VERNON LEE on JOHN SARGENT |
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Sargent's Life through his writing, paintings and drawings Chapter XXVII The Rt. Honble. Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman. ~ 31, Tite Street, Chelsea. Dear Sir Henry, I deeply appreciate your willingness to propose my name for the high honour to which you refer, but I hold it as one to which I have no right to aspire as I am not one of His Majesty's Subjects but an American Citizen. „ ,. John S. Sargent. In 1913 he was given the degree of LL.D. by the University of Cambridge.
SCENE IN VENICE.
Dear Sir, . . . It is an honour that I fully appreciate and am deeply grateful for having been thought entitled to. I should be pleased to accept if I had the least right to hope that a miracle would happen in my favour. The miracle of overcoming something like panic when asked to speak has never happened to me yet, and the spectacle of panic instead of a speech is the entertainment I have afforded and long since resolved not to afford again. The annals of the society would have a disaster to chronicle that I feel bound to spare them by declining an honour that would entail the saddest consequences. . . . This nervousness in public did not hinder him from doing public work; it did, however, prevent him, on the resignation of Sir Edward Poynter in December, 191 8, from accepting the Presidency of the Royal Academy. When pressed very hard he said to his friend Sir Arthur Cope: "I would do anything for the Royal /Academy but that, and if you press me any more, I shall flee the country." Sir Arthur adds: "There is no doubt that if he had allowed his name to stand he would have been elected, not only without dissent, but with acclamation. " In the conduct of the Academy's affairs Sargent was loyal and active. Things had changed since he had paid his ceremonial calls as an A.R.A. on "the old fogeys"* of 1894. The Academy was still the Academy, but it had greater width of view; it was more alive to movements of art going on outside Burlington House. In 1 91 7 he resigned the Trusteeship of the Tate Gallery and in a letter to Mr. D. S. MacColl gave his reasons: advocate for changes and a nonconformist to that kind of loyalty that consists in maintaining that everything is perfect. But that is a very different thing from joining those who oppose it as an institution and very likely disapprove of its system. Few artists have been more consistently applauded in their lifetime than Sargent, few have seen their work maintain through many years greater popularity with the public. There had never been a moment since 1875 when his pictures had not found a ready market, there had never been a year when he had not more commissions than he could execute. Critics, after the first hesitations, had, with few exceptions, consistently eulogized his paintings; dealers had been resolute in their acquisition; fellow-artists had acclaimed him; and the public, the fourth estate in the formation of a painter's reputation, had made him their favourite. The prices realized by his pictures at auction rose steadily. His first picture to be sold at Christie's was Autumn on the River ; 30 by 19 inches, which brought £52 10s. for the South African War Fund in 1900. In 1906 Miss Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, owned by Sir Henry Irving, brought £1,260. In 1910 Expectancy: A Young Girl 29/4 by 23% inches, was sold for £504. In 191 6 Rehearsal of the Bas de Loup Orchestra fetched £231. In 1924 The Hospital at Granada, 20 by 27^ inches, was bought on behalf of the Felton Bequest, Melbourne, for £2,205. The highest price paid for a water-colour before his death was in 1920, when £750 was paid for the Church of the Gesuati on the Zattere, Venice* Appreciation of his water-colours has since then rapidly increased. The view is even entertained that they will do more than his oil paintings to maintain the level of his fame. To some, such a view will be on a par with Matthew Arnold's whimsical declaration that Shelley's prose will outlive his verse. But, however that may be, the skill and vitality with which
It was only after Sargent met Brabazon in 1886 or 1887 that he took to water-colours on a scale at all comparable to his work in oils. From then onwards, whenever other calls on his time allowed, he devoted a portion of the year to working in this medium. Here and there in his work we may fancy that the influence of Brabazon is present, especially in some of the more subdued renderings which he has given of the side canals in Venice; but these are rare. For the most part he is entirely himself, deriving from no one. He followed his own pleasure; every picture is the offspring of exultation in his facility; their spontaneity is pronounced, they flow from his hand with the turbulence of water from a mill race. If little is added to what he represents, nothing is taken away. If the scenes he paints delight us, the same delight will be found in his renderings of them. To live with Sargent's water-colours is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the lustre of a bright and legible world, "the refluent shade" and "the ambient ardours of the noon." If the modern painter of water-colours aims at slightness, and to-day shorthand is preferred to definition, that was not the aim of Sargent. He never ran the risk of emptiness. He cultivated in his compositions full measure, pressed down and running over. When Mr. James showed him a water-colour he had done Sargent said: "Very nice, but terrifically slight; I'd like to see you make one without any sky or water. Work out these forms" (pointing