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Title: On books and arts

Author: Sir Frederick Wedmore

Release date: December 30, 2023 [eBook #72545]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Hodder and Stoughton

Credits: Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON BOOKS AND ARTS ***





Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_, boldface in
=equals signs=. Additional notes will be found near the end of this
ebook.




ON BOOKS AND ARTS




                           ON BOOKS AND ARTS


                                   BY
                           FREDERICK WEDMORE


                                 LONDON
                          HODDER AND STOUGHTON
                           27 PATERNOSTER ROW
                                  1899




Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty




_NOTE_


_In the pages that here follow I have gathered up such of my more or
less critical contributions to various Reviews, and to one great daily
paper, as I am least unwilling to preserve within the covers of a book._

_As the proportion borne by things reprinted from the ‘Standard’
will seem small to those who know during how many years I have been
permitted to contribute to its columns the expression of opinion on
many of those arts which have been both my delight and my laborious
study, let me just simply say that every line that I have written in
that paper has been written with a single eye to the needs of the
occasion and the moment, and the more expressly any writing is designed
for a particular need and place, the less, I think, is it adapted for
transplanting._

_There has been no attempt to bring these essays, or these fragments,
‘up-to-date’--to bring them to the point of view, I mean, of the time
at which they chance to be republished. A suppression here, and there
the alteration of a phrase--little else is attempted. They remain,
frankly, ‘contributions.’_

                                                             _F. W._

  _Westminster, October 1899._




CONTENTS


                                              PAGE
  THE SHORT STORY                                1

  MY RARE BOOK                                  25

  BALZAC                                        44

  GEORGE ELIOT                                  55

  MY FEW THINGS                                 64

  ANNE OLDFIELD                                 97

  SIDDONS AND RACHEL                           103

  JOSEPH JEFFERSON                             109

  ZOLA’S ‘THÉRÈSE RAQUIN’                      113

  ‘MACBETH’ AND IRVING                         118

  ‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’                       122

  REMBRANDT                                    128

  DUTCH SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DRAWINGS           144

  VELASQUEZ                                    157

  FRENCH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING           164

  CHARDIN                                      172

  MOREAU                                       188

  GAINSBOROUGH                                 202

  COTMAN                                       219

  H. G. HINE                                   233

  THOMAS COLLIER                               235

  LORD LEIGHTON                                237

  MILLAIS                                      248

  BURNE-JONES                                  257

  BOSBOOM AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES               263

  HENNER                                       270

  FRANCIS JAMES                                275




THE SHORT STORY


One of the most engaging of the wits of our day wrote lately in a
weekly newspaper that it is, for the most part, only those who are
not good enough actors to act successfully in Life, who are compelled
to act at the Theatre. Under the influence of such an amiable paradox
it is possible that we may ask ourselves, in regard to story-writing,
whether the people singled out to practise it are those, chiefly, to
whose personal history Romance has been denied: so that the greatest
qualification even for the production of a lady’s love-tale, is--that
the lady shall never have experienced a love-affair. Eminent precedents
might be cited in support of the contention. A great editor once
comfortably declared that the ideal journalist was a writer who did
not know too much about his subject. The public did not want much
knowledge, he said. The literary criticism in your paper would be
perfect if you handed it over to the critic of Music; and the musical
criticism would want for nothing if you assigned it to an expert in
Art. And Mr. Thackeray, speaking of love-tales, said something that
pointed the same way. He protested, no one should write a love-story
after he was fifty. And why? Because he knew too much about it.

But it was a personal application I was going to have given to the
statement with which this paper begins. If the actor we see upon the
boards be only there because more capable comedians are busy on the
stage of the world, I am presumably invited by the Editor of _The
Nineteenth Century_ to hold forth on the Short Story because I am not a
popular writer. The Editor, in the gentle exercise of his humour, bids
me to fill the place which should be filled by the man of countless
editions. It is true that in the matter of short stories, such a writer
is not easy to find; and this too at a time when, if one is correctly
informed, full many a lady, not of necessity of any remarkable gifts,
maintains an honourable independence by the annual production of
an improper novel. Small as my personal claims might be, were they
based only on my books--_Renunciations_, for example, or _Pastorals
of France_--I may say my say as one who, with production obviously
scanty, has for twenty years been profoundly interested in the artistic
treatment of the Short Story; who believes in the short story, not
as a ready means of hitting the big public, but as a medium for the
exercise of the finer art--as a medium, moreover, adapted peculiarly
to that alert intelligence, on the part of the reader, which rebels
sometimes at the _longueurs_ of the conventional novel: the old three
volumes or the new fat book. Nothing is so mysterious, for nothing is
so instinctive, as the method of a writer. I cannot communicate the
incommunicable. But at all events I will not express opinions aimed
at the approval of the moment: convictions based on the necessity for
epigram.

In the first place, then, what is, and what is _not_, a short story?
Many things a short story may be. It may be an episode, like Miss
Ella Hepworth Dixon’s, or like Miss Bertha Thomas’s; a fairy tale,
like Miss Evelyn Sharp’s: the presentation of a single character with
the stage to himself (Mr. George Gissing); a tale of the uncanny (Mr.
Rudyard Kipling); a dialogue of comedy (Mr. Pett Ridge); a panorama
of selected landscape, a vision of the sordid street, a record of
heroism, a remote tradition or an old belief vitalised by its bearing
on our lives to-day, an analysis of an obscure calling, a glimpse at
a forgotten quarter. A short story--I mean a short imaginative work
in the difficult medium of prose; for plot, or story proper, is no
essential part of it, though in work like Conan Doyle’s or Rudyard
Kipling’s it may be a very delightful part--a short story may be any
one of the things that have been named, or it may be something besides;
but one thing it can never be--it can never be ‘a novel in a nutshell.’
That is a favourite definition, but not a definition that holds. It
is a definition for the kind of public that asks for a convenient
inexactness, and resents the subtlety which is inseparable from precise
truth. Writers and serious readers know that a good short story cannot
possibly be a _précis_, a synopsis, a _scenario_, as it were, of a
novel. It is a separate thing--as separate, almost, as the Sonnet is
from the Epic--it involves the exercise almost of a different art.

That, perhaps, is one reason why it is generally--in spite of temporary
vogue as pleasant pastime--a little underrated as an intellectual
performance. That is why great novelists succeed in it so seldom--or at
all events fail in it sometimes--even a novelist like Mr. Hardy, the
stretch of whose canvas has never led him into carelessness of detail.
Yet with _him_, even, in his short stories, the inequality is greater
than befits the work of such an artist, and greater than is to be
accounted for wholly by his mood; so that by the side of _The Three
Strangers_, or, yet better, that delightful thing, _Interlopers at the
Knap_, you have short tales tossed off with momentary indifference--as
you can imagine Sheridan, with his braced language of comedy, stooping
once to a charade. And if a _master_ nods sometimes--a master like
Hardy--does it not almost follow that, by the public at least, the
conditions of the short story are not understood, and so, in the
estimate of the criticism of the dinner-table, and by the criticism of
the academic, the tale is made to suffer by its brevity? But if it is
well done, it has done this amazing thing: it has become quintessence;
it has eliminated the superfluous; and it has taken _time_ to be
brief. Then--amongst readers whose judgments are perfunctory--who
have not thought the thing out--it is rewarded by being spoken of as
an ‘agreeable sketch,’ ‘a promising little effort,’ an ‘earnest of
better things.’ In this wise--not to talk of any other instance--one
imagines the big public rewarding the completed charm of _The Author of
Beltraffio_ and of _A Day of Days_, though pregnant _brevity_ is not
often Mr. James’s strength. And then Mr. James works away at the long
novel, and, of course, is clever in it, because with him, _not_ to be
clever might require a passiveness more than American. Very good; but
I go back from the record of all that ‘Maisie’ ought not to have known,
to _The Author of Beltraffio_ and to _A Day of Days_--‘promising little
efforts,’ ‘earnests of better things.’

Well, then, the short story is wont to be estimated, not by its
quality, but by its size; a mode of appraisement under which the
passion of Schumann, with his wistful questionings--in _Warum_, say,
or in _Der Dichter spricht_--would be esteemed less seriously than the
amiable score of _Maritana_! And a dry-point by Mr. Whistler, two dozen
lines laid with the last refinement of charm, would be held inferior to
a panorama by Philippoteau, or to the backgrounds of the contemporary
theatre. One would have thought that this was obvious. But in our
latest stage of civilisation it is sometimes only the obvious that
requires to be pointed out.

While we are upon the subject of the hindrances to the appreciation
of a particular form of imaginative work, we may remind ourselves
of one drawback in regard to which the short story must make common
cause with the voluminous novel: I mean the inability of the mass of
readers to do justice to the seriousness of any artistic, as opposed
to any moral, or political, or pretentiously regenerative fiction.
For the man in the street, for the inhabitant of Peckham Rye, for
many prosperous people on the north side of the Park, perhaps even
for the very cream of up-to-date persons whose duty it is to abide
somewhere where Knightsbridge melts invisibly into Chelsea. Fiction is
but a _délassement_, and the artists who practise it, in its higher
forms, are a little apt to be estimated as contributors to public
entertainment--like the Carangeot Troupe, and Alexia, at the Palace
Theatre. The view is something of _this_ nature--I read it so expressed
only the other day: ‘The tired clergyman, after a day’s work; what book
shall he take up? Fiction, perhaps, would seem too trivial; history,
too solid.’

The serious writer of novel or short story brings no balm for the
‘tired clergyman’--other than such balm as is afforded by the delight
of serious Art. At high tension he has delivered himself of his
performance, and if his work is to be properly enjoyed, it must be met
by those only who are ready to receive it; it must be met by the alert,
not the fatigued, reader; and with the short story in particular,
with its omissions, with the brevity of its allusiveness, it must be
met half way. Do not let us expect it to be ‘solid,’ like Mill, or
Lightfoot, or Westcott--or even like an A B C Railway Guide. You must
condone the ‘triviality’ which puts its finger on the pulse of life and
says ‘Thou ailest _here_ and _here_’--which exposes, not a political
movement, like the historian of the outward fact, but the secrets
of the heart, rather, and human weakness, and the courage which in
strait places comes somehow to the sons of men, and the beauty and the
strength of affection--and which does this by intuition as much as by
science.

But to go back to considerations not common in some degree to all
Fiction, but proper more absolutely to the short story. I have
suggested briefly what the short story may be; we have seen briefly
the one thing it _cannot_ be--which is, a novel told within restricted
space. Let us ask what methods it may adopt--what are some of the
varieties of its form.

The short story admits of greater variety of form than does the
long novel, and the number of these forms will be found to be
increasing--and we must not reject conventionally (as we are terribly
apt to do) the new form because we are unfamiliar with it. The forms
that are open to the novel are open to the short imaginative piece,
and, to boot, very many besides. Common to both, of course, is the
most customary form of all--that in which the writer narrates as
from outside the drama, yet with internal knowledge of it--what is
called the ‘narrative form,’ which includes within its compass, in a
single work, narrative proper and a moderate share of dialogue. Common
again to both short and long stories, evidently, is a form which, in
skilled hands, and used only for those subjects to which it is most
appropriate, may give strange reality to the matter presented--the
form, I mean, in which the story is told in the first person, as the
experience and the sentiment of one character who runs throughout the
whole. The short story, though it should use this form very charily,
adopts it more conveniently than does the long novel; for the novel
has many more characters than the short story, and for the impartial
presentation of many characters this form is a fetter. It gives of a
large group a prejudiced and partial view. It commended itself once
or twice only to Dickens. _David Copperfield_ is the conspicuous
example. Never once, I think, did it commend itself to Balzac. It is
better adapted, no doubt, to adventure than to analysis, and better
to the expression of humour than to the realisation of tragedy. As
far as the presentation of _character_ is concerned, what it is usual
for it to achieve--in hands, I mean, much smaller than those of the
great Dickens--is this: a life size, full length, generally too
flattering portrait of the hero of the story--a personage who has the
lime-light all to himself--on whom no inconvenient shadows are ever
thrown--the hero as beheld by Sant, shall I say? rather than as beheld
by Sargent--and then, a further graceful idealisation, an attractive
pastel, you may call it, of the lady he most frequently admired; and,
of the remainder, two or three Kit-Cat portraits, a head and shoulders
here, and there a stray face.

The third and only other form that I remember as common to both novel
and short story, though indeed not equally _convenient_ to both, is
the rare form of Letters. That again, like any other that will not
bear a prolonged strain, is oftener available for short story than
for big romance. The most consummate instance of its employment, in
very lengthy work, is one in which with infinitely slow progression it
serves above all things the purpose of minute and searching analysis--I
have named the book in this line of description of it: I have named
_Clarissa_. For the short story it is used very happily by Balzac--who,
though not at first a master of sentences, is an instinctive master
of methods--it is used by him in the _Mémoires de Deux Jeunes
Mariées_. And in a much lighter way, of bright portraiture, of neat
characterisation, it is used by an ingenious, sometimes seductive,
writer of our period, Marcel Prévost, in _Lettres de Femmes_. It is
possible, of course, to _mix_ these different forms; but for such
mixture we shall conclude, I fancy, that prolonged fiction offers the
best opportunity. Such mixture has its dangers for the short story;
you risk, perhaps, unity of effect. But there are short stories in
which monotony is avoided, and the force of the narrative in reality
emphasised, by some telling lines from a letter, whose end or whose
beginning may be otherwise imparted to us.

I devote a few lines to but two or three of the forms which by
common consent are for the short story only. One of them is simple
dialogue. For our generation, that has had the fascination of an
experiment--an experiment made perhaps with best success after all
in the candid and brilliant fragments of that genuine humorist, Mr.
Pett Ridge. The method in most hands has the appearance of a difficult
feat. It _is_ one, often--and so is walking on the slack-wire, and
the back-spring in acrobatic dance. Of course a writer must enjoy
grappling with difficulties. We understand that. But the more serious
artist reflects, after a while, that the unnecessary difficulty is an
inartistic encumbrance. ‘Why,’ he will ask, ‘should the story-teller
put on himself the fetters of the drama, to be denied the drama’s
opportunities?’ Pure dialogue, we may be sure, is apt to be an
inefficient means of telling a story; of presenting a character. There
may be cited one great English Classic who has employed the method--the
author of _Pericles and Aspasia_, of that little gem of conversation
between Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn. But then, with Walter Savage
Landor, austere and perfect, the character existed already, and there
was no story to tell. Mere dialogue, under the conditions of the modern
writer, leaves almost necessarily the problem unsolved, the work a
fragment. It can scarcely be a means to an end; though it may, if we
like, be a permissible little end in itself, a little social chatter,
pitched in a high key, in which one has known tartness to be mistaken
for wit. Thus does ‘Gyp’ skim airily over the deep, great sea of
life. All are shallows to her vision. And as she skims you feel her
lightness. I prefer the adventure of the diver, who knows what the
depths _are_: who plunges, and who rescues the pearl.

Then, again, possible, though not often desirable for the short story,
is the diary form--extracts from a diary, rather. Applied to work on
an extensive scale, your result--since you would necessarily lack
concentrated theme--your result would be a chronicle, not a story.
Applied to the shorter fiction, it must be used charily, and may then,
I should suppose, be used well. But I, who used the form in ‘The New
Marienbad Elegy’ in _English Episodes_, what right have I to say that
the form, in the hands of a master, allows a subtle presentation of
the character of the diarist--allows, in self-revelation, an irony,
along with earnestness, a wayward and involved humour, not excluding
sympathy? It is a form not easily received, not suffered gladly. It
is for the industrious, who read a good thing twice, and for the
enlightened, who read it three times.

I throw out these things only as hints; we may apply them where we
will, as we think about stories. But something has yet to be said.
Of the two forms already named as generally unfitted for the long
novel, and fitted only now and then for the short story, one, it will
be noticed, is all dialogue; the other, necessarily, a form in which
there is no dialogue at all. And I think we find, upon reflection, the
lighter work leans oftenest to the one form; the graver work leans
oftenest to the other.

Indeed, from this we might go on to notice that as far as the short
story is concerned, most of the finer and more lasting work, though
cast in forms which quite _permit_ of the dialogue, has, as a matter
of fact, but little dialogue in it. Balzac’s _La Grenadière_--it
is years since I read it; but has it any dialogue at all? Balzac’s
_L’Interdiction_--an extraordinary presentation of a quaint
functionary, fossiliferous and secluded, suddenly brought into contact
with people of the world, and with the utmost ability baffling their
financial intrigue--this is certainly the most remarkable short story
ever written about money--_L’Interdiction_ has not much dialogue.
In the _Atheist’s Mass_, again--the short story of such a nameless
pathos--the piece which, more even than _Eugénie Grandet_ itself,
should be everybody’s introduction, and especially every woman’s
introduction, to the genius of Balzac: _La Messe de l’Athée_ has no
dialogue. Coming to our actual contemporaries in France, of whom Zola
and Daudet must still, it is possible, be accounted the foremost, it
is natural that the more finished and minute worker--the worker lately
lamented--should be the one who has made the most of the short story.
And in this order of his work--thus leaving out his larger and most
brilliant canvas, _Froment Jeune et Risler Aîné_--what do we more
lastingly remember than the brief and sombre narrative of _Les Deux
Auberges_?--a little piece that has no story at all; but a ‘situation’
depicted, and when depicted, _left_. There is an open country; leagues
of Provence; a long stretching road; and, on the roadside, opposite
each other, two inns. The older one is silent, melancholy; the other,
noisy and prosperous. And the landlord of the older inn spends all
his time in the newer; taking his pleasure there with guests who were
once his own, and with a handsome landlady, who makes amends for his
departed business. And in his own inn, opposite, a deserted woman sits
solitary. That is all--but the art of the master!

Now this particular instance of a pregnant brevity reminds me that
in descriptions of landscape the very obligations of the short story
are an advantage to its art. Nature, in Fiction, requires to be seen,
not in endless detail, as a botanical or geographical study, but, as
in Classic Landscape Composition, a noble glimpse of it, over a man’s
shoulder, under a man’s arm. I know, of course, that is not the popular
view. Blameless novels have owed their popularity to landscape written
by the ream. Coaches have been named after them; steamboats have been
named after them. I am not sure that, in their honour, inaccessible
heights have not been scaled and virgin forests broken in upon, so that
somewhere in picturesque districts the front of a gigantic hotel might
have inscribed on it the title of a diffuse novel.

But that is not the great way. The great way, from Virgil’s to
Browning’s, is the way of pregnant brevity. And where dialogue _is_
employed in the finer short story, every line of it is bound to be
significant. The short story has no room for the reply that is only
_near_ to being appropriate, and it deserves no pardon for the word
that would not have been certainly employed. It is believed, generally,
and one can well suppose that it is true, that the average dialogue of
the diffuse novel is written quickly. That is in part because so little
of it is really dramatic--is really at all the inevitable word. But the
limited sentences in which, when the narrator must narrate no more, the
persons who have been described in the short story express themselves
on their restricted stage, need, if I dare assert it, to be written
slowly, or, what is better, re-read a score of times, and pruned, and
looked at from without, and surveyed on every side.

But, indeed, of the long story, as well as of the short, may it not be
agreed that on the whole the dialogue is apt to be the least successful
thing? The ordinary reader, of course, will not be dramatic enough
to notice its deficiencies. In humorous dialogue, these are seen
least. Humorous dialogue has a legitimate licence. You do not ask from
it exactitude; you do not nail it down to its statement. But in the
dialogue of the critical moment, when the fire of a little word will
kindle how great a matter, how needful then, and how rare, that the
word be the true one! We do not want laxity, inappropriateness, on the
one hand; nor, on the other, the tortured phraseology of a too resolute
cleverness. And those of us who have a preference--derived, it may be,
from the simpler generation of Dickens--for an unbending when it is
a question of _little_ matters, and, when it is a question of great
ones, for ‘a sincere large accent, nobly plain’--well! there is much
of modern finessing we are hardly privileged to understand. Yet if one
wants an instance, in a long novel, in which the sentence now said at
a white heat is the result, inevitable, burningly true to life, of the
sentence that was said just before, one condones the obscurity that has
had its imitators, and pays one’s tribute of admiration to the insight
of _Diana of the Crossways_.

One of the difficulties of the short story, the short story shares with
the acted drama, and that is the indispensableness of compression--the
need that every sentence shall tell--the difference being, that in
the acted drama it must tell for the moment, it must tell till it is
found out, and in the short story it must tell for at least a _modest_
eternity, and something more, if that be possible--for if a ‘Fortnight
is eternity’ upon the Stock Exchange, a literary eternity is, perhaps,
forty years.

Of course the short story, like all other fiction to be read, does
not share the other difficulties of the acted drama--above all, the
disadvantage which drags the acted drama down--the disadvantage of
appealing to, at all events of having to give sops to, at one and
the same moment, gallery and stalls: an audience so incongruous that
it lies outside the power of Literature to weld it really together.
In the contemporary theatre, in some of the very cleverest of our
acted dramas, the characters are frequently doing, not what the man
of intuition, and the man who remembers life, _knows_ that they would
do, but that which they must do to conciliate the dress circle, to
entertain the pit, to defer not too long the gentle chuckle with which
the ‘average sensual man’ receives the assurance that it is a delusion
to suppose our world contains any soul, even a woman’s soul, that is
higher and purer than his. To such temptations the writer of the short
story is not even exposed, if he be willing to conceive of his art
upon exalted lines, to offer carefully the best of his reflection, in
a form of durable and chosen grace, or, by a less conscious, perhaps,
but not less fruitful, husbanding of his resources, to give us, sooner
or later some first-hand study of human emotion, ‘gotten,’ as William
Watson says, ‘of the immediate soul.’ But again, contrasting his
fortunes with those of his brother, the dramatist, the writer of short
stories must, even at the best, know himself denied the dramatist’s
crowning advantage--which is the thrill of actual human presence.

I have not presumed, except incidentally and by way of illustration,
to sit in rapid judgment, and award impertinently blame or praise to
the most or the least prominent of those who are writing short stories
to-day. Even an occasional grappler with the difficulties of a task
is not generally its best critic. He will criticise from the inside,
now and then, and so, although you ought to have from him, now and
again, at least--what I know, nevertheless, that _I_ may not have
given--illuminating commentary--you cannot have final judgment. Of the
art of Painting, where skill of hand and sense of colour count for
much more than intellect, this is especially true. It is true, more
or less, of Music--in spite of exceptions as notable as Schumann and
Berlioz: almost perfect critics of the very art that they produced. It
is true--though in a less degree--of creative Literature. We leave this
point, to write down, before stopping, one word about _tendencies_.

Among the better writers, one tendency of the day is to devote a
greater care to the art of expression--to an unbroken continuity of
excellent style. The short story, much more than the long one, makes
this thing possible to men who may not claim to be geniuses, but who,
if we are to respect them at all, must claim to be artists. And yet,
in face of the indifference of so much of our public here to anything
we can call Style--in face, actually, of a strange insensibility
to it--the attempt, wherever made, is a courageous one. This
insensibility--how does it come about?

It comes about, in honest truth, partly because that instrument of
Art, our English tongue, in which the verse of Gray was written, and
the prose of Landor and Sterne, is likewise the necessary vehicle in
which, every morning of our lives, we ask for something at breakfast.
If we all of us had to demand breakfast by making a rude drawing of
a coffee-pot, we should understand, before long--the quickness of
the French intelligence on that matter being unfortunately denied
us--the man in the street would understand that Writing, as much as
Painting, is an art to be acquired, and an art in whose technical
processes one is bound to take pleasure. And, perhaps, another reason
is the immense diffusion nowadays of superficial education; so that
the election of a book to the honours of quick popularity is decided
by those, precisely, whose minds are least trained for the exercise of
that suffrage. What _is_ elected is too often the work which presents
at a first reading everything that it presents at all. I remember Mr.
Browning once saying, _àpropos_ of such a matter, ‘What has a cow to do
with nutmegs?’ He explained, it was a German proverb. Is it? Or is it
German only in the way of ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’? Anyhow, things
being as they are, all the more honour to those younger people who, in
the face of indifference, remember that their instrument of English
language is a quite unequalled instrument of Art.

Against this happy tendency, one has to set--in regard at least to some
of them--tendencies less admirable. For, whilst the only kind of work
that has a chance of engaging the attention of Sainte-Beuve’s ‘severe
To-morrow’ is work that is original, individual, sincere, is it not a
pity, because of another’s sudden success, to be unremittingly occupied
with the exploitation of one particular world--to paint for ever, say,
in violent and garish hue, or in deep shades through which no light can
struggle, the life of the gutter? to paint it, too, with that distorted
‘realism’ which witnesses upon the part of its practitioners to _one
thing only_, a profound conviction of the ugly! I talk, of course,
not of the short stories of the penetrating observer, but of those of
the dyspeptic pessimist, whose pessimism, where it is not the _pose_
of the contortionist--adopted with an eye to a sensational success of
journalism, to a commercial effect--is hysteria, an imitative malady,
a malady of the mind. The profession of the literary pessimist is
already overcrowded; and if I name two writers who, though in different
degrees, have avoided the temptation to join it--if I name one who
knows familiarly the cheery as well as the more sombre side of Cockney
character and life, Mr. Henry Nevinson, the author of the remarkable
short-stories, _Neighbours of Ours_, and then again a more accepted
student of a sordid existence--Mr. George Gissing, in _Human Odds and
Ends_ especially--I name them but as such instances as I am privileged
to know, of observant and unbiassed treatment of the subjects with
which they have elected to deal.

In France, in the short story, we may easily notice, the uglier forms
of ‘Realism’ are wearing themselves out. ‘Le soleil de France,’ said
Gluck to Marie Antoinette, ‘le soleil de France donne du génie.’ And
the genius that it gives cannot long be hopeless and sombre. It leaves
the obscure wood and tangled bypath; it makes for the open road: ‘la
route claire et droite’--the phrase belongs to M. Leygues--‘la route
claire et droite où marche le génie français.’ Straight and clear
was the road followed--nay, sometimes actually cut--by the unresting
talent of Guy de Maupassant, the writer of a hundred short stories,
which, for the world of his day at least, went far beyond Charles
Nodier’s earlier delicacy and Champfleury’s wit. But, somehow, upon
De Maupassant’s nature and temperament the curse of pessimism lay.
To deviate into cheeriness he must deal with the virtues of the
_déclassées_--undoubtedly an interesting theme--he must deal with
them as in the famous _Maison Tellier_, an ebullition of scarcely
cynical comedy, fuller much of real humanity than De Goncourt’s sordid
document, _La Fille Elisa_. But that was an exception. De Maupassant
was pessimist generally, because, master of an amazing talent, he
refreshed himself never in any rarefied air. The vista of the Spirit
was denied him. His reputation he may keep; but his school--the school
in which a few even of our own imitative writers prattle the accents
of a hopeless materialism--his school, I fancy, will be crowded no
more. For, with an observation keen and judicial, M. René Bazin treats
to-day themes, we need not say more ‘legitimate’--since much may be
legitimate--but at least more acceptable. And then again, with a style
of which De Maupassant, direct as was his own, must have envied even
the clarity and the subtler charm, a master draughtsman of ecclesiastic
and bookworm, of the neglected genius of the provincial town (some poor
devil of a small professor), and of the soldier, and the shopkeeper,
and the Sous-Préfet’s wife--I hope I am describing M. Anatole
France--looks out on the contemporary world with a vision humane and
genial, sane and wide. Pessimism, it seems to me, can only be excusable
in those who are still bowed down by the immense responsibility of
youth. It was a great poet, who, writing of one of his peers--a man of
mature life--declared of him, _not_ ‘he mopes picturesquely,’ but ‘he
knows the world, firm, quiet, and gay.’ To such a writer--only to such
a writer--is possible a happy comedy; and possible, besides, a true
and an august vision of profounder things! And _that_ is the spirit to
which the Short Story, at its best, will certainly return.


                  (_Nineteenth Century_, March 1898.)




MY RARE BOOK


I wish I could say it was my diligence that discovered it, and that
I hunted it out of some fifth-rate bookstall of Goswell Street or
of the New Road--‘all this lot at 6d. apiece.’ But no, it has no
romantic story as far as I am concerned. Given perhaps, eighty years
ago, by friend to friend, or lover to sweetheart, in days when our
great-grandmothers were beautiful and our great-grandfathers devoted,
it got to be neglected, it got to be sold--somebody ceased to care for
it, or somebody wanted the few shillings it then would bring--somehow
it tossed about the world, till a keen bookseller or keen bookbuyer
rescued it, and took it to a binder of note, and then it was arrayed
in seemly dress, and safer for the future. Afterwards--but not for
very long, I think--it was a rich man’s possession: one thing, and
quite a little thing, in a great library of English classics, from
Defoe and Sterne to Dickens and Tennyson. Then it came to be sold,
along with most or all of its important companions, and so I got it,
in prosaic fashion. I bought it under the hammer at Sotheby’s--or
rather, Mr. F. S. Ellis bought it there on my behalf--on the 3rd of
March, in this present year of grace. And now it takes up its position
on insignificant shelves, by the side of the Rogers with the Turner
illustrations; by the side of a few things--but the collector knows
them not.

This is how it figures in the auctioneer’s catalogue: ‘Wordsworth (W.)
Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems (including Rime of the Ancyent
Marinere by Coleridge), FIRST EDITION, _green morocco extra g. e. by
Riviere_, 1798.’ The ‘g. e.’ means nothing more mysterious than ‘gilt
edges.’ The morocco is of a rich and sunny green--the ‘good’ green of
modern artistic speech, which rightly enough, I suppose, endows colour
and line with moral qualities. I am thankful to the rich man for having
saved me both money and trouble, in binding, completely to my taste, it
happens, my rare book.

And few things, perhaps, deserve more careful guardianship. The
_Lyrical Ballads_, as the world now knows, were a starting-point in
the new English Literature, which addressed itself to study in the
field of Nature more than in academies, and which taught us the beauty
and interest of common life and of everyday incident; and it is a
delight to me to see the pages of these simple lyrics and pastorals as
Wordsworth’s own eye was content with them when Cottle, the Bristol
bookseller, passed them through the press, and printed them, as well
as might be, on pleasantly toned paper, bearing here and there on
its water-mark the date of its making, ‘1795.’ On the whole, it is a
well-printed book; two hundred and ten pages, tastefully arranged, and
of _errata_ there are but five. Those were days when centralisation
had not brought the best work all to London, and even concentrated
it in certain quarters of London; and of what is sometimes called
provincial, but of what there is better reason to define as suburban,
clumsiness--for nothing is done so ill in the world as what is done
in London suburbs--there is only a trace in the gross inequality of
the size of the figures in the table of contents: they are taken, it
appears, from different founts. But generally the book is printed with
smoothness and precision, and, even apart from the high literature
which it enshrines, is worthy of its good green coat, joyful of hue,
pleasant of smell, and grateful of touch to the fingers that pass over
it. And nothing that comes now, even from the Chiswick Press, or from
Jouaust or whoever may be the fashionable printing man to-day in Paris,
can be much neater than its title-page; the mention of which brings me
to a point of interest to the bibliophile.

The book has two title-pages; or, rather, like many of the books of
its day, there belong two title-pages to the same edition of it--the
custom having been for a second bookseller, who bought what the first
bookseller was minded to get rid of, to print his own title-page.
This is the course that the thing followed in the matter of _Lyrical
Ballads_. The book was printed, as we shall see in detail presently,
by Cottle, in Bristol, in the year 1798. Five hundred copies were
printed, but they did not sell. ‘As a curious literary fact,’ says
Cottle, in his ‘Recollections,’ ‘I might mention that the sale of the
First Edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was so slow, and the severity
of most of the reviews so great, that its progress to oblivion seemed
ordained to be as rapid as it was certain.’ ‘I had given,’ he adds,
‘thirty guineas for the copyright; but the heavy sale induced me to
part with the largest proportion of the impression of 500, at a loss,
to Mr. Arch, a London bookseller.’ Mr. Arch printed his own title-page.
My copy has his title-page, ‘_London, printed for J. & A. Arch,
Gracechurch Street_’; and so, I think, had the copy sold at Mr. Dew
Smith’s sale, about four years ago. The date, of course, remains the
same, 1798, and all else remains the same. The British Museum copy--it
was Southey’s copy--has the Bristol title-page, and the Museum may
possibly acquire a copy with Mr. Arch’s when opportunity occurs. In
the only copy of the First Edition which they have at present, the
words are, ‘_Bristol, printed by Biggs and Cottle, for T. N. Longman,
Paternoster Row, London_.’ Thus the First Edition of five hundred was
divided--say two hundred for Mr. Cottle, say three hundred for Mr. Arch
when the Bristolian found the sale was ‘slow’ and ‘heavy.’ Where have
they all gone to? It was only eighty-four years ago. But where have all
the copies of the big edition of the _Christmas Carol_ gone to? That
was hardly forty years ago.

To recall a little the origin of the book--the circumstances under
which Wordsworth and Coleridge planned and produced it. It was in the
Nether Stowey and Alfoxden time, when the men were neighbours, three
miles of green Somerset country dividing the home of Coleridge from
the home of Wordsworth. I saw the place--that is, the neighbourhood,
and Coleridge’s home--a few years since, much in that summer weather
which tempted their own more prolonged wanderings, which followed
them in that excursion to ‘Linton and the Valley of Stones,’ which
was the first cause, Wordsworth says, of the issue of _Lyrical
Ballads_. Plain living and high thinking they practised then, and from
necessity as much as from choice. A yeoman of Somerset would hardly
have lived at that time--and certainly he would not live to-day--in
the cottage which was Coleridge’s. Straight from the country road you
step to its door: in an instant you are in the small square parlour,
with large kitchen-like fireplace, with one, or, I think, two small
windows, and a window-seat from which, on days of evil weather, the
stay-at-home commanded the prospect of the passing rustic as he
walked abroad--perhaps of the occasional traveller on his way to the
village inn. But generally, fair weather or foul, the spectacle was
scanty--time was marked by shifting light and changes in the colour
of the sky, or by the movements of beasts at milking-time, or at
hours of rest and of labour. Never, I should say, was one hour merely
frittered away by either the poet who lived or the poet who visited
in that humble cottage. Never a call of ceremony: an interview that
bears no fruit--a social necessity, the continual plague of cities.
Never an hour that did not tell in some way, by active work, or by
‘wise passiveness,’ upon the mind that was to be cultivated and the
character that was to be developed. Such a life, led not in actual
isolation, but in narrowed and selected companionship, was perhaps
about the best preparation men could make for work of the concentrated
and the self-possessed power of the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ and of the
serene profundity of the lines connected with Tintern Abbey. This was
the place, and these were the conditions, for the quietude of life and
thought felt as the greatest necessity of existence by Wordsworth, ‘a
worshipper of Nature,’ ‘unwearied in that service.’

In 1797 came the first thought of the book. Wordsworth’s account of it
may already be familiar. Prefixed in later editions to the poem of ‘We
are Seven,’ which was printed for the first time in _Lyrical Ballads_,
is a note which says: ‘In reference to this poem I will here mention
one of the most noticeable facts in my own poetic history, and that of
Mr. Coleridge.’ And then he tells the story: ‘In the autumn of 1797,
he, my sister, and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the
afternoon, with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones near
to it; and, as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray
the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to the _New
Monthly Magazine_, set up by Phillips, the bookseller, and edited by
Dr. Aikin. Accordingly, we set off, and proceeded along the Quantock
Hills towards Watchet; and in the course of this walk was planned the
poem of the “Ancient Mariner,” founded on a dream, as Coleridge said,
of his friend Mr. Cruikshank.’ And then Wordsworth adds some details
which are characteristic. ‘Much the greatest part of the story was Mr.
Coleridge’s invention,’ he says; ‘but certain parts I suggested.’

Now, what were those parts? They were parts which yield to no other in
importance, and which do very much to throw over the work the glamour
of noble imagination, the sudden magical charm which was Wordsworth’s
own, and with which he was accustomed to illumine the commoner themes
of his habitual choice. It was Wordsworth’s suggestion that the Ancient
Mariner should be represented as having killed the Albatross, and that
‘the tutelary spirits of these regions’--the regions of the South
Sea--‘should take upon them to avenge the crime.’ ‘I also suggested the
navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had
anything more to do with the scheme of the poem.’ A detail, however, he
had to do with. ‘I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of
the poem, in particular--

   “And listened like a three years’ child:
    The Mariner had his will.”

These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with
unnecessary scrupulosity recorded, slipped out of his mind, as they
well might.’

