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CORNELL UNIVERSITY. LIBRARY 
 
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 Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924097494813 
 
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iREFERENCES 
 
 ,IN ART. LIFE. AND 
 LITERATURE. BY 
 HARRY aUILTER ma. 
 TRIN: COLL: CAMB: 
 OF THE INNER TEM- 
 PLE. Esq,, BARRISTER- at- law. 
 
 1892 
 
 SWAN SONNEN- 
 SCHEIN & CO. 
 PATERNOSTER 
 SQUAReitONOON 
 
The Copyright of all Pictures and Drawings appearing in this Book 
 is most strictly reserved. 
 
\^ IS good' 
 
 BOOK I OEDICA^i 
 
 TETO JMYWIFE 
 AND W^rSH IT^V 
 WEREMOREWOi 
 RTHYOFHERPll 
 HARRY QUILTER 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 HARDLY know whether this book should 
 be called old or new. Half the matter 
 at least has already appeared at various 
 intervals during the past seventeen years. 
 But even this portion has been revised, recast, 
 and in many places rewritten for the present 
 publication. And rather more than a third is entirely 
 new, having been written within the last three months. 
 Lastly, of the previously-published portion, some fifty pages 
 appeared in a privately-printed pamphlet, and an equal 
 quantity has been taken here and there from a series 
 of three hundred articles (written in the Spectator), and 
 appears for the first time in connected form. 
 
 Therefore I may say with Charles Reade,^ that "to 
 describe this work as a reprint would be unfair to the 
 public and to me. The English language is copious, and 
 in any true man's hands quite able to convey the truth," 
 viz. that this is a new work in which a considerable amount 
 of revised writing has been included. 
 
 Did not the world move so fast nowadays, I might per- 
 haps allege as a sufficient reason for the inclusion of those 
 papers which have formerly appeared, that they represent 
 the best part of nearly twenty years' service as a public 
 writer, and that during that period I have been frequently 
 asked to reprint several of the Essays in question. But 
 I doubt whether such a plea is allowable at a time when 
 the Press is groaning with new works, and at all events 
 the above are not the chief reasons which have led me to 
 make the selection. 
 
 1 In his preface to The Cloister and the Hearth. 
 V 
 
My first desire has been, by presenting my views upon 
 Art and its connection with life, in various forms, and 
 by recording in connected sequence the critical opinions 
 expressed during many years upon English and Foreign 
 painting, to enable the public to judge whether these views 
 and criticisms be substantially just or no, and whether 
 time has not, so far at all events, justified my words. 
 Not even the bitterest critic — and some critics are very 
 bitter — can feel more keenly than myself the imperfections 
 of temper, haste, and form which have so frequently dis- 
 figured my periodical writing. Nor can any one resent 
 more than I deplore the apparent indifference and scorn 
 with which I have approached and censured work which 
 has always taken labour and thought, and patient, if mis- 
 taken, skill to produce. Of old, when I considered that a 
 picture was in a bad style of art, I habitually ignored, if I 
 did not forget, the personal feeling of the artist. 
 
 As we grow older we see that even the truest truths of 
 our youth are only partially tenable; that our harshest, 
 most unjust antagonists have had some justice, some 
 right on their side ; but in early manhood I think a critic 
 is almost necessarily "a good hater," if he be very much 
 in earnest. If he sees at all, he sees so very clearly: he 
 cannot believe but that his world is apparent to every one 
 who wishes to look. Compromise appears to him equally 
 base and feeble — he throws every half-loaf out of the window 
 impatiently — better far no bread at all than such a beggarly 
 portion! At least so I fear the present writer felt, and 
 feeling, erred ; and destroyed by impatience and intolerance 
 the influence he might perhaps otherwise have gained. 
 
 Nothing, then, shall be said here in extenuation of these 
 faults, nor would I plead, at this late hour, ad miseri- 
 cordiam. The work must stand or fall with all its im- 
 perfections on its head. But with regard to inadequate, 
 ignorant, or mistaken criticism, a few words are, in justice 
 to myself, necessary ; for such charges are easily and fre- 
 quently brought against a public writer, especially against 
 one who does not belong to any of the well - recognised 
 journalistic coteries. 
 
 In the course of the years covered by the Essays in this 
 
 vi 
 
book (1872- 1 890), I must have seen and written of nearly 
 half a million pictures and sculptures, and criticised several 
 hundred books, chiefly relating to art. This work has 
 been done for the most part at a few hours' notice, and 
 generally with no time for revision or reflection. That is 
 one of the conditions of newspaper writing. In such 
 circumstance there is, I dare to say, no possibility of 
 avoiding occasional errors, mistakes, or blunders, especially 
 in writing which at least aims at independence. 
 
 Such mistakes I have made not infrequently in my 
 critical life, and have had them dealt with severely enough, 
 by those whose business it is to furnish entertaining para- 
 graphs to the lighter journals. That was all right and 
 fair: a critic is paid not to make mistakes, and, if he 
 does commit them, should not " 'scape whipping." And I 
 am a little pleased to remember that in nearly twenty 
 years the paragraph censors have only detected me in 
 some "half-dozen serious blunders, three of which I had pre- 
 viously discovered. I do not count in these misprints of 
 proper names, or similar clerical errors. 
 
 One form of attack, however, which has been used against 
 me, I believe, with some effectiveness, is undoubtedly most 
 traitorous and mean — equally unworthy of a journalist 
 and a gentleman — and that is censure which, avowedly 
 based upon quotation, is in reality founded upon ingenious 
 misrepresentation of an author's meaning. In cases where 
 such condemnation is enforced by the misquotation of 
 sentences, phrases, and even words and stops, robbed of 
 their context, and skilfully pieced together to excite ridi- 
 cule, the critic has no difficulty in apparently proving that 
 the author or writing criticised, is vulgar, incapable, or 
 absurd. 
 
 For the honour of journalism, I am proud to think that 
 such malfaisance is extremely rare ; but it does exist in 
 London, and a well-known critic so betrayed his office 
 with regard to a book which I wrote about six years ago. 
 His mala fides I proved to his own Editor's (dis-)satis- 
 faction in an interview wherein we compared, point by 
 point, the reviewer's quotations and my words as I had 
 written them. At the end of this interview, which lasted 
 b vii 
 
about two hours, the Editor (who had the most wonder- 
 ful memory I have ever knowji), went through each instance 
 I had brought before him, and repeated the criticism and 
 my objection, and asked if that was my case. I assented, 
 and asked him, in my turn, if he could defend his reviewer, 
 if he could assert that there was not a manifest and inten- 
 tional wrong done me by the article. He admitted that no 
 defence was possible ; that the review was entirely unjust, 
 and demanded what I " wanted him to do." I said, " Pub- 
 lish in your paper what you have just acknowledged " ! 
 "What!" he said, "insert an interview with an author 
 against my own critic ! That would be the ' New Journalism ' 
 with a vengeance ! Well, I'll see what I can do." So he 
 departed, but of course nothing was done. The " affair was 
 too unimportant." 
 
 The critic's name — which I knew throughout — I prefer 
 not to mention. He will probably not resent the omis- 
 sion. I heard afterwards that he had boasted of having 
 done rather a smart thing in journalism ; and after, I hope, 
 a somewhat different fashion, I took a quiet revenge a year, 
 or two later. He wrote a nice little book (to mention its 
 nature would probably indicate the author's name), and, 
 being then Editor of the Universal Review, I sat down 
 and wrote the very nicest criticism thereof which I possibly 
 could, and put it at the head of the most important books 
 of the month ; and I have since then always felt that we 
 were — quits. 
 
 To return to the question of just and unjust criticism. 
 The only fair way is to take the work as a whole, and 
 consider whether, having regard to its amount and the 
 circumstances under which it was done, the result is admir- 
 able, or the reverse. Especially with critical work which 
 has been before the public some years, the date of writing is 
 an essential point, and in many cases time will either have 
 proved or disproved the justice of the judgment. 
 
 The fashion for certain artists passes away, but fine art 
 remains fine, and if the critic has sought that out, in the first 
 instance, his words should remain also. 
 
 In reprinting as the last Essay in this book, verbatim, some 
 of the criticisms I wrote from year to year in a weekly news- 
 
 viii 
 
paper, I give any reader who cares to judge my work, the 
 materials for decision. On the whole, are these verdicts (if 
 I must call them so, though Preferences is the title I should 
 choose) substantiated by the fuller knowledge of to-day? 
 That is for the public to decide, and with anxiety I wait their 
 sentence. The right intention of the work should not count, 
 nor should, in this aspect, the deficiencies of its manner. 
 The single question is the justice and insight of the criticism. 
 If these. are lacking, no more is to be said. 
 
 A last word of a less serious kind on the vexfed question 
 of a critic's right to point out the bad as well as to define 
 the good amongst the subjects he deals with. In this 
 matter, though I think his duty clear, he may be left by 
 those of another opinion quite securely to the justice of the 
 Fates. " Exposition " is easy enough and even more safe 
 than easy; but "criticism" of the real kind above fore- 
 shadowed, is a more than parlous matter. Those who 
 endeavour to guide public opinion arouse animosity almost 
 in proportion to their earnestness and insight. 
 
 I saw this choice of Hercules (the pleasure of exposition v. 
 the duty of criticism) placed before me many years since, and 
 with some misgiving, hesitation, and regret, elected for the 
 latter course. Perhaps I am still at heart content that my 
 decision was not for the primrose path ; but I certainly 
 should have been glad to have found the strait road a 
 little less stony, and a little more accommodating. What 
 Thackeray calls " thorns in the cushion " are every whit as 
 plentiful in the seat of the critic as in that of the Editor. I 
 have tried both vocations, singly and in combination, and 
 the difference of discomfort is merely fractional. Irate 
 artists, actors, and authors, furious relations, indignant 
 contributors, and every description of journalist, from the 
 sardonic Saturday Reviewer, to the ingenious young gentle- 
 man who disports himself in the columns of the Empire 
 Gazette, have been severe, satirical, pathetic, or abusive at 
 my expense. The shape of my head, the roundness of my 
 shoulders, the fit of my clothes, the colour of my necktie, 
 the profession of my relatives, the quality of my ancestors, 
 the amount of my income, my poor little personal " prefer- 
 ences," and even my holiday trips and the furniture of my 
 office, have been animadverted upon as equally displeasing 
 
 ix 
 
and criminal. Like Mark Twain when he " ran for Gover- 
 nor," I feel inclined to sign myself " once an honest man, 
 but now " — and so on with the initials of the various oppro- 
 brious epithets bestowed upon me. The ingenious Mr. 
 Whistler hit upon a new form of torture by depriving me of 
 the first letter of my name, and Mr. Richmond enlivened 
 the somewhat dreary proceedings of an Art Congress by 
 furious demands to see my pictures, and a harangue on my 
 iniquities so majestic and impassioned that he had to be 
 called to O'rder by the Chairman. One critic a tout faire 
 took it much to heart that I should try to paint, and pur- 
 sued me, with the help of his staff, in half the periodicals 
 of London town. Strong friends used to come and offer 
 to walk with me for protection, and thick sticks to be sent 
 me anonymously, without which I was not to stir abroad. 
 In the back of the room in which I write, reposes a great 
 book which I can, scarcely lift, within whose covers lurk 
 two thousand abusive notices, which I was weak enough to 
 allow Mr. Romeike to send — a solid twenty pounds' worth 
 of invective, without counting the labour of my secretary in 
 sticking them in. May not these things too be called thorns 
 in the cushion ? 
 
 And yet so weak is human nature, so inconsistent, so 
 vicious, that I miss the diatribes, the personalities, the 
 sarcasm, the wail of this paper, the snarl of that. I miss 
 the allusions to my numerous frailties, my relations' short- 
 comings, the locality where lives my tailor, and the offensive 
 way I walk down Fleet Street. So, again, O dear old 
 enemies, ye who 
 
 " Have done my Credit in Men's Eye much wrong : 
 Have drown'd my Honour in a shallow Cup, 
 And sold my Reputation for a Song," 
 
 let us have a last encounter! Once more let your 
 antipathies and my preferences mingle in the serried 
 columns of your favourite journals. And then— let us 
 forget all this fine fury of opinion, and acknowledge its 
 merely Pickwickian origin, in the sacred recesses of the 
 Omar Khayyam Club, or where the " Chat Noir " mews 
 nightly under the shadow of Montmartre. 
 
 HARRY QUILTER. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. A Chapter in the History of Pre-Raphaelitism — 
 
 I. Introductory. ...... 
 
 II. Ford Madox Brown ..... 
 
 III. Dante Gabriel Rossetti ..... 
 
 IV. William Holman Hunt ..... 
 
 V. The Foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 
 VI. The Influence of John Ruskin .... 
 
 VII. John Everett Millais ..... 
 VIII. The Lesser Pre-Raphaelites .... 
 IX. TM Painting and Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 X. The Painting of Holman Hunt 
 II. Ccelebs at Home 
 
 III. In Memoriam : Frank Holl 
 
 IV. Amy Levy : A Reminiscence ...... 
 
 V. The Unfashionable Art of England .... 
 
 VI. Life, Art, and Nature in an Old -World City . 
 VII. Jean Francois Millet and William Hunt . 
 VIII. Two Days of a Painter 
 IX. The Art of Watts 
 X, The Amateur 
 XI. WiLKiE Collins 
 XII. Thoughts on French Art . 
 XIII. The Royal Academy from 1872-1890: An Essay in Nineteen 
 Chapters 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 8 
 IS 
 23 
 30 
 38 
 
 47 
 60 
 80 
 
 95 
 106 
 124 
 13s 
 150 
 16s 
 177 
 190 
 201 
 226 
 247 
 281 
 
 297 
 
 XI 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The Autotype Illustrations are marked (*) 
 
 Frontispiece .... * The Blue Closet . . D. G. Rossetti 
 
 Title of Picture. 
 
 Artists Name. TO face page 
 
 *Ophelia 
 
 Sir John Millais, R.A. 
 
 I 
 
 Study of Head for Isabella Supper . 
 
 J) 
 
 4 
 
 *CordelJa's Portion 
 
 Ford Madox Brown , 
 
 8 
 
 *The Last of England . 
 
 » • 
 
 12 
 
 *"Work!" 
 
 J) 
 
 15 
 
 One of Rossetti's Models 
 
 Z>. G. Rossetti . 
 
 i8 
 
 *Early Portrait of Rossetti 
 
 W. Holman Hunt 
 
 20 
 
 *TheShip 
 
 » • • 
 
 23 
 
 *La Bella Mano .... 
 
 D. G. Rossetti . 
 
 . 26 
 
 The Gladness of the Land 
 
 C. H. Shannon 
 
 30 
 
 The Isabella Supper 
 
 . Sir John Millais, R.A. 
 
 35 
 
 * Cromwell at St. Ives 
 
 Ford Madox Brown . 
 
 • 38 
 
 *Venus' Mirror .... 
 
 E. Burne Jones 
 
 42 
 
 *« Daddy Hunt" and "Jack Millais » 
 
 D. G. Rossetti . 
 
 • 47 
 
 A Woman with Grapes . 
 
 „ ... 
 
 52 
 
 The Triumph of Saul and David 
 
 . T. M. Rooke . 
 
 • 56 
 
 *The Waters of Lethe . 
 
 . F. Sandys 
 
 60 
 
 *The Trial of Wycliffe . 
 
 . Ford Madox Brown . 
 
 • 63 
 
 *Early Portrait of Millais . 
 
 W. Holman Hunt 
 
 • 70 
 
 Death the Friend .... 
 
 . G. du Maurier 
 
 ■ 74 
 
 *The Beguiling of Merlin 
 
 E. Burne Jones . 
 
 • 78 
 
 *The Annunciation .... 
 
 D. G. Rossetti . 
 
 . 80 
 
 xni 
 
Title of Picture. 
 
 Artist's Name. 
 
 
 TO FACE PAGE 
 
 Miss Siddal .... 
 
 . D. G. Rossetti . . . .84 
 
 *Beata Beatrix 
 
 >) 
 
 
 
 . 86 
 
 "Found" .... 
 
 )) 
 
 
 
 . 90 
 
 '■'Love co-equal with the Ages . 
 
 . Z. Housman 
 
 
 
 ■ 94 
 
 *The Shadow of the Cross 
 
 W. Holman Hunt 
 
 
 
 . 98 
 
 *Meditation .... 
 
 . D. G. Rossetti . 
 
 
 
 104 
 
 "Sweethearts" 
 
 E. K. Johnson . 
 
 
 
 106 
 
 *I1 Palazzo Dandolo 
 
 . Harry Quilter . 
 
 
 
 . 114 
 
 Madonna .... 
 
 . Perugino . 
 
 
 
 . 118 
 
 *Dante's Dream 
 
 . D. G. Rossetti . 
 
 
 
 122 
 
 Portrait of Frank Holl . 
 
 . Renouard 
 
 
 
 . 126 
 
 *The Lonely Shore 
 
 . Harry Quilter . 
 
 
 
 • 134 
 
 Homewards .... 
 
 . E. Waterlow, A.R.A 
 
 
 
 138 
 
 *Italian Landscape . 
 
 . M. R. Corbett . 
 
 
 
 . 142 
 
 *The End of a Day 
 
 . Esther Isaacs . 
 
 
 
 149 
 
 *Vanity Fair .... 
 
 . George Pinwell . 
 
 
 
 152 
 
 The Duke of Gloucester and the Mu 
 
 rderers Sir John Gilbert, R.A 
 
 f. 
 
 
 . 154 
 
 *Strange Faces 
 
 . Fred Walker, A.R.A. 
 
 
 
 IS7 
 
 Home . ... 
 
 . G. D. Leslie, R.A. 
 
 
 
 158 
 
 *Study for « The Widower " . 
 
 . Luke Fildes, R.A. 
 
 
 
 160 
 
 La Marchesa 
 
 . Sir F. Burton . 
 
 
 
 162 
 
 *How they Met Themselves . 
 
 . D. G. Rossetti . 
 
 
 
 16s 
 
 Venice. .... 
 
 Clara Montalba 
 
 
 
 168 
 
 *The Close of a Day 
 
 Arthur Lemon . 
 
 
 
 172 
 
 The Eavesdropper . 
 
 William Hunt-. 
 
 
 
 177 
 
 *The Old Clock . . . . 
 
 George Pinwell . 
 
 
 
 178 
 
 Les Amoureux 
 
 . A. G. Binet . 
 
 
 
 180 
 
 The Gamekeeper . 
 
 . William Hunt . 
 
 
 
 182 
 
 The Gipsies .... 
 
 ,, 
 
 
 
 184 
 
 The Staffordshire Lanes . 
 
 . David Cox 
 
 
 
 188 
 
 *A Venetian Doorway 
 
 . Harry Quilter . 
 
 
 
 190 
 
 *The Harbour, Polperro . 
 
 „ 
 
 
 
 198 
 
 *The Passing of the Rain-Cloud 
 
 . G. F. Watts, R.A. . 
 
 
 
 200 
 
 *Psyche ...... 
 
 >J 
 
 
 
 205 
 
 *Herr Joachim . . . . 
 
 )> 
 
 
 
 2.T2 
 
 *The Return of the Dove 
 
 )J 
 
 
 
 216 
 
 *Sir Galahad 
 
 J) 
 
 
 
 2 20 
 
 XIV 
 
TUU of Picture. 
 
 *The Rain, it raineth ever 
 
 Artist s Name. top 
 
 y Day . . G. F. Watts, R.A. . 
 
 ACE PAGE 
 
 Black-Eyed Susan . 
 
 . Fred Walker, A. R.A. 
 
 226 
 
 Le Reve 
 
 . A. de Richemont 
 
 228 
 
 *Jezebel 
 
 . H. S. Ricketts . 
 
 232 
 
 Almond Blossom . 
 The Piazzetta, St Mark's 
 
 . Alfred East . 
 > . . . Samuel Prout . 
 
 236 
 240 
 
 *Mary Magdalene at the 
 
 House of Simon 
 
 
 the Pharisee ..<- 
 
 . D. G. RossetH . 
 
 244 
 
 Portrait of Wilkie Collin 
 
 ' • • ■ ■ • * . . 
 