to a tangle of bushes in the foreground). Mr. James answered that he had made such attempts but always lost, in so doing, the effect of the whole. He said: "But I don't see how you can . . . see . . . the whole until you have made some of the parts." Of his own water-colours he was a severe critic; rarely satisfied, deprecating praise, and always ready to point out what he regarded inadequate or mistaken. When he brought home one of his well-known sketches, Quarry at Chocorua, Mrs. James said to him: "How delightful it must be to know that every time you work you will bring back something fine." Sargent replied: "But I hardly ever do! Once in a great, great while." Neither in his water-colours nor his oil painting did he turn for subjects to the humbler walks of life. Destiny prescribed for him the role of a portrait painter of the social world. He had brought the tradition with him from Paris; he had grown up in the age of Duran, Bonnat, Dagnan Bouveret, and Boldini, when to have your portrait painted was a normal incident of fashion- able life. In London he carried on the tradition. He was unaffected by the change taking place in Paris in the character of subjects which the rising artists were painting. Posterity will learn about the epoch of Sargent only what is to be gathered from a study of the eminent, the rich and the successful. He painted, in fact, the world of which Henry James wrote. His migration to England put an end to his interested outlook on peasant life and folk subjects, fisherwomen by the sea, dancers in Spanish cabarets, Parisian flaneurs in the Luxembourg Gardens, Venetian water-carriers and beggar girls. The future student of the social life of the last fifty years in France will be able to reconstruct much of it from the work of French painters. In England there has been nothing which corresponds to this dedication of the highest talent to making works of art from the life of the people, from a butcher's wife in her bath to an advocate pleading in the law courts. Conditions in England decided the direction of Sargent's genius. He was turned from his experiments in Impressionism, and his leanings towards subjects like the Spanish dancers; civilization for him became "the litter in which we forget the bearers." And as the chronicler of the beau monde like Van Dyck in his day, and like Reynolds, Romney, Lawrence and Gainsborough in theirs, he established within a few years a supremacy hardly disputed. Through the munificence of Sir Joseph Duveen, those who visit the Tate Gallery now see side by side the work of Sargent and that of the French Impressionists. To pass from the French school to Sargent is to make an abrupt transition. A new idiom is exchanged for one that modern criticism would have us believe, has said its last word. But in taking stock of the situation we must recognize that Sargent's work should be compared not with the French school of to-day, but with the portrait painters of the past. And the moment we do this, strong though the influence of fashion inevitably is upon our aesthetic appreciations, we can- not doubt that he will maintain a distinguished place in the company of eminent painters. Degas said at the graveside of Corot: "The artist will be replaced with difficulty, the man never." That must correspond with what is felt by many who knew Sargent. In personal appearance he was a striking figure. Standing over six feet in height, he maintained a remarkable uprightness of carriage, and, though in later years decidedly a heavy man, he was to the end of his life quick and emphatic in his movements. Advancing years had made his prominent grey-blue eyes more noticeable, but had done nothing to lessen the keen- ness with which they seemed to rake the field of vision. Great painters have usually been men of strong physique. Sargent appeared to escape the fatigues of more normal humanity; at the end of a long day's work his mind would be serene and cool, his temperament buoyant; he would show no sign of fag either in brain or limb. I left London last Thursday and came to Holland because I cannot talk Dutch and so would hold my tongue and give my throat a chance. Here there is enough sea air to make it necessary to hold on to railings and lamp-posts, and I am regaining my voice slowly, but I know that if I talked for half an hour I should be dumb again for a week. If I came to your dinner my voice would be taken away with the fish. His burly full-blooded aspect was deceptive: it gave no warrant of the diffidence and gentleness that lay beneath. A stranger would never have suspected that behind such alacrity and power was an almost morbid shrinking from notoriety and an invincible repulsion from public appearances. In this he presented a continual paradox. It was an engaging trait, and perhaps helped to preserve the freshness and delicacy of his perception, enabling him the better to estimate the sensibilities of others. During the War a famous musician in Paris was in straitened circumstances; Sargent, anxious to help, wrote as follows, enclosing a substantial sum: Boston, MON CHER FAURE, II y a si longtemps que nous ne nous sommes vus que je me persuaderais facilement que c'est dans quelque vie anterieure que mes a tomes out fait la connaissance des votres et s'y sont fatalement ac- croches. Sans vous en douter vous promenez avec vous un jumeau sentimental invetere et inoperable. Votre souvenir et vos oeuvres me hantent et c'est peut-etre vous que je salue d'un coup de chapeau quand chaque hiver je vois Sirius, et chaque printemps le premier amandier en fleur. Mais, comme a un negre, il me faut un fetiche, un objet