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Philip Gilbert Hamerton

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I had only one servant, a young man from the moorland country on the
borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, perfectly well adapted to life in
the Highlands. He had excellent health, and was physically a good
specimen of our north-English race. It was a pleasure to see his tall
straight figure going over the roughest ground with no appearance of
hurry, but in fact with such unostentatious swiftness that few sportsmen
could follow him. I was myself active enough then, and accustomed to
wild places, but he always restrained himself when we did any mountain
work together. He afterwards became well known as the "Thursday" of the
"Painter's Camp," but I may give his real name here, which was Young
Helliwell. Temperate, hardy, and extremely prudent, not to be caught by
any allurements of vulgar pleasure, he lived wisely in youth, and will
probably have fewer regrets than most people in his old age.

Young had studied the art of simple cookery at Hollins, so he was able
to keep me tolerably well when we happened to have anything to eat,
which was not always. There were no provision shops on Lochaweside;
Inverary was at some distance in one direction and Oban in the other,
and as I had never given a thought to feeding before, I was an utterly
incompetent provider. The consequence was that we fasted like monks,
except that our abstinence was not on any regular principle; in fact,
sometimes we had so little to eat for days together that we began to
feel quite weak. This gave us no anxiety, and we only laughed at it,
undereating being always more conducive to good spirits than its
opposite, provided that it is not carried too far.

The camp consisted of three structures,--my hut, which was made of
wooden panels with plate-glass windows; a tent for Young, with a wooden
floor, and wooden sides to the height of three feet; lastly, a military
bell-tent that served for storing things. My hut was both painting-room
and habitation, but it would have been better to have had a separate
painting-room on rather a larger scale. Mr. Herkomer afterwards imitated
the hut for painting from nature in Wales, and he introduced a clever
improvement by erecting his hut on a circular platform with a ring-rail,
so that it could be turned at will to any point of the compass. Young's
tent was, in fact, also a kind of hut with a square tent for a roof.

In a climate like that of the West Highlands, wooden floors at least are
almost indispensable; but a camp so arranged ceases to be a travelling
camp unless you have men and horses in your daily service like a Shah of
Persia. It may be moved two or three times in a summer.

I have always had a fancy for double-hulled boats (now generally called
catamarans), and had two of them on Loch Awe. This eccentricity was
perhaps fortunate, as my boats were extremely safe, each hull being
decked from stem to stern and divided internally into water-tight
compartments. They could therefore ship a sea with perfect impunity, and
although often exposed to sudden and violent squalls, we were never in
any real danger. One of my catamarans would beat to windward tolerably
well, but she did not tack quickly, and occasionally missed stays.
However, these defects were of slight importance in a boat not intended
for racing, and small enough to be always quite manageable with oars.
Since those days I have much improved the construction of catamarans, so
that their evolutions are now quicker and more certain. They are
absolutely the only sailing-boats that combine lightness with safety and
speed.

As to the practice of landscape-painting, I very soon found that the
West Highlands were not favorable to painting from nature on account of
the rapid changes of effect. Those changes are so revolutionary that
they often metamorphose all the oppositions in a natural picture in the
course of a single minute. I began by planting my hut on the island
called Inishail, in the middle of Loch Awe, with the intention of
painting Ben Cruachan from nature, but soon discovered that there were
fifty Cruachans a day, each effacing its predecessor, so my picture got
on badly. If I painted what was before me, the result was like playing
successfully a bar or two from each of several different musical
compositions in the vain hope of harmonizing them into one. If I tried
to paint my first impression, it became increasingly difficult to do
that when the mountain itself presented novel and striking aspects.

Every artist who reads this will now consider the above remarks no
better than a commonplace, but in the year 1857 English
landscape-painting was going through a peculiar phase. There was, in
some of the younger artists, a feeling of dissatisfaction with the
slight and superficial work too often produced from hasty water-color
sketches, and there was an honest desire for more substantial truth
coupled with the hope of attaining it by working directly from nature.
My critical master, Mr. Ruskin, saw in working from nature the only hope
for the regeneration of art, and my practical master, Mr. Pettitt,
considered it the height of artistic virtue to sit down before nature
and work on the details of a large picture for eight or ten weeks
together. I was eagerly anxious to do what was considered most right,
and quite willing to undergo any degree of inconvenience. The truth is,
perhaps, that (like other devotees) I rather enjoyed the sacrifice of
convenience for what seemed to me, at that time, the sacred cause of
veracity in art.

