It is not suggested that when a musician wants to compose an air or chorus he is to cast about for some little-known similar piece and lay it under contribution. This is not to spring from the loins of living ancestors but to batten on dead men’s bones. He who takes thus will ere long lose even what little power to take he may have ever had. On the other hand there is no enjoyable work in any art which is not easily recognised as the affiliated outcome of something that has gone before it. This is more especially true of music, whose grammar and stock in trade are so much simpler than those of any other art. He who loves music will know what the best men have done, and hence will have numberless passages from older writers floating at all times in his mind, like germs in the air, ready to hook themselves on to anything of an associated character. Some of these he will reject at once, as already too strongly wedded to associations of their own; some are tried and found not so suitable as was thought; some one, however, will probably soon assert itself as either suitable, or easily altered so as to become exactly what is wanted; if, indeed, it is the right passage in the right man’s mind, it will have modified itself unbidden already. How, then, let me ask again, is the musician to comport himself towards those uninvited guests of his thoughts? Is he to give them shelter, cherish them, and be thankful? or is he to shake them rudely off, bid them begone, and go out of his way so as not to fall in with them again?
Can there be a doubt what the answer to this question should be? As it is fatal deliberately to steer on to the work of other composers, so it is no less fatal deliberately to steer clear of it; music to be of any value must be a man’s freest and most instinctive expression. Instinct in the case of all the greatest artists, whatever their art may be, bids them attach themselves to, and grow out of those predecessors who are most congenial to them. Beethoven grew out of Mozart and Haydn, adding a leaven which in the end leavened the whole lump, but in the outset adding little; Mozart grew out of Haydn, in the outset adding little; Haydn grew out of Domenico Scarlatti and Emmanuel Bach, adding, in the outset, little. These men grew out of John Sebastian Bach, for much as both of them admired Handel I cannot see that they allowed his music to influence theirs. Handel even in his own lifetime was more or less of a survival and protest; he saw the rocks on to which music was drifting and steered his own good ship wide of them; as for his musical parentage, he grew out of the early Italians and out of Purcell.
The more original a composer is the more certain is he to have made himself a strong base of operations in the works of earlier men, striking his roots deep into them, so that he, as it were, gets inside them and lives in them, they in him, and he in them; then, this firm foothold having been obtained, he sallies forth as opportunity directs, with the result that his works will reflect at once the experiences of his own musical life and of those musical progenitors to whom a loving instinct has more particularly attached him. The fact that his work is deeply imbued with their ideas and little ways, is not due to his deliberately taking from them. He makes their ways his own as children model themselves upon those older persons who are kind to them. He loves them because he feels they felt as he does, and looked on men and things much as he looks upon them himself; he is an outgrowth in the same direction as that in which they grew; he is their son, bound by every law of heredity to be no less them than himself; the manner, therefore, which came most naturally to them will be the one which comes also most naturally to him as being their descendant. Nevertheless no matter how strong a family likeness may be, (and it is sometimes, as between Handel and his forerunners, startlingly close) two men of different generations will never be so much alike that the work of each will not have a character of its own—unless indeed the one is masquerading as the other, which is not tolerable except on rare occasions and on a very small scale. No matter how like his father a man may be we can always tell the two apart; but this once given, so that he has a clear life of his own, then a strong family likeness to some one else is no more to be regretted or concealed if it exists than to be affected if it does not.
It is on these terms alone that attractive music can be written, and it is a musician’s business to write attractive music. He is, as it were, tenant for life of the estate of and trustee for that school to which he belongs. Normally, that school will be the one which has obtained the firmest hold upon his own countrymen. An Englishman cannot successfully write like a German or a Hungarian, nor is it desirable that he should try. If, by way of variety, we want German or Hungarian music we shall get a more genuine article by going direct to German or Hungarian composers. For the most part, however, the soundest Englishmen will be stay-at-homes, in spite of their being much given to summer flings upon the continent. Whether as writers, therefore, or as listeners, Englishmen should stick chiefly to Purcell, Handel, and Sir Arthur Sullivan. True, Handel was not an Englishman by birth, but no one was ever more thoroughly English in respect of all the best and most distinguishing features of Englishmen. As a young man, though Italy and Germany were open to him, he adopted the country of Purcell, feeling it, doubtless, to be, as far as he was concerned, more Saxon than Saxony itself. He chose England; nor can there be a doubt that he chose it because he believed it to be the country in which his music had the best chance of being appreciated. And what does this involve, if not that England, take it all round, is the most musically minded country in the world? That this is so, that it has produced the finest music the world has known, and is therefore the finest school of music in the world, cannot be reasonably disputed.
To the born musician, it is hardly necessary to say, neither the foregoing remarks nor any others about music, except those that may be found in every text book, can be of the smallest use. Handel knew this and no man ever said less about his art—or did more in it. There are some semi-apocryphal[128]rules for tuning the harpsichord that pretend, with what truth I know not, to hail from him, but here his theoretical contributions to music begin and end. The rules begin “In this chord” (the tonic major triad) “tune the fifth pretty flat, and the third considerably too sharp.” There is an absence of fuss about these words which suggests Handel himself.
The written and spoken words of great painters or musicians who can talk or write is seldom lasting—artists are a dumb inarticulate folk, whose speech is in their hands not in their tongues. They look at us like seals, but cannot talk to us. To the musician, therefore, what has been said above is useless, if not worse; its object will have been attained if it aids the uncreative reader to criticise what he hears with more intelligence.
So far as I can see, this is the least stable of the arts. From the earliest records we learn that there were musicians, and people seem to have been just as fond of music as we are ourselves, but, whereas we find the old sculpture, painting (what there is of it) and literature to have been in all essentials like our own, and not only this but whereas we find them essentially the same in existing nations in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, this is not so as regards music either looking to antiquity or to the various existing nations. I believe we should find old Greek and Roman music as hideous as we do Persian and Japanese, or as Persians and Japanese find our own.
I believe therefore that the charm of music rests on a more unreasoning basis, and is more dependent on what we are accustomed to, than the pleasure given by the other arts. We now find all the ecclesiastical modes, except the Ionian and the Æolian, unsatisfactory, indeed almost intolerable, but I question whether, if we were as much in the habit of using the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and Mixo-Lydian modes as we are of using the later Æolian mode (the minor scale), we should not find these just as satisfactory. Is it not possible that our indisputable preference for the Ionian mode (the major scale) is simply the result of its being the one to which we are most accustomed? If another mode were to become habitual, might not this scale or mode become first a kind of supplementary moon-like mode (as the Æolian now is) and finally might it not become intolerable to us? Happily it will last my time as it is.
