e had acquired, however, the
need of some liquid which he could sip constantly. I brought him an
admiration settled in early boyhood, for my father had always said,
"George Wilson was our born painter, but Nettleship our genius," and even
had he shown me nothing 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 Blake's joyous, intellectual
energy a Saturnian passion and melancholy. "God Creating Evil," the
death-like head with a woman and a tiger coming from the forehead, which
Rossetti--or was it Browning?--had described "as the most sublime design
of ancient 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 in meditation, especially a blind Titan-like ghost
floating with groping hands above the tree-tops. I wrote a criticism, and
arranged for reproductions with the editor of an art magazine, but after
it was written and accepted the proprietor, lifting what I considered an
obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage
rookery, insisted upon its rejection. Nettleship did not mind its
rejection, 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 concerned with the sense of touch, with the softness or roughness,
the minutely observed irregularity of surfaces, for his genius; and I
think he knew it. "Rossetti used to call my pictures pot-boilers," he
said, "but they are all--all"--and he waved his arm to the
canvasses--"symbols." When I wanted him to design gods, and angels, and
lost spirits once more, he always came back to the point "Nobody would be
pleased." "Everybody should have a _raison d'etre_" was one of his
phrases. "Mrs ----'s articles are not good but they are her _raison
d'etre_." I had but little knowledge of art for there was little
scholarship in the Dublin art school, so I overrated the quality of
anything that could be connected with my general beliefs about the world.
If I had been able to give angelical or diabolical names to his lions I
might have liked them also and