Intentions
only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down to
give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire
now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism
is always in front of Life.
The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates
Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from
the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and
that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise
that energy. It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but
it is extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light upon the
history of Art.
It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates
Art. The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have
already seen through poetry, or in paintings. This is the secret of
Nature’s charm, as well as the explanation of Nature’s weakness.
The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue
things, is the proper aim of Art. But of this I think I have spoken at
sufficient length. And now let us go out on the terrace, where ‘droops
the milk-white peacock like a ghost,’ while the evening star ‘washes the
dusk with silver.’ At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive
effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to
illustrate quotations from the poets. Come! We have talked long enough.
PEN, PENCIL AND POISON
A STUDY IN GREEN
IT has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men
of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature.
As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision
and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic
temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are
preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much
importance. Yet there are many exceptions to this rule. Rubens served
as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin
secretary to Cromwell. Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the
humourists, essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire
nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their
country; and Charles Lamb’s friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the
subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic
temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a
poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose,
an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful,
but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle
and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.
This remarkable man, so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison,’ as a
great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at Chiswick,
in 1794. His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of Gray’s
Inn and Hatton Garden. His mother was the daughter of the celebrated Dr.
Griffiths, the editor and founder of the _Monthly Review_, the partner in
another literary speculation of Thomas Davis, that famous bookseller of
whom Johnson said that he was not a bookseller, but ‘a gentleman who
dealt in books,’ the friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the
most well-known men of his day. Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him
birth, at the early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_ tells us of her ‘amiable disposition and numerous
accomplishments,’ and adds somewhat quaintly that ‘she is supposed to
have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any person
of either sex now living.’ His father did not long survive his young
wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up by his
grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his uncle George
Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned. His boyhood was passed
at Linden House, Turnham Green, one of those many fine Georgian mansions
that have unfortunately disappeared before the inroads of the suburban
builder, and to its lovely gardens and well-timbered park he owed that
simple and impassioned love of nature which never left him all through
his life, and which made him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual
influences of Wordsworth’s poetry. He went to school at Charles Burney’s
academy at Hammersmith. Mr. Burney was the son of the historian of
music, and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to turn
out his most remarkable pupil. He seems to have been a man of a good
deal of culture, and in after years Mr. Wainewright often spoke of him
with much affection as a philosopher, an archæologist, and an admirable
teacher who, while he valued the intellectual side of education, did not
forget the importance of early moral training. It was under Mr. Burney
that he first developed his talent as an artist, and Mr. Hazlitt tells us
that a drawing-book which he used at school is still extant, and displays
great talent and natural feeling. Indeed, painting was the first art
that fascinated him. It was not till much later that he sought to find
expression by pen or poison.
Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish dreams
of the romance and chivalry of a soldier’s life, and to have become a
young guardsman. But the reckless dissipated life of his companions
failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made
for other things. In a short time he wearied of the service. ‘Art,’ he
tells us, in words that still move many by their ardent sincerity and
strange fervour, ‘Art touched her renegade; by her pure and high
influence the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and
tarnished, were renovated with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to
the simple-hearted.’ But Art was not the only cause of the change. ‘The
writings of Wordsworth,’ he goes on to say, ‘did much towards calming the
confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations. I wept over
them tears of happiness and gratitude.’ He accordingly left the army,
with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-tattle, and
returned to Linden House, full of this new-born enthusiasm for culture.
A severe illness, in which, to use his own words, he was ‘broken like a
vessel of clay,’ prostrated him for a time. His delicately strung
organisation, however indifferent it might have been to inflicting pain
on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain. He shrank from
suffering as a thing that mars and maims human life, and seems to have
wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from which so many
great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged. But he was
young—only twenty-five years of age—and he soon passed out of the ‘dead
black waters,’ as he called them, into the larger air of humanistic
culture. As he was recovering from the illness that had led him almost
to the gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking up literature as
an art. ‘I said with John Woodvil,’ he cries, ‘it were a life of gods to
dwell in such an element,’ to see and hear and write brave things:—
‘These high and gusty relishes of life
Have no allayings of mortality.’
It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance
of a man who had a true passion for letters. ‘To see and hear and write
brave things,’ this was his aim.
Scott, the editor of the _London Magazine_, struck by the young man’s
genius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that he
exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series of
articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful pseudonym
he began to contribute to the literature of his day. _Janus
Weathercock_, _Egomet Bonmot_, and _Van Vinkvooms_, were some of the
grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to
reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. These disguises
intensified his personality. In an incredibly short time he seems to
have made his mark. Charles Lamb speaks of ‘kind, light-hearted
Wainewright,’ whose prose is ‘capital.’ We hear of him entertaining
Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet
John Clare, and others, at _a petit-dîner_. Like Disraeli, he determined
to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique
cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well
known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new
manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite
white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being
different from others. There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de
Rubempré. At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De Quincey saw him
once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s. ‘Amongst the company, all
literary men, sat a murderer,’ he tells us, and he goes on to describe
how on that day he had been ill, and had hated the face of man and woman,
and yet found himself looking with intellectual interest across the table
at the young writer beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to
him to lie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on ‘what sudden
growth of another interest’ would have changed his mood, had he known of
what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even
then guilty.
His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by Mr.
Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside his
achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us
hardly justifies his reputation.
But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by
the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody,
rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is in art,
and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.
Nor is his work without interest. We hear of William Blake stopping in
the Royal Academy before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be
‘very fine.’ His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been
realised. He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern
culture that are regarded by many as true essentials. He writes about La
Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian Renaissance. He loves
Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of _Cupid
and Psyche_, and the _Hypnerotomachia_, and book-binding and early
editions, and wide-margined proofs. He is keenly sensitive to the value
of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the
rooms in which he lived, or would have liked to live. He had that
curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a
subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity,
if not a decadence of morals. Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of
cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that ‘sweet marble monster’
of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.
There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestions for
decoration, that shows that he did not entirely free himself from the
false taste of his time. But it is clear that he was one of the first to
recognise what is, indeed, the very keynote of æsthetic eclecticism, I
mean the true harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective of age
or place, of school or manner. He saw that in decorating a room, which
is to be, not a room for show, but a room to live in, we should never aim
at any archæological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves
with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy. In this artistic