I attempted to restore one old friend of my fathers to the practice of his youth, but failed though he, unlike my father, had not ged his belief. My father brought me to dih Jaettleship at Wigmore Street, onventor of imaginative designs and noainter of melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked a great deal??too much, I imagine, for so young a man, or may be for any man??and on the way home my father, who had been plainly anxious that I should make a good impression, was very angry. He said I had talked for effed that talking for effect recisely what one must never do; he had always hated rhetorid emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me into great deje. I called at leships studio the day to apologise aleship opehe door himself and received me with enthusiasm. He had explaio some womahat I would probably talk well, being an Irishman, but the reality had surpassed, etc., etc. I was not flattered, though relieved at not having to apologise, for I soon discovered that what he really admired was my volubility, for he himself was very silent. He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, as one of my fathers friends used to say, like an lass, and sipped cocoa all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea cup that must have been designed for him alone, not g how cold the cocoa grew. Years before he had been thrown from his horse while hunting and broken his arm and, because it had been badly set, suffered great pain for along time. A little whiskey would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great deal and he found himself a drunkard, but having signed his liberty away for certain months he was pletely cured. He had acquired, however, the need of some liquid which he could sip stantly. I brought him an admiratioled in early boyhood, for my father had always said, Gee Wilson was our born painter but leship enius, and even had he showhing I could care for, I had admired him still because my admiration was in my bones. He showed me his early designs and they, though often badly drawn, fulfilled my hopes. Something of Blake they certainly did show, but had in place of Blakes joyous intellectual energy a Saturnian passion and melancholy. God creating evil
the death? like head with a woman and a tiger ing from the forehead, which Rossetti??or was it Browning???had described as the most sublime design of a or modern art had been lost, but there was another version of the same thought and other designs never published or exhibited. They rise before me even now iation, especially a blind Titan?like ghost floating with groping hands above the treetops. I wrote a criticism, and arranged for reprodus with the editor of an art magazine, but after it was written andaccepted the proprietor, lifting what I sidered an obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien?Lepage rookery, insisted upon its reje. leship did not mind its reje, saying, Who cares for such things now? Not ten people, but he did mind my refusal to show him what I had written. Though what I had written was all eulogy, I dreaded his judgment for it was my first art criticism. I hated his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too much ed with the sense of touch, with the softness hness, the minutely observed irregularity of surfaces, for his genius; and I think he k. Rossetti used to call my pictures pot? boilers, he said, but they are all??all, and he waved his arms to the vases, symbols. When I wanted him