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On an easel stood a masterly small portrait of Lord Dunstable as a young man, by Bastien Lepage; and not far from it rather pushed into a corner a sketch by Millais of a fair-haired boy, leaning against a pony. By this time Doris was quivering both with excitement and fatigue. She sank into a chair, and turned eagerly to the wine and biscuits with which Miss Field pursued her.
But all lovers are not too weak to cope with love. John Ruskin, if you remember, loved his wife, and he shot neither himself, nor her, nor Millais. Charles J. Johnson is not a Ruskin, and Ruskin's love was not a madness. And, Herbert, to me there is nothing comic in a stress of feeling. Let the lover pale and flutter and faint; in the presence of his deity it is an acceptable form of worship.
Nick was kindly confusing and shaming Miss Ingate with a short history and catechism of modern art, including such names as Vuillard, Bonnard, Picasso, Signac, and Matisse all very eagerly poured out and all very unnerving for Miss Ingate, whose directory of painting was practically limited to the names of Raphael, Sir Joshua, Rembrandt, Rubens, Gainsborough, Turner, Leighton, Millais, Gustave Doré and Frank Dicksee.
He divorced her and gave her to Millais, and the three were life-long friends. If I were a man in such a case as A. J.'s I should treat my wife as I would a daughter. I would treat her as an Individual with the right of choice. Many a daughter has rushed headlong into a marriage which her relatives opposed and she regretted at leisure.
We like to think these things, but we can only make believe to ourselves as Millais did when he went to Budleigh Salterton and painted that picture. When still quite a boy, Walter Raleigh went to Oriel College, Oxford, but we know nothing of what he did there, and the next we hear of him is that he is fighting for the Huguenots in France.
Yet Everett Millais is this year of the exact age at which Raphael painted the "Disputa," his greatest work; Rossetti and Hunt are both of them older still nor is there one member of the body so young as Giotto, when he was chosen from among the painters of Italy to decorate the Vatican. But Italy, in her great period, knew her great men, and did not "despise their youth."
He, too, knew something about me, having been shown some of my verses, and to meet him was one of my cherished dreams. Only half a dozen people were present, and from a well-known portrait of him by Millais I recognized his form at once. This was Ruskin. He had sent me, through Lord Houghton or somebody, a verbal message of poetic appreciation already. I was now meeting him in the flesh.
He was indignant at her desire to suppress parts of 'Queen Mab'; but he might have admired the honesty with which she retained 'Epipsychidion', although that poem describes her as a "cold chaste moon." The old sea-captain in Sir John Millais' picture, "The North-West Passage," now in the Tate Gallery in London, is a portrait of Trelawny in old age. To return to the Shelleys.
The burning of heretics was a public amusement, and the court ladies sat out the play. On the queen-mother and on her miserable son lay all the blood of the St. Bartholomew. The country was torn asunder; everywhere was battle, murder, pillage, and such woeful partings as Mr. Millais has represented in his incomparable picture. To the solitary humourous essayist this state of things was hateful.
It is simple and natural, and entirely free from the besetting sins of so slight a picture triviality, affectation, empty prettiness, or simply silliness. In its way it is perfect, and for that perfection is for ever reserved the popularity which we find temporarily accorded to pictures like Frith's Dolly Varden or Millais' Bubbles.
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