They rise before me even now in
meditation, especially a blind Titan-like ghost floating with
groping hands above the treetops. 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 arms
to the canvases, '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.
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