materiel devant lequel faire mes prosternations, et je viens vous implorer a quatre pattes cette faveur, avez-vous le manuscript d'une de vos romances que vous voudriez bien m'envoyer a Padresse ci dessus ? Ce serait pour moi un tresor inestimable — faites moi ce plaisir. John S. Sargent. Time or distance made no difference to the warmth of his friendships; he never suffered their temperature to fall. He was generous to a fault in deed and judgment. His kindness of heart was exceptional. The wife of an American painter fell ill; she was without anyone to look after her save her husband, who made a livelihood by teaching a class. Sargent came to the rescue, and during the wife's illness and after her death took the class, taught, and kept the pupils together till such time as the painter was able again to take them over. He was always ready with personal service if that could be more effective than finance. There was a certain splendour about his personality, his dynamic energy, his largeness of outlook, his complete immunity from what was small or unworthy, as well as in the high simplicity and honour of his life. He hated pretensions and affectation, "that seal of mediocrity," whether in art or individuals. His opinions carried a weight which was derived from his sincerity and experience — a statement which he would certainly have met with "Tush, tush I" or some stronger deprecation. His taste was startling at times, but, supported as it always was by good reason, it was upsetting and often shook the most convinced. He was shy of emotion, inclined to shirk it when it came his way; this made him difficult to know: he seemed to protect himself in a network of repressions. This was noticeable in the War. Positive truth, selected and arranged to convey the essential, was his aim; if that was attained other things would follow. He held that if mystery, charm and poetry were treated as an end in themselves, they were sure to lead to mannerism and disaster. In conversation he allowed himself plenty of latitude; he could caricature and embroider amusingly; he was a good hand at "picking mirth from off rotten walls," and was all for a leaven of nonsense. His work (and he thought nothing of seven hard days in the week) never unfitted him for enjoyment. He would arrive to the minute where he was due to dine, and no company but seemed richer for his presence; he was easy and mellow, and no one had fewer moods to air or antipathies to control. At all times he was natural, courteous and interested, droll with an edge, and ready to pursue whatever game was afoot, and keenly alive to everything that concerned his friends. The following letter to de Glehn, on his marriage, is characteristic. Sept. 20th. My dear Premp, I have just opened a packet of letters and find your, let us say, communication. Yours ever, ,
Sargent read widely. In English prose, which he knew less well than French, he admired particularly Sir Thomas Browne, Smollet, Sterne, Swift, Defoe, Gibbon, Pater Doughty's "Arabia Deserta," Samuel Butler. He seldom read English novels, and he could never appreciate Dickens. He preferred French poetry to English. He had read and remembered a great deal of Shakespeare and Shelley, but he cared little for Keats, still less for Pope: on the latter point he was very positive. I never heard of his reading modern English verse, with the exception of Flecker, whose "Hassan" certainly gave him pleasure. War poetry he refused to read, with the exception of Julian Grenfell's "Into Battle," of which he wrote: "The verses are very fine and moving — there is something unusual in the sensation conveyed of all his perceptions and all his sympathies being keyed up to a high pitch by something enormous that is behind the scenes." As a rule, what he liked in books was travel, ad- venture and strange personal experience. He loved writing that put before him definite images and portraits, such as Beckford's, Gobineau's and St. Simon's, and the wit and finish of Max Beerbohm's essays delighted him. In April, 1925, he was once more due to start for America. He had shown no outward sign of ill-health. His friends had thought him tired, but he had been pursuing his ordinary life of unrestricted activity. For several days he had been engaged in his preparations, packing, lifting cases, and, in disregard of the protests of his friends, putting on himself a physical strain of much severity. On the evening of the 14th a few of his friends met at 10, Carlyle Mansions for a farewell dinner given by Miss Sargent: Mrs. Ormond, Lady Prothero, the two Misses Barnard, L. A. Harrison, Wilson Steer, Henry Tonks and Nelson Ward. Sargent was in high spirits, he had dispatched to America the final instalment of his decorations for the Museum of Fine Arts and he was spending his last evening with his friends. He acted, as he always did at his sister's parties, as host. The party, as was the custom, broke up at 10.30. The guests said good- bye, with wishes for Sargent's speedy return; and then, after lingering a little with his sister, he drove away. It was his habit to read before going to sleep. When the maid knocked at his door on the morning of April 15, there was no answer: John Sargent was dead. Beside him lay an open volume of the "Dictionnaire Philosophique ,, of Voltaire. His glasses had been pushed up over his brow; he had the aspect of one quietly sleeping. Death had come with soundless tread, "unexpected and unrecognized," as in January, 1905, he had written of his mother. Br VERNON LEE (Copyright and all other rights given to Miss Sargent)
J. S. S.: In Memoriam
