Chapter II: Part 2

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.