 247 
 
 *The Tower of Ivory 
 
 C. H. Shannon 
 
 249 
 
 Paysage 
 *The Blind School . 
 
 . Rapin .... 
 . John Huybers . 
 
 258 
 
 Orphaned 
 
 . E. K. Johnson . 
 
 262 
 
 Le Jour de la Visite k 1'] 
 
 Hopital . . Geoffrey .... 
 
 268 
 
 *Study of a Head . 
 
 . Alphonse Legros 
 
 272 
 
 " There's none so deaf a 
 
 s those that won't 
 
 
 hear " 
 
 . E. Blair Leighton 
 
 276 
 
 *Soir d'Hiver . 
 
 . A. G. Binet . 
 
 280 
 
 Lisette 
 
 . S. Courtois 
 
 282 
 
 *Study . 
 
 . John Lavery 
 
 284 
 
 A Primeval Bathing-Plac 
 
 e . . . C. H. Shannon 
 
 286 
 
 Laboratoire . 
 
 . E. Gelhay 
 
 288 
 
 *Study . 
 
 George Clausen. 
 
 290 
 
 Dans les Bois 
 
 G. de Souza-Pinto 
 
 294 
 
 *The Lemon Tree at Cap 
 
 ri . . . Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A. 
 
 297 
 
 The Habit does not mal 
 
 A the Monk . G. F. Watts, R.A. . 
 
 302 
 
 The Sisters . 
 
 George Pinwell . 
 
 306 
 
 * Carting Hay 
 
 . E. P. Bucknall 
 
 310 
 
 The Casuals . 
 
 . Luke Fildes, R.A. 
 
 314 
 
 Sir William Bowman 
 
 . W. W. Ouless, R.A. 
 
 318 
 
 *Les 6migr^s 
 
 . Sir James Linton, P.R.I. . 
 
 322 
 
 On the Temple Steps 
 
 . E. J. Poynter, R.A. . 
 
 326 
 
 Shine and Shower . 
 
 . Henry Moore, A. R.A. 
 
 328 
 
 A Summer Shower 
 
 C. E. Perugini. 
 
 333 
 
 *The Wings of the Wind 
 
 . Alfred Hunt . 
 
 338 
 
 Louis XI. 
 
 . Seymour Lucas, A.R.A. 
 
 343 
 
 *0n the Medway . 
 C 
 
 . W. L. Wyllie, A.R.A. 
 XV 
 
 346 
 
Title of Picture. 
 
 The Harbour Bar 
 
 Taormina 
 
 Darby and Joan 
 *The Last Load 
 
 Fame . 
 
 Portrait of a Lady 
 *Study for " Her Mother's Voice " 
 
 The Sleepy Pool . 
 *St. Martin's in the Fields 
 
 My Heart's in the Highlands . 
 
 * Harrow .... 
 Study of a Head . 
 
 The Lady of Shalott 
 A Summer Night . 
 *The Silver Lining of the Cloud 
 Ego et Rex Mens . 
 Saturday Night at the Savage Club 
 Poor Jack .... 
 
 * Market Place, Wells 
 
 The Conversion of St. Hubert 
 
 Artist's Name. to face page 
 
 Adrian Stokes . 
 
 348 
 
 J. MacWhirter, A.R.A. . 
 
 352 
 
 Dendy Sadler . 
 
 356 
 
 Mark Fisher . 
 
 3S8 
 
 E. Blair Leighton 
 
 362 
 
 John Pettie, R.A. 
 
 36s 
 
 W. Q. Orchardson, R.A. . 
 
 366 
 
 Ernest Parton . 
 
 370 
 
 W. Logsdail 
 
 374 
 
 J. Farquharson . 
 
 376 
 
 Fred Goodall, R.A. . 
 
 378 
 
 Albert Moore . 
 
 380 
 
 J. Waterhouse, A.R.A. 
 
 382 
 
 Albert Moore . 
 
 384 
 
 J. Aumonier 
 
 388 
 
 Sir John Gilbert, R.A. 
 
 390 
 
 W. H. Bartlett 
 
 392 
 
 P. R. Morns, A.R.A. 
 
 394 
 
 Albert Goodwin 
 
 396 
 
 Arthur Lemon . 
 
 398 
 
 XVI 
 
A NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 HERE are several illustrations included in this book 
 concerning which no reference will be found in the 
 text, and which are not such as the Author himself 
 would select for his personal gratification. These 
 have been inserted for the sake of rendering the 
 pictorial record of Contemporary Art complete, and their discrimina- 
 tion may well be left to the reader's perception. 
 
 With regard to the four sketches of my own here inserted, I wish 
 to state that the two Venice drawings were done nearly ten ydars 
 since, and that the pictures of " The Harbour, Polperro," and " A 
 Lonely Shore" were painted out of doors in Cornwall in 1887 and 
 i88g respectively, and exhibited at the "Institute" in those years. 
 Their merit or demerit must be left to the reader ; they are placed 
 here merely as examples of my student work. 
 
 I am desirous of tendering my hearty thanks to the artists, 
 private owners, and Fine- Art dealers who have . kindly allowed me 
 to use their pictures or copyrights, or who have done sketches 
 expressly for me. The names of these are as follows ; those which 
 are printed in italics being the last-mentioned class : — 
 
 E. K.Johnson, R.W.S., Albert Moore, R.W.S., Clara Montalba, 
 
 R. W.S., E. Waterlow, A.R.A., M. R. Corbett, Arthur Lemon, A. de 
 
 Rickemont, G. Rapin, E. Blair Leighton, A. G. Binet, S. Courtois, 
 
 John Lavery, George Clausen, Henry Moore, A.R.A., Alfred Hunt, 
 
 xvii 
 
R.W.S., W. L. Wyllie, A.R.A., Adrian Stokes, J. MacWhirter, 
 A.R.A., Mark Fisher, W. Q. Orchardson, R.A., Ernest Parton, 
 W. Logsdail, Fred Goodall, R.A., J. Aumonier, Sir John Gilbert, 
 R.A., P. R. Morris, A.R.A., Albert Goodwin, R. W.S., T. M. Rooke, 
 Sir John Millais, R.A., Ford Madox Brown, W. Holman Hunt, 
 Edward Burne-Jones, A.R.A., Sir F. Burton, G. F. Watts. R.A.,* 
 Sir Frederick Leighton (and John Ruskin), W. W. Ouless, R.A., 
 Luke Fildes, R.A., E. J. Poynter, R.A., C. E. Perugini, Seymour 
 Lucas, A.R.A., Dendy Sadler, Joseph Farquharson, J. Water- 
 house, A.R.A., W. H. Bartlett, Alphonse Legros, Charles Fairfax 
 Murray, Sir James Linton, Sir Julian Goldsmid, Messrs. W. Agnew 
 and Sons, Messrs. Macmillan and Co., the Proprietors of the Graphic, 
 Messrs. Virtue and Sons, Alexander Henderson, to whom my thanks 
 are especially due for allowing his beautiful pictures of " Sir Galahad " 
 and "The Return of the Dove" (G. F. Watts, R.A.) to be photo- 
 graphed for this work alone, and George Rae. 
 
 This, I believe, completes the list of the obligations which I wish 
 to acknowledge most gratefully ; should any name be inadvertently 
 forgotten, I trust the omission will be pardoned. Much of the 
 information in the Pre-Raphaelite Essay was obtained from Ford 
 Madox Brown, John Seddon (the architect), Madame Bodichon, the 
 late Thomas Woolner, R.A., and, under the circumstances stated 
 elsewhere, W. Holman Hunt. To these also my best thanks 
 are due. 
 
 1 Mr. Watts most generously placed at my disposal the whole of his gallery, and left 
 me free to choose what I liked. I trust I have not exceeded the limits of modesty ; but the 
 temptation was great. 
 
 xvui 
 
A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF PRE- 
 RAPHAELITISM: INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 N the April of 1886 I suggested to the Editor of the 
 Contemporary Review that a short series of two or 
 three articles, giving the personal history of the Pre- 
 Rapha,elite Brotherhood, would probably be attractive 
 to the public ; and at his request I undertook the 
 task. On setting to work the idea occurred to me 
 that the paper would be far more likely to attract popular attention 
 if it were written by one of the " Brotherhood," and circumstances 
 showed clearly that this practically meant Mr. Holman Hunt, for 
 Sir John Millais had steadily refused to write on this subject, and 
 had moreover abandoned to a very considerable extent his earlier 
 method, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had been dead for more than 
 three years. 
 
 When I suggested this idea to the Editor, he at once approved 
 of it, if I could arrange the terms satisfactorily, and would be 
 responsible for the literary form of the article ; at least I was to edit the 
 paper, and see that it was suitable for a Review. This was done. I saw 
 Mr. Hunt and persuaded him to write the account in question, the 
 money part of the matter was arranged satisfactorily, and all promised 
 well. When, however, the MS., or a part of it, was sent me by Mr. 
 Hunt, I perceived at once that whatever might be the interest from 
 a religious and quasi-metaphysical point of view, it was not what either 
 the Editor would like, or the public want to hear about the P.R.B. 
 In a word, there was too much preamble, too little fact, and the 
 arrangement of what incidents were included was desultory and 
 somewhat haphazard. The writing of articles, in fact, is not a busi- 
 ness which can be evolved out of the inner consciousness, and of all 
 article-writing perhaps that kind which seeks to tell an absolutely 
 plain story consecutively, is the most difficult to the amateur, who 
 will insist upon disquisition, preamble, illustrations, and, worst of all, 
 purple patches of descriptive writing. 
 
My position was now one of some difficulty. Mr. Hunt was a 
 friend — and a celebrated artist for whose work I had high admiration 
 and respect ; on the other hand, the Editor of the Contemporary 
 (also a friend) had embarked on this paper at my suggestion, and on 
 my guarantee had offered a considerable sum of money for the 
 article: I was at once bound to see Mr. Bunting^ through, and 
 most desirous not to offend Mr. Hunt. I knew, or thought I 
 knew, what the public wanted to know about the P.R.B., and that 
 Mr. Hunt could tell it to them : only he had not done so, and 
 unless the paper were remodelled I felt its success could only be 
 very partial. Under the circumstances, I did what was perhaps 
 unjustifiable, i.e. wrote the first portion of the article myself, chiefly 
 on facts obtained in conversation from Mr. Hunt and notes supplied 
 by him. I can't remember at this lapse of time whether I took 
 down any of his actual words, but I think not. My memory was 
 then a good one, and with the help of the painter's notes, I could trust 
 it to reproduce accurately the information supplied to me. Mr. 
 Hunt and myself revised the proofs, the paper was signed with his 
 name, duly appeared, and was instantly and peculiarly successful. 
 Very generously Mr. Hunt offered me a cheque for half the amount 
 received, but I did not feel that I could accept any money for what 
 I had not done under my own name, and what I would not have 
 done at all had it not been for the peculiar circumstances. 
 
 Though I do not know that any one was specially wronged there- 
 by, and though a not inconsiderable proportion of articles- signed by 
 celebrated names are doubtless actually written by journalists, on the 
 facts which the supposed authors supply, it had never been my lot 
 to be mixed up before with that species of literature, and it made me 
 a little uncomfortable. It is one thing being accustomed to sell your 
 brains, and another to sell your prejudices, and my education had 
 taught me only the former. 
 
 After the cheque was declined however, an arrangement was 
 come to between Mr. Hunt and myself, whereby I was to have the 
 right of re-publishing this article (and the subsequent paper in con- 
 tinuation of the same subject) in a book which I had in contempla- 
 tion on the "History of Pre-Raphaelitism." I had previously 
 received and collected a good- deal of interesting information about 
 the pre-Raphaelites, and I thought the embodiment of Mr. Hunt's 
 description of his early struggles and personal reminiscences would 
 greatly add to the interest of my work, especially if appropriately 
 illustrated by the early pictures of the Brotherhood. To make a 
 long story short, my book was proposed to a publisher (and was 
 indeed sold to him), but was never written, for shortly after my 
 
 1 The Editor of the Contemporary Review. 
 2 
 
agreement with the publishers had been signed, and when I had 
 with considerable difficulty procured permission to include repro- 
 ductions of many of the most interesting pre-Raphaelite pictures in 
 my history, an announcement appeared in the Athenceum that the 
 papers in question, revised, and added to, were to be published by 
 Messrs. Macmillan. I was indeed hoist with my own petard ! 
 
 The first result was that my history was abandoned. The pub- 
 lishers told me frankly, and quite reasonably, that Mr. Hunt's 
 re-publication would certainly "take the wind out of my sails," and 
 rather than go on with the agreement they paid me a small sum for 
 the work already done on the book, and we tore up our contract. 
 I expected with considerable interest the publication of Mr. Hunt's 
 book, which Messrs. Macmillan had announced as to appear 
 "shortly." The autumn came and passed, the weeks, the months, 
 the years rolled by, picture after picture grew steadily to comple- 
 tion under Mr. Hunt's skilful hands, but the Chronicle of pre-Raphael- 
 itism, though six years have since passed, remains an unpublished 
 chronicle still. 
 
 Life is short, and I have waited long enough for my pre-Raphaelite 
 brother, and have therefore decided to include in the present volume 
 some of the material I once collected for the use of my book. I 
 bear no grudge against Mr. Hunt; no doubt he thought he was 
 acting within his right, in the first place; and in the second, 
 his long delay was — well — to be expected! And I have not the 
 slightest desire to make out a case for myself as an aggrieved person. 
 But I think it necessary, for the sake of my own credit, that the 
 public should know I am not, even in the few quotations inserted 
 from the papers in question, using another man's brains in availing 
 myself of work which I originally projected, carefully edited, cor- 
 rected, and wrote no small portion of with my own hand. To this I 
 have only to add that I have indicated wherever this paper is 
 quoted. 
 
 The more important, and hitherto unpublished, reminiscences 
 obtained from Mr. Ford Madox Brown are also shown, as are the 
 few notes given me by Mr. Woolner, R.A.^ The first of these were 
 told me by the artist himself, chiefly in reply to questions, and 
 were taken down on the spot by my shorthand secretary. Mr. 
 Brown was, during the whole time of our conversation, painting on 
 the frescoes of the Manchester Town Hall, and subject to con- 
 tinual interruption; I must here express my great obligation to 
 him for the kindness with which he gave me all the information 
 
 ^ Since writing this article, Mr. Woolner has died. It is too late for me to make any 
 alterations in the text, so if any expressions occur therein which may seem inappropriate at the 
 present time, I hope the above fact will be borne in mind. — October loth, 1892. 
 
 3 
 
in his power — information of specially valuable character, as will be 
 seen hereafter. 
 
 The story of the pre-Raphaelite movement is the story of four 
 great artists and generous -minded enthusiastic men. It is the 
 story, too, of enthusiastic effort in the cause of art : and in connec- 
 tion with such effort it may almost be said that there can be no such 
 word as failure. Certainly, in this case, though the Brotherhood 
 lasted but a very short while even in name, though its members were 
 few, and, with exception of the leaders, undistinguished and ineffec- 
 tive ; though the founders themselves were very quickly separated 
 in aim, and very partially true to their professed principles : the 
 movement so inaugurated has had permanent and most enlivening 
 influence upon all contemporary English painting. Opponents of 
 the theory, if theory be not too large a word for the somewhat 
 contradictory principles and practice of these P.R.B. painters, 
 have nevertheless been led to modify their practice in view of 
 the results attained by their opponents — all unconsciously much of 
 the spirit of pre - Raphaelitism has crept into Academic work, 
 and even where the form of this latter has remained unchanged, the 
 traditional practice has, as it were, been supplemented and informed 
 by greater intellectual consistency, more intelligent and thorough 
 study of accessories and probabilities, and an attention to detail 
 which was unknown before 1 848. 
 
 It would be an interesting task to show how far this change is due 
 to the influence we are considering, and how it has been affected by 
 the spirit of French art, which has also undergone a complete 
 revolution during the same period. The Barbizon School, the School 
 of Idyllism in Landscape, xSio. '' plein air" school, the "Impres- 
 sionists," are all, like the celebrated person who spoke prose without 
 knowing it, unconsciously to themselves pre-Raphaelite workers: 
 men who are seeking for truths of nature and emotion for themselves 
 instead of in traditional fashion. But this would lead me too far 
 in the present instance, and could hardly be made clearly intel- 
 ligible to the reader without an elaborate series of illustrations 
 from the pictures of the French painters. 
 
 In the following pages there will not be found (to the best of my 
 belief) any allusion to facts and occurrences, the relation of which 
 would give pain either to the pre-Raphaelite painters or their friends 
 and relatives. I have written neither as an advocate nor an opponent, 
 but by the relation of plain facts, have endeavoured to dispel some of 
 the misapprehensions which have become current on the subject, and 
 to consider the practice of these painters in relation to their person- 
 ality as well as to their supposed theories. A good deal of very 
 eloquent and high-strung rubbish has been written about the pre- 
 
 4 
 

 ^Ifli?^ 
 
 -%*» 
 
 STLDV OF HEAl; FOR ISABEI,LA SFIMM;R 
 
Raphaelite movement, and the instigators of the revolt have been 
 credited with many wonderful aims and theories of which they were 
 most innocently ignorant: but in truth they were very like other 
 brilliant young men in their sturm und drang period, and had few 
 theories which they did not abandon, or aims which they did not 
 forsake. 
 
 \X. is very difficult at the present time to arrive at the actual raison 
 ditre of the P.R.B., as it was called by its members ; for, whatever 
 was the aim, it was soon abandoned, and the members of the asso- 
 ciation went thenceforward on separate and individual lines. The 
 one principle which, howeyer, was at first their ruling one, was that 
 of painting each subject from one model, and if the picture was of 
 such a kind as to need a landscape background, making a separate 
 and original study for that picture as far as possible under the con- 
 ditions of light which the subject required. Millais especially was 
 most particular on this point, and it was partly Madox Brown's dis- 
 sension about the single personality of the model which prevented 
 the latter from associating himself nominally with the P.R.B. Even 
 this principle, however, was soon abandoned by the majority of the 
 members, though not before some very fine results had been pro- 
 duced,_ such as the orchard in " The Light of the World," the mossy 
 red-brick wall of " The Huguenot," and the lovely landscape back- . 
 grounds of the "Autumn Leaves" and the "Ophelia." In con- 
 nection with this theory of seeking for an actual physical environment 
 for the drama of their pictures, there was the endeavour, so finely 
 characterised and insisted upon some years after this period by John 
 Ruskin, of representing that action in terms of actual thought and 
 emotion, rather than in conventionally artistic manner : to show a 
 scene as it was or might have been, instead of as it might prettily or 
 gracefully be arranged. Very possibly this idea dictated the choice 
 of name. Seeing in the prints and casts from the Italian pre- 
 Raphaelite painters and sculptors the desire for expression rather than 
 the desire for artistic perfection, these young men may have jumped to 
 the conclusion, illogical, but not wholly unreasonable, that there was 
 a necessary connection between the simplicity of form in the earlier 
 work, and its intensity of meaning, and thence reasoned that if they 
 could only throw overboard all the later artistic traditions, they 
 might be able to embody in modern work the simplicity, directness, 
 and appeal of early Italian painting. The probability is, however, 
 that their theory was less profound, less conscious, at all events until 
 Ruskin gave expression thereto in his famous essay. The truth is 
 that at this time, not only in England, but in Germany, in France, 
 and even in Italy, an analogous influence to the pre -Raphaelite 
 practice was springing up in all directions. A wave of tradition- 
 questioning was sweeping over the world of art, as over that 
 of science and religion : the study of nature and natural fact was 
 
 5 
 
advancing by leaps and bounds : conventionalities were for the 
 moment forgotten ; the times were ripe for change. 
 
 And at this happy conjunction of things the pre-Raphaelite 
 practice shaped itself, little by theory, much by instinct and sym- 
 pathy, and borrowing here and there the form of ancient art, leaped 
 forth to point the way to the art of the future. 
 