TALKING about John Sargent recently with his sisters, and hearing the letters he wrote as a small boy to Ben del Castillo, I recognize that, even more than in cases of other friends, the John Sargent I can write about is merely the one who has long existed in my mind, and, perchance, scarcely anywhere else. Also, that what I can write about him, when indeed it won't be writing about my own past self, must be taken as akin to a legend: a few genuine facts, but intermeshed with a good deal more which, as with other legends, is surmise, misinterpretation, confusion of times and places and persons — in short, incorrect and easily corrected by others. But not by me! Because John Sargent exists in my mind just like that; and that is the only John Sargent I know, and wish to write about. So that whatever rectifications may be made, I shall answer: "No doubt," or "Yes, of course," and return to my own view. Take, for instance, the matter of John Sargent's heredity, and the respective parts played by his parents. Already his sisters have demurred to my view, and tell me that his special gifts must have come from his father's side, since among his paternal ancestors there was, at least, one painter of Colonial times. But to me, who see in recollection Mrs. Sargent painting, painting, painting away, always an open paint-box in front of her, through all the forty years I knew her, her whole jocund personality splashed, as it were, with the indigo of seas and the carmine of sunsets, to me the painting gift of John Sargent is all from his mother; while what he had from his father was the deep-seated character, the austere, self-denying strength which smelted and tempered that talent into genius. Since John Sargent, as I see him, is at bottom a puritan, for ever questioning and curbing the divine facility of his gifts, setting them new tasks from a puritan's hatred of yielding to his own preferences, a puritan's assertion of liberty against the wiles of enslaving mannerism, that Delilah. By this I account for his having turned, with all his energy and infinite application, to tasks less suited to his gifts than those which lay ready to his hand. More- over, persuaded as I am that the individual temperament of every artist expresses itself with unconscious imperative far more in how he paints than in what he chooses to be painting, I account by this for the way he laid down his perfectly pure and sharply contrasted colours; above all, for the rushing lines and wilful but broadly generous angles, out of which the unerring speed of his hand and his eye built up the likeness of men and things. Neither is this all: it was the puritan in John Sargent who was perpetually dissatisfied with that spontaneous imaginative vision of his, inclining him to the recondite and far-fetched, and compelling him to an arduous search after the unsuspected aspects and innermost qualities of whatever he painted. If, as I imagine, there is a portrait of John Sargent as a very young man among the geologists on the glacier in Besnard's Ecole de Pharmacie," then the rapid, passionate concentration of the stroke of his hammer on the moraine-stone may well be symbolical of the deliberate and loving, but sometimes ruthless, laying bare of the unsuspected structure of material things, and, however unconscious he remained of such psychological revelations, no less of the soul of his sitters. All this has been occasionally attributed to the modern artist's craving to faire nouveau. Whereas, if ever there has been a great man (and I suspect all great men are more or less alike in this matter) who disdained, or rather ignored, the desire to pit his work against something done by others, it was John Sargent. But he was pursued by the fear of sliding into what he himself had already done, of yielding and losing himself in the deliciousness of his marvellous facility. And that, that something of Beethoven, in a man of Mozartian spontaneity and variety, abundance and swiftness, was, I shall always believe, the puritan heredity of John Sargent's New England father.
VERNON LEE II When I was a child, and John and Emily and I (eighteen months separating the youngest of us from the eldest) were children together, for two winters at Nice and one (so memorable) in Rome, I adored Mrs. Sargent and was rather afraid of Dr. Sargent. Not that he ever scolded me, or his own children in my presence. With perfect courtesy he passed over my vain little person, whereas Mrs. Sargent, bubbling with sympathies and the need for sympathy, treated everyone as an equal in the expansiveness of her unquenchable youthfulness and joie de vivre. When I come to think of it, Dr. Sargent could not have been so very tall, but his head seemed higher up than other people's, and his thin back (I see him clad in a sober pepper and salt) longer and stiffer. One knew whenever he spoke, not without an austere twang; and I, at all events had a childish impression that his words implied disapproval. It was certainly to him that I attributed the ban put upon novel-reading (or was it merely novel-reading of a Sunday ?) at an age when I myself spent half my days over Fenimore Cooper and even the dangerous Chateau briand. Similarly, he must have put some quite mysterious obstacle (I cannot for the life of me remember whether of the nature of words or doors) interposed between myself (and John, of course) and certain large livraisons of "Notre Dame de Paris," of which I can almost see the blood-curdling illustration of Quasimodo au piori. These volumes were in a spare room — perhaps a box-room, but with something funereal — of the Sargents' flat at Nice, which I was allowed to frequent.
