BOOKS
The Only Pre-Raphaelite
By EVELYN WAUGH
NIBS. CUTHBERT—Diana Holman-Hunt*—is much younger than 1 but genealogically we are of the same generation, having a great-great- grandfather in common. By the circumstances of her upbringing she might belong to an earlier generation, for her childhood was spent almost alone with her two grandmothers. With one she Made her home, at the other's she made occa- sional visits. The first was conventional, frivol- oils, self-indulgent and, it appears, rather cold- hearted. The other (nee Waugh). the widow of the painter, was emotional, pious, stout-hearted, well- read and reckless of personal appearance. I knew her, but not well. I had tea with her in her sparsely inhabited, richly furnished house in Melbury Road and listened 'eagerly to her re- miniscences of the Pre-Raphaelites, delighting in her strong intellect and sharp expressions, but I her totally ignorant, as I suppose were most of ner guests, of the extraordinary features of the oldnage which her granddaughter here delight- ful!), reveals. It is 'Grand,' Mrs. Holman Hunt. who dominates the book. Mrs. Freeman, the maternal grandmother, might he any well-to-do woman of the period. Mrs. Holman Hunt would have been extravagantly original in any age. The book, My Grandmothers and 1, has al- ready been noticed in the Spectator, where it Provided the theme for an essay on domestic servants. If it is now treated as an excuse to write about Holman Hunt. homage must first be paid to the great skill of the author. In her pre- l_aee she describes her work as 'true in essence. uttt not it detail' and there are a number of ob- scurities and discrepancies that will puzzle a reader who treats it as a source of biography. Dates and ages are usually left vague. Impressive characters such as 'Big Aunt' loom into the story as they must have done in the child's life without introduction or full identification. It is the secret of the book's charm that the author has not sought to elaborate her memories with research. !dull curiosity remains unsatisfied. How much loney, one would like to be told, did 'Grand' leave? Her extreme parsimony was clearly clue to Choice rather than to necessity, But were the gold
father, w
coins in the drawer real sovereigns'? Was the who makes a brief and endearing appear- nnee, running through the modest but far from Grand' family fortune? When and where did _wand' adopt ritualistic practices so alien to her before origins? Simeon Solomon died had Diana Holman-Hunt was born. His name il_ad been expunged from the memoirs of the Period. Can 'Grand' really have hoped to en- vy tinter. him and relieve his destitution during really period of the First World War? Can she _,eally have been ignorant of the causes of his downfall'? How old was the Duke of Gloucester and how old the author when she invited him to gpr fishing in Kensington Gardens? But these problems cease to tease \ 1 lie n the book is
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u* Mv Ganisiomornrits AND I. By Diana Holman: 'Amt. (Hamish Hamilton, 2Is.)
accepted for what it is--a triumphant re-creation of a child's memories.
Mrs. Holman Hunt had long been widowed when the granddaughter became aware of her and, no doubt, had developed her peculiarities in loneliness. Not that she was a recluse. Her social life was vigorous and varied but in. her later years it seems to have been confined to the hours of daylight. Once the burglar traps had been set the little household retired hungry to their com- fortless rooms and the old woman was left with her memories. .What reverence the English painters and writers of the nineteenth century excited and perpetuated among their womenfolk!
