The publication of Joe’s first book was quickly followed by an illustrated volume on the Abbey Church of St. Albans from articles written for the Art Journal; plenty of study on architecture and on monkish lore was done for this in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Later in life Joe used to say that, after the period of ravenous and enthusiastic boyhood, he might never have opened a serious book again—so much more enthralling to him was the daily intercourse for work or play with living men and women—had it not been for the necessity of boiling the pot; and that all that he read for a special purpose stuck to him as no desultory reading did and became stored in his mind for use and pleasure for the rest of his life.
I can see myself how true this was in respect of the whole range of Arthurian legend, on which subject he became an authority; he devoured everything in English and French that he could find when he was writing his plays of King Arthur and Tristram, and never forgot any of it.
The Abbey of St. Albans was too special a subject to make a popular book, and the first volume of Joe’s work which attracted attention was Essays on Art, gathered together in 1879.
I remember that, just as among his published work in verse he held that his Tristram and Iseult was his best, so he considered the Essay—practically on Keats, who held, I think, the highest place with him among the nineteenth century poets but entitled The Artistic Spirit in Modern English Poetry, he judged to be among his most satisfactory prose; with the exception of the Essay on Macbeth, written as a pamphlet at the time of Henry Irving’s production of the play, and now re-published under the title of Sex in Tragedy in his book Coasting Bohemia.
A letter which he wrote me later from France, when he was studying the provincial museums there for a series of articles in the Manchester Guardian, bears out pleasantly the criticism in the article on Corot and Millet in Essays on Art.
Limoges,
August 1882.
“... The landscape of the Loire somewhat disappointed me, although the towns are full of interest. Very fruitful the country seems to be, overflowing with corn and vine but far stretching and unvaried with a vague sense of melancholy in it that is almost oppressive. It is impossible to catch even a passing view of such country as lies between Orléans and Nantes without turning in thought from the landscape to the people who dwell in it; and the picture that is left in the mind of the daily life of these peasants who labour all day in fields that have no break or limit save where patches of corn alternate with spaces of vine, is strangely touching and sad. It wanted a France such as France is on the borders of the Loire to produce the solemn and austere sentiment of Millet, and I hardly think one understands the stern reality of his work until one has passed through miles and miles of this fruitful and uneventful land.
The later passages of to-day’s journey were a delightful change in the character of the scenery; a narrower river (The Vienne) but more sympathetic, with happy-looking green pastures and hilly banks.
This place stands high and the air is delightfully fresh. It has an industrial museum which is important in connection with my work.