STUDY (PENCIL) . this much is certain, that "the Sargents" began to play a dominant part in my life only the following year, when we had moved into a gaunt house facing the sea and the sweep of the Promenade des Anglais. Then was established a regular coming and going between us; weekly, or more frequent, afternoons spent together in our respective abodes. Afternoons, moreover, spent in painting. For, to readers unaware of my skill as an artist, it is well to explain that, in default of the spelling and caligraphy wherein John Sargent's infantile letters show perfect mastery of which mine are entirely devoid, I fell back, like other primitives, upon the use of pictographs. These were of so vast and elaborate a kind as to require constant supplies of paints and drawing-books; indeed, I sold my acquiescence in the family's plans and a modicum of good behaviour in return for painter's requisites, replenished at every birthday or journey or infant ailment. I do not know whether at that time John Sargent yet possessed a paint-box of his own. He certainly used mine. And I feel sure that my perennial supplies of water-colours and porcelain palettes and albums of vario-tinted paper were what drew him to me; and that our fraternal friendship grew out of those afternoons of painting together. Together \ in the sense that we consumed refreshments and paints in company, and conversed the while on elevated topics: I must have poured forth about the weekly nights in the family's box at the Nice opera, with vocal imitations, perhaps, of performers and discussion of the verisimilitudes in Verdi's and Donizetti's librettos. But never did John Sargent participate in my pictorial self-expression or show any interest therein: to him paints were not for the telling of stories. There were illustrated books and papers lying about, and a stretch of Mediterranean and perspectived houses and coast- lines looked in at the windows, and to the reproduction of all these did John Sargent apply himself. And with miraculous intuition and dexterity. I can see in my mind's eye (for I saw it with the bodily one within the last half century, and even hope to find it in some mislaid portfolio) a "picture" which he made for my album. I can see the clean juxtaposed blue and green of sky and waves, the splendid tossing lines of sea and ships, see even the bold pencil title in a clearer version of his grown-up writing, the title in a corner, "U.S. Ship (name, alas, forgotten !) Chasing the Slaver Panther." His sister, on my mentioning this work, suggests that he may have copied it from some Illustrated London News or suchlike. Maybe, though I cannot recollect anything confirming her suggestion. But even if it was so copied, the rendering of the composition, the quality of the lines, above all, the fresh, slick colour which he had added, made it into a free translation, indeed, a transfiguration: thus did he already see, in that marvellous mind's eye of his, the things presented by Nature, or by other of her interpreters. At Nice, in 1867-68, John Sargent, in furtive use of his mother's paints, or long afternoons with my preposterous and horribly messy boxes, was already a painter. In spirit and in fact. But in his parents' and apparently his own intentions, acquiescent expectation, he was a future U.S.A. sailor. That, I imagine (or was actually told), had been the chosen vocation of his father, and when for some reason, possibly health, that vocation was thwarted, Dr. Sargent, adopting another profession and, in expatriated wanderings, following none at all, had handed it over to his small son. The rather pale, melancholy dyspeptic (for did he not absorb a mysterious substance labelled " Pepsina Porci" ?)> that delicate, taciturn, austere — and oh so, so little of a jolly Tar ! — father, was evidently fascinated by the profession from which fate had excluded him. He frequented American warships and admirals (considerably unlike himself in person), and I cannot but fancy that his nautical patriotism had been heightened by, and in turn heightened, the rancours he nurtured concerning the Alabama business, then recent history, and the British attitude towards what he spoke of as "The Rebels." For the following winter, 1868-69, determining my own life, decided, I believe, that John Sargent was to be, not a naval officer, but a painter. But there was no give and take, mere perfect fusion of desire and effort in our concentrated hunts for bits of antique marbles, digging them out of the pavement with out umbrella ferrules, and loitering behind our elders in the then desolate regions, between arum-fringed convent and villa walls, of the Esquiline and Viminal, until Dr. Sargent's stern "Come on, children" forced us to leave that half-dislodged scrap of porphyry or cipollino to some future walk in those classic purlieus. . . . Did I not recognize one of our cruelly abandoned pieces of green mottled serpentine in a gutter behind S. Maria Maggiore, some thirty years later, and should I not be able to show it you, or at least its place, even nowadays, fifty years after those walks ? Walks there were, also, in less passionate search for groundsel to give Emily's canary, groundsel growing in the Roman Forum, still undisturbed by Boni's diggings. However, our spirits responded in complete unison to less childish appeals. There were yet other walks on which you would meet Cardinals, and sometimes even Pio Nono himself, a white sash round his portly white middle, distributing benedictions with two extended fingers among the bay hedges and mossy fountains of Villa Borghese. There were early winter morning waits, jammed up among black-veiled ladies in St. Peter's, not without secret refreshment of biscuits and chocolate during the patient hours before some pontifical mass; and later afternoons in tinsel-hung churches, where tapers shone dim through the stale incense, and the little organs scrunched out chords as prelude to the bravuras of fluted sopranos and cooing throaty falsettos. There were scamperings, barely restrained by responsible elders, through icy miles of Vatican galleries, to make hurried forbidden sketches of statues selected for easy portrayal. Nor any less wonderful the hours {pijjcrari already droning at