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 perception he was perfectly right.  All beautiful things belong to the same age.

And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted figures and the faint ΚΑΛΟΣ finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’ of Michael Angelo, or of the ‘Pastoral’ of Giorgione.  Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours, ‘cased in a cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded with small brilliants and rubies,’ and close by it ‘squats a little ugly monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of corn-bearing Sicily.’  Some dark antique bronzes contrast with the pale gleam of two noble Christi Crucifixi, one carved in ivory, the other moulded in wax.’  He has his trays of Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze bonbonnière with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized ‘brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked,’ his citron morocco letter-case, and his ‘pomona-green’ chair.

One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts and engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning over his fine collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum,’ of which he was a warm admirer, or examining with a magnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, ‘the head of Alexander on an onyx of two strata,’ or ‘that superb altissimo relievo on cornelian, Jupiter Ægiochus.’  He was always a great amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful suggestions as to the best means of forming a collection.  Indeed, while fully appreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the importance of reproductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and all that he says about the value of plaster casts is quite admirable.

As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first step in æsthetic criticism is to realise one’s own impressions.  He cared nothing for abstract discussions on the nature of the Beautiful, and the historical method, which has since yielded such rich fruit, did not belong to his day, but he never lost sight of the great truth that Art’s first appeal is neither to the intellect nor to the emotions, but purely to the artistic temperament, and he more than once points out that this temperament, this ‘taste,’ as he calls it, being unconsciously guided and made perfect by frequent contact with the best work, becomes in the end a form of right judgment.  Of course there are fashions in art just as there are fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite free ourselves from the influence of custom and the influence of novelty.  He certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how difficult it is to form any fair estimate of contemporary work.  But, on the whole, his taste was good and sound.  He admired Turner and Constable at a time when they were not so much thought of as they are now, and saw that for the highest landscape art we require more than ‘mere industry and accurate transcription.’  Of Crome’s ‘Heath Scene near Norwich’ he remarks that it shows ‘how much a subtle observation of the elements, in their wild moods, does for a most uninteresting flat,’ and of the popular type of landscape of his day he says that it is ‘simply an enumeration of hill and dale, stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses; little more than topography, a kind of pictorial map-work; in which rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting through rifted clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials of the real painter, are not.’  He had a thorough dislike of what is obvious or commonplace in art, and while he was charmed to entertain Wilkie at dinner, he cared as little for Sir David’s pictures as he did for Mr. Crabbe’s poems.  With the imitative and realistic tendencies of his day he had no sympathy and he tells us frankly that his great admiration for Fuseli was largely due to the fact that the little Swiss did not consider it necessary that an artist should paint only what he sees.  The qualities that he sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and dignity of line, richness of colour, and imaginative power.  Upon the other hand, he was not a doctrinaire.  ‘I hold that no work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be consistent with itself is the question.’  This is one of his excellent aphorisms.  And in criticising painters so different as Landseer and Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a phrase now classical, he is trying ‘to see the object as in itself it really is.’

However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease in his criticisms of contemporary work.  ‘The present,’ he says, ‘is about as agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first perusal. . . . Modern things dazzle me.  I must look at them through Time’s telescope.  Elia complains that to him the merit of a MS. poem is uncertain; “print,” as he excellently says, “settles it.”  Fifty years’ toning does the same thing to a picture.’  He is happier when he is writing about Watteau and Lancret, about Rubens and Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and Michael Angelo; happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things.  What is Gothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art of the Renaissance were always dear to him.  He saw what our English school could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies of pointing out to the young student the artistic possibilities that lie dormant in Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work.  In his judgments on the great Italian Masters, says De Quincey, ‘there seemed a tone of sincerity and of native sensibility, as in one who spoke for himself, and was not merely a copier from books.’  The highest praise that we can give to him is that he tried to revive style as a conscious tradition.  But he saw that no amount of art lectures or art congresses, or ‘plans for advancing the fine arts,’ will ever produce this result.  The people, he says very wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, must always have ‘the best models constantly before their eyes.’

As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often extremely technical in his art criticisms.  Of Tintoret’s ‘St. George delivering the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon,’ he remarks:—

The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved from the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf; and the full hues of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower key by the purple-lake coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of the saint, besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on the foreground in the indigo shades of the wild wood surrounding the castle.

