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ON BOOKS AND ARTS



ON BOOKS AND ARTS



BY



FREDERICK WEDMORE



LONDON
HODDER AND STOUGHTON

27 PATERNOSTER ROW
1899



Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty



NOTE

In the pages that here follow / have gathered up such
of my more or less critical contributions to various Reviews,
and to one great daily paper, as I am least unwilling to
preserve within the covers of a book.

As the proportion borne by things reprinted from the
' Standard ' will seem small to those who know during how
many years I have been permitted to contribute to its columns
the expression of opinion on many of those arts which have been
both my delight and my laborious study, let me just simply
say that every line that I have written in that paper has
been written with a single eye to the needs of the occasion
and the moment, and the more expressly any writing is
designed for a particular need and place, the less, I think,
is it adapted for transplanting.

There has been no attempt to bring these essays, or these
fragments, ' up-to-date ' to bring them to the point of view,
I mean, of the time at which they chance to be republished.
A suppression here, and there the alteration of a phrase
little else is attempted. They remain, frankly, 'contributions'

F. W.

Westminster, October 1899.



CONTENTS

PAGE

THE SHORT STORY ..... I

MY RARE BOOK . . . . . . .25

BALZAC ... ... 44

GEORGE ELIOT . . . . . -55

MY FEW THINGS ...... 64

ANNE OLDFIELD ...... 97

SIDDONS AND RACHEL . . . . .103

JOSEPH JEFFERSON . . . . .109

ZOLA'S 'THERESE RAQUIN' . . . -113
'MACBETH' AND IRVING . . . . .118

'THE DUCHESS OF MALFI ' . . . .122

REMBRANDT . . . . . .128

DUTCH SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DRAWINGS . . 144
VELASQUEZ . . . . . . I 57

FRENCH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING . . 164

CHARDIN ....... 172

vii



viii ON BOOKS AND ARTS

PAGE

MOREAU . . > . . . . .188

GAINSBOROUGH ...... 2O2

COTMAN ....... 219

H. G. HINE ....... 233

THOMAS COLLIER . . . . . .23$

LORD LEIGHTON . . . . . .237

MILLAIS ....... 248

BURNE- JONES . . . . . .257

BOSBOOM AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES . . . 263

HENNER ....... 270

FRANCIS JAMES . . . . . .275



THE SHORT STORY

ONE of the most engaging of the wits of our day
wrote lately in a weekly newspaper that it is, for
the most part, only those who are not good enough
actors to act successfully in Life, who are compelled
to act at the Theatre. Under the influence of such
an amiable paradox it is possible that we may ask
ourselves, in regard to story-writing, whether the
people singled out to practise it are those, chiefly,
to whose personal history Romance has been denied :
so that the greatest qualification even for the pro-
duction of a lady's love-tale, is that the lady shall
never have experienced a love-affair. Eminent pre-
cedents might be cited in support of the contention.
A great editor once comfortably declared that the
ideal journalist was a writer who did not know too
much about his subject. The public did not want
much knowledge, he said. The literary criticism
in your paper would be perfect if you handed it
over to the critic of Music ; and the musical criticism
would want for nothing if you assigned it to an

A



2 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

expert in Art. And Mr. Thackeray, speaking of
love-tales, said something that pointed the same
way. He protested, no one should write a love-
story after he was fifty. And why? Because he
knew too much about it.

But it was a personal application I was going to
have given to the statement with which this paper
begins. If the actor we see upon the boards be
only there because more capable comedians are
busy on the stage of the world, I am presumably
invited by the Editor of The Nineteenth Century to
hold forth on the Short Story because I am not a
popular writer. The Editor, in the gentle exercise of
his humour, bids me to fill the place which should be
filled by the man of countless editions. It is true
that in the matter of short stories, such a writer is
not easy to find ; and this too at a time when, if one
is correctly informed, full many a lady, not of
necessity of any remarkable gifts, maintains an
honourable independence by the annual production
of an improper novel. Small as my personal claims
might be, were they based only on my books
Renunciations, for example, or Pastorals of France
I may say my say as one who, with production
obviously scanty, has for twenty years been pro-
foundly interested in the artistic treatment of the



THE SHORT STORY 3

Short Story ; who believes in the short story, not as
a ready means of hitting the big public, but as a
medium for the exercise of the finer art as a
medium, moreover, adapted peculiarly to that alert
intelligence, on the part of the reader, which rebels
sometimes at the longueurs of the conventional
novel : the old three volumes or the new fat book.
Nothing is so mysterious, for nothing is so instinctive,
as the method of a writer. I cannot communicate
the incommunicable. But at all events I will not
express opinions aimed at the approval of the
moment : convictions based on the necessity for
epigram.

In the first place, then, what is, and what is not,
a short story ? Many things a short story may be.
It may be an episode, like Miss Ella Hepworth
Dixon's, or like Miss Bertha Thomas's ; a fairy tale,
like Miss Evelyn Sharp's : the presentation of a
single character with the stage to himself (Mr. George
Gissing); a tale of the uncanny (Mr. Rudyard
Kipling) ; a dialogue of comedy (Mr. Pett Ridge);
a panorama of selected landscape, a vision of the
sordid street, a record of heroism, a remote tradition
or an old belief vitalised by its bearing on our lives
to-day, an analysis of an obscure calling, a glimpse
at a forgotten quarter. A short story I mean a



4 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

short imaginative work in the difficult medium of
prose ; for plot, or story proper, is no essential part
of it, though in work like Conan Doyle's or Rudyard
Kipling's it may be a very delightful part a short
story may be any one of the things that have been
named, or it may be something besides ; but one
thing it can never be it can never be ' a novel in a
nutshell.' That is a favourite definition, but not a
definition that holds. It is a definition for the kind
of public that asks for a convenient inexactness, and
resents the subtlety which is inseparable from precise
truth. Writers and serious readers know that a good
short story cannot possibly be a prfcis, a synopsis,
a scenario, as it were, of a novel. It is a separate
thing as separate, almost, as the Sonnet is from the
Epic it involves the exercise almost of a different
art.

That, perhaps, is one reason why it is generally
in spite of temporary vogue as pleasant pastime
a little underrated as an intellectual performance.
That is why great novelists succeed in it so seldom
or at all events fail in it sometimes even a
novelist like Mr. Hardy, the stretch of whose canvas
has never led him into carelessness of detail. Yet
with him, even, in his short stories, the inequality
is greater than befits the work of such an artist,



THE SHORT STORY 5

and greater than is to be accounted for wholly by
his mood ; so that by the side of The Three Strangers,
or, yet better, that delightful thing, Interlopers at the
Knap, you have short tales tossed off with momentary
indifference as you can imagine Sheridan, with his
braced language of comedy, stooping once to a charade.
And if a master nods sometimes a master like Hardy
does it not almost follow that, by the public at
least, the conditions of the short story are not under-
stood, and so, in the estimate of the criticism of the
dinner-table, and by the criticism of the academic,
the tale is made to suffer by its brevity ? But if it
is well done, it has done this amazing thing : it has
become quintessence; it has eliminated the super-
fluous ; and it has taken time to be brief. Then
amongst readers whose judgments are perfunctory
who have not thought the thing out it is rewarded
by being spoken of as an ' agreeable sketch,' ' a
promising little effort,' an ' earnest of better things.'
In this wise not to talk of any other instance one
imagines the big public rewarding the completed
charm of The Author of Beltraffio and of A Day
of Days, though pregnant brevity is not often Mr.
James's strength. And then Mr. James works away
at the long novel, and, of course, is clever in it,
because with him, not to be clever might require a



6 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

passiveness more than American. Very good ; but
I go back from the record of all that ' Maisie ' ought
not to have known, to The Author of Beltrajfio and
to A Day of Days ' promising little efforts,' ' earnests
of better things.'

Well, then, the short story is wont to be estimated,
not by its quality, but by its size ; a mode of ap-
praisement under which the passion of Schumann,
with his wistful questionings in Warum, say, or in
Der Dichter spricht would be esteemed less seriously
than the amiable score of Maritana \ And a dry-
point by Mr. Whistler, two dozen lines laid with the
last refinement of charm, would be held inferior to a
panorama by Philippoteau, or to the backgrounds of
the contemporary theatre. One would have thought
that this was obvious. But in our latest stage of
civilisation it is sometimes only the obvious that
requires to be pointed out.

While we are upon the subject of the hindrances
to the appreciation of a particular form of imaginative
work, we may remind ourselves of one drawback in
regard to which the short story must make common
cause with the voluminous novel : I mean the
inability of the mass of readers to do justice to the
seriousness of any artistic, as opposed to any moral,
or political, or pretentiously regenerative fiction.



THE SHORT STORY 7

For the man in the street, for the inhabitant of
Peckham Rye, for many prosperous people on the
north side of the Park, perhaps even for the very
cream of up-to-date persons whose duty it is to
abide somewhere where Knightsbridge melts invisibly
into Chelsea, Fiction is but a delassement, and the
artists who practise it, in its higher forms, are a little
apt to be estimated as contributors to public enter-
tainment like the Carangeot Troupe, and Alexia,
at the Palace Theatre. The view is something of this
nature I read it so expressed only the other day :
' The tired clergyman, after a day's work ; what book
shall he take up ? Fiction, perhaps, would seem too
trivial ; history, too solid.'

The serious writer of novel or short story brings
no balm for the ' tired clergyman ' other than such
balm as is afforded by the delight of serious Art.
At high tension he has delivered himself of his per-
formance, and if his work is to be properly enjoyed,
it must be met by those only who are ready to
receive it ; it must be met by the alert, not the
fatigued, reader ; and with the short story in par-
ticular, with its omissions, with the brevity of its
allusiveness, it must be met half way. Do not let
us expect it to be ' solid,' like Mill, or Lightfoot, or
Westcott or even like an A B C Railway Guide. You



8 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

must condone the ' triviality ' which puts its finger on
the pulse of life and says ' Thou ailest here and here '
which exposes, not a political movement, like the
historian of the outward fact, but the secrets of the
heart, rather, and human weakness, and the courage
which in strait places comes somehow to the sons of
men, and the beauty and the strength of affection
and which does this by intuition as much as by
science.

But to go back to considerations not common in
some degree to all Fiction, but proper more abso-
lutely to the short story. I have suggested briefly
what the short story may be ; we have seen briefly
the one thing it cannot be which is, a novel told
within restricted space. Let us ask what methods it
may adopt what are some of the varieties of its
form.

The short story admits of greater variety of form
than does the long novel, and the number of these
forms will be found to be increasing and we must
not reject conventionally (as we are terribly apt to
do) the new form because we are unfamiliar with it.
The forms that are open to the novel are open to the
short imaginative piece, and, to boot, very many
besides. Common to both, of course, is the most
customary form of all that in which the writer



THE SHORT STORY 9

narrates as from outside the drama, yet with internal
knowledge of it what is called the ' narrative form,'
which includes within its compass, in a single work,
narrative proper and a moderate share of dialogue.
Common again to both short and long stories, evi-
dently, is a form which, in skilled hands, and used only
for those subjects to which it is most appropriate,
may give strange reality to the matter presented
the form, I mean, in which the story is told in the
first person, as the experience and the sentiment of
one character who runs throughout the whole. The
short story, though it should use this form very
charily, adopts it more conveniently than does the
long novel ; for the novel has many more characters
than the short story, and for the impartial presenta-
tion of many characters this form is a fetter. It
gives of a large group a prejudiced and partial view.
It commended itself once or twice only to Dickens.
David Copperfield is the conspicuous example. Never
once, I think, did it commend itself to Balzac. It
is better adapted, no doubt, to adventure than to
analysis, and better to the expression of humour
than to the realisation of tragedy. As far as the
presentation of character is concerned, what it is
usual for it to achieve in hands, I mean, much
smaller than those of the great Dickens is this : a



io ON BOOKS AND ARTS

life size, full length, generally too flattering portrait
of the hero of the story a personage who has the
lime-light all to himself on whom no inconvenient
shadows are ever thrown the hero as beheld by
Sant, shall I say ? rather than as beheld by Sargent
and then, a further graceful idealisation, an attrac-
tive pastel, you may call it, of the lady he most
frequently admired ; and, of the remainder, two or
three Kit-Cat portraits, a head and shoulders here,
and there a stray face.

