Part 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(_Art Journal_, January and March 1894.)

ANNE OLDFIELD

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

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

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

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

(_Literature_, 22nd October 1898.)

SIDDONS AND RACHEL

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

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

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

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

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

(_Academy_, 3rd September 1887.)

JOSEPH JEFFERSON

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

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

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

(_Academy_, 6th November 1875.)

ZOLA’S ‘THÉRÈSE RAQUIN’