If the contributions themselves were characteristic, so certainly
is the manner of speaking of them. These men, and the men who were
more or less their associates, believed much in each other. In no
different spirit from Wordsworth’s did Coleridge himself write, in his
introduction to _Poems on Various Subjects_, these words about Charles
Lamb: ‘The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of
the India House; independently of the signature, their superior merit
would have sufficiently distinguished them.’ And in no different spirit
did Coleridge write of Wordsworth, years afterwards, in the _Biographia
Literaria_, when their ways had parted. He could explain generously
then ‘what Mr. Wordsworth really intended’ by the theories put forward
in that famous preface which was too much for Coleridge.

But to return to the book--or rather, for the moment, to Wordsworth’s
account of it. As the friends endeavoured to proceed conjointly in the
construction of the ‘Ancient Mariner’--it was still that same evening
in which the poem was conceived--their respective manners proved so
widely different that it would have been, to Wordsworth’s mind, ‘quite
presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking
upon which I could only have been a clog.’ ‘The “Ancient Mariner”
grew and grew,’ he adds, ‘till it became too important for our first
object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we
began to think of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has
told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects taken from
common life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative
medium.’ That ‘imaginative medium’ was to distinguish these poems, we
have been told elsewhere, from the rhymed stories of Crabbe. Poetic
realism and prosaic realism, and what a world between them!

In April 1798 Wordsworth wrote to his friend, the Bristol bookseller:
‘You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on adding very rapidly
to my stock of poetry. Do come and let me read it to you under the
old trees in the park.’ Definite proposals, too, were to be made; and
it was written to Cottle--this time, I think, by Coleridge--‘We deem
that the volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, one work
in kind.’ That same spring, but later on, Cottle did visit Nether
Stowey, and he writes of it in his own book of interesting if sometimes
illegitimate gossip: ‘At this interview it was determined that the
volume should be published under the title of _Lyrical Ballads_, on
the terms stipulated.’ Thirty guineas seems to have been Wordsworth’s
share. And, furthermore, it was settled that it should not contain the
poem of ‘Salisbury Plain,’ but only an extract from it--Cottle himself,
nevertheless, thought that poem the finest Wordsworth had written; that
it should not contain the poem of ‘Peter Bell,’ but consist rather of
shorter poems, and for the most part of pieces more recently written.
‘I had recommended two volumes,’ Cottle tells us, ‘but one was fixed
on, and that to be published anonymously.’ All which speedily came
about. Cottle further says, ‘The volume of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was
published about midsummer, 1798.’ But it was not really till some while
after midsummer, for not only were the Tintern Abbey lines, which close
the little volume with so august a calm, not written till the 13th of
July, but it is said expressly in Wordsworth’s _Life_ that as late as
September the 13th the book was ‘printed, not published.’ Some weeks
before, Wordsworth and his sister took up temporary abode in Bristol,
that they might be near the printer. Then, at length, in the early
part of autumn, the _Lyrical Ballads_ appeared, and Wordsworth and his
sister, and Coleridge, left England for Germany.

To the first edition of _Lyrical Ballads_ is prefixed four pages
of ‘Advertisement,’ or preface. About it two or three points are
noticeable. First, it gives no hint that two poets have been engaged
upon the volume: ‘the author,’ who speaks of himself in the third
person, is responsible alike for the ‘Ancient Mariner’ and for ‘Goody
Blake and Harry Gill.’ Secondly, it is written in that familiar
language--just our daily speech a little chastened and braced--which
Wordsworth employed at the beginning, and employed to the end. Again,
it utters, thus early in Wordsworth’s life, that note of warning
as to mistaken notions of what Poetry demands, which the writer
repeated afterwards with infinite elaboration. ‘It is the honourable
characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every
subject which can interest the human mind’--that is, by implication,
his first apology for the choice of humble theme. ‘Readers of superior
judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are
executed: it must be expected that many lines and phrases will not
exactly suit their taste.’ Expressions may seem too familiar--may seem
lacking in dignity. But, ‘it is apprehended that the more conversant
the reader is with our elder writers, and with those in modern times
who have been most successful in painting manners and passions, the
fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make.’ Here is the
apology for the fashion of presentation--the germ of that which was
afterwards so fully developed in famous writings which borrowed here
and there a neat and significant phrase from this first ‘Advertisement.’

The title of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ begins the table of contents,
and the poem runs on to the fifty-first page of the volume--nearly
a quarter of all that the volume holds. But Coleridge’s remaining
contributions were small and few, consisting of ‘The Nightingale,’ and
of but one other. That he made even these contributions has sometimes
escaped people’s notice. He had intended to do more, for he tells
us in the _Biographia Literaria_ that, having written the ‘Ancient
Mariner,’ he was preparing, among other poems, ‘The Dark Ladie’ and
the ‘Christabel.’ ‘But Mr. Wordsworth’s industry has proved much
more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that
my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an
interpolation of heterogeneous matter.’ When the ‘Ancient Mariner’
came to be reprinted--under Coleridge’s banner alone--some minor
changes were made. Some of them were gains, but some were losses. And
there was added then, what the _Lyrical Ballads_ does not contain,
the ‘Gloss’--that wonderful telling of the story and yet departing
from it--which is set forth in grave and inspired prose. ‘It was an
afterthought,’ Wordsworth tells us, in speaking of his friend’s poem.

Of Wordsworth’s own share--that far greater share of his--in the poems,
it is interesting to notice how the general title, _Lyrical Ballads
with a few other Poems_, is required to cover the whole of it. For
they are of two kinds--Wordsworth’s poems in the volume--the simple
stories of humble life, which may or may not be dramatic, in which the
‘I’ of the poet is not necessarily himself, and the poems which record
unmistakably his personal feeling and experience, such as ‘The Tables
Turned, an Evening Scene,’ the noble lines written near Tintern Abbey,
and the small poem which rejoices in perhaps the longest title ever
bestowed upon verse, ‘Lines written at a small distance from my house,
and sent by my little boy to the person to whom they are addressed.’
These, and one or two others, are the contributions to which Coleridge
refers when he says that ‘Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems
written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained
diction which is characteristic of his genius.’

Many of Wordsworth’s verses, whether of the one class or the other,
in the _Lyrical Ballads_, bear reference to the circumstances of
the moment and the place--are stamped with the mark of his Alfoxden
sojourn. ‘The Thorn’ arose out of his observing on the ridge of
Quantock Hill a thorn on a stormy day. He had often passed it
unnoticed in calm. ‘I said to myself, Cannot I by some invention
do as much to make this Thorn prominently an impressive object as
the storm has made it to my eyes at this moment? I began the poem
accordingly, and composed it with great rapidity.’ He adds that Sir
George Beaumont painted a picture from it, which Wilkie thought his
best. Wilkie--sagacious Scotsman!--did not commit himself too much by
such praise. But Wordsworth thought the picture nobly done. The only
fault of any consequence, he said, was the woman’s figure--too old
and decrepit ‘for one likely to frequent an eminence on such a call.’
‘Expostulation and Reply,’ which Wordsworth learned was a favourite
among the Quakers, was composed in front of the house at Alfoxden, in
the spring of 1798. ‘The Tables Turned’ was composed at the same time,
in praise of the

    Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
    Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

And of ‘The Last of the Flock,’ the author says that the incident
occurred in the village of Holford, close by Alfoxden.

But I think the most interesting of the records is the record of ‘We
are Seven.’ This was composed while walking in the favourite grove.
In Wordsworth’s confession that he composed the last stanza first, we
get at the secret of how entirely the subject had struck him from the
spiritual side.

    ‘But they are dead; those two are dead!
    Their spirits are in heaven!’
    ’Twas throwing words away, for still
    The little maid would have her will,
    And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’

The life of the poem lies in the instinctive thought of immortality,
and in the sense of neighbourhood and close companionship between the
quick and the dead. It is the same thought, the same sense, that throws
its magical light on the tale of Lucy Gray, and permits those last
verses which make the whole thing wonderful, and the common story fine--

    Yet some maintain that to this day
    She is a living child;
    That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
    Upon the lonesome wild.
    O’er rough and smooth, she trips along
    And never looks behind;
    And sings a solitary song
    That whistles in the wind.

The poem of ‘We are Seven,’ expressing a conception precious to
Wordsworth, yet not expressing it exactly as he would have it
expressed, was, after its first publication, subjected to more changes
than any composition of its length. Of course the direct address to
‘dear brother Jem’--‘A little child, dear brother Jem’--is removed.
Wordsworth only allowed it to stand at first because he relished the
joke of hitching in his friend James Tobin’s name, and this gratuitous
reference to a good fellow, a bad critic, and the brother of the author
of ‘The Honeymoon,’ was promptly suppressed. ‘I sing a song to them,’
is substituted for a line far more effective with the context--‘I sit
and sing to them.’ Another line, beautiful with the context--‘And all
the summer dry’--yields to the line ‘And when the grass was dry.’ But
at one point ‘little Jane’ becomes ‘sister Jane,’ perhaps happily,
and, ‘Quick was the little maid’s reply’ gives the desired sense of
readiness and certainty better than the line it effaces. It is the old
story of careful verbal alterations--some are for the better, some are
for the worse.

More than one of the graver pastoral poems are missing, naturally
enough, to my rare book. I do not find in it that pastoral of
‘Michael,’ which of itself is quite enough, it seems to me, to
ensure to its writer a fame which shall last as long as any judges
of Literature remain--any judges who, caring for style itself, care
supremely for its fit association with the sentiment it is its business
to express. ‘Michael’ is intensely realistic: in the best sense it is
more realistic than anything of Crabbe’s, and the verse that seems
to be halting is but prosaic deliberately. The effect is sought for,
and the effect is gained. The pathos is all the greater because the
elevation of language is so slight and infrequent. When it occurs, it
tells! That poem belongs to the next series of the poet’s works--to
the little collection published first, I think, in 1802, and assuming
to itself the title of _Lyrical Ballads; Volume the Second_. There had
before been no hint of a second, and the first is complete in itself.

I said, just now, in speaking of the ‘We are Seven,’ that Mr. James
Tobin--‘dear brother Jem’--was a bad critic. He showed himself so in
this wise. When _Lyrical Ballads_ was going through the press, it was
Cottle, I suppose, who gave a sight of it to dear brother Jem. He went
to Wordsworth upon that, as one charged with a mission, and who would
not be denied. There was one poem, brother Jem said, in the volume
about to be published, which Wordsworth must cancel. ‘If published,
it will make you everlastingly ridiculous.’ And Wordsworth begged to
know which was the unfortunate piece. He answered, ‘It is called, “We
are Seven.”’--‘Nay,’ said Wordsworth, ‘that shall take its chance,
however.’ For he knew his strength. And another generation has reversed
the judgment which Tobin’s approved.


                  (_Gentleman’s Magazine_, May 1882.)




BALZAC


Through the ‘usual channels of information’--I mean, of course, the
daily papers--many readers have become aware of the recent publication,
in the _Revue de Paris_, of a series of Balzac’s letters. But few
have understood their importance. Their interest for the student is
great, for in a revelation of their author, that is impressive and
almost final, they confirm to the full the view of Balzac which those
of us have taken (I took it myself in my little _Life_ of him in the
‘Great Writers’ Series) who have perceived that by his temperament and
inclination, as well as by his power, he is divided widely from those
more sordid and limited realists at whose head it was erewhile the
fashion to place him. Romance, it has been claimed--often by friend and
foe alike--Romance was Victor Hugo’s, Materialism was Balzac’s. And now
Balzac is found--and one has a right to be surprised, not of course at
the kind, but only at the degree of the manifestation--he is found
in mature years to be in his own conduct more simply and absolutely
romantic than the most visionary or most warm-hearted schoolgirl. He
works himself into a genuine and indescribably enthusiastic, but always
respectful, attachment to a young married woman whom he has never
seen, who inquires of him about his stories, who sends him _Thomas à
Kempis_ (which he translates later into the _Médecin de Campagne_:
‘c’est l’Evangile en action’), who writes to him confidentially for a
year or two before she meets him, who later receives him as her guest
in Russian Poland, and whom he marries at last, in 1850, only several
years after the death of her husband.

The facts that have been mentioned latest have been known since about
the time of the publication of the now familiar couple of volumes of
Balzac’s _Correspondence_. It is the earlier and most interesting part
of the story that is new. The report had previously been current that
Balzac had for the first time been made aware of Madame de Hanska’s
existence when he was staying at, or passing through, Neuchâtel,
in September 1833. She announced, so it was said, her wish to be
introduced to him on hearing that he was at the hotel; and this last
autumn (such is the vanity of human effort upon matters after all not
profoundly important), I established the fact, in concert with the
present proprietor of the Hôtel Belle Vue at Neuchâtel, that the old
but not yet disused Hôtel du Faucon must have been the hostelry in
which this memorable meeting took place. The ‘Faucon,’ which had been
built just in the middle of the little town but a few years before
the date of Balzac’s visit, was then the inn at which a traveller
of any importance was sure to descend--neither the ‘Belle Vue’ nor
the ‘Lac’ existed at that period. Let us take courage, however--our
trouble was not so useless as I had for a moment imagined it. The
actual meeting-place of two friends, two ‘lovers’ (in Walt Whitman’s
sense, at all events), is in the end at least as interesting as the
meeting-place of two strangers, who were to warm towards each other
only in future years. They met, then, we may fairly presume, at the
Faucon at Neuchâtel, but met after a correspondence by turns polite and
chivalrous, intimate and ardent.

It was no unusual thing for Balzac--the historian, above all things,
of men’s ambitions and of women’s hearts--to receive, together with
the compliments, the confessions of the fair. In our own age--an
age perhaps more enamoured of physical prowess and presence than
of intellectual or spiritual achievement--I have not heard that the
novelist or the successful writer of the short story is in constant
receipt of the confidences and eulogiums of women. These, I am
informed, when bestowed liberally on the stranger, are directed,
nowadays, in chief to the _jeune premier_ with a rapid action and a
well-made coat. But it was otherwise two generations ago; and Balzac,
sometimes complaining of the embarrassment, sometimes, on the other
hand, with not a little of honest pride in the circumstances that
caused it, avows himself endowed with the functions of a confessor. In
the two volumes of the well-known _Correspondence_ I have referred to
before, and in such other writings as have hitherto been accessible, it
is chiefly question of a certain anonymous ‘Louise,’ whom he never saw,
to whom he said many pretty things on writing-paper, and to whom he
was once minded to dedicate one of his stories. As a rule, I believe,
he left unanswered the letters of the stranger--felt, perhaps, that it
was enough that they should have been received, and, if they contained
anything that was noteworthy, registered, very likely, in the book of
his memory for possible employment in fiction. But now it is made clear
abundantly, that in the case of Evelina de Hanska, not only was there
correspondence, intimate if scarcely voluminous, before any personal
meeting, but likewise that by means of it such a tie was created, such
a mutual fascination formed, as could hardly with ease be broken. And
yet, what if when they met in the flesh there had been--as after all
there might have been--disillusionment! What if Evelina de Hanska had
proved as distasteful to Monsieur de Balzac as Anne of Cleves to the
experienced Henry!

He was in the best of all possible moods, however, to be impressed with
Madame de Hanska, during the period of their earliest correspondence;
for unquestionably he was wounded, unquestionably he was sore. Among
the friendships--verging sometimes on love-affairs--which Balzac
formed with women, two were at this moment in the crisis of their
fate. Many years before the existence of Madame de Hanska became known
to him, Balzac had been friend, trustful dependant, would-be lover,
probably--it is difficult to express the relationship--of a certain
Madame de Berny. She was a little older than he was, and she helped him
in money troubles when he was young enough to be able to accept her
assistance without shame, and she knew the world at a time when, if I
may proffer the phrase, he joined the inextinguishable simplicity of
the artist to the more prosaic simplicity of the inexperienced.

At Madame de Berny’s house in the Oise, Balzac had written his brief
and restrained masterpiece, _Le Curé de Tours_. Her difficult virtue,
and all her other qualities and characteristics, made, confessedly,
much of the interest of _Le Lys dans la Vallée_. That relationship of
theirs--into which, as I consider, a morbid element, an exaggerated
sentimentality, did at one time to some extent enter--was only wholly
broken by Madame de Berny’s death. For two years at least she was the
victim of a mortal illness. The illness began, and the depression
caused by it in Balzac began, about 1833.

But during the year 1832, Balzac, whose feeling towards Madame de
Berny--‘an angel at my side’--must with long years have somewhat
changed its character--during the year 1832 Balzac had passed through
an experience the end of which he speaks of, long afterwards, as ‘_un
des plus grands chagrins de ma vie_.’ And that was his experience
with the young Madame de Castries--the Duchesse de Castries she
became, in due time, some years later--a light of Parisian Society,
fully as fascinating in the quietude of Aix-les-Bains as amidst the
distractions of all the _salons_ of the capital. It is not from the
letters that Balzac wrote to her--not, at all events, from any that
have been published--that we know or can surmise how irresistible for
Balzac was her personal magnetism. It is rather from certain amongst
the letters sent by him to his life-long friend, his sister’s school
friend, Madame Zulma Carraud of Angoulême, that we are informed of the
effect of Madame de Castries’ dealings with him. She was at one time
a delight, then a disillusionment, and then (and, as it seems to me,
ever afterwards) a painful yet attractive memory. The rupture--never a
quarrel avowed to the outsider; never indeed a rupture that was quite
complete, or that was in any way explicable save under the supposition
that the lady of the _belle chevelure venitienne_ had a blonde’s
inconstancy and a Scottish caution--the rupture, such as it was,
occurred in the autumn of 1832, when Balzac, who was to have gone over
into Italy with the lady and her brother, parted from her at Geneva,
and consoled himself (let me be permitted to hope) as best he could, by
buying, at that famous dealer’s on the Quai des Bergues,[1] a little of
the ‘Carl Théodore’ (Frankenthal) porcelain that his soul loved. The
‘collector,’ I am informed, is heartless--but he has his compensations.

    [1] Since moved to the Corratorie.

The second of the just published letters addressed to Madame de Hanska
contains sentences which are meaningless, if it is not to Madame de
Castries that they refer. ‘Only Heaven and I can ever understand the
frightful energy with which a heart must be endowed, if, being full
of tears that are repressed, it must suffice still for the labours of
writing.’ Again--and this time why should I translate?--the cry of a
moment: ‘_Toutes mes passions, toutes mes croyances, sont trompées._’
And he tells his correspondent that Madame Recamier at least never
sat, as was supposed, for Feodora.[2] ‘I met a Feodora once, but her
I shall never paint; besides, the _Peau de Chagrin_ was written long
before I met her.’[3] Yet again, ‘I made Feodora out of two women whom
I knew, but not intimately. Observation was enough for me--with a few
confidences to boot.’

    [2] Feodora, the evil genius, one may say, of the _Peau de
        Chagrin_.

    [3] If this was Madame de Castries, the intention did not
        always hold good, since more than touches of that charmer
        there are supposed to be in the _Duchesse de Langeais_.

What Balzac seems to have been struck with, from the first, in Evelina
de Hanska, was her sincerity and oneness of purpose, the truth of
her devotion to his work, and a certain similarity, an immediate
sympathy, between his nature and hers. Much of his work, as he avows,
has been done to strike the public--to provide the public with that
without which it could scarcely accord him the attention he asked. But
‘certainly there are books in which I have loved to be myself; and you
will know well which they are, for they are those in which my heart has
spoken.’ When at length the two came together, at Neuchâtel in 1833--as
in Vienna, and in Russian Poland itself, in later years--there was
nothing, it seems, in either to diminish the interest or to break the
spell. And the fascination continued. I have for my own part a little
theory that the sympathy of the woman, her deep interest in his work,
her participation in it (_Séraphita_ and some kindred labour, whatever
be its defects, would never have existed but for that influence of
this mystic Northerner), gave the attachment, as far as Balzac was
concerned, something of the features of an attachment of consolation.
His early adoration, as I hold, his boyish passion, was for Madame de
Berny. And, in maturer years, his ideal, his very dream of beauty and
of charm, was Madame de Castries--Madame de Castries set, so to put it,
in the best of her backgrounds: Madame de Castries at Aix-les-Bains.
Never, I think, in Balzac’s life was that experience, or the force of
it, equalled. But in Evelina de Hanska, whether as friend or wife, he
discovered and obtained a steady rest--a rest the more assured, it may
be, because she entertained for him feelings of a deeper devotion than
any that were extended by that admirable and almost lifelong comrade,
his friend, his sister’s friend, the blameless and the wise Madame
Zulma Carraud.

An idealist, anyhow, Balzac was at the beginning; an idealist he
remained to the end. The ‘_amitiés d’épiderme_,’ as he excellently
called them, attracted him but little. In my short book about him,
in the ‘Great Writers’ Series, I tried to show that what he sought
for and obtained was the intimacy of the heart. Gautier knew this.
And one-sided indeed must be those people--whether the word of their
choice is intended for blame or for praise--who, judging either by life
or work, think that Balzac is properly described as ‘materialist’ or
‘realist,’ alone or chiefly. The Real, which is not always the hideous,
he was strong enough to face; yet Romance was essential to him. It is
time, now, that the sentimental and _soi-disant_ Romantic began to
understand that in Balzac there were depths of feeling and of poetry
to which they could never approach; and time also that those tiresome
disciples of mere ugliness in literary theme and literary treatment,
who account him their yet insufficient master, were informed, roundly,
that whatever the lessons he may half-incidentally have taught them,
nothing of Balzac’s greatness can ever fairly be claimed as supporting
or justifying the narrow limitations of their sordid sect and creed.


                      (_The Bookman_, March 1894.)




GEORGE ELIOT


The accounts of George Eliot’s earlier life, which are in general
circulation, are in some respects imaginary. ‘George Eliot’--Mary Ann
Evans--was not the daughter of a poor clergyman, nor was she ever
‘adopted’ by a wealthy one. She was the daughter of a land surveyor
in the Midland Counties, and was brought up at her father’s home,
her mother dying when Mary Ann Evans was still a child. Nor was she
ever the ‘pupil’ of Mr. Herbert Spencer, nor a frequent writer in the
_Westminster Review_. She made the acquaintance and the friendship
of Mr. Spencer when she was a woman, and already the mistress of
the abstruse subjects in which she then chiefly delighted. She was
for a time joint-editor of the _Westminster_ with Dr. Chapman; but
her writings in that Review were neither numerous nor generally
important. After a residence of some years in Coventry--where she
learned profoundly the features of the ‘Midlands,’ which she afterwards
described--Mary Ann Evans came to London. At twenty-six years old
she translated Strauss’s _Life of Jesus_, and seven years later,
Feuerbach’s _Essence of Christianity_; but her efforts at creative
writing were wisely delayed. Her apprenticeship to Literature and
Philosophy was elaborate and laborious; her training was extensive and
deep. It was not until 1858 that _Scenes of Clerical Life_ betrayed the
presence of a new artist in Fiction--an artist of fresh gifts, but of
undeveloped art.

The narratives of the ‘Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,’ of
‘Janet’s Repentance,’ and of ‘Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story’--the _Scenes of
Clerical Life_, in other words--impressed certain readers, and deserved
to impress them; but not even the pathos of Mrs. Barton’s death would
have given the writer lasting reputation had the book continued to
stand alone. On re-perusal, the imperfections of its mechanism are too
apparent; the novelist had not learned the art of proportion, nor the
art of selection and rejection. Some little books, no bigger than the
_Scenes of Clerical Life_, have been enough to secure for their authors
an enduring fame. Nothing more than the _Vicar of Wakefield_ could have
been required to keep Goldsmith’s memory green. Sterne, desiring to be
immortal, was under no obligation to write anything more, after he had
written the _Sentimental Journey_. But the _Scenes of Clerical Life_,
admirably fresh and spontaneous as they were, gave no such position to
their author. It was not a young woman, but it was a woman young in her
art, who was at work in them.

With _Adam Bede_ it was otherwise. _Adam Bede_, published about the
beginning of 1859, was seen at once to be more than a touching, and
more than a popular, story. It was an achievement of complete art,
and had the power of complete art, ‘to teach a truth obliquely,’ nor
‘wrong the thought’--as Mr. Browning has subtly put it--‘nor wrong
the thought, missing the mediate word.’ It was at bottom a work of
noble teaching. In it the novelist described with fidelity, but with
poetic fidelity, scenes and characters the like of which she thoroughly
knew; and the world recognised both the truth and the charm of the
portrayal, and if it did not take to the young Squire, it took about
equally to the two most strongly contrasted heroines that ever figured
in one volume--to the preaching woman, Dinah Morris, with her exalted
and patient spirit, and to the giddy Hetty, who had no virtue but the
virtue of fascination.

It was chiefly to provincial society, or to the humbler society of the
country-side, that George Eliot kept in her earlier works; and it was
there that she was ever best. The elaborate Dutch painting of _Silas
Marner_ dealt sympathetically with the religious life of obscure sects;
_The Mill on the Floss_ portrayed the humours of the lower middle
class, and gave us a delightful study of the passionate and lovable
‘Maggie’; _Felix Holt_ dealt with country politics, though its best
interest lay in the development of three wonderful characters--the
agreeable Esther, the perplexed Felix, and the Dissenting minister
who, in that old-world corner of England where the scene lay, had even
in our own generation the dignity and quietude of an ancient Puritan
emigrating beyond seas. Immense and always tender study of actual life
was evident in these novels; and yet it did not require the publication
of such a _tour de force_ as _Romola_, which, in 1863, followed _The
Mill on the Floss_ and _Silas Marner_, to prove that the only novelist
of quite the first rank who had arisen since Dickens and Thackeray
was most powerful in work inspired by meditation and learning, rather
than by observation, and that in that respect, as of course in many
others, she differed absolutely from Dickens, whose strength lay in the
observation of humanity, and from Thackeray, whose strength lay in the
observation of ‘good society.’ If some works of George Eliot’s, of
later date than _Romola_, remind us too often that their author, like
the character in _Faust_, had _schrecklich viel gelesen_--that George
Eliot was burdened with her learning--_Romola_ is a conspicuous example
of the ‘talent that forms itself,’ not exactly ‘in solitude,’ yet by
profound and continuous meditation. Like all the greater works of its
writer, it is a study of the heart. And in _Romola_ the subtle wit of
Italy is displayed, with curious variety of power, by a writer who had
shown herself mistress, long before, of the blunter English humour.

But such a success as that of _Romola_--the success of an historical
novelist for whom history is alive and is not a mere tradition, mere
decorative background--is hardly to be made more than once. _Romola_
may live at least as long as _Esmond_--in _Esmond_ the _tour de force_
is, if anything, more apparent; the machinery creaks sometimes yet more
audibly in the working. In any case George Eliot did wisely to bring
her imagination back to England, and to the shires ‘which we the heart
of England well may call,’ and, having given us _Felix Holt_, to give
us _Middlemarch_. _Middlemarch_, perhaps, has two faults as a work of
art, but they are faults which evidence, at all events, the range of
its writer’s mind. It is not properly one story, but several stories.
The desire to put forth in a single colossal work--and _Middlemarch_
is of the length of two three-volume novels--a picture of the whole
of provincial life, touched at points, and disturbed, by the problems
of our time, resulted in the creation of a book in which the many
threads of narrative were often but slightly blended. _Middlemarch_ is
not a cabinet picture; it is a vast panorama. Again, in _Middlemarch_
there was visible, for the first time in George Eliot’s career, some
relaxation--or worse than relaxation--of literary style. Though on the
whole it is justly allowed to be a noble piece of English writing, it
is in expression less lucid and felicitous than the earlier novels;
and the germs of a style charged too much with scientific similes are
found to be of increased growth in _Daniel Deronda_. In George Eliot’s
earliest fiction, though it was written in mature years, her art was
not developed. In her latest, it was not concealed.

But between the two--between the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ and _Daniel
Deronda_--there lie some half-dozen romances, prolix, indeed, and dull
at times, yet in some ways almost perfect in the most serious order of
literary work. And, moreover, the presence of sheer mental power, the
power chiefly of analysis and of synthesis, is almost as evident in
_Daniel Deronda_ as in the better fictions. The study of modern Jewish
life and character in that formidable novel was of such a nature as to
lead a leader of Jewish Society to pay a tribute to its knowledge and
its sympathy. That study was directed, not only by insight, but by a
continuous desire to do justice to the subject selected--to the minds
chosen for dissection. The wide and deep interest in the fortunes of
humanity, which characterised George Eliot, and which increased with
her learning and her years--as her art somewhat declined--can never
have been more apparent than in _Daniel Deronda_. The interest was
sometimes, it is true, evidenced by way of an exalted pity; and seeing
how removed that pity seemed from all that aroused it, the saying was
remembered by certain critics that pity is akin to contempt. Those
critics had understood George Eliot but superficially. All through her
later works--and not in _Daniel Deronda_ and _Middlemarch_ alone--there
is visible an increasing personal sense of the inevitableness of
mistake, of a ‘waste of force’ in human life; and that gave to the
labour of even this bright intellect a sadness which was scarcely
bitterness at all.

George Eliot, during many years, was occasionally busy with what is
formally poetry--informally, of course, much of her best prose was
poetry, and poetry of a higher order. In some of her verse--in _Jubal_
and the _Spanish Gypsy_--she touched on the careers and characters
of people whom she would hardly have brought into her novels, and in
one or other of her poems she expressed with a fulness and intensity
not found in her prose fiction that love of music and that sympathy
with the aspirations of the musical artist which she shared with the
great writer of _Abt Vogler_. The docile public received her poems
with at least sufficient appreciation--a part of which may fairly be
set down to the remembrance of those triumphs as a novelist which, for
the time, she had laid aside. But her poems were, in the main, like
Raphael’s departure from the art of his more constant practice--like
the sonnets of Michael Angelo--the evidences of an artist’s aspiration
towards a field of success which shall have the charm of what is new
and unfamiliar. They were that, and hardly more. It is, of course,
on the romances of George Eliot that her fame will rest, and on them
not because of any reflection they present of the manners of our
time--these, in truth, they left to other novelists--but because of the
earnestness and profundity of their dealing with problems of the age,
and problems of our nature. A future generation may find, and, indeed,
not a few judges, most worthy to be listened to, declare already, that
much of her sad philosophy is itself a mistake as great as any which
her genius discovered in the world she lived in. But if George Eliot’s
analysis of life betrays some deeply rooted faults, it will at least
always be admitted that it was that of a grave and gifted inquirer. If
the work which began with the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, and ended,
not auspiciously, with _Theophrastus Such_, has great deficiencies, it
was wrought, at all events, by a serious artist, a free and wonderful
spirit.


                   (_Standard_, 24th December 1880.)




MY FEW THINGS


‘My few things!’ In the very title there is conveyed, I hope, some
apology for writing of them. If I accept the invitation to do so,
it is partly because I must needs know more of what they are--they
are ‘but poor few,’ in Shakespeare’s phrase--than any one else can
know; partly again because, as I am pleasantly informed, it may be
interesting to certain readers to be told, for a change, not what
can be amassed--amassed and perhaps neglected--by a millionaire who
gives several thousand guineas for a modern painting, but what can be
got together with merely ‘joyful trouble,’--with pains, and waiting,
and love of the things, and only a little money--by a simple man of
Letters, who happens to have been concerned, to some extent, with other
arts than his own; and partly also because, connected with the few
things that one has, there are associations, not few but many.

A little blue-grey drawing--an early drawing of Varley’s, which
has nothing but the lasting virtues of Economy and Style--was the
first artistic thing that ever belonged to me. It came to me--like a
prized Morland mezzotint, many years later--from the portfolio of my
great-grandfather, who was, as I am told, a friend of Turner’s earliest
patron, Dr. Munro. But it is prints, not drawings, that, since I began
to collect a little, I have chiefly brought together.

In a collection of prints there is something less indefinite, something
more systematic, than in a collection of drawings. The things, if
they are good, have the advantage of being known, of being more or
less recognised--not, indeed, by the large public, but at least by
the people with whom, on matters of Art, it is most interesting to
come into contact. Prints are classed and catalogued. Each print by
a particular master has, in the collector’s mind, a direct bearing
on the component parts of that master’s work. Again, fine drawings,
although cheap in relation to the prices paid for modern paintings,
are dear in comparison with many prints to which the adjective
‘fine’ could scarcely be denied; for, while here and there an ‘Adam
and Eve’ of Dürer is sold under the hammer for many hundred pounds,
that is the exception absolutely; and while, at Sotheby’s or
Christie’s, on eventful sale days, two thousand pounds may be the
ransom of a Rembrandt etching, that is not only because it is fine,
but because that particular etching--or that particular ‘state’ of
it--is excessively rare. It has been chronicled; it has been read
of; it has profited by the existence of the accurate catalogue of
the work of the Master--it is a certified thing. But, with knowledge
gradually acquired, with diligence exercised in the right place, a
print extremely fine, extremely desirable, may still be bought for
a few pounds. It will be much fuller of Art than any drawing which
ordinary good fortune is to enable you to get for the same outlay. And
I say this as one who loves drawings--as one who, notwithstanding his
theories, even ventures to live with a few of them; but, if I have
a preference in the matter of collecting--well, I suppose it is for
prints.

About a print, every point is interesting. Apart from subject, apart
too from technical treatment of the copper, there is the delightful
question, How does your own impression compare with other people’s?
And, again, the paper. The true print-lover can talk about different
papers--old French, old Dutch, old English, Japanese--as the
connoisseur of clarets talks of Pontet Canets and Pichon Longuevilles.

... But my Solander-box is all this time unopened!

I suppose the first print that I ever bought was a ‘Liber’ print
of Turner’s. The Burlington Fine Arts Club had held a wonderfully
important exhibition of them--there were Mr. J. E. Taylor’s, Mr. Henry
Vaughan’s, Mr. Gambier Parry’s finest impressions; illustrative,
thoroughly, of that which Turner meant to do; of the means, to some
extent, by which he did it. And having by that time discovered
what I most cared for in the set, and made, no doubt, the politic
compromise--learning to bring my needs within the limits of a lean
purse--I got my friend, Stopford Brooke, to choose from amongst several
impressions of ‘Hind Head Hill,’ that happened then to be at Colnaghi’s
(for it was soon after the great Turner Sale), the one he thought the
best; and from amongst an equal number of impressions of ‘Severn and
Wye,’ that happened to be at Mrs. Noseda’s, similarly, the best. ‘I
chose well that day,’ said Stopford Brooke, many years afterwards,
noticing those prints on my wall. No such opportunities of choice, as
existed then, are likely again to be afforded.

Those were the days when, if I bought at all, it was--at first at
least--‘for the wall’ and not ‘for the folio’--to use a phrase of
Halsted’s. Halsted meant by it to distinguish between the buyer who,
from the very nature of things, must promptly be satisfied (since you
can neither multiply ‘walls’ nor enlarge them), and the buyer to whom
the infinite was open--that infinite in which Solander-box succeeds
Solander-box, folio succeeds folio, and drawer succeeds drawer. His,
perhaps, is the more dangerous case; but the collector who can display
on his walls all his possessions--who can stop buying when the mere
purposes of furnishing are answered--is simply _not_ a collector.
Halsted scorned him.

The mention of this aged dealer’s name brings back to me recollections.
I saw Mr. Halsted in almost the latest of his days, when he was a less
prominent but probably a more interesting figure, in the world of Art
and Connoisseurship, than he had been in his prime. In his prime, his
shop was in Bond Street; but when it was my privilege to go, a humble
learner, sitting at the feet of a dealer who had known ‘Mr. Turner,’
and had been for at least one generation surrounded by his work,
Halsted, elderly, deliberate of speech, slow and almost halting of
movement, large, angular--a craft somewhat difficult to ‘bring round’
or to ‘change the course’ of, within the scanty waters of his back
shop--had his abode--his mart at all events--in Rathbone Place, by
the French _blanchisseuse de fin_ and a little Swiss _café_. He was
half retired; and there in the back shop he would cause you to sit
down, in a perfect light under the window, and would show you what you
had asked for, if he had it--for, in those days, he bought nothing;
he was engaged merely in selling, in the most leisurely of manners,
and at prices which were never open to any suggestion of abatement,
the remains of his old stock. Standing over you--a little away from
you--with something of a soldierly sternness, like a sergeant in a
barrack-yard, he rolled out, slowly, story after story of Mr. Turner,
of Sir John Hippesley, whom he had influenced to admire the ‘Liber,’
by placing before his eyes a ‘Severn and Wye,’ at breakfast-time, and
then of Mr. Turner again. You bought something, of course; but the best
of it is, you never were sorry for it afterwards, for Halsted’s eye
was faultless: his knowledge, though he was old, was in advance of his
day. I cherish as impressions which had received his _imprimatur_--if
one may use the word of things he had thought worthy to buy and to
sell--an ‘Oakhampton Castle,’ a ‘Hindoo Worshippers,’ and I forget for
the moment what else. These two, I remember, bear the stamp of passage
through the collection of the famous Mr. Stokes--the first ‘Liber’
collector--and of his niece, Miss Constance Clarke.

