The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon!
Where got'st thou that goose-look?
would supply a modern playwright with a square foot of gold-beaten invective. "True poems," said Irving, "are caskets which enclose in a small compass the wealth of the language—its family jewels." But when poems are paid by the line, bards are pardonable for diffuseness. And then, besides diffuseness, our age has wonderful literary fecundity. Few people know how much painters paint, and how much great writers write; for the bards of a single poem, as Mr. Stedman shows, are exceptional, and rich quantity as well as rich quality is the usual rule for greatness, whether of novelist, poet, essayist, metaphysician, or historian. So here we come upon another source of the accumulated floods of literature. The other day I was looking through a prodigious list of the works of Alexandre Dumas, père. There were 127 of them, mostly novels—"Monte Christo," "Three Musketeers," "Bragelonne," and the rest that we used to read. They made 244 volumes; but the plays were not included, and many slighter miscellanies did not seem to be there; and the posthumous work on cookery was certainly not there; and of course there was no effort to collect everything from "Le Mois," "La Liberté," and the half dozen other journals he edited or wrote in; so that I doubt not the writings of this illustrious man, if ever brought together in a complete edition, would make at least 150 works of 300 or 400 stout volumes. And in English literature we have many Salas and Southworths. I remember an announcement in the "Lancet" that "Mr. G. A. Sala is completely restored to health, and in the full discharge of his professional duties." An expressive term, that "full discharge"!
Again, some popular authors employ apprentices to do the bulk of their work, only touching it up with mannerisms, and so turn out much more than if they wrought it all. The world, too, has now accumulated a myriad handbooks of facts and compilations of statistics, which enable writers with a fondness for theory, like Buckle, to have all their material ready to spin into generalization. Then there is a popular education toward prolixity in the telegraphic part of newspapers. The associated press writers from Washington seem to be selected for their inability to be terse and pithy, and dribble out the simplest fact with pitiful iteration. The special news-writers, being often at their wits' end for their dole of day's work, can hardly be asked to be laconic. The special messages which the ocean wires bring, doubtless with exquisite terseness and picturesqueness, are most carefully interwritten and diluted; so that, for example, the words "Thiers spoke at Coulmiers" become "M. Adolphe Thiers, president of the French Republic before the accession of the present Chief Executive, Marshal MacMahon, delivered an address, or rather made some remarks partly in the nature of an oration or speech on subjects connected with matters of interest at the present time, at the town of Coulmiers, which is situated"—and here follow a dozen lines from the Cyclopædia, but dated at Paris, giving the geography, history, and commerce of Coulmiers. One can fancy in the "Atlantic cable" columns of the "Morning Meteor" the tokens of a standing prescription to dilute foreign facts with nine parts domestic verbiage; and this kind of "editing" educates mankind to padding and patching with superfluous material.
It is harder for French writers to be prolix. The French writer is inevitably epigrammatic first, and, if diffusive afterward, it is with malice aforethought. If we compare, for example, publicists like Guizot and Gladstone, while each has that perfect command of his material, instead of letting the material command him, which marks the skilful writer, yet the Englishman sometimes seems to require two or three consecutive sentences to bring out his thought, whereas M. Guizot packs it into one. But Guizot deliberately goes on to put the identical statement into two or three paraphrased forms. For example, in the "History of Civilization in Europe" there is usually a terse sentence or two in each paragraph which contain the whole of it, packed into briefest compass; were these key sentences repeated on the side of the page as marginal notes, the reader could master the book by mastering the margins. When an English writer is diffuse, he cannot help it; when a French writer is diffuse, he effects it by sheer effort at repetition.
And we humble hack scribblers, who confidingly slip our daily, and weekly, and monthly mites into the vast mass of current reading turned out for an omnivorous public—let us hope that the world's maw may long remain unsated and the market unglutted.
GROWTH OF AMERICAN TASTE FOR ART.
While to many it has seemed a pity that the Johnston gallery should be broken up, yet this distribution of its treasures scatters the seeds of art education. Besides, the prices obtained at the sale must impress many wealthy men with a conviction valuable to the interests of art; namely, that pictures, like diamonds, are a safe investment, as well as a source of enjoyment and fame. Considering that the times are hard, and that pictures are luxuries, the sum thus paid for art treasures, so soon after the centennial purchases, is a proof of the number of good patrons that can be counted on when works of value are for sale. But the works must be of value. At a former auction in New York "old masters" brought these prices: Madonna Del Correggio, $30; two Murrillos, $160 and $90; a landscape of Salvator Rosa, $55; a Tintoretto, $115; a Guido, $35; "St. John," by Sir Joshua Reynolds, $15—and so on. Every few months we find a so-called Titian or Raphael going for the price of the frame. Such auctions tell a story as emphatic as that of the Johnston gallery.
When the German painters were considering whether they should send canvases to the Centennial Exposition the "Allgemeine Zeitung" reminded them "that their works bring twice as much in America as in Germany." But each successive sale here shows that most buyers now know what is worth getting and what is not, though naturally some painters are the rage who will be forgotten fifty years hence. Still, the cynics are wrong in decrying the eagerness to buy painters who are in fashion. What harm in a millionaire's ordering a picture d'ameublement, to suit a particular room or panel, or in his ordering from the bookseller a hundred volumes of current novels? If the picture be good, whether bought by the foot for furnishing or whether painted under the microscope, its sale may aid the profession of art.
Comparing the Johnston sale with some of the famous auctions of the past four years at the hotel Drouot, we find that in the Paturle collection twenty-eight canvases bought $90,000, being all works of masters. The general prices were not higher than the Johnston prices, but Ary Scheffer's Marguerites brought 40,000 and 35,000 francs; a Troyon, 63,000; and Leopold Robert's admirable "Fishers of the Adriatic," 83,000 francs. The gallery of the Pereires brought 1,785,586 francs, which was rather higher than the Johnston total, but I believe there were more masterpieces. A head by Greuze brought 32,500 francs. The highest prices seemed to be carried off by the Dutch painters, who were in force, and three works by Hobbema, a country residence, a forest scene, and a windmill, brought respectively 50,000, 81,000, and 30,000 francs.
The prices for good pictures, taking into account agreeableness of subject and state of preservation, seem to be much the same in New York and Paris, though French newspapers fancy American taste for art to be at barbarian pitch. They should learn otherwise from the American painting and sculpture in Paris, London, Vienna, Florence, and Rome; they might learn otherwise from the discriminating appreciation of their own artists at such sales as Mr. Johnston's. The worst statuary as well as by far the best at Philadelphia last year was Italian, and some of the worst painting as well as the best was Spanish. There is some monstrous governmental art, no doubt, with us, but as for popular taste, there is nothing in America so vulgar as the cheap glass necklaces, tin spangles, and painted trinkets on the sacred images in the churches of Southern Europe. American travellers speak of the contrast between the beautiful cathedral and its hideous painted images bedizened with trash to which dollar-store jewels are gems of art; and the approaches to a splendid church or castle are very likely bedecked with clumsy, unvolatile angels, most terrestrial and unlovely. It is true that the decoration of temples and the adoration of images, whether under heathen or Christian auspices, has always fostered art; but American popular taste, low as it is supposed to be, would hardly set up in churches statues of painted wood only fit for tobacco shops. In Rome, where American taste is looked down upon, they have annual shows of painted wooden figures of saints and angels, in all hues, each uglier than the other, to be sold for putting upon the altars as votive offerings. In fact, wherever the "Latin race" is, the popular taste runs to blocks of the Virgin and Child resembling the lay figures in a tailor's shop.