And elsewhere he talks learnedly of ‘a delicate Schiavone, various as a tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,’ of ‘a glowing portrait, remarkable for morbidezza, by the scarce Moroni,’ and of another picture being ‘pulpy in the carnations.’

But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an artistic whole, and tries to translate those impressions into words, to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for the imaginative and mental effect.  He was one of the first to develop what has been called the art-literature of the nineteenth century, that form of literature which has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning, its two most perfect exponents.  His description of Lancret’s Repas Italien, in which ‘a dark-haired girl, “amorous of mischief,” lies on the daisy-powdered grass,’ is in some respects very charming.  Here is his account of ‘The Crucifixion,’ by Rembrandt.  It is extremely characteristic of his style—

Darkness—sooty, portentous darkness—shrouds the whole scene: only above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the murky ceiling, a rainy deluge—‘sleety-flaw, discoloured water’—streams down amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more horrible than that palpable night.  Already the Earth pants thick and fast! the darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt—the air is stagnant—a muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and some of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill.  The horses snuff the coming terror, and become unmanageable through fear.  The moment rapidly approaches when, nearly torn asunder by His own weight, fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in narrower rivulets from His slit veins, His temples and breast drowned in sweat, and His black tongue parched with the fiery death-fever, Jesus cries, ‘I thirst.’  The deadly vinegar is elevated to Him.

His head sinks, and the sacred corpse ‘swings senseless of the cross.’  A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the air and vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the sea rolls on high from the sands its black weltering waves.  Earth yawns, and the graves give up their dwellers.  The dead and the living are mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through the holy city.  New prodigies await them there.  The veil of the temple—the unpierceable veil—is rent asunder from top to bottom, and that dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries—the fatal ark with the tables and seven-branched candelabrum—is disclosed by the light of unearthly flames to the God-deserted multitude.

Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right.  It would have lost nearly all its charms in losing that perplexing veil of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the doubting imagination may speculate.  At present it is like a thing in another world.  A dark gulf is betwixt us.  It is not tangible by the body.  We can only approach it in the spirit.

In this passage, written, the author tells us, ‘in awe and reverence,’ there is much that is terrible, and very much that is quite horrible, but it is not without a certain crude form of power, or, at any rate, a certain crude violence of words, a quality which this age should highly appreciate, as it is its chief defect.  It is pleasanter, however, to pass to this description of Giulio Romano’s ‘Cephalus and Procris’:—

We should read Moschus’s lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd, before looking at this picture, or study the picture as a preparation for the lament.  We have nearly the same images in both.  For either victim the high groves and forest dells murmur; the flowers exhale sad perfume from their buds; the nightingale mourns on the craggy lands, and the swallow in the long-winding vales; ‘the satyrs, too, and fauns dark-veiled groan,’ and the fountain nymphs within the wood melt into tearful waters.  The sheep and goats leave their pasture; and oreads, ‘who love to scale the most inaccessible tops of all uprightest rocks,’ hurry down from the song of their wind-courting pines; while the dryads bend from the branches of the meeting trees, and the rivers moan for white Procris, ‘with many-sobbing streams,’

Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice.

The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling horn of Aurora’s love no more shall scatter away the cold twilight on the top of Hymettus.  The foreground of our subject is a grassy sunburnt bank, broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort of land-breakers), rendered more uneven by many foot-tripping roots and stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are again throwing out light-green shoots.  This bank rises rather suddenly on the right to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the entrance of which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding between his knees that ivory-bright body which was, but an instant agone, parting the rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading alike on thorns and flowers with jealousy-stung foot—now helpless, heavy, void of all motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick hair in mockery.

From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press forward with loud cries—

And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;
And put strange pity in their horned countenance.

Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of death.  On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with ‘vans dejected’ holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan people, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, and satyr-mothers, pressing their children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry along from the left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky wall, on whose lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn her grief-telling waters.  Above and more remote than the Ephidryad, another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine-festooned pillars of an unshorn grove.  The centre of the picture is filled by shady meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is ‘the vast strength of the ocean stream,’ from whose floor the extinguisher of stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine-washed steeds to behold the death-pangs of her rival.

Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite admirable.  The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent.  Much of the best modern literature springs from the same aim.  In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied.  In everything connected with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely interested, and strongly upheld the necessity for archæological accuracy in costume and scene-painting.  ‘In art,’ he says in one of his essays, ‘whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well’; and he points out that once we allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where the line is to be drawn.  In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on a famous occasion, he was ‘on the side of the angels.’  He was one of the first to admire Keats and Shelley—‘the tremulously-sensitive and poetical Shelley,’ as he calls him.  His admiration for Wordsworth was sincere and profound.  He thoroughly appreciated William Blake.  One of the best copies of the ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ that is now in existence was wrought specially for him.  He loved Alain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer and Chapman, and Petrarch.  And to him all the arts were one.  ‘Our critics,’ he remarks with much wisdom, ‘seem hardly aware of the identity of the primal seeds of poetry and painting, nor that any true advancement in the serious study of one art co-generates a proportionate perfection in the other’; and he says elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo talks of his love for Milton, he is deceiving either himself or his listeners.  To his fellow-contributors in the London Magazine he was always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan Cunningham, Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of the malice of a friend.  Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb are admirable in their way, and, with the art of the true comedian, borrow their style from their subject:—

What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the gaiety of a boy with the knowledge of a man: as gentle a heart as ever sent tears to the eyes.

How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit most seasonably out of season.  His talk without affectation was compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity.  Like grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets.  He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic observation on the fashion for men of genius was a standing dish.  Sir Thomas Browne was a ‘bosom cronie’ of his; so was Burton, and old Fuller.  In his amorous vein he dallied with that peerless Duchess of many-folio odour; and with the heyday comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher he induced light dreams.  He would deliver critical touches on these, like one inspired, but it was good to let him choose his own game; if another began even on the acknowledged pets he was liable to interrupt, or rather append, in a mode difficult to define whether as misapprehensive or mischievous.  One night at C-’s, the above dramatic partners were the temporary subject of chat.  Mr. X. commended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I don’t know which of them), but was instantly taken up by Elia, who told him ‘That was nothing; the lyrics were the high things—the lyrics!’

One side of his literary career deserves especial notice.  Modern journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man of the early part of this century.  He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations.  To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school Janus Weathercock may be said to have invented.  He also saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public interested in his own personality, and in his purely journalistic articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes for some popular newspaper of our own time.  This being the least valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence.  A publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of the illegalities of his private life.

Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature.  ‘I hold three things in high estimation,’ he says somewhere: ‘to sit lazily on an eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick trees while the sun shines around me; and to enjoy solitude with the consciousness of neighbourhood.  The country gives them all to me.’  He writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath repeating Collins’s ‘Ode to Evening,’ just to catch the fine quality of the moment; about smothering his face ‘in a watery bed of cowslips, wet with May dews’; and about the pleasure of seeing the sweet-breathed kine ‘pass slowly homeward through the twilight,’ and hearing ‘the distant clank of the sheep-bell.’  One phrase of his, ‘the polyanthus glowed in its cold bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken panel,’ is curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage is rather pretty in its way:—

The short tender grass was covered with marguerites—‘such that men called daisies in our town’—thick as stars on a summer’s night.  The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a high dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals was heard the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sown seeds.  The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a cloud streaked the calm æther; only round the horizon’s edge streamed a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near village with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with blinding whiteness.  I thought of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written in March.’

However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age.  How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us.  Even in later days, too, he was always reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about ‘The Excursion,’ and the ‘Poems founded on the Affections.’  There is no doubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine.  In one of the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which served to show off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands, he used to carry crystals of the Indian nux vomica, a poison, one of his biographers tells us, ‘nearly tasteless, difficult of discovery, and capable of almost infinite dilution.’  His murders, says De Quincey, were more than were ever made known judicially.  This is no doubt so, and some of them are worthy of mention.  His first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths.  He poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he had always been very much attached.  In the August of the next year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife’s mother, and in the following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his sister-in-law.  Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained.  It may have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason.  But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his wife for the sake of a sum of about £18,000, for which they had insured her life in various offices.  The circumstances were as follows.  On the 12th of December, he and his wife and child came up to London from Linden House, and took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street.  With them were the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie.  On the evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night Helen sickened.  The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of Hanover Square, was called in to attend her.  She lived till Monday, the 20th, when, after the doctor’s morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright brought her some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk.  When they returned Helen Abercrombie was dead.  She was about twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair hair.  A very charming red-chalk drawing of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration.  De Quincey says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder.  Let us hope that she was not.  Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.

