Part 5

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.

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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.’