the corner shrine) at the windows of our own lodgings, opposite the palace of the Propaganda Fide, watching the Cinderella coaches, with emblazoned hammercloth and hanging gold-braided footmen, and the various Eminences — was that the villain Antonelli ? — alighting, draped in scarlet mantles and followed by scarlet ill-furled umbrellas of state. And such afternoons culminated in the advent (likewise watched from the windows) of the tin box of dinner, balanced on the head of the cookshop's porter, and balancing on its top the Charlotte Russe — whipped cream in a mural crown of sponge biscuits — expressly ordered to regale "the Sargents." Their parents did not have hot boxes from the cookshop. They kept a white-capped chef and gave dinner-parties with ices. . . . Indeed, with these dinner-parties my random reminiscences are at last converging back towards a narrative. For it would happen that when myself and protecting housemaid had clambered up the 200 steps leading from our Piazza Mignanelli to the one-storeyed and many-windowed house, hired for the winter by John and Emily's parents, I would meet cabs and vetture di rimessa, drawn up outside, and we children would eat downstairs while the dinner-party above sent us down its sumptuous broken victuals. Meanwhile, in the drawing-room, where the cupola of St. Peter's looked straight in at the windows for all the world like its sunset effigy on the lampshades we tried to imitate, in the drawing-room, between the marble busts of George Washington and of the Goddess Isis (since furnished lodgings in Rome never lacked gods or sibyls or stray martyrdoms), there were being entertained some of those legendary artists: Harriet Hosmer, Randolph Rogers, W. W. Story, and so forth, whose statues, each in every stage of wet-sheeted clay, pock-marked plaster, half-hewn or thoroughly sandpapered marble, were displayed on a weekly day by their explanatory creators, and which you can read about — and, of course, we children in 1868-69 were perpetually reading about — in Hawthorne's "Marble Faun." The "Marble Faun"! the illustrious prototypes of its Kenyon, Hilda and the other lady — ah ! her name was Miriam—some- how coupled (but children needn't ask why) with Beatrice Cenci — all these sculptors and sculptresses, as monumental as their own Zenobias and Libyan sibyls, were having coffee upstairs, with a due proportion of painters almost as crimson and gold as those lampshades. I do not know that it was with my childish eyes of the body that I then saw what with the growing eyes of the spirit I have seen more and more clearly: namely dear, eloquent, rubicund, exuberant Mrs. Sargent, exhibiting those sketches not without wistful glances. And, on the other side, Dr. Sargent, thin, iron- grey and of iron, puritan stiffness, thinking perchance of the Alabama and the havoc she had wrought on the U.S. Navy; Dr. Sargent a little averted, or, at most, with some curt glance or word expressing his estimation of that small boy's futile talent; and, to anyone who could take his meaning, his repulsion from all this art, this expatriated fooling with paints and clay and all this doubtful world of marble fauns and spurious romance when there, out there, was the real, manly romance of the high seas. I began these notes about John Sargent by saying that they would embody not so much facts — though I am not aware of having invented anything — as the legend of John Sargent, de posited by unnoticed accretions in my mind, and found there now that, of a sudden, he has ceased existing for me anywhere else.
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER.
This legend, which embodies, even if it does not exactly correspond with, the facts, is a very beautiful one, and runs as follows: "I am going to sit and smoke," the old man repeated evening after evening, "with my son John."
This legend of the father and son is, properly, all I have to tell about John Sargent. For our real intimacy did not last beyond those years of our childhood and especially of that wonderful year, last but one of the Temporal Power, which good fortune gave us in each other's company in Rome. For while my people returned there for another four or five years, the Sargents, perhaps for the sake of a very good boys' school, settled in Florence. And when circumstances drifted us also to Florence in 1873, Dr. an d Mrs. Sargent, with Emily and an additional little daughter, had settled once more at Nice. And by that time Dr. Sargent's wisely and firmly carried out sacrifice of his own prejudices and wishes had already sent John by himself to study painting under Carolus in Paris. So our meetings became rare and brief. As happens (or happened in those distant more conservative times), once friends always friends; while with those who had been children together absence merely kept up the notion and the externalities of the interrupted fraternal intimacies of vanishing childhood. We corresponded more or less regularly, John and Emily and I; and on my part with a self-engrossed confidence that we were still and ever would be each other's closest friends. Indeed, I confess that my axiomatic belief that John Sargent was going to be the great painter of the future, a belief whose realization was later to surprise me as a wonderful coincidence, was at bottom due to a general faith, unadmitted but un- challenged, that everyone connected with myself must partake in the glory of my secret adolescent day-dreams. In these John Sargent was an unfailing figure. But the possession of a bona- fide brother, sufficiently my elder to engross all my juvenile worship, left for John only a comradeship which, though largely a matter of the imagination, was never anything more. Never did his comings and goings (one can discuss such emotional de- tails at near three score and ten !) occasion a heart-beat, nor bring those fine pangs which I had learned when almost a child (for I was a precocious votary of the genius loci) in my partings from Rome. Thus John remained merely the great painter and the comrade secretly expected to see in my vain self his equal and, so to speak, twin, in the sister-art of letters. In this taken-for- granted and, as remarked, mainly imaginary comradeship, our months of separation