Formerly all discords were prepared, and Monteverde’s innovation of taking the dominant seventh unprepared was held to be cataclysmic, but in modern music almost any conceivable discord may be taken unprepared. We have grown so used to this now that we think nothing of it, still, whenever it can be done without sacrificing something more important, I think even a dominant seventh is better prepared.
It is only the preparation, however, of discords which is now less rigorously insisted on; their resolution—generally by the climbing down of the offending note—is as necessary as ever if the music is to flow on smoothly.
This holds good exactly in our daily life. If a discord has to be introduced, it is better to prepare it as a concord, take it on a strong beat, and resolve it downwards on a weak one. The preparation being often difficult or impossible may be dispensed with, but the resolution is still de rigueur.
It has been said “Thou shalt not masquerade in costumes not of thine own period,” but the history of art is the history of revivals. Musical criticism, so far as I can see, is the least intelligent of the criticisms on this score. Unless a man writes in the exotic style of Brahms, Wagner, Dvořák and I know not what other Slav, Czech, Teuton or Hebrew, the critics are sure to accuse him of being an anachronism. The only man in England who is permitted to write in a style which is in the main of home growth is the Irish Jew, Sir Arthur Sullivan. If we may go to a foreign style why may we not go to one of an earlier period? But surely we may do whatever we like, and the better we like it the better we shall do it. The great thing is to make sure that we like the style we choose better than we like any other, that we engraft on it whatever we hear that we think will be a good addition, and depart from it wherever we dislike it. If a man does this he may write in the style of the year one and he will be no anachronism; the musical critics may call him one but they cannot make him one.
The analogy between literature, painting and music, so close in so many respects, suggests that the modern custom of making a whole scene, act or even drama into a single, unbroken movement without subdivision is like making a book without chapters, or a picture, like Bernardino Luini’s great Lugano fresco in which a long subject is treated within the compass of a single piece. Better advised, as it seems to me, Gaudenzio Ferrari broke up a space of the same shape and size at Varallo into many compartments, each more or less complete in itself, grouped round a central scene. The subdivision of books into chapters, each with a more or less emphatic full close in its own key, is found to be a help as giving the attention halting places by the way. Everything that is worth attending to fatigues as well as delights, much as the climbing of a mountain does so. Chapters and short pieces give rests during which the attention gathers renewed strength and attacks with fresh ardour a new stretch of the ascent. Each bar is, as it were, a step cut in ice and one does not see, if set pieces are objected to, why phrases and bars should not be attacked next.
Jones and I went last Friday toDon Giovanni, Mr. Kemp[131]putting us in free. It bored us both, and we likeNarcissusbetter. We admit the beauty of many of the beginnings of the airs, but this beauty is not maintained, in every case the air tails off into something that is much too near being tiresome. The plot, of course, is stupid to a degree, but plot has very little to do with it; what can be more uninteresting than the plot of many of Handel’s oratorios? We both believe the scheme of Italian opera to be a bad one; we think that music should never be combined with acting to a greater extent than is done, we will say, in theMikado; that the oratorio form is far more satisfactory than opera; and we agreed that we had neither of us ever yet been to an opera (I mean a Grand Opera) without being bored by it. I am not sorry to remember that Handel never abandoned oratorio after he had once fairly taken to it.
We went last night to the Philharmonic and sat in the shilling orchestra, just behind the drums, so that we could see and hear what each instrument was doing. The concert began with Mozart’s G Minor Symphony. We liked this fairly well, especially the last movement, but we found all the movements too long and, speaking for myself, if I had a tame orchestra for which I might write programmes, I should probably put it down once or twice again, not from any spontaneous wish to hear more of it but as a matter of duty that I might judge it with fuller comprehension—still, if each movement had been half as long I should probably have felt cordially enough towards it, except of course in so far as that the spirit of the music is alien to that of the early Italian school with which alone I am in genuine sympathy and of which Handel is the climax.
Then came a terribly long-winded recitative by Beethoven and an air with a good deal of “Che farò” in it. I do not mind this, and if it had been “Che farò” absolutely I should, I daresay, have liked it better. I never want to hear it again and my orchestra should never play it.
Beethoven’s Concerto for violin and orchestra (op. 61) which followed was longer and more tedious still. I have not a single good word for it. If the subject of the last movement was the tune of one of Arthur Robert’s comic songs, or of any music-hall song, it would do very nicely and I daresay we should often hum it. I do not mean at the opening of the movement but about half way through, where the character is just that of a common music-hall song and, so far, good.
Part II opened with a suite in F Major for orchestra (op. 39) by Moszkowski. This was much more clear and, in every way, interesting than the Beethoven; every now and then there were passages that were pleasing, not to say more. Jones liked it better than I did; still, one could not feel that any of the movements were the mere drivelling show stuff of which the concerto had been full. But it, like everything else done at these concerts, is too long, cut down one-half it would have been all right and we should have liked to hear it twice. As it was, all we could say was that it was much better than we had expected. I did not like the look of the young man who wrote it and who also conducted. He had long yellowish hair and kept tossing his head to fling it back on to his shoulders, instead of keeping it short as Jones and I keep ours.
Then came Schubert’s “Erl König,” which, I daresay, is very fine but with which I have absolutely nothing in common.
And finally there was a tiresome characteristic overture by Berlioz, which, if Jones could by any possibility have written anything so dreary, I should certainly have begged him not to publish.
The general impression left upon me by the concert is that all the movements were too long, and that, no matter how clever the development may be, it spoils even the most pleasing and interesting subject if there is too much of it. Handel knew when to stop and, when he meant stopping, he stopped much as a horse stops, with little, if any, peroration. Who can doubt that he kept his movements short because he knew that the worst music within a reasonable compass is better than the best which is made tiresome by being spun out unduly? I only know one concerted piece of Handel’s which I think too long, I mean the overture toSaul, but I have no doubt that if I were to try to cut it down I should find some excellent reason that had made Handel decide on keeping it as it is.
There have been some interesting wind concerts lately; I say interesting, because they brought home to us the unsatisfactory character of wind unsupported by strings. I rather pleased Jones by saying that the hautbois was the clarionet with a cold in its head, and the bassoon the same with a cold on its chest.