One thing amusing about a visit to Halsted’s was the occasional
presence of his brother. You went to the shop perhaps once by
chance, and Halsted was away. In his place was an inferior sort of
person, courteous and good-natured, but humbly conscious of his
own inferiority. You could do no business with him. If I remember
rightly, he was not even allowed to have the keys. The fine prints
were quite inaccessible. Yet this was, after all, but one of the
inferior brother’s manifestations. He had another phase--another facet.
Chancing, one summer evening, to walk northwards, through Camden Town,
I suddenly beheld the brother standing on what proved to be his own
doorstep, free of heart and with no one to say him nay. He, too, had
a shop, it appeared, and here it was, come upon unexpectedly: a print
shop of the third order--you wondered who they were, in Camden Town or
anywhere else, who bought the cheap things which alone it contained.

Only one other of the old-fashioned dealers, the dealers of another
generation, did I ever see. That was the aged Mr. Tiffin, once busy
in the Strand, but, when I called upon him to inspect the remains of
his possessions, living chiefly retired, slow and deaf, in the small
bourgeois comfort of a villa at Canonbury. There--not to much practical
purpose--I sought him out. He too was a figure of the elder world, and
as such he dwells in the memory.

But I have wandered from the prints of the ‘Liber Studiorum,’ of which
indeed, though one of the warmest admirers of them, I possess but a
handful. Amongst them I greatly cherish one impression--the gift of a
friend whose benefactions to the National collections are remarkable,
and whose knowledge of Turner is profound. It is an early ‘state’ of
the subject known as ‘Inverary Pier, Loch Fyne, Morning’--one of those
plates engraved from end to end by Turner’s own hand. This impression
was given by the Master to Lupton, the mezzotint engraver of the
‘Solway Moss,’ and, a generation ago, my friend had bought it from
him. Another admirable student of Turner’s art sent me once more than
one of those etchings which, in Turner’s case, are the interesting
preparations for the finished ‘Liber’ plate. The rare ‘Isis’ is amongst
them.

Amongst the Turner prints that I have bought, I have always been guided
rather by fineness of impression than by priority of ‘state.’ Thus,
side by side with a First State of the ‘London from Greenwich’ I do
not fear to place a late one of ‘The Frontispiece, with the Rape of
Europa.’ The impression must have been printed the moment the plate had
profited by Turner’s retouch. As for the costly curiosities known as
‘engraver’s proofs’--working proofs, in fine, struck off to see how the
plate was progressing--speaking broadly and roughly, I do not believe
in them. They have their own interest, of course, as illustrating the
means by which the effect was obtained; but, in quality, they yield
to an impression taken when the effect had just been got, or, in the
case of a fine Second or later State, to an impression taken when the
effect, lost in the interval by wear, had just been regained.

No one who appreciates Turner can quite confine himself to the
‘Liber,’ though the ‘Liber’ is the most comprehensive expression of
that infinite genius. Accordingly, in my drawers there may be found,
no doubt, pieces from one or other of his engraved publications:
something, it may be, from the ‘Rivers of England’--amongst them the
‘York’ and the ‘Ripon,’ which are not his indeed, but his friend
Girtin’s--something from the ‘Southern Coast’; and, from the ‘England
and Wales,’ that exquisite ‘Yarmouth,’ which, like the ‘Clovelly’ and
the ‘Portsmouth’ (both of them in the ‘Southern Coast’) exemplifies
old William Miller’s marvellous faculty of rendering the sky effects,
the aerial perspective, of Turner’s maturest art. One has heard of
Turner’s compliments to John Pye, over ‘Pope’s Villa,’ and they were
not undeserved; but how great should his recognition have been of the
Scottish Quaker, simple of nature, subtle of gift, for whom no passage
of Turner’s brush-work was too intricate or too baffling! But let us
turn to earlier Masters.

Only well-to-do people can buy, in any large numbers and in those
fine impressions which alone rightly represent their subjects, the
etchings of Rembrandt; but it is a wonder, and almost a shame, that so
few well-to-do English people take advantage of their opportunities;
for, as a result of their not doing so, or doing so at the best in
so scanty a measure, a most undue proportion of the fine Rembrandts
which have been the ornaments of English collections have within the
last few years crossed the seas, and are now lodged--where they are
justly appreciated--in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Baltimore, New York.
Where, amongst us in England, are the successors of Dr. Wellesley,
of Sir Abraham Hume, of Mr. Holford, of my kind, delightful friend,
Richard Fisher? We want a new race of collectors of the highest class
of ancient prints; the old is dying out; the young is too modest or too
timid: it is afraid to spend its money, though its money could hardly
be spent more economically. Looked at even from the financial point of
view--as the great auctions prove--nothing is better justified than the
investment of important sums in the prints by the Masters. Rembrandt
is for all Time. Every year--taking the wide world over--there is
an increase in the number of people sensible enough to desire and
determine to possess themselves of some representation of his work.

Nothing but small means has prevented my buying in abundance
Rembrandt’s incomparable landscapes, so well aware am I that Landscape
Art reaches its topmost level in the best of Rembrandt’s work--in
his ‘Cottage with Dutch Hay-Barn,’ say, and in his ‘Landscape with a
Tower.’ His Sacred Subjects, with all their virtues of ‘sincerity and
inwardness,’ commend themselves less to us. His Portraiture, upon the
other hand, combines every artistic charm with every human interest.
A few examples I have--a mere handful, but good impressions they must
always be; and the two which, from their subjects, are least unworthy
of mention, are, I suppose, a First State of the ‘Clément de Jonghe,’
the Amsterdam print-seller, which has a picturesqueness less obvious,
but a character more subtle, than in the plate’s later states; and an
early and fortunate impression from that group of studies, executed,
I am convinced, in different years, and containing as its chiefest
and latest ornament an energetically sketched portrait of Rembrandt
himself, in that advanced middle life of his, which gave us, perhaps,
the greatest number of the fine fruits of his genius. To certain of
the commentators on Rembrandt, this rare little plate--a masterly
collection of _croquis_, and nothing besides--is not, I fancy, quite
sufficiently known; though our admirable English amateur, Wilson--who
wrote in 1836--and the latest deceased of the great French collectors
and commentators, Monsieur Dutuit, of Rouen, do it conspicuous justice.
My impression belonged, a generation or two ago, to the Arozarena
collection. I got it, with some other things, at that fascinating
shop in Paris, whose outside is so simple and so unassuming, whose
inside is stuffed with treasures--the shop a door or two from the Quai
Malaquais, up the dark and narrow ‘Rue des Saint-Pères,’ at which, from
the morning to the evening hours, sits placidly at his desk ‘Monsieur
Jules’--Clément’s successor, once Clément’s assistant--the learned
‘Marchand d’Estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale.’

Even the smallest of collectors may have a ‘speciality’--and I suppose
my speciality to be the comparatively humble one of Méryon and of
Whistler--or, perhaps, of modern etchings generally--but (let me say
it for myself as well as for others) it is at one’s peril that one is
specialist alone. Things are seen then out of all proportion; bias and
prejudice take the place of judgment--a mere fanaticism flourishes,
where there ought to be a growing critical capacity, alert and lively.
On that account, in my small cabinet, a Whistler or a Méryon is liable
to be confronted with an Italian of the Renaissance, a German of the
day of Dürer. Zoan Andrea’s ‘Dance of Damsels,’ after a design of
Mantegna’s, a Coat of Arms of Beham’s, an ornament of Aldegrever’s,
instructively remind me of a delicacy earlier than Whistler’s, and of
a _burin sobre et mâle_ that was wielded three hundred years before
Méryon’s. But while, in collecting, I venture to discountenance the
exclusive devotion to a particular master, I am almost as strongly
against the acquisition of isolated examples of very many men. If a man
is worth representing at all, represent him at the least by a little
handful of his works. Collect one or two masters largely, and obtain
of others small but characteristic groups.

       *       *       *       *       *

I am fond of my few French prints of the Eighteenth Century. It is easy
to dispose of them (a common way in England)--the works, I mean, of all
that Eighteenth Century School--by calling them light, trifling, even
indiscreet in certain of their revelations of a life that seldom aimed
to be austere; but, in reality, the prints of the ‘_Dix-Huitième_’
represent all phases of the thoughts and ways of French society--its
deeds and its ideals--from the childhood of Louis Quinze to the
Revolution; and, if you read French _contes_ and comedy, memoir and
criticism, these things, from Watteau to Chardin, from Chardin to
Fragonard, are their true illustrations. For myself, I do but mourn
that I have so few of them: not a single Moreau, for instance--not the
‘Sortie de l’Opéra,’ with the love-letter conveyed in the nosegay,
nor ‘C’est un Fils, Monsieur!’ in which a well-favoured young woman
bounces into the library of the fortunate collector, with the news that
he is also, as it seems, a parent. The insular pre-Raphaelite speaks
of the French Eighteenth Century as ‘the bad period.’ It is ‘the bad
period’ to people who are too rigid to grasp its grace. The narrowly
learned, as Walter Savage Landor reminds us--‘the generality of the
learned,’ he is even severe enough to say--‘are apt to conceive that
in easy movement there is a want of solidity and strength.’ Now, ‘easy
movement,’ spontaneous elegance, is the very characteristic of the Art
of France, as it is of its delightful people; and not to recognise, not
to enjoy that, is merely to be under the sway of pedantry, antiquarian
or academic. French Eighteenth Century Art, like Dutch Art of the
Seventeenth Century, like the Art of Titian and of Velasquez, reflected
Life--much of the charm of Life--and unless it be that Life itself
and Beauty have no interest for us, we cannot afford to pass that Art
superciliously by.

Wonderfully small, however, is the amount of sympathy that I am
privileged to expect from English collectors of the older type, in
my enjoyment of a sometimes faulty, but an often bewitching, school.
A score of French prints, some of them recording the high elegance
of Watteau, the pleasant gallantry of Baudouin or Lavreince, the
sober homeliness and the grave truth of Chardin (whose lessons were
Wordsworthian in their way)--these various things, which I shall still
venture to cherish, are wont to be ‘sat upon’ by the antiquary; much
as a certain little table-case of Battersea enamels, dainty and aglow
with colour, like flowers on a wintry day (puce and gold and _rose du
Barry_, that no time and no winter fades), is ‘sat upon’ by some of my
friends who behold indescribable virtues in every product of Japanese
design. We have all of us got our limits--I remember, though, that in
France, two of the men most prominent and influential in their love for
the artistic work of their own country in its famous ‘_Dix-Huitième_,’
had been almost the first to welcome the inventions of the Japanese.
These men were Philippe Burty and Edmond de Goncourt--but then it is
lamentably true that they ignored Rembrandt and Dürer, as far as any
practical interest in them was concerned.

The mention of the Frenchmen brings me once more face to face with
two striking personalities. Burty was a critic in journalism, and an
_Inspecteur des Beaux Arts_ besides--an enthusiast, a connoisseur, a
real _curieux_. When I knew him he had already done much in France
for the popular recognition of Etching. His flat upon an outer
boulevard--the Boulevard des Batignolles--told charmingly of the
refinement and variety of his tastes. Some _kakemonos_ and _tsubas_
hung on the walls; but here there was an etching, and there an ivory.
And he had a little _coin de tapisserie_, as he smilingly said, ‘like
Erasmus at the Louvre’--he was thinking of the background of Holbein’s
picture. In his deep French bookcases, well-bound volumes were ranged,
a second row behind the first, and when the glass doors were opened
and a few vacant places discovered, Burty’s favourite cat--the cat of
the literary man, moving with quietude, treading with grace--curved
about in the bookcase, sleek and smooth, harmless, careful, almost
appreciative.

One Sunday afternoon, when, I remember, as the result of an accident,
we had failed to see Zola, Philippe Burty drove me down to Auteuil--to
the Villa Montmorency, with its wild poetic garden--to spend a couple
of hours with Edmond de Goncourt and his treasures. Jules, the beloved
brother, was already dead, and Edmond, surrounded by his collections,
lived lonely at Auteuil, in the house arranged for both. Stately and
distinguished, melancholy, and yet interested, a descendant of the
old _noblesse_, with many memories in the dark brown eyes that lay
under black eyebrows and silver-grey hair, Edmond de Goncourt moved
about amongst his portfolios, saying a word here, and there directing
a glance. The history of his life surrounded him--the treasures he
and his brother had amassed and studied, before the ‘_Dix-Huitième_’
was fashionable, and very much as a recreation from those ‘_noires
études de la vie contemporaine_’--the words are his own--which had
given us _Germinie Lacerteux_ and _Manette Salomon_. No such collection
of that fascinating French ‘_Dix-Huitième_’ as belongs to Edmond de
Goncourt has ever been made. His _Maison d’un Artiste_ is a book
which is written for the most part about it, and in comparison with
its treasures my humble score of chosen prints--chiefly, after all,
by the Eighteenth Century’s more serious masters--becomes absolutely
insignificant. Still, they remind me, pleasantly enough, of a
delightful period, a delightful people, and of an art that was masterly
when it was Watteau’s, more lightly gracious when it was Pater’s, and,
when it was Chardin’s, was sedate and simple and almost austere.

Sketches in oil or water-colour by Cotman and James Ward, by Thomas
Collier and Charles Green, Edwin Hayes, Alfred East, Shannon, Linton,
Fulleylove, Carl Haag, Wyke Bayliss, Francis James--I need not finish
the list, and it would be foreign to the present purpose to enlarge on
the men--do something, one may hope, to prevent one’s bowing the knee
at only a single shrine. But is that indeed my danger?--I, who confess
to have felt at times the force of quite another temptation--the
temptation to be busy at last in getting together things with which
the pictorial Art that I love has nothing to do. A comely little piece
or so of ‘Blue and White’; a bit of Worcester, with the square mark; a
Nantgarw plate, with its ‘Billingsley rose’; a plate of Frankenthal,
bought in the Corratorie at Geneva, at a shop where, two generations
ago, they had sold things of that fabric to none other than Balzac (who
declared, through his _Cousin Pons_, that Frankenthal would one day be
as much sought after as Sèvres)--these things, I say, the thin end of
the wedge, things that are nothing by themselves, remind me that, in
gathering china, Man may be happy. And so a few books--the earliest
obtained being the _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798, _relieure Janséniste_, a
green coat by Riviere, and the Rogers with the Turner illustrations,
in ‘original boards,’ now, alas! disposed to crack--assure me of the
charm that must lurk for my luckier brethren in the seriously gathering
together of First Editions or of famous ones.

Let us pass to the examples of the Revival of Etching. About forty
Méryons, about seventy Whistlers, are mine. The one artist has been
much more prolific than the other, and thus, while, as regards Méryon,
the possession of even ‘forty’ prints allows the collector to be
fairly well provided for, as regards Whistler, the ‘seventy’ represent
scarcely a third part of that etcher’s catalogued work. Mr. H. S.
Theobald has more Whistlers than I have; so has Sir John Day; Mr. B. B.
Macgeorge, of Glasgow, has, I know, more Méryons; while, of both these
masters, distinctly larger collections than my own rest in the hands of
Mr. Samuel P. Avery and of Mr. Howard Mansfield, of New York.

Nearly all the finer plates of Méryon--those in which, to use his own
phrase, he ‘engraved Paris,’ with a fidelity so affectionate, yet
with an imagination so tragic--were wrought between the year 1850 and
the year 1854. Bracquemond was the only important figure in the group
to whom the Revival of Etching is due, who was working at that time.
Whistler, Seymour Haden, Jules Jacquemart, and Legros, were all of them
a little later; Whistler’s first dated plate--and he was quite among
the earliest of these artists--being of the year 1857.

In looking through my Méryons, it interests me to find that a good
many that are in my Solander-box to-day, belonged, long since, to
distinguished Frenchmen who were Méryon’s contemporaries. Thus, a
First State of the ‘Saint-Etienne-du-Mont’ was given by Méryon to
Bracquemond. My impressions of the ‘Abside’ and the ‘Stryge’ belonged
to Aglaüs Bouvenne, who catalogued Bonington, appreciated Méryon, and,
in comparatively recent years, wrote some reminiscences of him. A ‘Rue
des Toiles, à Bourges’ has on it Méryon’s dedicatory inscription,
addressed to Hillemacher the painter. A curious proof of the ‘Partie
de la Cité de Paris,’ before the introduction of the towers, which
were never really in the actual view, though Méryon chose to see them
there, came from the friend of Méryon’s youth, a friend who spoke over
his grave--M. de Salicis. Some others of the prints have been Philippe
Burty’s. The final trial proof of the ‘Tourelle, dite “de Marat,”’ and
one or two other subjects, of which I spare the reader the details,
were originally bought of Méryon by M. Wasset, a man the public wots
not of, but a collector full of character: the ‘Cousin Pons,’ I dare to
call him, of my own earlier day.

Let me, in a paragraph devoted to himself alone, recall M. Wasset to my
memory. An employé--_secrétaire_, it may be--at the Ministry of War,
he lived, when I mounted to his flat, one winter’s night (how many
years ago!) in a dark, winding, narrow street, of the Rive Gauche,
between the Seine and St. Sulpice--the Rue Jacob. The Cousin Pons, did
I say, this gentleman resembled? But Pons was _gourmet_ as well as
connoisseur--M. Wasset knew no passion but the collector’s. He dined
modestly--by subscription, it was understood--at the Café Procope, in
the Quarter--was _abonné_ for repasts taken there, in a haunt once
classic, now dull and cheap. His rooms in the Rue Jacob, low and small,
were stuffed full with his collections. _Bric-à-brac_ he had, even
more than prints. Strange beings who dredged in the River, brought him
ancient jewellery, and seventeenth-century watches, that had slept
their Rip Van Winkle sleep in the mud of the Seine. I see the venerable
collector now, his sombre and crowded rooms lit with a single lamp,
and he, passing about, spare, eager, and trembling, with bowed figure;
garrulous, excited as with wine, by the mere sight and handling of his
accumulated possessions. A few years afterwards--urged thereto by the
greatest of Parisian printsellers, Clément, who is now no more--he had
a sale, in the Rue Drouot, of his hundreds of prints, of which the
Méryons, of course, formed but a small part. Other treasures--then
ardently desired--he was to purchase with the proceeds. Is his heart,
one wonders, with those treasures now--in the dark Paris street? Or,
the hands that trembled so, fifteen years since--have they relaxed
their hold, for ever, of the things that were meat and drink, that
were wife and child, to him?

Méryon, I remember, took me by storm as a great artistic personality,
and, since he conquered me immediately, I have always been faithful to
him. In that there is no sort of virtue; for has he not now become,
thus early, almost everywhere, where prints are loved, an accepted
classic? To appreciate Whistler--even at all to enjoy him--requires a
longer education. There are even some things that at first one resents.
A touch of charlatanry lurks, one at first supposes, in the Bond
Street ‘arrangement in yellow and white,’ and in the _velarium_ under
which we were invited to gather when the master held sway in Suffolk
Street. But, in time, that impression passes. Then, one accepts the man
whole--takes him as he is--genius like his has a certain licence to be
abnormal. And though it pleases Mr. Whistler, in sundry catalogues and
joyous little books about the ‘art of making enemies,’ to represent
from time to time that I, among a hundred others, do not appreciate
him, that is only because he would have us believe he is a victim to
the interesting monomania of persecution, and I, forsooth, when this is
his mood, am called upon to figure as one of those who would pursue and
vex him. Peace! peace! Now that he has ‘done battering at England’ (I
will not vouch precisely for the phrase), I am, it seems, an ‘enemy’ no
more. So much the better!

I take it, he and Méryon are quite the greatest of the etchers
this century has seen, and if so (since of great true etchers the
Eighteenth Century was barren), they are the greatest since the days
of Claude and Rembrandt. To no one who has studied any group of their
plates for a single quarter of an hour, can it be necessary to insist
upon the essential unlikeness of these two remarkable men. Unity of
impression--almost a test of excellence, the one note dominant, the
rest subordinated--that is found, I know, and found almost equally,
in the work of both. But by what different measures has it been
maintained! Whistler, in so much of his work, has shown himself the
flexible, vivacious, and consummate sketcher, the artist whose choice
of economical and telling ‘line’ is faultless and perhaps well-nigh
immediate. Méryon, upon the other hand, has been remarkable for
building up, with learned patience worthy of Albert Dürer, little by
little, his effects; so that when the thing is done, and that sombre
vision of his has become a realised performance, he has not so much
made a drawing upon a plate, as erected a monument (for so it strikes
one) from base to coping-stone. Such work has at least the permanence
of the very monuments it records. An _œuvre de longue haleine_--a task
severe and protracted--is each one of Méryon’s important coppers. Yet
all the length of Méryon’s labour witnesses to no relaxing hold of his
first thought, and in the great complexity of ordered line there is
revealed no superfluous, no insignificant stroke.

Each man is discovered in his work. In Méryon’s ‘Abside’ say, in the
‘Pont Neuf,’ in the ‘Saint-Etienne-du Mont,’ is his brooding spirit,
his patient craftsmanship, his temperament intense and profound. He was
poor; he was often weary; he spent himself on his work. In Whistler’s
‘Garden,’ in his ‘Piazzetta,’ in his ‘Florence Leyland,’ in the ‘Large
Pool,’ in that wonderful tiny thing, ‘The Fruit Shop,’ there is the
boyish freshness, the spirit of enjoyment, which he has known how
to preserve till the present time. Whistler has never been tired,
or, if he has, he and his work have parted company at that moment.
Wonderful as is his gift of observation and handling, his plates are
a lark’s song. As you see the man before you, elastic, joyous, slim,
and _débonnair_, having never known the heavy and sad wisdom of our
modern youth, nor the cares of our middle age, his appearance almost
persuades you that all his exquisite craftsmanship, practised now
for forty years, is but the blameless recreation of an hour snatched
from life’s severer tasks--the task of sipping duly, _à l’heure de
l’absinthe_, one’s _apéritif_, on the Boulevard; of pulling on the
River, in the long June days; of condensing every rule of life into
perhaps three epigrams, effective at a dinner-party. Who would not envy
this possessor of a craft fantastic, airy, and immortal! Though Mr.
Whistler may entertainingly insinuate that long life has been denied to
his friendships, he will agree with me, I know, when I assert that it
is secured to his etchings.

That my print-drawers contain but four or five etchings by Seymour
Haden is at once my misfortune and my reproach. As one looks at them
one conjures up visions of bygone sales at Sotheby’s, when as yet
Mr. Wilkinson, benign and aged, sat in the chair, to wield the ivory
hammer--what opportunities neglected, of which the more diligent have
availed themselves! For I cannot accept Seymour Haden’s too modest
estimate of the value of his own work. Labour so energetic and decisive
is not destined to be prized by one generation alone, and in esteeming
it comparatively lightly, his connoisseurship, accurate enough when it
is concerned with Claude and Rembrandt, Méryon and Whistler--all of
whom, in his time, he has loved and collected--is for once at fault.

I am somewhat poor again in those etchings which are the creation of
the austere genius of Legros. Popular they will never be, for Legros is
almost alone among men of genius in not belonging to his own day--in
receiving well-nigh no influence from the actual hour. He is a belated
Old Master--but a ‘master’ always: never an affected copyist, who
pranks ‘in faded antique dress.’ Had he but humoured the affectations
of the time, it is quite possible that the time would at all events
have talked about him, and, denied actual popularity, he might yet
have been solaced by an æsthetic coterie’s hysterical admiration. But
that has not been for Legros. As it is, with his gravely whispered
message, his general reticence, his overmastering sense of Style, his
indifference to attractive truths of detail, his scorn of the merely
clever, he is placed at a disadvantage. But his work remains; not
only the etchings, of which Messieurs Thibaudeau and Poulet-Malassis
catalogued a hundred and sixty-eight as long ago as 1877, but the grave
pictures in which the peasant of the Boulognais devoutly worships, or
in which the painted landscape is as the landscape of a dream, and the
vigorous oil portraits--not one of which, perhaps, reaches the nobility
of his etched portrait of Watts--and the pencil drawings of the nude,
several of which Legros has given to the Museum of his birthplace,
Dijon, where the stray Englishman who stays to look at them finds that
they are as finely severe as are the pencil drawings of Ingres. I have
his one big etching, ‘La Mort du Vagabond’--the scale too large to
be effective generally, but, _pace_ Mr. Whistler, I do not, in this
case, find it ‘an offence,’[4]--and amongst others, two that have, it
may be, no particular rarity, but that are worthily, and I think even
exceptionally, characteristic. The one is ‘La Communion dans l’Eglise
Saint-Médard’: in line and in feeling an instance of the most dignified
treatment of ecclesiastical function or religious office. And the
other is ‘Les Chantres Espagnols,’ the singing-men, aged and decayed,
eight of them, in a darkened choir--was ever a vision of narrow and of
saddened lives more serious or more penetrating!

    [4] ‘The huge plate,’ writes Mr. Whistler--on the whole
        truthfully--‘the huge plate is an offence: its undertaking
        an unbecoming display of determination and ignorance, its
        accomplishment a triumph of unthinking earnestness and
        uncontrolled energy.’

From these grave things it is sometimes a relief to turn to
Jacquemart’s etchings of still-life. The man himself had troubles: not
difficulties about money, nor, like Méryon, the knowledge that he was
little appreciated--for appreciation came to him early--but lack of
health during years that should have been vigorous, and a compulsory
flight towards the sunshine, which yet did not appreciably lessen the
distance that divided him from Death. But his work, from end to end,
in its serene, deliberate accomplishment, suggests no chances and
changes, no personal emotion, and even no actual experience of human
life. One says at first, it might have been done at any period; then
one recognises perhaps what one may call a modern feeling for the
object portrayed; then one thinks of Hollar’s ‘Five Muffs,’ and of
Rembrandt’s ‘Shell,’ and remembers that both have a freedom, a delicate
skill, akin, after all, to the skill and the freedom in the etchings
of Jacquemart. Of Jacquemart’s two great series, the prints for his
father’s _Histoire de la Porcelaine_ and those of the ‘Gemmes et Joyaux
de la Couronne,’ I possess only the first, and these in book form,
as they were sent me by Madame Techener, the widow of Jacquemart’s
publisher and friend. In a simple, russet-coloured half-binding, done
afterwards by Zaehnsdorf, they stand on a shelf I go to. Elsewhere
are such proofs of Jacquemart etchings as the occasional good
fortune of auction rooms--snatched in a spare half-hour--has brought
to a life-long lover of engravings. There is a certain plate of
sword-handles and daggers--things, some of them, that ‘rend and rip’--

   ‘Gash rough, slash smooth, help Hate so many ways,
    Yet ever keep a beauty that betrays
    Love still at work with the artificer, through all his quaint
             devising--’

as Robert Browning wrote, describing weapons that lay, as I remember,
at peace at last, on his own drawing-room table. How Jacquemart etched
such blades! By this print of his there is one of a seventeenth-century
watch--just such a watch as I said used to be fished up from the bed of
the Seine, for quaint old Monsieur Wasset--and with it the presentment
of Renaissance jewel; and, perhaps, of a carved mirror, or a bit of
Valenciennes porcelain.

Allow me a reflection! The cheapest way of enjoying _objets d’art_
is to enjoy them in etchings; and it is often the easiest way, since
you have but to sit in your chair and look; and it is often not the
least true, since the etcher himself has seen with trained eye before
his trained hand came to draw. Well, to enjoy _objets d’art_ in that
fashion, with tolerable completeness and extreme satisfaction, the
intelligent poor man has really but to get the two chief series of
Jacquemarts (those that are still lacking to me, the ‘Gemmes et
Joyaux de la Couronne,’ are, I know Seymour Haden would tell me, the
bigger, broader, richer, more spontaneous of the two), and those fifty
plates by different etchers, of whom Courtry, Greux, and Le Rat were
among the principal, which Holloway published about a score of years
since--‘Works of Art in the Collections of England.’ In that excellent
folio, the men who have just been mentioned, and several others,
followed hard on Jacquemart’s heels. What a treatment of jade, in
some of those plates! Mr. Addington’s vase in particular--absolutely
unctuous. What a treatment of _cristal de roche_! Desgoffe’s painted
panel at the Luxembourg is only a little finer. What a treatment
of ivory!--that extraordinary Moorish casket, that was Malcolm of
Poltalloch’s.

But this is only copyist’s etching, some people may say.
‘Copyists’--No! You would not enjoy it so much, were it merely servile
imitation. It is interpretation, significant and spirited, alert and
vivid.

Of the original etchers of the younger school in England, Frank Short
and William Strang have long seemed to me the most interesting,
notwithstanding the as yet somewhat marked limitations of theme of
the one, and that possessing ‘devil’ of the love of ugliness which
I have now almost ceased to hope may be exorcised from the other.
Strang, for all the presence of that which is repulsive to many, is
a man of great qualities. A Celt to the depths of him, he is wildly
imaginative. He is dramatic, and his prints are dramatic, however
much he may profess to be busy with line and tone. Besides, there are
moments in which he confesses to being a poet. He has the instinct of
tragedy. Technically, his etchings are almost always good; nor is it,
to my mind, a sin in them that so many of them set you thinking. I
have but a few of Mr. Strang’s prints; of Frank Short’s I have more,
and when he can interpret a Dewint like that ‘Road in Yorkshire,’ and
a Constable like that sketch of Mr. Vaughan’s, I see no reason for not
putting those mezzotints--interpretations so brilliant, translations so
faithful yet so free--by the side of his work in Etching, inspired not
by familiarity with the art of another, but by the presence of charming
line or charming vista in Nature. Frank Short, in his original work, is
a most delicate draughtsman of form in landscape. ‘Evening, Bosham,’
and ‘Sleeping till the Flood,’ sufficiently show it.

Of another good man, Mr. C. J. Watson, I have not enough to judge him
at my ease; but he is a sterling etcher, distinctly gifted, and without
artifice and trick. An actually imaginative vision one must not perhaps
ask of him, but mental flexibility--can he but cultivate it--may enable
him to go far.

‘Profil de Jeune Fille,’ a rare dry-point by Paul Helleu, has, it
seems to me, like much of the work by that most modern of Parisian
pastellists and etchers, a delightful spontaneity and force and
freedom. It is an inevitable _chef-d’œuvre_--the greatest, perhaps, of
a facile and exquisite master.

My gossip stops. Grant me only the grace of one more line, to avow the
satisfaction with which, even after having enjoyed the companionship of
at least some little work that is admittedly classic, I can look upon
the prints of Mr. Charles Holroyd, a young etcher of our latest day. In
them so much of what is generally, and often even rightly, seductive,
is frankly abandoned, that they may keep unimpaired at least the
distinction and reticence which are the very soul of Style.


                (_Art Journal_, January and March 1894.)




ANNE OLDFIELD


‘Mrs. Oldfield, the celebrated comedian,’ is the title inscribed
by a contemporary--who knew how the lady should be spoken of--upon
the copper which Edward Fisher engraved in mezzotint from the
picture by Richardson. A photogravure reproduction from this rare,
desirable print--which shows the lissome grace and flexible charm of
a young woman who enchanted the town, and who was the delight of Mr.
Mainwaring before she was the delight of General Churchill--forms the
frontispiece to the slight and gossipy and unscientific, but by no
means disagreeable volume which Mr. Robins has compiled--we cannot
say written--about the actress whom he dubs familiarly ‘Nance.’ A
cheaper reproduction of another portrait of her--the original also by
Richardson--is to be found upon a later page. In both portraits she
is represented _in propria persona_, of which we need not complain,
but which it is expedient to chronicle, inasmuch as such portraiture
throws no direct illumination upon the achievements of her art.
Deprived of any such assistance as might well have been given, at all
events had the compiler of the volume been dealing with a comedian of
later time--with Garrick, say, whose Abel Drugger is known to us by
the canvas of Zoffany; with Siddons, who not only as the ‘Tragic Muse’
reveals the characteristics of her power; or even with Mrs. Abington,
whose performance as Miss Prue in _Love for Love_ we seem to witness
by dint of familiarity with Sir Joshua’s picture--we are thrown back
entirely, for our acquaintance with Mrs. Oldfield, upon the written
records produced for our survey.

These are remarkably scanty. Of the life of the fascinating woman
much remains in mystery. Of the achievements of the actress there
is what is called, in stilted language, ‘a consensus of opinion,’
but singularly little of definite chronicle. Certain passages in the
_Spectator_ discuss the appropriateness of her delivery of a comic
epilogue to a tragic play--for it was the fate of Mrs. Oldfield to
act Tragedy sometimes, though she preferred, upon the whole, that
the management should ‘give such things to Porter’--and a few other
contemporary allusions to her were printed in her day; but her day was
before the era of very penetrating criticism, either professional or
not professional: no Lamb, no Hazlitt, had the chance of making her
a peg for whimsicality or pungent brilliance; and the appreciative
amateur who, a generation before her, had, in the diary that the world
cherishes, chronicled his sense of the delightfulness of Mrs. Knipp and
of Nell Gwynne--‘all unready, pretty, prettier than I thought’--was
deprived by Fate of the occasion of waxing cordial over the personal
grace of Mrs. Oldfield.

Accordingly, we receive from an industrious American a volume written
‘round’ Mrs. Oldfield, rather than actually about her. We cannot
altogether blame him for it. We do blame him for once or twice
slinking away, as it were, from the evidence of his own, perhaps
unavoidable, ignorance, under cover of propriety and a regard for the
conventionalities. Of this nature is his exceedingly slight treatment
of the possible existence of a daughter of the actress; but he had
already brought himself to chronicle some particulars of two sons--and
this was perhaps as much as we could expect. Mrs. Oldfield was never
married. Her time looked leniently upon such freedom as she took
in love affairs; and the transference of her affection was neither
frequent nor brutal. She was a woman of impulse and of sensibility and
of magnetic charm. Men who ‘dined with Walpole’ passed on without
a trace of consciousness of inferiority in her companionship to the
agreeable converse of Oldfield. She was as kind as she was pleasant.
She relieved Savage, who rose to excellence in the verses penned by him
on her demise. She was endowed with common sense, which is frequently
possessed, though not invariably exercised, by people of genius. She
was nice to the humblest, and she walked with Royalty on the slopes
of Windsor. Brought up in a third-rate street in Westminster and in
a tavern in St. James’s Market, she died at her house in Grosvenor
Street, in only middle age, and left a comfortable fortune to the two
youths born of her connection with distinguished and superior men.
Such, briefly, was the woman--mercurial, gay, and charming; bringing
tears, bringing laughter, never bringing regret. Would that it were
possible to write even as definitely as that of the actress and of the
method of her art!

Mr. Robins, who has filled his pages with the stories of the plot of
a few of her pieces and with extracts from two or three comedies in
which she was presumably most brilliant, would have made his book
perhaps not more generally engaging, but more instructive, had he
printed from Mr. Joseph Knight’s scholarly record in the _Dictionary
of National Biography_ the immense list of her _rôles_. He does, of
course, speak incidentally at least of the actress’s range; but nothing
convinces one of it quite so surely as the scanning of that record of
her honourable labour. So far as one can tell, she must have been about
at her best in _The Provoked Husband_; but, did she play Andromache or
even Sophonisba, she got from each the maximum of its effect. Though
poor originally, she was of gentle blood, and perhaps she played best,
with her poetic realism, the parts of ladies of her day. Over a spell
of twenty years, her art--like Ellen Terry’s and Mrs. Kendal’s in our
own time--knew no decay. Like Aimée Desclée, she acted at the last in
presence of great physical suffering. When she died the Town grieved
‘sincerely’; and though, with curious English compromise, she was
refused a monument, she was not forbidden to be buried in the great
grey Abbey whose walls rise cliff-like over against the street in which
she passed her childhood. It is a pity that her story has been told
by Mr. Robins with so naïve an absence of anything approaching style.
She was a theme for a writer. But the amiable book-maker and genuinely
interested student of her craft and period who is responsible for the
various prolixity of this volume must be forgiven much because he has
loved much. He tells us, it is true, by way of permissible yet not
wholly praiseworthy padding, much more about her contemporaries in
her palmy days, and in her days not palmy, than about herself. Mrs.
Oldfield meanders, like a thin stream, through a meadow of Queen Anne
and early Georgian gossip. We do not resent the gossip. If it is not
authentic information, it is readable chatter. Would only that it were
easier to disengage from the mass of it the delightful and enlivening
and kindling personality of Mrs. Oldfield!


                   (_Literature_, 22nd October 1898.)




SIDDONS AND RACHEL


Two little books by Mrs. A. Kennard--contributions to the ‘Eminent
Women’ series--give with much tact and grace of treatment all that
the ordinary reader, if not quite all the special student, needs to
know about the two great tragic actresses of England and of France.
With regard to both, the special student may ask, perhaps, for more
of theatrical criticism, for an analysis more elaborate of that which
was accomplished in sight of the public, by the two famous artists.
Yet, as regards Sarah Siddons--a tragedian removed from us now by the
space of three generations--there may well have been difficulties.
Rachel, of course, lived in a period of criticism more diffuse and
systematic; Jules Janin filling, in her day, to some extent, the place
since filled by Vitu and Sarcey; and, indeed, the published records
of her performances, though scattered, are elaborate and abundant.
Turning from the public achievement to the private character, little
else remains to be told of Mrs. Siddons; but of Rachel there might
have been produced many a scandalous chronicle. Wrong from one point of
view, Mrs. Kennard, in this matter, was certainly right from another.
Of the ‘Dichtung’ and the ‘Wahrheit,’ which meet in the life of the
artist, she has taken, in some respects, chiefly the ‘Dichtung.’ ‘We
have tried,’ she says herself, in her preface, ‘to extract the poetry
and romance there is to be found in this life, rejecting what is base
and unworthy.’ Nor must it, after all, be supposed that in Rachel’s
life--outside her art--all was unworthy or base. Always she was a
dutiful daughter; always a devoted mother; sometimes a generous, and
once or twice a constant, friend. But her life was a fever. And, in her
maddened demand for excitement, it ran its course rapidly.

How different all this matter was with Mrs. Siddons! Rachel was a
Jewess, born in an inn in Switzerland, and bred in France; a Bohemian
who, after twenty-four hours of enforced respectability at Windsor,
‘_avait besoin de s’encanailler_’--thirsted to be a cad again. Mrs.
Siddons was an Englishwoman; even the Irish blood, not quite absent
from her veins, was without influence on her personal life--we are far
from saying it did not prompt her to be an artist. And not only was
she an Englishwoman; she was a Kemble besides, and rigid self-control
was the very watchword of the Kembles, in art and life. We are told
she had ‘the gift of tears.’ It may be. Certainly she roused in others
pity and passion. But when one recognises this, one may remember, too,
how the methods acceptable to one age may be ineffective in another.
Mrs. Siddons’s epoch was the epoch of the acceptability of Claude’s
and David’s art. It was the age of firm contour in draughtsmanship,
of composition in painting, of deportment in manners. In manhood,
the age admired as ideal what Mr. Turveydrop, some time afterwards,
only unwittingly burlesqued. The fire, and genius, and spontaneity of
Rachel would speak to us to-day. Rachel gave to the most artificial
of tragedy--to the tragedy which was ‘so Greek’ to its admirers, so
full of Louis xiv. to ourselves--that truth which Desclée, after
her, bestowed upon an incident in the Avenue du Roi de Rome--upon
a passion of this morning. Should we be equally sensible to the
favourite effects of Mrs. Siddons? Should we--who have passed not only
through Romanticism, but into Naturalism, since her day--be impressed,
genuinely or profoundly, by her Lady Macbeth, her Hermione?

As regards the outer life of the two women--Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic Muse’
and the Phèdre whom even Sarah Bernhardt, who has so much in common
with her, has not been able to surpass--it was, as may be expected,
essentially different. Mrs. Kennard owes something, but cannot owe very
much, to the _Life_ of Mrs. Siddons by Campbell, the inefficient friend
of her later years, to whom she bequeathed her memoranda, letters, and
diary. Boaden’s _Life_, of which Crabb Robinson spoke as ‘one of the
most worthless books of biography in existence,’ cannot have helped
Mrs. Kennard much more; but she acknowledges handsomely her obligations
to Mr. Percy Fitzgerald. About Rachel a whole literature has been
written; yet much of it is hardly serviceable. At least one biography
is avowedly hostile. Arsène Houssaye does not mean to be ill-natured,
but will at all costs be amusing. Jules Janin--a man of words, so much
more than of thoughts--is hopelessly fluent. He betrays the essential
worthlessness of the mere ready writer.

On the whole, perhaps, it is the letters of Rachel that are the truest
guide. Letters to her parents, to her sister, to her friends--if
not to her lovers--to her master, Samson, on the conditions and the
problems of her work--letters of gratitude, letters of regret, letters
making a small gift, though refusing a great loan--these things build
up gradually, on a pretty sure foundation, the edifice of Rachel’s
character, as it is fitting that we should see it. Rachel’s life
was in the Present. After excitement, was to come, not rest, but
_le néant_. She acted in bad health as in good, chiefly to satisfy
one of the deepest needs of her nature, reckless what might follow.
Mrs. Siddons, when youth and impulse had left her, dragged herself
somewhat unwillingly from town to town, to repair the losses of her
husband--the honest and somewhat incapable gentleman who sought a
refuge for rheumatism at Bath--and she undertook yet another round of
engagements in order that she might provide herself with a carriage on
her retirement: ‘a carriage, now become a necessity.’

As regards the society the two women cultivated and enjoyed, Mrs.
Siddons liked the intellectual and ‘the great world,’ and visited it
as its equal. But Rachel, in her loftiest social flights, was not so
much an artist as a show. Exhibited to the mighty, and encouraged by
them, and bound to behave herself in their presence--for the success of
eccentricity had not then been established--she was really most at home
with a few Bohemians, and with her kith and kin who lived on her. Mrs.
Siddons cared for the stage much more than did Fanny Kemble. She had
for it a respect which was wanting, it would seem, even in Macready’s
feeling for it; yet, in a measure, she acted to live, rather than lived
to act. Rachel--with the capacity for unnamed odiousness, and supported
in her private life by no fine example and no noble tradition--did yet,
in the main, live for the practice of her art; though its practice can
hardly have been furthered by her moral deterioration, and the chaos of
her later days.


                    (_Academy_, 3rd September 1887.)




JOSEPH JEFFERSON


Joseph Jefferson has been seen again--and with all the enthusiasm of
many years ago--in _Rip Van Winkle_. The playbill which announces his
appearance makes no mention of Washington Irving, but claims the play
as ‘written by Dion Boucicault.’ It needs, however, no very profound
student to detect in that tender and graceful fancy of the story, a
quality not to be numbered among the useful talents of the versatile
dramatist who can give us anything that lies between _London Assurance_
and the _Shaughraun_. But I believe that, after all these years, the
work of three hands is really to be found in the play; Mr. Jefferson
himself having manipulated much of its action and business. He does not
act the piece: he lives in it. And he is only to be compared with Got,
in Balzac’s _Mercadet_. Both performances are restrained and reserved,
without the appearance of restraint and reserve. Both are quiet. There
are no dramatic outbursts, and no surprises. But in each case a
character, a career--one might almost say a life itself--is put before
the spectator. Greater things have undoubtedly been done upon the
stage--greater things have been done on the stage of our day by Irving,
and greater remain to be done by him--but nothing quite so complete has
been seen: nothing giving one the sense of so easy and unlaboured a
mastery. The pathos is very gentle: the humour has something of Charles
Lamb in it. Jefferson has a face of the utmost good-humour; very kindly
eyes, gentle ways, which win upon the children and the dumb things of
his village of Falling Waters. For it is certainly his village, this
Falling Waters; we cannot seriously separate the actor from the man.
And he has a voice of admirable quality and compass: an enunciation of
the utmost distinctness, with no perceptible mannerism, unless, indeed,
the studied quietness be itself a mannerism. The voice is capable of
what would be called an almost womanly tenderness, by those who have
never observed that the tenderness of a man--as here to children--may
be even a profounder thing.

In _Rip Van Winkle_ he plays a winning character. We have all of us a
weakness for the amiable ne’er-do-well, who begins by ruining himself,
and ends--much against his feeble inclination--by ruining his children
and his friends. Our sympathy is wholly with him, and not with his
irritated wife; and when he has drunk away his fortune, and all that
he can of hers, we think that if he sits quietly under her reproaches,
or makes but a gentle answer, he has atoned for everything. That is
the magnetism of the lovable. And that is the kind of character that
Mr. Jefferson embodies, in a manner so entirely natural that you are
constantly forgetting that it is a performance. He has learned nothing
by rote. He has an easy way of seeking for his words: a half-absorbed
repetition of part of a phrase, as in our everyday, unchosen speech. He
does not finish his sentence like an actor who has learned his lines
and counted the delivery of them, and measured them to the end. The
common actor winds up an address as Rossini and his school wind up a
finale--‘I have the honour to remain your humble and obedient servant,’
Schumann said of them. But Mr. Jefferson’s sentences die off sometimes,
or are changed a little, by a slight thing happening in his presence,
or by the swift occurrence of a fresh thought which you may read in his
face. It is the perfection of naturalness--the perfection of seeming
spontaneity.

And if his humour is as mild as Charles Lamb’s, his pathos is as gentle
as Hans Christian Andersen’s. There is the delicate suggestion, for
those who can seize it--the suggestion and nothing more. When Rip goes
out from the home from which his wife has at last banished him--goes
out pointing to the child, in answer to his wife’s reproach that he
has no part in this house: ‘You say I have no part in this house’--the
pathos is of a simple and suggested kind, comparable only to Hans
Andersen’s, in the _Story of a Mother_. And as there is nothing in
Literature like the one, there is little on the Stage like the other.


                    (_Academy_, 6th November 1875.)




ZOLA’S ‘THÉRÈSE RAQUIN’


On Saturday I went to _Thérèse Raquin_ at the Royalty Theatre;
and while I found the piece itself--as indeed I expected to find
it--far less of a melodrama than certain of its critics had said,
I discovered that the performance, though good and creditable, was
not quite so noteworthy as it had been pronounced. The thing is
worth seeing, though--would indeed in any case be worth seeing. It
is but the second piece of M. Zola’s which has found hospitality
among us: nay, in a certain sense, it is the first, for _L’Assommoir_
was hardly seen in its nakedness and truth, though it was seen with
fulness of horror in Charles Reade’s version _Drink_. The version of
_Thérèse Raquin_--executed mainly, as I suppose, by Mr. De Mattos,
but overlooked by Mr. George Moore--does not widely depart from the
original. It is not a bad translation, though it might, with advantage,
have been a little more colloquial. It suggests nowhere that it
has been subjected to the process which I believe to be the only
satisfactory one, in translation, to a writer who is ambitious, as he
ought to be, to write the English that we talk: the process of wholly
discarding the original at a certain point--when the bare but real
equivalent of that original has once been secured--of forgetting, from
that moment, the existence of the original, and of setting oneself
solely to say well and naturally what the translation, which is still
beside one, says with awkwardness. The translation of _Thérèse Raquin_
is good enough, it may be, for most people’s requirements on the stage;
but it is not good enough to be counted as literature. The thing--that
is--has not become Mr. De Mattos’s own: he has remained its somewhat
mechanical interpreter.

_Thérèse Raquin_ occupies a middle place in M. Zola’s work. In point
of date, it is early; but I mean ‘a middle place’ in that it displays
neither the exaggerated and sterile realism of the uglier of the
writer’s books nor the abounding poetry of the finer of them. A problem
in itself less interesting than the problem of the _Page d’Amour_ is,
in _Thérèse Raquin_, treated with hardly a trace of the poetic tragedy
which gives the _Page d’Amour_ so much of its value. _Thérèse Raquin_
contains only one or two sentences--they are those in which the wicked
little _bourgeoise_ expresses her desire to live for ever in the
sunshine--which permit one to realise that its author is the author
of the passionate idyl _La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret_. But, on the other
hand, in _Thérèse Raquin_ we are not face to face with the superfluous
and unveracious hideousness of _La Terre_; and the view of humanity is
not so brutal and so gross as that which is taken in _Nana_. No; in
these respects we may rank _Thérèse Raquin_ rather with _L’Assommoir_
itself: in both a sad and ugly and degraded world, but a glimpse of the
skies. In both--as in everything, for the matter of that, that M. Zola
writes--an austere moral: the assured march of evil-doing to its own
punishment.

If _Thérèse Raquin_ were simply the melodrama some of its opponents
have pronounced it to be, the murder, which is the cause of the
two lovers’ remorse and collapse, would have been done, not in the
interval between two acts--the first of which ends and the second of
which begins with a quiet game of dominoes in a Parisian parlour--but
in sight of the audience, with an abundance of water in the middle
of the stage, and at the back a panorama of the Seine by Asnières or
Meudon. As it is, with the material circumstances of the murder we
are not for one moment invited to be concerned. We are shown in one
act the state of mind and feeling in which, to two people who were
perhaps not born to be villains, such a solution as murder becomes
possible; we are shown in another the state of mind and feeling which,
in two such people, may presumably succeed to that deed of violence
of which they have been guilty. The interest of these acts--different
slightly from the interest of the later ones--is the interest of mental
analysis; and, if these acts are melodrama, _The Ring and the Book_ is
a ‘shocker.’

The intelligent, unprejudiced person who goes to see _Thérèse Raquin_,
comes away with the knowledge that he has witnessed an exposition
of several bitter truths--an exposition made by M. Zola with power
and with singleness of aim, but here and there accompanied by a
purposeless, or at the least an unsuccessful, diffuseness, which is
one of the most characteristic and abiding defects of this important
writer’s method. This diffuseness, this fulness of detail which is
not actually illustrative and explanatory, Balzac, who was Zola’s
master, had in a measure; but he had it far less than Zola. A profuse
employment of the commonplace, in order that one may be ‘natural’--this
avoidance of selection and rejection, when selection and rejection
are of the very essence of Art--commends itself, as I understand, to
a little school of criticism, or of dogmatism, which has now found
voice among us; and that it does so is an entertaining evidence of the
capacity of its professors for critical preachment.


                    (_Academy_, 24th October 1891.)




‘MACBETH’ AND IRVING


I question if _Macbeth_ can ever, in the hands of _any_ tragedian,
make the same mark as _Hamlet_. _Hamlet_, as far as the opportunities
for the display of the one actor are concerned, might almost have
been written by an actor’s playwright of our day, bent on securing
prominence for the ‘star.’ Macbeth claims little of our sympathy.
Most of us wonder more at his wife, and care more for Macduff. But it
is a point in Henry Irving’s art, as displayed in this play, that he
brings into such high relief all that Macbeth had of noble, or of the
remains of noble: reverence and awe; indignation at crimes that seemed
to him baser, because they were done for pettier ends, than his own;
admiration of courage in another, and of character more resolute than
his; hesitation, having gone so far, to go yet further in the taking
of innocent blood. Macbeth’s attitude before the prayer of the grooms;
his righteous satire--‘your spirits shine through you’--on the hired
murderers; his invocation to his wife; his almost tender and pitying
warning to Macduff--

   ‘But get thee back: my soul is too much charged
    With blood of thine already’--

all these things show one or other of the qualities that are good in
him. But other things, of course, showing the quite other qualities
that have given _Macbeth_ a name, are more conspicuous and abundant: at
all events are more upon the surface; and the art is great that knows
how to dwell on the sympathetic and worthy, and that in doing so does
much to modify the popular conception.

It may be true, of course, that the main thought of Irving in _Macbeth_
is to show the deterioration of character through one crime that brings
another; but such deterioration is, after all, generally a gradual
process, and there is time, while it is proceeding, to show something
of the higher nature with which the character began. I think I note
also, in Irving’s Macbeth, an added emphasis, not only on his belief
in the supernatural, but in the power of the supernatural over him.
The prophecy of the weird voices is more than ever a destiny. His
crimes are done under a spell. He is moved to them from without, by a
something not himself, making for Evil.

And the hold that this force from without, this supernatural power,
this sense of destiny, this something not himself, making for Evil, has
upon him, divides Macbeth until the very end of the action of the play,
from such as his own hired murderers. Not that these, indeed, are set
before us, by Shakespeare, as quite voluntary cut-throats, rejoicing in
their profession; but as men rendered desperate: the one

   ‘Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
    Have so incensed, that I am reckless what
    I do to spite the world’:

the other, less revengeful, yet more weary,

   ‘So weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune,
    That I would set my life on any chance,
    To mend it or be rid on ’t.’

Of course no commonly intelligent actor could fail to indicate--for the
play itself indicates it a hundred times--how much Macbeth is separated
from these, originally; but it does need some such a deep understanding
of the character as seems to be Irving’s, to indicate, as time goes on,
the gradual sinking to that level of theirs--the fact that the distance
that divided the one from the others at the time that the one would
ponder regretfully that he ‘could not say “Amen”’ when the grooms ‘said
“God bless us,”’ had shrunk to well-nigh nothing by the time when
Macbeth’s first greeting to an arriving messenger must needs, in his
desperation, be no milder than--

    ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon’--

words which recall the purposeless and exaggerated angers of impending
frenzy--and when his final and bloody resolution--

    ‘Yet I will try the last,’

is spoken to his foe with a savage hopelessness akin to the murderers’
own. And it is at least a suggestive and worthy, if not at every point
a complete; stage performance that can display the half-repenting
pathos of the first, and the savagery of the last, and the passages
from crime to crime by which the transition is accomplished.


                    (_Academy_, 23rd December 1876.)




‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’


The Independent Theatre has pleased a few, and, it is to be feared,
displeased many, by its production of Mr. Poel’s version of _The
Duchess of Malfi_. But it is the ill-advised whom on one account or
another it has now vexed; it is the wisest whom it has at last done
something to satisfy. I said ‘at last.’ That was ungrateful. For, once,
at least, before, the Independent Theatre--eschewing mere eccentricity
and the ‘experimental’ drama (a pretty word, very, for the dull or the
unseemly)--once before was it occupied with work of genius and high
literary art, or with work at all events by a writer whose genius, here
and there, is not to be gainsaid. Did it not give us, for a change,
what is at all events the lucid realism of M. Zola?

And now, after a _régime_ more or less of the experimental and
unnecessary, we have again a great man’s work. The Independent
Theatre has once more realised that to be revolutionary is not to
be sufficing. We have had a taste of Webster--Webster, it is true,
with the lime-light turned on at the appropriate moment; Webster with
a skirt-dance; Webster with a measure of scenic effect, dexterously
shocking, or dexterously entertaining, as the case may be, to the
modern taste. But still a classic--a giant in conception and writing--a
strong tower in comparison with a puny earth-work. Excellently has Mr.
Swinburne said of him, ‘There is no poet morally nobler than Webster.’
Fearlessly has Mr. Gosse asserted that _The Duchess of Malfi_ is ‘a
masterpiece excelled only by _King Lear_.’ And, if I take down my
volumes of Lamb’s _Specimens_, I find that, in a little footnote, Elia
becomes most eloquent and most descriptive when he descants upon this
play. ‘To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to
lay upon fear as much as it can bear ... this only a Webster can do.’
And again, contrasting inferior writers with this potent if imperfect
master, ‘They know not how a soul is capable of being moved; their
terrors want dignity; their affrightments are without decorum.’

But Webster, with all his qualities, had faults that were of his time,
along indeed with faults, or deficiencies, that were his own. Among
the latter I would note some absence of clearness in exposition. The
relation of character to character, the how and wherefore of the minor
events--these things are not invariably made plain: Webster himself,
perhaps, could hardly have passed creditably through a searching
examination in them. And among the faults, or accidents, if you will,
of his time, were--one need hardly say it, but that it affects his
acceptability upon the modern stage--the permitted coarseness, the
absence of reticence on matters we are not accustomed to amplify and
define; and, in mechanical arrangement, the frequent shifting from
scene to scene within the compass of a single act--a point in which no
English dramatist, as far as my remembrance carries me, went wholly
right, until the trick had been learned from the French masters of
construction of our own time.

Mr. Poel, in a version reverent and tasteful by the absence of
additions, has dealt with the deficiencies of Webster’s epoch with
judgment and tenderness. As far as it is possible to be so, the piece
is now what on the playbill it is asserted to be--‘rearranged for the
modern stage.’ And if the modern stage should turn out, after these
initial performances of the new version, not quite willing to have it,
that will be not so much on account of the irrepressible horrors--the
modern stage has no deep-seated aversion to _them_--as on account
of the limited measure of interest which that stage displays in the
achievements of Writing, in the noble dealing with almost baffling
themes, in the vigour and affluence of literary imagination and style.
The similes of Webster--pregnant, and less far-fetched than much of
the imagery of his contemporaries--are rather lost upon a public and
upon players who account inflation to be poetry and familiarity to
be wit. ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,’ is one
among a hundred lines, for instance, in which a writer of stately
simplicity--born writer, rather than playwright--requires to be heard
by those to whom the suggestive is sufficient: requires, in a word, to
be met half-way along his road. Then, again, though there are hints of
lightness, there is no touch of actual comedy. And when the tortures
so characteristic of the Italian temperament--a temperament never
more inventive than when spurred on by the motive of cruelty--when
these are tried upon the long-suffering Duchess--when crazy folk
yell in an adjoining chamber, and a hand that seems to her dead and
cold is proffered to her where she expected a live one--an audience
without imagination, without historical knowledge, versed only in the
commonplace and the cockney, titters, it may be, or becomes indifferent.

Much of Mr. Poel’s best work went into the training of an intelligent
company. His rehearsing ensured a certain smoothness and expressiveness
of general movement. Mr. Bassett Roe bore himself with dignity and
ease as the Cardinal, through whose influence--for such appears to be
Mr. Poel’s reading of the situation--the forces of the Church in its
bad period, the terrors of the Inquisition, are brought to bear upon
the ill-fated Duchess. Mr. Murray Carson, as Daniel de Bosola, filled
a great part well. Miss Mary Rorke, with a dignified presence, a rich
voice completely at her service, and an unusual sense of the simplicity
of pathos, was, as the Duchess, an interesting and satisfactory figure.
And Miss Hall Caine filled out to completeness, by her intelligence
and sunny, sympathetic style, the small part of Cariola. Some people
thought the ‘Dance of Death,’ as Mr. Arthur Dillon--a learned, helpful
student of the time--had cleverly devised it, was too horrible: it
had to me the fascination at once of the beautiful and the _macabre_.
Horrors there were in the performance, and in the piece, of necessity;
but the Independent Theatre--sometimes too little in touch with the
main-stream of English life and thought--may well permit itself to give
a piece in which Literature is burdened with horrors. Has it not more
than once indulged its supporters with things in which horrors are
unburdened with Literature?


                    (_Academy_, 29th October 1892.)




REMBRANDT


It is a bold thing to say, but yet I think it is a true one,--and the
saying is welcome to surprise the academic and conventional--that if
the painted work of Rembrandt did not exist at all, and if his drawings
were unknown, the three hundred etchings that he wrought during some
forty years of labour would assert for him, amongst all capable judges,
a claim to that place, precisely, which he is now admitted to occupy.
It is not that in saying this I would underrate for a moment the skill
of the pure colourist, the dexterity of the juggler who plays with
subtle hue, the master of the material which is applied to prepared
canvas; but that if one asks oneself, ‘What are the qualities, really,
which in any Art lead us to assign to the practitioner of it his
particular and permanent station?’ one finds shortly that one’s answer
has to be the following, or something like it: ‘The qualities are an
alert freshness and comprehensiveness of spirit, an individual vision
of the world, and the knowledge how best to wield the instrument by
which that vision is expressed.’

In the case of a writer, language is the instrument, and Sterne’s or
Molière’s perception and sensitiveness are made evident in words.
In the case of a pictorial artist, paint may be the instrument, or
water-colour, or the humble but expressive pencil--or the instrument
may be that which was Rembrandt’s more than any other’s: it may be the
needle of the etcher.

I hope that, in my enumeration of the qualities of intellect and
craftsmanship that make for excellence in creative Literature and in
pictorial Design, I have cut the ground from under the feet of those
who advocate the work of craftsmen merely--those who consider that in
_technique_ lies the end as well as the beginning of success. Even to
the most casual of the students of the Arts--to the most superficial
observer of the means whereby the several performers may produce
their effects, in story, drawing, print--it can scarcely be necessary
to say that a command of _technique_ must be demanded by the severe
and accurate judge. But the genius of a man of the first order--a
Goethe, Coleridge, Balzac, Rembrandt, Turner--is, as it seems to me,
misunderstood altogether, if the flexibility and freshness of spirit
and the originality of vision are not remembered and praised when we
praise too the excellent command of technical means. And in the case of
Rembrandt, the character and charm of whose three hundred etchings are
the theme of my discourse, the first thing to take account of is that
we have to deal not only with a conjurer of the brush and a magician
of the needle, but with a deep soul. An _âme d’élite_--that is the
true phrase for it: a being not above human faults, but above average
human excellence; a reveller in pageantry, who yet had a tender eye
for the large lines of simple landscape; an artist who, with masculine
perception of the import of material things, was alive, constantly and
keenly, also to the concerns of the spirit; a judge of character, who
understood and who dissected all that he portrayed; a man of feeling,
who rendered to the full the pathos of age, of suffering, and of
Death--who somehow rendered also, as in the wistful portrait of the
Prince of Orange, the incommunicable pathos of Youth.

Over all Rembrandt’s work, from the beginning to the end of it, as much
on canvas as in drawing, as much in drawing as in etching, there reigns
an absolute sincerity. It was himself that he expressed. Warped by
no prejudice, modified by no fashion, his art, during the generation
and a half in which he did his joyful labour--in the midst of personal
triumph, in the midst, too, of personal disaster--recorded his own
unaffected perception of the outward world and his own profound vision
of the souls and the experiences of men. To study his work, therefore,
is, if we have the wit, to have the opportunity to glean from it that
which it is open to us to glean always from the greatest Classics--the
richer harvest of a familiarity not alone with technical achievement,
but with the great, deep way of apprehending Life and the world.

From youth to age, with art delightful and supreme, Rembrandt expressed
himself in Etching. One of his first prints--the subject known to
many by Wilson’s title of it, ‘Head of a Woman lightly etched’--is
the earliest of his known portraits of his mother; and that shows
already mastery of character and mastery of line, as the lady, with the
pardonable vanity of the handsome, the pardonable self-appreciation
of one who was scarcely less a woman of the world because she was
_bourgeoise_ by station, smiles her sagacious, kindly, genial smile,
and lives with Whistler’s ‘Portrait of his Mother,’ with Holbein’s
‘Erasmus,’ with Latour’s pastels that glow sober yet vivid on the
walls of the Museum of Saint-Quentin. It is a sketch, and consummate.
His very last print--so it is generally accepted--is that ‘Woman
with the Arrow’ which, unless the place be given to the print often
called ‘_Négresse couchée_,’ is the most tolerable of his nudities.
It is not faultless in draughtsmanship; or, if it is faultless in
draughtsmanship, then how deficient was the model in perfection of
form! But, in a fine impression--and in Etching, if the impression
be not fine, the work does not exist--how alive is the figure! The
flesh, how supple! The pose--the grace of the faulty. The light, how
glowing, and the shade, how velvety! You forgive--it may be rather
that you scarcely notice--the inexplicable mixture of realism with
the classic. The side of a bed, the young thing sitting on it: Degas
might have conceived the figure thus. But it is not pure realism, for
she holds an arrow--suggests some light allegory, as much, save for
her imperfections, as some nudity of Titian’s or Tintoret’s--just that
touch of the Classic, that one remove from the actual, Rembrandt’s
tribute to an art inspired by higher thought, by fancy more elegant,
than any that it was the privilege, generally, of the art of Amsterdam
to show.

Between that early etching, the first of his mother’s portraits,
and this final one, his last record of the body, to which he has
imparted a slimmer charm than the charm that belonged unquestionably
to Hendrickje Stoffels, the young and sympathetic companion of his
later years--recorded, opulent and somewhat sensuous, in the great
Edinburgh picture,--the range of Rembrandt, in about three hundred
prints, is almost inconceivably great. Several of his plates, and these
not really the least attractive, are, like the rare sheet of studies,
with the portrait of Rembrandt himself (No. 82 in the catalogue of Mr.
Middleton-Wake), so to put it, thumb-nail sketches as he passed upon
his way and was struck and interested by this or that countenance, this
or that gesture. Many deal with Sacred Subjects, and invariably with
a directness, a homeliness, one might say almost, that is his alone.
It would have been impossible so to have conceived the incidents of
Bible Story if Rembrandt had not so profoundly believed in them. The
conventional and perfunctory are altogether banished. And though, for
reasons that the present place would not perhaps be quite the fittest
for dwelling on, the Sacred Subjects of this great Dutch master do
not attract or charm as the portraits and the landscapes do, there is
yet in them a world of material for serious study: in them invention
and imagination enrich a treatment fortified already by closeness of
observation. His mind is stored; his spirit is devout. In the ‘Death
of the Virgin’ he takes advantage of tradition--gives us therefore
not only St. Joseph moved at his loss, St. Luke with hand on wrist as
feeling the pulse of the dying, but (as Mr. Middleton-Wake reminds us)
a company of Apostles, brought miraculously, legend says, from distant
missions; and, above, are angels and cherubim. A religious composition
better known to the public, is the ‘Christ healing the Sick,’ or, as
it is called often, ‘The Hundred-Guilder Print.’ It got that latter
name because, during that portion of his life in which Rembrandt was
popular, the then substantial sum of a hundred guilders was wont to
be obtained for it, when, out of Rembrandt’s studio, an impression of
it was sold. Its intense reality and homely pathos--the qualities in
it which have influenced, so greatly, later and now living etchers,
like Legros and William Strang--gave it immediate value. And since
those days a fine impression has always had its price, though it
should be said here that the difference in money value, established
more particularly in our own generation, between a fine impression
of the most rare ‘First State’ of this plate and the less rare but
often as desirable ‘Second,’ is a fantastic difference, dependent
only upon relative difficulty of acquisition. Thank goodness, even
now a twenty-pound note will buy sometimes a most desirable Rembrandt
etching. A couple of hundred guineas is required to buy a fine
impression of the Second State of the ‘Hundred Guilder’; and of a First
State, could it come into the market, there is every reason for knowing
that two thousand pounds would be about the ransom.

In various branches of his practice, Rembrandt’s fame is about equally
dependent on picture, drawing, and original print; but I take leave
to ask the reader to impress upon his mind that in one branch, the
branch of Landscape, that is not so at all. Lord Lansdowne’s ‘Mill,’
a famous landscape at Cassel, and a few other landscapes scattered
about collections private and public, could not, however undeniable
their art and however complete their charm, secure for Rembrandt that
exalted place amongst the makers of Landscape which the drawings give,
and which is given yet more by the etchings. It may be asked, naturally
enough, ‘Why were Rembrandt’s painted landscapes so few--his mastery
being so great?’ The answer is, that like our own Gainsborough’s, a
century later, they were painted, most of them, for his own personal
delight. The painted landscape of Rembrandt could not have been
warmly appreciated by a generation that made difficult the life of
Hobbema, and that extended welcome less to Wynants and De Koninck than
to the Dutchmen who had become Italianised in theme and treatment.
How, then, about the drawings and the etchings? Well, the truth is,
with these it mattered little. The drawings were generally masterly
brief studies. In the case of the etchings even, hours, not weeks,
for the most part--a day and not a month--had been bestowed on the
performance. For Rembrandt, with at least some other sources of income,
it was enough to have had the delight of execution; and then, here
and there a friend--the Burgomaster Six perhaps, or Uytenbogaert, the
Receiver-General to the States of Holland--would want an impression
or so. There was the little sketch ‘Six’s Bridge’--a decisive,
plain-sailing, by no means particularly picturesque record of the
wooden way whose name is associated with Rembrandt’s lifelong friend.
There is the ‘Goldweigher’s Field’--his estate, rather: the estate
of Uytenbogaert, lying a few miles from Amsterdam; its pavilion and
ornamental water, the surrounding lands, the modest, heathy uplands,
the trees and towers, a bird’s-eye view, a very panorama of slightly
undulating plain that stretches to the Zuyder Zee. Of Rembrandt’s
etched landscapes--which are rare generally--this is one of the rarer,
one of the more important. Art like that does not captivate at just the
first glance at it; but, with knowledge, comes a deep appreciation of
the vision and the chronicle.

Two other landscapes I should wish to name as at least the equals
of this one, and both of them, it may be, are easier to receive,
easier for the little-trained eye to enjoy promptly. One is the
‘Large Landscape with a Cottage and Dutch Hay-barn’; the other is the
‘Landscape with a Ruined Tower.’ The first is a record of sunshine;
the second, of the more dramatic weather that threatens storm. The
first is the more intricate. Little in keeping with the fashions of our
moment, in the art of landscape, is it to present within the limits of
a single composition a view so varied and so elaborately wrought. But
Rembrandt, even more than Turner, could achieve without any loss of
unity of impression the presentation or suggestion of every fact of the
scene; and the piece remains ‘modern,’ though a Classic. The ‘Landscape
with a Ruined Tower’--broad, decisive, concentrated--is, in a sense, an
anticipation of the method of Constable: the interest lying less in
formal elegance of line or placid light than in the strong realisation
of the forces of Nature--a vivid broad illumination and an ominous
shadow, and the expression of these exalting somehow the features of
an everyday land, as emotion transfigures a face. The ‘tower,’ the
close observer may inform me--thinking of the title--is not ‘ruined’;
for here is its domed roof. Yes, but the domed roof is in the First
State only, and that is so rare that it is doubtful if it had ever been
examined by the cataloguer who bestowed upon the etching the name by
which it is still known.

Although the etched Landscape of Rembrandt, in its singular union of
simplicity and learning, in the close, uncustomary alliance of Style
with personal impression, stands well-nigh alone, and suffices as the
basis of a reputation as great as Titian’s, Claude’s, or Poussin’s--and
one which now, with only slight and temporary declension, has endured
for two hundred years--we have yet to give consideration to his triumph
in that branch of Art with which, in the mind of the average educated
person, he is more generally identified--I mean Portraiture: which
means to some the taking of superficial likeness, and to some the
revelation of character.

For this reason and that, every industrious and thoughtful, as well as
every careless, student of pictorial Art, has his own favourites in
Portraiture: there is our pride in Reynolds, our joy in Gainsborough,
our wonder at the magic of Velasquez, our steady confidence in truth
when Holbein is the draughtsman, our grave and brooding satisfaction
over the august portraiture of the Venetians. But Rembrandt unites
men’s suffrages--carries with him even those who admire most warmly
this painter’s unswerving veracity and that one’s fluent grace. And as
one thinks what was the human material which furnished elements for
the creations of Rembrandt--the old men and the women and the youths
of Amsterdam--one thinks all the more, how exalted was the vision,
and yet how firmly with his feet on earth stood the man to whom it
was vouchsafed! Over and over again, the needle, as the brush, of
Rembrandt, has been occupied with a face which had no beauty--at all
events no formal beauty--that we should desire him. He has given it
interest and dignity--dignity without a touch of the artificial or
pretentious; the dignity of the individual soul in its best hours.
He did this more or less at all times, but he did it more markedly
in his later time than in his earlier; for, wonderful as was the
completeness of Rembrandt’s art within its self-set limits in even his
earliest time, he had, in common with most of the greatest of creative
and critical intellects, that gift of long development, of steady
progression. Rembrandt was no juvenile prodigy. As time passed, as
experience gathered, as misfortunes saddened--at all events in certain
lonely hours--the spirit of a man of whom upon the whole indeed it may
be said, he

                              ‘rose distinct
    Above slave-sorrows, to his chariot linked,’

Rembrandt’s command of the instruments of his employment became only
more complete, if also his method was more summary. More and more
sonorous were the notes he uttered, and the _vox humana_ stop, which is
absent in colder craftsmen, sounded with increased frequency and more
assured appeal.