did not shake my faith. Nor — which was odder — was it shaken by the far-between brief meetings during our years of growing-up. One such, I remember, was on the Lake of Como — we were respectively fourteen and thirteen — where we picked up, not indeed antique marbles, but, as we had done at Nice, figs which had dropped over villa walls, while continuing, with Emily as a silent participator, our Roman discussion of the merits of Canova versus the Antique and Guido Reni compared with Rafael; and to read once more the extracts from "Childe Harold " in the guide book. Then, some years later, came ten days in a hotel (alas ! since profaned into a bank !) at Bologna; days of historical-romantic rapture, such as only adolescence can taste. By this time I was a half-baked polyglot scribbler of sixteen, and John a year older: a tall, slack, growing youth with as yet no sign of his later spick-and-span man-of-the-world appearance; did he not protect his rather stooping shoulders with a grey plaid shawl ? . . . He had very nearly completed his classical education in that Florence school and sundry German gymnasia, working hard, meanwhile, wherever there was an opportunity of drawing from the life or from casts: he was within a year or two of the promised initiation into Paris art-schools and entire independence. Yet so great was his, I know not whether to call it modesty or reserve, that I cannot remember his ever mentioning his future. So those ten days were lived by John and me in a present of our imagination, or, rather, a fantastic past we were making up as we went along; rambling, as we did — Mrs. Sargent, my mother, John, Emily and myself — by moonlight, through the mediaeval arcades and under the leaning towers and crenellations of that enormously picturesque and still unspoilt city. While, of a morning, after threading our way among the bullocks charioting the vintage, we would spend hours over the portfolios of prints and the unreadable (for they were bristling with various clefs of Ut) scores of the music school. Nor was a word ever exchanged, save about the half imaginary sights we saw, the (I now think) wholly imaginary personages whose portraits sur- rounded us; and the music, which we had as yet scarcely ever heard, of those eighteenth-century composers who already fired my enthusiasm. It is characteristic of John Sargent's good- natured modesty and his willingness (as in Rome) to fall in with my fancies that, being a nearly grown-up painter, he readily set to copying some marvellously hideous portraits of the musicians ("Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter") I idolized. So that I still cherish a careful water-colour of a youthful portrait of Mozart — Mozart, who never appealed to him, because lacking the exotic, far-fetched quality which always attracted John Sargent in music, literature, and, for many years, in persons. Which leads to the remark that those days at Bologna already showed that imaginative quality of his mind with which he transfigured my own priggish historical sentimentalities. The words "strange, weird, fantastic" were already on his lips — and that adjective curious , pronounced with a long and some- how aspirated u y accompanied by a particular expression half of wonder and half of self-irony. That word curious was to me, at least, his dominant word for many years, in our meetings in Florence, in Paris (on my way to England) and then, and when, after the Gautreau annoyance had made him change his abode, in the various studios he occupied in London.
TOWER AT TURIN Indeed, as time interposed longer intervals between our meetings, and filled up the intervening absences more and more with interests unshared by the other, that word curious be- came the keynote of John Sargent's and my conversation; the cliche representing a stereotyped reciprocal attitude such as alas, alas, is often all that remains in the externally unchanged relations of once fraternal friends. Recognizing such to have been the case, despite all John's unfailing kindness towards me, I recognize once more that all I can tell, first hand, of his life and character is contained in the legend of what his father did for him and what he came to feel for his father. However, I should like to say some more about the double nature which, as it seems to me, John Sargent had inherited from his exuberantly gifted, expressive and lebenslustige mother, on the one hand, and from his puritan, reserved and rather sternly dissatisfied father, on the other. For people appear to have seen only one side at a time, and failed to appreciate both his many- sidedness and the complexity of his genius: that double nature of his occasionally self-conflicting, but more often harmoniously blended, as becomes a creature of supreme facility and of restless, indomitable passion for the difficult. Those words I have just quoted, in use already before he went to Paris, expressed one whole side of John Sargent's tendencies. As a young man he was, and perhaps remained, especially attracted by the bizarre and outlandish: Spanish dancers (the Jaleo and the wonderful frontispiece to Miss Strettell's translations) posed and lit up in enigmatic fashion; Spanish Madonnas like idols, and Javanese dancers scarcely more barbarically improbable; and that Fumee d'Ambregris, a Moorish woman veiled in incense fumes, which was, I think, his earliest public success. Such were his individual predilections. But his student days with Carolus fell under the reign of Manet, Degas, Monnet and Renoir, whose realistic creed is set forth in Zola's "Mes Haines." And when I met him, during his Paris years, in 1881, he described himself as an impressionist and an "intransigeant," entirely given up to the faithful reproduction of "les valeurs." Indeed, for years after, and maybe to the very end of his days, I feel certain that his conscious endeavour, his self-formulated program, was to paint whatever he saw with absolute and researchful fidelity, never avoiding ugliness nor seeking after beauty. But, like most, though perhaps not all, supreme artists, John Sargent was not aware of what he was really about, nor in what manner his superficial verbal program was for ever disregarded by the unspoken, imperious synthesis