On Something (Dodo Press) (3 page)

Then there is this reason for anonymity, that at times—for quite a short
few years—a sort of universality of good work in one or more departments
of art seems to fall upon the world or upon some district. Nowhere do
you see this more strikingly than in the carvings of the first third of
the sixteenth century in Northern and Central France and on the Flemish
border.

Men seemed at that moment incapable of doing work that was not marvellous
when they once began to express the human figure. Sometimes their mere
name remains, more often it is doubtful, sometimes it is entirely lost.
More curious still, you often have for this period a mixture of names. You
come across some astonishing series of reliefs in a forgotten church of a
small provincial town. You know at once that it is work of the moment when
the flood of the Renaissance had at last reached the old country of the
Gothic. You can swear that if it were not made in the time of Francis I or
Henry II it was at least made by men who could remember or had seen those
times. But when you turn to the names the names are nobodies.

By far the most famous of these famous things, or at any rate the most
deserving of fame, is the miracle of Brou. It is a whole world. You would
say that either one transcendent genius had modelled every face and figure
of those thousands (so individual are they), or that a company of inspired
men differing in their traditions and upbringing from all the commonalty
of mankind had done such things. When you go to the names all you find is
that Coulombe out of Touraine began the job, that there was some sort of
quarrel between his head-man and the paymasters, that he was replaced in
the most everyday manner conceivable by a Fleming, Van Boghem, and that
this Fleming had to help him a better-known Swiss, one Meyt. It is the
same story with nearly all this kind of work and its wonderful period. The
wealth of detail at Louviers or Gisors is almost anonymous; that of the
first named perhaps quite anonymous.

Who carved the wood in St. James's Church at Antwerp? I think the name
is known for part of it, but no one did the whole or anything like the
whole, and yet it is all one thing. Who carved the wood in St. Bertrand
de Coraminges? We know who paid for it, and that is all we know. And as
for the wood of Rouen, we must content ourselves with the vague phrase,
"Probably Flemish artists."

Of the Gothic statues where they were conventional, however grand the
work, one can understand that they should be anonymous, but it is curious
to note the same silence where the work is strikingly and particularly
individual. Among the kings at Rheims are two heads, one of St. Louis,
one of his grandson. Had some one famous sculptor done these things and
others, were his work known and sought after, these two heads would be as
renowned as anything in Europe. As it is they are two among hundreds that
the latter thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries scattered broadcast;
each probably was the work of a different workman, and the author or
authors of each remain equally unknown.

I know not whether there is more pathos or more humour or more consolation
in considering this ignorance of ours with regard to the makers of good
things.

It is full of parable. There is something of it in Nature. There are men
who will walk all day through a June wood and come out atheists at the end
of it, finding no signature thereupon; and there are others who, sailing
over the sea, come back home after seeing so many things still puzzled as
to their authorship. That is one parable.

Then there is this: the corrective of ambition. Since so much remains, the
very names of whose authors have perished, what does it matter to you or
to the world whether your name, so long as your work, survives? Who was
it that carefully and cunningly fixed the sights on Gumber Corner so as
to get upon a clear day his exact alignment with Pulborough and then the
shoulder of Leith Hill, just to miss the two rivers and just to obtain the
best going for a military road? He was some engineer or other among the
thousands in the Imperial Service. He was at Chichester for some weeks
and drew his pay, and then perhaps went on to London, and he was born in
Africa or in Lombardy, or he was a Breton, or he was from Lusitania or
from the Euphrates. He did that bit of work most certainly without any
consideration of fame, for engineers (especially when they are soldiers)
are singular among artists in this matter. But he did a very wonderful
thing, and the Roman Road has run there for fifteen hundred years—his
creation. Some one must have hit upon that precise line and the reason for
it. It is exactly right, and the thing done was as great and is to-day as
satisfying as that sculpture of Brou or the two boys Murillo painted, whom
you may see in the Gallery at Dulwich. But he never thought of any one
knowing his name, and no one knows it.

Then there is this last thing about anonymous work, which is also a
parable and a sad one. It shows how there is no bridge between two human
minds.

How often have I not come upon a corbel of stone carved into the shape
of a face, and that face had upon it either horror or laughter or great
sweetness or vision, and I have looked at it as I might have looked upon
a living face, save that it was more wonderful than most living faces. It
carried in it the soul and the mind of the man who made it. But he has
been dead these hundreds of years. That corbel cannot be in communion with
me, for it is of stone; it is dumb and will not speak to me, though it
compels me continually to ask it questions. Its author also is dumb, for
he has been dead so long, and I can know nothing about him whatsoever.

Now so it is with any two human minds, not only when they are separated by
centuries and by silence, but when they have their being side by side
under one roof and are companions all their years.

Once there was a man who, having nothing else to do and being fond of
that kind of thing, copied with a good deal of care on to a bit of wood
the corner of a Dutch picture in one of the public galleries.

This man was not a good artist; indeed he was nothing but a humpbacked
and very sensitive little squire with about £3000 a year of his own and
great liking for intricate amusements. He was a pretty good mathematician
and a tolerable fisherman. He knew an enormous amount about the Mohammedan
conquest of Spain, and he is, I believe, writing a book upon that subject.
I hope he will, for nearly all history wants to be rewritten. Anyhow, he,
as I have just said, did copy a corner of one of the Dutch pictures in one
of the galleries. It was a Dutch picture of the seventeenth century; and
since the laws of this country are very complicated and the sanctions
attached to them very terrible, I will not give the name of the original
artist, but I will call him Van Tromp.

Van Tromps have always been recognized, and there was a moment about fifty
years after the artist's death when they had a considerable vogue in the
French Court. Monsieur, who was quite ignorant of such things, bought
a couple, and there is a whole row of them in the little pavilion at
Louveciennes. Van Tromp has something about him at once positive and
elusive; he is full of planes and values, and he interprets and renders,
and the rest of it. Nay, he transfers!

