Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
MCMVIII

All rights reserved

PREFACE

Those of us who have emerged from the Victorian Era with an undiminished reverence for the great names which have made it memorable, must be prepared to endure with patience the pitying tolerance, or even the indulgent rebuke, of the men who herald a younger generation.

It was only a few weeks ago that I ventured to enquire of a cultivated young writer of the newer school if Dickens was now much read by the generation which presumably he had a claim to represent. The question gave him no pause. In a sentence that was dictated solely, as it seemed, by a sincere desire to impart accurate information, he gravely informed me that among young men of culture Dickens was now never read after the age of fourteen. I confess that, despite the coldly judicial tone of this utterance, I was not entirely convinced, for I happen to know even young people who are still so far belated in their taste as to regard Dickens as an incomparable genius. But the statement helped me at any rate to realise how easy it is to grow old-fashioned, and suggested to me that in addressing an age which believes that art, like science, is always advancing, it would be prudent, on the threshold of these reminiscences of some of the men I have known and whose work I have worshipped, to make frank avowal of my own faith, and humbly to confess my limitations.

Let me say, then, that in the region of Art and Literature I am still an impenitent Victorian. I have no desire to disparage the work of those who profess a more modern creed, and I think, although this perhaps may be vainglorious boasting, that I am not unable to appreciate the more instant appeal of a later day. But my talk with younger men, whose comradeship delights me, makes it often abundantly clear to me that I am disqualified, perhaps by age, from sharing to the full measure their more recent enthusiasms. Our occasional divergence of feeling, which it would be idle not to recognise, rests in some cases upon an essential difference in the point of view. The progress of science which, to borrow a phrase from Mr. Gladstone in regard to our revenue, is in our day “advancing by leaps and bounds,” has, I think, set some younger men aglow with the thought that art too is destined, with the passing of the ages, to claim and to inherit a realm correspondingly enlarged.

This belief, perhaps only half confessed, that in the fields of Literature and Art the later achievement must, for that reason alone, be the greater achievement, is apt to beget in the minds of some younger men a certain impatience with the heroes of an earlier day. As the topmost pebble set upon the upraised cairn which represents the sum of scientific knowledge must of necessity record the final altitude which science has reached, so it is in some quarters held, by an analogy that seems to me radically mistaken, that the most modern achievement in art has the right to claim in virtue of its historical position a higher place than that which it has succeeded.

Let me confess at once that this is not my belief. There is a little fringe of science lying at the threshold of every art, and until the secrets it has to yield are conquered, the illusion of progressive advancement is inevitable. But that puny conquest counts for nothing beside art’s constant and unchangeable conditions, conditions which leave its earlier victories unsurpassed and unsurpassable. It is, indeed, the glory of the artist’s spirit, in whatever field it be exercised, that it is incapable of advancement. Each achievement, as time attests its worth to rank at all, remains through all time incomparable. It knows no rivalry. It defies all competition. It affects no advance upon the triumphs of yesterday; it fears no eclipse from the victories of to-morrow. And although history shows many barren seasons when the spirit of the artist sinks and flags, the revival, when it comes, is due to no added store of knowledge, but is the free gift of men newly risen whose genius proves itself able to recapture that power of imaging life which in the hands of genius has always been perfect from the first.