The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined to pay the policy on the technical ground of misrepresentation and want of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action in the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that one decision should govern all the cases.  The trial, however, did not come on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately given in the companies’ favour.  The judge on the occasion was Lord Abinger.  Egomet Bonmot was represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William Follet, and the Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for the other side.  The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present at either of the trials.  The refusal of the companies to give him the £18,000 had placed him in a position of most painful pecuniary embarrassment.  Indeed, a few months after the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested for debt in the streets of London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of one of his friends.  This difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly afterwards he thought it better to go abroad till he could come to some practical arrangement with his creditors.  He accordingly went to Boulogne on a visit to the father of the young lady in question, and while he was there induced him to insure his life with the Pelican Company for £3000.  As soon as the necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy executed, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they sat together one evening after dinner.  He himself did not gain any monetary advantage by doing this.  His aim was simply to revenge himself on the first office that had refused to pay him the price of his sin.  His friend died the next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at once for a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany, and was for some time the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a beautiful country house at St. Omer.  From this he moved to Paris, where he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others talk of his ‘skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all who knew him.’  In 1837 he returned to England privately.  Some strange mad fascination brought him back.  He followed a woman whom he loved.

It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels in Covent Garden.  His sitting-room was on the ground floor, and he prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen.  Thirteen years before, when he was making his fine collection of majolica and Marc Antonios, he had forged the names of his trustees to a power of attorney, which enabled him to get possession of some of the money which he had inherited from his mother, and had brought into marriage settlement.  He knew that this forgery had been discovered, and that by returning to England he was imperilling his life.  Yet he returned.  Should one wonder?  It was said that the woman was very beautiful.  Besides, she did not love him.

It was by a mere accident that he was discovered.  A noise in the street attracted his attention, and, in his artistic interest in modern life, he pushed aside the blind for a moment.  Some one outside called out, ‘That’s Wainewright, the Bank-forger.’  It was Forrester, the Bow Street runner.

On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey.  The following report of the proceedings appeared in the Times:—

Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a certain power of attorney for £2259, with intent to defraud the Governor and Company of the Bank of England.

There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which he pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant Arabin in the course of the morning.  On being brought before the judges, however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and then pleaded guilty to two of the indictments which were not of a capital nature.

The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other indictments, but that the Bank did not desire to shed blood, the plea of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded, and the prisoner at the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder to transportation for life.

He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.  In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself ‘lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death’ for having been unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the British Museum in order to complete his collection.  The sentence now passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death.  He complained bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own, having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was, had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase, was at least a circonstance attenuante.  The permanence of personality is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner.  There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across him by chance.  They had been going over the prisons of London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of Wainewright.  He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was ‘horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table he had dined.’

Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of fashionable lounge.  Many men of letters went down to visit their old literary comrade.  But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom Charles Lamb admired.  He seems to have grown quite cynical.

To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon, and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: ‘Sir, you City men enter on your speculations, and take the chances of them.  Some of your speculations succeed, some fail.  Mine happen to have failed, yours happen to have succeeded.  That is the only difference, sir, between my visitor and me.  But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have succeeded to the last.  I have been determined through life to hold the position of a gentleman.  I have always done so.  I do so still.  It is the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his morning’s turn of sweeping it out.  I occupy a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!’  When a friend reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.’

From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent from there in the Susan to Van Diemen’s Land along with three hundred other convicts.  The voyage seems to have been most distasteful to him, and in a letter written to a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of ‘the companion of poets and artists’ being compelled to associate with ‘country bumpkins.’  The phrase that he applies to his companions need not surprise us.  Crime in England is rarely the result of sin.  It is nearly always the result of starvation.  There was probably no one on board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a psychologically interesting nature.

His love of art, however, never deserted him.  At Hobart Town he started a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and his conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm.  Nor did he give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in which he tried to make away with people who had offended him.  But his hand seems to have lost its cunning.  Both of his attempts were complete failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian society, he presented a memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave.  In it he speaks of himself as being ‘tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of the exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.’  His request, however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge consoled himself by making those marvellous Paradis Artificiels whose secret is only known to the eaters of opium.  In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living companion being a cat, for which he had evinced at extraordinary affection.

His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art.  They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked.  In a note to the Life of Dickens, Forster mentions that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that ‘he had contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice, kind-hearted girl.’  M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells us of a young man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curious resemblance to his victim.  The development of Mr. Wainewright’s style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive.  One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.