The large sweeps of sound floated over the orchestra like the wind playing upon a hill-side covered with young heather, and I sat and wondered which of the Alpine passes Handel crossed when he went into Italy. What time of the year was it? What kind of weather did he have? Were the spring flowers out? Did he walk the greater part of the way as we do now? And what did he hear? For he must sometimes have heard music inside him—and that, too, as much above what he has written down as what he has written down is above all other music. No man can catch all, or always the best, of what is put for a moment or two within his reach. Handel took as much and as near the best, doubtless, as mortal man can take; but he must have had moments and glimpses which were given to him alone and which he could tell no man.
I saw the world a great orchestra filled with angels whose instruments were of gold. And I saw the organ on the top of the axis round which all should turn, but nothing turned and nothing moved and the angels stirred not and all was as still as a stone, and I was myself also, like the rest, as still as a stone.
Then I saw some huge, cloud-like forms nearing, and behold! it was the Lord bringing two of his children by the hand.
“O Papa!” said one, “isn’t it pretty?”
“Yes, my dear,” said the Lord, “and if you drop a penny into the box the figures will work.”
Then I saw that what I had taken for the keyboard of the organ was no keyboard but only a slit, and one of the little Lords dropped a plaque of metal into it. And then the angels played and the world turned round and the organ made a noise and the people began killing one another and the two little Lords clapped their hands and were delighted.
They buried Dickens in the very next grave, cheek by jowl with Handel. It does not matter, but it pained me to think that people who could do this could become Deans of Westminster.
Theold masters taught, not because they liked teaching, nor yet from any idea of serving the cause of art, nor yet because they were paid to teach by the parents of their pupils. The parents probably paid no money at first. The masters took pupils and taught them because they had more work to do than they could get through and wanted some one to help them. They sold the pupil’s work as their own, just as people do now who take apprentices. When people can sell a pupil’s work, they will teach the pupil all they know and will see he learns it. This is the secret of the whole matter.
The modern schoolmaster does not aim at learning from his pupils, he hardly can, but the old masters did. See how Giovanni Bellini learned from Titian and Giorgione who both came to him in the same year, as boys, when Bellini was 63 years old. What a day for painting was that! All Bellini’s best work was done thenceforward. I know nothing in the history of art so touching as this. [1883.]
P.S. I have changed my mind about Titian. I don’t like him. [1897.]
The academic system goes almost on the principle of offering places for repentance, and letting people fall soft, by assuming that they should be taught how to do things before they do them, and not by the doing of them. Good economy requires that there should be little place for repentance, and that when people fall they should fall hard enough to remember it.
We have spent hundreds of thousands, or more probably of millions, on national art collections, schools of art, preliminary training and academicism, without wanting anything in particular, but when the nation did at last try all it knew to design a sixpence, it failed.[136]The other coins are all very well in their way, and so are the stamps—the letters get carried, and the money passes; but both stamps and coins would have been just as good, and very likely better, if there had not been an art-school in the country. [1888.]
When is a man studying from nature, and when is he only flattering himself that he is doing so because he is painting with a model or lay-figure before him? A man may be working his eight or nine hours a day from the model and yet not be studying from nature. He is painting but not studying. He is like the man in the Bible who looks at himself in a glass and goeth away forgetting what manner of man he was. He will know no more about nature at the end of twenty years than a priest who has been reading his breviary day after day without committing it to memory will know of its contents. Unless he gets what he has seen well into his memory, so as to have it at his fingers’ ends as familiarly as the characters with which he writes a letter, he can be no more held to be familiar with, and to have command over, nature than a man who only copies his signature from a copy kept in his pocket, as I have known French Canadians do, can be said to be able to write. It is painting without nature that will give a man this, and not painting directly from her. He must do both the one and the other, and the one as much as the other.
It may be doubted whether they have not done more harm than good. They are an attempt to get a bit of stuffed nature and to study from that instead of studying from the thing itself. Indeed, the man who never has a model but studies the faces of people as they sit opposite him in an omnibus, and goes straight home and puts down what little he can of what he has seen, dragging it out piecemeal from his memory, and going into another omnibus to look again for what he has forgotten as near as he can find it—that man is studying from nature as much as he who has a model four or five hours daily—and probably more. For you may be painting from nature as much without nature actually before you as with; and you may have nature before you all the while you are painting and yet not be painting from her.
Is very like trying to put a pinch of salt on her tail. And yet many manage to do it very nicely.
Art has no end in view save the emphasising and recording in the most effective way some strongly felt interest or affection. Where there is neither interest nor desire to record with good effect, there is but sham art, or none at all: where both these are fully present, no matter how rudely and inarticulately, there is great art. Art is at best a dress, important, yet still nothing in comparison with the wearer, and, as a general rule, the less it attracts attention the better.
An artist’s touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing.
One reason why it is as well not to give very much detail is that, no matter how much is given, the eye will always want more; it will know very well that it is not being paid in full. On the other hand, no matter how little one gives, the eye will generally compromise by wanting only a little more. In either case the eye will want more, so one may as well stop sooner or later. Sensible painting, like sensible law, sensible writing, or sensible anything else, consists as much in knowing what to omit as what to insist upon. It consists in the tact that tells the painter where to stop.
Painting is only possible by reason of association’s not sticking to the letter of its bond, so that we jump to conclusions.
Painters should remember that the eye, as a general rule, is a good, simple, credulous organ—very ready to take things on trust if it be told them with any confidence of assertion.
We must take as many as we can, but the difficulty is that it is often so hard to know what the truths of nature are.
After having spent years striving to be accurate, we must spend as many more in discovering when and how to be inaccurate.
He is like nature to Fuseli—he puts me out.
When a thing is near and in light, colour and form are important; when far and in shadow, they are unimportant. Form and colour are like reputations which when they become shady are much of a muchness.
Money is very like technique (or vice versa). We see that both musicians or painters with great command of technique seldom know what to do with it, while those who have little often know how to use what they have.
These things are antagonistic. The composer is seldom a great theorist; the theorist is never a great composer. Each is equally fatal to and essential in the other.
I have never seen statues of Jove, Neptune, Apollo or any of the pagan gods that are not as great failures as the statues of Christ and the Apostles.
If a man has not studied painting, or at any rate black and white drawing, his eyes are wild; learning to draw tames them. The first step towards taming the eyes is to teach them not to see too much.