of his particular temperament and gifts. Also, like other painters of those ingenuous, unpsychological days, John Sargent did not know that seeing is a business of the mind, the memory and the heart, quite as much as of the eye; and that the valeurs which the most stiff- necked impressionist could strive after were also values of association and preference. Now, to his constitution, ugliness and vulgarity were negative values, instinctively avoided. In theory, John Sargent would doubtless have defended Manet for cutting some of his figures in half and even decapitating them by the frame, let alone choosing to portray bounders and sots in ballet- stalls and bars. I can almost hear him taking a brief for Renoir's crowd of cads and shop-girls under umbrellas; and for Degas's magnificent lady in her bathroom, under the ministrations of the corn-cutter. But Sargent never painted such things himself. His faithfulness was to selected detail of reality, not to reality as a promiscuous whole; it did not go beyond perspective oddities of posture or improbable-looking colour and light on skin, hair and stuffs. And when he painted certain types of rapacity and vulgarity, he raised them to the same sublime intensity as did Rafael, that other cruellest of portrait-painters, in his hog Pope and fox-and-ferret Cardinals. That picture, of any pictures ever painted perhaps the one giving me the same artistic happiness as the slow movement of certain Mozart quartets, that penetratingly beautiful Carnation Lily y makes me wish to say a few more words about the nature of Sargent's imagination, if only to express my gratitude for it. I have spoken, almost overmuch, of his love for the bizarre. But that, however evident, was a superficial trait, perhaps the mere reaction of an austerely fastidious nature against the crassness with which some of his greatest contemporaries accepted, indeed sought for, commonplace, ugly and ignoble subjects for their painting. It may also have been connected with the Parnassian, the Heredia and Leconte de Lisle movement in literature. I can conceive that at any other time than the eighties or nineties, and with any other surroundings than the expensive and traditionless "tastefulness" of the wordly people who sat for him, this bizarre element might have vanished from Sargent's work. The boyish hankering after the " curious " would have been entirely transmuted into the particular imaginative habit, poetical, yet of almost scientific insight, which distinguishes Sargent as much as his individual quality of line and colour. Just as his eye — or what we call eye for want of a better name — took in with marvellous subtlety all the visible relations making up the shape of objects, and his hand — (again for want of a better name) — transferred them to canvas or paper with prestigious swiftness and decision, so also Sargent's imagination perceived all those other relations, relations for the mind and the emotions, which give all objects and persons a significance ramifying far beyond their mere present self, give them, for instance, a past and a future. Thus I remember Professor Geddes remarking that Sargent's Alpine sketches showed a geologist the composition of the rocks and the manner their shapes had been modelled by water and ice and sun and wind. And Sargent was not a geologist. Similarly, no doubt, with his portrayal of vegetation. So far was he from the complacent impressionist formula of representing things without knowing what they were ! Sargent may not have known what they were called^ but take, for instance, his Ruskinian rendering of the planes and angles of architecture, why, every exquisite, sharp, yet tender corner shows the four-square shape of the building, records the certainty that cornice or capital or archway would have revealed definite loveliness of shape if seen from another or nearer point of view. Because Sargent had seen it, felt it, remembered it, and, with no need for verbal expression, had told us what there would remain to be seen, merely by his intuitive choice of the most significant aspects actually visible. Quite similarly do I explain the revelations of his portrait painting. I remember once asking whether he was aware of the character of the people he painted; and his denial of all knowledge of and interest in their psychology is surely confirmed by the very fact that (as in the imaginary cases of that Five Towns Magnate of Arnold Bennett's story) this most reserved and delicately unmercenary of artists did make certain portraits of certain sitters, and pocket the price, evidently without a suspicion of what he had told about those who paid it. That quite unverbal, intuitive imagination of his had fastened on the facial forms, the pose and gesture, sometimes even the accessories, which revealed the man or woman's character and life. To this kind of imagination I would apply Ruskin's adjective penetrative^ for Sargent's art does penetrate to the innermost suggestion of everything he painted, but does so by following its merely visible elements. I do not think Sargent, despite the infinite ingenuity he showed in his attempts, was an imaginative painter like Watts or Besnard, imaginative in the sense of building up allegories and narrating events. His symbolism was immanent in the aspects which he painted. Who else has ever expressed the tragedy of war as he has done in his group of gassed soldiers, its horror conveyed without contortion or grimace; and war's tragedy assigned a subordinate and transitory place in the order of things by that peaceful landscape and the game of football in the middle distance. This composition is as majestically serene as some antique frieze; while for the emotions of the beholder it is terrible, like a chapter of Tolstoi. As regards our friendship, I have sometimes regretted that, having started with such early intimacy, I did not get, or try, to know John Sargent better. But, after all, what can be better than knowing a great man, not in the details of his common personal existence, but in the impersonal feelings and thoughts special to his greatness, and which he enabled us to share with him ? VERNON LEE. Oxford
CARRARA QUARRY THE END
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