Read Ebook: The Fur Bringers: A Story of the Canadian Northwest by Footner Hulbert

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 3144 lines and 86849 words, and 63 pages

CHAP. PAGE

PREFATORY NOTE FOR THE EDITION OF 1905 3

INTRODUCTION 9

POSTSCRIPT FOR THE EDITION OF 1905 245

BIBLIOGRAPHY 250

INDEX 255

FINE PRINTS

INTRODUCTION

In the collecting of Prints--of prints which must be fine and may most probably be rare--there is an ample recompense for the labour of the diligent, and room for the exercise of the most various tastes. Certain of the objects on which the modern collector sets his hands have, it may be, hardly any other virtue than the doubtful one of scarcity; but fine prints, whatever School they may belong to, and whatever may be the money value that happens to be affixed to them by the fashion of the time, have always the fascination of beauty and the interest of historical association. Then, considered as collections of works of art, there is the practical convenience of their compactness. The print-collector carries a museum in a portfolio, or packs away a picture gallery, neatly, within the compass of one solander-box.

Again, the print-collector, if he will but occupy himself with intelligent industry, may, even to-day, have a collection of fine things without paying overmuch, or even very much, for them. All will depend upon the School or master that he particularly affects. Has he at his disposal only a few bank-notes, or only a few sovereigns even, every year?--he may yet surround himself with excellent possessions, of which he will not speedily exhaust the charm. Has he the fortune of an Astor or a Vanderbilt?--he may instruct the greatest dealers in the trade to struggle in the auction-room, on his behalf, with the representatives of the Berlin Museum. And it may be his triumph, then, to have paid the princely ransom of the very rarest "state" of the rarest Rembrandt. And, all the time, whether he be rich man or poor--but especially, I think, if he be poor--he will have been educating himself to the finer perception of a masculine yet lovely art, and, over and above indulging the "fad" of the collector, he will find that his possessions rouse within him an especial interest in some period of Art History, teach him a real and delicate discrimination of an artist's qualities, and so, indeed, enlarge his vista that his enjoyment of life itself, and his appreciation of it, is quickened and sustained. For great Art of any kind, whether it be the painter's, the engraver's, the sculptor's, or the writer's, is not--it cannot be too often insisted--a mere craft or sleight-of-hand, to be practised from the wrist downwards. It is the expression of the man himself. It is, therefore, with great and new personalities that the study of an art, the contemplation of it--not the mere bungling amateur performance of it;--brings you into contact. And there is no way of studying an art that is so complete and satisfactory as the collecting of examples of it.

And then again, to go back to the material part of the business, how economical it is to be a collector, if only you are wise and prudent! Of pleasant vices this is surely the least costly. Nay, more; the bank-note cast upon the waters may come back after many days.

The study of engravings, ancient and modern--of woodcuts, line engravings, etchings, mezzotints--has become by this time extremely elaborate and immensely complicated. Most people know nothing of it, and do not even realise that behind all their ignorance there is a world of learning and of pleasure, some part of which at least might be theirs if they would but enter on the land and seek to possess it. Few men, even of those who address themselves to the task, acquire swiftly any substantial knowledge of more than one or two departments of the study; though the ideal collector, and I would even say the reasonable one, whatever he may actually own, is able, sooner or later, to take a survey of the larger ground--his eye may range intelligently over fields he has no thought of annexing.

From this it will be concluded--and concluded rightly--that the print-collector must be a specialist, more or less. More or less, at least at the beginning, must he address himself with particular care to one branch of the study. And which is it to be? The number of fine Schools of Etching and Engraving is really so considerable that the choice may well be his own. This or that master, this or that period, this or that method, he may select with freedom, and will scarcely go wrong. But the mention of it brings one, naturally, to the divisions of the subject, and the collector, we shall find, is face to face, first of all, with this question: "Are the prints I am to bring together to be the work of an artist who originates, or of an artist who mainly translates?"

Well, of course, in a discussion of the matter, the great original Schools must have the first place, whatever it may be eventually decided shall be the subject of your collection. You may buy, by all means, the noble mezzotints which the engravers of the Eighteenth Century wrought after Reynolds, Romney, and George Morland, but suffer us to say a little first about the great creative artists, and then, when the possible collector has read about them--and has made himself familiar, at the British Museum Print-room say, with some portion of their work--it may be that though he finds that they are nearly all, however different in themselves, less decorative on a wall than the great masters of rich mezzotint, he will find a charm and spell he cannot wish to banish in the evidence of their originality, in the fact that they are the creations of an individual impulse, whether they are slight or whether they are elaborate.