Quickness in seeing as in everything else comes from long sustained effort after rightness and comes unsought. It never comes from effort after quickness.
Painting depends upon seeing; seeing depends upon looking for this or that, at least in great part it does so.
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it you are lost.
Any man, as old Heatherley used to say, will go on improving as long as he is bona fide dissatisfied with his work.
Improvement in one’s painting depends upon how we look at our work. If we look at it to see where it is wrong, we shall see this and make it righter. If we look at it to see where it is right, we shall see this and shall not make it righter. We cannot see it both wrong and right at the same time.
Tell the young artist that he wants a black piece here or there, when he sees no such black piece in nature, and that he must continue this or that shadow thus, and break this light into this or that other, when in nature he sees none of these things, and you will puzzle him very much. He is trying to put down what he sees; he does not care two straws about composition or light and shade; if he sees two tones of such and such relative intensity in nature, he will give them as near as he can the same relative intensity in his picture, and to tell him that he is perhaps exactly to reverse the natural order in deference to some canon of the academicians, and that at the same time he is drawing from nature, is what he cannot understand.
I am very doubtful how far people do not arrange their light and shade too much with the result with which we are familiar in drawing-masters’ copies; it may be right or it may not, I don’t know—I am afraid I ought to know, but I don’t; but I do know that those pictures please me best which were painted without the slightest regard to any of these rules.
I suppose the justification of those who talk as above lies in the fact that, as we cannot give all nature, we lie bysuppressio veriwhether we like it or no, and that you sometimes lie less by putting in something which does not exist at the moment, but which easily might exist and which gives a lot of facts which you otherwise could not give at all, than by giving so much as you can alone give if you adhere rigidly to the facts. If this is so the young painter would understand the matter, if it were thus explained to him, better than he is likely to do if he is merely given it as a canon.
At the same time, I admit it to be true that one never sees light but it has got dark in it, nor vice versa, and that this comes to saying that if you are to be true to nature you must break your lights into your shadows and vice versa; and so usual is this that, if there happens here or there to be an exception, the painter had better say nothing about it, for it is more true to nature’s general practice not to have it so than to have it.
Certainly as regards colour, I never remember to have seen a piece of one colour without finding a bit of a very similar colour not far off, but having no connection with it. This holds good in such an extraordinary way that if it happens to fail the matter should be passed over in silence.
The expression “seeing colour” used to puzzle me. I was aware that some painters made their pictures more pleasing in colour than others and more like the colour of the actual thing as a whole, still there were any number of bits of brilliant colour in their work which for the life of me I could not see in nature. I used to hear people say of a man who got pleasing and natural colour, “Does he not see colour well?” and I used to say he did, but, as far as I was concerned, it would have been more true to say that he put down colour which he did not see well, or at any rate that he put down colour which I could not see myself.
In course of time I got to understand that seeing colour does not mean inventing colour, or exaggerating it, but being on the look out for it, thus seeing it where another will not see it, and giving it the preference as among things to be preserved and rendered amid the wholesale slaughter of innocents which is inevitable in any painting. Painting is only possible as a quasi-hieroglyphic epitomising of nature; this means that the half goes for the whole, whereon the question arises which half is to be taken and which made to go? The colourist will insist by preference on the coloured half, the man who has no liking for colour, however much else he may sacrifice, will not be careful to preserve this and, as a natural consequence, he will not preserve it.
Good, that is to say, pleasing, beautiful, or even pretty colour cannot be got by putting patches of pleasing, beautiful or pretty colour upon one’s canvas and, which is a harder matter, leaving them when they have been put. It is said of money that it is more easily made than kept and this is true of many things, such as friendship; and even life itself is more easily got than kept. The same holds good of colour. It is also true that, as with money, more is made by saving than in any other way, and the surest way to lose colour is to play with it inconsiderately, not knowing how to leave well alone. A touch of pleasing colour should on no account be stirred without consideration.
That we can see in a natural object more colour than strikes us at a glance, if we look for it attentively, will not be denied by any who have tried to look for it. Thus, take a dull, dead, level, grimy old London wall: at a first glance we can see no colour in it, nothing but a more or less purplish mass, got, perhaps as nearly as in any other way, by a tint mixed with black, Indian red and white. If, however, we look for colour in this, we shall find here and there a broken brick with a small surface of brilliant crimson, hard by there will be another with a warm orange hue perceivable through the grime by one who is on the look out for it, but by no one else. Then there may be bits of old advertisement of which here and there a gaily coloured fragment may remain, or a rusty iron hook or a bit of bright green moss; few indeed are the old walls, even in the grimiest parts of London, on which no redeeming bits of colour can be found by those who are practised in looking for them. To like colour, to wish to find it, and thus to have got naturally into a habit of looking for it, this alone will enable a man to see colour and to make a note of it when he has seen it, and this alone will lead him towards a pleasing and natural scheme of colour in his work.
Good colour can never be got by putting down colour which is not seen; at any rate only a master who has long served accuracy can venture on occasional inaccuracy—telling a lie, knowing it to be a lie, and as,se non vera,ben trovata. The grown man in his art may do this, and indeed is not a man at all unless he knows how to do it daily and hourly without departure from the truth even in his boldest lie; but the child in art must stick to what he sees. If he looks harder he will see more, and may put more, but till he sees it without being in any doubt about it, he must not put it. There is no such sure way of corrupting one’s colour sense as the habitual practice of putting down colour which one does not see; this and the neglecting to look for it are equal faults. The first error leads to melodramatic vulgarity, the other to torpid dullness, and it is hard to say which is worse.
It may be said that the preservation of all the little episodes of colour which can be discovered in an object whose general effect is dingy and the suppression of nothing but the uninteresting colourless details amount to what is really a forcing and exaggeration of nature, differing but little from downright fraud, so far as its effect goes, since it gives an undue preference to the colour side of the matter. In equity, if the exigencies of the convention under which we are working require a sacrifice of a hundred details, the majority of which are uncoloured, while in the minority colour can be found if looked for, the sacrifice should be madepro ratafrom coloured and uncoloured alike. If the facts of nature are a hundred, of which ninety are dull in colour and ten interesting, and the painter can only give ten, he must not give the ten interesting bits of colour and neglect the ninety soberly coloured details. Strictly, he should sacrifice eighty-one sober details and nine coloured ones; he will thus at any rate preserve the balance and relation which obtain in nature between coloured and uncoloured.
This, no doubt, is what he ought to do if he leaves the creative, poetic and more properly artistic aspect of his own function out of the question; if he is making himself a mere transcriber, holding the mirror up to nature with such entire forgetfulness of self as to be rather looking-glass than man, this is what he must do. But the moment he approaches nature in this spirit he ceases to be an artist, and the better he succeeds as painter of something that might pass for a coloured photograph, the more inevitably must he fail to satisfy, or indeed to appeal to us at all as poet—as one whose sympathies with nature extend beyond her superficial aspect, or as one who is so much at home with her as to be able readily to dissociate the permanent and essential from the accidental which may be here to-day and gone to-morrow. If he is to come before us as an artist, he must do so as a poet or creator of that which is not, as well as a mirror of that which is. True, experience in all kinds of poetical work shows that the less a man creates the better, that the more, in fact, he makes, the less is he of a maker; but experience also shows that the course of true nature, like that of true love, never does run smooth, and that occasional, judicious, slight departures from the actual facts, by one who knows the value of a lie too well to waste it, bring nature more vividly and admirably before us than any amount of adherence to the letter of strict accuracy. It is the old story, the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.
With colour, then, he who does not look for it will begin by not seeing it unless it is so obtrusive that there is no escaping it; he will therefore, in his rendering of the hundred facts of nature above referred to, not see the ten coloured bits at all, supposing them to be, even at their brightest, somewhat sober, and his work will be colourless or disagreeable in colour. The faithful copyist, who is still a mere copyist, will give nine details of dull uninteresting colour and one of interesting. The artist or poet will find some reason for slightly emphasising the coloured details and will scatter here and there a few slight, hardly perceptible, allusions to more coloured details than come within the letter of his bond, but will be careful not to overdo it. The vulgar sensational painter will force in his colour everywhere, and of all colourists he must be pronounced the worst.
Briefly then, to see colour is simply to have got into a habit of not overlooking the patches of colour which are seldom far to seek or hard to see by those who look for them. It is not the making one’s self believe that one sees all manner of colours which are not there, it is only the getting oneself into a mental habit of looking out for episodes of colour, and of giving them a somewhat undue preference in the struggle for rendering, wherever anything like a reasonable pretext can be found for doing so. For if a picture is to be pleasing in colour, pleasing colours must be put upon the canvas, and reasons have got to be found for putting them there. [1886.]
P.S.—The foregoing note wants a great deal of reconsideration for which I cannot find time just now. Jan. 31, 1898.
A man cannot be a great colourist unless he is a great deal more. A great colourist is no better than a great wordist unless the colour is well applied to a subject which at any rate is not repellent.
There is no excuse for amateur work being bad. Amateurs often excuse their shortcomings on the ground that they are not professionals, the professional could plead with greater justice that he is not an amateur. The professional has not, he might well say, the leisure and freedom from money anxieties which will let him devote himself to his art in singleness of heart, telling of things as he sees them without fear of what man shall say unto him; he must think not of what appears to him right and loveable but of what his patrons will think and of what the critics will tell his patrons to say they think; he has got to square everyone all round and will assuredly fail to make his way unless he does this; if, then, he betrays his trust he does so under temptation. Whereas the amateur who works with no higher aim than that of immediate recognition betrays it from the vanity and wantonness of his spirit. The one is naughty because he is needy, the other from natural depravity. Besides, the amateur can keep his work to himself, whereas the professional man must exhibit or starve.
The question is what is the amateur an amateur of? What is he really in love with? Is he in love with other people, thinking he sees something which he would like to show them, which he feels sure they would enjoy if they could only see it as he does, which he is therefore trying as best he can to put before the few nice people whom he knows? If this is his position he can do no wrong, the spirit in which he works will ensure that his defects will be only as bad spelling or bad grammar in some pretty saying of a child. If, on the other hand, he is playing for social success and to get a reputation for being clever, then no matter how dexterous his work may be, it is but another mode of the speaking with the tongues of men and angels without charity; it is as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
This picture is inspired by no deeper feeling than a determination to adhere to the conventions of the time. These conventions ensure an effect of more or less devotional character, and this, coupled with our reverence for the name of Raffaelle, the sentiments arising from antiquity and foreignness, and the inability of most people to judge of the work on technical grounds, because they can neither paint nor draw, prevents us from seeing what a mere business picture it is and how poor the painting is throughout. A master in any art should be first man, then poet, then craftsman; this picture must have been painted by one who was first worldling, then religious-property-manufacturer, then painter with brains not more than average and no heart.
The Madonna’s head has indeed a certain prettiness of a not very uncommon kind; the paint has been sweetened with a soft brush and licked smooth till all texture as of flesh is gone and the head is wooden and tight; I can see no expression in it; the hand upon the open book is as badly drawn as the hand of S. Catharine (also by Raffaelle) in our gallery, or even worse; so is the part of the other hand which can be seen; they are better drawn than the hands in theEcce homoof Correggio in our gallery, for the fingers appear to have the right number of joints, which none of those in the Correggio have, but this is as much as can be said.
The dress is poorly painted, the gold thread work being of the cheapest, commonest kind, both as regards pattern and the quantity allowed; especially note the meagre allowance and poor pattern of the embroidery on the virgin’s bosom; it is done as by one who knew she ought to have, and must have, a little gold work, but was determined she should have no more than he could help. This is so wherever there is gold thread work in the picture. It is so on S. Nicholas’s cloak where a larger space is covered, but the pattern is dull and the smallest quantity of gold is made to go the longest way. The gold cording which binds this is more particularly badly done. Compare the embroidery and gold thread work in “The Virgin adoring the Infant Christ,” ascribed to Andrea Verrocchio, No. 296, Room V; “The Annunciation” by Carlo Crivelli, No. 739, Room VIII; in “The Angel Raphael accompanies Tobias on his Journey into Media” attributed to Botticini, No. 781, Room V; in “Portrait of a Lady,” school of Pollaiuolo, No. 585, Room V; in “A Canon of the Church with his Patron Saints” by Gheeraert David, No. 1045, Room XI; or indeed the general run of the gold embroidery of the period as shown in our gallery.[147]
So with the jewels; there are examples of jewels in most of the pictures named above, none of them, perhaps, very first-rate, but all of them painted with more care and serious aim than the eighteen-penny trinket which serves S. Nicholas for a brooch. The jewels in the mitre are rather better than this, but much depends upon the kind of day on which the picture is seen; on a clear bright day they, and indeed every part of the picture, look much worse than on a dull one because the badness can be more clearly seen. As for the mitre itself, it is made of the same hard unyielding material as the portico behind the saint, whatever this may be, presumably wood.