'Grand' copiously and regularly weeping over the slab in St. Paul's Cathedral which covered her husband'S ashes; 'Grand' tenaciously de- fending, and training a third generatien to de fend, his just claims to have been the originator of Pre-Raphaelitism: 'Grand' literally, labelling the tea cups but or which eminent Victorians
had drunk; can we hope to see such pietas among
the relicts of our modern painters? Nor was she, singular in so much else, unique in this. The great men of the mid-Victorian era imposed themselves on their immediate posterity when no apparatus existed to record their spoken words. They imposed not only their athievements but their reticence. Whatever their weaknesses and doubts they did, almost all of them, regard them- selves as the custodians of morality. We know very little of their private lives, particularly of their pleasures. Some traces have been left of their early manhood—of smoking-parties, boat- ing-parties, an easy cameraderie. in lending and borrowing money, but from the moment they marry we are given only a record of professional triumphs and official honours. Rossetti was a man of flagrantly Bohemian habits but his bmther William succeeded in obliterating almost every trace. Of Holman Hunt we know less than of any of them. We have his own fascinating auto- biography (the second, two-volumc, fully illu- strated edition of which, incidentally, was paid for by 'Grand') but apart from that almost nothing. His works, he believed, ensured his im- mortality. Perhaps it is prurient to ask for more. Perhaps in this prurient age more attention would be paid to his works if we knew more of his life than he was prepared to disclose.
'Grand' was in a somewhat ambiguous posi- tion. She was the sister of his first wife at the time when such marriages were illegal in Eng- land. Ten years elapsed between the two mar- riages during much of • which time Hunt was abroad and alone. One is reminded of Augustus Egg who ended his days in Algiers with a wife whom, the official biographer states, he was, to his regret, unable to present to his friends. Did Hunt have any escapades in his young manhood in Palestine? We know nothing of his courtship. Had he taken the younger sister's fancy at his first wedding? Her descriptions of his full, scented beard are distinctly amorous—as indeed they should be. But one wonders what went on in the years of his widowhood and how he finally settled for 'Grand.' Not, apparently, as I had al- ways supposed, partly to provide a second mother for Cyril. He, according to 'Big Aunt; was soon sent packing by 'Grand.'
There can be no one alive today who can claim Hunt's friendship. There were few at the time of his death, and there are not many anecdotes of him in the rerainiscences of the period. He does not seem to have been a likeable man. My father, who got on with most people, stayed with him as a young man when Hunt was at the height of his fame and found him impenetrably aloof. Mrs. Plunket-Greene, who knew him in her childhood, reported him as cruel and pomp- ous. The charge of cruelty was based on the story that he had starved an animal to death in his garden to paint the Scapegoat—a less hilarious incident than Diana Holman-Hunt's description of his boiling a horse. Max Beerbohm represents lsim as plebeian in appearance and .. patronising in manner. After the age of thirt he seems to have made or kept no close friends. But 'Grand' certainly doted on him, and his son Hilary unexpectedly remembers him as an in- dulgent father who was constantly getting him out of s'.rapes. His portrait of himself suggests the saini and the sage.
His cr aracter will, presumably, remain enigma- tic. Hi• works remain and they are,. I suppose, the lea . appreciated of any comparable painter's. When 1 . was last in Birmingham his superb Sharp iv of Death lay in • the cellars, of • the city Art 1,allery. He was, beyond question, the ori- ginal Pre-Raphaelite and .the only one to pursue throughout his whole life the principles of his adolescence. Pre-Raphaelitism in popular use has come to connote picturesque medirevalism of the kind exemplified in the watercolours of the 1860s which Rossetti painted under Ruskin's direction. Ple-Raphaelitism to Hunt meant the intense study of natural appearances devoted to the inculcation of a lofty theme. He was obsessed with the structure of objects (hence his attempts to reduce the horse to a skeleton) and with the exact tinc- ture of shadows. While his contemporaries in France, whom he regarded with loathing and contempt, sought to record a glimpse, he sought to record months of intense scrutiny. Their works are eagerly sought by the modern nouveaux riches; Hunt's are probably of less value than when they were painted. It must be admitted that they are ugly, compared with the Italian and Flemish masters he professed to emulate. He was in his work, as apparently in his life. notably lacking in the wish to please. He rejoiced in defying contemporary standards of prettiness (except in a very few deplorable cases). Why does not the present age rejoice with him? A kind of cataract seems to seal the eyes of this half-cen- tury:which has accepted with relish monstrosit'es of every sort, to the invention, accomplishment. untiring vitality and dedicated purpose of these great and often hidden masterpieces.
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