This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled literary London, and made so brilliant a début in life and letters, is undoubtedly a most interesting study.  Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts contained in this memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere pretence and assumption, and others have denied to him all literary power.  This seems to me a shallow, or at least a mistaken, view.  The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose.  The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists.  It is possible that De Quincey exaggerated his critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is much in his published works that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in the bad sense of that bad word.  Here and there he is distinctly vulgar in expression, and he is always lacking in the self-restraint of the true artist.  But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which he lived, and, after all, prose that Charles Lamb thought ‘capital’ has no small historic interest.  That he had a sincere love of art and nature seems to me quite certain.  There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture.  We cannot re-write the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.

Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form any purely artistic judgment about him.  It is impossible not to feel a strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned Lord Tennyson, or Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol.  But had the man worn a costume and spoken a language different from our own, had he lived in imperial Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or in Spain in the seventeenth century, or in any land or any century but this century and this land, we would be quite able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his position and value.  I know that there are many historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster.  This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required.  Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius, or censuring Cæsar Borgia.  These personages have become like the puppets of a play.  They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us.  They are not in immediate relation to us.  We have nothing to fear from them.  They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.  And so it may be some day with Charles Lamb’s friend.  At present I feel that he is just a little too modern to be treated in that fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens of Mr. John Addington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee, and other distinguished writers.  However, Art has not forgotten him.  He is the hero of Dickens’s Hunted Down, the Varney of Bulwer’s Lucretia; and it is gratifying to note that fiction has paid some homage to one who was so powerful with ‘pen, pencil and poison.’  To be suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.

A DIALOGUE.  Part I.  Persons: Gilbert
and Ernest.  Scene: the library of a house in
Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.

Gilbert (at the Piano).  My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?

Ernest (looking up).  At a capital story that I have just come across in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your table.

Gilbert.  What is the book?  Ah! I see.  I have not read it yet.  Is it good?

Ernest.  Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning over the pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs.  They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

Gilbert.  Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives everything except genius.  But I must confess that I like all memoirs.  I like them for their form, just as much as for their matter.  In literature mere egotism is delightful.  It is what fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sévigné.  Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it.  Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his shame.  The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter very little.  He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to silence.  The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented—if that can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect—may not, cannot, I think, survive.  But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness.  The lonely church at Littlemore, where ‘the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are few,’ will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of that gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower’s sure recurrence a prophecy that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his days—a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to be fulfilled.  Yes; autobiography is irresistible.  Poor, silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into the circle of the Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion is the better part of valour, bustles about among them in that ‘shaggy purple gown with gold buttons and looped lace’ which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at his ease, and prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the ‘good hog’s hars-let,’ and the ‘pleasant French fricassee of veal’ that he loved to eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his ‘gadding after beauties,’ and his reciting of Hamlet on a Sunday, and his playing of the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things.  Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions.  When people talk to us about others they are usually dull.  When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.

Ernest.  There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say.  But do you seriously propose that every man should become his own Boswell?  What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives and Recollections in that case?

Gilbert.  What has become of them?  They are the pest of the age, nothing more and nothing less.  Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

Ernest.  My dear fellow!

Gilbert.  I am afraid it is true.  Formerly we used to canonise our heroes.  The modern method is to vulgarise them.  Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.

Ernest.  May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?

Gilbert.  Oh! to all our second-rate littérateurs.  We are overrun by a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as mutes.  But we won’t talk about them.  They are the mere body-snatchers of literature.  The dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and the soul is out of their reach.  And now, let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorák?  Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorák?  He writes passionate, curiously-coloured things.

Ernest.  No; I don’t want music just at present.  It is far too indefinite.  Besides, I took the Baroness Bernstein down to dinner last night, and, though absolutely charming in every other respect, she insisted on discussing music as if it were actually written in the German language.  Now, whatever music sounds like I am glad to say that it does not sound in the smallest degree like German.  There are forms of patriotism that are really quite degrading.  No; Gilbert, don’t play any more.  Turn round and talk to me.  Talk to me till the white-horned day comes into the room.  There is something in your voice that is wonderful.