 Had the leaders only been true to themselves, had they been more 
 fortunate in their partners and disciples, and less bitterly attacked 
 and injudiciously applauded, there might have grown up in England 
 from this movement the most magnificent art of modern times, for 
 never before, and certainly never since, had so bold, and, on the 
 whole, so successful an attempt been made to weave together in one 
 strand of meaning and beauty the loveliness of the outside world 
 and the emotions and interests of humanity. Moreover, the root 
 idea of all fine art, the search for perfection, was here of the very 
 essence of the aim, and, while maintained, gave dignity and interest 
 even to the least successful example : set free the genius of these 
 young painters from all hindering circumstance ; and started them for 
 a new world of beauty, where there should be, as Emerson said — 
 
 " Neither great nor small 
 To the soul which maketh all ; 
 For where it cometh all things are, 
 And it Cometh everywhere." 
 
 This was not to be — Ruskin, informed and urged by Coventry 
 Patmore, saw the intellectual and artistic possibilities of the move- 
 ment, and gave them expression in those letters to the Times which 
 remain to this day as models of passionate special pleading ; but 
 his heart and head were full of other work, and at the critical 
 moment he left England for Switzerland and Italy; and though 
 he never altogether withdrew his sympathy from the art, he in after 
 years ceased to hold any communication with Rossetti or Millais, and 
 little with Holman Hunt. The press critics and the Royal Acade- 
 micians made short work of the pre-Raphaelites — short work in 
 the sense of derision and abuse. The latter skied or rejected most 
 pre - Raphaelite pictures, the former laughed at or abused them 
 according to the humour of the moment. I can myself call to mind 
 the utter scorn and blame which were showered upon such pictures 
 as Mr. Burne-Jones's " Seasons," "Love amongst the Ruins," " Night 
 and Morning," when they were exhibited at the "Old Society" 
 and the Dudley Gallery, and this was at least ten or twelve years 
 after the date of which I am speaking, and I also remember well 
 the day the committee of the Water-Colour Society themselves took 
 down Mr. Burne-Jones's picture of "Phyllis and Demophoon," 
 because one of their patrons had declared its nudity to be shameful. 
 
 6 
 
On this occasion both the painter and the President, Mr. (now Sir 
 Frederick) Burton, resigned. 
 
 But to return to these earlier days, it has been said that the 
 P.R.B. were not true to themselves or each other : the fact seems to 
 be that after the first early years of their associateship, though the 
 old friendship remained unimpaired, all consonance of aim had 
 entirely disappeared. This can hardly be properly understood with- 
 out some consideration of the different temperaments and ambitions 
 of the three leaders, Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais. But 
 before doing this I must show clearly, by the consideration of 
 Madox Brown's own painting, and the record of his pwn words, 
 how irresistible is the evidence that he was in all but name the real 
 founder and leader of the pre-Raphaelite movement : the inspirer 
 AS WELL AS THE TEACHER of Rossetti and Holman Hunt ; and how 
 unnecessary it is to go back to Ghiberti gates and Orcagna and 
 Mantegna frescoes for the theory of truth to nature, simplicity, and 
 reality which this master had already grasped in his foreign student- 
 hood, and was actually exemplifying in His pictures before Rossetti and 
 Millais had left the Royal Academy schools, or Holman Hunt had 
 entered them ! In doing this I ask my readers' patience to allow 
 me first to say a few words about Madox Brown himself — and to 
 believe that they are written in no spirit of partizanship or friendly 
 exaggeration. My words can be proved to be true by any one who 
 will take the trouble to examine the evidence for them, who will 
 examine for himself Brown's pictures, or will even consider carefully 
 the reproductions of them which I have given in the quarto edition 
 of this book. 
 
II.— FORD MADOX BROWN: THE TEACHER OF 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AND 
 HOLMAN HUNT. 
 
 " One of the finest colourists living."— Z>. G. Rossetti of Madox Brown. 
 
 HERE are more things in London town than are 
 dreamt of in our philosophy, and here is one of them. 
 Within three hiiles of the Royal Academy there still 
 lives and paints one of our greatest artists ; who is the 
 true founder of the movement usually called pre- 
 Raphaelite, and the teacher of Holman Hunt and 
 Rossetti, the man whose genius the former "silently recognised" nearly 
 half a century ago, and of whom Rossetti spoke as above only three 
 years before his death. In a small house on the side of Primrose 
 Hill, without a studio save his sitting-room, without recognition from 
 the public, the press, or the Academy authorities, in but indifferent 
 health, and with narrow if not failing income, this great man lives, 
 who for half a century has given the public work of absolutely unique 
 quality, original, thoughtful, industrious, and beautiful. He lives 
 there, poor, brave, and patient still, encompassed, I yet am glad 
 to think, with the love and respect of a few true-hearted friends, and 
 carrying out to the last the doctrines which he has shown alike in his 
 painting and his life, of thorough work, independence, and honesty. 
 In the mad competition for wealth and notoriety which surges 
 round him, in the ingenuities of advertisement and the duplicities of 
 commerce, he has, and has ever had, no part ; above all has he lacked 
 the will to conciliate or truckle to the powers that be : he has dared 
 to live his honourable, kindly, industrious life after his own fashion, in 
 truth and honour. 
 
 Is it desirable, is it decent, is it tolerable, that such a noble servant 
 to art and England should be so neglected and forgotten ! We pension 
 our Under-Secretaries of State after five years' service, our soldiers 
 after five-and-twenty — might we not pension our artists when they 
 have worked for us fifty years ! Pension I mean in the manner that 
 
 8 
 
they would most desire ; pension them with a smile, a few kind words, 
 perhaps even a " Well done, thou good and faithful servant ! " I don't 
 feel at all clear that Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen might not 
 as well "shake hands" with Madox Brown as with an aged negress 
 from South Carolina ; or, if knighthood still may be taken to have its 
 olden significance, there are few workers in England who would 
 better deserve and dignify such honour. 
 
 Believe me, for once, readers who care for justice and gratitude, I 
 am not speaking rashly, or without warrant : these words are not 
 exaggerated, are not the result of friendship or ignorance. These 
 facts are true, as they are pathetic, as they are intolerable. This 
 artist is a splendid one even now, when ill-health and great age have 
 perhaps somewhat lessened the cunning of his hand and the keenness 
 of his eye, and when long-continued neglect and misunderstanding 
 have saddened the spirit which they had no power to sour. 
 
 I challenge any reader of this book to look at the pictures herein ^ 
 which I shall presently describe, of " Work," " The Last of England," 
 "Cordelia's Portion," and "Cromwell at St. Ives," and not confess 
 that in every one of them is shown not only technical power and 
 knowledge of the most disciplined and extended kind, but a dignity of 
 intellectual aim, a purity of sentiment, and a breadth of conception 
 such as we cannot parallel in any other single English artist now 
 alive. 
 
 Knowing that this is so, and knowing too that half a century ago 
 some of the greatest artists living thought Madox Brown's cartoons 
 for the frescoes in the House of Lords the finest in the whole com- 
 petition ; and that since then he has spent fifteen years at little more 
 than journeyman's wages in painting the frescoes of the Manchester 
 Town Hall, I say once more emphatically, here is one unjustly 
 neglected who deserves well of the nation. " Who is on my side ? 
 who will help the good cause of gratitude and justice ? " 
 
 The cause might be helped, might be won so easily, if only — it is 
 a big if, I know — the press, metropolitan and provincial, would take 
 it up. 
 
 One article in each newspaper in England, and the thing would be 
 done. Think of it, editors who yourselves so often work for years 
 without recognition or reward ! think of it, brother journalists who 
 fling your brains into the gutter weekly or daily to gain a house- 
 painter's wages ! think of it, artists, and critics, and the great wide- 
 spread race of occasional correspondents, and for once let us unite to 
 thank a great artist and a brave man for the pictures he has painted, 
 and the example he has set ! 
 
 1 Quarto Edition. 
 
 c 9 
 
This is not a Jan Van Beers, whose pictures are in Bond Street, 
 and whose heart is in the Quartier Brdda ; nor a Solomon J. Solomon 
 newly escaped from the Salon Menagerie. This is not a painter of 
 babies' frocks, big-hatted young ladies in villa gardens, Chippendale 
 interiors, Venetian alleys, Scotch mists, or Newly n fishwives ; but he 
 is a painter who has pierced to the heart of deep emotions, and con- 
 ceived the very aspect of great deeds, who has brought history home 
 to our perceptions as a reality, who has preached to us in simple 
 manly fashion of the dignity of labour, the consolations of love, the 
 fury of jealousy, the triumph and the tragedy of conquest, the most 
 vital incidents of our nation and our life. 
 
 I do not ask, nor wish, for my friend the reward of money, which 
 I know to-day is not given to unfashionable art. Give him only 
 that which is so clearly his due, the reward of esteem and honour. 
 Leave him in his studio-less house with the few who love him, 
 and who will give to his personal life all it needs of comfort and 
 affection — but publicly, is it not possible that, with all our South 
 Kensingtons, our Guildhalls, our Academies, our National Galleries, 
 our Luxembourgs, and in fact with all our apparatus for making art 
 progress — whither ? — we might do something to show that we know 
 — even though late — a great man when we have got him, and are 
 not above manifesting to him our knowledge and our praise ? 
 
 I hope very earnestly that the above words may have some little 
 fruit: perhaps that would have been more likely had they been 
 written with less apparent vehemence : the tone is, I fear, as the 
 Home Secretary wrote to the Rev. Francis Eden,i "intemperate, 
 out of place, and without precedent." 
 
 Let me now try to show how far my words are justified by Brown's 
 pictures. 
 
 The historical ones I must dismiss very briefly, for space would 
 fail me to discuss them adequately. They range from the " Wil- 
 helmus Conquestator," originally executed in Paris in 1844(1), and 
 exhibited at the Westminster Hall competition, when it was called 
 " Harold," to the " Cromwell," passing by the way " Chaucer at the 
 Court of Edward HL," " Wyclifife reading his Translation of the Bible 
 to John of Gaunt," " King Rdn^'s Honeymoon," and the whole series 
 of Manchester frescoes, of which the first is of the building of 
 Manchester by the Romans, and the last brings the history of the 
 city down to our own time. Allied to these historical works are the 
 religious pictures, and the semi-historical scenes from Shakespeare, 
 the Mort d Arthur, and Byron : of one of these, the " Cordelia's 
 
 1 Pardon for quoting an almost more unfashionable author than Brown is an artist, 
 Charles Reade. 
 
 10 
 
Portion," I give here (in my quarto edition) an autotype reproduc- 
 tion. Besides these, there are many elaborate designs for stained 
 glass, nearly all of which are of historical, religious, or legendary 
 subjects, and were executed while Brown was a member of the 
 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company firm, of which it is not 
 generally known that Burne -Jones was also a partner. The greater 
 part of the stained glass (which was the most important section of 
 the business in early days) was executed by Madox Brown and 
 Burne -Jones — the work of the latter being as magnificent as any 
 he has ever executed, but somewhat transcending the limits of the 
 material. These last were thoroughly understood and appreciated 
 in Brown's work, and the artist's little note ^ as to the right use of the 
 material is so entirely just and enlightening, that I quote it here- 
 with : — 
 
 "With its heavy lead -lines, surrounding every part (and no 
 stained glass can be rational or good art, without strong lead- 
 lines), stained glass does not admit of refined drawing ; or else it 
 is thrown away upon it. What it does admit of, and above all 
 things imperatively requires, is, fine colour; and what it can 
 admit of, and does very much require also, is invention, expression, 
 and good dramatic action. For this reason, work by the greatest 
 historical artists is not thrown away upon stained-glass windows, 
 because though high finish of execution is superfluous and against 
 the spirit of this beautiful decorative art, yet, as expression and 
 action can be conveyed in a few strokes equally as in the most 
 elaborate art, on this side therefore, stained glass rises again to 
 the epic height." 
 
 No less than two hundred cartoons for this class of work Brown 
 told me a few days since he had in "a big box there." 
 
 The modern section of our artist's painting comprises his best- 
 known pictures, a good many portraits, nearly all treated pictorially, 
 and a great quantity of pencil and chalk studies. In the last-men- 
 tioned medium especially the work is of rare excellence, and I know 
 few more quietly and securely beautiful things in modern art than the 
 chalk portrait of the painter's wife. Two of these modern pictures 
 are, I believe, the most perfect examples of the complete realisation 
 of an imaginative conception which the world has ever seen : they 
 are essentially pre-Raphaelite in the sense which Ruskin understood 
 the word ; and I am proud to be able to add that though London 
 practically rejected them, both are in public permanent galleries — 
 one at Birmingham and the other at Liverpool." These are " The 
 Last of England" and "Work." 
 
 " The Last of England " is, according to the painter, in the 
 
 * In the catalogue of his exhibition, 1863. 
 
 ^ Both reproduced in the quarto edition. 
 
 II 
 
strictest sense historical. It treats of the great emigration move- 
 ment which reached its culminating point in 1852; but I do not 
 think that, in the future years, men will think most of the history of 
 the subject. Surely I need not describe the incident of the picture : 
 a weak and broken-down husband, his face full of brooding passion, 
 leaving the land where hope and health and fortune have alike failed 
 him. A young and beautiful wife holding his hand in consolation 
 and support, while half seen beneath her shawl a tiny hand in its 
 turn clasps hers with the unconscious trust which is to be her future 
 recompense — in the background the rout of steerage passengers, the 
 hurrying sailors, the tug casting off, and the chalk cliffs of England 
 growing faint in the distance. He, in Saul's darkest hour ; she, with 
 sorrow too deep for tears, but not for trust and hope — for " the circle 
 of her love moves with her." Such is the circumstance of the 
 picture. I am glad to think it is not so easy — is, indeed, scarcely 
 possible — to set down any adequate record of its beauty and its 
 power. To the present writer, at all events, there is no modern 
 picture which in expressional interest and insight can be considered 
 as equal to this; and there is only one, "The Huguenot" of Sir 
 John Millais, which can equal the beauty of the woman's face, with 
 the lovely features shadowed but not distorted with unselfish grief, and 
 unflinching trust and love. I may perhaps be pardoned for pointing 
 out that, leaving these emotional realities on one side, the concep- 
 tion of the artist has not arrested itself at the expression of the 
 dramatic and personal feeling of his subject, but has worked out in 
 fullest detail and accurate subordination the various accidents of the 
 scene — and in inserting each of these has chosen his detail in obedi- 
 ence to a clear intellectual purpose. Let us hear what was the 
 artist's own point of view and description of how the picture was 
 painted — 
 
 " This picture, begun in 1852, was finished more than nine years ago 
 (i.e. in 1856). To ensure the peculiar look of light all round, 
 which objects have on a dull day at sea, it was painted for the 
 most part in the open air on dull days, and when the flesh was 
 being painted, on cold days. Absolutely without regard to the art 
 of any period or country, I have tried to render this scene as it 
 would appear. The minuteness of detail which would be visible 
 under such conditions of broad daylight, I have thought necessary 
 to imitate, as bringing the pathos of the subject more home to the 
 beholder." 
 I will not enter here upon any actual description of the second 
 picture, " Work" : the finest pure pre-Raphaelite picture in the world, 
 as it appears to me. It hangs in the Corporation Gallery at Liver- 
 pool, "plain for all folk to see"; in colour a cut-open jewel; in 
 meaning a sermon and a hymn of praise ; in conception the offspring 
 of a big brain ; in execution the product of a master's hand. The 
 
 12 
 
magnificence of gesture alone in the main group of workmen — the 
 navvies—stamps the composition as the work of a great artist ; and its 
 multiplicity of incident and meaning, the elaboration of the composi- 
 tion, the novelty of the subject, and the completion, intellectual and 
 artistic, of its rendering, are all entirely admirable. 
 
 This is one of the great pictures of the modern world ; a record 
 which will never be surpassed of certain facts significant to the well- 
 being of our country and civilisation, and giving warning of certain 
 dangers which lie in wait for us in the future. The "Cordelia's 
 Portion," beautiful as it is in composition and in the expression in 
 the faces of Cordelia and Lear, must rank below these last-mentioned 
 pictures, if only because of dealing with a subject of less interest — 
 less vital humanity. In this work the artist is illustrator only— not 
 illustrator and poet — another has supplied the conception, he only the 
 arrangement. There is also visible in this picture one defect, the 
 only serious one I know in Madox Brown's art, and that is an uncon- 
 scious admission — nay, it seems a preference for awkwardness of 
 gesture, amounting occasionally almost to ugliness. In nearly every 
 instance of this which I have noticed in Brown's work, the strained, 
 or cramped, or exaggerated gesture appears to have been deliberately 
 adopted rather than sacrifice an iota of the dramatic or intellectual 
 meaning of the composition, and in this I think that the artist has on 
 several occasions been decidedly in error. Perhaps the most marked 
 instance is to be found in the picture of " Romeo and Juliet," where 
 Romeo, still clasping Juliet with one arm, has the other stiffly extended 
 in an aljsolutely horizontal line, which gives him the appearance of a 
 semaphore rather than a human being. No doubt the suggestion 
 that he " wants to be off," to keep his intention in the vernacular, is 
 thereby indicated vigorously, but the gain in meaning does not com- 
 pensate for the uncouthness of gesture. However, where so much 
 is given us, we may well excuse an occasional drawback of this kind : 
 we find the equivalent in the work of every great artist— each has 
 some special shortcoming, in form, in colour, in manliness, in meaning, 
 in brushwork, in subject, in carelessness, in insolence, in industry, or 
 in feeling. 
 
 I am writing of 3. great artist, not of a. perfect one ; there are no 
 perfect artists, nor ever were ; and when a painter of to-day combines 
 high aim, deep feeling, dramatic intensity, fine draughtsmanship, 
 splendid colour, an unrivalled power of composition, and great intel- 
 lectual power, we can tolerate some personal prepossessions which 
 we might otherwise condemn. The truth is, that Brown never 
 entirely shook himself free of the Gothic training he received at 
 Antwerp under Baron Wappers ; the same element is to be found in 
 the work of Baron Leys, which was in great vogue at Antwerp at 
 the time of Brown's studentship. Antwerp was then, as it is now, 
 
 13 
 
perhaps the strongest art school in Europe in the study of chiar- 
 oscuro, and there the influence of the Spanish and Flemish Schools is 
 mainly predominant — to use Brown's own words, " I had a mixed 
 impression, but Rembrandt towered over all." His stay in Rome 
 completed the impression, by showing him, as it were, the reverse of 
 the medal ; and manifesting the practice of painters, the foundation 
 of whose art was light and colour, instead of light and shadow; 
 harmony instead of contrast. Before his stay in Rome, Madox 
 Brown went to Paris, and there the first true germ of the pre- 
 Raphaelite movement sprang into life in the determination taken by 
 this young painter to make his pictures "real." Here are his actual 
 words : "In Paris I first formed my idea of making my pictures real, 
 because no French artist at that time did so. Meissonier was then 
 only just beginning" (beginning to be known, Brown must have 
 meant, as of course he had been painting for several years, and was 
 indeed doing some of his finest work). " They (the French painters) 
 had nothing new in light and shadow. The idea was my own. I 
 walked about Paris with Casey and talked it over ; then my wife 
 became ill, and I came back with an idea already made out. John 
 Marshall's sketch was painted in Rome. Then I began the 'WyclifFe 
 reading his Bible' ; this was the first thing in the Italian School." 
 And this was also the first essentially pre-Raphaelite English picture. 
 It was sold by the artist to Mr. M. Wilkinson, a banker, and within 
 the past year it came to the hammer at Christie's. This work was 
 succeeded by the only picture which Mr. Madox Brown considers 
 to have been painted by him implicitly in the pre-Raphaelite style, 
 " Pretty Baa-Lambs." Critics said there was a deep symbolical 
 meaning in the picture ; the lambs, they said, meant Christ ; but it 
 would be a pity if pictures were painted of little girls standing on 
 their toes with their heads out of joint. These criticisms appeared 
 in the Morning Star, of which Mr. Edmund Yates was then Art 
 critic. 
 
 Shortly after this, Rossetti, seeing Madox Brown's " Harold " at 
 Westminster Hall, came to him and asked for admission to his studio 
 as a pupil. This was granted, as I have said above, and the greater 
 part of the following chapter treats of this student period, and the 
 intercourse of Brown and Rossetti. 
 
 14 
 
III.— DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 
 AS STUDENT AND FRIEND. 
 
