representing at all, represent him at the least by a
little handful of his works. Collect one or two
MY FEW THINGS 77
masters largely, and obtain of others small but
characteristic groups.
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-
Huitieme ' represent all phases of the thoughts and
ways of French society its deeds and its ideals
from the childhood of Louis Quinze to the Revolu-
tion ; 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 1'Opera,' with the love-
letter conveyed in the nosegay, nor c 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
78 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
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 home-
liness 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
MY FEW THINGS 79
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-Huitieme! 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 Diirer, 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 kake-
monos and tsubas hung on the walls ; but here there
was an etching, and there an ivory. And he had a
8o ON BOOKS AND ARTS
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 dis-
covered, 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 collec-
tions, 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
MY FEW THINGS 81
' Dix-Huitieme ' was fashionable, and very much as a
recreation from those ' noires etudes de la vie contem-
poraine ' the words are his own which had given us
Germinie Lacerteux and Manette Salomon. No such
collection of that fascinating French l Dix-Huitieme '
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 insignifi-
cant. 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, Fulley-
love, 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
F
82 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
quite another temptation the temptation to be busy
at last in getting together things with which the pic-
torial 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 Pans, that Frankenthal would
one day be as much sought after as Sevres) 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 Janstniste, 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 Meryons, about seventy
Whistlers, are mine. The one artist has been much
more prolific than the other, and thus, while, as
regards Meryon, the possession of even ' forty ' prints
MY FEW THINGS 83
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 Meryons ; 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 Meryon those in
which, to use his own phrase, he 'engraved Paris,'
with a fidelity so affectionate, yet with an imagina-
tion 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 Meryons, it interests me to
find that a good many that are in my Solander-box
to-day, belonged, long since, to distinguished French-
men who were Me'ryon's contemporaries. Thus, a
First State of the 'Saint-Etienne-du-Mont ' was
given by Meryon to Bracquemond. My impressions
84 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
of the ' Abside ' and the ' Stryge ' belonged to Aglaiis
Bouvenne, who catalogued Bonington, appreciated
Meiyon, and, in comparatively recent years, wrote
some reminiscences of him. A ' Rue des Toiles, a
Bourges' has on it Mryon's dedicatory inscription,
addressed to Hillemacher the painter. A curious
proof of the ' Partie de la Cit de Paris,' before the
introduction of the towers, which were never really
in the actual view, though Mryon chose to see them
there, came from the friend of Meryon'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 Meryon 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 employe
secretaire, 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
MY FEW THINGS 85
gourmet as well as connoisseur M. Wasset knew no
passion but the collector's. He dined modestly by
subscription, it was understood at the Cafe" Pro-
cope, in the Quarter was abonne 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-d-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, pass-
ing 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, Clement, who is
now no more he had a sale, in the Rue Drouot, of
his hundreds of prints, of which the Meryons, 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
86 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
were meat and drink, that were wife and child,
to him ?
Me"ryon, 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 ' arrange-
ment 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 im-
pression 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 repre-
sent 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 in-
teresting 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 !
MY FEW THINGS 87
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 !
I take it, he and Me>yon are quite the greatest of
the etchers this century has seen, and if so (since
of great true etchers the Eighteenth Century was
barren), they are the greatest since the days of
Claude and Rembrandt. To no one who has studied
any group of their plates for a single quarter of an
hour, can it be necessary to insist upon the essential
unlikeness of these two remarkable men. Unity of
impression almost a test of excellence, the one
note dominant, the rest subordinated that is found,
I know, and found almost equally, in the work of
both. But by what different measures has it been
maintained ! Whistler, in so much of his work, has
shown himself the flexible, vivacious, and consum-
mate sketcher, the artist whose choice of economical
and telling ' line ' is faultless and perhaps well-nigh
immediate. Meryon, upon the other hand, has been
remarkable for building up, with learned patience
worthy of Albert Diirer, little by little, his effects;
so that when the thing is done, and that sombre
vision of his has become a realised performance, he
has not so much made a drawing upon a plate, as
erected a monument (for so it strikes one) from
88 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
base to coping-stone. Such work has at least the
permanence of the very monuments it records. An
ceuvre de longue haleine a task severe and pro-
tracted is each one of Meryon's important coppers.
Yet all the length of Meryon's labour witnesses to
no relaxing hold of his first thought, and in the
great complexity of ordered line there is revealed
no superfluous, no insignificant stroke.
