COLONEL GOFF. “PINE TREES, CHRISTCHURCH.”
seem prosaic to the person whose poetry is conventional.
Most of Gof plates give proof of thorough draughtsmanship, to the discerning; though nowhere is such draughtsmanship paraded or made obvious. In one most recent plate, however, devoted to a subject of which the inartistic, unimaginative mind, and the insensitive hand, would have made mere pattern—I mean the etching of the bared boughs of a weird apple tree—the draughtsmanship is, of necessity, and happily, conspicuous. But the thing is not pattern at all, and though we follow with delight the intricate line, there is the charm of an impression as well as the fidelity of a record. There is accent about the etching; emphasis, vitality; an atmosphere plays, as it were, amongst the boughs; the tree is not the tree only, but a part of Nature and the day.
Gœthe said to that disciple to whom he most fully unveiled himself,—to the privileged Eckermann,—“All my poems are ‘occasional’ poems.” In that resided their freshness, and Gœthe knew it well. “All my etchings are ‘occasional’ etchings,” could be said by nearly every fine etcher, too wise to set forth upon the picturesque tour with the deliberate resolution to perpetrate particular prints. For the art of etching, if it is to yield you its peculiar charm, must have been exercised—I cannot say this thing too often—only upon spontaneous promptings. There are very few exceptions. Méryon himself—that greatest genius, perhaps, in original engraving whom our Nineteenth Century has known, and one of the most elaborate of artists,—was not really an exception; for, slow as his work must have been, the unity of impression preserved throughout so long a labour—the original impulse—was there, which the circumstance created. The spontaneity is essential. And few men better than Colonel Goff have executed spontaneous work with the resources of a firmly-held knowledge.
D. Y. CAMERON. “BORDER TOWERS.”
D. Y. CAMERON. “THE PALACE, STIRLING CASTLE.”