 OSSETTI was at once the strongest and the weakest 
 member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Strong- 
 est in the splendid individuality of his artistic genius 
 (whether in poetry or painting), and strongest in intel- 
 lectual insight and spiritual influence ; but weakest in 
 self-restraint, in sensitiveness, and, if the truth must be 
 told, in self-indulgence. A generous, morbid, passionate, hyper-sensi- 
 tive nature, intensely beloved by his friends, whom yet he would treat, 
 when the whim took him, with utter indifference ; very prone to 
 suspicion and anger, and utterly reckless in his judgments on 
 others, but gifted with such power of will, such personal charm, such 
 generosity of impulse, and such brilliance of intellectual insight and 
 artistic perception, that, in the eyes of his friends and admirers, all 
 shortcoming was atoned for or forgotten. Very amusing is Brown's 
 account of the way in which Rossetti's lessons used to be received by 
 the pupil, and very characteristic the behaviour of Rossetti, and the 
 matter-of-fact way in which his master treated him — setting him 
 down to still-life groups, in which " an old tobacco canister figured 
 as one of the chief objects. Rossetti was most impatient of this 
 work. He used to clean his palette on sheets of notepaper, and 
 leave them lying about on the floor, and they would very often 
 stick to my boots when I came in in the dark." 
 
 Here is, sans phrases, the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite Brother- 
 hood, and the source of the inspiration of its chief member — an 
 impatient pupil fuming at the representation of a tobacco canister, 
 and littering the studio with palette scrapings which stick to his 
 master's boots ! 
 
 And take another, a little anecdote told me by Brown which 
 shows alike Rossetti's impatience and his exacting nature in trifles. 
 
 15 
 
"He had no objection to drapery on lay figures, as is generally sup- 
 posed. On the contrary, so far from hating lay figures, he had two 
 or three very expensively got-up ones, and also a very expensive 
 thing like a sentry-box in which to place them. And he would have 
 his place arranged on such occasions as if it were a State affair, or as 
 if Gladstone were expected to arrive. He was, indeed, fond of 
 purchasing anything expensive simply because it was expensive. 
 One day he came into my studio, where I had a lay figure set all 
 ready, and walked towards it, whereupon I exclaimed, 'Gabriel, 
 don't go near that,' and he shouted, ' Good God Almighty, how can 
 I remember this ? I have a box made for my figures, and my friends 
 can walk about without touching them.' " 
 
 This sort of spirit seems to have run throughout his life : he could 
 not understand that other people should not do as he did, and if they 
 did not, he was angry as frankly as a child would be. There 
 was, it seems to me, much more of the Italian than the English 
 nationality in him, and his moments of excitement, his fits of depres- 
 sion, his mad pranks, and madder suspicions, the nature of his 
 intellect, his queer mixture of business capacity and utter childish- 
 ness, his moral contradictions, were all such as are common enough 
 in Italy, but rarely met with in our own country. Italians aire at 
 once, as far as the experience of the present writer goes, the most 
 sentimental and the most practical men in the world ; children in 
 feeling, and as shrewd as a Yankee speculator in business matters. 
 With all his eccentricity there were few better men of business in the 
 artist world than Rossetti, and though he treated the purchasers of 
 his pictures with scant courtesy, he rarely lost a commission thereby. 
 
 Here is a characteristic anecdote of his later period in this con- 
 nection. George Rae is a fine judge of art, and a banker at 
 Birkenhead, and was from the first an admirer and purchaser of 
 Rossetti's work, but on one occasion Rossetti asked him more 
 than he wished to give for a picture ("The Bride"). Rae went 
 away and came back in a few days afterwards, when Rossetti 
 greeted him sarcastically, "Why, I thought you were on your 
 way back to Birkenhead." Rae asked him what he wanted for 
 the picture, and Rossetti said 300 guineas! "Why," said Rae, 
 "you offered it me for ^^250!" "I really do not remember," 
 said Rossetti ; "perhaps I did; but why the devil didn't you take it 
 when I offered it you ? Well, then, you have me ; you can have it 
 for yx) pounds. If the odd shillings are of any use to you, Rae," he 
 said in a most lordly style, "you are welcome to them." This, says 
 Madox Brown, was essentially Rossetti's nature in dealing with a 
 banker — and, indeed, other folks beside bankers were apt to be 
 treated according to the whim of the moment. I asked Madox 
 
 i6 
 
Brown once whether he did not think that Rossetti's friends made a 
 mistake in putting up with so much from him, and whether his sensitive- 
 ness and morbid feeling were increased by their tolerance. But he 
 seemed to think that this was not so, especially in the earlier years 
 of his life : he " always had a lot of sycophants, but they did it from 
 a good feeling, and not from any hope of gain to themselves. I 
 think, too, it was really a case of mutual flattery." Perhaps the most 
 curious contradictions of Rossetti's character were in the matter of 
 money; he was utterly extravagant in the purchase of whatever 
 took his fancy, and yet would hesitate and bargain about the most 
 necessary expenditure. In the same way with his pictures, he would 
 at one moment talk as if art were degraded by the most distant 
 reference to its commercial value, and at another would write or 
 speak as if that value were his primary object. Hear him on the 
 subject of some gamekeeper's daughter, whom he has never seen. 
 
 "By the bye, he tells me, from your information, that thei"e is a 
 British beauty on hand in the shape of a gamekeeper's 
 daughter. Do you- think one could ask her to sit for her 
 portrait in chalk ? I daresay I could brush off fifty guineas' 
 worth of her at a sitting or two, and would give her a sketch 
 of herself besides. But ought one to ask ? " ^ 
 
 And again, a few weeks later, apparently with reference to the same 
 model. 
 
 " Sophy Burgess' head I have sold already for fifty guineas, so trade 
 
 has not been quite at a standstill. I think when I finish S I 
 
 shall give him a nimbus and call him his Redeemer ; by which 
 title he may be made to pay. This sounds base, I perceive, on 
 reading it over." 
 
 The truth is that, even to his art, Rossetti's attitude of mind 
 was incalculable and inconsistent ; at one time reverencing it as a 
 religion, at another seeing in it only a means of livelihood to be 
 resorted to when money was desirable. His hours of work, too, were 
 equally fitful. On occasion he would paint without intermission for 
 several days, and then do nothing for a week : fits of energy and idle- 
 ness succeeding one another suddenly. As he once wrote to a friend, 
 he "was an inveterate Southerner," and did "not know what was to 
 be got out of the North save rheumatism, and a habit of swearing." 
 The last he certainly acquired to great perfection. 
 
 His best drawings he was very loath to part with, valuing them even 
 more, highly than his pictures ; and on the whole with justice, for they 
 are equally beautiful, and superior in some technical qualities. Coloured 
 chalk has never been used with greater subtlety or delicacy than in 
 
 1 Letter to Madame Bodichon. 
 D 17 
 
some of these ; but his actual painting (brush work) is, in all but his 
 very finest period, uncertain and tentative. 
 
 There is considerable reason to believe that Rossetti felt this incom- 
 pleteness himself, for in the later years of his life he was very fond of 
 retouching the earlier pictures, and in several cases by no means to 
 their advantage. From the beginning he was very fond of starting 
 pictures, very impatient of continuing, very loath to finish them. 
 During the time of the Newnan Street Studio, Brown tells me that he 
 began twelve pictures one after another, none of which were finished. 
 
 " He, Rossetti, came down to my house at Finchley one day very 
 cold and wet, and went into the kitchen. He was evidently 
 greatly depressed, and said to me, ' I cannot paint ; I can write a 
 sonnet, but I cannot paint. It is a delusion one gets into one's 
 head. Millais, Hunt, you, can paint, but I can't.' I said, 'Oh 
 nonsense, you must try and rouse yourself; this is your twelfth 
 picture, and unless you break the spell you will never do anything 
 in your life.' He gave a sort of laugh — he was in a frightful state 
 of depression — and called himself a fool. After that he painted 
 some water-colour sketches, and found he could finish them with- 
 out much difficulty." 
 
 The following anecdote of Rossetti refers to this early period when 
 he was working in Madox Brown's studio, I give as usual in the 
 latter painter's own words. 
 
 " He had a most beastly bit of alpaca for the drapery of his lay 
 figure, which would not make folds nor sit properly. He had 
 worked at this for a whole week, and it seemed to me that he 
 would go mad, I told him to leave it alone, that that piece of 
 alpaca would never make proper folds. He exclaimed, 'God 
 Almighty, what am I to do ? it is the colour, it must do; I cannot 
 get anything else,' It finished in this way — he got a little china 
 palette and stuck this upon his easel, and then sat upon the 
 ground with his drawing-board, leaning against the easel, when 
 down came the whole lot, and the china palette breaking, cut his 
 hands, ' This has ended it all,' he cried out ; ' I shall have lock- 
 jaw, and a very good thing too. I have had quite enough of this 
 work.' I said, ' Nonsense, Gabriel, people don't have lock-jaw 
 simply because they cut their thumbs.' ' If people cut their 
 thumbs,' he said, 'they always have lock-jaw : well, I am glad, I 
 shall never touch this picture again,' and he never did." 
 
 There is rather a misconception prevalent as to the prices fetched 
 by Rossetti's early work. From the first these were by no means indif- 
 
 i8 
 
ONE OF KOSSETTrS AKJOELS 
 
 DAN 11- GAURIEL J^USSETTI 
 
 From the craMjn driiwin;; in the pos^csMoii of the aullior 
 
ferent, especially when we remember that forty years since prices were 
 altogether lower than of late. I can remember well that as late as 
 the "Bicknell" sale (somewhere about i86i), the highest price which 
 a water-colour painting had ever been sold for at a public auction was 
 ^630 : this was impressed upon my memory from the fact of my 
 father having purchased the work, which was the Rievaulx Abbey of 
 Copley Fielding. Some fifteen years later also, at Christie's, this 
 picture realised nearly 2000 guineas, and fine water-colours generally 
 had during that period more than doubled in value. 
 
 Rossetti's usual price at this time for a water-colour sketch was 
 between twelve and twenty-five guineas, and a good many of these 
 were taken by Ruskin at that price : they were always a small size. 
 He used to do them in about a fortnight without models (alas ! for 
 P.R,B. theories). Sometimes, however, he would have models, and 
 then it was an affair of six months or so. One of these twelve-guinea 
 sketches has since been sold by auction for £4^0. 
 
 This period — about 1852 — was the hardest, financially speaking, of 
 Rossetti's life. He had just then a persistent run of ill-luck — one 
 thing coming after another — and he had not yet settled what it was he 
 wanted to do in art : he was finding himself His landlord swindled 
 him ; Ruskin (who had at first helped him), to use Madox Brown's 
 express words, "funked it and hooked it" to Switzerland, and a 
 dealer who had given him a large commission failed. This picture 
 was never finished, but was repainted in later years. 
 
 Of all Rossetti's paintings, it is the only one with which I am 
 acquainted which deals realistically with a scene of modern life, and 
 I cannot help thinking that either the scene or its treatment must 
 have been suggested by Holman Hunt. In any case " Found " 
 forms a perfect sequel to "The Awakening Conscience" of the last- 
 mentioned artist. The origin of the composition was a ballad entitled 
 " Rosabell" — a ballad by W. B. Scott, a painter and poet, and warm 
 sympathiser with the P.R.B. This was about 1858 (according to 
 Madox Brown), about ten years after the founding of the Brotherhood. 
 
 I have given a short description of this picture in a subsequent 
 chapter, which deals more especially with the characteristics of 
 Rossetti's art; suffice it to say here that the "unfortunate calf," 
 referred to below by Mr. Madox Brown, played an important though 
 subsidiary part in the tragic story of the picture. The reproduction 
 here inserted is from a pen-and-ink drawing in the collection of Mr. 
 Fairfax Murray, and it is to be noted that the face of the countryman is 
 different from that of the oil-picture, and far finer in expression. There 
 seems to be no doubt that the original picture was left unfinished till 
 
 19 
 
1 882, and was then taken up again, slightly altered, and considerably 
 injured in repainting. It was a passion with Rossetti in later years 
 to retouch his earlier compositions, and I am assured by a large 
 collector of his paintings that several in his possession were almost 
 entirely spoilt by being lent the painter for that purpose. 
 
 But to return to " Found." 
 
 "Rossetti painted several of these sketches (the water-colours 
 above alluded to) in my house at the same time he was going on 
 with that unfortunate calf. He was six weeks on that calf in 
 a miserable farmyard. The calf was three days old when he 
 commenced, and when he ended the calf used to jump into its 
 own cart, and put itself into position. 
 
 " The farmer was very kind ; and lent him the cart and other things 
 he wanted. He used to stand in the yard in a lot of muck and 
 slush, and I thought he was certain to catch a fever of some 
 sort. He never began to paint till one, and left off about four, 
 because of the light." 
 
 Before continuing with these reminiscences, let us see what manner 
 of man Rossetti was at this time in outward appearance ; at all events, 
 in the eyes of his intimate friend Holman Hunt : — 
 
 " Imagine a young man of decidedly foreign aspect, about 5 feet 
 7^ in height, with long brown hair touching his shoulders, not 
 taking care to walk erect, but rolling carelessly as he slouched 
 along, pouting with parted lips, staring with dreaming eyes — the 
 pupils not reaching the bottom lids — grey eyes, not looking 
 directly at any point, but gazing listlessly about ; the openings 
 large and oval, the lower orbits dark-coloured. His nose was 
 aquiline but delicate, with a depression from the frontal sinus 
 shaping the bridge ; the nostrils full, the brow rounded and 
 prominent, and the line of the jaw angular and marked, while 
 still uncovered with beard. His shoulders were not square, but 
 yet fairly masculine in shape. The singularity of gait depended 
 upon the width of hip, which was unusual. Altogether, he was 
 a lightly-built man, with delicate hands and feet; although 
 neither weak nor fragile in constitution, he was nevertheless 
 altogether unaffected by any athletic exercises. He was careless 
 in his dress, which then was, as usual with professional men, 
 black and of evening cut. So superior was he to the ordinary 
 vanities of young men that he would allow the spots of mud to 
 remain dry on his legs for several days. His overcoat was 
 brown, and not put on with ordinary attention; and with his 
 pushing stride and loud voice, a special scrutiny would have 
 been needed to discern the reserved tenderness that dwelt in 
 
 20 
 
the breast of the apparently careless and defiant youth. But 
 any one who approached and addressed him was struck with 
 sudden surprise to find all his critical impressions dissipated in 
 a moment; for the language of the painter was refined and 
 polished, and he proved to be courteous, gentle, and winsome, 
 generous in compliment, rich in interest in the pursuit of others, 
 and_ in every respect, as far as could be shown by manner, a 
 cultivated gentleman. (I hate the word in its canting sense, but 
 here in its least presumptuous significance it has a meaning 
 which no other word would so accurately convey.) To one who 
 lived with him he showed an inexhaustible store of accomplish- 
 ments, yet from his uncontrollable temper under the trials of 
 studio work, it was clear that he had been a spoilt child." 
 
 " First, to complete the picture of Rossetti, I should say that fre- 
 quently he would leave his day's appointed task to engage 
 himself with some design or poem that occupied his thoughts. 
 When he had once sat down and was immersed in the effort to 
 express his purpose, and the difficulties had to be wrestled with, 
 his tongue was hushed, he remained fixed and inattentive to all 
 that went on about him ; he rocked himself to and fro, and at 
 times he moaned lowly, or hummed for a brief minute, as though 
 telling off" some idea. All this while he peered intently before 
 him, looking hungry and eager, and passing by in his regard 
 any who came before him, as if not seen at all. Then he would 
 often get up and walk out of the room without saying a word. 
 Years afterwards, when he became stout, and men, with a good, 
 deal of reason, found a resemblance in him to the bust of Shake- 
 speare at Stratford-upon-Avon, and still later, when he had out- 
 grown this resemblance, it seemed to me that it was in his early 
 days only that the soul within had been truly seen in his face. 
 In these early days, with all his headstrongness and a certain 
 want of consideration, his life within was untainted to an exem- 
 plary degree, and he worthily rejoiced in the poetic atmosphere 
 of the sacred and spiritual dreams that then encircled him, how- 
 ever some of his noisy demonstrations at the time might hinder 
 this from being recognised by a hasty judg:ment." 
 
 Thus we obtain in Madox Brown's recollections of his friend, and 
 from Hunt's description, a tolerably clear presentment of Rossetti's 
 personality, which is borne out by all I have learned from other 
 sources. We see before us an impetuous, generous, enthusiastic 
 man, richly endowed with genius and almost irresistibly attractive to 
 his friends ; we see too a glimpse of the reverse side of the medal, of 
 his feverish energy, his impatience of restraint, his easy discourage- 
 ment, his fits of depression, his uncontrollable temper. Such is the 
 
 21 
 
stuff of which in every age of the world the "Seer," the Prophet, has 
 been made ; he who, at once less and greater than those amongst 
 whom he lives, demands alike their faith and their toleration, their 
 admiration and their pity, their obedience and their help. And these 
 were given to Rossetti without stint or murmur, and he took them 
 and played with them, or cast them aside as the whim of the moment 
 dictated, no one questioning his right, I don't know that there is 
 anything more touching or interesting in this whole story than the 
 tacit and unconscious testimony borne by Mr. Madox Brown and Mr. 
 Holman Hunt of their "care" for their friend : of the way in which 
 they strove to give him just the help he needed — to raise his spirits, 
 to forward his art, to make him work. Take as an example of this 
 an incident in the story of the " Beata Beatrix," a commission from 
 Lord Mount Temple, now in the National Gallery. It was com- 
 menced at the Hermitage on the hill at Highgate. Soon after it 
 was begun Rossetti fell seriously ill, and John Marshall (to the last 
 one of his most faithful friends) and Madox Brown took him away 
 to Scotland. Brown left him at Stobhall, having to return to Eng- 
 land. " Before I left him I said, Let us send him the * Beata 
 Beatrix,' as I knew he had a commission for it from Lord Mount 
 Temple, and he was very hard up at the time. He said it was 
 ridiculous to expect him to work at that time. Well, I heard 
 afterwards of what took place. Rossetti took it out one day and 
 looked at it and put it away again : then he looked at it again, then 
 he started on it, and in a week the work was finished and ^ 300 was 
 paid to him." 
 
 This picture is a representation of Rossetti's wife, and many stories 
 are told in connection with it, but these do not concern me here. 
 And I would remind my readers that the omission of those incidents 
 in Rossetti's life, and those traits of his character which were con- 
 nected with his relations to women, is entirely intentional. 
 
 No mention could be made of this portion of his story without 
 giving much pain to relations and friends, nor does the present writer 
 believe that the private life of any artist, however famous, falls 
 within the limits of the justifiable criticism of a contemporary, though 
 in after years it may perhaps be fitting to consider how far the art 
 produced was weakened and impaired by frailty and excess. I should 
 not even have inserted here the anecdotes of Mr. Madox Brown 
 depicting Rossetti's variable temper and want of self-control, were it 
 not that hitherto almost the only recorded personal traits of this man 
 have been those of intimate friends and relations, or intense sympa- 
 thisers. These partizan records, though natural enough and even 
 considering their origin praiseworthy, have given to some extent a 
 false impression of the artist's character, and of the circumstances 
 surrounding the pre-Raphaelite movement. 
 
 22 
 
IV.— WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT 
 AND HIS FIGHT FOR ART. 
 
 N the last chapter I have endeavoured to discuss 
 the chief personal characteristics of Rossetti, give 
 some incidents of his early artist -life, his aims 
 and financial difficulties, and show the kind of influ- 
 ence he exercised over his comrades. Let me now 
 pass to Mr. Holman Hunt and attempt a similar 
 task. And here at the outset the difficulty occurs, that almost the only 
 information we have on the personal life of this painter rests upon 
 his own authority. In one way, of course, that is the best authority 
 possible ; in another it is almost the worst for the telling of the story 
 of pre-Raphaelitism. No man probably who ever lived could look 
 back to the struggles of youth and the share he took in the promulga- 
 tion of any great movement, and see quite without prejudice the exact 
 proportion of his influence, and the exact measure of his action. 
 Unless we can correct, as is possible with Rossetti, the testimony of 
 himself, or his relations and partizans, by that of those who are more 
 impartial judges, we must always remain a little doubtful whether the 
 narrator is not erring, now on the side of modest self-depreciation, 
 now on the reverse, and we must accept his account of motive and 
 aim with a certain reserve. Even to ourselves we exercise some 
 reticence in our most expansive moments, and our personality stands 
 to us almost equally compounded of what we are and what we would 
 be. In Holman Hunt's case such correction is impossible, and so 
 it is very natural that, in the notes which follow of Mr. Hunt's early 
 life, we should miss some of the light and shade necessary to a perfect 
 understanding of the man, and only see as it were the presentment 
 of his artistic personality. Moreover, in the eyes of his contem- 
 poraries that personality was in some ways overshadowed by those 
 of his more brilliant and dashing comrades, and possibly by their 
 more fortunate circumstance, for in the first years of their career, both 
 
 23 
 
Rossetti and Millais were free from the grinding money anxieties 
 which beset Hunt from his youth onwards, Rossetti, truly, was 
 always in financial difficulties, but they were almost entirely due 
 to his extravagance and improvidence. Millais appears to have 
 earned money from the time he was fifteen, if not earlier, and both 
 living and painting at home, and having parents of comfortable 
 middle-class" means, had not even the expense of a studio to keep up. 
 As we have seen, at the age of twenty he had even saved ;^500. 
 
 If we consider the great and continual success of Millais' student- 
 hood, his dash and confidence, and perhaps above all his handsome 
 face and figure, and then turn to the magnetic charm which the 
 spirit and enthusiasm of Rossetti are allowed by every one to have 
 exercised over his friends, we shall not be surprised if the third 
 member of the triumvirate, who, though he shared in the artistic 
 qualities of his comrades, had not any special personal fascination of 
 his own, has been since chiefly known through his art. To this end 
 no doubt Hunt's long absences in the East greatly contributed, as did 
 a certain concentration of aim, and a curiously unconscious egoism 
 of character. This last appears to me very clearly revealed in the 
 following reminiscences, which show us not only the persistence, 
 industry, and energy of the young painter, but also how keen was his 
 eye to business, and how rapidly his prices rose directly the hour of 
 success had struck. It is quite a mistake to suppose indeed that an 
 artist as a rule, or any of these P. R. Brethren in particular, is, oi" was 
 a bad man of business. Quite the contrary : of the three painters of 
 whom I am speaking, it would be difficult to say which was the best 
 hand at a bargain, but all were first-rate. If we could put together 
 the total amount of money which they have received for their work, I 
 doubt whether it would not exceed that of any other six painters in 
 England, and it would certainly not be far short of half a million 
 sterling. 
 
 Much silly nonsense has been written and spoken about the pre- 
 Raphaelites as artists who sacrificed themselves for their con- 
 victions, and dwelt in an empyrean into which no considerations of a 
 pecuniary character were ever allowed to intrude. The facts are 
 entirely the other way, and such effort to make out that great artists 
 are different from all the rest of the world, and are more or less than 
 other men affected by the pleasures and desires of youth and man- 
 hood, seems to me as ridiculous as it is futile ; as contemptible as it is 
 false. Why should not Mr. Holman Hunt equally paint " The Light 
 of the World," and write to Mr. Bridger (who was the lucky possessor 
 of an art-union prize, value £']o), pointing out that " the amount of 
 his prize was the exact price of my work, as he would see in the 
 Academy list, and that I hoped it would please him to buy it " .■* Poor 
 Mr. Bridger ! To such a pass had all his discourses over the studio 
 
 24 
 
fire of " churches and brasses and other antiquarian matters " brought 
 him. He seems to have died hard, however, for he replies to this 
 "hope" of Hunt's "that he should look at all the pictures for sale; 
 and if mine was the best he should choose it : if not he should take 
 another. But after looking for a month or more, he came to mine 
 and bought it." 
 
 No, there is nothing inconsistent in an artist wanting a good price 
 for his work, in driving as hard a bargain for its sale as possible. 
 Two things only he must avoid in this connection. The first is, that 
 he must recognise that what binds the purchaser binds also the artist ; 
 or, in other words, that he is bound by the same rules of honesty and 
 obligation as other folk who buy and sell. And the other is, that he 
 must, before he sells, and after, do his work as well as he can — must 
 not have two classes of work — one which he does on commission, and 
 the other which he does for his own honour and pleasure. To these, 
 perhaps a third may be added as most desirable, namely, that an artist 
 who thus does his best for himself financially, should be specially care- 
 ful not to claim, or to assume, an indifference to the pecuniary result 
 of his painting ; for this is to run with the hare and hunt with the 
 hounds, and is, moreover, unfair to the purchaser, who in pictures, as 
 in other purchases, will not be wise to forget the wholesome legal 
 maxim of " caveat emptor ! " 
 
 To return to Hunt. His father was in very moderate circumstances, 
 and seeing that his boy would have to earn his living, we can hardly 
 blame him that he entertained the strongest objection to his becoming 
 an artist. In fact, he would not listen to his son's wishes in this 
 respect. Mr. Hunt, senior, appears to have entertained the common 
 opinion of those days with regard to artists, i.e. they were a dissolute, 
 reckless set of fellows, much akin to actors and authors, and other 
 low-class individuals — 
 
 . " perplext with impulses, 
 Sudden to start off cross-wise, not straight on, 
 Proclaiming what is right and wrong across, 
 And not along, this black thread through the blaze." 
 
 So, when he is twelve, Holman Hunt is taken from school, where his 
 studies in design, chiefly in his copy-books, do not appear to have 
 been adequately appreciated, and is placed with an auctioneer and 
 estate-agent " as a sort of probationary clerk." 
 
 The usual result follows : the probationary clerk gives his time to 
 Apollo rather than Mercury ; in other words, draws portraits instead 
 of leases, and paints the old orange- woman who rashly enters the office 
 in search of a customer. " I won't buy your oranges," says Hunt, 
 "but— I'll paint your portrait." You see. Mercury had taught him 
 E 25 
 
something :^{\.tx all— how to seize the occasion. According to Hunt, 
 " Old Hannah (the orange- woman) was delighted, and then and there 
 I painted her on a bit of sized-paper in her habit as she lived, her 
 basket on her head and an orange in her hand." Previously, however, 
 the seduction of the house-agent has been accomplished by the young 
 artist, for it turns out by the irony of fate that in his non-auctioneer- 
 ing moments he has artistic proclivities. And coming one day into 
 the office and finding his clerk shuffling something away in his desk, 
 he demands to see it, and discovers that he " can draw." " This led 
 to inquiries on his part as to whether I had painted, and it turned out 
 that he was himself fond of art, and, whenever he could get a chance, 
 practised painting. ' One day,' he said to me, ' when there's nothing 
 much to be done, you and I will shut ourselves in here and have a 
 day's painting together' ; and so it happened. Here were the tables 
 turned upon my father with a vengeance ! I was getting artistic en- 
 couragement from the very employer who should have been instilling 
 into me commercial principles. This lasted about a year and a half, 
 when, owing to my employer's retirement from business, I obtained 
 another situation in the City at a Manchester warehouse in Cateaton 
 Street, managed by a London agent of Richard Cobden. Here I sat 
 by myself in a little room looking out on three blank walls, and made 
 entries in a ledger, and seemed farther than ever from my desire of 
 becoming an artist. But here too, curiously enough, another artistic 
 friend turned up in the person of an occasional clerk whose business 
 it was to design patterns for the firm's calicoes, etc. etc. Surrepti- 
 tiously I also used to try my hand at designing, and attained sufficient 
 proficiency to enable my friend to make use of my designs on various 
 occasions. I remember an amusing incident of this period, which gave 
 me great delight at the time. The window of my room was made of 
 ground glass, and, having but little to do, I passed my time drawing 
 with both pen and pencil flies upon its roughened surface. A good 
 blot of ink sufficed for the body, and some delicate strokes with a hard 
 pencil for the wings, and at a short distance the deception was perfect. 
 Day by day the number of flies in that room increased, till one day, 
 my employer coming in, stopped suddenly in front of the window and 
 said, 'I can't make out how it is; every .day I come into this room 
 there seem to be more flies in it,' and he took out his handkerchief to 
 brush them away. 
 
 " So the time went on slowly till I had been nearly a year and a 
 half in the City, and disliked it more every day. My father allowed 
 me to spend my little salary in taking lessons of a City portrait- 
 painter, for it was only as a profession that he disapproved of artistic 
 employment. The lessons I received from this artist ingrained 
 certain habits and traditional practices of which in after years I had 
 much trouble to be rid. My master was in his faults as- well as his 
 virtues a follower of Sir Joshua Reynolds." 
 
 26 
 
. Apparently Mr. Hunt, senior, was not therefore very fortunate or 
 judicious in his attempts to wean his son from becoming an artist. 
 First of all comes the auctioneer who is secretly devoted to painting, 
 and then the lad is allowed to strengthen his natural artistic ability 
 by technical practice under a master ; then, to complete the paternal 
 discomfiture, the episode of Old Hannah the orange-woman, and 
 the auctioneer's indiscreet admiration of her portrait, which he shows 
 to all his friends; then the Manchester warehouseman and his 
 clerk who designs patterns for calicoes, till finally the news of his 
 son's artistic triumphs reaches the ears of Mr. Hunt, and there 
 is, we may fancy, a little family explosion of the kind we all know, 
 and the lad speaks out. " I will be an artist and nothing but an 
 artist, and if you keep me in the City till I am twenty-one, you'll 
 only be taking away so much of my chances of doing any good in the 
 future." That's the upshot of what Hunt describes himself as saying 
 to his father, and no doubt the father was secredy proud of his 
 
 son's resolution, and openly told him he might go to the 
 
 Academy — his own way, but that he must not expect to be 
 supported on the journey. So here again was the existence of the 
 P.R.B. secretly decided by such diverse elements and accidents as 
 an auctioneer's propensity for painting, an orange -woman's lack of 
 custom, and a father's tardy acquiescence in his son's ambition. For 
 had it been five years later before Hunt had been able to devote 
 himself to painting he would in all probability never have even met 
 Millais and Rossetti, both of whom were senior to him in the 
 Academy schools, and certainly would never have been the third 
 founder of the P.R.B. At the date of the above conversation (1844) 
 Hunt was sixteen. 
 
 Then ensues what Hunt describes with evident truth as a " hard 
 fight." Three days a week he paints portraits for a livelihood, when 
 he can get any to do, for these windfalls are rare ; and on the other 
 days he draws at the British Museum, either in the Sculpture 
 Gallery or the Print Room. Sometimes he copies pictures, some- 
 times " acts as journeyman to other copyists," but the most curious 
 part of his work is the alteration of existing portraits — portraits 
 which did not please their originals. Thus he puts another coat on 
 the portrait of a Mr. Godfrey and changes his expression — to order.. 
 The job is executed to Mr. Godfrey's satisfaction, and Hunt adds, 
 with his admirable business instinct in full working order, "duly 
 paid." 
 
 We can hardly, I think, overrate the beneficial effect of this 
 mixture of hard artistic study, and sharp struggle for the means to 
 live while the study was being carried on, on the character of Hunt's 
 subsequent painting, especially with regard to the carrying out of his 
 pre-Raphaelite theories. Evidently industry and patience were 
 daily taught the young artist by that best of teachers — necessity, and 
 
 27 
 
in the opposition, tacit indeed but unfaltering, which his adoption of 
 art as a profession encountered at home, his spirit was undoubtedly 
 trained to endure and overcome the wider opposition which was to 
 meet the style of his work hereafter. 
 
 A year goes by in this way, and Hunt goes up to the Academy 
 Schools. He is seventeen, and we might suppose from the joint result 
 of Hannah and the portraits above mentioned, the calico patterns, the 
 print room and the sculpture gallery study, and his youthful predis- 
 position towards art, that his admission as a student would be tolerably 
 certain. After all, if a lad wants to learn to draw at an Academy, the 
 probability would seem to be that he does not know already, or in 
 other words, that his work should be judged less by its compliance 
 with rule and convention, than by its promise and indication of native 
 talent. Such, however, is not, and never has been, the Royal 
 Academy practice, and admission to the school has been granted only 
 to those who could do after a certain highly stippled-up and elaborate 
 fashion an antique statue. In the sculpture galleries of the British 
 Museum there might have been seen any day during the past fifty 
 years, and may be seen now, forty or fifty boys and girls, of all ages 
 from ten to twenty, producing these useless and abominable chalk 
 and charcoal drawings by the dozen — by the hundred. Six mortal 
 weeks is the least time which each student spends in the vain 
 elaboration of these antique models ; and the result is judged not by 
 the manner in which the drawing has caught the spirit of the 
 original — or " les grands contours du dessin," as my old master 
 Legros used to say — but by the smoothness of the shading, the 
 " polish," so to speak, with which the light and shade are rendered. 
 
 No more stupid and absolutely futile method of selecting a student 
 could be conceived than this : no more certain manner of preventing 
 an artist in after life understanding and enjoying the beauty of antique 
 art could be adopted than this of making him labour for weeks, 
 without help or explanation, to reproduce the delicacies of light and 
 shade, and the details of modelling which he has neither learnt to 
 see, to enjoy, nor to understand. 
 
 Well, anyhow Holman Hunt's drawings were not " polished " 
 enough, and the Academy would have none of them at this date. 
 After some months he tries again, having in the interval polished 
 diligently, but still the work is not right, and again he is rejected. 
 At this, his long-suffering father loses patience and delivers himself 
 of an ultimatum in the form of a lecture, through which, despite its 
 kindness, we can read a grim determination. 
 
 " Then my father spoke very seriously. I was wasting my time 
 and energy ; I should do no good as a painter. My drawings were 
 
 28 
 
clever enough for friends to admire, but between them and the pro- 
 fessional class there was a great gulf, and so on : winding up with, 
 that he would allow me to try once more, but if that failed, ' I must 
 go back to the City.' " 
 
 _A year and a half had now passed since Hunt had left his 
 high stool in the warehouse, and he was apparently no nearer his 
 aim than before. We cannot blame the father's resolution, for we 
 may conceive how difficult it was for him to believe that the lad 
 was right, and the Academicians wrong in thinking that there was 
 here no stuff out of which a great artist might be made. Still it 
 must have been a nervous moment for Hunt when he stood for the 
 third and last time between the worlds of commerce and art, waiting 
 for the decision of the Royal Academy as to which should claim him. 
 We know the result: even Jupiter sometimes nods, and this must have 
 been an occasion, for the third drawing is — accepted. The City stool 
 is vacant for ever, and Mr. Hunt, senior, goes back to his commercial 
 avocations and his unfinished lawsuit, a wiser and a sadder man. Put 
 not your trust in Academies, is probably his motto for the remainder 
 of his days. 
 
 Mr. Hunt gives very few dates — none precisely ; but his entrance 
 to the Academy must have been towards the end of 1846. Millais 
 (then fifteen) was there already, and had won the silver medal 
 in the Antique School ; Rossetti, too, was a student, probably since 
 1844. He had entered in 1843 Sim's Drawing Academy in Queen 
 Street, Bloomsbury, a school then kept by F. S. Carey, son of the 
 translator of Dante, and probably been admitted to the Academy 
 in the following year. Had his entry been later Hunt would 
 have met him, as he did Millais, in the antique sculpture 
 room of the British Museum. This was not the case ; and it was 
 about a year later that Rossetti spoke to Hunt for the first time 
 (with one exception noted below), on the occasion of the exhibition 
 of the latter's first picture at the Royal Academy — " The Eve of 
 St. Agnes" (1848). This led to Rossetti's calling at Hunt's studio, 
 and subsequently to the formation of the P.R.B., but this portion 
 of the story is so important that I must deal with it in a separate 
 chapter. 
 
 29 
 
v.— THE FOUNDATION OF THE 
 PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD. 
 
 [his will be a convenient place to glance at the 
 English Art of this period, as it appeared to the 
 three men who were soon to influence it so materi- 
 ally. That there is a great difficulty in doing this 
 satisfactorily will be understood if the reader will 
 bear in mind that one of these painters (Millais) 
 was little given to expression of his beliefs ; another (Rossetti) 
 was so enthusiastic and changeable that he was led away entirely 
 by the feeling of the moment ; and the third (Hunt), though he has 
 put down in his notes reflections on various painters, has not done 
 so in such a manner as to lead us to believe his views were either 
 clear or determinate. Hunt's writing is in fact, if I may be pardoned 
 for saying so, as ?<«-pre-Raphaelite as is well possible ; it is, in studio 
 phrase, " blottesque," conventional, and " treacly." 
 
 I have tried to the best of my ability to extract from the views of 
 this painter some consistency of principle and idea, but have failed 
 to do so save in one or two instances. The nearest approach to a 
 definite idea is his dislike of prettiness, which turns up in one form 
 or another in most of the criticisms. In Landseer it appears as 
 " pomatumy texture " ; in Etty, " Parisian paper-hanger's taste " ; and 
 " cloysome richness and sweetness " ; Mulready is injured by his 
 taste for prettiness; Maclise by his for glamour; Leslie's style is 
 "miniature"; and Murillo's "large 'Holy Family' in the National 
 Gallery" is "rubbish." From such remarks the bias against pretti- 
 ness is evident enough, but that is by no means an uncommon bias 
 with artists. In a subsequent description, where Hunt tells us of 
 the quattro-centists he did admire in the National Gallery, we find 
 less to guide us. Francia, Garafola, Van Eyck are the only names 
 mentioned ; and there is a sudden dash of panegyric on some details 
 of the "Sta. Caterina" of Raphael and the " Bacchus and Ariadne" 
 
 30 
 
THE GLADNESS OF THE LAND 
 
 C. H. SHANNON 
 
 From the original drawing in the possession of the author 
 
of Titian. The really great pre-Raphaelite masters appear to have 
 attracted no notice from him at all— we hear nothing of Giotto and 
 the Giptteschi, nothing of Carpaccio, the Bellinis, Mantegna, Orcagna, 
 Angelico, Masaccio, Memling, Quentin-Matsys, and, strangest of all, 
 considering Hunt's prepossessions, of Albrecht Durer. On the other 
 hand, we^find an early portrait of his mother by Rubens spoken of as 
 " possessing this characteristic of care and humility," and a Holbein 
 as fascinating him by its delicate painting. 
 
 On the whole, in fact, I cannot discover from Hunt's own 
 description of his artistic prepossessions in these student days that 
 there was any idea whatever in his mind analogous to. that which 
 Ruskin afterwards attributed to him. It is true that in a later 
 portion of his reminiscences he states more or less definitely that this 
 was the case, but this statement is made so much in the very words 
 of Ruskin, and is so obviously a reflection of the defence of pre- 
 Raphaelitism by that great critic, that we may, I think, especially 
 when we remember that it was not written till forty years after 
 the events described, assume it to be rather the interpretation of the 
 writer, than the record of the artist. I find it myself quite impossible 
 to believe that a student who represents himself as having been a 
 frequenter of the National Gallery and an admirer of early Italian 
 and Flemish work therein, could have been (as he is represented by 
 Ruskin) so profoundly moved by seeing some engravings of Ghiberti, 
 as to have his principles entirely modified thereby — or could find in 
 them qualities of truth and simplicity which he had never found in 
 the other paintings of that period. Moreover, such a conversion is 
 not only incredible, but was in this instance entirely unnecessary. 
 Painting flies on the window of his master's counting-house was 
 Hunt's real conversion to pre-Raphaelitism — old Hannah the orange- 
 woman was his Ghiberti, and his slavery at commercial portraits, and 
 the re-coating of Mr. Godfrey and his friends, the school in which 
 he learned fidelity of detail, industry, and patience. Another bit of 
 real instruction, inspiration — in the old sense of the word — Hunt 
 received about this period at the National Gallery. While he was 
 copying Wilkie's "Blind Fiddler," a visitor "looking over me said 
 that Wilkie painted it without any dead colouring, but finished 
 each bit as fresco was done." The speaker (we are not told his 
 name) had been the painter's pupil. Hunt calls this the first bit of 
 genuine instruction he had received, and one which " in some ways, 
 perhaps, determined the course of my artistic life." He does not, 
 very properly, count the nominal instruction given in the Royal 
 Academy Schools ; in fact, says plainly that there was none worthy of 
 the name — in which opinion Mr. Watts, Royal Academician though 
 he be, is quite at one with him, saying frankly of his studenthood 
 there, which must have been but slightly before Hunt's time, " finding 
 
 31 
 
there was no teaching, I ceased to attend." On this instruction 
 of Wilkie's pupil, Hunt begins to remodel his practice : he tries for 
 definite meaning and precision in each touch ; he endeavours to get 
 rid of all careless, "loose," irresponsible handling; he purifies his 
 style, and it is from this point of view — the technical point of view — 
 be it observed, that he grows to admire the early workers whose 
 practice had been founded on fresco. 
 
 The opinions of Rossetti at this period appear to have been chiefly 
 influenced by his literary tastes. His brother, indeed, tells us that 
 he studied Retsch's outlines, and used to fill in his sketches for a 
 drawing club to which he belonged from a series of lithographs by 
 " Filippo Pistrucci"; and he disliked the conventional English and 
 French pictures alike in treatment and subject, hating them with 
 equal impartiality ; but with antique art I cannot find that he con- 
 cerned himself at all, his predilections being entirely in favour of the 
 romantic and mediaeval poetry, and this chiefly of the northern nations. 
 His study of Dante did not, according to his brother, begin till 1844, 
 at which time he was already familiar with Scott, Byron, Keats, 
 Coventry Patmore, Mr. Browning, Tennyson, and Shakespeare. The 
 Nibelungen Lied also was a great favourite, and a little later came 
 Coleridge and W. Bell Scott. Illustrations to one or other of these, 
 and subjects of a quasi -poetical, quasi -religious nature, such, for 
 instance, as the "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," formed the staple of his 
 art-work in these years, when he was but an infrequent attendant at 
 the Academy Schools. It is notable that the mediaeval bias thus 
 early acquired, and very plainly evident in both the " Annunciation " 
 and the "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," never entirely deserted him, 
 nor did he ever entirely abandon the use of symbolism. How 
 different were the practice, the education, and the aim of Hunt I 
 have just shown — as different as had been his early reading of 
 Homer and Plutarch, geometrical and mathematical books, and the 
 auctioneer's ledger. A strange dislike of sculpture was at this time, 
 and, I believe, later, a characteristic of Rossetti's art feeling ; and I 
 cannot find that, apart from his Shakespeare study, the drama either 
 written or acted influenced him. It must be remembered also with 
 regard to his religious compositions, that not only was Rossetti an 
 Italian by descent, but he was by training, no matter how much he 
 may have abandoned the creed in after life, a Catholic. The arrange- 
 ment of bringing up the girls in the religion of the mother, and the 
 boys in that of the father — adopted by the Rossettis — was more 
 common then than now. No doubt the Catholic influence working 
 through Dantesque poetry coloured his painting from the first, as 
 indeed it coloured his poetry, but the religious side of his art was 
 always more apparent than real. I can find neither in the records 
 of the man's life, all given by friends and partizans, in his letters, of 
 
 32 
 
which I have many and have read more, nor in any of his writings 
 or pictures, any really religious feeling. A spiritual aspect there is 
 to his art, but of a most indefinite and dreamy character : more a 
 protest against the empire of the body than a forgetfulness of its 
 influence. 
 
 Of Millais I have as yet said nothing, because his part, then as 
 now, was not the part of the thinker, the reformer, or the dreamer, 
 but the part of the doer. He was the " Good-tempered man " of the 
 comniunity, caring nothing much for all these details of theory or 
 principle, tradition or sentiment, but ready always to fall in with his 
 friends' views, reflect his friends' feelings, and sometimes even, if all 
 tales be true, borrow his friends' conceptions. 
 
 " With these brief hints as to the views of the three young artists, 
 let us hear how they founded their celebrated association. 
 
 Rossetti had seen at the Academy, and been greatly pleased with 
 Hunt's " Eve of St. Agnes," and after congratulating him warmly 
 thereon, had asked if he might come to Hunt's studio, and " thus the 
 three Pre-Raphaelite Brethren were first brought into intimate rela- 
 tions." Before this Millais and Rossetti had known each other, and 
 Hunt and Millais had made acquaintance at the Museum, but the 
 three had not associated together. The result of the acquaintance is 
 that Rossetti takes a studio with Hunt in Cleveland Street, and thither 
 continually comes Madox Brown full of advice for his pupil Rossetti, 
 and with a little to spare for his pupil's friend ; and thither comes also 
 Millais, " his spirit on fire with eagerness to seize whatever he saw 
 to be good." Hunt has a solid capital of £^0 from his art-union 
 prize and " £'j from portraits " (what is your price nowadays for 
 a portrait, Mr. Hunt, I wonder ?), and Rossetti — but no one knows 
 now, or ever did know, what Rossetti had or had not in the way of 
 money. I suppose, however, he bought his draperies, and three 
 expensive lay figures, and that sentry-box arrangement to put them 
 in, which tickled his master's fancy so much. 
 
 •One evening the comrades go to tea with the Millais family, and 
 there are shown, to pass away the evening, I suppose, which possibly 
 went rather slowly, "a book of engravings of the frescoes in the 
 Campo Santo at Pisa." Let Hunt tell the story himself: — 
 
 " It was probably the finding of this book at this special time 
 which caused the establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite Brother- 
 hood. Millais, Rossetti, and myself were all seeking for some 
 sure ground, some starting-point for our art which would be 
 secure, if it were ever so humble. As we searched through 
 this book of engravings we found in them, or thought we 
 found, that freedom from corruption, pride, and disease for 
 F 33 
 
which we sought. Here there was, at least, no trace of decline, 
 no conventionality, no arrogance. Whatever the imperfection, 
 the whole spirit of the art was simple and sincere — was, as 
 Ruskin afterwards said, ' eternally and unalterably true.' Think 
 what a revelation it was to find such work at such a moment, 
 and to recognise it with the triple enthusiasm of our three 
 spirits. If Newton could say of his theory of gravitation, that 
 his conviction of its truth increased tenfold from the moment in 
 which he got one other person to believe in it, was it wonderful 
 that, when we three saw, as it were, in a flash of lightning, this 
 truth of art, it appealed to us almost with the force of a revolu- 
 tion ? Neither then nor afterwards did we affirm that there 
 was not much healthy and good art after the time of Raphael ; 
 but it appeared to us that afterwards art was so frequently 
 tainted with this canker of corruption that it was only in the 
 earlier work we could find with certainty absolute health. Up 
 to a definite point the tree was healthy ; above it, disease began : 
 side by side with life there appeared death. Think how dif- 
 ferent were the three temperaments which saw this clearly. I 
 may say plainly of myself, that I was a steady and even 
 enthusiastic worker, trained by the long course of early diffi- 
 culties and opposition of which I have told the story, and 
 determined to find the right path for my art. Rossetti, with 
 his spirit alike subtle and fiery, was essentially a proselytiser, 
 sometimes to an almost absurd degree, but possessed, alike in his 
 poetry and painting, with an appreciation of beauty of the most 
 intense quality. Millais, again, stood in some respects midway 
 between us, showing a rare combination of extraordinary artistic 
 faculty with an amount of sterling English commonsense. 
 And, moreover, he was in these early days, beyond almost any 
 one with whom I have been acquainted, full of a generous, 
 'quick enthusiasm ; a spirit on fire with eagerness to seize what- 
 ever he saw to be good, which shone out in every line of his 
 face, and made it, as Rossetti once said, look sometimes like the 
 face of an angel. All of us had our qualities, though it does 
 not come within the scope of this paper to analyse them fully. 
 They were such as rather helped than embarrassed us in work- 
 ing together. 
 
 " ' Pre-Raphaelite ' was adopted, after some discussion, as a dis- 
 tinctive prefix, though the word had first been used as a term 
 of contempt by our enemies. And as we bound ourselves to- 
 gether, the word ' Brotherhood ' was suggested by Rossetti as 
 preferable to clique or association. It was in a little spirit of 
 fun that we thus agreed that Raphael, the Prince of Painters, 
 was the inspiring influence of the art of the day ; for we saw 
 
 34 
 
that the practice of contemporary painters was as different from 
 that of the master whose example they quoted, as established 
 interest or indifference had ever made the conduct of disciples. 
 It was instinctive prudence, however, which suggested to us 
 that we should use the letters P.R.B., unexplained, on our 
 pictures (after the signature) as the one mark of our union. 
 
 The first work that we agreed to do after this was a series of 
 designs for Keats' ' Isabella.' These were to be executed 
 entirely on our new principles, and subsequently etched for 
 publication. Millais chose as his subject the household of 
 Lorenzo's brothers at meals. Rossetti at first made excuses for 
 procrastination. I did one of Lorenzo at his desk in the ware- 
 house, in order that thus (with Millais' design) the lover's 
 position in the house should be made clear to the spectator 
 from the outset. Though Millais had much oil work on hand 
 which had to be finished in the old style, he was impatient to 
 begin in the new manner, and he announced his determination 
 to paint his design. But his old work still hung about, until 
 we were almost doubtful of the time before the sending-in day 
 being sufficient for the task, when suddenly, about November, 
 the whole atmosphere of his studio was changed, and the new 
 white canvas was installed on the easel. Day by day advanced, 
 at a pace beyond all calculation, the picture now known to the 
 whole of England,^ which I venture to say is the most wonder- 
 ful painting that any youth still under twenty years of age ever 
 did in the world. 
 
 ' In my studio Rossetti's plan of work promised to do all that was 
 desired. The picture was 'The Education of Mary Virgin,' 
 and he had advanced it considerably, but, from his unchecked 
 impatience at difficulties, the interruptions to our work, to mine 
 as much as to his, were so serious that once I had to go out 
 walking with him to argue that, without more self-restraint on 
 his part, we should certainly lose our chances of appearing, in 
 the same season, in a band with Millais. He took this remon- 
 strance in the best part, and applied himself with new patience 
 to his work, which ultimately possessed in the important parts 
 the most exquisite beauty and grace; he exhibited it subse- 
 quently in a gallery in Portland Place. Millais' picture was 
 seen with wonder when finished, and he sold it before his 
 ' show ' day. My ' private view ' was without any visitors, but 
 the picture was delivered by myself in the evening, still wet, at 
 the Academy. Before we were admitted to varnish our 
 pictures we learned that they had been hung as pendants to 
 
 ^ " Lorenzo and Isabella." 
 
 35 
 
one another in fair places just above the line, and in the Times 
 I remember the notice of the exhibition began with two columns 
 of comment upon our pictures as the remarkable feature of the 
 collection. The fact itself was an unexpectedly gratifying 
 testimony to the impression the works had made. On going 
 to the Academy at seven in the morning (to get the longest 
 opportunity, if necessary, for work before the public were 
 admitted at twelve), we were received by many of the members 
 with cordial compliments — some introducing themselves to me 
 for this purpose — but there was an opposing spirit of indignation 
 expressing itself loudly by some artists." 
 
 To make a long story short, Rossetti's picture was sold on the 
 private view day. Hunt's shortly afterwards for £\QO, through the 
 intervention of Egg, one of the Royal Academicians. The purchaser 
 was Mr. Gibbons, who appears to have bought the work, if we may 
 trust Hunt's account, as a matter of charity, for he did not hang it 
 in his collection, and on his death it was the only picture sold by the 
 family. As I shall not have occasion to refer again to this com- 
 position, I may add here that there was perhaps some little excuse 
 for this proceeding on the part of Mr. Gibbons and his family, for 
 the " Rienzi swearing to avenge the Death of his Brother " is not a 
 picture which even the admirers of Mr. Hunt would at the- present 
 day esteem very highly. It is laborious in detail and execution, and 
 of some dramatic power ; but the colour is remarkably garish and 
 unpleasant, and the attitudes and gestures of the various figures 
 awkward and strained. The same criticism applies to some extent 
 to the succeeding picture by this artist, " The Christian Missionary," 
 the landscape portion of which was painted on the Lea marshes, and 
 which was exhibited the succeeding year, when it was hung as a 
 pendant to the " Christ in the Home of his Parents," by Millais. 
 
 "While we had been quietly working, the hostile feeling against us 
 had shown itself to be wilder and more extended. A newspaper had 
 in its gossiping column revealed the meaning of P.R.B., which had 
 been disclosed, through the weakness of Rossetti, to a rank gossiper, 
 and far and near it seemed as if the honour of Raphael was the 
 feeling dearest of all to the bosom of England, and that this we had 
 impiously assailed. The leading journals denounced our work as 
 iniquitous and infamous, and, to make our enormity more shameful 
 in extra-artistic circles, the great Charles Dickens wrote a leading 
 article against Millais' picture in Household Words. This was an 
 attack upon the whole of us, and though my picture was not men- 
 tioned, the prejudice excited was more practically damaging to me, 
 since Millais had sold his work, while mine had still the duty to 
 perform of tempting 150 guineas out of the pockets of some admirer 
 
 36 
 
or approver, before I could go on with a new work. Sometimes I 
 went to the Exhibition stealthily, hoping to hear some opinion ex- 
 pressed, but as soon as the public arrived at my picture they invariably 
 said, ' Oh, this is one of those preposterous pre-Raphaelite works,' 
 and went on to the next without looking again upon the canvas. 
 One fellow-student, some years my senior, told me that he regretted 
 to see me mixed up with this charlatanism ; that he perfectly under- 
 stood that our object was to attract great attention to ourselves by 
 our extravagant work ; and that when we had succeeded in making 
 ourselves notorious (which, being undeniably clever fellows, we should 
 soon do), we should paint pictures of real merit. I thereupon wickedly 
 said that he had divined our purpose, and besought him to respect 
 the secret. ..." 
 
 37 
 
VI.— THE INFLUENCE OF JOHN RUSKIN. 
 
 HE account given in the last chapter is curiously 
 reminiscent even in language of that more cele- 
 brated description of the founding of the Brother- 
 hood by Mr. Ruskin — a description which I have 
 shown some ground for believing was partly 
 imaginary and wholly mistaken, not in the rela- 
 tion of incident, but the explanation of aim. For though the 
 movement and the inspiring influence of natural study and abandon- 
 ment of convention were real and important enough, the choice of 
 a name was scarcely more than a joke. The religious and moral 
 principles with which Ruskin credited the young artists were, in 
 truth, in the case of two of their number, entirely non-existent, and 
 even with the third, at this time, extremely doubtful. Hunt himself 
 says the name was chosen " in a spirit of fun " : Rossetti says, in so 
 many words, that though the movement was real the Brotherhood was 
 a joke ; so says Woolner ; so says Madox Brown. And though, 
 perhaps, these painters in later years may have somewhat underrated 
 or been ashamed of the seriousness of their youthful confederacy, 
 there is the strongest intrinsic evidence that Ruskin's high moral 
 and metaphysical explanation thereof was one of those ingenious 
 theories of which he has given so many to the world, but which 
 have no objective validity. On this point, however, where authori- 
 ties contradict one another so flatly, the historian must decide by 
 collateral evidence, all of which is in favour of the less serious 
 interpretation of the " Brotherhood." 
 
 The artist who most nearly approached to Ruskin's ideal, but 
 non-existent pre-Raphaelite, was undoubtedly Holman Hunt. Yet 
 ■even his art is not essentially the realistic art at which Ruskin 
 imagined the P.R.B. aimed. Hunt would disclaim the name of 
 realist perhaps more emphatically than any other. I do not quite 
 know what word he would take in its place, nor is it, I think, very 
 
 38 
 
certain, or even probable that the painter could himself precisely 
 define his position. The nearest approach to such a definition with 
 which I am acquainted is comprised in the following quotation : — 
 
 " While we differed so far, it may be seen that we were never, 
 what often we have been called, realists. I think the art would 
 have ceased to have the slightest interest for any one of the 
 three painters concerned had the object only been to make a 
 representation, elaborate or unelaborate, of a fact in Nature. 
 Independent of the consideration that the task would put out of 
 operation the faculty of' making man ' how like a god,' it seemed 
 then, as it does now, that a mere imitator gradually comes to see 
 Nature so clay-like and meaningless — so like only to what one 
 sees when illness brings a heavy cloud before the eyes — that his 
 pictures or statues make a spectator feel, not how much more 
 beautiful the world is than she seemed before, but only that she 
 is a tedious infliction, or even an oppressive nightmare. . . . On 
 one other point there has been misapprehension which it is now 
 time to correct. In agreeing to use the utmost elaboration in 
 painting our first pictures, we never meant more than that the 
 practice was essential for training the eye and the hand of the 
 young artist ; we should never have admitted that the relinquish- 
 ment of this habit of work by a matured painter would have 
 made him less of a pre-Raphaelite. I can say this the better 
 now because, although it is not true, it is often said, that my 
 detail is microscopic, I have retained later than either of my 
 companions the pencilling of a student. When I take to large 
 brushes, and enrich my canvases with impasto, it will imply that 
 the remnant of my life would not suffice to enable me to express 
 my thoughts in other fashion, and that I have in my own opinion 
 obtained enough from severe discipline to trust myself again to 
 the self-confident handling of my youth, to which I have already 
 referred." 
 These words are particularly memorable in connection with 
 Raskin's description of this movement, as they show that the great 
 writer to a considerable extent misconceived even Hunt's position, and 
 mistook the means adopted by him for training the hand and eye, for 
 the actual and final aim of the painter. The " highest possible degree 
 of completion" to which Ruskin alludes as the principle of pre-Raphael- 
 itism was, we see, even with Hunt, but an incident of its practice — 
 an incident which might or might not be abandoned when the skill of 
 hand, to acquire which it had been serviceable, was gained. As might 
 have been expected, this minute realisation ultimately shaped itself 
 in the- work of each artist in accordance with personal idiosyncrasy. 
 We can trace the influence in Millais' brilliant painting of texture 
 and surface, we find it translated in Rossetti's art to a clear vision 
 
 39 
 
of each symbolical accessory, and in Hunt's great religious pictures 
 our attention is attracted by the multiplicity and the elaboration of 
 the detail by aid of which the artist has worked out his conception. 
 The difference of aim, as of manner, is in this respect very marked, 
 Millais painting his surroundings often with what Ruskin once 
 characterised as " dull and objectless veracity " ; Rossetti using his 
 details for the double purpose of increasing the spiritual significance, 
 and the colour loveliness of his picture, while Hunt appears to take 
 the detail of his picture from the point of view of an earnest preacher 
 or faithful historian, losing frequently the Tightness of material aspect 
 in his desire to omit no portion of his subject, and caring little, if at 
 all, whether the added detail be beautiful or no, so long as it be an 
 intellectual item in the telling of his story. I fear to weary my 
 readers on this point, or I should have been very desirous to analyse 
 from this point of view such typical pictures as Millais' "Black 
 Brunswicker," Hunt's " Isabella and the Pot of Basil," and Rossetti's 
 "Beloved," or the "Blue Bower": any one, however, who is 
 interested in the subject can eeisily work out such an analysis and 
 comparison, one which is not only interesting in the present con- 
 nection, but which points to three phases of artistic energy — the 
 spiritually significant, the intellectually interesting, and the crafts- 
 manly perfect — of which all very great art partakes, and becomes the 
 greater or the less perfect as it preserves or ignores their relation 
 and their importance. A few words on this subject will be found in 
 the concluding portion of these notes. 
 
