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

by J. Comyns Carr

It had suddenly dawned upon him, after the painful crisis he had gone through, that there were junctures in life in which the use of a foreign tongue might be of practical service; and I have no doubt, with the indomitable persistence which forms part of the national character, he is even now in some Northern home struggling with the difficulties of the French language.

Yet, apart from the merest smattering obtained at school, my later acquaintance with the tongue came about in a curious way. In 1870 I made the acquaintance of a Monsieur Gauthiot, a dear friend of many years, who had just then, by reason of the bitter spirit aroused by the Franco-German War, been driven from Berlin, where he had occupied the post of Professor of French Literature. For a while he took refuge in London, whence be contributed occasional articles to the Débâts. And here it was, when we came to know one another, that we agreed to dine together twice a week, so that on one evening we should talk English, and on the other that he should instruct me in French.

Our meetings used to take place at the Café Royal in Regent Street, then a sufficiently humble restaurant chiefly patronised by foreigners. In cost assuredly, and perhaps in excellence of cuisine, the Café Royal of that day was far removed from the stately establishment which has since won so wide a popularity.

But they were pleasant evenings which Gauthiot and I passed there together, sometimes, when our mutual instruction was over, ending in a friendly bout of dominoes, and indeed, if his natural preference for French cooking had not led us there, it is hard to say where else in London we could have found a congenial place of meeting.

Restaurants in those days were few—Verrey’s, which survives, Simpson’s in the Strand, and the old Mitre Tavern by Temple Bar, were the only houses of note that I can recall. A year or two later an attempt was made to do something on more sumptuous lines by the establishment of the Pall Mall Restaurant on the island site adjoining Trafalgar Square, but it failed for lack of patronage, for the days when dining out was to become fashionable had not arrived.

In 1883, when Messrs. Macmillan contemplated the establishment of the English Illustrated Magazine, they invited me to become its editor, and the three years during which I conducted this publication constituted my last important association with Art Journalism.

It was our purpose to compete in quality of illustration with the established periodicals of the United States, the excellence of whose woodcuts was attracting deserved attention in England, and I am glad to think that in these earlier years of the Magazine’s life, enough was accomplished both in Literature and Art to prove that the project might, under happier conditions, have been carried to a successful issue. But, owing to influences which lay beyond our power to control, it chanced that the experiment was undertaken at an unfortunate hour.

The art of the wood-engraver was already suffering through competition with those mechanical processes of reproduction by which it is now almost entirely destroyed. And it soon became evident that the more careful work we were trying to present could not compete in popular acceptance with those rougher and readier methods which, by reason of their greater economy, were already widely employed. And yet it must always be, I think, a matter for regret that this beautiful art of the wood-engraver should be doomed to annihilation. I have tried to show in a separate chapter how great a part it played in that renaissance of Art in England which is associated with the pre-Raphaelite movement, and I am proud to think that some of the best of its later examples found their way into the English Illustrated Magazine during the period of my editorship.

On the literary side the Magazine could boast, during those earlier years, of contributions from men already famous, or who have since won their way to fame. Among the poets, Meredith and Swinburne were repeated contributors to its pages; and from a throng of distinguished writers in various fields I may cite the names of Professor Huxley, Henry James, Marion Crawford, Bret Harte, Lawrence Oliphant, Stanley Weyman, Theodore Watts-Dunton, and Richard Jefferies.

It was during the progress, through the pages of the Magazine, of his captivating story, The House of the Wolf, that Weyman asked my judgment on a little play he had written, and I wrote him in response a long letter pointing out what I thought to be its defects, and setting forth the reasons why, as I believed, it could scarcely, as it stood, be expected to achieve a success on the stage.