The Highlands of Scotland were intensely attractive to me, as being a
kind of sublimation of the wild northern landscape that I had already
loved in my native Lancashire; but the Highlands were not well chosen as
a field for self-improvement in the art of painting. A student ought not
to choose the most changeful of landscapes, but the least changeful; not
the Highlands or the English Lake District, but the dullest landscape he
can find in the south or the east of England. Norfolk would have been a
better country for me, as a student, than Argyllshire. If, however, any
prudent adviser had told me to go to dull scenery in those days, it
would have been like telling a passionate lover of great capitals to go
and live in a narrow little provincial town. I hated dull, unromantic
scenery, and at the same time had the passion for mountains, lakes, wild
moorland, and everything that was rough and uncultivated,--a passion so
predominant that it resembled rather the natural instinct of an animal
for its own habitat than the choice of a reasonable being. I loved
everything in the Highlands, even the bad weather; I delighted in clouds
and storms, and have never experienced any natural influences more in
harmony with the inmost feelings of my own nature than those of a great
lake's dark waters when they dashed in spray on the rocks of some lonely
islet and my boat flew past in the gray and dreary gloaming.

"Le paysage," says a French critic, "est un état d'âme." He meant that
_what we seek_ in nature is that which answers to the state of our own
souls. What is called dreary, wild, and melancholy scenery afforded me,
at that time, a kind of satisfaction more profound than that which is
given by any of the human arts. I loved painting, but all the
collections in Europe attracted me less than the barren northern end of
our own island, in which there are no pictures; I loved architecture,
and chose a country that is utterly destitute of it; I delighted in
music, and pitched my tent where there was no music but that of the
winds and the waves.

The Loch Awe of those days was not the Loch Awe of the present. There
was no railway; there was not a steamer on the lake, either public or
private; there was no hotel by the waterside, only one or two small
inns, imperceptible in the vastness of the almost uninhabited landscape.
The lake was therefore almost a solitude, and this, added to the
wildness of the climate and the peculiarly simple and temporary
character of my habitation, made nature much more profoundly impressive
than it ever is amidst the powerful rivalry of the works of man. The
effect on my mind was, on the whole, saddening, but not in the least
depressing. It was a kind of poetic sadness that had nothing to do with
low spirits. I have never been either merry or melancholy, but have kept
an equable cheerfulness that maintains itself serenely enough even in
solitude and amidst the desolate aspects of stony and barren lands. As
life advances, it is wise, however, to seek the more cheering influences
of the external world, and those are rather to be found in the brightest
and sunniest landscape, with abundant evidence of happy human
habitation; some southern land of the vine where the chestnut grows high
on the hills, and the peach and the pear ripen richly in innumerable
gardens.




CHAPTER XXXI.


1857-1858.

Small immediate results of the expedition to the Highlands.--Unsuitable
system of work.--Loss of time.--I rent the house and island of
Innistrynich.--My dread of marriage and the reasons for
it.--Notwithstanding this I make an offer and am refused.--Two young
ladies of my acquaintance.--Idea of a foreign marriage.--Its
inconveniences.--Decision to ask for the hand of Mdlle. Gindriez.--I go
to Paris and am accepted.--Elective affinities.

The immediate artistic results of the expedition to the Highlands were
very small. I had gone there to paint detailed work from nature, when I
ought to have gone to sketch, and so adapt my work to the peculiar
character of the climate.

