But, once free from the drill of training, the French painters of those days gave us some very charming and poetical productions. One of my favourite artists was Hamon, a man whose fancies were usually as delicate and elusive as thistledown floating on a moonbeam. He saw everything through dawnlight or twilight; his nymphs and loves, hovering over flowers, painting the morning-glories, sowing white stars for lilies and golden ones for honeysuckles, were too ethereal to be quite human, too alluring to be all spiritual—but exquisite beyond words. Yet he too painted one serious picture which, once seen, could never be forgotten. It was called “Le triste Rivage.” In the foreground rolled the inky Styx, with Charon, sitting, dark and saturninely indifferent, in his skiff, oars shipped ready to put out as soon as the craft should be full. And to it, down a narrow canyon between high granite walls, pressed a stream of humanity, old men and youths, kings and pontiffs and beggars, mothers with their babies in their arms, young beauties in all the pomp of silk and pearls, sages with calm sapient eyes, and naked criminals dragging their chains, not one conscious of any presence but his own—the awful loneliness of death stamped on every face—yet all crowding and pushing forward to the narrow beach and the waiting boat—every eye strained to catch some glimpse of the land that lay, shrouded in darkness, on the other side. It made one think.
Talking of pictures, I must speak of one that my sister and I saw in Munich or Dresden, in 1867, I think, a year which was considered remarkably rich in good modern exhibitions abroad—where, by the way, the average was immeasurably higher than I ever found it at the Academy shows in London. This that we fell in love with was a painting of a Sphinx—a great white marble creature with globed breasts and a face of bestial beauty, cold as ice. She crouched on her high pedestal in a tangle of white roses flooded with moonlight. A young man, little more than a boy, was falling back from her, his ashy face, sublime in death, still transfigured with the mortal ecstasy of her kiss; and her pitiless marble talons were yet clutching his body. I wish I could remember the name of the painter. He must have been a true poet.