The Schools of early line-engravers, Italian, Flemish, German, are almost entirely Schools of original production. I say "almost," for as early as the days of Raphael, the interpreter, the translator, the copyist, if you will, came into the matter, and the designs of the Urbinate were multiplied by the burin of Marc Antonio and his followers. And charming prints they are, these Marc Antonios, so little bought to-day. Economical of line they are, and exquisite of contour, and likely, one would suppose, to be valued in the Future more than they are valued just now, when the rhyme of Mr. Browning, about the collector of his early period, is true no longer--

"The debt of wonder my crony owes Is paid to my Marc Antonios."

That in the main the earlier work is original, is not a thing to be surprised at, any more than it is a thing to lament. The narrow world of buyers in that primitive day was not likely to afford scope for the business of the translator; the time had not yet come when there was any need for the creations of an artist to be largely multiplied. That time came first, perhaps, in the Seventeenth Century, when the immediately accepted genius of Rubens gave ground for the employment of the interpreting talent of Bolswert, Pontius, and Vosterman. Again, there was Edelinck, Nanteuil, and the Drevets.

It need scarcely be said that extreme rarity is a characteristic of the early Schools. The prints of two of the most masculine of the Italians, for instance, Andrea Mantegna and Jacopo de' Barbarj, are not to be got by ordering them. They have, of course, to be watched for, and waited for, and the opportunity taken at the moment at which it arises. In some measure there will be experienced the same engaging and preventive difficulty in possessing yourself of the prints of the great Germans and of the one great Flemish master, Lucas of Leyden. And if these, in certain states at least, in certain conditions, are not quite as hard to come upon as the works of those masters who have been mentioned just before them, and of their compatriots of the same period, that is but an extra inducement for the search, since there is, of course, a degree of difficulty that is actually discouraging--a sensible man does not long aim at the practically impossible. Now, in regard to the early Flemish master with whom D?rer himself not unwillingly--nay, very graciously--exchanged productions, there are yet no insuperable obstacles to the collector gathering together a representative array of his work; it is possible upon occasion even to add one or two of his scarce and beautiful and spirited ornaments to the group, such as it may be, of subjects based on scriptural or on classic themes. To be a specialist in Lucas van Leyden would be to be unusual, but not perhaps to be unwise; yet a greater sagacity would, no doubt, be manifested by concentration upon that which is upon the whole the finer work of Albert D?rer. Of late years, Martin Sch?ngauer too, with the delicacy of his burin, his tenderness of sentiment, and his scarcely less pronounced quaintness, has been a favourite, greatly sought for; but, amongst the Germans, the work that best upon the whole repays the trouble undertaken in amassing it, is that of the great Albert himself, and that of the best of the Little Masters.

Two other men of very different genius and of unsurpassed energy we associate with this revival of Etching. Both are yet with us in the fulness of their years; and both will occupy the collector who is wise in his generation, and will be, one may make bold to say, the delight of the far Future as well as of the Present. I mean Sir Seymour Haden and Mr. James Whistler. The prints of Seymour Haden shame no cabinet; the best of Whistler's scarcely suffer at all when placed beside the master-work of Rembrandt. But it is dangerous treating much of contemporaries when one's task is chiefly with the dead; and though I might mention many other not unworthy men, of whom some subsequent historian must take count--nay, who may even be referred to at a later stage of this volume--I will confine myself here, in this introductory chapter, to just the intimation that Legros and Helleu are, next after the etchers I have already named, those probably who should engage attention.

The use and object of this book, and necessary limitations of its service--Monographs for the specialist--The point of view of the individual--The vastness of the Print-collector's field--Fashions and silly fads--Bartolozzi best in his "Tickets"--The Exaltation of the coloured print--Its general triviality--The task of the Collector--The fine impression--Brilliance--Condition--The conservation of prints.

So much by way of explanation--by way, too, of disarming the kind of criticism which would judge a general endeavour only by the success with which it seemed to meet the needs of a particular case. A Bibliography of the subject, which will be found on later pages, and which must itself be a selection, comparatively brief, from the mass of material that bears upon the theme, will suffice to set the student of the special school or master upon the desirable track; and meanwhile one thing may be done, nor, as I hope, that one thing only: the would-be tiller of the particular plot may be reminded of the vastness of the land. Even of print collecting it is true, sometimes, that the trees prevent you from seeing the forest.