Of course in Portraiture, though he succeeds always, he succeeds
best when his themes are the best. With the exception of ‘Clément de
Jonghe,’ with the exception of ‘Lutma,’ with the exception perhaps of
‘Jan Six’--etched by him many years before he wrought the noble painted
portrait which is owned still by a descendant of its sitter (Mr. Six
van Hillegom of Amsterdam)--Rembrandt is most profoundly interesting,
most penetrating, most sympathetic, when it is this or that member
of his own family who serves as his model. Once or twice at least he
portrayed the features of his son; several times those of his mother,
whom in the ‘Mère de Rembrandt au voile noir’ he records in an hour
of austere and guarded meditation, as in the ‘Head of a Woman lightly
etched’ he records her in the relaxation of social ease. Many times, in
drawing, print, and picture, he portrayed his wife, Saskia--in moods
that seemed to vary with his own: now perched upon his knee, in the
Dresden canvas of almost aggressive buoyancy and self-satisfaction; now
demure and pretty, in a Berlin drawing; now radiant and almost stately
in the ‘Great Jewish Bride,’ so it is said--though I find least witness
of her here--now the healthy, blameless animal of Mrs. Joseph’s golden
canvas; now the sick, worn woman, with vitality gone, eye dimmed, life
surely ebbing, of the lovely and pathetic little etching which Sir
Seymour Haden was, I think, the first to christen ‘The Dying Saskia.’

But oftener than he depicted any member of his family--and oftener much
than he thought fit to give expression to the cordial youthful face and
ample contours of Hendrickje Stoffels, the agreeable consolation of
his age--he had recourse to his own countenance. In the great series
of what the Germans call ‘self-portraits’ we may trace the changes in
his air from spirited youth to burdened years. To-day he is comely,
clean, and fit. To-morrow, after a night of revelry, it may be--for
from few human experiences did Rembrandt, any more than Goethe, stand
aside--he is haggard and ‘to pieces.’ Then he is proud in cap and
feather; he buckles on his sword. Or, aged a little, he paints himself
in loose gown, palette in hand, it may be, and mahl-stick at his side.
Then, heavy and stooping, baggy below the eyes, with mouth tender yet
saddened, trouble has come upon him from all the ends of the earth.
He totters, scarcely yet irresolute, but weighed down certainly by
years and sorrows; his wife long gone; his fame obscured; his means
narrow; and, save for the sustaining power of his art, and one hopes,
at least, for the consolation of one deep affection, anxiety in all his
hours. We will not leave him like this--though like this we find him
in Lord Iveagh’s immortal picture, and in one or two representations
of kindred character in Vienna and at St. Petersburg. We will leave
him happy in his drawing. It is an etching of scarcely surpassable
interest, existing in many ‘States’--a print to be avoided in the
later, which are flat and expressionless; to be cherished in all the
earlier, of which the first is rarest and most vigorous. See its
slashing directness. With blow to left and blow to right, so to say it,
on the copper, he hacks his way triumphantly and speedily to his goal.
He is the master of all methods. Here, as in so much besides, he has
been broad and rapid. In the ‘Burgomaster Six’--which has something of
the quality of a mezzotint--how tender and how slow! In the ‘Clément de
Jonghe’--the printseller of Amsterdam--how large yet subtle! He is the
master of many an instrument. We can apply to him the phrase, and the
implied eulogy, of Robert Browning--he ‘blows through brass,’ but he
can ‘breathe through silver.’


                 (_Pall Mall Magazine_, December 1898.)




DUTCH SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DRAWINGS


The drawings, the studies, of the Italian Schools, and of all Schools
besides, have these sources of interest, always admitted--they reveal
to us, as studies must, the personal thought of the master in his
theme, and they may often be identified as preparations for some long
recognised picture with whose history we are henceforth to be the
better acquainted. But some among the drawings of the Dutch School,
though coming late indeed in the procession of the world’s Art, are
still the earliest to possess for us that different and self-contained
interest which belongs to work done for its proper sake, itself
realising the intention with which it was begun, and so, in the first
form in which it comes down to us, at once final and complete.

The School of Holland--that northern School to which at last, in the
great Seventeenth Century, supremacy in Art had moved--was perhaps the
first to adequately feel the value of those immediate impressions
which the Italians and the early Flemish had recognised chiefly to
control, to alter, to enlarge. And in the many methods of their Art,
the masters of Holland sought to perpetuate for the beholders of their
work the impressions which to themselves who recorded them had perhaps
been as fleeting as vivid. Sketches in oil, sketches in water-colour,
sketches in chalk, in bistre, and with the reed pen, and sketches with
the etching needle--these all, in the hands of the great Dutchmen,
were not merely studies for themselves, but possessions for their
public, just as expressive and interesting as work more prolonged and
elaborate. Therefore the amount of finish which each of such finished
sketches received was not the important matter: with the greatest
artists the amount was often but small: they knew that the important
matter was the sufficiency of finish--its capacity for conveying to one
mind the impression received by another.

And it is characteristic of Dutch Art, and especially of Dutch
Landscape Art, that it had no period of painful and tentative labour,
like that during which the art of earlier schools had had to struggle
slowly towards freedom of expression. Profiting no doubt by the
experience of the Past, and the recent Past especially of Bruges
and of Leyden, it gained almost at once the power of finish always
expressive, always economical, yet often very swift and summary.
The work of its earliest masters--Roghman say, and Van Goyen--has
neither pettiness of manipulation when it is most delicate, nor
uncertainty when it is most rapid. The signs of an art mature and
masculine--economy of means, decision of hand--are promptly upon it.
Roghman, it appears, made few pictures, but many drawings. There are
five-and-twenty in the Museum of Rotterdam alone. His drawings must
have been acceptable to the public of his day, and they show that a
public then existed capable of the intelligent interpretation of the
work of an artist who left much to be interpreted. Van Goyen, if he
did not make many drawings, painted many pictures with at least as
marked an economy of means as he has used in the few drawings we know.
His science of large design and the expressive completeness of his
gradations of tone, enabled him--often in picture and drawing alike--to
dispense with the easier attraction of various colour, so that even a
modern master of colour, Théodore Rousseau, was wont to hold him up as
a model to his own pupils.

Van Goyen travelled, and Roghman travelled, but their art, like that
of Rembrandt--their younger and greater contemporary, who remained at
home--continued to be not an imported art, but an art of the soil;
and it was only at a later period that the experience of travel, and
the contact with an art very different from their own, were to bring
to the Dutchmen a new method with a false ideal. There was first the
true Dutch time, rich and fertile--a time in which Van Goyen painted,
with a seeming monotony always delicately varied, the long river banks,
the low-lying towns, and the great high skies of Holland; in which
Cuyp fixed interest on the common aspects of the afternoon fields,
steaming in moist sunshine; in which Adrian van Ostade passed from
the vulgarities of the alehouse to the skilfully rendered charm of
the cottage door and the bench in the sunlight; in which Jan Steen
perfected himself in as keen and comprehensive a knowledge of the world
of men as Art has ever displayed; and in which Rembrandt contentedly
imaged Dutch life and landscape, always with nearly equal vigour,
nearly equal artistic precision, though at one time in a style that
formed the style of Gerard Dow and at another in one that was inherited
by Philip de Koningh or by Nicholas Maas.

There were various local centres for these various workers and their
works. Leyden itself was a centre--the birthplace of Rembrandt, the
birthplace of Van Goyen. The Hague became a centre, and Van Goyen
removed to it; Amsterdam a centre, and Rembrandt was a leader there.
But Haarlem was the favourite, and probably because of the privileges
that belonged to the Guild of St. Luke--St. Luke, the painters’
patron saint--which was established in that town. The Guild of St.
Luke at Haarlem has left us valuable records--not indeed the raciest,
but certainly among the most trustworthy we can hope to have access
to--upon Dutch Art, which has wanted always, and wants to-day, a
trustworthy general historian. Laurens Van der Winne (as the Dutch
writer, M. van der Willigen, tells us, in his _Artistes d’Harlem_),
towards the end of the seventeenth century, made a list of one hundred
and seventy-four men who in his time were all reputed as good painters,
and whom he had personally known. His son, in 1702, after the father’s
death, noted that of these only sixteen were then living; and the
grandson, possessing himself of manuscript books and account-books of
the period, was able to enlarge the list of early members of the Guild,
and to add to our knowledge of its laws. ‘No one without the pale of
the Society could sell or introduce his pictures. Many painters thus
found themselves obliged to join the brotherhood in order to enjoy its
advantages. Every year two sales were announced by the officer of
the Society; each member could bring to the sale whatever he desired
to sell.’ ‘Many painters were attracted to the town,’ for lesser or
longer periods; but, though many painters contributed to the Guild,
‘it appears,’ writes the Haarlem citizen, ‘that they did not all live
here.’ Notwithstanding the advantages of the Guild, the profession of
painting was not lucrative for the many. Even the busiest and most
prolific artists, like Wouvermans, were debtors sometimes to men who
befriended them. Others were so indigent that they must needs be
excused their payment of the yearly moneys to the brotherhood. In 1661,
Frans Hals, the greatest of the Haarlem masters, found himself in this
circumstance. Haarlem, since his death, has happily delighted to honour
him.

The art of Holland, like the national life, saw many vicissitudes
during that eventful Seventeenth Century; and the second half of the
century brought changes of taste and fashion, which cast for a while
into the shade even such supreme art as the art of Rembrandt. Leaders
of social opinion were not proof against the attractions of the work of
Both and Berghem, which sacrificed so much that it might gain, as it
did gain, the outland charm of southern colour and southern light; and
the friend of Rembrandt, Jan Six, as one of many, showed himself in the
later years of the century a convert to that newer and brilliant but
bastard art. By the time that Cuyp and Wynants had died old and Adrian
Van de Velde had died young--when the seventeenth century was entering
its fourth quarter--there remained among the home-bred landscape
painters hardly one to hold his own against the newer fashion. Hobbema,
it is true, worked on, with great and patient fidelity, but he worked
unregarded and died poor.

And in other branches of Art, after this time, the school declined.
William Van de Velde and Backhuysen--the two great painters of the sea
and the fleet--had had a worthy precursor in Renier Zeeman, but they
had no worthy successors. The best painters of gentle life and of the
life of the tavern were falling away. In the comparatively humble but
yet delightful field of ‘still life,’ only, could the early years of
the Eighteenth Century surpass the achievements of fifty years before.
The admired painter of flowers, Jan Van Huysum--whose drawings are
seen in large numbers at the British Museum, and whose work is known,
perhaps, at its best and boldest in his drawings--then arose. He was
one of a whole family of flower and fruit painters; and not the only
one who gave some excuse for the ecstasy of a French novelist who was
also a connoisseur. Balzac declared of him that his work would hardly
be paid for if it were covered with diamonds. But Michael, his kinsman,
was perhaps almost as worthy of that praise. To their work succeeded,
far on in the Eighteenth Century, the vulgar mimicry of Van Os, with
the colours of the chromo-lithograph. And as to Landscape Art--that,
free once more from Italian influence, was indeed natural and Dutch
again in its aim, with Van Stry especially; but in its practice it
insisted rather upon the importance of detail than upon the value of
effect. Jacob Cats carried to its last length the trivial elaboration
which had become the fashion of his day. The virtue had gone out of
Dutch Art, and Dutch Art faded imperceptibly into modern painting.

It was one of the characteristics of the great men of the Renaissance,
that they tried many arts and were masters of many. It was one of the
characteristics of the Seventeenth Century Dutchmen, that they tried
many branches of Art, and were masters of all that they tried. Supreme
in technicalities of painting and in technicalities of etching, they
were the first to use with any large effect the medium of water-colour,
and their use of that, in a manner not tentative and occasional, like
Dürer’s, but often familiar and accomplished as our own (of our great
last generation), is shown by many drawings. Coloured sketches assigned
to Rembrandt, doubtless on good foundation, are in the collections
of the British Museum and of M. J. De Vos, a veteran collector at
Amsterdam; and on our Burlington Club walls--not to speak of the
wonderful pen drawings, so decisive at once and free--is a sketch of
a city gate, from the collection of Seymour Haden, a sketch in which
line counts for little, and the effect is sought and gained by tender
gradations of tinting in monochrome. Probably of the same period are
the two drawings in which Philip De Koningh, who in landscape came
nearest to Rembrandt, has used his orange-browns with subtle variation,
to portray his wonted effects of infinite distance.

Colour, or it may be a wash of sepia, used by Rembrandt and by De
Koningh chiefly to suggest distance or tone, is used by Berghem more
often to suggest the pleasantness and warmth of sunlight, which were
so precious to him, and were the charm of his art. His artificial but
agreeable landscape of ordered valley and well-disposed mountain and
happy peasant of the opera, is represented notably by one of the many
splendid drawings belonging to Malcolm of Poltalloch--a delicately
coloured design, airy and sunny almost as De Koningh’s best paintings,
and to be noticed, not only for the extreme rarity of such work
in water-colour at that time and by that master, but also for its
foretaste of the subtlety with which our own great art of water-colour
learned, so many generations afterwards, to reach atmospheric effects.

But it was in the painting of interiors that the resources of the
art of water-colour were used most fully by the Dutchmen, and they
were used only most fully in the old age of Berghem, and after the
death of Rembrandt, when Adrian van Ostade, himself now old, had come
from Haarlem to Amsterdam, and they were used best by that master of
ignoble conception and often repulsive work. The special virtues of
Ostade--accomplished management of light and shade, and faultless
composition of mean subjects--an instinct, that is, for the spacing
out, the perfectly balanced filling, the never crowding, of his given
area of paper or canvas--have long ago been acknowledged; and his
sense of beauty in colour and beauty in grouping, and beauty indeed
sometimes in line, in inanimate things, has gone far to atone for that
vulgar indifference to charm of figure and face, common indeed to many
of the Dutchmen, but Ostade’s to an exceptional degree. Drawings of
Mr. Malcolm’s and Mr. Cook’s show him, once for all, the consummate
practitioner of a branch of art, the precedence in which--the invention
of which, almost--our own country has liked to claim. Rich and mellow,
tender and luminous, beyond all that has thus far been acknowledged,
was the best work of Ostade in his old age, in the English art of
water-colour. Dusart followed him in elaboration of work, but not at
all in felicitous adaptation of the means to the end.

There are naturally certain masters rightly famed for their work in
oil painting, who are seen at a disadvantage in drawings, whether by
pen or chalk or washes of colour. It is not all who gave to their
smaller designs, with whatever purpose of immediate sale, completion
so brilliant and expressive as that which we see, for instance, in a
little red chalk drawing of Wouvermans--a group of figures, horses
and dogs--a sharply finished work, exquisite in its possession of
every quality for which the master may be praised. Again, some men
dependent on glow of colour or gradations of tone beyond the art of
limited material, or at least beyond their command of it--Cuyp, for
instance--might be judged hardly by drawings. The pleasantness of Cuyp
is not in his drawings.

And then there are the great masters of one generation, who have not
been great masters at all in another: their excellence, seen late,
escaped the appreciation of their contemporaries or of their immediate
successors. Fashions in art change, and Van der Heist, exalted by Sir
Joshua above Rembrandt, drops later to his proper place. Each age, we
may be sure, has something right in its criticism: the great Sir Joshua
himself, who thought that ‘Bruges afforded but scanty entertainment
to a painter,’--Bruges, with its masterpieces of the sacred art of
Memling--had the keenness to see the style and the beauty under the
orgies of Jan Steen. But to this inevitable variation and inconstancy
of taste is due, alas! much permanent loss--things that were treasures
once being now not to be guarded, or things of no account until now,
being treasures for to-day. And the loss is felt most surely in the
case of drawings--so short a period of neglect being enough to destroy
them. It may be that certain artists unrepresented in collections,
or represented inadequately, drew very little. All did not multiply
studies with the fertility of William Van de Velde; but all must have
drawn, and the work of some is missing to us. The flying sheets of
long unvalued artists, on which Hobbema pencilled the forms of many
trees, with a patient precision which in modern art only Crome has
equalled--on which Wynants drew his narrow path, wandering over the
sandhills or by the side of the farm--on which Jan Steen caught the
rare girl’s prettiness and the last subtleties of vivacious gesture--on
which De Hooch or Metsu drew tenderly faces of grave quietude, absorbed
in daily and common occupation--these flying sheets, one fears, were
dust and refuse two hundred years ago.


       (_Introduction to Burlington Club Catalogue_, April 1878.)




VELASQUEZ AT THE NEW GALLERY


A collection of Spanish Art at the New Gallery contains such
representation as it has been possible to acquire of Murillo, Ribera,
and Zurbaran--and even of the artists of our own century: Goya,
Madrazo, Fortuny--but nothing that vies for a moment in attractiveness
and vitality with the work of Velasquez. Unfortunately, it does not
include two of the most important of those canvases of Velasquez which
have a resting-place in England--Mr. Bankes’s priceless ‘document’
(for it is that and something besides), the first study, we mean, at
Kingston Lacy, for the great Madrid picture of ‘Las Meninas,’ and
the yet more important, because the even more exceptional and more
perfected picture, the astonishing ‘Venus,’ whose home for many years
has been at a small country house upon the borders of two counties
in the North. The sketch--the oil sketch, for Velasquez never made
preparatory drawings--the sketch of ‘Las Meninas’ would have recalled
appropriately the composition, and conveyed something of the character
of a mature masterpiece whose actual presence can never be looked for
here; and the recumbent ‘Venus’ would have shown an almost austere
artist winning for once an easy triumph in the treatment of a luxurious
theme, more properly, or more habitually, Titian’s. But, as it is,
the representation of Velasquez, in Regent Street, affords ground
for study. We could wish, for our own part, that decorative, even
symmetrical, arrangement had been discarded, and that the master’s
works, as far as they are here, had been seen close together, with no
distracting juxtaposition of paintings of a secondary rank. To have
ranged the Velasquez canvases in order of date would have been at least
to have facilitated reference and to have assisted observation.

Nothing, perhaps, is earlier, among the canvases of Velasquez now
shown, than the large, somewhat straggling picture--with perfect
composition yet to learn--of a ‘Peasant Boy Feeding Fowls.’ It comes
from Ireland, and is lent by Lady Gregory. It does not, in every
particular, want breadth of treatment: it is broader in treatment,
indeed, than some things which may presumably have been painted not
very long after it. The vigour of perception, the realistic outlook
upon life, the point of view, in fact, is hardly less characteristic
than in work avowedly mature; yet, to pass on from it to painting
of the first Madrid, rather than of the Seville, period, is to move
into the presence of a much greater accomplishment. Before taking
another step, however, it may be well to glance at one picture like
it in subject, and, it is scarcely too much to say, even richer in
handling--a picture not Velasquez’s at all, yet a link in the chain
of his history, for it is the work of his first master, whose harsh
temper drove the youth from his painting-room--Herrera el Viejo: it is
a broad and finely treated representation of a bird upon the wing--‘A
Partridge.’ This is one among the many interesting loans of Sir Clare
Ford, whose opportunities of study have been exceptional, and whose
devotion to Velasquez himself is indeed hereditary.

The Duke of Wellington is the owner of what seems to be the first
picture by Velasquez of whose history there is authentic record.
We saw it at the Royal Academy, one winter, in bygone years. It is
called the ‘Water-Carrier,’ or ‘El Corno, Aquador de Sevilla,’ and it
represents, with a force and luminousness already extraordinary, a
man in tattered brown doublet, bearing in one hand the large earthen
jar, and, with the other, tendering a glass of water to a boy standing
beside a table. It is recorded in the inventory of Buen Retiro, all
but two hundred years ago. Since then its fortunes have been various.
The picture figured amongst the _impedimenta_ of Joseph Bonaparte in
his flight from Madrid, but at the rout of Vittoria it was captured
from his carriage, and Ferdinand VII. afterwards gave it to the Great
Duke. Sir Charles Robinson contributes an illustration of the story
of Jael and Sisera, painted, possibly, about 1623--a composition in
which, it is said, there is to be discerned a portrait of the Conde
Duque Olivarez (who at that period summoned Velasquez to Madrid), and a
posthumous portrait of the Duke of Alva; and it is suggested that there
may be in this canvas an allegorical reference to the assassination of
William the Silent. Two figures are in armour. At Madrid, we believe,
there are three suits of armour of the Duke of Alva’s--there are ten of
Charles the Fifth’s. A typical group of the earlier work of the master
may be said almost to end with the presentment of the veteran ‘Spanish
Beggar,’ belonging to Sir Francis Cook, and, as it would seem, somewhat
unnecessarily questioned by such an industrious authority as Justi,
who considers that it is the work of a Fleming. Not even the most
audacious of assailants has ventured to throw doubt upon the portrait
of ‘Quevedo’--a head and shoulders, black and deep brown-grey--the poet
wearing conspicuously those thick and dark-rimmed glasses which, by
reason of too assiduous study, he is reported never for a moment after
middle life to have been able to dispense with.

With Mr. Huth’s portrait of Philip the Fourth, a full-length, life-size
figure, and with the portrait of Don Balthasar, the eldest son of
a monarch who would appear to have spent an appreciable portion of
his lifetime in the painting-room of Velasquez, the artist reaches
the hill-top--a summit, fortunately, from which, even to the end of
his days, he was not destined to descend. The ‘Don Balthasar’ is
the possession of the Duke of Westminster. It shows the child in
a costume enriched with gold and silver, mounted upon a prancing
pony, in the courtyard of the palace; and finely painted as the face
is, the picture, as a whole, illustrates the justice of Mr. R. M.
Stevenson’s contention that in the outdoor full-length portraits, in
which _ensemble_, and atmosphere, realised background even, a sense of
the presence of the actual world, must needs count for so much, there
is not to be looked for that searching and intimate treatment of
the visage which Velasquez reserved in the main for works which were
studies of the head alone.

And if the Duke of Westminster’s ‘Don Balthasar’ (not to speak of
the Queen’s well-known and splendid representation of the boy)
illustrates this--a subordination of the personal portrayal to the
general effect--so the very perfection of the study of individuality
is evidenced in one or two of the portraits of Philip’s second wife,
Mariana of Austria, and in that unsurpassable achievement, the Duke of
Wellington’s half-length, or head and shoulders, of Innocent the Tenth.
It is probable that in more than one of the portraits of Mariana--those
in which she is depicted at full-length--much of the painting of her
raiment is due to the hand of some pupil of the master’s. But by
Velasquez wholly, as we should surmise, is Sir Francis Cook’s bust of
the little lady, and this is the earliest of her portraits here, and is
succeeded by Mr. Cuthbert Quilter’s three-quarters length, and by Sir
Clare Ford’s extraordinarily fresh and vigorous and thorough rendering
of the girl in much the same manner. Greatest of all, perhaps, for
colour, character, and--there is no other word for it--‘modernness,’
or actuality, is the ‘Innocent the Tenth.’ It belongs to the Duke of
Wellington. Seven years ago we paid it, at the Old Masters, our tribute
of homage. It is one of several treatments of the same dignitary,
wrought by Velasquez after that voyage to Italy in which the artist
had Spinola for companion. But it is one of the most genuine and one
of the most intact; and perhaps it is but by an error of phrase that
it is described as a ‘repetition’ of the picture at the Hermitage. In
it, at all events, the finest qualities of masculine portraiture are
combined and displayed. It is said that the key to human expression
is most of all at the corners of the mouth. Charged with the love of
life, the love of its good things, and the love of domination, is this
mouth of Innocent’s. But is his eye less revealing?--wary, here, and
shrewd; watchful, yet full of fire. What a study of character, and what
a triumph of brush-work! A noble ‘Philip the Fourth,’ harmonious in
silver and rose-red, from the Dulwich Gallery, sets forth, certainly
not better than this does, the greatness of Velasquez’ mission, nor has
it quite as fully as this the pre-eminent decisiveness which is so much
of his charm.


                   (_Standard_, 30th December 1895.)




FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PAINTING


There is plenty of variety in the Exhibition which the Academy proffers
to the Londoner this winter; and that was desirable--we may almost
say, necessary--for the Old Masters proper--such of them as are
shown--have not nearly the attractiveness and importance that have been
customary. This, under the circumstances, is scarcely to be wondered
at, for while of the Venetian painting there is but the most doubtful
or the scantiest trace, the great Dutch and Flemish Masters of the
Seventeenth Century are altogether unrepresented. Rembrandt and Rubens,
Hobbema and Snyders, De Hooch and Nicholas Maas, are as if they were
not. The Second Room, in which they are wont to be gathered together,
makes not a sign of them; and the Third or Great Gallery contains a
not quite happy or well-balanced representation of the masters of the
larger canvas, although we note already one exceptional Claude, one
faultless Vandyke, and one superb Velasquez. Even the First Room, which
is exclusively English, is not so attractive as it has sometimes been;
though here and there a late Turner or an early Cotman, a Hogarth
‘conversation piece,’ vivacious and sterling, or a William Dobson
portrait, honest at least and capable, asserts unmistakably the hand of
a master. Much of the interest is concentrated upon the newer occupants
of the Second Room. Most of them are clever, but many hopelessly
incompatible.

This Second Room is given over to the French of two periods. But what
have the French of the Eighteenth Century in common with the French
of the Nineteenth? They have not even a tradition--they have only a
name. In England, as you pass from Richard Wilson to Turner, from
Hogarth to the elder Leslie, from Reynolds and Romney, even to Etty
and James Ward, the break of continuity is never complete; the elders
were in a certain sense the ancestors of the younger men. But in France
the incomparable grace of Watteau found no reflection of itself in
the powerful brutality of Delacroix. Imagine Corot as the successor
of Boucher--or Millet’s vision of the peasantry succeeding to the
suave dream of Prud’hon. Yet it is with these juxtapositions of the
essentially incompatible--with this momentary joining together of those
whom Heaven (or, indeed, the peculiarity of their different genius) has
put asunder--that we are face to face at Burlington House. Yet, even as
it is, there may be a certain interest in the comparison; and if it is
made fairly, the result will be an enhanced appreciation of those great
masters of the Eighteenth Century, who were French in spirit as well as
in name. Briefly and slightly we will speak of these, and these almost
alone.

As the authorities of the National Gallery have never yet been so
fortunate as to possess a Watteau, it is well for the nation that we
have, at Dulwich, one beautiful and unexceptionable example of his
art, and it is well too that that picture is now at Burlington House.
This is the canvas known as a ‘Ball under a Colonnade’--the scene an
arcade overlooking a garden; a lady and gentleman dancing a minuet in
the foreground, and, to right and to left of them, groups of gay, happy
people, disposed with Watteau’s naturalness and Watteau’s consummate
skill. The condition of the picture is faultless, but this--with the
great master of Valenciennes--is scarcely rare. Watteau’s method was
not a method of experiment; his technique was as sound as his spirit
was vivacious. What is more remarkable--what would be remarkable
anywhere--is the perfection of accomplished workmanship, the carrying
out to the end, with all the vividness of a sketch, of a conception
definite and elaborate from the beginning. The colouring comes as an
inheritance from the Venetian--as Watteau’s adaptation of the palette
of the supreme decorators. There are many canvases by the master spirit
of the French Eighteenth Century larger of touch than this one; there
are few more happily intricate or truer to the graceful side of life,
in a world finely imagined as well as finely seen.

Next to this admirable picture, which only the Louvre, or Edinburgh,
or, it may be, Potsdam, can surpass, hangs a beautiful and interesting
work, avowedly by the pupil with whom Watteau was once angered, but
with whom in his declining days he was generously reconciled, calling
him to him, and imparting to him, as a final gift, what he could of
the secrets of his art. To Mr. Alfred de Rothschild belongs ‘The
Pleasure Barge,’ a work in which the foreground figures are on a larger
scale than in the Watteau, and in which the handling is neat and
obviously careful, even while it is broad. If Pater himself had been
the inventor of the _genre_, or even, perhaps, if he had practised
it in any fashion recognisably his own, this piece of delicate and
painter-like work--which, as it is, no one with any true appreciation
of the graceful can possibly dispraise--would have had a higher rank.
As it is, we recognise the dexterous handiwork, the pupil’s strangely
complete reception of his master’s spirit; but feel, at the same
moment, that Pater is an echo rather than a voice--that his talent
glowed only at the fire that Watteau lit.

Lord Rosebery is the possessor of a portrait of Robespierre, by Jean
Baptiste Greuze. It is a direct, good portrait; very sound, and only
perhaps a little nattering; the ‘sea-greenness’ of the revolutionary,
having, it may be, been apparent but to the imagination of Carlyle.
A second Greuze, highly and daintily finished, and so appropriately
small in scale, is the ‘À Vous’ of Mr. Clementi Smith, an interior,
with three friendly figures, and the glass genially passing. Thus,
though in both cases Greuze is represented creditably, in neither
is he represented by the kind of picture which in our own day is
associated with his name--in neither is there the too seductive or
too adroitly planned presentation of womanhood with its lines refined
to the slenderness of the child, or the child with, too early upon
her, and too consciously and evidently, the contours of the woman.
Fragonard’s ‘Letter,’ belonging to Lady Wallace, is an engraved
picture, small and of undoubted quality--the ‘Lettre d’Amour,’ it
should be called, properly--that is indeed its name in the print--for
the impulsiveness of the scribe, the earnestness of her glance, the
fire of her action, are due to no urgency of everyday business, but to
the ecstasy of love. Small as the thing is, in its touch and spirit we
recognise the southern temperament of sunshine and storm, and remember
that Provence was the land of Fragonard’s birth, and that of its
half-Italian landscape he has been till now one of the most sympathetic
of depictors. From the same gallery--from Lady Wallace’s--we might
conceivably have had the loan of a more important Fragonard,
‘L’Escarpolette.’ To Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild belongs the
life-size portrait of Madame de Pompadour, seen somewhat from below,
lounging upon a sofa, and dressed in the colours whose particular
combination Boucher so much affected--sky blue and rose. The picture
has little restfulness, and not too much of character--the mistress
rather than the dilettante, was it, perhaps, at the moment, the
courtier’s business to paint. It is in a high key, yet not precisely
garish; a clever _tour de force_, agreeable, gay.

Two interesting, since somewhat unusual, examples of Prud’hon come
from Hertford House; one of them, a little nude boy inadequately
described as ‘Le Zéphyr,’ a work in which a master of tender sentiment,
and graceful, even if somewhat monotonous, design, betrays some debt
to Correggio; the other the singular allegory of ‘The Triumph of
Bonaparte’--Napoleon surrounded by female figures and by Cupids in a
triumphal car--a picture in which Prud’hon shows something, indeed, of
himself, and much of his obligation to the Greeks. It is a work more
characteristic than the first, and less ambitious than the second; but
it is in his simple designs most of all that we can discern best the
real Prud’hon, with just a touch of a Classicism never austere, and a
world of tenderness never actually effeminate.

In the ‘Odalisque,’ a sketch of an Oriental nudity, we see for once
that which is rather surprising in work of Ingres’s--a picture, that
is, in which, at the stage now reached, the colour is better than the
design, if it is not better than the draughtsmanship. The curved line
of the right arm repeats, surely, only awkwardly the curve of the
wide-hipped figure; and in the left arm, and in the modelling of some
portions of the trunk, there is little indication of the ‘correctness
of form’ which, to borrow Gautier’s phrase, was, at least with Ingres,
‘virtue.’ We are glad, of course, to see any canvas of Ingres’s at
Burlington House, because it is a sight vouchsafed but seldom, and
again, because Ingres is a master in whose labours there is, alike in
France and England, some right revival of interest. But it would have
been well had it been possible to represent him, not semi-romantic and
luxurious, limp in line, impoverished of colour, but rather, as in ‘The
Apotheosis of Homer,’ august of conception, or, as in ‘The Source,’
refined and exquisite of form.


                    (_Standard_, 4th January 1896.)




CHARDIN


Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin--a man of the _bourgeoisie_, as original
as Hogarth--was born on the 2nd November 1699. It was in Paris, in the
quarter of St. Sulpice, in the trading quarter where shopkeepers and
skilled artisans wait on the wants of the neighbouring Faubourg St.
Germain. He was of humble, decent parentage, as befitted the place;
and he had for godmother, when he was christened, one Anne Bourgine,
wife of Jacques Riche, who declared herself unable to sign her name
in attestation of the event. Chardin’s father was a cabinet-maker; a
dexterous craftsman, with a speciality which, along with such honour
as it afforded, he passed on to one of his sons. He made, as Chardin’s
best biographer has told us, ‘ces billards monumentaux dont une planche
de Bonnart nous a gardé le dessin,’ and he made them for the King. But
though he worked successfully and well, the burden of a family weighed
on his fortunes, and his thought about his children was chiefly that
they might find means of support. Chardin was given little education,
and he was to have followed his father’s trade, but he showed, in his
quite early youth, enough of promise as a painter for it to be held
reasonable that he should enter M. Cazes’ painting-room. Cazes was not
at this time an unknown artist, but Chardin learned almost nothing
from him. The inventor of a _genre_, Chardin must needs be his own
best teacher. Time and his own individuality alone could allow him his
sturdy facility of touch. Only in working for himself could he acquire
the schemes of colour, the tones, the delicate justice of expression,
for which we admire him to-day. And if he was already independent of
a master in the selection of his method, still more his own was his
choice of the world which he observed to record.

That world, of which Chardin has given us so veracious yet so poetic a
chronicle, was indeed the world of his daily life. His art concerned
itself with the familiar pursuits of the lower middle class, homely
because it was bound to be frugal, but refined because it was French.
The grosser manners which reflected accurately--as manner is wont
to do--the duller thoughts of our English lower middle class of a
hundred years since, would never have afforded to an artist who
desired inspiration from that class alone, such an opportunity as
was offered to Chardin by the lower _bourgeoisie_ of France. The
ruder civilisation of the London of that period provoked from English
art no such exquisite transcript. And had it come, it could hardly
have been welcomed, for in the two countries the taste of the day
was different--the one was finer than the other. A similarity in
coarseness, in imaginative Literature--the unquestioned grossness
of Rétif de la Bretonne, placed by the side of the grossness of
Smollett--may seem to deny it. But pictorial art makes the contrast
evident. In France it was possible not only for Chardin to exist, but
for him to be valued.

In a life that was eighty years long--a life mainly calm, and filled
with peaceful work--Chardin was of course able to accomplish much,
and to labour with variety; but whatever may have been his great
successes in other departments of Art than that of _genre_ painting,
it is by his mastery and originality in that that he may be expected
most to interest us. It was to that that he chiefly devoted the
middle years of his career. Other successes established his fame;
other successes came happily to its support, long afterwards, when he
was failing. We do not note, indeed, in Chardin, rapid transitions,
sudden transformations--the one occupation was apt to overlap the
other--but until we are to look into his course in great detail it may
be accepted as roughly true that it was first still-life that engrossed
him, then scenes of the domestic interior, and then, in the late days,
portraiture. Of the two first, he was a painter in oil. For the third
he employed pastel.

That, putting it briefly, was the course of his work. What was the
course of his life apart from work?--the course, I mean, of that second
life of the artist in painting or literature which is separate from
his production, yet must affect it so much? How about the people who
were nearest to him?--those whose society gave him his pleasure or
withheld it? Chardin was twice married. While he was still engaged in
the struggles of his youth, before his position was assured, he met a
young girl, Marguerite Saintar, at some modest merrymaking, where his
parents had planned that he should find her. Whether or not he knew
of their aims, his own wishes seemed to have been at one with theirs.
He liked Marguerite Saintar, who liked him in return. The attachment
appears indeed to have been so mutual that in their loves there was no
place for the proverb of the ‘one who kisses’ and ‘the other who holds
out the cheek.’

In 1728, Chardin being twenty-nine, he was received into the Academy,
and by 1731 he was permitted to marry the young woman to whom he was
devoted. She was still but twenty-two, but in the few years that they
had waited, their positions had a good deal changed. Chardin had won a
reputation to which already a certain modest money value was attached,
and the girl had lost her small fortune. The painter’s father was now
opposed to the marriage, but his objections were overcome. The couple
were wedded for but four years. Their only child, a son, remained to
Chardin, when his wife died, after a time of union troubled as to
outward matters, and which, in the wife’s declining health, it must
have needed either satisfied love or a happy temperament to make even
fairly bright. Chardin’s was a temperament of calm--the shrewd smiling
face, painted by himself when he was seventy years old, shows him yet
elastic and vivacious.

At forty-five--it was nine years after the close of the first domestic
episode--Chardin married a second time. Still in the parish of St.
Sulpice, to which from his youth he had been constant, he wedded a
youngish widow, Françoise Marguerite Pouget. Later, he was to paint,
in her agreeable features, a ‘rêve de femme et la philosophie de ses
quarante ans.’ She bore him company during the rest of his life, from
the days of his eminence to the days when fame forsook him. On the
whole he was fortunate. He worked so slowly and deliberately that it
would not have been easy for his painting to have made him rich, but
he had no unsatisfied ambitions, and he enjoyed his art and his home
and his assured friendships. No utterly disabling blow fell on him
till he had entered upon his later years. Then his son died, who had
been in a measure his pupil and follower. The remembrance of this, and
his own gathering age, and the neglect of his art, affected him in the
end, and he was a martyr to the disease which caused Bishop Butler, who
himself suffered from it, to say that the keenest physical pleasure in
life was the cessation of pain. In the last days dropsy followed upon
stone. On the 6th of December 1779, Doyen wrote to a familiar friend of
Chardin’s, M. Desfriches--‘Madame Chardin begs me to inform you of her
situation, which is very pitiable.’ The last sacrament had been given
to the aged painter. ‘M. Chardin a reçu le bon Dieu.’ ‘He is in a state
of exhaustion which causes the greatest anxiety.’ Later in the day he
died.

