WAINEWRIGHT AT HOBART TOWN

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.—Pen, Pencil and Poison.

CARDINAL NEWMAN AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHERS

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.—The Critic as Artist.

ROBERT BROWNING

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.—The Critic as Artist.