Gilbert (rising from the piano).  I am not in a mood for talking to-night.  I really am not.  How horrid of you to smile!  Where are the cigarettes?  Thanks.  How exquisite these single daffodils are!  They seem to be made of amber and cool ivory.  They are like Greek things of the best period.  What was the story in the confessions of the remorseful Academician that made you laugh?  Tell it to me.  After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.  Music always seems to me to produce that effect.  It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.  I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.  And so tell me this story, Ernest.  I want to be amused.

Ernest.  Oh!  I don’t know that it is of any importance.  But I thought it a really admirable illustration of the true value of ordinary art-criticism.  It seems that a lady once gravely asked the remorseful Academician, as you call him, if his celebrated picture of ‘A Spring-Day at Whiteley’s,’ or, ‘Waiting for the Last Omnibus,’ or some subject of that kind, was all painted by hand?

Gilbert.  And was it?

Ernest.  You are quite incorrigible.  But, seriously speaking, what is the use of art-criticism?  Why cannot the artist be left alone, to create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth the world which we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would each one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify it for us, and give to it a momentary perfection.  It seems to me that the imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude around it, and works best in silence and in isolation.  Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism?  Why should those who cannot create take upon themselves to estimate the value of creative work?  What can they know about it?  If a man’s work is easy to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . .

Gilbert.  And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is wicked.

Ernest.  I did not say that.

Gilbert.  Ah! but you should have.  Nowadays, we have so few mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them.  The members of the Browning Society, like the theologians of the Broad Church Party, or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott’s Great Writers Series, seem to me to spend their time in trying to explain their divinity away.  Where one had hoped that Browning was a mystic they have sought to show that he was simply inarticulate.  Where one had fancied that he had something to conceal, they have proved that he had but little to reveal.  But I speak merely of his incoherent work.  Taken as a whole the man was great.  He did not belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the Titan.  He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could sing.  His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he passed not from emotion to form, but from thought to chaos.  Still, he was great.  He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by which thought moves.  It was the machine he loved, not what the machine makes.  The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise.  So much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language, or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression.  Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse’s hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man’s utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning’s hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek.  There are moments when he wounds us by monstrous music.  Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, and no Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory horn to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh.  Yet, he was great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made from it men and women that live.  He is the most Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare.  If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths.  Even now, as I am speaking, and speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room the pageant of his persons.  There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks still burning from some girl’s hot kiss.  There, stands dread Saul with the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.  Mildred Tresham is there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed’s.  The spawn of Setebos gibbers in the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima’s haggard face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself.  Pale as the white satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as he hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go down.  Yes, Browning was great.  And as what will he be remembered?  As a poet?  Ah, not as a poet!  He will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had.  His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what more should an artist do?  Considered from the point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet.  Had he been articulate, he might have sat beside him.  The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is George Meredith.  Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.

Ernest.  There is something in what you say, but there is not everything in what you say.  In many points you are unjust.

Gilbert.  It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.  But let us return to the particular point at issue.  What was it that you said?

Ernest.  Simply this: that in the best days of art there were no art-critics.

Gilbert.  I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest.  It has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend.

Ernest.  It is true.  Yes: there is no use your tossing your head in that petulant manner.  It is quite true.  In the best days of art there were no art-critics.  The sculptor hewed from the marble block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within it.  The waxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture to the statue, and the world, when it saw it, worshipped and was dumb.  He poured the glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and the river of red metal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body of a god.  With enamel or polished jewels he gave sight to the sightless eyes.  The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his graver.  And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who passed by, δια λαμπροτάτου βαίνοντες αβρως αιθέρος, became conscious of a new influence that had come across their lives, and dreamily, or with a sense of strange and quickening joy, went to their homes or daily labour, or wandered, it may be, through the city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow where young Phædrus bathed his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass, beneath the tall wind—whispering planes and flowering agnus castus, began to think of the wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed awe.  In those days the artist was free.  From the river valley he took the fine clay in his fingers, and with a little tool of wood or bone, fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to the dead as their playthings, and we find them still in the dusty tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold and the fading crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment.  On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixed with milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod with tired feet the purple white-starred fields of asphodel, one ‘in whose eyelids lay the whole of the Trojan War,’ Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or figured Odysseus, the wise and cunning, bound by tight cords to the mast-step, that he might listen without hurt to the singing of the Sirens, or wandering by the clear river of Acheron, where the ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed; or showed the Persian in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon, or the galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay.  He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and prepared cedar.  Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted with wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, and with heated irons making it firm.  Panel and marble and linen canvas became wonderful as his brush swept across them; and life seeing her own image, was still, and dared not speak.  All life, indeed, was his, from the merchants seated in the market-place to the cloaked shepherd lying on the hill; from the nymph hidden in the laurels and the faun that pipes at noon, to the king whom, in long green-curtained litter, slaves bore upon oil-bright shoulders, and fanned with peacock fans.  Men and women, with pleasure or sorrow in their faces, passed before him.  He watched them, and their secret became his.  Through form and colour he re-created a world.