About thirty years ago Mr. Mayor (of Hildesheim and London) thought it his
duty to impress upon the public how great Van Tromp was. This he did after
taking thirteen Van Tromps in payment of a bad debt, and he succeeded. But
the man I am writing about cared nothing for all this: he simply wanted to
see how well he could imitate this corner of the picture, and he did it
pretty well. He begrimed it and he rubbed at it, and then he tickled it up
again with a knife, and then he smoked it, and then he put in some dirty
whites which were vivid, and he played the fool with white of egg, and so
forth, until he had the very tone and manner of the original; and as he
had done it on an old bit of wood it was exactly right, and he was very
proud of the result. He got an old frame from near Long Acre and stuck it
in, and then he took the thing home. He had done several things of this
kind, imitating miniatures, and even enamels. It amused him. When he got
home he sat looking at it with great pleasure for an hour or two; he left
the little thing on the table of his study and went to bed.

Here begins the story, and here, therefore, I must tell you what the
subject of this corner of the picture was.

The subject of this corner of the picture which he had copied was a woman
in a brown jacket and a red petticoat with big feet showing underneath,
sitting on a tub and cutting up some vegetables. She had her hair bunched
up like an onion, a fashion which, as we all know, appealed to the Dutch
in the seventeenth century, or at any rate to the plebeian Dutch. I must
also tell you the name of this squire before I go any further: his name
was Hammer—Paul Hammer. He was unmarried.

He went to bed at eleven o'clock, and when he came down at eight o'clock
he had his breakfast. He went into his study at nine o'clock, and was very
much annoyed to find that some burglars had come in during the night and
had taken away a number of small objects which were not without value; and
among-them, what he most regretted, his little pastiche of the corner of
the Van Tromp.

For some moments he stood filled with an acute anger and wishing that he
knew who the burglars were and how to get at them; but the days passed,
and though he asked everybody, and even gave some money to the police, he
could not discover this. He put an advertisement into several newspapers,
both London newspapers and local ones, saying that money would be given if
the thing were restored, and pretty well hinting that no questions would
be asked, but nothing came.

Meanwhile the burglars, whose names were Charles and Lothair Femeral,
foreigners but English-speaking, had found some of their ill-acquired
goods saleable, others unsaleable. They wanted a pound for the little
picture in the frame, and this they could not get, and it was a bother
haggling it about. Lothair Femeral thought of a good plan: he stopped at
an inn on the third day of their peregrinations, had a good dinner with
his brother, told the innkeeper that he could not pay the bill, and
offered to leave the Old Master in exchange. When people do this it very
often comes off, for the alternative is only the pleasure of seeing
the man in gaol, whereas a picture is always a picture, and there is a
gambler's chance of its turning up trumps. So the man grumbled and took
the little thing. He hung it up in the best room of the inn, where he gave
his richer customers food.

Thus it was that a young gentleman who had come down to ride in that
neighbourhood, although he did not know any of the rich people round
about, saw it one day, and on seeing it exclaimed loudly in an unknown
tongue; but he very rapidly repressed his emotion and simply told the
innkeeper that he had taken a fancy to the daub and would give him thirty
shillings for it.

The innkeeper, who had read in the newspapers of how pictures of the
utmost value are sold by fools for a few pence, said boldly that his price
was twenty pounds; whereupon the young gentleman went out gloomily, and
the innkeeper thought that he must have made a mistake, and was for three
hours depressed. But in the fourth hour again he was elated, for the young
gentleman came back with twenty pounds, not even in notes but in gold,
paid it down, and took away the picture. Then again, in the fifth hour was
the innkeeper a little depressed, but not as much as before, for it struck
him that the young gentleman must have been very eager to act in such a
fashion, and that perhaps he could have got as much as twenty-one pounds
by holding out and calling it guineas.

The young gentleman telegraphed to his father (who lived in Wimbledon but
who did business in Bond Street) saying that he had got hold of a Van
Tromp which looked like a study for the big "Eversley" Van Tromp in the
Gallery, and he wanted to know what his father would give for it. His
father telegraphed back inviting him to spend one whole night under the
family roof. This the young man did, and, though it wrung the old father's
heart to have to do it, by the time he had seen the young gentleman's find
(or
trouvaille
as he called it) he had given his offspring a cheque
for five hundred pounds. Whereupon the young gentleman left and went back
to do some more riding, an exercise of which he was passionately fond, and
to which he had trained several quiet horses.

The father wrote to a certain lord of his acquaintance who was very
fond of Van Tromps, and offered him this replica or study, in some ways
finer than the original, but he said it must be a matter for private
negotiation; so he asked for an appointment, and the lord, who was a tall,
red-faced man with a bluff manner, made an appointment for nine o'clock
next morning, which was rather early for Bond Street. But money talks, and
they met. The lord was very well dressed, and when he talked he folded his
hands (which had gloves on them) over the knob of his stick and pressed
his stick firmly upon the ground. It was a way he had. But it did not
frighten the old gentleman who did business in Bond Street, and the
long and short of it was that the lord did not get the picture until he
had paid three thousand guineas—not pounds, mind you. For this sum the
picture was to be sent round to the lord's house, and so it was, and there
it would have stayed but for a very curious accident. The lord had put
the greater part of his money into a company which was developing the
resources of the South Shetland Islands, and by some miscalculation or
other the expense of this experiment proved larger than the revenues
obtainable from it. His policy, as I need hardly tell you, was to hang on,
and so he did, because in the long run the property must pay. And so it
would if they could have gone on shelling out for ever, but they could
not, and so the whole affair was wound up and the lord lost a great deal
of money.