Miss Bretherton | Page 2

so to speak, of a real
influence so strong that no one writing of the English stage at the
present moment can easily escape it; but otherwise everything is

fanciful, the outcome, and indeed, too much the outcome, of certain
critical ideas. And in the details of the story there has been no
chronicling of persons; all the minor and subsidiary figures are
imaginary, devised so as to illustrate to the best of the writer's ability
the various influences which are continually brought to bear upon the
artist in the London of to-day. There are traits and reminiscences of
actual experience in the book,--what story was ever without them? But
no living person has been drawn, and no living person has any just
reason to think himself or herself aggrieved by any sentence which it
contains.
CHAPTER I
It was the day of the private view at the Royal Academy. The great
courtyard of Burlington House was full of carriages, and a continuous
stream of guests was pressing up the red-carpeted stairs, over which
presided some of the most imposing individuals known to the eyes of
Londoners, second only to Her Majesty's beefeaters in glory of scarlet
apparel. Inside, however, as it was not yet luncheon-time, the rooms
were but moderately filled. It was possible to see the pictures, to
appreciate the spring dresses, and to single out a friend even across the
Long Gallery. The usual people were there: Academicians of the old
school and Academicians of the new; R.A.'s coming from Kensington
and the 'regions of culture,' and R.A.'s coming from more northerly and
provincial neighbourhoods where art lives a little desolately and barely,
in want of the graces and adornings with which 'culture' professes to
provide her. There were politicians still capable--as it was only the first
week of May--of throwing some zest into their amusements. There
were art-critics who, accustomed as they were by profession to take
their art in large and rapid draughts, had yet been unable to content
themselves with the one meagre day allowed by the Academy for the
examination of some 800 works, and were now eking out their notes of
the day before by a few supplementary jottings taken in the intervals of
conversation with their lady friends. There were the great dealers
betraying in look and gait their profound, yet modest, consciousness
that upon them rested the foundations of the artistic order, and that if,
in a superficial conception of things, the star of an Academician differs

from that of the man who buys his pictures in glory, the truly
philosophic mind assesses matters differently. And, most important of
all, there were the women, old and young, some in the full freshness of
spring cottons, as if the east wind outside were not mocking the efforts
of the May sun, and others still wrapped in furs, which showed a juster
sense of the caprices of the English climate. Among them one might
distinguish the usual shades and species: the familiar country cousin,
gathering material for the over-awing of such of her neighbours as were
unable to dip themselves every year in the stream of London; the
women folk of the artist world, presenting greater varieties of type than
the women of any other class can boast; and lastly, a sprinkling of the
women of what calls itself 'London Society,' as well dressed, as well
mannered, and as well provided with acquaintance as is the custom of
their kind.
In one of the farther rooms, more scantily peopled as yet than the rest, a
tall thin man was strolling listlessly from picture to picture, making
every now and then hasty references to his catalogue, but in general
eyeing all he saw with the look of one in whom familiarity with the
sight before him had bred weariness, if not contempt. He was a
handsome man, with a broad brow and a pleasant gentleness of
expression. The eyes were fine and thoughtful, and there was a
combination of intellectual force with great delicacy of line in the
contour of the head and face which was particularly attractive,
especially to women of the more cultivated and impressionable sort.
His thin grayish hair was rather long--not of that pronounced length
which inevitably challenges the decision of the bystander as to whether
the wearer be fool or poet, but still long enough to fall a little carelessly
round the head and so take off from the spruce conventional effect of
the owner's irreproachable dress and general London air.
Mr. Eustace Kendal--to give the person we have been describing his
name--was not apparently in a good temper with his surroundings. He
was standing with a dissatisfied expression before a Venetian scene
drawn by a brilliant member of a group of English artists settled on
foreign soil and trained