All subtle arts belonged to him also.  He held the gem against the revolving disk, and the amethyst became the purple couch for Adonis, and across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her hounds.  He beat out the gold into roses, and strung them together for necklace or armlet.  He beat out the gold into wreaths for the conqueror’s helmet, or into palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into masks for the royal dead.  On the back of the silver mirror he graved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or love-sick Phædra with her nurse, or Persephone, weary of memory, putting poppies in her hair.  The potter sat in his shed, and, flower-like from the silent wheel, the vase rose up beneath his hands.  He decorated the base and stem and ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf, or foliated acanthus, or curved and crested wave.  Then in black or red he painted lads wrestling, or in the race: knights in full armour, with strange heraldic shields and curious visors, leaning from shell-shaped chariot over rearing steeds: the gods seated at the feast or working their miracles: the heroes in their victory or in their pain.  Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a ground of white the languid bridegroom and his bride, with Eros hovering round them—an Eros like one of Donatello’s angels, a little laughing thing with gilded or with azure wings.  On the curved side he would write the name of his friend.  ΚΑΛΟΣ ΑΛΚΙΒΙΑΔΗΣ or ΚΑΛΟΣ ΧΑΡΜΙΔΗΣ tells us the story of his days.  Again, on the rim of the wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or the lion at rest, as his fancy willed it.  From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed Aphrodite at her toilet, and, with bare-limbed Mænads in his train, Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained feet, while, satyr-like, the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated skins, or shook that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted fir-cone, and wreathed with dark ivy.  And no one came to trouble the artist at his work.  No irresponsible chatter disturbed him.  He was not worried by opinions.  By the Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was no Higginbotham.  By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth.  By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do not understand.  On the reed-grown banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in the dock.  The Greeks had no art-critics.

Gilbert.  Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your views are terribly unsound.  I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of some one older than yourself.  That is always a dangerous thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.  As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it.  It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.  I have merely to do with literature.

Ernest.  But what is the difference between literature and journalism?

Gilbert.  Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.  That is all.  But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd.  It would be more just to say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.

Ernest.  Really?

Gilbert.  Yes, a nation of art-critics.  But I don’t wish to destroy the delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the relation of the Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his age.  To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.  Still less do I desire to talk learnedly.  Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.  And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes.  No: let me play to you some mad scarlet thing by Dvorák.  The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us, and the heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep.  Don’t let us discuss anything solemnly.  I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.  Don’t degrade me into the position of giving you useful information.  Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.  Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver.  Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her.  The sky is a hard hollow sapphire.  Let us go out into the night.  Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful still.  Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?

Ernest.  You are horribly wilful.  I insist on your discussing this matter with me.  You have said that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.  What art-criticism have they left us?

Gilbert.  My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-criticism had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics, and that they invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism of everything else.  For, after all, what is our primary debt to the Greeks?  Simply the critical spirit.  And, this spirit, which they exercised on questions of religion and science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education, they exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of the two supreme and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless system of criticism that the world has ever seen.

Ernest.  But what are the two supreme and highest arts?

Gilbert.  Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life.  The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own.  The principles of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we can hardly understand them.  Recognising that the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say, with much keener æsthetic instinct.  In this they were right, as they were right in all things.  Since the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always.  Even the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect that such rhythmical life produces.  We, in fact, have made writing a definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaborate design.  The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a method of chronicling.  Their test was always the spoken word in its musical and metrical relations.  The voice was the medium, and the ear the critic.  I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer’s blindness might be really an artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving to remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul, but that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music, repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words that are winged with light.  Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to his blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that England’s great poet owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his later verse.  When Milton could no longer write he began to sing.  Who would match the measures of Comus with the measures of Samson Agonistes, or of Paradise Lost or Regained?  When Milton became blind he composed, as every one should compose, with the voice purely, and so the pipe or reed of earlier days became that mighty many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music has all the stateliness of Homeric verse, if it seeks not to have its swiftness, and is the one imperishable inheritance of English literature sweeping through all the ages, because above them, and abiding with us ever, being immortal in its form.  Yes: writing has done much harm to writers.  We must return to the voice.  That must be our test, and perhaps then we shall be able to appreciate some of the subtleties of Greek art-criticism.

