On books and arts — Themes and Context

The Paradox of the Practitioner

In 'The Short Story,' Wedmore builds his argument on a series of borrowed paradoxes. He quotes a 'great editor' who claimed the ideal journalist 'did not know too much about his subject,' and Thackeray's protest that no one should write a love story after fifty. These are not mere name-drops; they are structural devices. Wedmore uses them to question the relationship between experience and art, a theme he returns to in later essays. The effect is to position the critic as a mediator between the artist's life and the work's effect, rather than a judge of either alone.

Notably, Wedmore does not resolve these paradoxes. He leaves them suspended, inviting the reader to consider how distance—from subject, from emotion, from fashion—might sharpen perception. This is a consistent authorial choice: his criticism proceeds by juxtaposition, not declaration.

The Vocabulary of Decline in Dutch Art

Wedmore's essay on Dutch seventeenth-century painting reveals a precise diction of artistic decay. He writes of 'the vulgar mimicry of Van Os, with the colours of the chromo-lithograph,' and of Jacob Cats carrying 'to its last length the trivial elaboration which had become the fashion.' The language is evaluative but grounded in observable shifts: from 'home-bred landscape painters' to 'the newer fashion,' from 'supreme art' to 'bastard art.'

His description of Hobbema—'worked on, with great and patient fidelity, but he worked unregarded and died poor'—is a miniature narrative of neglect. Wedmore's choice of verbs ('cast into the shade,' 'faded imperceptibly') gives the history a biological inevitability, yet he also notes the resilience of still life, where 'the early years of the Eighteenth Century surpass the achievements of fifty years before.' The pattern is not simple decline but a redistribution of excellence.

Balzac's Diamond and the Limits of Praise

In the same essay, Wedmore reports Balzac's declaration that Jan Van Huysum's work 'would hardly be paid for if it were covered with diamonds.' He then immediately adds that 'Michael, his kinsman, was perhaps almost as worthy of that praise.' This is a characteristic Wedmore move: he uses an extravagant quotation not to endorse it but to test its boundaries. The phrase 'almost as worthy' introduces a calibration, a critical fine-tuning that refuses hyperbole.

Wedmore's own prose rarely reaches for such dazzle. He prefers the measured, the comparative, the qualified. When he calls Balzac 'a French novelist who was also a connoisseur,' the appositive does double duty: it identifies Balzac's authority while subtly marking his distance from the purely aesthetic. This layering of roles—novelist, connoisseur, source—is typical of Wedmore's method of building authority through accumulation rather than assertion.

The Structure of the Collection as a Critical Act

The table of contents reveals a deliberate architecture. The volume moves from literary essays ('The Short Story,' 'Balzac,' 'George Eliot') to dramatic criticism ('Siddons and Rachel,' 'Macbeth and Irving') to art criticism (Rembrandt, Velasquez, Chardin, etc.). This sequence is not chronological but categorical, and it implies a hierarchy of attention. Wedmore's preface admits that the pieces are 'fragments' not updated, yet their arrangement suggests a coherent sensibility.

Within each section, the essays are ordered by subject's stature or by historical sequence. The art section, for instance, begins with Rembrandt and ends with Francis James, a contemporary. This movement from the canonical to the lesser-known enacts a critical judgment: that the principles applied to great art also illuminate the minor. Wedmore's authorial choice to preserve the essays 'frankly' as contributions means that the collection itself becomes a record of a critic's evolving attention, not a final statement.

Readers approaching On Books and Arts will find a critic who trusts the specific instance over the general rule. Wedmore's essays reward attention to his diction—words like 'fidelity,' 'trivial,' 'bastard' carry weight—and to his habit of embedding others' voices within his own. The collection does not argue a single thesis but demonstrates a method: close observation, historical placement, and a willingness to let paradox stand. It is best read not as a guide but as a series of demonstrations.