The placid and agreeable cheerfulness of Chardin’s temperament affords
some key to the things which his art chose, and the things which it
left aside. Contentment with the daily round, and with the common lot,
alone could have allowed him to confine the subject of his work within
the limits of a narrow experience. He painted what he saw, and he
saw the _bourgeoisie_, nor was he anxious to extend the field of his
vision. He is the artist of ‘Le Bénédicité,’ of ‘La Mère Laborieuse,’
of ‘L’Économe,’ of ‘La Bonne Éducation’--that is, he is the painter of
decent middle-class life, in its struggle with narrow means, and in
its happiness, which is that of the family and of tranquil and ordered
labour. Even the pursuits of his youth, when he painted still-life,
and the pursuits of his age, when he was drawing portraits, accorded
with that chronicle of the Parisian _bourgeoisie_ which was the work of
his mid-career; for the portraits were yet of everyday folk, and the
still-life, the fruits, the china, the copper vessels, the silk-lined
workboxes in whose familiar textures, colours, tones, his brushes
revelled so adroitly, were the natural accessories and accompaniments
of an existence led always within the limits of the home. Thus
regarded--and this is the fair way of looking at his course--there is
really no sudden change of route to be discovered in his artistic
progress. His was the record of the things he saw; but in his youth he
did not feel himself strong enough to portray, in what he saw, that
which was one day to interest him most--Humanity.

He began very humbly. It was in 1728, when he was but twenty-nine, that
his picture of ‘The Skate’ attracted some notice; and other objects of
still-life were grouped with it at the Exposition de la Jeunesse, in
the Place Dauphine, when M. Largillière--not a bad judge, one would
have thought--inspected his things, and, not knowing that they were
Chardin’s, protested that they must be the work of some very excellent
Dutchman, and that Chardin would be wise if he copied them. Soon after
that, as we have seen, he was accepted at the Academy, and from that
time forward he exhibited at the Louvre. An exhibitor for forty years,
he was for twenty years a hanger. That was a capacity in which he was
sure to make enemies; but at least he was never blamed for bestowing
unmerited prominence upon his own labours.

Chardin won, and he would have deserved to retain, a reputation by his
still-life pictures alone, for the truth is, none of the older Dutchmen
had conceived of common matter so nobly; and, sentiment apart, none had
brought to its representation a touch quite so large, a palette quite
so rich. To Chardin belongs at once a reality without meanness, and an
arrangement without pretension or artifice. The very gathering of his
groups of household things has a significance; it is characteristic; it
reveals in him that sense of human interest with which his forerunners
were scarcely occupied, and which we, in these later days, have missed
equally in men as different as Blaise Desgoffe and William Hunt. Into
Chardin’s pictures nothing is put thoughtlessly; and, possessed as he
was of a perception uniquely keen to note the varied individuality
of matter and its artistic interest, he yet had little of mere pride
in his ability to paint so well the object and the substance of
his choice. The simple materials gathered on his kitchen-slab have
their place there of right, and tell the story of modest and frugal
provision--from the little red jar of rough but highly glazed pottery,
to the eggs and the saucepan. In one picture there will be exactly the
material for the humblest meal, and the things that are required to
prepare it--that and no more--a transcript from his own limited home
in the early days, when he was an ill-rewarded painter and the husband
of an ailing young woman whose fortune was gone. In another, and it
is most likely of a later time, there are the fruits for the dessert
of the well-to-do, and with them is the silver and the gold, and the
sugar-bowl of now famous Dresden.

But though Chardin does justice to a luxury of colour, as in the
‘Goblet d’Argent,’ and in the picture--both are in the Salle Lacaze--of
the brown wooden jewel-box whose pale-blue soft silk lining catches
so discreet and delicate a light, the charm of the very simple never
escapes him. A tumbler of water and three tiny onions, and there is a
subject for Chardin. And in all the still-life of his earlier and of
his middle years there is an unfailing vigour of draughtsmanship, a
quiet truth of chiaroscuro, an effect of unforced picturesqueness; and
with easy decisiveness he executes intricate schemes of colour. His
hues, above all, are blended and fused; the influence of colour upon
the colour that is near it he is found to have studied to perfection.
He is a master of the elaborate interchange of reflections between
the silver cup and the glazed copper-hued pottery, on which its light
chances to play. And now the reflected light is cold and clear, and
now it is vague and warm. To see these things as Chardin saw them, is
really to see them for the first time. He opens to us, in a measure
that is entirely his own, the charm of the world of matter.

No engraving--hardly even the soft lights and the opulent shadows of
mezzotint--could render the character of this still-life of Chardin’s.
No etching, short of Jacquemart’s, could do justice to work in
itself so subtle, yet apparently so bold. But the manly and refined
line-engraving of the French engravers of the middle of the Eighteenth
Century was happily able to translate, with singular excellence, the
work of Chardin’s middle age, a work in which the rendering of matter
counted indeed for something, yet in which character, sentiment, story
counted also for much.

It was in 1734, and still at the Place Dauphine, that Chardin showed
that which seems to have been the first of his _genre_ pictures--a
picture of a woman sealing a letter. From that time onwards, to about
the beginning of his last decade, the painter’s work consisted chiefly
of the record of the daily life of the civilised _bourgeoisie_, on whom
Fortune never smiled too lavishly, but from whom she rarely turned with
a quite empty hand. The value of the _bourgeois_ virtues, of reticent
affection, of subdued love, of calm persistency in uneventful and
continually recurring labour, Chardin himself must have felt. Unlike
too many of his Dutch brethren, he saw life, and dealt with it, where
life was not gross. His children have an unconscious innocence along
with their reflectiveness; his boys are all ingenuous; his young women
bring the delightfulness of grace to the diligent doing of household
work in kitchen or parlour; and his seniors, in gaining experience,
have not lost sweetness.

And with the interest of pleasantness you have in Chardin’s case
the assurance of the interest of truth. Hogarth was as true, but he
was less pleasant; Morland was as pleasant, but he was less true.
Hogarth painted an individual; Morland generalised or idealised the
individual, and was contented with a type. Chardin’s figures do not
cease to be typical of the race, while they retain the delicate
accuracy of personal studies, and betray an untiring reference not
to a few models only, but to all the nature he lived amongst. Always
without exaggeration, always with directness and a deep simplicity,
the self-effacing art of Chardin accomplished its task, writing for
us in picture after picture, or print after print, the history of the
quietest of refined lives that the Eighteenth Century knew; arresting
for us the delicate gesture, in itself so slight, yet so completely
revealing; and tracing, on honest and sensitive faces, every expression
that rises above broad comedy, or falls short of high passion.

Unaccustomed though it was to the sincere portrayal of homely things,
Chardin’s own generation became quickly appreciative of the finest
phase of his art, and from 1738 to 1757 (as M. Emmanuel Bocher has
so laboriously and carefully recorded in a volume which is the
inevitable supplement to the De Goncourts’ literary study) the best
engravers of the time--Laurent Cars, Lépicié, Surugue, Le Bas, and
others besides--were busy in the translation of Chardin’s work. Such
accomplished draughtsmen with the burin could not fail, of course,
to express his obvious subject, and to retain in the black and white
of their copperplates the sentiment of the canvas. But they did more
than this--their flexible skill allowed them to retain often Chardin’s
manner and method; so that the very men who had rendered best, or as
well as the best, the trembling light of Watteau and his immense and
airy distance, with all its delicate gradations and infinite planes,
are found to be the complete interpreters of Chardin’s peculiar breadth
and simplicity, and of that deliberate firmness which is opposed the
most to Watteau’s masterly indecision. The low prices at which the
prints were issued made the prints saleable, and popularised Chardin’s
art among the educated middle class. Often but a couple of francs were
charged for an engraving worth, if it is in fine condition, three or
four guineas to-day.

Contemporary criticism, and especially the criticism of Diderot, was
favourable to Chardin, and may have assisted his fame. There were
years in which ‘the father of modern criticism,’ occupied as much with
intellectual charm and moral teaching as with technical perfection,
fairly raved over the painter whose work was the eulogium of the _tiers
état_. Lafont de St. Yonne, in 1746, places him very high in the ranks
‘des peintres compositeurs et originaux.’ In 1753, the Abbé le Blanc
writes of him--‘Il prend la nature sur le fait.’ And a few years later
it is Diderot who says: ‘It is always nature and truth. M. Chardin
is a man of mind. He understands the theory of his art.’ Again, ‘M.
Chardin is not a painter of history, but he is a great man.’ Then there
dawns upon the critical mind some sense that the painter is repeating
himself. From the old mint he reissues, with but slight modification,
the old coins. Still-life apart, he can give us no new subjects; and
the familiar ends by being undervalued, and the excellent is held
cheaply. At last, from Diderot, in 1767, there comes the undisguised
lamentation, ‘M. Chardin s’en va!’

Fortunately, however, though popularity passed from him, the old man
was able to interest himself in a fresh department of work. He had
painted a few portraits at an earlier time, but now his attention was
attracted to portraiture in pastel--that was the medium in which an
artist as masculine as himself, and as penetrating, had obtained an
admitted triumph; and why should Chardin fail where Quentin Latour had
brilliantly succeeded? Nor did he fail altogether. He was able to draw
back upon himself, in the last years, a little of the old attention.
And the pastel portraits, if they had the ‘_fragilité_’ had also the
‘_éclat_,’ which a well-known verse attributes to the then fashionable
method. And in subjects which were portraits only, the flesh tints were
no longer, by any possibility, effaced by the stronger reality which
somehow Chardin had been wont to bestow upon the accessories in his
pictures.

Pleasant to him and well merited as must have been that slight return
of appreciation which came to Chardin in his eighth decade, it is
not by the labour of that time that we are now likely to class him.
With the galvanised revival of a classical ideal, his name, after his
death, fell into dishonour. Some of his worthiest pictures tumbled,
neglected, about the quays of Paris. Only within the last quarter of a
century has there been evident the sign of an intention to do justice
to his work; and for us his principal distinction is, as I have said
already, that he is not only foremost, but was for years alone, in the
perception of the dignity and beauty of humble matter, and of the charm
which Art may discover in the daily incidents of the least eventful
life.


                       (_The Art Journal_, 1885.)




MOREAU


One of the prettiest chapters of the volume in which French artists
of the Eighteenth Century have recorded with grace and freedom the
lighter manners of their age, is that certainly which was written by
Moreau le Jeune. He employed, with extreme diligence, half a life
in writing it. Born in March 1741, he died in November 1814. The
son of a Parisian wigmaker, of the parish of St. Sulpice--which was
also Chardin’s--he, with his brother, Moreau l’Aîné, a painter not
greatly known, was drawn early into the circle of the producers of
Art. He was a pupil of Louis de Lorrain, a now forgotten painter,
whom he followed, at seventeen years old, to St. Petersburg. Coming
back to Paris, he was in the workroom of Le Bas, the engraver, and
there he learned the secret of the burin’s expression. He engraved
with delicate skill. It was but slowly, however, that in his own
designs he showed himself an accomplished draughtsman; for though his
daughter, Madame Carle Vernet--who wrote an account of him--lets us
understand that he was born drawing, there is much of his early work
that is obviously laboured. Suddenly, the De Goncourts tell us--those
critics who, with M. Maherault, the industrious collector, have
studied him the best--suddenly his power of draughtsmanship declared
itself--the individuality of his vision and method. It was in a drawing
commissioned by Le Bas, who sought to engrave it, the ‘Plaine des
Sablons’--a review by Louis XV. In it he was revealed as the successful
draughtsman of festivals, the historian of lively ceremonies. And such
success was rewarded. For, with commendable promptitude, in 1770--the
year after the drawing was executed--he was appointed ‘Dessinateur
des Menus-plaisirs,’ and five years later, when Cochin retired,
‘Dessinateur du Cabinet du Roi.’ Thus, while still a young man,
Moreau’s position was assured, and he was left free to use much of his
time in works on which it was possible to bestow a more exquisite grace
than any which could be fitly employed upon labours in which official
portraiture counted for much. Moreau was free to invent for himself,
and free to illustrate the best literary inventions of a literary
age. His career was before him, and the day not distant when he would
produce ‘L’Histoire des Mœurs’ and the illustrations to the ‘Nouvelle
Héloïse.’

I have indicated now, by a brief line or two, the direction in which
Moreau le Jeune must chiefly be studied, and the places in which he may
be seen if men would see him at his prime. Perhaps it may be a matter
of taste, and a matter of taste only, whether one prefers him in his
more spontaneous or in his more official work. The draughtsman is the
same in either labour, though the inspiration is different. For me his
greatest achievement is ‘L’Histoire des Mœurs,’ or, in another phrase,
‘Le Monument du Costume,’ which must be spoken of in detail later on.
For many, and above all, for the lovers of curiosities, the seekers
in byways of history, his celebrity hangs chiefly on his performance
of the various ‘Sacres’; his records of the public functions, his
‘Fêtes at Versailles for the Marriage of the Dauphin and of Marie
Antoinette’; his ‘Crowning of Voltaire’--at the Théâtre Français--in
1788; his ‘Fêtes at the Hôtel de Ville,’ on the birth of a new Dauphin
to Louis XVI. Among these we may look perhaps principally at the
‘Crowning of Voltaire,’ for it has the virtues of them all. The drawing
was engraved by Gaucher, who has preserved in the print the lively
touch of the original. But what, one asks, was the occasion of the
ceremony, what the cause of the ‘crowning’? At the Théâtre Français,
Voltaire’s _Irène_ had been performed for sixteen nights. In those days
of limited audiences that was a brilliant success. The bust of the poet
is placed then in the middle of the stage, to be adorned and declaimed
before. Madame Vestris--another, of course, than the Vestris known to
Englishmen--reads aloud, and with emphasis, the lines of which the
Marquis de Saint-Maur has hurriedly been delivered. Other performers,
in more or less classic garb, cluster about her with garlands in their
hands, ready to bestow them on the bust. In a box, high up on one side
of the theatre, sits the demi-god, with two fair friends--one of whom
is his niece, Madame Denis, and the other that Marquise de Villette to
whom the print that represents the occasion is dedicated. The playhouse
is full. The clapping of hands is lusty and enthusiastic. People rise
in their boxes. Men stare upwards from the pit. Fine ladies crane their
necks to catch a glimpse of the hero with the thin angular face, with
its tell-tale lines of wit and mockery and observation.

Moreau must have seen the sight himself, and borne away the vivid
recollection of it. Never was _l’actualité_--the thing that passes,
the thing that may be insignificant to-day, but is to be History
to-morrow--never was _l’actualité_ designed with a more fitting mixture
of grace and precision. But in the more important work next to be
spoken of, there was greater room for invention. Therein was Moreau,
in the true sense, dramatist as well as draughtsman, for even if the
outline of the subject was suggested to him by the speculator who
undertook the publication, it was Moreau alone who gave veracity and
character to the head and gesture of each person in the play.

The ‘Suite d’Estampes pour servir à l’histoire des Mœurs et du Costume
dans le Dix-huitième Siècle’ began to be published in 1775 by Prault,
of Paris, though it has been of late suggested that it was really
conceived and undertaken by a German of the name of Eberts. The
notion was to give a series of plates in which the most correct and
fashionable manners, and the dress of the moment, and the furniture in
vogue, should be together portrayed. The artist first pitched upon to
recall them was, strangely enough, a foreigner. Freudeberg, a Bernese
settled in Paris, a draughtsman of grace and charm undoubtedly, but of
a closely bounded talent, had found favour with the public, and it was
he who was chosen to make--and he did make--the first dozen drawings.
The best engravers of the day were forthwith to engrave them. But by
the time the first series was finished--and two odd pieces, I believe,
not generally taken account of as belonging to the set--Freudeberg
became home-sick and resolved to depart, and the business of continuing
the work, which in the view of its promoter was to be a practical guide
to fashion, was assigned to Moreau. Moreau did the second series, and
then the third. The second dealt with the fortunes of a lady; the
third with those of a _grand seigneur_, who was likewise something of
a _petit-maître_. And for each there was a text, bald, it may be, but
in a measure appropriate. It was anonymous, and chiefly descriptive. A
little later, in a new issue, it was sought to associate the work with
popular literature, and Restif de la Bretonne--a free-spoken ‘realist,’
whom, after long neglect, it is now, not altogether without cause,
the fashion to enjoy--was invited to write his commentary, and his
commentary took the form of quite a new interpretation. ‘Restif,’ says
M. Anatole de Montaiglon, ‘au lieu de respecter le sentiment des trois
suites, a isolé chaque motif et chaque planche.’ Restif, that is, has
invented for each plate some fresh little story.

In life, the mind associates with a given and chosen landscape the
more magnetic and memorable of the figures that people it. These alone
bestow on it the reality of its human interest, and the others may be
ignored. And so, among the masses of description and criticism of the
arts of design, the writings which we really associate with the works
they endeavour to vivify are those generally which have a charm of
their own--the charm of the literary touch. Restif de la Bretonne’s
stories, with all their faults, have just that charm. There is that in
them which permits their author to take possession of the theme, so
that the theme belongs no longer at all to whatever dullard chanced to
be the first to treat it.

Two designs which I never see without wanting them are the most
vivacious of Moreau’s series. They are the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra’ and
‘C’est un fils, Monsieur!’ Others, even among the most admirable, are
more limited in their aim. The ‘Grande Toilette,’ for instance, as
its name implies, is occupied more particularly with raiment. It is
a very summary of fashion. It is the great lord, or the consummate
_petit-maître_, displayed to us when dressing is completed. The
edifice, it seems, has just been crowned. ‘Monseigneur,’ vividly
writes Restif de la Bretonne, ‘Monseigneur is dressed; for some
minutes already he has been standing; his cordon bleu is assumed;
they have just given him his purse, and he has his bouquet.’ Yes, the
edifice has been crowned: Monseigneur is ready; for--and the touch is
untranslatable--they have _achevé de le chausser_. You see the neat
shoes, the garter, the closely drawn stocking, the whole paraphernalia
of the leg he was proud of. ‘_Achevé de le chausser_’--it is all in
the phrase. And now he is free, no doubt, to enjoy the idleness of the
morning, to do a service to a comedian, and, after an author has had
audience of him, to accept the dedication of a book.

‘La Petite Loge’ is just as characteristic. What one sees is the
inside of an opera-box, of which the tenants are a couple of bachelors
of fashion. A dance is over, on the stage, and a girl who has taken
part in it has been brought into the box, to be encouraged--to be
touched under the chin. And here is an epitome of Restif’s story. A
Prince, struck with the beauty of a ragged little child in the street,
determined that she should be educated--pensioned her and her mother.
Soon, however, busied with the greatest business of his class and
day--‘occupied with intrigue,’ the story-teller tells us--he forgot
his little protégée. She had her money regularly--all that she was
promised--but he was too busy to think of her. Then, one night, at the
Opera, smitten with the charm of a new dancer, he inquired who the
dancer was, and ordered her to be brought to him. As soon as she was
in the box, ‘Il lui passa sous le menton une main un peu libre’; but
then it was disclosed to him that she was the child he had been struck
with. Coulon, the famous dancing-master, had by this time taught her to
some purpose. As for her future, her mother--an ancestress, I take it,
of Halévy’s ‘Madame Cardinal’--had already a register of one hundred
and twenty pages, filled with the propositions of the Court and the
town. ‘Sa mère se reservait le droit de les comparer,’--for nothing,
it seems, even by a Madame Cardinal, should be done in a hurry. Well,
among the girl’s many lovers there was one who was unselfish. What did
he want but to marry her! The Prince--not minded now to be outdone in
chivalry--generously urged that he should be accepted, and Isabelle
was glad to consent. But the King ordered the lover’s arrest, and
the young people were separated. The girl lived prudently, in London
and in Paris. She and her art were admired; but she died of a sudden
illness. ‘Her young lover was in absolute despair, and the Prince, her
protector, wept for her.’

In the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra’ we see the elegant and famous crowd that
surged out of the theatre after a performance long looked forward to.
‘Gluck’s new Operas--it is essential to see them,’ said a writer who
knew what it was that a fashionable woman could not afford to neglect.
The ‘all Paris’ of the day was there; and at the end, when the crowd
was in the lobbies, and the _aboyeur_ was calling the carriages, and
the flower-girl was a messenger of intrigue--that was the moment that
gave birth to plans for dainty suppers eaten away from home, the time
when ‘abbés without a family learned the secret of how they might
belong to all.’ What a bustle of flirtation! What a passing about of
love-letters! The elegance of the scene must make amends, as best it
can, for its light-hearted naughtiness.

‘C’est un fils, Monsieur!’ has no such forgiveness to ask of us. It
is the blithest picture that we need to be shown of the home joys of
the refined. A young husband, who is known already as ‘le Président,’
and who is a student and a fortunate collector of Art as well as a man
of the world, rises from his study chair with outstretched hands and
radiant face, as the newly born baby is carried in to him in triumph,
followed by a procession of household retainers, and preceded by the
lively Miss Rozette, the President’s foster-sister. Nothing is more
expressive than the joyous pantomime of this privileged young woman,
and the answering gestures of the newly made father; and delightful
is the sentiment of the piece. In England, popular Art has sometimes
made the joys of domesticity a little dull; but here the respectable is
actually gay, and nothing but sunshine lies upon the path of duty.

Of the many writers whom Moreau avowedly illustrated, as distinguished
from those who furnished a text for his designs, Rousseau was the one
in whom he most believed, and for Rousseau much of his best work was
executed. His designs for the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ were among the last of
the important drawings wrought by him before he made that journey into
Italy which his daughter speaks of as having ‘opened his eyes,’ but
which, to whatever it may have ‘opened’ them, certainly closed them to
the aspects of that France it was his truest mission to portray. The
types of Julie and Saint-Preux are types which Moreau understood--he
understood their impulse and their sentiment; and how many faults he
would have forgiven them for their grace! To illustrate Rousseau was
of course to have the opportunity--and in Moreau’s case it was also
to profit by it--of representing both a deeper and a more immediate
sensitiveness than most of that which claimed interpretation in the
sometimes callous figures of the ‘Monument du Costume.’ Moreau was
grateful for so fortunate an occasion, and he thoroughly responded
to it. His Julie is ‘un type de Greuze honnête,’ with her ‘bouche
entr’ouverte,’ her ‘regard profond,’ her ‘gorge couverte en fille
modeste, et non pas en dévote,’ her ‘petite figure de blonde, mouvante
et sensible.’ Moreau read Rousseau again and again: he genuinely cared
for him, and when Rousseau died, the death-scene was not suffered to
pass unrecorded, and of the grave in the Ile des Peupliers, by Geneva,
he made a little etching.

Presently, however, Moreau was to be led away from the very sentiment
of the scenes he had understood the best. His individuality was
lessened, his flexibility arrested by the journey to Italy,
undertaken with Dumont, the architect, in 1786. And his association
with David--‘le peintre de Marat assassiné et le membre de la
Convention’--operated to make more certain his style’s divorce from
all the natural grace and flowing sentiment and homely unheroic
dignity with which it had lived so fruitfully for more than twenty
years. The illustrator of Rousseau was already less happy as the
illustrator of Voltaire; and in 1791 Moreau was received into the
Academy; the drawing which procured him the distinction being that
of ‘Tullie faisant passer son char sur le corps de son père.’ Wille,
the engraver, writes, in his published journal, how he went to the
Academical Assembly when Moreau was received. ‘There was an Academician
to receive: it was Monsieur Moreau, draughtsman and engraver. He had
begged me to be his sponsor, and I presented him to the Assembly with a
great deal of pleasure.’ But Moreau’s entrance into the Academy was the
signal for his exit from the regions of his native art. The bibliophile
may seek with avidity for the editions of Renouard, which years
afterwards Moreau illustrated. But his verve had deserted him; his
talent was gone; his originality had yielded up the ghost. And somehow,
too, in his last years, and in his old age, poverty overtook him. In
February 1814, he wrote to M. Renouard that he was penniless--‘Je n’ai
pas le sou.’ Friends he had, though; and one of the first acts of
Louis XVIII. was to reappoint him to the old office--‘draughtsman to
the King.’ He held the place for but a short time; for on the 30th
November, in the same year, Moreau died. With his later style both he
and his daughter, and the group, too, by whom they were surrounded,
were content--no one assailed it then or looked back regretfully to the
earlier--but it is by the work of the first half of his career as an
artist that Moreau finally takes rank as one of the most precise and
flexible of draughtsmen, and as the closest possible observer of the
gay, great world that he portrayed.


                       (_The Art Journal_, 1885.)




GAINSBOROUGH AT THE GROSVENOR GALLERY


‘If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire
for us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of
Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the
art, among the very first of that rising name.’ So wrote, in his
Fourteenth Discourse, Sir Joshua Reynolds--a lover of pomp and ceremony
even in the art of Literature--doing therein ‘untimely justice’ to the
merits of his contemporary, whom he survived. Since then the English
School, whose separate existence this accomplished admirer of the
Roman and the Bolognese did but doubtfully and modestly look forward
to, has become an accomplished fact, and all but a hundred years after
his death, ‘the talents of the late Mr. Gainsborough’ are honoured at
the Grosvenor Gallery. In the two large rooms and in the vestibule
there are to-day exhibited about a couple of hundred pieces from his
brush; the great Sir Joshua Exhibition of last winter is felt to be
successfully rivalled; and an opportunity is given to the student to
perceive the range, the flexibility, the spontaneity of Gainsborough’s
art.

Gainsborough, like any other distinct individuality in Art or Letters,
is best understood when he is taken simply on his merits, without
reference to other personalities who happened to be of his time. To
institute a perpetual comparison between him and Sir Joshua is to
make the sterile blunder that is made when Dickens is pitted against
Thackeray, the epic of _Copperfield_ against the satire of _Vanity
Fair_. In each case it was only accident that brought the men into
juxtaposition; and as regards Gainsborough, it is rather with Velasquez
or Vandyke, or with some French Eighteenth Century Master of familiar
grace, that we should compare him. These were his kindred, with
these he had something in common, as the Romans, the Bolognese, and
sometimes the Venetians, were the kindred of Sir Joshua. And yet, to
a certain extent, comparison between Gainsborough and Sir Joshua is
even now unavoidable. Living at the same period and in the same great
town, painting the same people, and--save for the briefer apparition
of Romney--dividing between them, though dividing unequally, the
applause of polite Society, that choice which the men of their time
had to make of one of them, has still to a certain extent to be made
by us. Often, of course, we are liberated from the necessity of any
such narrow alternative; but when we look at the portraits, by the two
artists, of Johnson, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, the characteristics of
each--what each lacked and what each brought to the accomplishment of
his task--cannot but suggest themselves. And it will then be apparent
that Reynolds painted with a more obvious learning, Gainsborough with a
more spontaneous grace; Reynolds often with a more determined adherence
to the particular character, Gainsborough with a keener enjoyment of
the suggestions that character afforded for translating a sometimes
uncouth nature into an exquisite art. Take, for instance, the two
portraits of Mrs. Siddons: the learning and tradition of the Schools,
the disposition towards a dignity that may be well-nigh pompous, are
in Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic Muse’; the spontaneous grace, the disposition
towards simplicity are in the Mrs. Siddons of Gainsborough. Further,
again, to compare the portraits of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua with that
one by Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery, is to see that here is
an instance in which the fidelity--the unflattering fidelity--is on
Reynolds’ side, and the idealisation on Gainsborough’s. Yet it is
hardly needful to declare of so great a man as Gainsborough that he
never idealised merely that he might flatter. He idealised because his
vision of the world was bound to be poetic. He was a poet above all
things. The ideal was his atmosphere. But Sir Joshua, with all his
accomplishments, lived with the prose of the world, and, as a rule, was
but in vain ambitious to reach to its poetry.

The poetic character of Gainsborough’s mind and work is, then, the
first thing to be realised, if we are to understand his pictures. For
otherwise we shall be offended at exaggerations and astonished at
suppressions, both of which are the result of a method he adopted in
obedience to his temperament, which combined, of course, a gentle and
genuine love of Nature with a consuming thirst to see that Nature was
never deprived of the assistance of Art. Gainsborough has been written
of as the earliest Master of Naturalism--save, indeed, Hogarth--in the
English School. Nor is the description untrue; in the sense that he
sought his inspiration from Nature, instead of from academies, and that
his landscape had more than a suggestion of Suffolk or of Somerset.
Yet Morland carried Naturalism much further than Gainsborough, and
Constable much further than Morland. Gainsborough was never a mere
copyist of Nature. From the first he composed and arranged, but his
artifices were seldom very apparent, and his control over actual
form--his artistic modification of it--was gentle and tempered, and
this is most of all made evident by the display of his Landscape. With
the permanent exhibition at the National Gallery and the annually
recurring winter shows at Burlington House, no one of course has any
need to be ignorant of the fact that one of the most fascinating of the
painters of portraits was also a landscape painter. But the display
at the Grosvenor Gallery will bring home to people a truth some may
have overlooked, because at the Grosvenor Gallery Gainsborough’s
range in landscape work is seen to have been extensive. No single
early painting there, indeed, can claim to be quite the equal of the
‘Great Cornard’ picture in Trafalgar Square, but the paintings are so
many, and the subjects so varied, that the impression they produce
must be great. In the East Room, the smaller room, are some of the
most interesting of these landscapes. There--to begin with only a
minor example--is the ‘Landscape with Figures against a Tree’: one of
the very few dated pictures. It is of the year 1775, or just about
the time that the painter left Bath for London. It is interesting
as seeming to belong to an earlier period, as carrying on to a time
when most of his work had changed character, the features of his more
youthful work. It is a bit of every day English scenery, accepted
for what it is, with a tolerance of the commonplace rare with him,
indeed in any day, but, as one would have thought, quite impossible to
his later life. Here, too, is one of his few failures to attain what
was really beautiful, ‘A Landscape with Cows,’ lent by the trustees
of the Duke of Newcastle--an artificial scene of blue distance and
of hot and ‘unconvincing’ foreground. ‘A View in Shropshire’ is in
character not less classical, not less suggestive of Claude, but it
is far more successful. The foreground is of wooded country, brown
and gold; behind it, a richly illuminated champaign ends abruptly in
a conical hill, which is the Wrekin beheld in the light of a selected
hour. The Catalogue of the Exhibition--full of industriously compiled
detail and of quaint anecdote, carefully burrowed for in half-forgotten
places--might, perhaps, have chronicled the fact that the great picture
we are speaking of is repeated, feature by feature, in another.
But this other happens to be hung so high that its merits we can
hardly estimate. Its pedigree, however, is unimpeachable. The little
‘Landscape with Horses Ploughing’ recalls, in the disposition of its
objects, Turner’s ‘Windmill and Lock,’ and Turner, who was never above
taking suggestions--who took them from every one--may possibly have
seen it. Lord Bateman’s ‘Boys and Fighting Dogs,’ though by no means
among the most attractive things, is at least memorable. It shares with
several other pictures the business of proving that as a draughtsman
of animals--certainly as a draughtsman of dogs--Gainsborough had few
rivals; and it is one of the rare instances of Gainsborough’s painting
what is properly called a subject picture--a picture in which the
portrayal of an incident has been the first care. Furthermore, the
boys here--like that uncouth child, ‘Jack Hill, in a Cottage’--are, at
all events, perfectly natural examples of everyday folk. Generally his
cottage urchins, though they have rustic grace and rustic wildness,
though they roll on the greensward and dabble in the brook, are not
profound studies of a real peasantry; and, though Leslie indeed said
of the ‘Girl with a Pitcher’ that nothing more beautiful had ever been
painted, we may remember that this lavish appreciation by a brother
artist who was invariably generous was bestowed at a time when the
graver aspects of the peasant’s life had, as far as pictorial art is
concerned, been mirrored only in the art of Turner. The student of
to-day, the student of Millet, can hardly single out for truthfulness,
though he can always single out for grace, the rustics of Gainsborough.
Into the realities of peasant life, Gainsborough scarcely even essayed
to have any deep entrance.

The large ‘View at the Mouth of the Thames’ is one of the most
realistic, one of the least poetic, of Gainsborough’s pictures. It is
an instance of how well this curiously flexible genius could at need
perform that which somebody else could still perform much better. And
if it had not to be remembered that Collins and Turner came after
Gainsborough, instead of before him, we should say the same about the
Duke of Westminster’s ‘Coast Scene.’ Here a sea that has only enough
of movement to give it vivacity and sparkle, runs up to a narrow
breadth of beach, behind which a cliff rises. Three figures are on the
beach--a group of country or of fisher folk; a man kneeling by a basket
hands up a fish, to be inspected by two girls, who bend towards him.
The inspiration of an ancient master and some concession to ancient
traditions are discernible in the umber and golden shores of another
piece. It is in the ‘River Scene with Cattle’ that Gainsborough is
more characteristic; it is there that he delights us in full measure
with that which is his own. The scene is at a ferry somewhere in the
Eastern Counties, where the stream is wide, the land large and flat,
the sky ample, the horizon infinite. At the edge of a miniature cliff,
stands a group of cattle. Below them are figures in shadow, and from
the water, to the right, rise high into the sky the tall and narrow
sails of two fishing-smacks drawn up together. Here the scene is an
everyday place, but Gainsborough has known how to choose the hour;
his selection of objects has been justified by a fortunate grouping;
he has secured a rhythm of line second only to that which lies at the
service of a subtle draughtsman of the figure or a great Ornamentist;
and the hues of silvery blue and golden grey with which his picture is
flooded, are those that gather only on the palette of a born colourist.
When this picture has been adequately seen, and its calm radiance
appreciated, the student has little need to go further to find what
Gainsborough was as a poetical recorder of earth and sky, and what as
a pure painter. But for variety’s sake, and for the sake of noting how
much Gainsborough saw for himself, and how much he was influenced,
too, by the ways in which predecessors as different from each other
as Hobbema and Cuyp had seen the world and presented it, it is well
to look carefully at some of the smaller landscapes in the other and
larger room. There are, perhaps, especially the ‘Small Landscape,’
with luminous white clouds, remote in a lofty sky; the ‘Forest Scene,’
and the unfinished sketch, in which Gainsborough has given to a little
group of gypsies and their beasts a greater dignity than a Fleming
could have bestowed on a Flight into Egypt. There are, of course,
larger works not claiming less attention; and one and all, by their
deficiencies as well as by their merits, show that the greatness or
the general attractiveness of Gainsborough as a landscape painter is
due not much to his naturalism--which was naturalism only in his own
day, and is seen to have been almost idealism in ours. His greatness as
a landscape painter consists much more in his continual endowment of
Nature with the grace and magic of Style.

       *       *       *       *       *

In Portraiture, the only failing that can be laid to Gainsborough’s
charge--and it may at times be a serious one--is that he was apt to
be less impressed by individuality of character than by the occasion
which his subject presented for the painter’s triumph in brush-work.
Facile observer as he was, and wonderful draughtsman, it was not often
that he braced himself to such an effort of stern realism as was made
in the portrait of ‘Judge Skinner.’ This light of the law, sitting
robed--with the keen, sagacious face perfectly dominant over all the
splendour of attire--was painted (on the canvas of which we are now
speaking) for Christ Church, Oxford, of which in 1742 he had been a
student; but the Grosvenor Gallery contains another, though a less
admirable, presentment of the same person. This, though inferior, comes
likewise from an unimpeachable quarter--it is lent by the Honourable
Society of Lincoln’s Inn. Of portraits of William Pitt, there are
several by Gainsborough; but his best representation of all, of the
young man who governed England, is that which comes, like the second
portrait of Skinner, from Lincoln’s Inn. The natural charm of the
model here accorded with that which was the frequent preoccupation of
Gainsborough’s art, and sincere must have been the painter’s pleasure
in dealing with a face which--like the face of Dickens in his youth,
two generations later--expressed sweetness with firmness, and placidity
with boundlessness of resource. The portrait of ‘David Garrick’ is less
satisfactory as an effort of craftsmanship. The shrewd little lady
who succeeded the great and genial Peg Woffington in Garrick’s love,
declared that it was the ‘best portrait ever painted of her Davy,’ so
we will not attempt to dispute the excellence of the likeness; but the
thought that inspired the composition was comparatively trivial and
commonplace. In a park-like scene, the background somewhat suggestive
of Garrick’s favourite retreat at Hampton, the actor whose attentions
were wont to be divided between the Tragic and the Comic Muse--as Sir
Joshua has expressed so suggestively in his happy allegory--stands by
a pedestal on which is placed the bust of Shakespeare, and Garrick
has his arm round the bust, and almost familiarly caresses it. More
valuable would have been a picture in which the head of the actor had
been more dominant than the _dégagé_ gesture. The head of Garrick,
however, if the story goes truly, was always a puzzle to Gainsborough.
Of Garrick and of Foote--mobile comedians, baffling beyond all men--he
is said to have exclaimed, when he essayed to paint them, ‘Rot them for
a couple of rogues, they have everybody’s faces but their own.’