 Most readers will, however, agree that, supposing three young 
 artists to have taken such a serious, almost religious, view of their 
 vocation as that indicated by Ruskin, it would be extremely im- 
 probable that they would in after years — and so very quickly — 
 entirely abandon, not only their special principles, and their general 
 point of view, but even their early habit of earnestness and moral 
 theory ; and yet this was certainly the case with the pre-Raphaelites. 
 No doubt Mr. Holman Hunt is, and always was, in his way, a man 
 who regarded his art as a religion, and indeed, in his mind, the two 
 seem to be mixed up inextricably — of which more anon ; but this 
 applies in no slightest degree to either Rossetti or Millais. In 
 the painting, and, indeed, so far as the world knows, in the intel- 
 lectual and emotional lives of these painters, the religious influence 
 is absolutely undiscoverable. Of Rossetti we can speak with 
 certainty from the records left us by himself in his poems; and 
 the whole life, genial, healthy, jovial, and successful as it has 
 been, of Sir John Millais, is that of a cheery artistic Gallio, who, 
 whatever may be his religious convictions, does not obtrude them 
 upon others, or even worry over them himself. It is opposed to 
 everything ever recorded of him, or seen in him, or spoken by 
 him, that he should as a boy have reasoned about art "being 
 
 40 
 
tainted with the canker of corruption." That is not the idea of 
 the painter but of the literary man: it is Ruskin, not Millais, 
 Rossetti, or even Hunt, though the last-mentioned uses the expres- 
 sion, who thinks along those lines of moral worth or decadence, 
 and reads into the art question, the religious bias. No doubt the 
 influence of Ruskin had already reached Hunt, who had had Modem 
 Painters lent him by a fellow-student, and been greatly impressed 
 by the teaching of the "graduate." He tells us that "to get 
 through the book I had to sit up most of the night more than 
 once, and I returned it before I had got half the good there was in 
 it ; but of all readers, none so strongly as myself could have felt 
 that it was expressly written for him." 
 
 There - is no evidence, however, that this influence touched 
 Rossetti in any way, indeed there is the strongest evidence to the 
 contrary ; for Rossetti regarded Ruskin from the first, if we may 
 trust the evidence of his letters, in the light of a picture-buyer, and 
 one who could help the P.R.B. from his writings, and his purse, rather 
 than as a teacher and a guide. Indeed, in these latter characters 
 he altogether declined to accept him, and as long as the intimacy 
 between the critic and the painter lasted it was continually strained 
 by the one insisting upon teaching, and the other refusing to be 
 taught, till at last there came a row royal, and the friendship was at 
 an end. I rather feel inclined to agree with W. M. Rossetti's view 
 upon this point, which is, that his brother was right and wise in 
 resisting dictation ; and there seems to be little doubt but that Ruskin 
 was quite human enough to be very genuinely surprised and very 
 frankly annoyed at such resistance. In after years, at all events, 
 when the Professor's influence was at its height, it is remarkable that 
 there is scarcely a mention of Rossetti's work. 
 
 One very prevalent misconception on this point which I have never 
 seen corrected is, that Ruskin discovered, as it were, the P.R.B., and 
 was their first champion. This was not the case : his knowledge 
 of them was due to the poet Coventry Patmore, an old friend of 
 Rossetti's, who not only informed Ruskin on the subject, but urged 
 upon him the propriety of writing in defence of the young painters' 
 work. Moreover, the intercourse between Rossetti and Ruskin did 
 not commence till 1854, by which time the "Brotherhood" was six 
 years old and about at an end, and both Rossetti's early oil-pictures, 
 " The Girlhood of Mary Virgin " and the " Annunciation " (now in 
 the National Gallery), had been painted and sold. Millais had painted 
 the " Christ in the Home of his Parents," the " Supper in the House 
 of Isabella," and Hunt "The Christian Missionary," the "Claudio 
 and Isabella," the " Rienzi," and other pictures. 
 
 In the first letter of Mr, Ruskin to the Times on the subject of 
 G 41 
 
the pre-Raphaelite painters, dated 1851, he tells us he has "no 
 acquaintance with any of these artists, and very imperfect sympathy 
 with them," and proceeds to explain that the tendency of their paint- 
 ing is " Romanist" and " Tractarian " ; in the second letter he again 
 expresses in another fashion his dislike of their " morbid tendencies," 
 though he by this time attributes these to another origin. In these 
 letters there is no mention whatever of Rossetti, though there is a 
 high panegyric on a picture by Mr. Charles Collins, one of the 
 weaker members of the brotherhood, who subsequently abandoned 
 painting, and made for himself some name in literature before his early 
 death. It is notable that one of the pictures by Millais referred to in 
 these letters is the " Woodman's Daughter," an illustration to one of 
 Coventry Patmore's poems, and it is very probable that this circum- 
 stance had some connection with Patmore's interest in th'e P.R.B. 
 I believe the author of The Angel in the House was at this time 
 acquainted with Millais and Rossetti, if not with Hunt. The next 
 letters to the Times from Ruskin are dated three years later, and in 
 these mention is altogether confined to Hunt's work. The Millais 
 " Huguenot " was in the same exhibition, if I am not mistaken. 
 
 There was some excuse perhaps for the omission of Rossetti's name 
 from these letters, as his work was not in the Academy at any period 
 during his lifetime, but the "Annunciation" had been publicly 
 exhibited at the Portland Street Gallery, and the painter's work made 
 known to Ruskin by Rossetti's first patron M'Cracken, I only insert 
 these facts to show how very limited, tardy, and incomplete was 
 the part taken by Ruskin in the pre-Raphaelite movement. The 
 truth is, that from the first he had only sympathy with it on those 
 points where the subjects or the sentiment of the pictures were such 
 as he was in touch with. This is shown very clearly by the descrip- 
 tions of Hunt's pictures, and the amount of space and consideration 
 given to their literary and symbolical meaning, in comparison with 
 their artistic qualities. Moreover, if we take Ruskin's chief work, 
 published during the very thick of the pre-Raphaelite movement, 
 i.e. from 1846- 1860, we find that the name of Rossetti is never even 
 mentioned in one of the five volumes ; that Millais' name occurs in 
 the index but twice (once in a note), and that incorrectly, for the note 
 was expunged years before the index edition was published ; and 
 the second reference is a bare mention of " The Huguenot," coupled 
 with "The Awakened Conscience," the artist's name appearing in 
 neither case. Thus it is literally the case that, in the completed 
 edition of Modern Painters, the names of both Millais ^ and Rossetti 
 are entirely omitted ; and this, despite the fact that the third member 
 of the school, Holman Hunt, is, according to the index, mentioned 
 
 1 I am of course fully aware that a good reason might have been given for the lack of 
 reference to the former of these artists ; but there could have been none for the omission of 
 Rossetti 
 
 42 
 
I 
 
no less than ten times — on each occasion with enthusiastic admira- 
 tion and unstinted praise. Even if we admit the artistic equality 
 of Hunt with Rossetti and Millais, and this, I think, as I shall show 
 hereafter, can hardly be seriously maintained, Mr. Ruskin's silence 
 as to the two last-named painters can only be explained on the 
 ground of deliberate intention, and can hardly be justified in a critic 
 who had from 1851 downwards posed as the champion of pre- 
 Raphaelitism. In saying this I am not forgetting the mention made 
 by Ruskin elsewhere of these painters. I am only pointing out 
 that it was the correspondence of the subject-matter and the spirit of 
 Hunt's work, and not the artistic excellence, which occasioned our 
 great critic's enthusiasm. He found in the religious intention of the 
 painter, in his somewhat blind and unselecting fidelity to Nature, 
 and most of all perhaps in his subject-matter, a complete echo of 
 his own theories of the raison ditre of art ; and, both in form and 
 spirit, this great, this surpassing excellence, as Ruskin conceived it 
 to be, rendered him comparatively blind to the imperfections of 
 Hunt's painting, and comparatively indifferent to the superior crafts- 
 manship of Millais, and the infinitely higher imaginative power of 
 Rossetti. 
 
 It was a great misfortune that this should have been the case, not 
 only for the painters concerned, but for the cause of fine art in 
 England. When we consider the unique power possessed by 
 Ruskin of rousing the enthusiasm of the young, and of setting forth 
 the beauties with which he was in sympathy, whether they existed 
 in pictures or in nature, it is beyond measure vexatious to find his 
 justice and his critical insight so frequently blinded by the necessity 
 of finding a definite unalterable correspondence and connection 
 between fine art and a special religious theory. Had he been con- 
 tent to assert the correspondence and connection of art with the 
 intellectual and spiritual needs of humanity, as well as with its 
 physical pleasures and experiences, he would, I think, have been on 
 safe ground, at all events he would have been able to justify his 
 admiration of this, that, or the other school, or painter, without twist- 
 ing the facts of history, or action, and seeking to show that art 
 flourished or decayed in proportion to the growth or decay in religious 
 belief and national honour — a contention which is absolutely contra- 
 dicted by all historical evidence, and by none more than the true 
 history of the Stones of Venice. 
 
 We must not forget that Ruskin's letters to the Times were not 
 written till the spring of 1851 ; in other words, two years after the 
 foundation of the Brotherhood, and at the period when the strongest 
 attacks were made upon the P.R.B. It is rather interesting to 
 remember that on this occasion Charles Dickens himself became an 
 art critic, and wrote an article in Household Words against pre- 
 
 43 
 
Raphaelitism. The prevailing opinion appears to have been that 
 the Brethren were only seeking to attract attention by the extrava- 
 gance of their work, and the critics undeniably treated them with 
 great harshness. Fortunately this condemnation had its fitting 
 reward, for a chance was given thereby to Ruskin's championship of 
 the cause; a championship which was at the time extraordinarily 
 effective. In the Exhibition, concerning which the first of these 
 letters was written. Hunt's work, for the first time perhaps, really 
 merited high praise. His picture of " Valentine and Sylvia " in that 
 year undoubtedly contained much, especially in the painting of the 
 dry leaves and woodland landscape, that was very beautiful.* And, 
 whether it was from the influence of Rossetti and Millais, with the 
 former of whom Hunt had been staying at Sevenoaks while the 
 sylvan portion of his picture was painted, or from other and more 
 personal causes, the colour of this picture is far superior to any of the 
 earlier productions of the artist. The fault which Ruskin found with 
 the school as a whole at this time, a fault, by the way, which could 
 only be fairly alleged against two of its members, was the " common- 
 ness of feature in many of the principal figures," did really exist, and 
 was traceable a good many years subsequently in the work of Millais ; 
 as for instance in the celebrated picture of "Apple Blossoms," in 
 which the faces of the children are of an intensity of ugliness hardly 
 to be atoned for, even by the splendid painting ^of the blossoming 
 tree. Those, too, who remember what may be called the last pre- 
 Raphaelite picture by this artist, i.e. the "Vale of Rest," will pro- 
 bably agree that the faces of the two nuns suffer from the same 
 hard unattractiveness. However, with this exception, Ruskin's 
 criticism of the "Valentine and Sylvia" is enthusiastically favourable. 
 
 " Further examination of this picture has even raised the estimate 
 I had previously formed of its marvellous truth in detail and 
 splendour in colour ; nor is its general conception less deserving 
 of praise ; the action of Valentine, his arm thrown round Sylvia, 
 and his hand clasping hers at the same instant as she falls at his 
 feet, is most faithful and beautiful, nor less so the contending of 
 doubt and distress with awakening hope in the half-shadowed, 
 half- sunlit countenance of Julia. Nay, even the momentary 
 struggle of Proteus with Sylvia just past, is indicated by the 
 trodden grass and broken fungi of the foreground. But all this 
 thoughtful conception and absolutely inimitable execution fail in 
 making immediate appeal to the feelings, owing to the unfor- 
 tunate type chosen for the face of Sylvia. Certainly this 
 cannot be she whose lover was 
 
 . ' as rich in having such a jewel, 
 As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearl.' " 
 
 44 
 
While Hunt was still waiting for the sale of this picture, he 
 obtained through Mr. Dyce a commission to clean and restore the 
 wall paintings by Rigaud at the Trinity House. This job he 
 executed after the usual manner of "restorers" — to wit, by 
 repainting as much as possible of the original, and making additions 
 whenever he felt inclined. 
 
 We have now brought the pre-Raphaelite story down to the 
 summer of 185 1 : the Germ has been born and died;^ the pictures 
 which excited most opposition painted and exhibited ; the first 
 onslaught of criticism endured more or less patiently and successfully, 
 and in some degree repelled, if not defeated, by Ruskin's defence. 
 Millais has from the first been selling his pictures and laying by 
 money. Rossetti has been up and down in spirits and cash, half a 
 hundred times at least; now beating the town for recruits to the 
 Brotherhood ; now, to use Brown's excessively plain description, 
 " lying, howling, on his belly in my studio," declaring that he was a 
 fool, and showing that he was a child ; and in the intervals of proselyt- 
 ism and despondency turning out beautiful pen-and-ink designs by 
 the score ; projecting and commencing oil-pictures by the dozen, and, 
 having pressed all the neighbouring chambermaids into his service as 
 models, he has changed them into queens and fairies, virgins and 
 mediaeval ladies, and such other religious or romantic material as he 
 stood most in need of. There is really great fun for any one with the 
 slightest sense of humour, who may happen to be a little tired of the 
 high falutin' and frequently unintelligible praise bestowed upon this 
 painter by his partizans, to read Rossetti's own words about his 
 pictures, and imagine him talking of the " Annunciation " habitually 
 as " the blessed white eyesore," and " the blessed white daub," and 
 describing how he has put a " gilt saucer " behind the head of the 
 angel, "which crowns the China-ese character of the picture." 
 
 All this time, too. Hunt has been labouring manfully along, under 
 the difficulties I have described, just succeeding in keeping himself 
 afloat by his industry and perseverance, and his readiness to turn his 
 hand to any form of art whatever, from putting a new coat on some 
 City man's portrait, working for a copyist in the National Gallery, 
 retouching a fresco, or drawing for the wood-engravers. To sum up 
 the state of affairs shortly, Millais' position is secure ; Rossetti can 
 sell his water-colours to friends as fast as he can do them, and has 
 besides two or three steady purchasers ; and Hunt alone has as yet 
 failed either to form a clientele, or to obtain any certain sale for his 
 pictures, large or small. This was the culminating point, the last 
 severe struggle, of this last-named painter's career. And, to add to 
 
 1 My endeavour in this essay being to avoid as far as possible the repetition of earlier 
 writers I have not told the oft-repeated story of the Germ. This will be found by any one 
 unacquainted with it, in the works of Mr. Hall Caine, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Mr. F. B. Sharp, 
 and many others. 
 
 45 
 
its ititensity, Mr, Hunt, senior, appears once more upon the scene, 
 again preaching with the kindest intention the superiority of com- 
 merce to art. It appears that the old gentleman had been severely 
 chaffed by his City friends about the P.R.B. and his son's painting. 
 They had even offered to bet him that the lad's pictures would be 
 taken down from the Academy walls, a suggestion which had been 
 actually made in one of the leading papers. We can fancy him 
 gravely inquiring of his son whether he thought this would really 
 be the case, and when his mind is assured on this point, expressing 
 " his conviction as confirmed, that in this country it was useless for a 
 man without influential and rich friends to hope to succeed as an 
 artist. There were too many established interests to overturn, ' and 
 you,' he said, ' have not even the party feeling in your favour of a 
 public school.' (There had been an attempt made to get me into the 
 Blue Coat School.) ' You have done wonders, I will maintain — more 
 than could have been expected, but it is hopeless.' " 
 
 Then ensues one of the pleasantest incidents in the whole story, 
 which may well serve to introduce the account of Millais, and the 
 turn of the tide in favour of the pre-Raphaelite Brethren. 
 
 46 
 
VII.— JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS AND THE 
 PALMY DAYS OF THE BROTHERHOOD. 
 
 S I have said, Millais was from the first in a more 
 favourable position than that of either Hunt or 
 Rossetti. He lived at home with his parents,- who 
 thoroughly believed in his vocation, and studied art 
 with their fullest assent and confidence, and he had 
 been successful in his earliest student days. At a 
 phenomenally early age he gained admission to the Royal Academy, 
 and before he was fifteen had taken the principal medal in the Antique 
 School. Subsequently he gained the highest honour the Academy 
 Schools bestow, i.e. the gold medal for historical painting, with a 
 picture entitled " Pizarro before the Inca of Peru." From the close 
 of his studentship, moreover, his black-and-white work was in request 
 for book illustration, and the first picture painted by him after the 
 founding of the P.R.B. was sold before it went into the Academy 
 for ;^ioo. He was at that time only nineteen. 
 
 Despite the old Latin saying, surely here was to be seen a "happy 
 man," one gifted with indisputable artistic genius, carefully trained from 
 earliest youth, with sufficient means to prompt and not enough to stifle 
 ambition, rich with friends and honours abroad, and pride, confidence, 
 and love at home ; splendid in health and physical beauty, generous 
 in spirit, happy in temperament. And for a last best gift of all there 
 is the testimony of Hunt that between himself and Rossetti stood 
 Millais midway, " showing a rare combination of artistic faculty with 
 an amount of sterling English commonsense. And moreover he was 
 in those early days, beyond almost any one with whom I have been 
 acquainted, full of a generous, quick enthusiasm ; a spirit on fire with 
 eagerness to seize whatever he saw to be good, which shone out in 
 every line of his face and made it, as Rossetti once said, look some- 
 times like the face of an angel." 
 
 47 
 
Such was the boy who came to Hunt's assistance when his father, 
 overborne by ridicule and the opinion of his acquaintances, expressed 
 his conviction as confirmed, that " in this country it was useless for a 
 man without influential and rich friends to hope to succeed as an 
 artist." For some time longer Hunt struggles on despite his father's 
 opinion. He tries book illustration, but the publisher declines his 
 drawings; his old resource of portrait-painting, whereby in earlier days 
 he had gained sufficient to defray the cost of models, etc., for his 
 subject pictures, fails him, and he becomes so reduced in means that 
 once " when I had a letter lying written before me I could not tell where 
 to find a penny for the stamp." So he decides to follow his father's 
 advice, give up painting, and, going " for a twelvemonth to a good 
 yeoman uncle for instruction as a farmer, at the end of that time to 
 emigrate to Canada, or the Antipodes (it was still at this date custom- 
 ary to so designate Australia) to take my place as a settler." Of 
 course he tells Millais, and Millais will have none of such a project. 
 He is as confident for his friend as for himself (when was he not 
 confident about anything or anybody ?), and he "announced that he 
 had saved ;^500, and that I should have all of it, little by little, as 
 I wanted it. My reply was, ' What do you think your father and 
 mother would think of me ? ' And when he reminded me that I had to 
 go to him in the morning, I said, ' Mind you don't say a word of what 
 we have been speaking about.'" The next day, however. Hunt goes 
 to breakfast with Millais, and when the servant opens the door, " the 
 good couple burst out of the sitting-room, crying, 'Is that Hunt?' 
 and saying, ' Come in here ! Jack has been telling us all about his 
 plan, and he has our fullest concurrence.' I had quite made up my 
 mind not to give in, but it was impossible in the face of such good- 
 ness ; and I am prouder now to acknowledge my indebtedness than 
 even my friend is shy to have his generosity published." Then, by 
 spme quaint association of ideas perhaps, Hunt goes down to Surrey 
 with Millais, and paints " The Hireling Shepherd," and they remain 
 together all the summer : Millais engaged upon the background of 
 the "Ophelia." From this time forward, as if Millais' good fortune 
 had, as gamblers say, " changed the luck," Hunt's success becomes 
 quickly assured. His picture of "Valentine and Sylvia," laughed 
 at in London, is sent to Liverpool, and there, though it receives much 
 " abuse " and " stupid rudeness," is rewarded by the Liverpool Council 
 with a ;^50 prize : a proceeding which immediately results in its pur- 
 chase by an Irishman who (with true national rashness) had never 
 seen the work, for 150 or 200 guineas,^ of which ^^lo are to be paid 
 monthly, and 60 guineas to be represented by a picture of Danby's. 
 So the background to "The Hireling Shepherd" is finished, and 
 that to " The Light of the World," and when Hunt returns per- 
 manently from Surrey, he has painted what are perhaps the two best 
 
 '^ Hunt does not remember which. 
 48 
 
pictures of his life; he is in funds and favour; Royal Academicians 
 ask him to dine I And behold, most wonderful of all, the next 
 Academy Exhibition sees his work for the first time "on the line " 
 And all because of that breakfast in Gower Street and "Jack's " help. 
 