The third and only other form that I remember
as common to both novel and short story, though
indeed not equally convenient to both, is the rare form
of Letters. That again, like any other that will not
bear a prolonged strain, is oftener available for short
story than for big romance. The most consum-
mate instance of its employment, in very lengthy
work, is one in which with infinitely slow progression
it serves above all things the purpose of minute and
searching analysis I have named the book in this
line of description of it : I have named Clarissa. For
the short story it is used very happily by Balzac
who, though not at first a master of sentences, is an
instinctive master of methods it is used by him in
the Mtmoires de Deux Jeunes Mariees. And in a
much lighter way, of bright portraiture, of neat



THE SHORT STORY 11

characterisation, it is used by an ingenious, some-
times seductive, writer of our period, Marcel PreVost,
in Lettres de Femmes. It is possible, of course, to
mix these different forms ; but for such mixture we
shall conclude, I fancy, that prolonged fiction offers
the best opportunity. Such mixture has its dangers
for the short story ; you risk, perhaps, unity of effect.
But there are short stories in which monotony is
avoided, and the force of the narrative in reality
emphasised, by some telling lines from a letter, whose
end or whose beginning may be otherwise imparted
to us.

I devote a few lines to but two or three of the
forms which by common consent are for the short
story only. One of them is simple dialogue. For
our generation, that has had the fascination of an
experiment an experiment made perhaps with best
success after all in the candid and brilliant fragments
of that genuine humorist, Mr. Pett Ridge. The
method in most hands has the appearance of a
difficult feat. It is one, often and so is walking on
the slack-wire, and the back-spring in acrobatic
dance. Of course a writer must enjoy grappling
with difficulties. We understand that. But the
more serious artist reflects, after a while, that the
unnecessary difficulty is an inartistic encumbrance.



12 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

' Why,' he will ask, ' should the story-teller put on
himself the fetters of the drama, to be denied the
drama's opportunities ? ' Pure dialogue, we may be
sure, is apt to be an inefficient means of telling a
story ; of presenting a character. There may be
cited one great English Classic who has employed
the method the author of Pericles and Aspasia, of
that little gem of conversation between Henry the
Eighth and Anne Boleyn. But then, with Walter
Savage Landor, austere and perfect, the character
existed already, and there was no story to tell. Mere
dialogue, under the conditions of the modern writer,
leaves almost necessarily the problem unsolved, the
work a fragment. It can scarcely be a means to an
end ; though it may, if we like, be a permissible little
end in itself, a little social chatter, pitched in a high
key, in which one has known tartness to be mistaken
for wit. Thus does ' Gyp ' skim airily over the deep,
great sea of life. All are shallows to her vision.
And as she skims you feel her lightness. I prefer
the adventure of the diver, who knows what the
depths are : who plunges, and who rescues the pearl.
Then, again, possible, though not often desirable
for the short story, is the diary form extracts from
a diary, rather. Applied to work on an extensive
scale, your result since you would necessarily lack



THE SHORT STORY 13

concentrated theme your result would be a chronicle,
not a story. Applied to the shorter fiction, it must
be used charily, and may then, I should suppose, be
used well. But I, who used the form in ' The New
Marienbad Elegy' in English Episodes, what right
have I to say that the form, in the hands of a master,
allows a subtle presentation of the character of the
diarist allows, in self-revelation, an irony, along with
earnestness, a wayward and involved humour, not
excluding sympathy ? It is a form not easily
received, not suffered gladly. It is for the indus-
trious, who read a good thing twice, and for the
enlightened, who read it three times.

I throw out these things only as hints ; we may
apply them where we will, as we think about stories.
But something has yet to be said. Of the two forms
already named as generally unfitted for the long
novel, and fitted only now and then for the short
story, one, it will be noticed, is all dialogue ; the
other, necessarily, a form in which there is no dialogue
at all. And I think we find, upon reflection, the
lighter work leans oftenest to the one form ; the
graver work leans oftenest to the other.

Indeed, from this we might go on to notice that as
far as the short story is concerned, most of the finer
and more lasting work, though cast in forms which



14 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

quite permit of the dialogue, has, as a matter of fact,
but little dialogue in it. Balzac's La Grenadiere it
is years since I read it ; but has it any dialogue at
all? Balzac's L Interdiction an extraordinary pre-
sentation of a quaint functionary, fossiliferous and
secluded, suddenly brought into contact with people
of the world, and with the utmost ability baffling
their financial intrigue this is certainly the most
remarkable short story ever written about money
L Interdiction has not much dialogue. In the
Atheist's Mass, again the short story of such a
nameless pathos the piece which, more even than
Eugenie Grandet itself, should be everybody's intro-
duction, and especially every woman's introduction,
to the genius of Balzac : La Messe de l'Atk/e has no
dialogue. Coming to our actual contemporaries in
France, of whom Zola and Daudet must still, it is
possible, be accounted the foremost, it is natural that
the more finished and minute worker the worker
lately lamented should be the one who has made
the most of the short story. And in this order of
his work thus leaving out his larger and most
brilliant canvas, Froment Jeune et Risler Aznewhat
do we more lastingly remember than the brief and
sombre narrative of Les Deux Aubergest a little
piece that has no story at all ; but a ' situation '



THE SHORT STORY 15

depicted, and when depicted, left. There is an open
country ; leagues of Provence ; a long stretching
road ; and, on the roadside, opposite each other, two
inns. The older one is silent, melancholy ; the other,
noisy and prosperous. And the landlord of the older
inn spends all his time in the newer; taking his
pleasure there with guests who were once his own,
and with a handsome landlady, who makes amends
for his departed business. And in his own inn,
opposite, a deserted woman sits solitary. That is all
but the art of the master !

Now this particular instance of a pregnant brevity
reminds me that in descriptions of landscape the
very obligations of the short story are an advantage
to its art. Nature, in Fiction, requires to be seen, not
in endless detail, as a botanical or geographical study,
but, as in Classic Landscape Composition, a noble
glimpse of it, over a man's shoulder, under a man's
arm. I know, of course, that is not the popular
view. Blameless novels have owed their popularity
to landscape written by the ream. Coaches have
been named after them ; steamboats have been
named after them. I am not sure that, in their
honour, inaccessible heights have not been scaled and
virgin forests broken in upon, so that somewhere in
picturesque districts the front of a gigantic hotel



16 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

might have inscribed on it the title of a diffuse
novel.

But that is not the great way. The great way,
from Virgil's to Browning's, is the way of pregnant
brevity. And where dialogue is employed in the
finer short story, every line of it is bound to be sig-
nificant. The short story has no room for the reply
that is only near to being appropriate, and it deserves
no pardon for the word that would not have been
certainly employed. It is believed, generally, and
one can well suppose that it is true, that the average
dialogue of the diffuse novel is written quickly.
That is in part because so little of it is really
dramatic is really at all the inevitable word. But
the limited sentences in which, when the narrator
must narrate no more, the persons who have been
described in the short story express themselves on
their restricted stage, need, if I dare assert it, to be
written slowly, or, what is better, re-read a score of
times, and pruned, and looked at from without, and
surveyed on every side.

But, indeed, of the long story, as well as of the
short, may it not be agreed that on the whole the
dialogue is apt to be the least successful thing ? The
ordinary reader, of course, will not be dramatic
enough to notice its deficiencies. In humorous



THE SHORT STORY 17

dialogue, these are seen least. Humorous dialogue
has a legitimate licence. You do not ask from it
exactitude ; you do not nail it down to its statement.
But in the dialogue of the critical moment, when
the fire of a little word will kindle how great a
matter, how needful then, and how rare, that the
word be the true one ! We do not want laxity,
inappropriateness, on the one hand ; nor, on the
other, the tortured phraseology of a too resolute
cleverness. And those of us who have a preference
derived, it may be, from the simpler generation of
Dickens for an unbending when it is a question of
little matters, and, when it is a question of great
ones, for ' a sincere large accent, nobly plain ' well !
there is much of modern finessing we are hardly
privileged to understand. Yet if one wants an
instance, in a long novel, in which the sentence now
said at a white heat is the result, inevitable, burningly
true to life, of the sentence that was said just before,
one condones the obscurity that has had its imitators,
and pays one's tribute of admiration to the insight of
Diana of the Crossways.

One of the difficulties of the short story, the short
story shares with the acted drama, and that is the
indispensableness of compression the need that
every sentence shall tell the difference being, that in

B



i8 ON BOOKS AND ARTS

the acted drama it must tell for the moment, it must
tell till it is found out, and in the short story it must