The tendency then was to detail, and the merit and value of good
sketching were not properly understood. There has been a complete
revolution, both in public and in artistic opinion, since those days.
The revival of etching, which in its liveliest and most spontaneous form
is only sketching on copper, the study of sketches by the great masters,
the publication of sketches by modern artists of eminence in the
artistic magazines, have all led to a far better appreciation of
vitality in art, and consequently have tended to raise good sketching
both in popular and in professional estimation. At the Paris Exhibition
of 1889 the Grand Prizes for engraving were given to an English
sketching etcher, Haden, and to two French etchers, Boilvin and Chauvel.
In 1857, I and many others looked upon sketching as defective work,
excusable only on the plea of want of time to do better. The omissions
in a sketch, which when intelligent are merits, seemed to me, on the
contrary, so many faults. In a word, I knew nothing about sketching. My
way was to draw very carefully and accurately, and then fill in the
color and detail in the most painstaking fashion from nature. I went by
line and detail, nobody having ever taught me anything about mass and
tonic values, still less about the difference between art and nature,
and the necessity for transposing nature into the keys of art. The
consequence was a great waste of time, and of only too earnest efforts
with hardly anything to show for them.

Here I leave this subject of art for the present, as it will be
necessary to recur to it later.

My guardian, like all women, had an objection to what was not customary,
and as my camp was considered a piece of eccentricity, she wanted me to
take a house on Lochaweside. The island called Innistrynich, which is
near the shore, where the road from Inverary to Dalmally comes nearest
to the lake, had a house upon it that happened to be untenanted. There
were twelve small rooms, and the camping experience had made me very
easy to please. It was possible to have the whole island (about thirty
acres) as a home farm, so I took it on a lease. This turned out a
misfortune afterwards, as I got tied to the place, not only by the
lease, but by a binding affection which was extremely inconvenient, and
led to very unfortunate consequences.

My dear guardian had another idea. Though she had prudently avoided
marriage on her own account, she thought it very desirable for me, and
sometimes recurred to the subject. Her heart complaint made her own life
extremely precarious, and she wished me to have the stay and anchorage
of a second affection that might make the world less dreary for me after
she had left it. At the same time it may be suspected that she looked to
marriage as the best chance of converting me to her own religious
opinions, or at least of obtaining outward conformity. To confess the
plain truth, I had a great dread of marriage, and not at all from any
aversion to feminine society, or from any insensibility to love.

My two reasons were these, and all subsequent observation and experience
have confirmed them. For a person given up to intellectual and artistic
pursuits there is a special value in mental and pecuniary independence.
So far as I could observe married men in England, they enjoyed very
little mental independence, being obliged, on the most important
questions, to succumb to the opinions of their wives, because what is
called "the opinion of Society" is essentially feminine opinion. In our
class the ladies were all strong Churchwomen and Tories, and the men I
most admired for the combination of splendid talents with high
principle, were to them (so far as they knew anything about such men)
objects of reprobation and abhorrence. No mother was ever loved by a son
more devotedly than my guardian was by me, and yet her intolerance would
have been hard to bear in a wife. Kind as she always was in manner, the
theological injustice which had been instilled into her mind from
infancy made her look upon me as bad company for my friends, as a
heretic likely to contaminate their orthodoxy. I could bear that, or
anything, from her, but I determined that if I married at all it should
not be to live under perpetual theological disapprobation.

The other grave objection to marriage was the dread of losing pecuniary
independence. I cared nothing for luxury and display, having an
unaffected preference for plain living, and being easily bored by the
elaborate observances of fine society, so that comparative poverty had
no terrors for me on that account; but there was another side to the
matter. A student clings to his studies, and dreads the interference
that may take him away from them. An independent bachelor can afford to
follow unremunerative study; a married man, unless he is rich, must lay
out his time to the best pecuniary advantage. His hours are at the
disposal of the highest bidder.

There was a young lady in Burnley for whom I had had a boyish attachment
long before, and whom I saw very frequently at her father's house in the
years preceding 1858. He was a banker in very good circumstances, and a
kind friend of mine, as intimate, perhaps, as was possible considering
the difference of years. He had been a Wrangler at Cambridge, and now
employed his forcible and fully matured intellect freely on all subjects
that came in his way, without deference to the popular opinions of the
hour. These qualities, rare enough in the upper middle class of those
days, made him very interesting to me, and I liked my place in an
easy-chair opposite to his, when he was in the humor for talking. He had
three handsome daughters, and his eldest son had been my school-fellow,
and was still, occasionally at least, one of my companions. Their mother
was a remarkably handsome and amiable lady, so that the house was as
pleasant as any house could be. We had music and played quintets, and
the eldest daughter sometimes played a duet with me. She was a good
amateur musician, well educated in other ways, and with a great charm of
voice and manner. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that
the old boyish attachment revived on my side, though there was nothing
answering to it on hers.

