SELF AND PARTNiRS C. J. HOLMES Photo London News Agency SELF PARi-NEJLS MOSTLY SELF Being the Reminiscences of C. J. HOLMES Not Art, of course, or any nonsense of that SOrt FAMILY RULING, 1890. What do you mean to do on retirement To paint Have you done any painting before OFFICIAL BLESSING, 1 928. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . MCMXXXV1 PREFACE THOSE who look to me for sensation must, I fear, be dis appointed.
No splendid adventures, ambitions, intimacies like those of Cellini, Haydon, or my friend Rothenstein can brighten these pages. Mine has been a c safety first life of office jobs, done to pay my way, to give very various masters some return for their money, and, incidentally, to dilute passion, fashion and prejudice in the arts with tepid common sense. Where the details are so trite, a chrono logical narrative is, on the whole, less tedious than any forced effort at literary pattern. If the reader gets bored, he or she has only to skip five or six paragraphs to reach something quite different to escape from shopkeeping to pictures, from domestic events to administrative bliss, from realities to fishing. My motto has been that of our good vicar, Truth with Charity. Unpleasant characters, unreliable persons in general, may not have vanished from the world, but each, in time, condemns himself and needs no extra branding. Omission is more honest than whitewash, and safer. To restore the blurred outlines of fact, I have had to quote some remarks not primarily made for publication casual sayings stick in the mind when actual events have grown dim.
Old letters, too, compel so many revisions of crude memory that quotation from them is occasionally needed though, as this is not ahistory of other people, I have refrained from draw ing much upon that fashionable source of entertainment. Few are likely to share my quite Chinese attachment to vii SELF AND PARTNERS things so remote, so completely trivial, as the story of my forebears and childhood yet to omit this would falsify the self-picture. As I look through the rather pitiful papers and letters of my parents, it is impossible to ignore the effect of their troubles upon my own beginnings. The Great War, and the improvements in motor-traffic, have made us so familiar with suffering and sudden death that we are no longer dis posed to shed many tears over such insignificant victims of the past. But it is well to remember that, for several critical decades, the parochial clergy formed the chief link between misery growing conscious of its power, and a civilization by turns indifferent, contemptuous, frightened the frail barrier between forces which might otherwise, in clashing together, have smashed the patchwork machinery upon which we all depend for existence. The death of Lord Curzon in 1925 provides a natural finale. He was almost the last of our elder Statesmen with him an epoch comes to an end. What went before, so quickly do things move, is already ancient history and material for the chronicler.
Recent events cannot yet be seen in the same true perspective, and are best left alone especially when they happen to include very little that is in the least amusing. Since I owe everything in life to the help and tolerance of others, I would specially ask forgiveness if some unlucky turn of phrase, or chance omission, makes me anywhere seem ungrateful. Retrospect also compels profound thank fulness for the goodfortune which has saved me from the penalty of countless errors and follies. Does Providence try to make amends for the calamities of one generation by treating the next to the exact opposite Only so can I explain the contrast between my fathers luck and my own. viii PREFACE Thanks are also due to the Controller of H. M. Stationery Office for permission to reprint sundry extracts from my evidence before the Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries in 1928, and to Mr. Walter Stone man and Mr.
A. C. Cooper for the excellent photographs of J. D.