Page:A Legend of Camelot, Pictures and Poems, etc. George du Maurier, 1898.djvu/131

 regretfully, recall to mind the grand old sunsets, by the grand Old Masters, in the National Gallery, and the quaint old children and mothers by Bogofogo, Antima Cassaro, Vecchio Coccoloro, Fra Stoggiato di Vermicelli, Sarsaparillo dello Strando, and other painters of that ante-præ-Raphaelite school; and, in the depths of his bliss, a feeling of discouragement would steal over him as he thought of those immortal works, showing thereby that he was a true artist, ever striving after the light. He little dreamt in his modesty, that, young and inexperienced though he might be, his pictures were even quainter than theirs; for not only could he already draw, colour, compose, and put into perspective quite as badly as they did, but he had over them the advantage of a real lay figure to copy, whereas they had to content themselves with the living model.

The amusements of this happy pair were of the simplest, healthiest, and most delightful kind; they never went to the play, nor to balls or dances, which they thought immodest—(indeed they were not even asked)—nor read such things as novels, magazines, or the newspaper; nor visited exhibitions of modern art, which they held in contempt, as they did all things modern; but they skipped, with single and double rope, and played battledore and shuttlecock, and hunt the slipper, and puss in the corner, and hide-and-seek, and such like little innocent old games; and they were devoted to music, not that of the present day, which they despised, nor that of the future, of which they had never heard; nor English music, which was not old enough; but music of the early continental school, with nice easy tunes, which they could learn to sing in unison, and early French and Italian words, which appealed to their fond hearts with all the hidden power of a language they loved but did not understand. Their voices were musical and low. They sang even the liveliest ditties to a slow sad measure of their own, and in the sweet but homely accent of their native London. The reader can hardly realize the effects that early French or Italian strains of a festive nature, with festive words to match, can produce on a musical Frenchman or Italian of the present day, when rendered in this unsophisticated manner by such performers as Mr. and Mrs. Jack Spratt.

They were not without friends, carefully chosen on the combined principles of natural and Hobsonian selection. They were few, but true and trusty, with remarkably fine heads for a painter; their gait, gestures, grammar, and personal habits were mediæval; their deportment grave, sad, and very strange; for the death of the early Italian Masters still weighed on their souls with all the force of some recent domestic bereavement, and they always behaved with the solemnity that befitted them as chief mourners, speaking of the dead in hushed and reverential whispers; not that they conversed very freely or very often; they were much given to long periods of thoughtful silence, which were held sacred by each other, and only broken now and then by flashes of a sad strange merriment, that would have puzzled an outsider immensely. But, buoyed up as they were by brave hopes of the past and a firm faith in better days gone by, they were not unhappy. They looked on themselves, and each other, and the Jack Spratts, and were looked upon by the Jack Spratts in return, as the sole incarnation on this degenerate earth of all such good as had still managed to survive there; and so they were always telling each other, and every one else they met. And no wonder, for they were marvellously accomplished; being each of them painter, sculptor, architect, poet, critic, and engraver, all in one; and all this without ever having learnt, but through a mere effort of the will, and by mutual consent, as it were; and if you were to mention to them the name of any world-renowned follower of any of those arts in the present day, they would coldly reply:—"We don't know any painters!" or, "We don't know any poets!" as the case might be, and walk off in an opposite direction; and after that you would find it very difficult to continue the conversation.

As for the Royal Academy, they held it in merely passive contempt, and were satisfied with never having heard the names of its most celebrated members. Their especial scorn was reserved for that 59