Each man is discovered in his work. In Meryon's
' Abside ' say, in the ' Pont Neuf/ in the ' Saint-
Etienne-du Mont,' is his brooding spirit, his patient
craftsmanship, his temperament intense and pro-
found. He was poor ; he was often weary ; he spent
himself on his work. In Whistler's ' Garden,' in his
' Piazzetta,' in his ' Florence Leyland,' in the ' Large
Pool,' in that wonderful tiny thing, ' The Fruit
Shop,' there is the boyish freshness, the spirit of
enjoyment, which he has known how to preserve
till the present time. Whistler has never been
tired, or, if he has, he and his work have parted com-
pany at that moment. Wonderful as is his gift of
observation and handling, his plates are a lark's
song. As you see the man before you, elastic,
joyous, slim, and ctibonnair> having never known the
heavy and sad wisdom of our modern youth, nor
the cares of our middle age, his appearance almost
MY FEW THINGS 89
persuades you that all his exquisite craftsmanship,
practised now for forty years, is but the blame-
less recreation of an hour snatched from life's
severer tasks the task of sipping duly, a Fheure de
V absinthe, one's aperitif, on the Boulevard ; of pulling
on the River, in the long June days ; of condensing
every rule of life into perhaps three epigrams, effec-
tive at a dinner-party. Who would not envy this
possessor of a craft fantastic, airy, and immortal !
Though Mr. Whistler may entertainingly insinuate
that long life has been denied to his friendships,
he will agree with me, A I know, when I assert that
it is secured to his etchings.
That my print-drawers contain but four or five
etchings by Seymour Haden is at once my mis-
fortune and my reproach. As one looks at them
one conjures up visions of bygone sales at
Sotheby's, when as yet Mr. Wilkinson, benign and
aged, sat in the chair, to wield the ivory hammer
what opportunities neglected, of which the more
diligent have availed themselves ! For I cannot
accept Seymour Haden's too modest estimate of
the value of his own work. Labour so energetic and
decisive is not destined to be prized by one genera-
tion alone, and in esteeming it comparatively lightly,
his connoisseurship, accurate enough when it is con-
90 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
cerned with Claude and Rembrandt, Meryon and
Whistler all of whom, in his time, he has loved
and collected is for once at fault.
I am somewhat poor again in those etchings which
are the creation of the austere genius of Legros.
Popular they will never be, for Legros is almost
alone among men of genius in not belonging to his
own day in receiving well-nigh no influence from
the actual hour. He is a belated Old Master but a
'master' always: never an affected copyist, who
pranks ' in faded antique dress.' Had he but
humoured the affectations of the time, it is quite
possible that the time would at all events have
talked about him, and, denied actual popularity, he
might yet have been solaced by an aesthetic coterie's
hysterical admiration. But that has not been for
Legros. As it is, with his gravely whispered message,
his general reticence, his overmastering sense of
Style, his indifference to attractive truths of detail,
his scorn of the merely clever, he is placed at a dis-
advantage. But his work remains ; not only the
etchings, of which Messieurs Thibaudeau and Poulet-
Malassis catalogued a hundred and sixty-eight as
long ago as 1877, but the grave pictures in which
the peasant of the Boulognais devoutly worships, or
in which the painted landscape is as the landscape
MY FEW THINGS 91
of a dream, and the vigorous oil portraits not one
of which, perhaps, reaches the nobility of his etched
portrait of Watts and the pencil drawings of the
nude, several of which Legros has given to the
Museum of his birthplace, Dijon, where the stray
Englishman who stays to look at them finds that
they are as finely severe as are the pencil drawings
of Ingres. I have his one big etching, 'La Mort
du Vagabond' the scale too large to be effective
generally, but, pace Mr. Whistler, I do not, in this
case, find it ' an offence,' l and amongst others,
two that have, it may be, no particular rarity, but
that are worthily, and I think even exceptionally,
characteristic. The one is ' La Communion dans
1'Eglise Saint-Medard ' : in line and in feeling an
instance of the most dignified treatment of ecclesi-
astical function or religious office. And the other is
' Les Chantres Espagnols,' the singing-men, aged and
decayed, eight of them, in a darkened choir was
ever a vision of narrow and of saddened lives more
serious or more penetrating !
From these grave things it is sometimes a relief to
turn to Jacquemart's etchings of still-life. The man
1 ' The huge plate,' writes Mr. Whistler on the whole truthfully
4 the huge plate is an offence : its undertaking an unbecoming display
of determination and ignorance, its accomplishment a triumph of un-
thinking earnestness and uncontrolled energy.
92 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
himself had troubles : not difficulties about money,
nor, like Me"ryon, the knowledge that he was little
appreciated for appreciation came to him early
but lack of health during,] years that should have
been vigorous, and a compulsory flight towards the
sunshine, which yet did not appreciably lessen the
distance that divided him from Death. But his work,
from end to end, in its serene, deliberate accomplish-
ment, suggests no chances and changes, no personal
emotion, and even no actual experience of human
life. One says at first, it might have been done at
any period ; then one recognises perhaps what one
may call a modern feeling for the object portrayed ;
then one thinks of Hollar's ' Five Muffs,' and of
Rembrandt's ' Shell,' and remembers that both have
a freedom, a delicate skill, akin, after all, to the skill
and the freedom in the etchings of Jacquemart. Of
Jacquemart's two great series, the prints for his
father's Histoire de la Porcelaine and those of the
' Gemmes et Joyaux de la Couronne,' I possess only
the first, and these in book form, as they were sent
me by Madame Techener, the widow of Jacquemart's
publisher and friend. In a simple, russet-coloured
half-binding, done afterwards by Zaehnsdorf, they
stand on a shelf I go to. Elsewhere are such
proofs of Jacquemart etchings as the occasional
MY FEW THINGS 93
good fortune of auction rooms snatched in a spare
half- hour has brought to a life -long lover of
engravings. There is a certain plate of sword-
handles and daggers things, some of them, that
'rend and rip'
' Gash rough, slash smooth, help Hate so many ways,
Yet ever keep a beauty that betrays
Love still at work with the artificer, through all his quaint
devising
as Robert Browning wrote, describing weapons that
lay, as I remember, at peace at last, on his own
drawing-room table. How Jacquemart etched such
blades ! By this print of his there is one of a
seventeenth-century watch just such a watch as
I said used to be fished up from the bed of the
Seine, for quaint old Monsieur Wasset and with it
the presentment of Renaissance jewel ; and, perhaps,
of a carved mirror, or a bit of Valenciennes porcelain.
Allow me a reflection ! The cheapest way of
enjoying objets (fart is to enjoy them in etchings ;
and it is often the easiest way, since you have but to
sit in your chair and look ; and it is often not the
least true, since the etcher himself has seen with
trained eye before his trained hand came to draw.
Well, to enjoy objets dart in that fashion, with toler-
able completeness and extreme satisfaction, the
94 ON BOOKS AND ARTS
intelligent poor man has really but to get the two
chief series of Jacquemarts (those that are still
lacking to me, the ' Gemmes et Joyaux de la Cou-
ronne,' are, I know Seymour Haden would tell me,
the bigger, broader, richer, more spontaneous of the
two), and those fifty plates by different etchers, of
whom Courtry, Greux, and Le Rat were among the
principal, which Holloway published about a score
of years since ' Works of Art in the Collections of
England. 5 In that excellent folio, the men who have
just been mentioned, and several others, followed
hard on Jacquemart's heels. What a treatment of
jade, in some of those plates ! Mr. Addington's
vase in particular absolutely unctuous. What a
treatment of cristal de roche \ Desgoffe's painted
panel at the Luxembourg is only a little finer.
What a treatment of ivory ! that extraordinary
Moorish casket, that was Malcolm of Poltalloch's.
But this is only copyist's etching, some people
may say. 'Copyists' No! You would not enjoy
it so much, were it merely servile imitation. It is
interpretation, significant and spirited, alert and
vivid.
Of the original etchers of the younger school in
England, Frank Short and William Strang have
long seemed to me the most interesting, notwith-
MY FEW THINGS 95
standing the as yet somewhat marked limitations of
theme of the one, and that possessing ' devil ' of the
love of ugliness which I have now almost ceased to
hope may be exorcised from the other. Strang, for
all the presence of that which is repulsive to many,
is a man of great qualities. A Celt to the depths of
him, he is wildly imaginative. He is dramatic, and
his prints are dramatic, however much he may
profess to be busy with line and tone. Besides,
there are moments in which he confesses to being
a poet. He has the instinct of tragedy. Technically,
his etchings are almost always good ; nor is it, to
my mind, a sin in them that so many of them set
you thinking. I have but a few of Mr. Strang's
prints ; of Frank Short's I have more, and when he