As it now is, we cannot do so.  Sometimes, when I have written a piece of prose that I have been modest enough to consider absolutely free from fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that I may have been guilty of the immoral effeminacy of using trochaic and tribrachic movements, a crime for which a learned critic of the Augustan age censures with most just severity the brilliant if somewhat paradoxical Hegesias.  I grow cold when I think of it, and wonder to myself if the admirable ethical effect of the prose of that charming writer, who once in a spirit of reckless generosity towards the uncultivated portion of our community proclaimed the monstrous doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of life, will not some day be entirely annihilated by the discovery that the pæons have been wrongly placed.

Ernest.  Ah! now you are flippant.

Gilbert.  Who would not be flippant when he is gravely told that the Greeks had no art-critics?  I can understand it being said that the constructive genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but not that the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did not criticise.  You will not ask me to give you a survey of Greek art criticism from Plato to Plotinus.  The night is too lovely for that, and the moon, if she heard us, would put more ashes on her face than are there already.  But think merely of one perfect little work of æsthetic criticism, Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry.  It is not perfect in form, for it is badly written, consisting perhaps of notes dotted down for an art lecture, or of isolated fragments destined for some larger book, but in temper and treatment it is perfect, absolutely.  The ethical effect of art, its importance to culture, and its place in the formation of character, had been done once for all by Plato; but here we have art treated, not from the moral, but from the purely æsthetic point of view.  Plato had, of course, dealt with many definitely artistic subjects, such as the importance of unity in a work of art, the necessity for tone and harmony, the æsthetic value of appearances, the relation of the visible arts to the external world, and the relation of fiction to fact.  He first perhaps stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet satisfied, the desire to know the connection between Beauty and Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the Kosmos.  The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them, but transfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they are still vital and full of meaning.  It may be that it is as a critic of Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering the name of the sphere of his speculation we shall find a new philosophy.  But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art primarily in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy, for instance, and investigating the material it uses, which is language, its subject-matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which is action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which are those of theatric presentation, its logical structure, which is plot, and its final æsthetic appeal, which is to the sense of beauty realised through the passions of pity and awe.  That purification and spiritualising of the nature which he calls κάθαρσις is, as Goethe saw, essentially æsthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied.  Concerning himself primarily with the impression that the work of art produces, Aristotle sets himself to analyse that impression, to investigate its source, to see how it is engendered.  As a physiologist and psychologist, he knows that the health of a function resides in energy.  To have a capacity for a passion and not to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and limited.  The mimic spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the bosom of much ‘perilous stuff,’ and by presenting high and worthy objects for the exercise of the emotions purifies and spiritualises the man; nay, not merely does it spiritualise him, but it initiates him also into noble feelings of which he might else have known nothing, the word κάθαρσις having, it has sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the rite of initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occasionally tempted to fancy, its true and only meaning here.  This is of course a mere outline of the book.  But you see what a perfect piece of æsthetic criticism it is.  Who indeed but a Greek could have analysed art so well?  After reading it, one does not wonder any longer that Alexandria devoted itself so largely to art-criticism, and that we find the artistic temperaments of the day investigating every question of style and manner, discussing the great Academic schools of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon, that sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing actual life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artistic value of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or the proper subject-matter for the artist.  Indeed, I fear that the inartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also in matters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarism were endless, and such accusations proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been robbed.  And I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite as much as people do nowadays, and had their private views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their art-historians, and their archæologists, and all the rest of it.  Why, even the theatrical managers of travelling companies brought their dramatic critics with them when they went on tour, and paid them very handsome salaries for writing laudatory notices.  Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks.  Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediævalism.  It is the Greeks who have given us the whole system of art-criticism, and how fine their critical instinct was, may be seen from the fact that the material they criticised with most care was, as I have already said, language.  For the material that painter or sculptor uses is meagre in comparison with that of words.  Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone.  If the Greeks had criticised nothing but language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world.  To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts.