Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/356

I Believe it was Burgon’s handsome face that first attracted me. He stood so near me at the Slade that I could not help taking stock of him, and so every day became more aware of the faultless shape of his features and the utter badness of his drawing. Being rich, friendless, and a trifle “stand-off-ish,” he was at once invested by the other fellows with an absurd halo of mystery. He was a Nihilist who had joined the class for some inscrutable and deadly object, a German prince, a lunatic; in short, anything but what he really was—the son of a well-to-do dry-salter, ”who had died, leaving him a handsome fortune. The only mistake Burgon père had made was in sending his son to be educated at Bonn without giving him the chance of keeping up home friends. He came back to his patrimony knowing no one, and was so completely isolated in his dainty suite of rooms in Jermyn Street that he could not make enough of me and my visits. I liked him; so, from fellow-workers, we became close companions—but his art was lamentable!

He talked well, but it seemed an absolute impossibility for him to express himself either with brush or pencil. The failure was complete, and he knew it—not only knew it, but felt it keenly; for, with all his airy nonchalance, and all that seemingly reckless contempt with which he spoke about art, he was a true poet at heart, and one who reverently regarded the true function of the artist.

I believe he would have bartered his good looks and fortune for the power to give one tangible protest against the landscape-painting of the day, but he could not; and it seemed as if, by some sport of chance, his handsome head had been placed on his shoulders by way of compensation. It worried him and set him at odds with the world, and the world dubbed him a cynical, conceited fellow, posing for a particular sort of sympathy which had to be evolved on purpose for him.

As a matter of fact, a more loyal, unselfish, tender-hearted fellow than Burgon never breathed. But he fretted over his failures.

“I'm sick of this!” he said one day to me at the Royal Academy,—“sick of exhibitions, sick of London! There is not a picture here that raises a genuine emotion within you. The pity of it!”

“And, pray, what's the use of bothering about it? Round it comes every year like a remorseless torture, and nine-tenths of the men you speak to about it persist in mistaking dexterity for genius. Let us get out of it. Let us do Rannoch Moor, as we said we would, where there is space, freedom, and reality.”

We had harboured a design on this big, desolate, out-of-the-way moor for many a day. Now the day had come. I too was sick of London, and longing to get into sketching quarters. So it happened that a week later we were in the tiny inn of King’s House, with Glencoe and Glen Etive on one side of us, and our dreary limitless space of moss and water on the other.

Burgon had never been in Scotland before. He knew the romantic part of its history—its poetry and wild legends. He