But it is not only the Sunday papers that are so immense. I used to hold the Saturday Evening Post in my hands, weighed down beneath its bulk, and marvel that the nation that had time to read it could have time for anything else. The matter is of the best, but what would the prudent, wise and hard-working philosopher who founded it so many years ago—Benjamin Franklin—say if he saw its lure deflecting millions of readers from the real business of life?
When we come to consider the American magazines—to which class the Saturday Evening Post almost belongs—and the English, there is no comparison. The best American magazines are wonderful in their quality and range, and we have nothing to set beside them. It is astonishing to think how different, in the same country, daily and monthly journalism can be. Omitting the monthly reviews, Blackwood is, I take it, our finest monthly miscellany; and all of Blackwood could easily and naturally be absorbed in one of the American magazines and be illustrated into the bargain, and still leave room for much more. And the whole would cost less! Why England is so poorly and pettily served in the matter of monthly magazines is something of a mystery; but part of the cause is the rivalry of the papers, and part the smallness of our population. But I shall always hold that we deserve more good magazines than we have now.
TREASURES OF ART
I was fortunate in being in New York when the Metropolitan Museum celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its birth, for I was therefore able to enjoy not only its normal treasures but such others as had been borrowed for birthday presents, which means that I saw Mrs. H. E. Huntington's Vermeer, as well as the supreme Marquand example of that master; more than the regular wealth of Rembrandts, Manet's "Still Life," Gauguin's "Women by the River," El Greco's "View of Toledo," Franz Hals' big jovial Dutchman from Mr. Harry Goldman's walls, and Bellini's "Bacchanale"—to say nothing of the lace in galleries 18 and 19, Mr. Morgan's bronze Eros from Pompeii, and the various cases of porcelain from a score of collections. But without extra allurements I should have been drawn again and again to this magnificent museum.
Two of the principal metropolitan donors—Altman and Hearn—were the owners of big dry goods stores, while Marquand, whose little Vermeer is probably the loveliest thing in America, was also a merchant. In future I shall look upon all the great emporium proprietors as worthy of patronage, on the chance of their being also beneficent collectors of works of art. This thought, this hope, is more likely to get me into a certain Oxford Street establishment than all the rhetoric and special pleading of Callisthenes.
The Frick Gallery was not accessible; but I was privileged to roam at will both in Mr. Morgan's library and in Mr. H. E. Huntington's, in each of which I saw such a profusion of unique and unappraisable autographs as I had not supposed existed in private hands. Rare books any one with money can have, for they are mostly in duplicate; but autographs and "association" books are unique, and America is the place for them. I had known that it was necessary to cross the Atlantic in order to see the originals of many of the pictures of which we in London have only the photographs. I knew that the bulk of the Lamb correspondence was in America, and at Mr. Morgan's I saw the author's draft of the essay on "Roast Pig," and at Mr. Newton's, in Philadelphia, the original of "Dream Children," an even more desirable possession; I knew that America had provided an eager home for everything connected with Keats and Shelley and Stevenson; but it was a surprise to find at Mr. Morgan's so wide a range of MSS., extending from Milton to Du Maurier, and from Bacon to "Dorian Gray"; while at Mr. Huntington's I had in my hands the actual foolscap sheets on which Heine composed his "Florentine Nights."
I ought, you say, to have known this before. Maybe. But that ignorance in such matters is no monopoly of mine I can prove by remarking that many an American collector with whom I have talked was unaware that the library of Harvard University is the possessor of all the works of reference—mostly annotated—which were used by Thomas Carlyle in writing his "Cromwell" and his "Frederick the Great," and they were bequeathed by him in his will to Harvard University because of his esteem and regard for the American people, "particularly the more silent part of them."
My hours in these libraries, together with a glimpse of the Widener room at Harvard and certain booksellers' shelves, gave me some idea of what American collectors have done towards making the New World a treasury of the Old, and I realised how more and more necessary it will be, in the future, for all critics of art in whatever branch, and of literature in whatever branch, and all students even of antiquity, if they intend to be thorough, to visit America. This I had guessed at, but never before had known.