My good friend, her father, sometimes talked to me about marriage, and
expressed the regret that in a state of civilization like ours, and in
our class, a family of children should be a cause of weakness instead of
strength. In a primitive agricultural community, sons are of great
value, they are an increase of the family force; in a highly-civilized
condition, they only weaken the father by draining away his income.
"Daughters," said my friend, "are of use in primitive societies and in
the English middle class, because they do the work of the house, and
spare servants; but our young ladies do nothing of the least use, and
require to be first expensively educated, and afterwards expensively
amused." My friend then went into details about the cost of his own
family, which was heavy without extravagance or ostentation. All this
was intended to warn me, but I asked if he had any objection to me
personally as a son-in-law. He answered, with all the kindness I
expected, that there was no objection to make (he was too intelligent to
see anything criminal in my philosophical opinions), and that in what he
had said about the costliness of marriage he had spoken merely as a
friend, thinking of the weight of the burden I might be taking upon
myself, and the inconvenience to my own life in the future.

One afternoon his daughter and I were alone together, playing a duet,
when I asked her if she would have me, and she laughingly declined. I
remember being so little hurt by the refusal that I said: "That is not
the proper way to refuse an, offer; you ought to express a little
regret--you might say, at least, that you are sorry." Then the young
lady laughed again, and said: "Very well, I will say that I am sorry, if
you wish it." And so we parted, without any further expression of
sentiment on either side.

I never could understand why men make themselves wretched after a
refusal. It only proves that the young lady does not care very much for
one, and it is infinitely better that she should let him know that
before marriage than after. It was soon quite clear to me that, in this
case, the young lady's decision had been the wise one. We were not
really suited for each other, and we should never have been happy, both
of us, in the same kind of existence. Perhaps she was rather difficult
to please, or indifferent to marriage, for she never accepted anybody,
and is living still (1889) in happy independence as an old maid, within
a short distance of Hellifield Peel. I had a little indirect evidence,
thirty years afterwards, that she had not forgotten me. Most likely she
will survive me and read this. If she does, let the page convey a
complete acknowledgment of her good sense.

This was the only offer of marriage I ever made in England. There was a
certain very wealthy heiress whose uncle was extremely kind to me, and
he pushed his kindness so far as to wish me to marry her. She was
well-bred, her manners were quite equal to her fortune, and she had a
good appearance, but the idea of marriage did not occur to either of us.
Some time afterwards, her uncle said to a friend of mine: "I cannot
understand Hamerton; I wanted him to marry my niece, and he has gone and
married a French woman." "Oh!" said the other, "that was only to
improve his French!"

There was another case that I would have passed in silence, had not
people in Lancashire persistently circulated a story of an offer and a
refusal. A young lady, also a rich heiress, though not quite so rich as
the other, had a property a few miles distant from mine. She was a very
attractive girl, very pretty, and extremely intelligent, and we were
very good friends. To say, in this case, that the idea of marriage never
occurred would he untrue; but when I first knew her she was hardly more
than a child, and afterwards it became apparent to me that to live
happily in her house I should have to stifle all my opinions on
important subjects, so I never made the offer that our friends and
perhaps she herself expected. Whether she would have accepted me or not
is quite another question. Had I made any proposal I should have
accompanied it by a very plain statement of my obnoxious opinions on
religion and politics, and these would almost certainly have produced a
rupture. After my marriage, and before hers, we met again in the old
friendly way. I was paying a call with my wife, in a country house in
Lancashire, when a carriage came up the drive--_her_ carriage--and the
lady of the house, extremely fluttered, asked me if I had no objection
to meet Miss ----. "On the contrary," I said, "I like to meet old
friends." The young lady visibly enjoyed the humor of the situation, and
the embarrassment of our hostess. We talked easily in the old way, and
afterwards my wife and I left on foot, and _her_ carriage passed us,
rather stately, with servants in livery. "There goes your most dangerous
rival," I said to my wife, and told her what story there was to tell.
"She is much prettier than I am," was the modest answer, "and evidently
a good deal richer; and she is a charming person." In due time Miss ----
married very suitably. Her husband is a good Churchman and Conservative,
who takes a proper interest in the pursuits belonging to his station.