Observe also the crozier which S. Nicholas is holding; observe the cheap streak of high light exactly the same thickness all the way and only broken in one place; so with the folds in the draperies; all is monotonous, unobservant, unimaginative—the work of a feeble man whose pains will never extend much beyond those necessary to make him pass as stronger than he is; especially the folds in the white linen over S. Nicholas’s throat, and about his girdle—weaker drapery can hardly be than this, unless, perhaps, that from under which S. Nicholas’s hands come. There is not only no art here to conceal, but there is not even pains to conceal the want of art. As for the hands themselves, and indeed all the hands and feet throughout the picture, there is not one which is even tolerably drawn if judged by the standard which Royal Academicians apply to Royal Academy students now.
Granted that this is an early work, nevertheless I submit that the drawing here is not that of one who is going to do better by and by, it is that of one who is essentially insincere and who will never aim higher than immediate success. Those who grow to the best work almost always begin by laying great stress on details which are all they as yet have strength for; they cannot do much, but the little they can do they do and never tire of doing; they grow by getting juster notions of proportion and subordination of parts to the whole rather than by any greater amount of care and patience bestowed upon details. Here there are no bits of detail worked out as by one who was interested in them and enjoyed them. Wherever a thing can be scamped it is scamped. As the whole is, so are the details, and as the details are, so is the whole; all is tainted with eye-service and with a vulgarity not the less profound for being veiled by a due observance of conventionality.
I shall be told that Raffaelle did come to draw and paint much better than he has done here. I demur to this. He did a little better; he just took so much pains as to prevent him from going down-hill headlong, and, with practice, he gained facility, but he was never very good, either as a draughtsman or as a painter. His reputation, indeed, rests mainly on his supposed exquisitely pure and tender feeling. His colour is admittedly inferior, his handling is not highly praised by any one, his drawing has been much praised, but it is of a penmanship freehand kind which is particularly apt to take people in. Of course he could draw in some ways, no one giving all his time to art and living in Raffaelle’s surroundings could, with even ordinary pains, help becoming a facile draughtsman, but it is the expression and sentiment of his pictures which are supposed to be so ineffable and to make him the prince of painters.
I do not think this reputation will be maintained much longer. I can see no ineffable expression in the Ansidei Madonna’s head, nor yet in that of the Garvagh Madonna in our gallery, nor in the S. Catharine. He has the saint-touch, as some painters have the tree-touch and others the water-touch. I remember the time when I used to think I saw religious feeling in these last two pictures, but each time I see them I wonder more and more how I can have been taken in by them. I hear people admire the head of S. Nicholas in the Ansidei picture. I can see nothing in it beyond the power of a very ordinary painter, and nothing that a painter of more than very ordinary power would be satisfied with. When I look at the head of Bellini’s Doge, Loredano Loredani, I can see defects, as every one can see defects in every picture, but the more I see it the more I marvel at it, and the more profoundly I respect the painter. With Raffaelle I find exactly the reverse; I am carried away at first, as I was when a young man by Mendelssohn’sSongs Without Words, only to be very angry with myself presently on finding that I could have believed even for a short time in something that has no real hold upon me. I know the S. Catharine in our gallery has been said by some not to be by Raffaelle. No one will doubt its genuineness who compares the drawing, painting and feeling of S. Catharine’s eyes and nose with those of the S. John in the Ansidei picture. The doubts have only been raised owing to the fact that the picture, being hung on a level with the eye, is so easily seen to be bad that people think Raffaelle cannot have painted it.
Returning to the S. Nicholas; apart from the expression, or as it seems to me want of expression, the modelling of the head is not only poor but very poor. The forehead is formless and boneless, the nose is entirely wanting in that play of line and surface which an old man’s nose affords; no one ever yet drew or painted a nose absolutely as nature has made it, but he who compares carefully drawn noses, as that in Rembrandt’s younger portrait of himself, in his old woman, in the three Van Eycks, in the Andrea Solario, in the Loredano Loredani by Bellini, all in our gallery, with the nose of Raffaelle’s S. Nicholas will not be long in finding out how slovenly Raffaelle’s treatment in reality is. Eyes, eyebrows, mouth, cheeks and chin are treated with the same weakness, and this not the weakness of a child who is taking much pains to do something beyond his strength, and whose intention can be felt through and above the imperfections of his performance (as in the case of the two Apostles’ heads by Giotto in our gallery), but of one who is not even conscious of weakness save by way of impatience that his work should cost him time and trouble at all, and who is satisfied if he can turn it out well enough to take in patrons who have themselves never either drawn or painted.
Finally, let the spectator turn to the sky and landscape. It is the cheapest kind of sky with no clouds and going down as low as possible, so as to save doing more country details than could be helped. As for the little landscape there is, let the reader compare it with any of the examples by Bellini, Basaiti, or even Cima da Conegliano, which may be found in the same or the adjoining rooms.
How, then, did Raffaelle get his reputation? It may be answered, How did Virgil get his? or Dante? or Bacon? or Plato? or Mendelssohn? or a score of others who not only get the public ear but keep it sometimes for centuries? How did Guido, Guercino and Domenichino get their reputations? A hundred years ago these men were held as hardly inferior to Raffaelle himself. They had a couple of hundred years or so of triumph—why so much? And if so much, why not more? If we begin asking questions, we may ask why anything at all?Populus vult decipiis the only answer, and nine men out of ten will follow on withet decipiatur. The immediate question, however, is not how Raffaelle came by his reputation but whether, having got it, he will continue to hold it now that we have a fair amount of his work at the National Gallery.
I grant that the general effect of the picture if looked at as a mere piece of decoration is agreeable, but I have seen many a picture which though not bearing consideration as a serious work yet looked well from a purely decorative standpoint. I believe, however, that at least half of those who sit gazing before this Ansidei Raffaelle by the half-hour at a time do so rather that they may be seen than see; half, again, of the remaining half come because they are made to do so, the rest see rather what they bring with them and put into the picture than what the picture puts into them.
