Part 4

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.