My guardian was of opinion that with my philosophical convictions, which
were at that time not only unpopular, but odious and execrated in our
own class in England, I should have to remain an old bachelor. She
herself would certainly never have married an unbeliever, and
although her great personal affection for me made her glad to
have me in the house, she must have felt that it was like sheltering
a pariah. Her sister once heard some rumor or suggestion, connecting
my name with that of a pious young lady, and looked upon it as a
sort of sacrilege. Under these circumstances I came at last to
the conclusion that, being under a ban, I would at least enjoy my
liberty, either by living my own life as a bachelor, or else by
marrying purely and simply according to inclination, without any
reference to the opinion of other people.

It was at this time that the idea of a foreign marriage first occurred
to me as a possibility. I had never thought of it before, and if such an
idea had entered my head, the clear foresight of the enormous
inconveniences would have immediately expelled it. A foreign marriage
is, in fact, quite an accumulation of inconveniences. One of the two
parties must always be living in a foreign country, and in all their
intercourse together one of the two must always be speaking a foreign
language. The families of the two parties will never know each other or
understand each other properly; there will be either estrangement or
misunderstanding. And unless there is great largeness of mind in the
parties themselves, the difference of national customs is sure to
produce quarrels.

All this was plain enough, and yet one morning, when I was writing on my
desk (a tall oak desk that I used to stand up to), the idea suddenly
came, as if somebody had uttered these words in my ear: "Why should you
remain lonely all your days? Eugénie Gindriez would be an affectionate
and faithful wife to you. She is not rich, but you would work and fight
your way."

I pushed aside the sheet of manuscript and took a sheet of note-paper
instead. I then wrote, in French, a letter to a lady in Paris who knew
the Gindriez family, and asked her if Mademoiselle Eugénie was engaged
to be married. The answer came that she was well, and that there had
been no engagement. Soon afterwards I was in Paris.

I called on M. Gindriez, but his daughter was not at home. I asked
permission to call in the evening, and she was out again. This was
repeated two or three times, and my wife told me afterwards that the
absences had not been accidental. At last we met, and there was nothing
in her manner but a certain gravity, as if serious resolutions were
impending. Her sister showed no such reserve, but greeted me gayly and
frankly. After a few days, I was accepted on the condition of an annual
visit to France.

From a worldly point of view, this engagement was what is called in
French _une folie_, on my part, and hardly less so on the part of the
young lady. We had, however, a kind of inward assurance that in spite of
the difference of nationality and other differences, we were, in truth,
nearer to each other than most people who contract matrimonial
engagements. The "elective affinities" act in spite of all appearances
and of many realities.

We have often talked over that time since, and have confessed that we
really knew hardly anything of each other, that our union was but an
instinctive choice. However, in 1858 I had neither doubt nor anxiety,
and in 1889 I have neither anxiety nor doubt.




CHAPTER XXXII.


1858.

Reception at home after engagement.--Preparations at Innistrynich.--I
arrive alone in Paris.--My marriage.--The religious ceremony.--An
uncomfortable wedding.--The sea from Dieppe.--London.--The Academy
Exhibition of 1858.--Impressions of a French woman.--The Turner
collection.--The town.--Loch Awe.--The element wanting to happiness.

On returning home after my engagement I was greeted very affectionately
at the front door by my dear guardian, who expressed many wishes for my
future happiness; but her sister sat motionless and rigid in an
arm-chair in the dining-room, and did not seem disposed to take any
notice of me. From that time until long after my marriage she treated me
with the most distant coldness, varied occasionally by a bitter
innuendo.

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