring of water overshadowed by a beech-tree, all painted at close quarters, I had transplanted a violet which I wanted in the near foreground, so as to be sure that it was in correct light and proportion. This was in the spirit of the Ruskinian doctrine, of which I made myself the apostle. On that study I spent such hours of the day as the light served, for three months, and then the coming of autumn stopped me. Any difficulty in literal rendering of a subject was incomprehensible to me, and in fact in that kind of work there is little difference, fo