Chapter 14

I attempted to restore one old friend of my father's to the
practice of his youth, but failed though he, unlike my father, had
not changed his belief. My father brought me to dine with Jack
Nettleship at Wigmore Street, once inventor of imaginative designs
and now a painter 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 effect and that talking for effect was
precisely what one must never do; he had always hated rhetoric and
emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me into
great dejection. I called at Nettleship's studio the next day to
apologise and Nettleship opened the door himself and received me
with enthusiasm. He had explained to some woman guest that 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 father's friends used to say, like an opera glass, and
sipped cocoa all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea
cup that must have been designed for him alone, not caring 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 completely cured. He 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