On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

George Eliot, during many years, was occasionally busy with what is formally poetry—informally, of course, much of her best prose was poetry, and poetry of a higher order. In some of her verse—in Jubal and the Spanish Gypsy—she touched on the careers and characters of people whom she would hardly have brought into her novels, and in one or other of her poems she expressed with a fulness and intensity not found in her prose fiction that love of music and that sympathy with the aspirations of the musical artist which she shared with the great writer of Abt Vogler. The docile public received her poems with at least sufficient appreciation—a part of which may fairly be set down to the remembrance of those triumphs as a novelist which, for the time, she had laid aside. But her poems were, in the main, like Raphael’s departure from the art of his more constant practice—like the sonnets of Michael Angelo—the evidences of an artist’s aspiration towards a field of success which shall have the charm of what is new and unfamiliar. They were that, and hardly more. It is, of course, on the romances of George Eliot that her fame will rest, and on them not because of any reflection they present of the manners of our time—these, in truth, they left to other novelists—but because of the earnestness and profundity of their dealing with problems of the age, and problems of our nature. A future generation may find, and, indeed, not a few judges, most worthy to be listened to, declare already, that much of her sad philosophy is itself a mistake as great as any which her genius discovered in the world she lived in. But if George Eliot’s analysis of life betrays some deeply rooted faults, it will at least always be admitted that it was that of a grave and gifted inquirer. If the work which began with the Scenes of Clerical Life, and ended, not auspiciously, with Theophrastus Such, has great deficiencies, it was wrought, at all events, by a serious artist, a free and wonderful spirit.

(Standard, 24th December 1880.)

MY FEW THINGS

‘My few things!’ In the very title there is conveyed, I hope, some apology for writing of them. If I accept the invitation to do so, it is partly because I must needs know more of what they are—they are ‘but poor few,’ in Shakespeare’s phrase—than any one else can know; partly again because, as I am pleasantly informed, it may be interesting to certain readers to be told, for a change, not what can be amassed—amassed and perhaps neglected—by a millionaire who gives several thousand guineas for a modern painting, but what can be got together with merely ‘joyful trouble,’—with pains, and waiting, and love of the things, and only a little money—by a simple man of Letters, who happens to have been concerned, to some extent, with other arts than his own; and partly also because, connected with the few things that one has, there are associations, not few but many.

A little blue-grey drawing—an early drawing of Varley’s, which has nothing but the lasting virtues of Economy and Style—was the first artistic thing that ever belonged to me. It came to me—like a prized Morland mezzotint, many years later—from the portfolio of my great-grandfather, who was, as I am told, a friend of Turner’s earliest patron, Dr. Munro. But it is prints, not drawings, that, since I began to collect a little, I have chiefly brought together.

In a collection of prints there is something less indefinite, something more systematic, than in a collection of drawings. The things, if they are good, have the advantage of being known, of being more or less recognised—not, indeed, by the large public, but at least by the people with whom, on matters of Art, it is most interesting to come into contact. Prints are classed and catalogued. Each print by a particular master has, in the collector’s mind, a direct bearing on the component parts of that master’s work. Again, fine drawings, although cheap in relation to the prices paid for modern paintings, are dear in comparison with many prints to which the adjective ‘fine’ could scarcely be denied; for, while here and there an ‘Adam and Eve’ of Dürer is sold under the hammer for many hundred pounds, that is the exception absolutely; and while, at Sotheby’s or Christie’s, on eventful sale days, two thousand pounds may be the ransom of a Rembrandt etching, that is not only because it is fine, but because that particular etching—or that particular ‘state’ of it—is excessively rare. It has been chronicled; it has been read of; it has profited by the existence of the accurate catalogue of the work of the Master—it is a certified thing. But, with knowledge gradually acquired, with diligence exercised in the right place, a print extremely fine, extremely desirable, may still be bought for a few pounds. It will be much fuller of Art than any drawing which ordinary good fortune is to enable you to get for the same outlay. And I say this as one who loves drawings—as one who, notwithstanding his theories, even ventures to live with a few of them; but, if I have a preference in the matter of collecting—well, I suppose it is for prints.

About a print, every point is interesting. Apart from subject, apart too from technical treatment of the copper, there is the delightful question, How does your own impression compare with other people’s? And, again, the paper. The true print-lover can talk about different papers—old French, old Dutch, old English, Japanese—as the connoisseur of clarets talks of Pontet Canets and Pichon Longuevilles.

... But my Solander-box is all this time unopened!

I suppose the first print that I ever bought was a ‘Liber’ print of Turner’s. The Burlington Fine Arts Club had held a wonderfully important exhibition of them—there were Mr. J. E. Taylor’s, Mr. Henry Vaughan’s, Mr. Gambier Parry’s finest impressions; illustrative, thoroughly, of that which Turner meant to do; of the means, to some extent, by which he did it. And having by that time discovered what I most cared for in the set, and made, no doubt, the politic compromise—learning to bring my needs within the limits of a lean purse—I got my friend, Stopford Brooke, to choose from amongst several impressions of ‘Hind Head Hill,’ that happened then to be at Colnaghi’s (for it was soon after the great Turner Sale), the one he thought the best; and from amongst an equal number of impressions of ‘Severn and Wye,’ that happened to be at Mrs. Noseda’s, similarly, the best. ‘I chose well that day,’ said Stopford Brooke, many years afterwards, noticing those prints on my wall. No such opportunities of choice, as existed then, are likely again to be afforded.

Those were the days when, if I bought at all, it was—at first at least—‘for the wall’ and not ‘for the folio’—to use a phrase of Halsted’s. Halsted meant by it to distinguish between the buyer who, from the very nature of things, must promptly be satisfied (since you can neither multiply ‘walls’ nor enlarge them), and the buyer to whom the infinite was open—that infinite in which Solander-box succeeds Solander-box, folio succeeds folio, and drawer succeeds drawer. His, perhaps, is the more dangerous case; but the collector who can display on his walls all his possessions—who can stop buying when the mere purposes of furnishing are answered—is simply not a collector. Halsted scorned him.