Generally, it may be noted, the full-lengths of men--sometimes, also,
the full-lengths of women--are less attractive than the half-lengths
and the busts, though whatever could be done by any artist to
overcome the difficulty of making the full-length interesting, could
be done by Gainsborough, since he was a master of draperies, and
skilled, as a pupil of Gravelot’s should have been, in the secrets of
dignified and gracious carriage. But, to remain for the moment with
the men’s portraits, one’s admiration of the elegance and harmony of
Tenducci’s portrait must be in excess of any feeling that can rightly
be prompted by the ‘Garrick.’ This, again, is the portrait of an
artist--Gainsborough’s sympathies were with artists--and Tenducci is
said to have ‘warbled so divinely.’ And then, to take an instance from
the women’s portraits, and to single out a full-length figure, in which
the face is modelled with exceptional exactness, and is one, too, of
peculiar refinement, take the portrait of Lady Sheffield, with her
aquiline nose and her almond-shaped eyes--even here the importance of
the countenance is a little effaced by the brilliant light on the showy
drapery of the skirt. No one could assert that, for real charm, that
picture--masterly as it is in its own kind--is equal to any one of half
a dozen busts or half-lengths in the same Gallery. But, on the other
hand, the ‘Sir Bate Dudley,’ ‘skilled in the nice conduct of a clouded
cane,’ is an instance of Gainsborough’s occasional triumph, even with
the full-length male figure; and the ‘Mrs. Graham,’ at Edinburgh, is
one of the most fascinating full-length portraits of a woman that has
been painted since the days of the Venetians. Furthermore, three more
quite masterly full-length male portraits are in the Grosvenor Gallery
itself: they are first, those that are lent by the Queen, the portrait
of Colonel St. Leger, the portrait of ‘Fischer’ the musician, and last,
the familiar ‘Blue Boy,’ a work directed possibly at the theories of
Sir Joshua and inspired by the practice of Van Dyck.

As one looks over the subjects of Gainsborough’s portraits, one
understands in part how it was that, comparing them with Sir Joshua’s,
or perhaps even with Romney’s, so few of them were engraved. Romney
was, above all things, seductive: he saw Lady Hamilton--or when
not Lady Hamilton, then some one who was almost equally pretty--in
everything, and the public liked what he saw. Sir Joshua was a
courtier, careful to be on the best of terms with the great world.
Gainsborough courted nobody, and the world talked much less about him.
Though, after the lapse of years, he succeeded in getting a hundred
guineas for a full-length picture, and moved, without imprudence, from
the cottage at Ipswich, rented at six pounds, first to the Circus at
Bath, and then to the west wing of Schomberg House, Pall Mall, he was
never really in his own time Sir Joshua’s rival in the public favour.
And much of his best work in Portraiture--over and above that work in
landscape which confessedly engaged his choice--was devoted to the
record of people of the artistic rather than the fashionable world;
people of professions the members of which were not in those days
motioned to the velvet of the social sward.

We have already spoken of more than one instance--and ‘Giardini,’
the fiddler, is another--of such a natural selection which governs
Gainsborough’s art. It is as characteristic of him in portraiture as
it is of Watteau in _genre_ pieces and gallant pastorals. But there
is a little canvas, the portrait of an unknown Mrs. Carr, which holds
its own either against portraits of people from the artistic world or
people from Georgian ‘Society.’ It is curiously natural and refined in
expression, exquisitely suggestive of elegant carriage, though so small
a portion of the figure is seen, and as a piece of flesh-painting, it
is unsurpassed by any of the more famous examples of Gainsborough’s
skill. Who was ‘Mrs. Carr’? And had Gainsborough, we may wonder, some
further interest in her than that which is aroused in any qualified
observer of Humanity by the vision of such agreeable beauty? For
Gainsborough, as a rule, painted best the models he knew the most.
Executing every touch with his own hand, and doing his most picturesque
with every model because he was so essentially artistic, he yet must
have undertaken many a portrait of fashionable persons or of enriched
_bourgeois_, into the dull recesses of whose character he did not
care to penetrate. Where he knew and liked, he painted with delight.
He was so profoundly impressionable: what he enjoyed stirred him: if
somebody played the fiddle particularly well, tears of rapture stood on
Gainsborough’s cheek.

His wife, who was in her youth a rose and brown coloured beauty,
and whose countenance was long afterwards lustrous enough under the
becoming grey of her powdered hair, Gainsborough painted several
times, and always with distinction and conspicuous artistry. His
handling of the subject is best in the portrait numbered 175--a
worthy companion to his own sensitive and high-bred countenance (No.
185). And his portraits of his daughters--his only children--are at
the least satisfying. One is a group--the two together; another is
a half-length of Mrs. Fischer; another, again, a half-length of the
brighter personality who remained ‘Miss Gainsborough.’ There is some
likeness between the two young women, in the general contour of the
head and in the fulness of the under-lip. ‘Miss Gainsborough,’ with
her clear brown eyes, delicate eyebrows, compact and intelligent
forehead, is the greater beauty; but to Mrs. Fischer there belongs a
winning expression of pathetic reverie. Both are felt to be the true
daughters of their father: the one by her possession of the gaiety and
fire of temper which characterised Gainsborough in his happiest times;
the other by her obvious inheritance of what proved more than her
share of Gainsborough’s keen perception of the sadness of so much of
human fortune. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was almost wholly intellectual
and ‘practical,’ who lived on the outside of things, had nothing of
Gainsborough’s sense of profundity and pathos. And, in so far as he had
nothing of this, he was, in the essentials of character, the less of an
artist. For Goethe said--and when he said it he was uttering one of the
deepest of his truths--‘To be artistic is to be serious.’


              (_The Standard_, 1st and 6th January 1885.)




COTMAN


It remained for the Norwich Art Circle to hold, for the first time,
an exhibition of the drawings of an artist who was nothing less than
a great master in water-colour, but whose place in the ranks of Art
was for many a year, by the general public, not so much contested as
ignored. Cotman was born a few years after Turner. Possessed of a
sensibility as keen, but of less tremendous vitality, he died a few
years before him. Turner was amongst Cotman’s friends; not a ‘chum,’
perhaps, but an advocate, strenuous and judicious--and strenuous and
judicious advocacy may claim to be called friendship. Had it not been
for Turner, it is unlikely that the less-known artist would have
received that post at King’s College which afforded him comfort, though
not affluence, in the last years of his life. Like Dewint, Cotman
taught drawing. But in London his connection was less influential
than that of Dewint, whose usual fee of a guinea an hour was no doubt
never reached by the draughtsman from Norwich. The appointment of
drawing-master at King’s College was therefore very serviceable: the
more so that Cotman’s original work, though it was produced with
the enthusiasm and the untiring enjoyment, and the sweat of the
brow besides, which in any art are the real artist’s equivalents or
substitutes for mechanical diligence--Cotman’s original work, I say
(like a little of Mozart’s best music), was produced ‘for himself and
two friends.’ Even the connoisseur, as a rule, held back. The public?
But can you for an instant expect the public to understand work which,
frankly, makes no bid for its sympathies, which is never furnished
‘according to sample,’ which is bound to be itself and wholly fresh,
and is content to be excellent? An intelligent criticism might perhaps
have drummed into the big public, not the real sense, but at all events
some tacit acceptance, of Cotman’s peculiar merit. But where was the
intelligent criticism of 1820 and 1830? There was little critical
writing then--at all events in the papers--that was either an influence
or an art.

John Sell Cotman was born at Norwich on the 16th of May 1782. His
father was a well-to-do haberdasher, established at that time in Cockey
Lane, but afterwards, when able to retire from business, living in a
villa at Thorpe, with a garden that looked on the river. Cotman himself
drew the garden--and idealised it--in the last year of his life. His
father survived him; dying very old--at eighty-four. Cotman died at
sixty.

Whatever troubles there had been on the subject of Cotman’s trade or
profession, they were got over by the simple process of his going his
own way, and of his father’s forgiving him. The boy was educated at
the grammar school, and at sixteen years old, after much discussion
about his future--after the interposition of Opie, with the not very
measured remark that the boy ‘had far better black shoes than be
an artist’--young Cotman chose the less desirable of these unhappy
alternatives, and, that he might be an artist, journeyed to London. A
young man at that period, and especially a young man who was wishing to
be a landscape painter, had little opportunity of artistic training,
unless indeed it might be that best kind of training which consists in
familiarity with people of mind, and with the works of art that bygone
genius has produced, and with those natural scenes which, like the
voice or the face of your friend, stimulate and enrich and endow with
a new experience. Cotman in these things was happy. He was trained by
the world, and by those lessons in noble by-past Art which he was so
well fitted to receive. His own true taste, and the faculty of real
development--which some of us call, like Wordsworth, ‘a leading from
above: a something given’--made him independent of academic influence;
and in his case no one undertook the academic task, and made the
too-confident promise to turn into fine gold what is brass at the
beginning, and must be brass to the end. Cotman was fine gold. He was,
that is to say, an artist born, not manufactured.

At the hospitable house of Dr. Munro, in the Adelphi Terrace, the young
man fell into association with a group of painters, most of whom were
his seniors. At eighteen years old he exhibited six drawings at the
Royal Academy, and while he was still extremely young, he presided
over a little society--a sketching club, one may call it--of which
Varley and Dr. Munro were members. At very moderate prices his drawings
seem to have found a sale, and he began to make excursions into
remote parts of the country--into Yorkshire and Lincolnshire--besides
visiting his family at Norwich. It was either at Norwich or Yarmouth,
in the first years of the century, that he made the acquaintance of
Dawson Turner, the antiquary. That acquaintance became a friendship,
and, to use the phrase of Charles Lamb in regard to such matters, ‘a
friendship that answered.’ Dawson Turner was at once, and for many a
year afterwards, a help to Cotman. And as a serious student--not only
a rich dilettante--he knew that he gained as much as Cotman from their
association. ‘We value him greatly,’ Dawson Turner wrote to Cotman’s
father, very long after their first introduction, and when it was
wanted to arouse the father to an understanding of Cotman’s position,
and of his depressed state.

In November 1805 we find Cotman established in Charlotte Street,
Portland Place, writing to Dawson Turner that he had been in
Yorkshire and Durham all the autumn, ‘making many close copies of
the fickle Dame Nature--copies,’ writes Cotman, not very elegantly,
‘consequently valuable on that account.’ A hope of settling in
Norwich--of working, and founding a drawing-class there--was now
growing upon him, and in 1806 it was accomplished. A young bachelor of
four-and-twenty--personally a little extravagant, but taking his art
very seriously--he possessed himself of an excellent house in Luckett’s
Court, Wymer Street. I saw the house this summer. A dignified house,
with gables of the Seventeenth Century, and much of the interior
woodwork seemingly of the early Eighteenth. For six years Cotman lived
there. There, was wrought almost all the best of his earlier art: Mr.
J. J. Colman’s ‘St. Luke’s Chapel’; Mr. Reeve’s ‘Twickenham’ (from a
yet earlier sketch); the same collector’s ‘Mousehold Heath’; my own ewe
lamb, ‘Bishopgate Bridge’; and a mass of work besides--much of which,
unquestionably, has been mislaid, neglected, ruined, forgotten.

The exhibition held at Norwich--to which I began by referring--gave us
an excellent opportunity of really studying this rarer and earlier art.
I am not thinking of the insignificant fact that there was to be seen
there a puerile yet rather clever performance which dates from Cotman’s
twelfth year; but to the assemblage of work of the early time when he
was really an artist--from 1800, say, to 1812. What was the character
of his labour then? With whom did he sympathise? Whom did he at all
resemble? The influence of Turner and of Girtin is to be detected in
some of the work of this period--in the noble architectural work,
especially--and it is not in the slightest degree unlikely that, in his
turn, Cotman exercised some influence over Turner; at a much later time
I mean, when everyday sobriety sufficed for neither of them, and when
Cotman, surely quite as much as Turner, led the way to revelries of
colour. Between Cotman and Girtin there could be no such reciprocity
of influence, for Girtin died, an accomplished master of water-colour,
though less than thirty years old, in 1802, and Cotman was then but
twenty.

Mr. Colman’s large and solid and sober drawing of ‘Durham’ (it has
these qualities, and yet is, somehow, without charm) reminds me of
an early Girtin; while a Girtin of the finer sort, just as simple,
just as straightforward, yet with something of the later magic of the
hand, is recalled by Mr. Reeve’s ‘Bridge over the Greta.’ A quiet
realism; a sense of the picturesque, entertained but yet subdued; a
composition, ordered, yet not seemingly artificial; a breadth that was
never thereafter for a moment departed from--these are, perhaps, the
characteristics of the mature and noble drawings of the earlier period,
such as ‘St. Luke’s Chapel,’ ‘Bishopgate Bridge,’ and ‘Mousehold
Heath.’ Wherever there is opportunity for it--as, in my ‘Bishopgate
Bridge,’ in the yew-tree to the left and the slope of the bank to the
river--there comes in Cotman’s sense of grace, his appreciation of
style and of dignity, his avoidance of mere topography; but it is in
Mr. Reeve’s ‘Twickenham’--thanks to the occasion of which the scene
itself is lavish--that that sense of grace dominates, and the stately
trees throw their shadows over the lawn by the water.

In 1812, Cotman removed to South Town, Yarmouth; Dawson Turner being,
presumably, at the bottom of the change. The painter’s association
with the interesting antiquary became more and more intimate. Purely
architectural, or, as one might say, monumental, draughtsmanship was
at this time a good deal occupying him. He was issuing at the moment
the first part of the _Antiquities of Norfolk_. In the year 1817, he
paid, on the advice of Dawson Turner, a first visit to Normandy. He
went there again in 1819 and 1820; and, two years after the third
visit, his _Architectural Antiquities of Normandy_ saw the light. It
was not until 1838 that he produced the book which best represents
the characteristics of his style--the book in which, fettered by no
established task, his sense of elegance, his genius for composition
in line and in light and shade, had free play--I mean, of course, his
_Liber Studiorum_: soft ground-etchings of unquestioned force and
charm. But at Yarmouth he had much to engage him. His range of subjects
increased. There it was that he acquired the close knowledge of coast
‘effects’ and of marine architecture which made him, in addition to
all his other capacities, so excellent a painter of the shore and sea.

It was in 1823, I think, that Cotman left Yarmouth: a married man in
early middle age, with five young children. He did it to establish
himself again at Norwich, hoping perhaps to sell his pictures better
there, and expecting again to add to his group of pupils--he still went
regularly and frequently to those who learnt of him at Yarmouth. This
time it was only a house opposite the Bishop’s Palace--the address,
‘St. Martin’s at Palace’--that sufficed for Cotman’s needs, or Cotman’s
ambitions. But before long, though he made no change, his mind suffered
tortures from the costliness of his new abode, and the unremunerative
character of the adventure. He went to the Dawson Turners in utter
gloom, and then it was that his excellent friend wrote to him and to
his father letters full of tact, wisdom, and feeling, pointing out to
the well-to-do father that Cotman must really be relieved, and pointing
out, to the now depressed and now exalted genius of a son, that his
position, could he but face it, and retrench a little, was not by any
means so bad. The existence of the letters on this subject allows us
entrance into the intimacy of these housekeeping troubles, and of the
troubles of mind that threatened to be more serious. But we do not
get the end of the story. We can only suppose that Cotman’s father,
who was really on good terms with him, afforded reasonable help, and
that though the house was not moved from with promptitude, the expenses
inside it were curtailed. Cotman rubbed on, somehow, and in 1834 he
received the appointment which I spoke of at the beginning--that post
of drawing-master at King’s College, London, which he was to retain
till his death.

Preparing to quit Norwich, and wishing to put money in his purse before
doing so, he had a sale by auction of many of his effects. These
included nearly twenty of his paintings in oil, and five guineas was
the highest price realised for any one of them. He sold, likewise,
some copies of his printed book: the demand proving by no means
‘active’--they were indeed rather ‘quiet’ than ‘lively’ or ‘firm’--but
of the drawings he wisely kept back all that were still in his
possession: they were destined to be serviceable in his King’s College
lessons.

After a brief sojourn in Gerrard Street, Soho--a mere preparatory
time--Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, was the spot fixed upon by
Cotman for his London home. But he went down to Norwich still, now and
then, in the autumn. His son, ‘J. J.,’ already gifted, and afterwards
eccentric, was settled there. Cotman wrote letters to him, in many
moods, now bright and fanciful, now depressed and forlorn. He was fond
of the Thames before the Thames was popular--witness Mr. Reeve’s early
‘Twickenham,’ and Mr. Pyke Thompson’s later ‘Twickenham,’ the ‘Golden
Twickenham’ of the Turner house at Penarth--and in one of those letters
to the son ‘J. J.,’ there is ‘the log’ that records the adventures of
Mr. Cotman’s ‘voyage’ with others of the ship’s company to Windsor,
where they were ‘not victualled from hence’--from London, that is to
say--and so might be expected to put in at Datchet. Then later, the
brightness was all gone, and illness was upon him. ‘It was my duty,
it was my wish, and I threatened to paint for your sake when you were
here, but I could not; I was ill in body, and spiritless.’

Again, still later, ‘I am not quite well, but better. I am
painting.’[5] And then he could paint no more. He died, in Hunter
Street, in July 1842, and was buried on the 30th of that month, in
what is now the dull suburban cemetery behind St. John’s Wood Chapel,
within sound of the cheers from ‘Lord’s’ and the screech of the
Metropolitan Railway.

    [5] These letters, some of which belong to Mr. Reeve, and
        others to the British Museum, have been quoted from more
        amply in my _Studies in English Art_.

The beginning of the later period of Cotman’s art dates rather from the
days of his visits to Normandy than from those of his removal to King’s
College. I used to think that it was a good deal by the composition--by
the theme chosen and by the disposition of its different elements--that
we could best affix some approximate date to the undated work of
this delightful master. And, unquestionably, composition counts; and
the tendency as time advanced was towards a greater elegance in this
matter--a more elaborate art, a franker departure from that Nature
which suffers, in Boucher’s word, the grass to be ‘too green,’ which
‘lacks,’ in Lancret’s answer, ‘harmony and seductiveness.’ But, with
a pretty familiar knowledge, now, of at least a couple of hundred of
Cotman’s sketches and designs--the most accomplished of his work, with
its wise and learned or inspired omissions, is sometimes disparaged as
a ‘sketch’--I am inclined to extend the period during which Cotman’s
art was wont to be wrought into studied fineness of line, and I
would appeal, perhaps, chiefly to colour to settle the question as
to the date of this or that drawing, coming from the hand of one
who was a poet at the beginning and a poet at the end. Undoubtedly,
in the best--in the very best--of Cotman’s later work (in Mr. Pyke
Thompson’s ‘Blue Afternoon,’ for instance, and Mr. Bulwer’s ‘Blasting
St. Vincent’s Rock’), there is a greater freedom of poetic expression
than was reached in the earlier work; an even keener sensibility, an
added love of luxury of hue and of forms that have grandeur sometimes
in their restraint, or elegance in their abandonment. Certain
black-and-white studies done in the last autumn of Cotman’s life--one
October and November, when the country around Norwich lay under flood,
and Cotman, visiting his native city, went out to depict no definite
landscape, but ‘the world afloat’--display that faculty of seizing the
spirit of a thing more than its body, which Youth, in any art, can
hardly claim--which comes to men, it may be, with the refinement and
chastening of the years. But the germs of all this faculty were there
from the first. Cotman was indebted for them to no institution, and to
no outward training. The Heavens had so willed it that his delightful
labour--so sterling, so sober, so poetic--should evade popularity. He
was granted his sensibilities that it should be impossible to vulgarise
him. Through good report and evil report he was an artist only. And so
he accomplished his work.


                  (_Magazine of Art_, December 1888.)




H. G. HINE


Strangely little notice, considering the artistic importance of the
subject, has been taken of the death of H. G. Hine, the eminent artist
in water-colours, vice-president of the Royal Institute, who died
a fortnight ago, aged eighty-three years. The explanation, I fear,
of the scanty comment his death has evoked, is to be sought in the
fact that the mass of that public which concerns itself with Art at
all, is occupied chiefly with such art as exhibits an easy piquancy
of treatment or an obvious interest of subject. Hine’s did neither;
yet the best-equipped critics have long done justice to the steady
perfection with which he dealt with those themes of serene weather
upon ‘the billows of the Downs,’ which--superlatively though they
were executed by him--he, with a hankering sometimes after other
compositions and other effects, declined to consider his speciality.
Yet a speciality, of course, they were: those visions of turquoise or
of opal sky, and of grey gold or of embrowned gold turf, with the
long, restful sweeps and subtle curves, the luminous shadows, the
points of light, with the shepherd and his flock on the ascending
hillside, with the ancient thorn-tree bent by the winds of many an
autumn.

Singularly unlike the work of strange refinement and unsurpassed
subtlety which it was his wont to produce, was Hine himself, with his
sturdy and sailorlike personality. Yet the character of the man was,
in truth, not less admirable than the artistic finesse of his work.
He found his true path somewhat late in life. His genius came to him
almost as tardily, but then, perhaps, almost as powerfully, as did
David Cox’s. He was long past fifty when--with a charm of composition
not less certain than Copley Fielding’s, and with the genius of a far
finer and fuller colourist--he began to do justice to the Sussex Downs,
amid whose generally unconsidered scenery it had been his excellent
fortune to be born.


                     (_Academy_, 30th March 1895.)




THOMAS COLLIER


English landscape art--the practice of which he had adorned by
five-and-twenty years of noble work--sustains a profound loss in the
death of Thomas Collier. He was born in the year 1840, at Glossop,
on the Derbyshire border. He early addressed himself to the career
of a landscape painter; and it is true, no doubt, that his method
was founded upon that of David Cox, nor is it possible that he could
have set up for himself a better model of delicacy of observation,
and of decisive and economical handwork. And the medium of Collier
was--like that of David Cox--almost exclusively water-colour. His oil
paintings were few, and, like Cox’s, they were executed chiefly in
his later time. But, with him, the later time was still only middle
age. Collier died when he was fifty-one: David Cox at seventy-six. Had
David Cox left us at the age of Collier, he would hardly have been
remembered to-day, and could have been an example to no one. Collier
passed through no such prolonged period of preparation for mastery.
He was already a master in his early manhood. His work cannot well
be divided into periods: freedom of manner, largeness of vision and
touch, belonged to him almost from the first. To the quite superficial
observer of his drawings, it appeared that he painted only two or three
subjects, and these on the same grey day. But to the real student of
his work, the richness and variety of his resource is revealed. He
observed and recorded differences of weather and light which escape
all casual and all untrained notice; and if he was among the simplest
and most vigorous, he was also among the most poetic recorders of
English countryside and homestead--of farm, and coast, and moor.
His work, exhibited in France, obtained for him the decoration of a
chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and here in England he was one of
the most distinguished members of the Royal Institute of Painters in
Water-Colours. But it is doubtful whether the opportunities afforded
to the large public for seeing his work were frequent enough to secure
him that degree of actual popularity which was his due; and it is at
all events certain that when the cabinet of sketches which he showed
occasionally to his friends shall come to be known more widely, Collier
will be accorded, without cavil or questioning, a lasting place among
the Masters.


                      (_Academy_, 23rd May 1891.)




LORD LEIGHTON


By the death of Lord Leighton, the Royal Academy loses a great
President and England a many-sided artist, who was certainly not far
removed from being a great painter. It was more, perhaps, by the
combination of so many various qualities of character and talent
than by the firm possession of one especial vein of genius, that
‘our dear President, our admirable Leighton’--to use the words most
fittingly applied to him by Sir John Millais--had come, of recent
years at least, to be distinguished and known. The painter’s and
designer’s art, evidenced in his youth, about forty years ago, by the
‘Procession of Cimabue,’ had not only never fallen into disuse, but
had never come to occupy, in his mind, a secondary or comparatively
unregarded place. But, along with the well-maintained devotion to the
craft to which he had first vowed his affections a full generation
ago, there had sprung up, partly of necessity and partly by reason of
Lord Leighton’s exceptional temperament, many interests, exclusive
of merely official duties, which occupied time and thought--so much
so that if he had not added to the tastes of an artist the habits and
qualifications of a great man of affairs, it would have been impossible
for him to have successfully crowded into his life all the pursuits
that engrossed it. It is easy for the ‘admirable Crichton,’ in these
modern times, to degenerate into the Mr. Brook of _Middlemarch_--the
not unamiable dilettante who was pretty certain to have once ‘taken up’
everything, and was pretty certain also to have dropped it. But Lord
Leighton, great as was the diversity of his interests, was absolutely
systematic and thoroughgoing; and, outside his especial art (in which
his place, whatever may have been his deficiencies, was peculiar and
unquestioned), he not only practised but excelled.

Leighton was linguist, student, antiquary, man of fashion,
administrator, even philanthropist. His oratory was an accomplishment;
albeit, in its addiction to ingenious ornament, his style was not quite
of our period. His tact in dealing with men and with affairs was almost
faultless. His opinions were decided, and he never concealed them; yet,
in uttering them, he hardly ever gave offence--never, indeed, to the
reasonable. When all these things are remembered, and when there is
added to them the recollection of a presence elegant and stately, and
of a manner which, though it could well keep intruders at a distance,
had singular and winning charm for the many whom it was intended to
please, it will be fully realised what a difficult and heavy honour
awaits Lord Leighton’s successor in his great function--that of
President of the Royal Academy, and official representative of English
Art. The Academy contains several painters of genius; several amiable
and distinguished men of the world; but as those who can look back the
furthest declare that no past President of whom they had any knowledge
ever equalled Lord Leighton, it may well be doubted whether a future
President is likely to equal him.

So much by way of rough indication of the character of the man, and of
the public man. A further explanation of his individuality must, of
course, be discovered in his Art; and even a cursory survey of it--and
of the creations which were the events of his life--will disclose
something of his strength, and something, too, of his weakness. The
son of a physician whose life was extended to a most ripe old age, and
grandson of Sir James Leighton, also a doctor--long resident at the
Court of St. Petersburg--Frederic Leighton was born at Scarborough,
on the 3rd December 1830. A Yorkshireman in fact--like William Etty,
and another remarkable artist of a later generation, Thomas Collier--no
one could have been less of a Yorkshireman in character than was
the late President. To what is understood or conjectured to have
been a Jewish strain in his blood are possibly to be attributed his
profoundly artistic inclinations, which were manifested very early,
and which, as the public knows, dominated the whole of his career. It
is recorded that young Leighton received drawing lessons in Rome as
long ago as the year 1842; and not two years afterwards he entered as
a student at the Academy of Berlin. With Rome, perhaps, began that
long series of _Wanderjahre_ which made him so cosmopolitan an artist
and so many-sided a man. He had some general education at Frankfort;
then, after a removal to Florence, where the American sculptor, Hiram
Powers, was consulted with a view to an opinion on his ability, and
prophesied that the boy ‘could become as eminent as he pleased,’
young Leighton’s father withdrew his long-standing objections to the
adoption of painting as a profession; and the new decision was followed
by a sojourn in Brussels and a longer stay in Paris. In Paris the
youth attended a life-school, and copied at the Louvre. Next we hear
of him at Vienna, where he was a pupil of Steinle, himself a pupil
of Overbeck. Of Overbeck’s religious unction, Leighton had never a
perceptible share. Something he no doubt owed to the leaders of the
German Renaissance of Painting; but amongst these, more, it may be,
to Cornelius than Overbeck. After his sojourn in Vienna, he was back
again in Rome--these early and most prolonged wanderings are worthy
of chronicle, because they had so much to do with the formation of
the characteristics of the artist--and it was from Rome that he sent
to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1855 a picture which made no bid
for immediately popular effect, which was nothing, moreover, of a
‘pot-boiler,’ and which made no concession to ordinary _bourgeois_
liking. It was the canvas in which is depicted, with something of
reticence and grace, and with a very learned draughtsmanship, the
procession which passed through the streets of Florence, on its way to
Santa Maria Novella, when Cimabue’s picture of the Madonna was carried
in the midst, and honour and peculiar recognition--in which a whole
city joined--were bestowed upon its painter. Elegant as the picture
was, it did not lack favour; a certain relative warmth, a certain
romantic spirit, the presentation of the ideal, it may be, in more
homely form, pleased a generation familiar with Dyce, Maclise, and
Cope; and the picture, as it happened, had an immediate success.

Paris was Leighton’s next halting-place, and now, an artist rising
above the horizon, he was no longer likely to seek direct instruction
from any one of the painters who were there at work; but he was
associated with, and was to some extent influenced by, men like Ary
Scheffer (whose ‘Augustine and Monica’ was long appreciated in England)
and Robert Fleury. He contributed almost without intermission, for
the next eight or nine years, to the Royal Academy, and it was in
1864, when he was represented by an ‘Orpheus and Eurydice,’ that he
was elected to the Associateship--becoming in 1869 a full member. The
year of his election to the Associateship was likewise the year of the
exhibition of his charming and seductive invention, ‘Golden Hours.’ To
the painter of mediæval or Renaissance history, and of themes avowedly
classic, there was vouchsafed the expression of the romantic and the
unquestionably poetic, and it is, no doubt, to the certain element of
poetry that is in Lord Leighton’s work--far more, at all events, than
to its austerer qualities of design, which never had any popularity
at all, and which, even amongst painters, have gone terribly out of
fashion--that is to be attributed part of the great favour which his
art has enjoyed. In 1869 was shown ‘Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon,’
and in 1876 the second great processional, ‘The Daphnephoria.’ Two
years later the ‘Arts of War’--not the least dignified and decorative
of modern frescoes--was finished for South Kensington, where was
already its companion, ‘The Industrial Arts of Peace,’ completed in
1873; another mural painting, that of ‘The Wise and Foolish Virgins,’
having, at an earlier date, been placed in the chancel of a fortunate
parish church in Hampshire. The year of the completion of ‘The Arts
of War’ was that of Lord Leighton’s election to the Presidency of the
Academy, which he obtained, it will be remembered, in direct succession
to Sir Francis Grant, with whose courtly qualities, and with whose
large and manly sympathies, he combined a width of artistic outlook, a
refinement of artistic expression, which had scarcely perhaps belonged
to any President of the Academy since the days of its first leader, Sir
Joshua Reynolds.

President, and knighted in consequence of that distinction in 1878,
Leighton was given a baronetcy in 1886. In the interval he had not
only proved beyond dispute his fitness for the responsibilities of
the official position, which he filled, but--to mention only some
of the most memorable of many works--had completed his own portrait
for the Uffizi, had wrought the really grave and impressive canvas
of Elisha raising the son of the Shunamite widow, and had, in his
peculiar fashion, effected an alliance between luxury in colour and
sculpturesque arrangement of ‘line’ in the great ‘Cymon and Iphigenia.’
In actual Sculpture, too--sharing the ambition of the men of the
Renaissance for a triumph in various mediums--he had produced ‘The
Sluggard.’ It was extraordinarily clever, but perhaps its qualities
were less truly sculptural than was some of his design executed in
the older and more familiar material. Yet, if this particular work
did not possess to the full all the great qualities that might have
been expected in it, the order of Lord Leighton’s talent was one,
nevertheless, which empowered him to succeed thoroughly in Sculpture,
sooner or later; for, in Sculpture, while there was room for the
generally unimpeded play of his own skill in design, there might have
been a relief found from the exercise of his art in a path in which
success to him was more uncertain and capricious--the path of colour.

It is too early, of course, to attempt to settle definitely the place
of Leighton in English Art; but it is certain that his influence,
whether as President or painter, tended to the extension of its vistas.
An upholder of the Classic--never, with all his range, much in love
with Realism--he was yet nothing whatever of a partisan, and--it may
be mentioned as a characteristic detail of him in his daily ways--he
was accustomed from time to time to purchase clever little drawings
(sometimes the very last one would have thought he would care for)
by artists who esteemed him as a President, but who regarded him
very lightly as a practitioner of their own craft. Lord Leighton was
perfectly aware that several circumstances limited--especially of late
years--the appreciation of his work. He was not altogether insensible
of its real defects--at all events, of peculiarities which were defects
upon occasion. He knew that his ‘brush-work’ was not absolutely
‘modern.’ He must have allowed that, now and again, when it was by
no means one of his aims to seek it, the texture of his flesh was
porcelain-like, and thus mainly conventional. He was, confessedly, not
greatly occupied with ‘values’ of colour, with the relation of part to
part. He was at one--perhaps more than they knew it--with many of our
newest artists in demanding a decorative quality; only the decorative
quality of his choice was not always--was, indeed very seldom--that of
theirs. A successful pattern of colour they could understand the virtue
of. The Japanese, or Mr. Whistler, had taught it them. But a successful
pattern of line, they were less capable of appreciating. They, for
example, or some of them, execrated Bouguereau, and resented in some
degree the hospitality prominently offered to that distinguished
Frenchman on the walls of the Academy. Lord Leighton, on the other
hand, was, very possibly, not fully alive to Bouguereau’s vices or
failings--to his mere smoothness, softness, not infrequent vapidness
of human expression. But he valued justly Bouguereau’s possession
of the best Academic graces, of faultless composition and subtle
draughtsmanship. For these things--these best Academic graces--he
himself strove. These, too, he generally, though not always, attained.

In regard to this particular matter, there were times when Leighton
knew himself to be a _vox clamantis in deserto_. But he had his
mission. It is an immense tribute to him to recognise that any
one caring, as he undoubtedly cared, to be acceptable amongst his
fellows--amongst the younger men, even, who were some day to succeed
him--should yet have been so true to his particular message. But Lord
Leighton had an admirable courage as well as a great patience and an
untiring diligence. And there were times, fortunately, when it was
brought home to him beyond cavil, that some educated appreciation
existed of his own especial artistic qualities, as well as of those
human virtues which made him, in many ways, so estimable a man, and so
fitting a leader of men.


                    (_Standard_, 27th January 1896.)




SIR JOHN MILLAIS


For the second time within a few months the Royal Academy has lost
its chief, while English Painting is deprived of its most popular
representative, and contemporary English Art of one who was long its
most vigorous and most varied personality. Born at Southampton in 1829,
the ‘son of John William Millais, Esquire, by Mary, daughter of Richard
Evemy, Esquire’--as the official biographies relate--Millais was really
the descendant of a Jersey family of long standing; but in character,
personal and professional, he was typically English. It is partly by
reason of the fact that, as a man and as an artist, Millais summed up
some, perhaps, of the defects, many certainly of the great qualities,
of our English race, that his popularity amongst all personal
associates, and amongst the spectators of his decisive, strenuous, and
eager work, was won so early, and has been so firmly held.

The man himself, during forty years or thereabouts of active adult
life--the artist during forty years of scarcely relaxed endeavour--has
been in thought, in conduct, in taste, and in production, pre-eminently
healthy. Millais, in the generation and a half of his active life--for
he began young--had seen fashions good and bad, foolish and reasonable,
rise and pass away; but, save by the influences of his quite early
days, the days of the Pre-Raphaelites, he has been practically
unaffected. He has developed in the direction proper to himself. As
time has passed, he and his sympathies have broadened and modified,
and if we miss in much of the later work the intense and concentrated
poetry of the earlier, that later work has qualities of its own that
do something to compensate. The man himself, too--sportsman, man of
the world, excellent comrade, hearty and sincere good fellow--has been
essentially greater in his more recent than in his earlier times; for
the temptations of a success, brilliant and uninterrupted, did him,
as a man at least, little harm. Simple and generous he was--by all
the records of his fellows--when he was at ‘Mr. Sass’s Academy’ fifty
years ago. Simple and generous--generous especially in thought and
judgment as well as in action--he remained, when in the late winter
of the present year he was appointed to the visible headship of the
profession to which he had given so much of the energy of his life.

Sir John Millais was only nine years old when he gained his first medal
at the Society of Arts--Mozart himself scarcely came before the public
in more tender years, as an executant upon the limited keyboard of his
day--and when he was seventeen, ‘Jack’ Millais was already an exhibitor
at the Academy. He was only twenty when his ‘Isabella,’ from the poem
of Keats, disclosed a new talent, almost a new order of talent; at
the least, a personality that had to be reckoned with--an influence
that had to be either accepted or fought against. Yet more marked
by an artistic individuality which was, in part, a return to older
conceptions and views than those of his day, were the ‘Carpenter’s
Shop,’ ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange,’ the ‘Huguenot,’ and ‘Ophelia.’
These, or most of them, are typical Pre-Raphaelite pictures--the
offspring of the tacit rebellion of a whole group of men, only one of
whom, Mr. Holman Hunt, remains to give effect in his later life to the
principles enunciated in youth. Dante Gabriel Rossetti--Pre-Raphaelite
to the end, though of course with certain modifications--was another of
those men; but years have passed since he went from us. The group was
completed by others never as celebrated, nor, as the world judges, so
successful. They painted their pictures; they made their illustrations;
they wrote as well as drew, in the quaint publication called _The
Germ_, which the lapse of time and the fad of the collector have since
made rare and valuable. Truth, rather than convention, was the aim of
their practice; but they were not peculiar in that,--all youth, if it
is earnest at all, is earnest for truth, or earnest rather for that
particular side of truth which happens just then to have been revealed,
and of which it exaggerates the value. Much has been written about the
Pre-Raphaelite ‘movement’ and its supreme importance--as if it were a
great religious Reformation and a French Revolution rolled into one.
In History it is destined to be remembered because it was a phase
through which two or three men of genius passed--a something, moreover,
that for the moment welded them together. It will not be recollected,
because at a later time mere imitative weaklings, by the dozen, made
feeble fight under what they professed to be its banner.

The interest, then, for sensible people, in Millais’s early pictures,
lies, not in the fact that they were Pre-Raphaelite, but in the fact
that they showed, many of them, an intensity of vision, a profundity
of poetic feeling, which is the property of gifted and of eager youth.
The passionate, constant devotion--the devotion of a minute which
lasts, you feel, for a lifetime; the ‘moment eternal,’ as the great
poet puts it--of the Puritan Maiden and of the Cavalier she helps, is
the interest of the ‘Concealed Royalist.’ The burning love-affair of
the ‘Huguenot’ is the interest of a canvas on which, before the days
when the aesthete had invented ‘intensity’ of attitude, Millais had
determined that his lovers should be intense, instead of sentimental.
Millais was in those years occupied very much with the presentation,
never of strictly sensuous enjoyment (Rossetti’s field, rather than
his), but of violent emotion, and uncontrolled, almost uncontrollable,
impulse. His people felt keenly, but with the elevation of poetic
natures, or of a poetic mood. And Millais painted them when their blood
ran high. He chose the incident that seemed to him the most dramatic
in all their story. He painted them on the crest of the wave--at the
moment of crisis.

This, however, like the more naïve Pre-Raphaelitism of a yet earlier
time, was but a phase--remarkable now chiefly because it has been so
absolutely outlived; nay, because so much of the view of life taken
subsequently by its author has, dominating it, a spirit so opposed
to this one. But the transition was not rapid: the ‘Autumn Leaves’
of 1856, and the ‘Vale of Rest’ of 1860, have, at least, the poetic
quality to the full, though with no violence of emotion. Rather, they
are suggestive and reticent; weird and extraordinarily expressive: in
the one there is depicted the wistfulness of childhood, in the other
the melancholy resignation of a nun to whom ‘rest’ means brooding on a
Past more eventful and more poignant than the occupation of her present
day.

Notwithstanding his later technical development, nothing that Sir John
Millais has painted will be remembered more definitely and firmly than
these; and it is noteworthy that they are among the first pictures
in which he relied in great measure upon landscape to express or
suggest the sentiment which it was the picture’s business to convey.
‘Spring Flowers’ of 1860 was in a lighter and gayer vein, if it is,
as we believe, the picture known originally as ‘Apple Blossom’--girls
lounging in an orchard under the loaded and whitened boughs. ‘My First
Sermon,’ in 1863, was more purely popular than anything we have named.
It dealt with childhood almost in the spirit of Édouard Frère, but
with its author’s singular realism of execution. ‘Vanessa,’ in 1869,
marked Millais as occupied increasingly with technical problems--with
the attainment of an almost novel boldness of effect. It is, like so
many pieces of his middle and later middle time, brilliant in colour
and brush-work. No one now thinks, we suppose, of claiming it as
dramatic--that is, of connecting it especially with the character of
the lady who came off second-best in the affections of Swift.

Very soon after the exhibition of ‘Vanessa,’ Millais, who had already
sought impressiveness in landscape background, turned to pure landscape
as a theme sufficient for the exercise of his art. He gave us then
‘Chill October,’ the October of the north and of the lowlands, with
the wind passing over water, and the reeds and scanty foliage bent
aside by its breath. The picture excited interest. It was visibly
forcible. The conception of the scene, too, was unusual and, of
course, unconventional; but in some later landscape work, Millais may
have been at once nearer to Nature and nearer to the attainment of a
perfected art. ‘New Laid Eggs,’ in 1873, with naïveté of expression
and dexterity of handling, but with a rusticity not very convincing,
was a ‘taking’ picture of happy, healthy, self-confident girlhood. Its
importance, in the volume of its author’s work, was quite eclipsed the
following year by the ‘North-West Passage,’ a canvas full of interest
almost romantic, yet most direct in its record of character--the main
figure being, indeed, a portrait of that Trevelyan who is associated
in most men’s minds with the career of Shelley. He it was who in Sir
John Millais’s picture posed as the sturdy sailor whose imagination
engages him in a remote and unknown voyage. When, many years after
it had been painted, the ‘North-West Passage’ was seen again in the
Millais Exhibition, at the Fine Art Society’s or at the Grosvenor
Gallery, it was felt that at the moment of its execution the painter
had reached the summit of his real artistic greatness, the masculine
and potent hand here best executing that which had been prompted by a
mind at its most vigorous. ‘A Jersey Lily,’ in 1878, was a tribute to
the then girlish beauty of Mrs. Langtry, who at about the same period
was recorded by Mr. Watts with exquisite simplicity. Again, just as
in his diploma picture it had pleased Millais to invoke the name of
Velasquez, and to perform a feat such as that to which Velasquez was
most wont to address himself, so, in another canvas, in one sense
more important--that of the three Miss Armstrongs playing whist with
a dummy--it pleased him to follow visibly in the steps of Sir Joshua
Reynolds--recalling his composition; the portrait group of the three
Ladies Waldegrave being the one with which he on this occasion made
it his business to vie. In 1879 Sir John was able to exhibit one of
the masterpieces of portraiture--that record or idealisation of Mr.
Gladstone of which the nobility and charm were instantly recognised--a
canvas which of itself would be sufficient to prove that the faculty
of poetic vision never finally deserted an artist who had seemed of
late to concentrate his energy rather on dexterous execution than on
the expression of profound feeling or elevated mood. The ‘Mr. Bright,’
which pretty closely followed the ‘Gladstone,’ was comparatively
unsuccessful. And the illness of the sitter and the consequent
incompleteness of his presentation on Millais’s canvas, made yet more
disappointing the portrait of Lord Beaconsfield which hung upon the
walls of the Academy in 1881. Next year, however, came the ‘Cardinal
Newman,’ to atone for all that had been amiss--again a poetic vision, a
worthy rising to the exigencies of a great theme, a performance at once
decisive and tender, energetic, yet exquisitely suave.


                    (_Standard_, 14th August 1896.)




BURNE-JONES


Unexpectedly and suddenly, from an attack of _angina pectoris_,
following upon the pest of influenza, Sir Edward Burne-Jones died
yesterday morning. He was sixty-five years old, and he looked worn
for his age--a man of delicate appearance, and certainly of great
sensitiveness; yet, as it had seemed already, of much staying power,--a
‘creaking gate,’ as his friends thought, not so very regretfully, since
destined, in all probability, to ‘hang long.’ But now his work and life
have been arrested; the laborious days which he had lived for forty
years of manhood are for ever over, and the wan face of the untiring
craftsman, which bent eagerly over his task, and brightened with quick
sensibility in the relaxation of the social hour, is for ever still.
‘Finis’ is written to the volume of achievement of one of the greater
practitioners in what we may call the second generation of the English
Pre-Raphaelites.

Of the first Pre-Raphaelites--of those of the first generation--more
than one changed his ways, his work, his whole conception of Art,
obviously, as time went on, and the most illustrious of them
all--Millais--was far enough removed from a Pre-Raphaelite in the end.
But of that distinguished and untiring practitioner of the second
generation, whose hold, of late years at least, upon the English and
to some extent upon the French public has become phenomenal, though
it will not be constant, it is certainly to be noted that although
there was, at different times, an unequal capacity, there was at no
time visible change in the direction of his tastes or in the method
of his work. Of the human figure Burne-Jones was not at the first
an excellent, and was never, at any time, an absolutely faultless
draughtsman. Yet the poetry of his figure-drawing, the almost feminine
tenderness with which he followed the lines of dainty human movement,
the dreamy grace that was in the place of strength, the elegant
diffuseness, so to say, which was characteristic of his style--never
even by accident tense and terse--these things are noticeable in his
earlier water-colours and in the very latest of his performances in
this year’s New Gallery. It was as a water-colour painter that he first
began to be known. A pupil of Rossetti, as far as he was a pupil of any
one, Burne-Jones was from the beginning romantic, and he was affluent
in colour.

But what, it may be asked, are the especial characteristics of Sir
Edward Burne-Jones’s art, as it has been revealed not only in the
designs for painted glass, mosaic, tapestry, in numberless pages
decorated with beautiful ornament--such as the Morris translation
of Virgil, and later, the great Chaucer--but likewise in the series
of large pictures, the adequate display of which was, so to say,
one of the _raisons d’être_ of the old Grosvenor Gallery? He had
indeed extraordinary individuality. He was amenable to influence,
for all that; and the influence he felt the most--that of his true
fellows--was exercised by the Italians of the earlier Renaissance: a
period scarcely primitive, scarcely accomplished. Those early Italians,
though engaging, were not really great draughtsmen of the human
figure--not great draughtsmen in the sense of the Greek sculptors, or
Michael Angelo, or Raphael, or Ingres, or Leighton, or Bouguereau.
Sir Edward Burne-Jones, lacking the peculiar education which fitted
the temperament and brought out the qualities of the men we have
named last of all, not unnaturally sympathised with those in whom
intention counted sometimes for more than execution. But it must not
be thought that because the ever-inventive artist did not possess the
Academic qualities, he was not, therefore, in certain respects, very
remarkable in draughtsmanship. He drew with the ease of conversation;
and, though never a master of accurate gesture--seldom dramatic in
the representation of the particular hour or scene--he was a master
of quaint and simple, and sometimes of elaborate, grace; and for the
untiring record of the particular type of maidenhood, seen best perhaps
in the ‘Golden Staircase,’ or in ‘Venus’s Looking-Glass,’ he stands
alone. We name those pictures rather than, for instance, the ‘Days of
Creation,’ or any of his various ‘Seasons,’ because in them he is at
his happiest--his girls, though in the work of the suave decorator they
are never essentially various, can be radiant as well as doleful. His
men have plenty of wistfulness, but they have rarely energy, strength,
decision. They are even, in a measure, sexless. And of childhood,
Burne-Jones has never been an inspired, or even, it would seem, a
particularly interested chronicler.

Of course, it must be remembered that Burne-Jones is judged unjustly
when judged by the rules of even the least narrow realism. He
painted, not the world of our own day, or of any day--least of all
the Kensington in which he lived, and slept, and had his studio--but
a world he had imagined and created; a world his conception of which
was fed, no doubt, by the earlier and graver of mid-Italian art.
Imagination, now stimulated by legend, now supported by classic lore,
and now the product of the brooding of an isolated mind--that is really
the genesis, the _raison d’être_, the Alpha and the Omega of his art.
Burne-Jones had, at his best, and especially in his middle period--the
days of the ‘Chant d’Amour,’ with its fitly welcomed splendours of
crimson and blue and golden brown--a wonderful gift of colour; and,
even where the draughtsmanship of the human figure left something to be
wished for, he was a marvellous, a loving, and a patient draughtsman
of flower and of herb. The backgrounds of some of his inventions, in
landscape and the architecture of towns, were of strange and mystic
quaintness. Sometimes, in these, he recalled almost the spirit, the
mystery, almost the charm, of the backgrounds of the prints by Albert
Dürer. The great Dürer!--well, that is saying much. But we have left to
the last what was perhaps Burne-Jones’s most essential characteristic,
certainly his greatest accomplishment. We mean his gift of composition
of line, his power of precisely and perfectly filling, and never
overcrowding, the space it was his business to occupy. His composition
of light and shade was less remarkable. He was a master of agreeable
outline, of flowing and spontaneous tracery. But if it is not his
imagination which is to keep his memory green, in the minds of the
students of Art--and we doubt whether, with all his very individual
merits, it really is--then it is that in which, in all our generation,
and perhaps in all our English School, he may be accounted to have most
possessed--the humbler faculty of patterning, of weaving faultless webs
of subtle line over the surface, large or small, which was devoted to
the exposition of whatever chanced to be his theme.


                     (_Standard_, 18th June 1898.)




BOSBOOM AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES


The English _cognoscenti_ of the modern type have now for some time
recognised that in Dutch Art there is more than one great period that
has to be reckoned with--that the great Seventeenth Century does not
exhaust the achievements of this people. It may not be quite true to
say of Dutch painting, as of French sculpture, that the traditions
have been invariably preserved, and that there has been little break
in the school; for the last century in Holland was a barren one--just
as barren there as in France and England it was brilliant. The revival
has been for later generations, and of those who did most to accomplish
it some are yet living, in an old age not so very advanced, and others
are lately dead. A history of this revival would be a great and worthy
subject: it may yet, one hopes, be undertaken by some one writer
qualified to treat it. Such a writer could not possibly be a person
who had lived wholly within its influence. He would have to bring
with him something better and wiser than the ungoverned admirations
of the modern studio. A knowledge of the Past must be his. Meanwhile,
we receive, and experience a certain satisfaction in receiving,
even that fragmentary contribution to the subject which is made in
the volume called _Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century_. Max
Rooses--the keeper of the Musée Plantin-Moretus at Antwerp--furnishes
a general introduction, which is readable and fairly comprehensive,
if not particularly critical. And many writers, whose collaboration
is of necessity destructive of unity of idea, but whose individual
opportunities of personal knowledge give the book something it might
yet have lacked had it been written by one serious and capable critic,
contribute biographical notes, authentic and amiable. The painters have
been caressed, not analysed. That is exactly what the least instructed
and least studious portion of the public is supposed to like, in the
‘text’ of its big Christmas picture-books--which, of course, is why
that text is written so seldom by the serious professional writers who,
if they chose to do it at all, could do it best.

Only a dozen painters are represented in Mr. Max Rooses’ volume, and
the selection of this dozen is extremely arbitrary, or would be if
it were not, as we understand, the intention of the publishers to
follow up the present with at least one other volume. Two women figure
amongst the twelve. Miss Jacoba van der Sande Backhuysen, the aged
flower-painter, who died three years ago, and then was seventy-one,
deserved probably to be included. She is included. Some of her work is
of freedom and vigour, if some also tends to be precise and impersonal.
You cannot find in every generation or in every land a Fantin-Latour
or a Francis James; and the flowers of Jacoba van der Sande Backhuysen
are generally welcome. But the introduction of Henriette Ronner, a
popular and quite delightful lady, with the narrow speciality of
painting cats, was surely scarcely merited. As for the men, the choice
is hardly less arbitrary. Israels, of course, is in his place, with his
grey record of the homely and the sad; and, though Alma-Tadema is a
naturalised Englishman, it is not surprising that the Dutch should be
reluctant to forget what at least was his origin. But if Alma-Tadema
is to be included, why is Van Haanen--a Dutchman still, probably, and
the truest and subtlest of all living painters of Venetian life and
character--why is Van Haanen to be left out? We receive gladly what
is given us of Bisschop, Weissenbruch, and Gabriel. But the omission
of such gifted Dutchmen as Mauve and Mesdag and Artz and Mathieu
Maris--even in a first volume--is memorable. Further, the omission of
the great name of Jacob Maris--certainly one of the most potent of all
contemporary masters--would be fatal to any pretensions that the volume
might make to completeness, or, if the phrase may be accorded us, to
even a temporary finality. But if it becomes the duty of any qualified
observer to note important omissions, compelling further instalments
of the history, it must be satisfactory to him to chronicle such
inclusions as those we have already cited as welcome and reasonable,
and it is nothing less than a pleasure to find, not only contained, but
placed in the forefront of the volume, the name and work of Johannes
Bosboom. To Bosboom, and his right of place there, we will devote our
remaining comments, and partly because the large English public is
still strangely deficient in the appreciation of his work.

Johannes Bosboom was born at the Hague in 1817. He died in 1891,
aged seventy-four, and in the artistic world of Holland he had by
that time long enjoyed complete and cordial recognition; to painters
and to the best critics--above all, perhaps, to that rich painter,
M. Mesdag, collector as well as artist--belong the majority of the
best of his works. The art of Bosboom is displayed to some extent in
oil pictures, but more finely, on the whole, in the great series of
his water-colours. He is a painter essentially of the succession of
Rembrandt--a master of the arrangement of light and shade--holding his
own honourably in the presentation of landscape, but known chiefly,
and known on the whole most to his advantage, as a painter of church
interiors. His earlier work is in method drier and smaller than his
later. The maturity of his genius finds him as broad as Cotman or
Dewint. He has the restfulness and dignity of these men when they
are at their best. He has not Cotman’s gift of colour, and in those
very church interiors to which Cotman would have given a colourist’s
charm--as his kindred work in the possession of Mr. James Reeve and
the late Mr. J. J. Colman assures us--Bosboom’s preoccupation is with
tone, and with sense of space; though, of course, in his colour he
is never inharmonious. Each is great in his own way, and the one is
almost as profoundly poetic as the other, though Bosboom, if anything,
excels Cotman in the restful picturesqueness of his vision. With him,
invariably, as in the great artist we have mentioned by the side of
him, the detail is nothing but a part of the whole. It is never
aggressive; it is never importunate; it is even for the most part
effaced. Bosboom, dealing with church interiors, is not, like Sir Wyke
Bayliss, a painter of great scenes as well as of great architecture.
For him the pageant has no attraction, and in the painting of a
ceremonial or a service, such as the ‘Taking the Sacrament in Utrecht
Cathedral,’ he is not really at his best. He is best when his church
is quiet, and all its spaciousness ‘tells.’ See, for instance,
the admirable ‘Church at Trier’--immense, velvety, solemn--and,
likewise, the not less masterly water-colour, the ‘St. Joris Church at
Amersfoort.’ An architectural draughtsman, in the technical or narrow
sense, he is never, from beginning to end--a fact that is partly due
to the broader and more poetic bent of his genius, and partly, too,
no doubt, to his observation having been chiefly exercised and his
imagination chiefly stirred by interiors quaint rather than elegant,
massive and large rather than exquisite in detail, picturesque rather
than perfect. The book of Mr. Max Rooses’ editing, will, in England,
have not been without its service, if it, or even our own comments on
it, should secure wider attention to the work of a master as eminently
human and sympathetic as he is austere and sterling. But, for the
fuller comprehension of Bosboom here, in England, there should be
gathered together in a single place a fair array of his work; and we
commend to the enlightened _dilettanti_ of the Burlington Fine Arts
Club this appropriate and honourable enterprise.


                   (_Literature_, 3rd December 1898.)




HENNER


The first thing to remember of the painter Henner is that he is above
all a poet. Has he then created stories or narrated them pathetically?
Has he made it the business of painting to do literary work? He has
done nothing of the kind. Even where he has used classical mythology
and Biblical tradition as the excuse for his canvases, the derived
subject seems to have taken hold of him but lightly; he has been
dramatic to the extent to which--well, shall I say?--to the extent to
which a reciter in a drawing-room is permissibly dramatic--gracefully
indicating action and character, never violently insisting on them.
Henner’s poetry--his gift of creating, of idealising, in restrained and
refined ways--is never shown by the usurpation of another’s functions.
It is shown in part by his choice of beautiful, artistic themes; by the
exceptional fulness of his appreciation of lovely form and hue; by the
combinations of faultless and harmonious colour which occur upon his
canvases; by the associations these somehow evoke; by the high pleasure
they bestow. To define it much further is impossible. I feel myself, in
describing his art, to be ineffective and faltering; but the analyst
does not exist who could account completely for his charm.

Henner, it will be allowed by those who are most qualified to notice,
is a great painter of the Nude. The Nude, according as you treat it,
can rise to poetic heights and address itself to the refined, or can
sink to more than prosaic depths. There is the high and there is the
low, and there are many levels for the painter to stay at and live upon
between them; and to the real artistic instinct, to the real fineness
of taste, in looking at the Nude, there is permitted that immediate
ease of judgment and decision by which the work is classed at once,
and its motive appraised. When the true judges appraise the Nude of
Monsieur Henner, the decision is a happy one. He is refinement to the
finger-tips--as refined as Burne-Jones, yet not sexless. Painters whom
only the Puritanic could accuse of vulgarity--Benner, say, in France,
with his ‘Dormeuse’ of Amiens; Ingres, a generation ago, with his
‘Source’ and her ‘_âme végétale_’; Etty, say, in England, with his
daylight flesh-colour, which the sunshine suffers to be neither creamy
nor grey, but rose and opal--they, and how many others, may be named
with praise. But Monsieur Henner’s work has somehow, in this matter, a
reticence and a distinction--a part of his Alsatian Poetry--which one
is apt to think unique. And it is worthy of notice--it throws a little
light on the undramatic, the simply painter-like method of Henner’s
work--that the undraped figure is there, not seldom, as a necessary
note of colour, and nothing besides: a note of ivory, telling, in some
picture of evening, against that olive green of the embrowned woodland
which rises, massed and darkening, against the last turquoise of the
sky.

Yes, it is a purely painter-like quality, the poetry of colours in
that more than blameless juxtaposition which is a rare achievement of
Art--the poetry of gleaming form, of discreet light, of restful and
mysterious shadow--that Henner will live by. The story he illustrates
gains nothing in dramatic interest by his treatment of it. His
business, even when he paints an ‘Hérodiade,’ is to solace and charm
rather than to excite; and the refinement and suavity of his vision
may accomplish for us of the Nineteenth Century what David’s music did
for the troubled soul of King Saul. Like Puvis de Chavannes--in work
more grandly decorative, in conception vast and suave--he administers
to men the refreshment of a pure and high beauty. In such a subject
as his ‘Prayer,’ it is his function but to vary things delicately:
to escape the commonplace, nothing more. But, as regards his figure
painting, in the refinement of his models we are never suffered to
lose sight of what is familiar, homely, intimate, personal. Nature has
been suggested with reticence, but nature has been constantly referred
to. Of his landscape, the materials are simple and few; breadth and
simplicity are of the very essence of his treatment. His selection is
arbitrary; a certain noble conventionality reigns in his canvases.
Give him a tranquil sky, a pool, a square stone fountain, a nymph, a
solemn cypress, a tangle of woodland--what more! Petty imitation, fussy
realisation of a hundred objects, he will hold to be valueless. But his
work must have Unity: it must have Style.

An artist with these preoccupations is not, one may say with safety,
likely to be a very popular portrait painter. Yet Henner has painted a
fair share of portraits. And no ‘hard and fast’ line can divide such
portraiture as he produces from his ideal work. When the touches on
his canvas are no longer dictated by what is obviously imagination, it
is not likely that a striking realism succeeds to the control, that
_modernité_ speaks from every corner of the picture, that the poet has
become the fashionable portrait painter. Reticence is still remembered.
Henner can perceive character, but it must be conveyed without
emphasis. With the palette set as of old, and the schemes of colour
such as the ideal work has already accustomed us to, Henner must pursue
his task. Perhaps it is the pallor of a thoughtful face of middle age,
to be framed in black hair, with an olive background. Perhaps, as in
the ‘Créole,’ it is the old Venetian tresses that are to fall richly on
the bust that is shining marble, that is gleaming ivory. A likeness, no
doubt; but before all things, a picture.


                     (_Magazine of Art_, May 1888.)




FRANCIS JAMES


I leave to a biographer in the Future the task of recording Mr. Francis
James’s birthplace and of settling the number of his years; of saying,
too, where he chiefly lived and chiefly practised. I am concerned with
his drawings, and not with the man, except in so far as his drawings
must reveal him; and the real man, and not the outside facts about him,
a man’s work does always to some extent reveal. In the case of Francis
James, his work is his water-colours. I know no oil painting by him. I
remember no pencil studies. I know no etchings by him, no lithographs
by him. And, moreover, modern man though he is, he seems to be able to
express himself without the assistance of silver point--the interesting
and difficult medium, the employment of which threatens to become a
label of the cultivated. His own work in water-colour is as direct,
immediate, uncorrectable as that; but colour is of the very essence of
it. Whatever he tackles, whatever he elects to let alone, Francis James
is essentially a colourist.

One thing about his life and circumstances I shall here--taking breath
in a parenthesis--venture to record. As a youth he was never compelled
to prepare for a profession. Being a country gentleman who gradually
became an artist, Mr. Francis James had a little comfortable means,
one may suppose. Is he to be cursed, then, on that account, with the
name of amateur? Certainly not. No more than Méryon, who was brought
up in the French Navy; no more than W. W. May, the charming marine
artist, in early life a sailor, and in late life Keeper of the Painted
Hall at Greenwich; no more than Robert Goff, who was in the Coldstream
Guards; or Seymour Haden, President of his own Academy, and once
such a successful surgeon that he might have been President of the
College of Surgeons to boot. In art of any kind--in Painting, Writing,
Modelling--the spirit in which a man does his work, and not the means
that he possesses, or the family that he belongs to, constitutes him
professional or amateur. Is his art his chief interest? If so, whatever
may be his status upon other grounds, professional artist, serious
professional artist, he is, with his books or his pictures. To the
serious artist a little money is of endless usefulness, even if it be
only a very scanty portion--three hundred a year and an umbrella--for
that scanty portion, which has caused the fool to eat the bread of
idleness, has caused the wise man to work with a will. It has gone some
little way towards securing him that deepest boon for the artistic
nature, _la liberté du travail_.

I suppose it was his exquisite enjoyment of flowers, as he had lived
amongst them, at all seasons of the year, in their natural place, that
gave the first impulse to Francis James to render flowers in Art.
Then, as to method in Water-colour painting, there came the influence
of Dewint, and then the influence of some, at least, of modern French
practice, and then the influence of his neighbour, down in Sussex--that
sensitive Impressionist, H. B. Brabazon, with his mature thought
upon the matter, and his delightful practice, his ‘blobs’ upon the
drawing-paper--‘blobs’ which are so very few, and are so admirably
right. James has become, of late years at all events, less purely an
Impressionist than Brabazon. In his work, whatever be its theme, there
is always more of positive and yet refined draughtsmanship. But the
influence of Brabazon is there all the same; or, at least, is there
from the first. An immense sensitiveness as to colour, a refinement
of colour which does not preclude boldness, the cultivation of an
alertness as to the most delicate gradations of colour--these things
characterise Francis James. They are of assistance to him, even of
incalculable assistance to him, in all the things that he depicts, in
all the visions he realises. But I think they are of most use to him of
all when it is flowers he is looking at; composing with grace, painting
with ineffable charm.

And, so far as I understand, flowers were the subject with which he
chose to begin.

It would, however, be now thoroughly unfair to Francis James to
consider him only as a flower painter. Outside flowers altogether,
there is a class of effect which he has made his own, and which is his
by reason of his habitual command of colour--fearless, original, and
gay. I am talking of the church interiors, beheld in keen, clear light;
and interesting less it may be by their architecture--as to which,
while John Fulleylove, and Albert Goodwin, and Wyke Bayliss, speak, who
is there that shall speak with equal authority to-day?--interesting
less by their architecture than by their hues and their illuminations,
and their accidents and accessories; the ornaments about the altar,
the wreath of flowers that encircle the figure of a saint, the bit of
heraldic glass that recalls Nuremberg, the sacred piece hoisted above
the altar; the banner, it may be, or perhaps only the pink cushion of
the altar rail, or the little green curtain that gives privacy to the
box of the confessional. At Rothenburg, as well as Nuremberg itself,
Mr. James went in for very serious draughtsman’s study of statues in
their niches, of the traceried wall, of plate upon the altar, of this
and that little detail, of which the treatment remained broad while it
became finished. At Nuremberg--to name two, that for excellent reasons
I remember--admirable is the broad and luminous picturesqueness of his
interiors of the Kaiser Kapelle and St. Sebald. At Rothenburg, as far
as simple architecture is concerned, what a variety lay before him!
And yet from all its richness and variety he turned now and then, to
paint the humble window of the little _bourgeois_ or little tradesman’s
house; the window-sill with its few pots of green-leaved and blossoming
flowers, seen, some of them, against the brown-red shutter; fragile
fuchsia, and healthy geranium.

But whether Francis James is occupied with flower painting, or with
church interiors of Germany or the Eastern Riviera, or with landscape
pieces, or with studies of the village shop, it is always the same
spirit of broad interpretation that dominates his work. Its business
is to recall an impression--artistic always, whether beautiful or
quaint--it is not generally its business to be imitative, strictly
imitative, of actual object or scene. Quite an infinity of detail is
pleasantly suggested by a drawing of the grocer’s shop at Bewdley--the
Post Office of the country town--and just as much by ‘Shop Front,
Bewdley,’ which shows us the deep bow-window of Mr. Bryan, the
bookseller; a background before which some quiet figure out of Jane
Austen might conceivably have passed. But the detail is not obtruded.
If you peer closely into the paper, it is not dryly made out. In a
sense, ‘_il n’y a rien_.’ Stand away a little, and then again, ‘_il y a
tout_.’

But, of course, Mr. James’s preoccupation with a quaint little world of
the provinces, whose combinations of colour, as he here shows us them,
are curious rather than lovely--that preoccupation of his is occasional
rather than constant; and we shall never therefore take his measure by
an inspection of work like this. Some quaint line it possesses, and
to the interest of quaint as well as of lovely combinations of line,
Francis James is quite alive. But it is where the combinations of line
may be lovely--where they may have their highest quality herein--and
yet more where with beautiful lines there must (to do justice to the
theme) be associated beautiful colour; it is here that Mr. James is
most characteristic. ‘Autumn, Asolo,’ shows this to some extent; and
so do other landscapes in which the world to which he has addressed
himself, whether of Lombard or Venetian plateau, or of Alpine height,
is dealt with with intrepidity. But it is to churches and flowers--or
sometimes to the interiors of drawing-rooms or bedrooms lived in by
tasteful people, and full therefore of objects that should gratify
the eye in their happy, well-arranged union--it is to churches and
flowers in the main, and most of all flowers, that we must come back,
to find Francis James quite at his most exquisite, quite at his most
characteristic.

Perhaps it is hardly possible nowadays to paint flowers without
submitting to some extent to the influence of the Japanese. From
them, whatever else you learn, you learn freedom of treatment and a
conception based upon essentials. The limitations of Japanese Art it
does not happen just now to be the fashion to recognise; though every
one who is really educated--every one who understands the Classics of
Art, the immense achievements of Europe from Holbein to Turner--must
know of these limitations, and must feel them. That does not prevent
the perception of the value of those things which Japanese art (among
the arts of other peoples indeed) has had some capacity for teaching
us. And when Francis James makes his pink and white roses trail over
the paper, with tints so pale and delicate, I think sometimes of the
Japanese. I think of them much less when he sets a whole posy--a whole
group, at least--in a tumbler, and has his massive colour, his rich,
great colour, his fearless juxtapositions. And then, perhaps, with the
Japanese influence not lost altogether, but still mainly subdued--not
displayed at all, and scarcely even insinuated--do I rejoice in Francis
James at his best.

Among painters, water-colour painters, Francis James is the poet of
flowers, as Van Huysum, it may be--two hundred years ago--was their
prose chronicler. The public knows Van Huysum best by his work in
oils. The rare amateur of noble prints knows him best by Earlom’s
two splendid translations of him into the medium of mezzotint. But
the not less rare connoisseur of the fine drawings of a past period,
knows him by water-colour sketches, such as those possessed by the
Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. And as there
are moments, moods, opportunities, when men apparently far apart get
nearer together, so, just now and again by Van Huysum’s practice in
water-colour--by his pure sketching in that medium--the gulf that
separates him from Francis James, is, not bridged indeed, but narrowed.
The moment Van Huysum passes beyond the pure sketch, the perhaps even
rapid study, something that is of the nature of the artificial, of
intentional and obvious intricacy, begins to assert itself. Now, with
the delightful artist of the day whose eulogium I am slowly making,
that is never the case.

Francis James’s fondness for flowers is, in some sense, akin to a
woman’s instinctive fondness for everybody’s children. He has joy in
their mere life. And it is their life that he paints. And he paints
them in their own atmosphere--the sunlight heightening so the key of
their colour, or a little rain perhaps has fallen and their life is
refreshed. Had the rain fallen when Van Huysum painted them, the drop
would have glistened on the petal; the perfection of the imitation of
it is what we might have been asked, first of all, to see and admire.
But it is not their accidental condition that Francis James imitates.
It is their splendid vigour or exquisite freshness--see, for instance,
this noble primula with its deep glowing, slightly mauveish reds and
its enriched green leaves; in its condition, a very bridegroom coming
out of his chamber.

Amongst flowers, Francis James, I find, is universal in his loves.
He does not swear fidelity to the rose--or he does not swear the
particular fidelity which is only exclusiveness. In every garden,
every greenhouse, every season of the year, he has (to use the sailor
simile) ‘a wife in every port.’ He is as various in his appreciations
of the beloved and the admirable as is a young man by Mr. Thomas Hardy.
Primula, tulip, rose, pelargonium, and then the hundred orchids--having
thanked one of them for its beauty, and profited by it, he turns with
happy expectation to another. Nor does disappointment await him.

One little confidence--made to me long ago, I recollect--I propose,
before I finish this article, ruthlessly to break. James destroys
many drawings. He strangles the ill-begotten. He pronounces, with
severity, judgment upon his creations. He assists the fittest to
survive. Three or four years back he was wrestling manfully with the
treatment of the orchid. No one, I think, had really treated the orchid
before then. Since then, in oils, Mr. William Gale, in a group of
works too little known, has treated it with unequal, of course, yet
often with remarkable, skill. But when Francis James had drawn, at
Sanders’ nursery--during several months’ sojourn at St. Albans, to that
end--orchids of every kind, great was the massacre of the innocents. We
were permitted afterwards to see the successes; the failures had been
done away with.

This is characteristic, and that is why I record it. People who
observe flowers, and do not only buy them, will not be astonished
that when this happened most--this severe review and condemnation--it
was orchids, orchids only, that were in question. And this for
several reasons. Some are beautiful, but some are ugly, almost morbid
indeed--things for the delectation of Des Esseintes, the too neurotic
hero of M. Huysman’s _À Rebours_; scarcely for healthy folk, whom
mere strangeness may not fascinate. And then again, the extreme
intricacy of the forms of some of them, tells in two ways against
their employment as subjects for a painter. It is not only--it is not
so much--that their intricacy adds to the difficulty of correctness;
it is rather that it adds to the difficulty of their comprehension by
the spectator of the draughtsman’s drawing. The public knows the rose
and the geranium--it knows, besides, two score of flowers of English
garden and hedgerow. But the intricacy of the orchid is as yet an
unfamiliar intricacy, and it is infinitely various; and therefore,
though the painting of the orchid in Francis James’s water-colours
was an experiment interesting and courageous, and within reasonable
limits successful, that work was but one phase--far from the most
important--of a career and of a talent full already of individuality,
distinction, charm.


                       (_Studio_, January 1898.)


THE END


        Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty
                   at the Edinburgh University Press




Mr. Frederick Wedmore’s Short Stories

_Each Vol. 3s. 6d._


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    truthfulness to the remote life they depict, “Pastorals of France”
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Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.





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