And then there is the charm of mere age. Any Italian picture of the early part of the sixteenth century, even though by a worse painter than Raffaelle, can hardly fail to call up in us a solemn, old-world feeling, as though we had stumbled unexpectedly on some holy, peaceful survivors of an age long gone by, when the struggle was not so fierce and the world was a sweeter, happier place than we now find it, when men and women were comelier, and we should like to have lived among them, to have been golden-hued as they, to have done as they did; we dream of what might have been if our lines had been cast in more pleasant places—and so on, all of it rubbish, but still not wholly unpleasant rubbish so long as it is not dwelt upon.
Bearing in mind the natural tendency to accept anything which gives us a peep as it were into a golden age, real or imaginary, bearing in mind also the way in which this particular picture has been written up by critics, and the prestige of Raffaelle’s name, the wonder is not that so many let themselves be taken in and carried away with it but that there should not be a greater gathering before it than there generally is.
As an example of the evenness of the balance of advantages between the principles of staying still and taking what comes, and going about to look for things,[151]I might mention my small Rembrandt, “The Robing of Joseph before Pharaoh.” I have wanted a Rembrandt all my life, and I have wanted not to give more than a few shillings for it. I might have travelled all Europe over for no one can say how many years, looking for a good, well-preserved, forty-shilling Rembrandt (and this was what I wanted), but on two occasions of my life cheap Rembrandts have run right up against me. The first was a head cut out of a ruined picture that had only in part escaped destruction when Belvoir Castle was burned down at the beginning of this century. I did not see the head but have little doubt it was genuine. It was offered me for a pound; I was not equal to the occasion and did not at once go to see it as I ought, and when I attended to it some months later the thing had gone. My only excuse must be that I was very young.
I never got another chance till a few weeks ago when I saw what I took, and take, to be an early, but very interesting, work by Rembrandt in the window of a pawnbroker opposite St. Clement Danes Church in the Strand. I very nearly let this slip too. I saw it and was very much struck with it, but, knowing that I am a little apt to be too sanguine, distrusted my judgment; in the evening I mentioned the picture to Gogin who went and looked at it; finding him not less impressed than I had been with the idea that the work was an early one by Rembrandt, I bought it, and the more I look at it the more satisfied I am that we are right.
People talk as though the making the best of what comes was such an easy matter, whereas nothing in reality requires more experience and good sense. It is only those who know how not to let the luck that runs against them slip, who will be able to find things, no matter how long and how far they go in search of them. [1887.]
Flushed with triumph in the matter of Rembrandt, a fortnight or so afterwards I was at Christie’s and saw two pictures that fired me. One was a Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini, I do not doubt genuine, not in a very good state, but still not repainted. The Madonna was lovely, the Child very good, the landscape sweet and Belliniesque. I was much smitten and determined to bid up to a hundred pounds; I knew this would be dirt cheap and was not going to buy at all unless I could get good value. I bid up to a hundred guineas, but there was someone else bent on having it and when he bid 105 guineas I let him have it, not without regret. I saw in theTimesthat the purchaser’s name was Lesser.
The other picture I tried to get at the same sale (this day week); it was a small sketch numbered 72 (I think) and purporting to be by Giorgione but, I fully believe, by Titian. I bid up to £10 and then let it go. It went for £28, and I should say would have been well bought at £40. [1887.]
I was telling Gogin how I had seen at Christie’s some pictures by Watts and how much I had disliked them. He said some of them had been exhibited in Paris a few years ago and a friend of his led him up to one of them and said in a serious, puzzled, injured tone:
“Mon cher ami, racontez-moi donc ceci, s’il vous plait,” as though their appearance in such a place at all were something that must have an explanation not obvious upon the face of it.
The crouching beasts, on whose backs the pillars stand, generally have a little one beneath them or some animal which they have killed, or something, in fact, to give them occupation; it was felt that, though an animal by itself was well, an animal doing something was much better. The mere fact of companionship and silent sympathy is enough to interest, but without this, sculptured animals are stupid, as our lions in Trafalgar Square—which, among other faults, have that of being much too well done.
So Jones’s cat, Prince, picked up a little waif in the court and brought it home, and the two lay together and were much lovelier than Prince was by himself.[153]
How well he has done Night in his “Crucifixion”! Also he has tried to do the Alps, putting them as background to the city, but he has not done them as we should do them now. I think the tower on the hill behind the city is the tower which we see on leaving Basle on the road for Lucerne, I mean I think Holbein had this tower in his head.
Van Eyck is delightful rather in spite of his high finish than because of it. De Hooghe finishes as highly as any one need do. Van Eyck’s finish is saved because up to the last he is essentially impressionist, that is, he keeps a just account of relative importances and keeps them in their true subordination one to another. The only difference between him and Rembrandt or Velasquez is that these, as a general rule, stay their hand at an earlier stage of impressionism.
There are few modern painters who are not greater technically than Giotto, but I cannot call to mind a single one whose work impresses me as profoundly as his does. How is it that our so greatly better should be so greatly worse—that the farther we go beyond him the higher he stands above us? Time no doubt has much to do with it, for, great as Giotto was, there are painters of to-day not less so, if they only dared express themselves as frankly and unaffectedly as he did.
The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.
It is not enough that the painter should make the spectator feel what he meant him to feel; he must also make him feel that this feeling was shared by the painter himselfbona fideand without affectation. Of all the lies a painter can tell the worst is saying that he likes what he does not like. But the poor wretch seldom knows himself; for the art of knowing what gives him pleasure has been so neglected that it has been lost to all but a very few. The old Italians knew well enough what they liked and were as children in saying it.
WhenI went back to Trübner, after Bogue had failed, I had a talk with him and his partner. I could see they had lost all faith in my literary prospects. Trübner told me I was ahomo unius libri, meaningErewhon. He said I was in a very solitary position. I replied that I knew I was, but it suited me. I said:
“I pay my way; when I was with you before, I never owed you money; you find me now not owing my publisher money, but my publisher in debt to me; I never owe so much as a tailor’s bill; beyond secured debts, I do not owe £5 in the world and never have” (which is quite true). “I get my summer’s holiday in Italy every year; I live very quietly and cheaply, but it suits my health and tastes, and I have no acquaintances but those I value. My friends stick by me. If I was to get in with these literary and scientific people I should hate them and they me. I should fritter away my time and my freedom without getting aquid pro quo: as it is, I am free and I give the swells every now and then such a facer as they get from no one else. Of course I don’t expect to get on in a commercial sense at present, I do not go the right way to work for this; but I am going the right way to secure a lasting reputation and this is what I do care for. A man cannot have both, he must make up his mind which he means going in for. I have gone in for posthumous fame and I see no step in my literary career which I do not think calculated to promote my being held in esteem when the heat of passion has subsided.”
