f Charles
Strickland," by Edward Leggatt, A.R.H.A. Martin Secker, 1917.

Maurice Huret in his famous article gave an outline of Charles
Strickland's life which was well calculated to whet the
appetites of the inquiring. With his disinterested passion
for art, he had a real desire to call the attention of the
wise to a talent which was in the highest degree original;
but he was too good a journalist to be unaware that the "human
interest" would enable him more easily to effect his purpose.
And when such as had come in contact with Strickland in the
past, writers who had known him in London, painters who had
met him in the cafes of Montmartre, discovered to their
amazement that where they had seen but an unsuccessful artist,
like another, authentic genius had rubbed shoulders with them
there began to appear in the magazines of France and America a
succession of articles, the reminiscences of one, the
appreciation of another, which added to Strickland's
notoriety, and fed without satisfying the curiosity of
the public. The subject was grateful, and the industrious
Weitbrecht-Rotholz in his imposing monograph[2] has been able
to give a remarkable list of authorities.

[2] "Karl Strickland: sein Leben und seine Kunst," by Hugo
Weitbrecht-Rotholz, Ph.D. Schwingel und Hanisch. Leipzig, 1914.

The faculty for myth is innate in the human race. It seizes
with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in
the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves
from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then
attaches a fanatical belief. It is the protest of romance
against the commonplace of life. The incidents of the legend
become the hero's surest passport to immortality. The ironic
philosopher reflects with a smile that Sir Walter Raleigh is
more safely inshrined in the memory of mankind because he set
his cloak for the Virgin Queen to walk on than because he
carried the English name to undiscovered countries.
Charles Strickland lived obscurely. He made enemies rather
than friends. It is not strange, then, that those who wrote of
him should have eked out their scanty recollections with a
lively fancy, and it is evident that there was enough in the
little that was known of him to give opportunity to the romantic
scribe; there was much in his life which was strange and terrible,
in his character something outrageous, and in his fate
not a little that was pathetic. In due course