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Later judgments have confirmed his estimate, and the reputation of Charles Strickland is now firmly established on the lines which he laid down.

1а

The rise of this reputation is one of the most romantic incidents in the history of art.

19, 4, 1а

I cannot agree with the painters who claim superciliously that the layman can understand nothing of painting, and that he can best show his appreciation of their works by silence and a cheque-book.

20б, 19

It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman: art is a manifestation of emotion.

19

But I will allow that the critic who has not a practical knowledge of technique is seldom able to say anything on the subject of real value, and my ignorance of painting is extreme.

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With his disinterested passion for art, he had a real desire to call the attention of the wise to a talent which was in the highest degree original.

1а

And when such as had come in contact with Strickland in the past, writers who had known him in London, painters who had met him in the cafes of Montmartre, discovered to their amazement that where they had seen but an unsuccessful artist, like another, authentic genius had rubbed shoulders with them.

4

It is the protest of romance against the commonplace of life.

19

The incidents of the legend become the hero's surest passport to immortality.

1а

It is not strange, then, that those who wrote of him should have eked out their scanty recollections with a

lively fancy, and it is evident that there was enough in the little that was known of him to give opportunity to the romantic scribe.

20б

In due course a legend arose of such circumstantiality that the wise historian would hesitate to attack it.

11

Mr. Strickland has drawn the portrait of an excellent husband and father, a man of kindly temper, industrious habits, and moral disposition.

1б,11

The Anglo-Saxon race is accused of prudishness, humbug, pretentiousness, deceit,

cunning, and bad cooking.

20в,

Personally I think it was rash of Mr. Strickland.

3

There, as is notorious, he spent the last years of his life; and there I came across persons who were familiar with him.

4

I find myself in a position to throw light on just that part of his tragic career which has remained most obscure.

4

If they who believe in Strickland's greatness are right, the personal narratives of such as knew him in the flesh can hardly be superfluous.

2а

What would we not give for the reminiscences of someone who had been as intimately acquainted with El Greco as I was with Strickland?

1а

And if I may judge from the reviews, many of these

books are well and carefully written.

4

The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thought.

19

Youth has turned to gods we of an earlier day knew not, and it is possible to see already the direction in which those who come after us will move.

17

The younger generation, conscious of strength and tumultuous, have done with knocking at the door; they have burst in and seated themselves in our seats.

20б

Of their elders some, by imitating the antics of youth, strive to persuade themselves that their day is not yet over; they shout with the lustiest, but the war cry sounds hollow in their mouth.

4, 1а

Who now, for example, thinks of George Crabbe?

20б

He was a famous poet in his day, and the world recognised his genius with a unanimity which the greater complexity of modern life has rendered infrequent.

19

I think he must have read the verse of these young men who were making so great a stir in the world, and I fancy he found it poor stuff.

2а

Of course, much of it was.

4

It is not without melancholy that I wander among my recollections of the world of letters in London when first, bashful but eager, I was introduced to it.

20б, 9

I felt they expected me to say clever things, and I never could think of any till after the party was over.

20б

It must have been bad for the furniture, but I suppose the hostess took her revenge on the furniture of her friends when, in turn, she visited them.

1а

If you had a neat figure you might as well make the most of it, and a smart shoe on a small foot had never prevented an editor from taking your "stuff."

23

They tried to look as little like authors as possible. They wished to be taken for men of the world.

11

I despaired of ever expressing myself with such aptness

or with such fluency.

20б

It is sad that I can remember nothing of all this scintillation.

20б

When we had done discussing the merits of the latest book,

it was natural to wonder how many copies had been sold,

what advance the author had received, and how much he was likely to make out of it.

1а

Then we would speak of this publisher and of that, comparing the generosity of one with the meanness of another; we would argue whether it was better to go to one who gave handsome royalties or to another who "pushed" a book for all it was worth.

20б, 1а, 1а

Then we would talk of agents and the offers they had obtained for us; of editors and the sort of contributions they welcomed, how much they paid a thousand, and whether they paid promptly or otherwise.

20б, 7

It gave me an intimate sense of being a member of some mystic brotherhood.

19, 4

Everyone seemed to be talking, and I, sitting in silence, felt awkward; but I was too shy to break into any of the groups that seemed absorbed in their own affairs.

4

I was conscious of my ignorance, and if Mrs. Strickland was a well-known writer I thought it as well to ascertain the fact before I spoke to her.

20б

Now and then she invited members of it to her house if they showed an appreciation of her talent and entertained

with proper lavishness.

4, 19

She held their weakness for lions in good-humoured contempt, but played to them her part of the distinguished woman of letters with decorum.

7, 11

Miss Waterford, torn between the aestheticism of her early youth, when she used to go to parties in sage green, holding a daffodil, and the flippancy of her maturer years, which tended to high heels and Paris frocks, wore a new hat.

1а

She was a woman of thirty-seven, rather tall and plump,

without being fat; she was not pretty, but her face was

pleasing, chiefly, perhaps, on account of her kind brown eyes.

11

She was the only woman of the three whose face was

free of make-up, and by contrast with the others she seemed simple and unaffected.

4, 20а

The dining-room was in the good taste of the period.

1а

There was a high dado of white wood and a green

paper on which were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames.

9

The green curtains with their peacock design, hung in straight lines, and the green carpet, in the pattern of which pale rabbits frolicked among leafy trees, suggested the influence of William Morris.

1а, 2а

Looking back, I think that Mrs. Strickland was the most

harmless of all the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from the rarefied heights of Hampstead to the nethermost studios of Cheyne Walk.

4, 1а, 1а

She had a real passion for reading (rare in her kind, who for the most part are more interested in the author than in his book, in the painter than in his pictures), and she invented a world of the imagination in which she lived with a freedom she never acquired in the world of every day.

5, 11

When she came to know writers it was like adventuring upon a stage which till then she had known only from the other side of the footlights.

1а

She accepted the rules with which they played the game of life as valid for them, but never for a moment thought of regulating her own conduct in accordance with them.

1а, 20б

I could not think of any retort to this, so I asked if Mrs.

Strickland had children.

20б

The subject was exhausted, and we began to talk of other things.

20б

I was very young, and perhaps she liked the idea of guiding my virgin steps on the hard road of letters; while

for me it was pleasant to have someone I could go to with my small troubles, certain of an attentive ear and reasonable counsel.

20б, 11, 20б

Mrs. Strickland had the gift of sympathy.

11

When, in the enthusiasm of my youth, I remarked on this to Rose Waterford, she said:

"Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it,

but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it."

1а, 5, 20а

And you felt sure that she was an admirable mother. There were photographs in the drawing-room of her son and daughter.

1б

The son -- his name was Robert -- was a boy of sixteen at Rugby; and you saw him in flannels and a cricket cap, and again in a tail-coat and a stand-up collar.

11

She smiled, her smile was really very sweet, and she blushed a little; it was singular that a woman of that age should flush so readily.

11

She smiled to cover her shyness, and I fancied she had a fear that I would make the sort of gibe that such a confession could hardly have failed to elicit from Rose Waterford.

7

One morning Mrs. Strickland sent me round a note to say that she was giving a dinner-party that evening, and one of her guests had failed her.

4

It was the kind of party which makes you wonder why the hostess has troubled to bid her guests, and why the guests have troubled to come.

7

The Stricklands "owed" dinners to a number of persons,

whom they took no interest in, and so had asked them;

these persons had accepted.

4

There was a K.C. and his wife, a Government official and his wife, Mrs. Strickland's sister and her husband, Colonel MacAndrew, and the wife of a Member of Parliament.

1а, 1а

The respectability of the party was portentous.

1а

The women were too nice to be well dressed, and too sure of their position to be amusing.

20б

There was about all of them an air of well-satisfied prosperity.

4, 11

They talked of the political situation and of golf, of their children and the latest play, of the pictures at the Royal Academy, of the weather and their plans for the holidays.

20б

Strickland shut the door behind her, and, moving to the other end of the table, took his place between the K.C. and the Government official.

1а

The K.C. told us of a case he was engaged in, and the Colonel talked about polo.

20б

He was a man of forty, not good-looking, and yet not ugly, for his features were rather good; but they were all a little larger than life-size, and the effect was ungainly.

11

He was probably a worthy member of society, a good

husband and father, an honest broker; but there was no reason to waste one's time over him.

4

They were even more attractive than their photographs had suggested, and she was right to be proud of them.

12

I was perhaps a little lonely, and it was with a touch of envy that I thought of the pleasant family life of which I had had a glimpse.

1а, 20б

They would grow old insensibly; they would see their son and daughter come to years of reason, marry in due course -- the one a pretty girl, future mother of healthy children; the other a handsome, manly fellow, obviously a soldier; and at last, prosperous in their dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants, after a happy,

not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they would

sink into the grave.

11, 1б, 4

It reminds you of a placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness.

20б

On reading over what I have written of the Stricklands, I am conscious that they must seem shadowy.

20б

As they stand they are like the figures in an old tapestry;

they do not separate themselves from the background, and at a distance seem to lose their pattern, so that you have little but a pleasing piece of colour.

5

There was just that shadowiness about them which you find in people whose lives are part of the social оrganism, so that they exist in it and by it only.

4

A pleasant, hospitable woman, with a harmless craze for the small lions of literary society; a rather dull man, doing his duty in that state of life in which a merciful Providence had placed him; two nice-looking, healthy children.

4, 7

I do not know that there was anything about them to excite the attention of the curious.

1а

I think that I have gathered in the years that intervene between then and now a fair knowledge of mankind, but even if when I first met the Stricklands I had the experience which I have now, I do not believe that I should have judged them differently.

20б

But because I have learnt that man is incalculable, I should not at this time of day be so surprised by the news that reached me when in the early autumn I returned to London.

1а

It meant that she had heard some scandal about one of her friends, and the instinct of the literary woman was all alert.

4, 1а

Not only her face, but her whole body, gave a sense of alacrity.

19

I could not do her the injustice of supposing that so trifling a circumstance would have prevented her from

giving them, but she was obstinate.

1а

In those days my experience of life at first hand was small, and it excited me to come upon an incident among people I knew of the same sort as I had read in books.

1а

I confess that time has now accustomed me to incidents of this character among my acquaintance.

1а

Strickland was certainly forty, and I thought it disgusting

that a man of his age should concern himself with affairs of the heart.

11, 1а

With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love without making a fool of himself.

1а, 23

I would come on a certain day to drink a dish of tea with her.

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