Trübner shrugged his shoulders. He plainly does not believe that I shall succeed in getting a hearing; he thinks the combination of the religious and cultured world too strong for me to stand against.
If he means that the reviewers will burke me as far as they can, no doubt he is right; but when I am dead there will be other reviewers and I have already done enough to secure that they shall from time to time look me up. They won’t bore me then but they will be just like the present ones. [1882.]
When I had writtenErewhonpeople wanted me at once to set to work and write another book like it. How could I? I cannot think how I escaped plunging into writing some laboured stupid book. I am very glad I did escape. Nothing is so cruel as to try and force a man beyond his natural pace. If he has got more stuff in him it will come out in its own time and its own way: if he has not—let the poor wretch alone; to have done one decent book should be enough; the very worst way to get another out of him is to press him. The more promise a young writer has given, the more his friends should urge him not to over-tax himself.
A lady, whom I meet frequently in the British Museum reading-room and elsewhere, said to me the other day:
“Why don’t you write anotherErewhon?”
“Why, my dear lady,” I replied, “Life and Habitwas anotherErewhon.”
They say these things to me continually to plague me and make out that I could do one good book but never any more. She is the sort of person who if she had known Shakespeare would have said to him, when he wroteHenry the IVth:
“Ah, Mr. Shakespeare, why don’t you write us anotherTitus Andronicus? Now that was a sweet play, that was.”
And when he had doneAntony and Cleopatrashe would have told him that her favourite plays were the three parts ofKing Henry VI.
If I die prematurely, at any rate I shall be saved from being bored by my own success.
I was completing the purchase of some small houses at Lewisham and had to sign my name. The vendor, merely seeing the name and knowing none of my books, said to me, rather rudely, but without meaning any mischief:
“Have you written any books likeHudibras?”
I said promptly: “Certainly;Erewhonis quite as good a book asHudibras.”
This was coming it too strong for him, so he thought I had not heard and repeated his question. I said again as before, and he shut up. I sent him a copy ofErewhonimmediately after we had completed. It was rather tall talk on my part, I admit, but he should not have challenged me unprovoked.
At the Century Club I was talking with a man who asked me why I did not publish the substance of what I had been saying. I believed he knew me and said:
“Well, you know, there’sLife and Habit.”
He did not seem to rise at all, so I asked him if he had seen the book.
“Seen it?” he answered. “Why, I should think every one has seenLife and Habit: but what’s that got to do with it?”
I said it had taken me so much time lately that I had had none to spare for anything else. Again he did not seem to see the force of the remark and a friend, who was close by, said:
“You know, Butler wroteLife and Habit.”
He would not believe it, and it was only after repeated assurance that he accepted it. It was plain he thought a great deal ofLife and Habitand had idealised its author, whom he was disappointed to find so very commonplace a person. Exactly the same thing happened to me withErewhon. I was glad to find thatLife and Habithad made so deep an impression at any rate upon one person.
I suspect I am rather a disappointing person, for every now and then there is a fuss and I am to meet some one who would very much like to make my acquaintance, or some one writes me a letter and says he has long admired my books, and may he, etc.? Of course I say “Yes,” but experience has taught me that it always ends in turning some one who was more or less inclined to run me into one who considers he has a grievance against me for not being a very different kind of person from what I am. These people however (and this happens on an average once or twice a year) do not come solely to see me, they generally tell me all about themselves and the impression is left upon me that they have really come in order to be praised. I am as civil to them as I know how to be but enthusiastic I never am, for they have never any of them been nice people, and it is my want of enthusiasm for themselves as much as anything else which disappoints them. They seldom come again. Mr. Alfred Tylor was the only acquaintance I have ever made through being sent for to be looked at, or letting some one come to look at me, who turned out a valuable ally; but then he sent for me through mutual friends in the usual way.
I doubt whether any angel would find me very entertaining. As for myself, if ever I do entertain one it will have to be unawares. When people entertain others without an introduction they generally turn out more like devils than angels.
The balance against them is now over £350. How completely they must have been squashed unless I had had a little money of my own. Is it not likely that many a better writer than I am is squashed through want of money? Whatever I do I must not die poor; these examples of ill-requited labour are immoral, they discourage the effort of those who could and would do good things if they did not know that it would ruin themselves and their families; moreover, they set people on to pamper a dozen fools for each neglected man of merit, out of compunction. Genius, they say, always wears an invisible cloak; these men wear invisible cloaks—therefore they are geniuses; and it flatters them to think that they can see more than their neighbours. The neglect of one such man as the author ofHudibrasis compensated for by the petting of a dozen others who would be the first to jump upon the author ofHudibrasif he were to come back to life.
Heaven forbid that I should compare myself to the author ofHudibras, but still, if my books succeed after my death—which they may or may not, I know nothing about it—any way, if they do succeed, let it be understood that they failed during my life for a few very obvious reasons of which I was quite aware, for the effect of which I was prepared before I wrote my books, and which on consideration I found insufficient to deter me. I attacked people who were at once unscrupulous and powerful, and I made no alliances. I did this because I did not want to be bored and have my time wasted and my pleasures curtailed. I had money enough to live on, and preferred addressing myself to posterity rather than to any except a very few of my own contemporaries. Those few I have always kept well in mind. I think of them continually when in doubt about any passage, but beyond those few I will not go. Posterity will give a man a fair hearing; his own times will not do so if he is attacking vested interests, and I have attacked two powerful sets of vested interests at once. [The Church and Science.] What is the good of addressing people who will not listen? I have addressed the next generation and have therefore said many things which want time before they become palatable. Any man who wishes his work to stand will sacrifice a good deal of his immediate audience for the sake of being attractive to a much larger number of people later on. He cannot gain this later audience unless he has been fearless and thorough-going, and if he is this he is sure to have to tread on the corns of a great many of those who live at the same time with him, however little he may wish to do so. He must not expect these people to help him on, nor wonder if, for a time, they succeed in snuffing him out. It is part of the swim that it should be so. Only, as one who believes himself to have practised what he preaches, let me assure any one who has money of his own that to write fearlessly for posterity and not get paid for it is much better fun than I can imagine its being to write like, we will say, George Eliot and make a lot of money by it. [1883.]