I have said just now, in the print-collector's world, how vast is the land! Time, of course, tends to extend it--would extend it inevitably, by reason of new production, did not Fashion sometimes intervene, and, while opening to the explorer some new tract, taboo a district over which he had aforetime been accustomed to wander. The fashions of the wise are not wholly without reason, but the fashions of the foolish have also to be reckoned with. As an instance, the very generation that has seen the most just appraisement of original Etching has witnessed too the exaltation of Bartolozzi and of his nerveless School, a decline of interest in Marc Antonio, even to some exte PETE:

You said I ought to go by myself till I felt better. So I'm off. Don't expect me till you see me. Charge me with 50 lbs. flour, 18 lbs. bacon, 20 lbs. rice, 10 lbs. sugar, 5 lbs. prunes, 1/2 lb. tea, 1/2 lb. baking powder, and bag of salt. Please take care of my dog. So long! A. D.

P. S.--I'm taking the dog.

Peter, like all men slow to anger, lost his temper with startling effect. Tearing the note off the door and grinding it under foot, he cursed the runaway from a full heart.

Eva, hearing, hastily called the children indoors, and thrusting them behind her peeped into the store. Peter, purple in the face, was wildly brandishing his arms.

Eva closed the door very softly and gave the children bread and molasses to keep them quiet. Meanwhile the storm continued to rage.

"The young fool! To run off without a word! I'd have let him go gladly if he'd said anything--and given him a good man! But to go alone! He'll break an arm and die in the bush! And to leave me like this with the year's outfit due next week!

"I'll not see him again until cold weather--if I ever see him! Fifty pounds of flour--with his appetite! He'll starve to death if he doesn't drown himself first! He'll never get to Enterprise! Oh, the consummate young ass! Damn Poly Goussard and his romantic stories!"

COLINA.

John Gaviller and Colina were at breakfast in the big clap-boarded villa at Fort Enterprise.

They were a good-looking pair, and at heart not dissimilar, though it must be taken into account that the same qualities manifest themselves differently in a man of affairs and a romantic, irresponsible young woman.

They were secretly proud of each other--and quarreled continually. Colina, by virtue of her reckless honesty, frequently got the better of her canny father.

"Well," he said, now with a gesture of surrender, "if you're determined to stay here, all right--but you must live differently."

At the word "must" an ominous gleam shot from under Colina's lashes.

"What's the matter with my way of living?" she asked with deceitful mildness.

"This tearing around the country on horseback," he said. "Going off all day hunting with this man and that--and spending the night in native cabins. As long as I considered you were here on a visit I said nothing--"

"Oh, didn't you!" murmured Colina sarcastically.

"--But if you are going to make this country your home, you must consider your reputation in the community just the same as anywhere else--more, indeed; we live in a tiny little world here, where our smallest actions are scrutinized and discussed."

He took a swallow of coffee. Colina played with her food sulkily.

Her silence encouraged him to proceed: "Another thing," he said with a deprecating smile, "comparatively speaking, I occupy an exalted position now. I am the head of all things, such as they are. Great or small this entails certain obligations on a man. I have to study all my words and acts.

"If you are going to stay here with me I shall expect you to assume your share; to consider my interests, to support me; to play the game as they say. What I object to is your impulsiveness, your outspokenness with the people. Remember, everybody here is your dependent. It is always a mistake to be open and frank with dependents. They don't understand it, and if they do, they presume upon it.

"Be guided by my experience; no one could justly accuse me of any lack of affability or friendliness in dealing with the people here--but they never know what I am thinking of!"

"Admirable!" murmured Colina, "but I'm not a directors' meeting!"

"Colina!" said her father indignantly.

"It's not fair for you to drag that in about my standing by you and supporting you!" she went on warmly. "You know I'll do that as long as I live! But I must be allowed to do it in my own way. I'm an adult and an individual. I differ from you. I've a right to differ from you. It is because these people are my inferiors that I can afford to be perfectly natural with them. As for their presuming on it, you needn't fear! I know how to take care of that!"

"A little more reserve," murmured her father.

Colina paused and looked at him levelly. "Dad, what a fool you are about me!" she said coolly.

"Colina!" he cried again, and pounded the table.

She met his indignant glance squarely.

"I mean it," she said. "I'm your daughter, am I not?--and mother's? You must know yourself by this time; you must have known mother--you ought to understand me a little but you won't try--you're clever enough in everything else! You've made up an idea for yourself of what a daughter ought to be, and you're always trying to make me fit it!"

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet