ESSAYS, BY THE AUTHOR OF " VERA."* PLEASANT and successful
writers of fiction are not always, indeed are not often, good essayists. They are too much used to com- manding apace, and being discursive or concise just as they please, to conform readily to the restrictions of proportion, and they are rarely endowed with the faculty for taking the gist out of other people's books, and serving it up with piquant sauce, which is indispensable to the critical essayist. So that one does not feel such an agreeable security that a volume of essays by the author of the Hotel du Petit St. Jean will be pleasant, instructive, and suggestive reading, as one felt that Vera, by the author of the Hotel du Petit St. Jean, would be a good story well told. In this instance, however, the clever novelist is also the clever essayist, although she exhibits her ability with less of evenness and sus- tainment in the latter capacity, and is slightly deficient in the simplicity, never overdone, or marred by affectation, which formed so striking and welcome a characteristic of her novels. In her essays there is an occasional touch of " fine " writing, a little straining after effect, a little effort at introducing things really irrelevant by a forced fancy of their appropri- ateness, which is a pity, and unnecessary, for the reader cannot fail to perceive, without any artificial suggestion on her part, that she is not only well, but extensively informed. In a few instances in this volume, the writer's style, in her works of fiction one of the purest and most refined within our knowledge, is too much studied, her sentences are too sonorous, too accurately rounded off, and the effect is that of an over-sweet monotony. We find on examination of such passages that they are not those in which she treats subjects which have all her sympathies, but that they occur when she is hampered with some formal notion of the requirement of the essay, as such, and is tempted to an ambi- tious generalization, instead of taking up her subject boldly, and simply, and venturing to be abrupt. This would be a safe venture ; there is no risk of her erring on the side of crudity or inelegance. Her real temptation is to over-polish, to the degeneration of the elegant into the finicking. This error of judgment is, however, not sufficiently serious or frequently recurrent to overpower the many beauties and graces which it blemishes. The subjects of the essays are, on the whole, well chosen, and well, though unequally, handled, and they bear witness to a cultivated and catholic taste, and to strong and appreciative sympathies in certain directions. In one in- stance only she is gravely hampered by the difficulty and unfitness of her subject, and obliged to resort to a vague, unsteady, point- less criticism, because it is impossible for her to go to the root of the matter. This instance is the essay on "French Anti-Clerical
• Essays. By the Author of " Vera " and "The Hotel du Petit St. Jean." London: Smith, Elder, and Co.
Novels." The productions of the anonymous Abbe, whether they be analyzed by critics who believe all the details of those, hideous pictures of rottenness and rascality, of treachery and tyranny ; or by critics who believe none of them ; or by critics who believe that there is much to be said for the positions of Julio, le Maudit, and Therese, la Riligieuse, are a kind of literature which does not admit of vagueness in the treatment of it, and to which the merely deprecatory style is altogether inapplicable. And yet, in what other style could a woman treat these books ? The con- sequence of the difficulty is that the essayist writes twaddle on a subject which is singularly unfit to be twaddled about, on which any opinion ought to be earnest opinion, and whose kernel she is obliged to drop, instead of cracking it. In her essay on "Anjou," the best qualities of the writer, her laboriousness, her power of arrangement, her feeling for the picturesque, her keen sense of association, and her strong sympathy, are manifested. But it is chiefly in this essay that the slight affectations, the occasional touches of pedantry, and the nerve-jarring strain to accomplish fine antithesis without the just material for it, force themselves upon the regretful notice of the reader who finds so much to admire.
"Memoirs of Madame Du Plessis-Mornay " and "Sketches of French Protestantism" are charming samples of welded history and biography ; and in "Dragon and Dragon-slayers" we find the hypothesis which Miss Thackeray has treated from the half- allegorical, half-actual point ofview, in "Jack the Giant-killer," one of her "Five Old Friends," elaborately set forth in its arch-
aeological and philological aspects. This essay is very clever, very painstaking, and just a little pretentious. "The Victorial of DOD
Pedro Nino" and "Modern Provencal Poems" inspire grati- tude for pleasantly conveyed information on subjects absolutely new to us, and very interesting. From much of the writer's criticism in her essay on "English Vera de Societe" we dissent.
She not only lacks lightness of touch and quaintness of fancy herself, in this instance, for the style of the essay is poor and sententious, but she fails to see them in the case of others.
Charles Victor de Bonstetten " is an admirably executed sum- mary of the long life of its subject,—a person concerning whom we feel at most a languid curiosity, but who is utterly alien to our sympathies in his three capacities of fribble, gossip, and sceptic.
"Literary Remains of the Life of Albert Diirer " and "Con- tributions to the Life of Rubens " are charming essays, full of interest, appreciation, and a delicate insight. Albert Diirer's story is vague, even with the quaint fragments of his auto- biography to teach us the little there is to be learned of his early years, fragments which are more valuable than all the contri- butions to his biography, for which we are indebted to "the late remorse" of his native city, and to "the affectionate admiration and careful researches of his own countrymen." With a true and loving touch the writer strikes the chords of this great man's lonely, yearning heart, so strong in its affections, so reverent, so thwarted, and brings out the points of conflict in his life of artist and craftsman, of lofty imagination and homely character, of a great destiny and a narrow existence. The strong, reticent feel- ings of Diirer, proved by his love for his father—there are few records equal in simple fervour and plain pathos to his account of his father's life and death—his love for Perkheimer, his enthu- siasm for Luther, and the impatient sadness of his large, balked expectations from Erasmus, invest the great melancholy artist's character with a profound reality and charm. He was "very ill married and always poor, in spite of living with the greatest frugality," says Dr. John Valentin Andre, writing to Prince Anton Ulrich, of Brunswick, and though there is no found- ation in recorded fact to justify the vulgar virulence with which Mr. Escott, in his life of Diirer, speaks of Fran Agnes on every occasion, having apparently adopted Schef- fer's novel as his text - book, she seems to have made her husband profoundly miserable. She was "sulky, quarrel- some, avaricious, stupid, and proud," says one of Derer's biographers ; and Albert himself calls her his "account mistress," and says that she looked upon his art very much as she would upon a milch cow. This is Diirer's account of the marriage :— " My father sent me abroad (in 1489), and I remained four years absent, till he summoned me again. As I had gone forth at Easter, 1489, so now at Whitsuntide, 1494, I came back to my family, and found Hans Frey in treaty with my father, he giving me his daughter, MistressAgnes, to wife, and with her 200 crowns." Unlucky dowry ! Agnes Diirer never forgot those 200 crowns, or allowed Albert to forget them. The following is the essayist's reading of the story of the great painter's life:—
"The numerous portraits and studies of Agnes' face to be found among Diirer's works show that in her youth she undoubtedly possessed personal attractions. It is said that she repeatedly served as the model for his Madonnas, but another face had apparently, at some time, crossed the painter's dreams. There is extant a sketch of a woman's head and bust, the face slightly averted ; and underneath it, with Diirer's mono- gram, the words, My Augusta.' Another sketch represents a woman in Nuremberg costume passing into a church, the inscription on the drawing, besides the painter's name, consisting of the words from Scripture, 'Remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.' The date is 1508, after his return from Italy. Whose prayers did Albert ask with the dumb strength of his manhood ? We cannot tell ; for this is no hackneyed love story of a Fornarina, two brown leaves the sole record that remains of it; but we can fancy-that face confronting Albert again on the confines of another world, its beauty grown awful, like the countenance of Beatrice, when she stood with outstretched hand upon the shining stairs, and Dante stammered his faint Yes,' in reply to her greeting."
This is very pretty, but it has never occurred to anybody to say a word for Agnes, and the longer the world has to think about the two, the less chance there will be for her. No doubt she was shrewish and sulky, dull and parsimonious ; but she may have loved her husband in her sullen way, and combined heartburning and flint-skinning with some result in suffering. She may have had her own gloomy, offended mode of thinking about "My Augusta," have wished her, for instance, a speedy advent to that "king- dom" where she should not be painted by other people's husbands, and, on the whole, had gloomy thoughts to season her meat withal, when, they being on their travels, Albert records how "my wife ate by herself at the inn and charged a florin for her expenses." A narrow-minded woman may be very capable of holding with grim tenacity to the one idea that her husband belongs to her, no matter whether he is a great artist or not, and a dogged conviction of this kind, unshared by the opposite party, may have had something to do with this woman's ill-temper and unpopularity.
The far different story of the brilliant, happy, prosperous, and beloved Prince-Painter of Antwerp is treated by the writer with equal sympathy and appreciation. Here there is no vagueness, no lack of material and of comment. The life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens is woven into the history of many countries, and asso- ciated with some of their most illustrious names. He is the most real and living of the great dead artists ; the man goes everywhere with one, when one looks at his works, explaining the allegorical flatteries of the Louvre, as he explained them to Mary de Medicis, at a loss to recognise the results of her own commission, and he is one of the most prominent and significant figures in that train of " The
Archdukes" which keep one constant phantom company at Brussels and at Antwerp :-
"Here in England," says the writer, "where he was a happy and an honoured guest, where we possess so many and so remarkable examples of his genius, is it not strange that he should not have found a biographer and an historian ? In this country, which boasts of his Chapeau de Paille,' his Wolf Hunt,' and so many of his family pieces, and which can show at Blenheim a collection of his works only sur- passed in number and in value by four royal galleries in Europe, it is astonishing that Rubens, his life, his times, his embassies, his scholars, and his school have not received a notice more than fragmentary. His engravers alone would furnish a curious chapter ; it might be shown why he selected such men as Lucas Vosterman, Witdonk, Bolawert, and Paul Pontius, to interpret and perpetuate copies of his pictures, and told where Bolswert learnt the vigour of his style, where Pontius acquired the sweetness of his line."
Judging by the qualities of this essay, we think no one could be more adapted to supply the deficiency of which she complains, than the writer herself.
Previous page
