The Life, Letters and Work of
Frederic Baron Leighton

Of Stretton

VOL. I

The Life, Letters and
Work of

Frederic Leighton

BY

MRS. RUSSELL BARRINGTON

AUTHOR OF "REMINISCENCES OF G.F. WATTS," ETC. ETC.

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I

LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN, RUSKIN HOUSE
1906

[All rights reserved]

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press

EARLY PORTRAIT OF LORD LEIGHTON
From the Painting by G.F. Watts (Photogravure)
By permission of the Hon. Lady Leighton-Warren and Sir Bryan Leighton, Bart.ToList

TO ALL WHO HOLD DEAR THE
MEMORY OF FREDERIC LEIGHTON
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED WITH
THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGIES FOR
ITS VERY MANY SHORTCOMINGS

PREFACE

Ten years and more have passed since Leighton died, yet it is still difficult to get sufficiently far away, to take in the whole of his life and being in their just proportion to the world in which he lived.

When we are in Rome, hemmed in by narrow streets, St. Peter's is invisible; once across that wonderful Campagna and mounting the slopes of Frascati, there, like a huge pearl gleaming in the light, rises the dome of the Mother Church. As distance gives the true relation between a lofty building and its suburbs, so time alone can decide the height of the pedestal on which to place the great.

The day after Leighton's death Watts wrote to me:—

"...The loss to the world is so great that I almost feel ashamed to let my personal grief have so large a place.

"I am glad you knew him so well. I am glad for any one who knew him. No one will ever know such another, alas! alas! alas!

"I am glad you have enjoyed the friendship of one of the greatest men of any time."

This is the estimate of a great artist who knew Leighton for forty years, and for many of those years enjoyed daily intercourse with him.

A few like Watts required no length of time before forming a right estimate of Leighton. They not only knew him to be great, but knew why he was great. Undoubtedly as a draughtsman Leighton was unrivalled; but bearing in mind his English contemporaries—Watts, Millais, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones—it is not as a painter that even his truest friends would claim for him his right to the exceptional position he undoubtedly occupied.

What was it that gave Leighton this position? He himself was the very last to claim it as a right. His creed and his practice were ever to fight against the weaknesses of his nature rather than to rejoice in its strength. For assuredly, however strong the intellect, beautiful the character, brilliant the vitality, and fine the intuitive instincts, a man may yet have within his nature foibles in common with the herd. The difference is, that in the truly great the unworthier side of nature is viewed as unworthy—is fought against and banished like the plague.

"A good man is wise, not because all his desires are wise, but because his reasonable soul masters unwise desires and is itself wise.

"He is courageous, because he knows when to fight, and does so under control of reason.

"He is temperate, because his pluck and his desires unite in giving the first place to the reasonable soul; and finally, he is just, because each principle is in its place and stops there."

In a letter to his mother when he was twenty-three Leighton wrote: "I feel I have of my nature a very fair share of the hateful worldly weakness of my country people;" adding, "Still, I have found no sufficiently great advantage or compensation for the tedium of going out." Again, three years later, after describing to his sister the delight he felt in the beauty he found in Algiers, he wrote: "And yet what I have said of my feelings, though literally true, does not give you an exactly true notion; for, together with, and as it were behind, so much pleasurable emotion, there is always that other strange second man in me, calm, observant, critical, unmoved, blasé—odious!

"He is a shadow that walks with me, a sort of nineteenth-century canker of doubt and discretion; it's very, very seldom that I forget his loathsome presence. What cheering things I find to say!"

Doubtless Leighton had within him the possibilities of becoming a worldling, and also of becoming a cynic. He overrode and banished the first as despicable, the second as hideous.

But it is not in the wisdom that—Socrates-like—steered his life by reason, that we find the adequate answer to the question, "Why was Leighton the prominent entity he was?" Diverse as were his natural gifts and his power of achievement on various lines, he differed radically from that modern development—the all-round man, who has no concentrated fire as a centre to illumine