On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

I am fond of my few French prints of the Eighteenth Century. It is easy to dispose of them (a common way in England)—the works, I mean, of all that Eighteenth Century School—by calling them light, trifling, even indiscreet in certain of their revelations of a life that seldom aimed to be austere; but, in reality, the prints of the ‘Dix-Huitième’ represent all phases of the thoughts and ways of French society—its deeds and its ideals—from the childhood of Louis Quinze to the Revolution; and, if you read French contes and comedy, memoir and criticism, these things, from Watteau to Chardin, from Chardin to Fragonard, are their true illustrations. For myself, I do but mourn that I have so few of them: not a single Moreau, for instance—not the ‘Sortie de l’Opéra,’ with the love-letter conveyed in the nosegay, nor ‘C’est un Fils, Monsieur!’ in which a well-favoured young woman bounces into the library of the fortunate collector, with the news that he is also, as it seems, a parent. The insular pre-Raphaelite speaks of the French Eighteenth Century as ‘the bad period.’ It is ‘the bad period’ to people who are too rigid to grasp its grace. The narrowly learned, as Walter Savage Landor reminds us—‘the generality of the learned,’ he is even severe enough to say—‘are apt to conceive that in easy movement there is a want of solidity and strength.’ Now, ‘easy movement,’ spontaneous elegance, is the very characteristic of the Art of France, as it is of its delightful people; and not to recognise, not to enjoy that, is merely to be under the sway of pedantry, antiquarian or academic. French Eighteenth Century Art, like Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century, like the Art of Titian and of Velasquez, reflected Life—much of the charm of Life—and unless it be that Life itself and Beauty have no interest for us, we cannot afford to pass that Art superciliously by.

Wonderfully small, however, is the amount of sympathy that I am privileged to expect from English collectors of the older type, in my enjoyment of a sometimes faulty, but an often bewitching, school. A score of French prints, some of them recording the high elegance of Watteau, the pleasant gallantry of Baudouin or Lavreince, the sober homeliness and the grave truth of Chardin (whose lessons were Wordsworthian in their way)—these various things, which I shall still venture to cherish, are wont to be ‘sat upon’ by the antiquary; much as a certain little table-case of Battersea enamels, dainty and aglow with colour, like flowers on a wintry day (puce and gold and rose du Barry, that no time and no winter fades), is ‘sat upon’ by some of my friends who behold indescribable virtues in every product of Japanese design. We have all of us got our limits—I remember, though, that in France, two of the men most prominent and influential in their love for the artistic work of their own country in its famous ‘Dix-Huitième,’ had been almost the first to welcome the inventions of the Japanese. These men were Philippe Burty and Edmond de Goncourt—but then it is lamentably true that they ignored Rembrandt and Dürer, as far as any practical interest in them was concerned.

The mention of the Frenchmen brings me once more face to face with two striking personalities. Burty was a critic in journalism, and an Inspecteur des Beaux Arts besides—an enthusiast, a connoisseur, a real curieux. When I knew him he had already done much in France for the popular recognition of Etching. His flat upon an outer boulevard—the Boulevard des Batignolles—told charmingly of the refinement and variety of his tastes. Some kakemonos and tsubas hung on the walls; but here there was an etching, and there an ivory. And he had a little coin de tapisserie, as he smilingly said, ‘like Erasmus at the Louvre’—he was thinking of the background of Holbein’s picture. In his deep French bookcases, well-bound volumes were ranged, a second row behind the first, and when the glass doors were opened and a few vacant places discovered, Burty’s favourite cat—the cat of the literary man, moving with quietude, treading with grace—curved about in the bookcase, sleek and smooth, harmless, careful, almost appreciative.

One Sunday afternoon, when, I remember, as the result of an accident, we had failed to see Zola, Philippe Burty drove me down to Auteuil—to the Villa Montmorency, with its wild poetic garden—to spend a couple of hours with Edmond de Goncourt and his treasures. Jules, the beloved brother, was already dead, and Edmond, surrounded by his collections, lived lonely at Auteuil, in the house arranged for both. Stately and distinguished, melancholy, and yet interested, a descendant of the old noblesse, with many memories in the dark brown eyes that lay under black eyebrows and silver-grey hair, Edmond de Goncourt moved about amongst his portfolios, saying a word here, and there directing a glance. The history of his life surrounded him—the treasures he and his brother had amassed and studied, before the ‘Dix-Huitième’ was fashionable, and very much as a recreation from those ‘noires études de la vie contemporaine’—the words are his own—which had given us Germinie Lacerteux and Manette Salomon. No such collection of that fascinating French ‘Dix-Huitième’ as belongs to Edmond de Goncourt has ever been made. His Maison d’un Artiste is a book which is written for the most part about it, and in comparison with its treasures my humble score of chosen prints—chiefly, after all, by the Eighteenth Century’s more serious masters—becomes absolutely insignificant. Still, they remind me, pleasantly enough, of a delightful period, a delightful people, and of an art that was masterly when it was Watteau’s, more lightly gracious when it was Pater’s, and, when it was Chardin’s, was sedate and simple and almost austere.

Sketches in oil or water-colour by Cotman and James Ward, by Thomas Collier and Charles Green, Edwin Hayes, Alfred East, Shannon, Linton, Fulleylove, Carl Haag, Wyke Bayliss, Francis James—I need not finish the list, and it would be foreign to the present purpose to enlarge on the men—do something, one may hope, to prevent one’s bowing the knee at only a single shrine. But is that indeed my danger?—I, who confess to have felt at times the force of quite another temptation—the temptation to be busy at last in getting together things with which the pictorial Art that I love has nothing to do. A comely little piece or so of ‘Blue and White’; a bit of Worcester, with the square mark; a Nantgarw plate, with its ‘Billingsley rose’; a plate of Frankenthal, bought in the Corratorie at Geneva, at a shop where, two generations ago, they had sold things of that fabric to none other than Balzac (who declared, through his Cousin Pons, that Frankenthal would one day be as much sought after as Sèvres)—these things, I say, the thin end of the wedge, things that are nothing by themselves, remind me that, in gathering china, Man may be happy. And so a few books—the earliest obtained being the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, relieure Janséniste, a green coat by Riviere, and the Rogers with the Turner illustrations, in ‘original boards,’ now, alas! disposed to crack—assure me of the charm that must lurk for my luckier brethren in the seriously gathering together of First Editions or of famous ones.

Let us pass to the examples of the Revival of Etching. About forty Méryons, about seventy Whistlers, are mine. The one artist has been much more prolific than the other, and thus, while, as regards Méryon, the possession of even ‘forty’ prints allows the collector to be fairly well provided for, as regards Whistler, the ‘seventy’ represent scarcely a third part of that etcher’s catalogued work. Mr. H. S. Theobald has more Whistlers than I have; so has Sir John Day; Mr. B. B. Macgeorge, of Glasgow, has, I know, more Méryons; while, of both these masters, distinctly larger collections than my own rest in the hands of Mr. Samuel P. Avery and of Mr. Howard Mansfield, of New York.

Nearly all the finer plates of Méryon—those in which, to use his own phrase, he ‘engraved Paris,’ with a fidelity so affectionate, yet with an imagination so tragic—were wrought between the year 1850 and the year 1854. Bracquemond was the only important figure in the group to whom the Revival of Etching is due, who was working at that time. Whistler, Seymour Haden, Jules Jacquemart, and Legros, were all of them a little later; Whistler’s first dated plate—and he was quite among the earliest of these artists—being of the year 1857.

In looking through my Méryons, it interests me to find that a good many that are in my Solander-box to-day, belonged, long since, to distinguished Frenchmen who were Méryon’s contemporaries. Thus, a First State of the ‘Saint-Etienne-du-Mont’ was given by Méryon to Bracquemond. My impressions of the ‘Abside’ and the ‘Stryge’ belonged to Aglaüs Bouvenne, who catalogued Bonington, appreciated Méryon, and, in comparatively recent years, wrote some reminiscences of him. A ‘Rue des Toiles, à Bourges’ has on it Méryon’s dedicatory inscription, addressed to Hillemacher the painter. A curious proof of the ‘Partie de la Cité de Paris,’ before the introduction of the towers, which were never really in the actual view, though Méryon chose to see them there, came from the friend of Méryon’s youth, a friend who spoke over his grave—M. de Salicis. Some others of the prints have been Philippe Burty’s. The final trial proof of the ‘Tourelle, dite “de Marat,”’ and one or two other subjects, of which I spare the reader the details, were originally bought of Méryon by M. Wasset, a man the public wots not of, but a collector full of character: the ‘Cousin Pons,’ I dare to call him, of my own earlier day.

Let me, in a paragraph devoted to himself alone, recall M. Wasset to my memory. An employé—secrétaire, it may be—at the Ministry of War, he lived, when I mounted to his flat, one winter’s night (how many years ago!) in a dark, winding, narrow street, of the Rive Gauche, between the Seine and St. Sulpice—the Rue Jacob. The Cousin Pons, did I say, this gentleman resembled? But Pons was gourmet as well as connoisseur—M. Wasset knew no passion but the collector’s. He dined modestly—by subscription, it was understood—at the Café Procope, in the Quarter—was abonné for repasts taken there, in a haunt once classic, now dull and cheap. His rooms in the Rue Jacob, low and small, were stuffed full with his collections. Bric-à-brac he had, even more than prints. Strange beings who dredged in the River, brought him ancient jewellery, and seventeenth-century watches, that had slept their Rip Van Winkle sleep in the mud of the Seine. I see the venerable collector now, his sombre and crowded rooms lit with a single lamp, and he, passing about, spare, eager, and trembling, with bowed figure; garrulous, excited as with wine, by the mere sight and handling of his accumulated possessions. A few years afterwards—urged thereto by the greatest of Parisian printsellers, Clément, who is now no more—he had a sale, in the Rue Drouot, of his hundreds of prints, of which the Méryons, of course, formed but a small part. Other treasures—then ardently desired—he was to purchase with the proceeds. Is his heart, one wonders, with those treasures now—in the dark Paris street? Or, the hands that trembled so, fifteen years since—have they relaxed their hold, for ever, of the things that were meat and drink, that were wife and child, to him?

Méryon, I remember, took me by storm as a great artistic personality, and, since he conquered me immediately, I have always been faithful to him. In that there is no sort of virtue; for has he not now become, thus early, almost everywhere, where prints are loved, an accepted classic? To appreciate Whistler—even at all to enjoy him—requires a longer education. There are even some things that at first one resents. A touch of charlatanry lurks, one at first supposes, in the Bond Street ‘arrangement in yellow and white,’ and in the velarium under which we were invited to gather when the master held sway in Suffolk Street. But, in time, that impression passes. Then, one accepts the man whole—takes him as he is—genius like his has a certain licence to be abnormal. And though it pleases Mr. Whistler, in sundry catalogues and joyous little books about the ‘art of making enemies,’ to represent from time to time that I, among a hundred others, do not appreciate him, that is only because he would have us believe he is a victim to the interesting monomania of persecution, and I, forsooth, when this is his mood, am called upon to figure as one of those who would pursue and vex him. Peace! peace! Now that he has ‘done battering at England’ (I will not vouch precisely for the phrase), I am, it seems, an ‘enemy’ no more. So much the better!