 Well, we must not speak with such levity of a Baronet and a Royal 
 Academician : a prince of art, as the society journals delight to term 
 him. But we may be glad to remember that two of the finest pieces 
 of work which Sir John Millais ever executed, the landscape and 
 background portions of the "Ophelia" and "The Huguenot," were 
 painted during this companionship with Hunt in Surrey, and it is 
 ^?- ^5^^"^"^ probabilities to suggest that the infinite laborious toil 
 which Hunt put into the two pictures above named, counted for much 
 m the inspiration of his comrade. Certainly at this period Hunt's 
 power of labour was prodigious : for nearly two months he used to 
 paint by the light of a candle upon " The Light of the World," from 
 9 P.M. to 5 A.M., sitting in an orchard in an open shed made of 
 hurdles. At five he would go to bed, sleep till ten, and devote the 
 rest of the day to drawing out the work for the evening. I fancy, 
 however, these hours did not often occur, for during these months, 
 as has been said, he was also doing a considerable amount of work 
 upon "The Hireling Shepherd," and it is perfectly impossible this 
 could have been the case if he had been at work often in the 
 manner indicated. 
 
 In fact, whatever Holman Hunt has achieved has been achieved 
 by sheer industry and unremitting toil. He does hot paint, even 
 now, easily : the work is beaten out, toiled over, struggled with. 
 There is no spontaneity : there never has been any either in his 
 drawing, his composition, or his brushwork. On the other hand, 
 his colour, always striking, is in some pictures really beautiful ; his 
 drawing is as solid and good as it is elaborated and matter-of-fact ; 
 and from the intellectual side his pictures have great merit, and from 
 the dramatic are uniformly effective. I should be inclined to plaCe 
 an imaginative realism as the highest quality of his art ; it appears 
 to me that by dint of long thinking over the subject chosen, and 
 considering its possibilities, not only of drama but of interesting 
 detail, he does finally succeed in creating a sort of half-prosaic, half- 
 imaginative world, which those who look at his pictures can wholly 
 believe in, though they may not altogether like. And if we can by 
 any means grant Mr. Hunt his point of view, there is little left to 
 be said but in praise. For very certainly this painter will give us no 
 excuse in not realising his conception. He may possibly, as on a 
 certain celebrated occasion, forget the sawdust in his carpenter's 
 shop, but he will not spare us one curl of the shavings, one tooth of 
 the saw, one fold of the Virgin Mary's gown, one bead of her 
 necklace. 
 
 H 49 
 
The picture of " The Huguenot " marks a very important stage in 
 Millais' painting. Its popularity was immediate and assured, and 
 probably no other picture by this artist has been so frequently 
 reproduced ; but that is by no means all that renders it important — 
 the composition marks the first application of the pre-Raphaelite 
 theory to a subject of modern interest and modern sentiment ; for, 
 despite the title and the costume of the lovers, this was essentially a 
 modern English picture. Moreover, this was Millais' first attempt 
 at sentiment — the first time he showed that power of depicting 
 emotional expression which was for many years subsequently the 
 prevailing charm of his painting. Over " The Huguenot," he, to 
 use a French expression, " found himself," and students of painting 
 will not need to be reminded how many variations he afterwards 
 played upon the same theme. The idea of the scene was not 
 improbably due to Holman Hunt's " Claudio and Isabella," which 
 had been finished and sold to Egg, the Royal Academician, about 
 eighteen months previously, and it is interesting to remember that 
 the quotation afiixed by Hunt to this latter picture might almost as 
 appropriately stand as the motto for " The Huguenot," which is 
 indeed but another illustration of one who prefers " death " to 
 "shamed life."^ 
 
 This brings us to the consideration of that question of which 
 so much has been written, the change which the art of Millais has 
 undergone during the past twenty years. Is it, or is it not, an aban- 
 donment of his old theories, a contradiction of them ? Or is it only 
 a logical development and extension of pre-Raphaelitism ? I do not 
 press my interpretation of the facts, but I am inclined to believe 
 that this theory, like all other theories, was never of much account 
 to the young artist, any more than it is to him now. Quick to feel 
 and eager to experience, was he ever capable of deep thought, logical 
 deduction, and long - enduring conviction ? Was not in him the 
 actual technical success of handicraft always a greater thing than 
 the expression of any imaginative idea, the realisation of any 
 definite creed ? One thing is indubitable, and that is that, with 
 advancing power and increasing age, a painter who is originally 
 thoughtful and imaginative is little likely to fail persistently in those 
 departments of his art : and has not the failure of Millais in these 
 respects been so complete as to be even painful, and is not the 
 change, the intellectual and emotional failure, to be traced to the 
 very time when the influence upon him of his brother pre- 
 Raphaelites and Ruskin faded ? We all know the old fairy stories 
 wherein the happy princess is endowed with every good gift, save 
 
 1 There is another story of the origin of this picture which attributes it to a subject 
 thought of by Hunt, but never painted, of an incident in the Wars of the Roses — two lovers 
 of the opposing factions plucking red and white roses in a garden. Hunt is said to have 
 told Millais of this idea, and Millais chancing to go to the opera of The Huguenots, to 
 have adapted it to that subject. 
 
 50 
 
one, the want of which renders her future years unpleasantly eventful — 
 was this one supreme gift of the imaginative faculty the secret want of 
 Millais' art, and what looked like imagination in the youth, merely 
 the reflection of that quality in his fellow-workers ? There are many 
 considerations which have led the present writer to answer these 
 questions in the affirmative, and in view of the importance of this 
 artist, and the many great and admirable qualities of his art, he may 
 perhaps be excused for mentioning some of these. 
 
 One of the chief, is the facility Millais has always shown in entering 
 into the ideas of others, and the great success he gained from the 
 first as a book-illustrator. This was particularly evident in the 
 magnificent series of designs he furnished for Anthony Trol- 
 lope's novels, especially Framley Parsonage, The Small House at 
 Allington, and Orley Farm. In these most beautiful drawings, the 
 nature of the artist displays itself evidently as in complete sympathy 
 with the spirit of the writer. The books are full of clear, if some- 
 what thin, types of English character, and the illustrations are the 
 perfect echo of the letterpress. Sir Peregrine Orme and Lady 
 Mason, the Judge, that somewhat uppish young gentleman, Felix 
 Graham, young Peregrine Orme, and Madeleine Graham, — Millais 
 has caught the very idiosyncrasy of them all ; they exhale the spirit 
 of Trollope, though the painter's sense of grace and beauty is also 
 evident in every line. But neither in artist nor novelist is the work 
 imaginative or ideal. It has no heights or depths; pleasing us* 
 always, we feel it to be the apotheosis of the ordinary. All imagina- 
 tive power is in essence, revealing, and strikes those who see or hear 
 it for the first time with a shock of question, if not displeasure. We 
 are placed in a strange world, listening to an unknown tongue, and 
 ask ourselves whether such unaccustomed things as those which are 
 placed before us can be true and admirable ? or whether the light 
 through which we are shown them is not one which has never 
 shone ? True, the facts may be ordinary enough, but they are there 
 touched to no ordinary issue : a new element has been introduced 
 which makes our oldest friend a stranger, our most familiar scene 
 astonishing. No one will assert that in these his early black-and- 
 white drawings Millais takes us to any such undiscovered country, or 
 does more than realise with very minute and admirable dexterity, 
 the very obvious meaning of an author who, perhaps more than 
 any other, prided himself upon being clearly intelligible, un-hysterical, 
 and consistent. 
 
 Again, in the illustrations to the Tennyson and to the Parables, 
 the same treatment, practical, clear, full of grace and beauty, and 
 solidly realistic of its subject-matter, is contmually met with m the 
 Millais designs. The woman sweeping the house for the lost piece 
 
 51 
 
of silver, searches diligently with broom and candle ; the " Evil One 
 sowing Tares," is just a very diabolical-looking old Jew in a red 
 gaberdine, sowing in a field at twilight. " Edward Gray " turns 
 away duly, as the poet says, from sweet Emma Moreland's some- 
 what direct questioning, and so on throughout the list. All are 
 delightful, all are beautiful with truth of keen visual perception, 
 artistic spirit, and knowledge, but the imaginative quality is hardly 
 to be found in a single instance. 
 
 Yet these designs are, if we accept Ruskin's definition, the most 
 definitely and essentially pre-Raphaelite compositions which any 
 member of the Brotlierhood or sympathiser with the school has 
 produced. They do one and all present their subjects with the 
 simplicity and reality which were the distinguishing qualities of early 
 Italian art. Also in this presentation there is to be found nothing 
 strained or morbid, as in Rossetti ; nothing harsh or disagreeable, 
 as was too often the case with Holman Hunt ; nothing bizarre 
 or awkward, as occurs in several of Madox Brown's pictures. 
 They have Ruskin's idea of pre-Raphaelitism, but no mannerisms 
 derived from the study of mediaeval art, and are clearly, unaffectedly 
 modern ; failing no whit in truth, they fail as little in beauty. It was 
 my good fortune when quite a lad to stay in a house where, on the 
 drawing-room table (as was the custom in those days), there lay some 
 large gift-books, and amongst them a folio volume entitled The 
 ■ Cornhill Gallery, which contained careful reprints of these drawings, 
 and I think it was to this fact that I owed the sympathy and admira- 
 tion I have ever since felt for Millais' genius, and for that view of art 
 which was inculcated by him ; a view in which pictorial beauty 
 appeared to be considered in terms of truth and simplicity, to depend 
 ultimately on its correspondence with facts of nature and life, and to 
 be absolutely superior in the attainment of these objects to any possible 
 shortcoming in the character of its subject-matter, or to almost any 
 breach of the conventional rules of art. 
 
 How it is that, with all our talk about art — some of which must be 
 sincere — no one cares to-day to think about this grand collection of 
 drawings, or hold them up as models for our young painters, is to 
 me inexplicable. From the point of view of craftsmanship alone, the 
 work is a model of excellence, both Rossetti's and Millais' pen and 
 pencil work being even in their youth entirely admirable, and beyond 
 all comparison superior to any of which we can boast in England 
 to-day. 
 
 With reference to this lack of imagination in Millais, think howmany 
 times he has taken as the subject of his picture a man and woman 
 standing face to face ! At the first effort I can recall seven such, " The 
 Huguenot," "The Black Brunswicker," "Trust Me," "Yes or No," 
 " The Master of Ravenswood," "Effie Deans," "The Knight Errant," 
 
 52 
 
Af 
 
 >:^i \ 
 
 
 \ 
 
 ,«■*.' ■ 
 
 Sil"?**?^**" N- 
 
 
 t 
 
 it 
 
 A WOMAN WITH GRAPES.-- I). G. Rnssinii 
 
and perhaps " The Proscribed Royalist " should be included, and of 
 course, if we included drawings, the number would be more than 
 doubled. Still more numerous would be the pictures in which there 
 is only one female figure (I am not including portraits of girls and 
 children) : indeed of late years such designs have formed the majority 
 of his painting, and the slightest addition of significant accuracy has 
 availed to change the model from "Cinderella" to "Caller Herrin'," 
 or from "Dropped from the Nest" to "Violets." In my own mind 
 I put these latest pictures outside the artist's work proper, and 
 that for the very simple reason that the majority of them have to 
 all^ appearance been executed for the sake of reproduction in colour- 
 printing, have been in fact sublimated "pot-boilers." Nearly the 
 whole number have appeared either in Christmas numbers of the 
 Graphic or Illustrated, and the dealers can of course afford to pay an 
 extreme price for such designs, as so much of the money returns in 
 the value of the copyright. An artist has of course the right to sell 
 his art to the best advantage ; but if, when he has gained his reputa- 
 tion, he chooses to apparently consider the question of ready and 
 profitable sale before that of producing the best work of which he is 
 capable, he must not be surprised if those who have the greatest faith 
 in his powers, are the least inclined to discuss their latest exercise. 
 
 Perhaps one word should be said here as to the Millais landscapes, 
 in which our painter's imaginative faculty is generally at its weakest, 
 though to these he usually gives a poetical title. In the early days the 
 landscape backgrounds to his figure pictures, notably to the "Sir 
 Isumbras," the "Autumn Leaves," the "Ophelia," and "The Wood- 
 man's Daughter," were very fine in colour, very powerful and 
 significant, and several large landscapes of the middle period, as, for 
 instance, the " Scotch Firs," and " Over the Hills and Far Away," 
 and in a lesser degree, " Flowing to the River," and " Flowing to 
 the Sea," had, if not poetical excellence, a certain grandeur of style 
 which justified their size, and what occasionally seems to be their 
 indifference as to the subject selected. But the later work, i.e. that 
 of the past ten years, has been absolutely motiveless, so far, at all 
 events, as the present writer can perceive. Sir John now seems to 
 stroll out from his Highland home and settle himself down in the first 
 convenient spot, and there he cuts a great slice out of Nature with 
 perfect content and satisfaction. Of course the result is something: 
 it is finely drawn, well painted, occasionally good in colour, frequently 
 delicate in atmosphere, but the result is not a great landscape picture : 
 sometimes even not a picture at all, but a study, by which I mean 
 that it lacks motive, dignity, and unity, and appears to have been 
 unselected, and irrelevant to the artist's personality. 
 
 All this, though, belongs to a later date than that of which I am 
 
 53 
 
speaking — 1854 — when Millais was but twenty-five, Rossetti twenty- 
 six, and Holman Hunt twenty-seven. It is as well to keep these 
 dates in mind, and also that of the foundation of the Brotherhood, 
 which took place in 1848. 
 
 The works by the Brotherhood which were being achieved or 
 exhibited in this year of 1854 were the chief typically pre-Raphaelite 
 pictures. They were — by Rossetti, " Found," and another oil-picture 
 which I cannot trace, but which was commissioned by M'Cracken; 
 by Hunt, "The Light of the World," "The Hireling Shepherd," 
 and " The Awakened Conscience " ; by Millais, the " Ophelia " and 
 "The Huguenot." 1 
 
 The " Found," of which a reproduction (of the original pen-and- 
 ink sketch) is here given, is extremely interesting for several reasons. 
 In the first place we have, as I have shown above, Madox Brown's 
 distinct remembrance of the carrying out in its execution of the 
 pre - Raphaelite principles which Rossetti soon after definitely 
 abandoned in his own practice. Then the subject is the only purely 
 modern one, realistically treated, which this painter ever attempted ; 
 and the picture therefore stands alone as evidence of what he could 
 have done in this direction. Lastly — and here I would ask my 
 readers to examine the design for themselves, and test the truth of 
 my assertion — the composition is unique in its demonstration of the 
 influence of Holman Hunt over his more brilliant comrade. "Found" 
 is, in fact, but a pendant to "The Awakened Conscience" — the 
 third act of that drama of sin and shame the whole course of which was 
 afterwards told in Rossetti's poem of "Jenny." The similarity in 
 both feeling and manner between the two pictures is too plain to be 
 mistaken, and both belong to the dramatic rather than the lyrical 
 side of art — a side which, with the exception of a few pen-and-ink 
 designs, and one or two water-colour drawings, was henceforward to 
 receive no illustration from Rossetti. I know no other design by 
 him in which beauty of arrangement and colour is deliberately 
 sacrificed to " the telling of a story," but of Hunt it might almost be 
 said that such sacrifice is the first characteristic of his art, and it is 
 probably for this reason that he alone has always adhered so steadily 
 to the pre-Raphaelite theory, finding in the multiplication, the elabora- 
 tion, and the invention of appropriate and fully-realised detail, the 
 greatest aid to his intellectual purpose. I will not enter into any 
 description of the progress, abandonment, and long- subsequent 
 taking-up again of this " Found " composition. W. M. Rossetti 
 tells us that it was finally worked upon in 1881, and Mr. Fairfax 
 Murray, who knows more about the chronology of Rossetti's work 
 than any one living, asserts it was greatly injured by re-painting in 
 
 1 Millais painted the " Vale of Rest " subsequently after an interval of work executed in the 
 more conventional manner. 
 
 54 
 
that year. There is no doubt that the present state of the picture is 
 unhnished, and, so far as colour goes, extremely unsatisfactory The 
 composition, however, and the skill with which the meaning of the 
 story IS made irresistibly clear, leave nothing to be desired, and there 
 T^^u ^A^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^" '^^ celebrated words of Ruskin, written 
 ,.•"/ Awakened Conscience," that this is one of those pictures 
 which are powerful " to meet full in the front the moral evil of the 
 age in which they were painted, to waken into mercy the cruel thought- 
 lessness of youth, and subdue the severities of judgment into the 
 sanctity of compassion." 
 
 It is strange to note that in this very year when for once Rossetti 
 took Hunt's practice as his model, and painted for the last time on 
 the strictly pre-Raphaelite theory, his friendship for Ruskin began. 
 Up to the spring of 1854, painter and critic were still unknown to one 
 another, and on that date Rossetti writes to Madox Brown as follows: 
 
 "M'Cracken (the picture-dealer) of course sent my drawing to 
 Ruskin, who the other day wrote me an incredible letter about 
 it, remaining mine respectfully (!!) and wanting to call,^ I of 
 course stroked him down in my answer, and yesterday he came. 
 . . . He seems in a mood to make my fortune." 
 
 The intercourse of Ruskin and Rossetti lasted, with occasional 
 breaks, from 1854 to 1866, and was undoubtedly of the greatest 
 service to the artist. Not only did the great writer continually 
 purchase Rossetti's water-colours, but he induced others to do so ; 
 and apparently also Ruskin supplied the funds for the publication of 
 Rossetti's first complete book, i.e. the Early Italian Poets (pub- 
 lished in 1 861). This volume was a comparative failure, as in seven 
 years only half the edition was sold : Rossetti's share amounting to 
 £% : 1 1 :8. Ruskin also behaved, as is fully admitted by W. M. Rossetti 
 in his memoir, with munificent generosity towards Miss Siddal (after- 
 wards Mrs. Rossetti), and was perhaps most helpful of all in the 
 respect that he appreciated and gave full scope to Rossetti's imagina- 
 tive art, at the same time that he refused to play the part, too common 
 in the painter's life, of a blindly admiring and universally tolerant 
 friend. I have said too common a part, and the abrupt ter- 
 mination of this, and many other Rossetti friendships, is only too 
 certainly to be ascribed to the intolerance with which the painter 
 received all criticism and advice, and even all help, unless it eame in 
 the exact shape, amount, and moment which he desired. From the 
 first he was surrounded by a band of too admiring relatives, too 
 enthusiastic friends, too sycophantic admirers. Ruskin is quite 
 wrong in asserting that at the schools of the Royal Academy he was 
 
 1 The notes of exclamation are Rossetti's. 
 
 55 
 
unpopular and "hissed by the students."^ Holman Hunt says 
 explicitly that Rossetti had even there "a following of noisy students," 
 and from that day to the day of his death no man had ever more 
 devoted and more numerous friends. Unfortunately very many of 
 these were willing to take him on his own terms, and the continuity 
 of such experience gradually made him almost intolerably insolent 
 and exacting in his demands upon others. Moreover, it is impossible 
 to read even his brother's memoir without finding upon almost every 
 page some evidence of the reckless disregard he had for the feelings 
 of any one who had in any way offended or thwarted him, or even, 
 if the full truth is to be told, ceased to be of service to him. His 
 earliest purchaser is, for instance, M 'Cracken, originally a shipbroker, 
 and we find him paying Rossetti nearly 50 per cent more than the 
 stipulated price for a water-colour, buying his first oil-picture, and for 
 two years continually helping Rossetti in all sorts of ways. Well, 
 M 'Cracken fails in business, and writes to tell D. G. R. that he cannot 
 give him the money he had arranged, and, says Madox Brown, 
 "Rossetti wrote a sonnet on M 'Cracken in great bitterness when 
 he could not supply him with any more tin." ^ 
 
 That is only one amongst many examples of the painter's intense 
 egotism : he seemed in certain moods to absolutely revel in insulting 
 those with whom he had business relations, and one consequence of 
 this procedure was that he naturally fell in after-life into the hands of 
 those who were content to put up with much, in order to make more. 
 
 From the beginning of his career, however, it is evident that a very 
 keen desire for money, and a very sharp eye for a bargain, were 
 prominent elements in the painter's character. In his brother's 
 memoir, carefully as the facts are arranged, we find the artist over 
 and over again insisting upon his monetary bond : putting the money 
 in the first place and his art in the second. He sees a pretty girl in 
 the country, where he is stopping at a friend's house, and his first idea 
 is, could he get her to sit "and knock fifty guineas out of her." He paints 
 his friend's head, and doubts whether it might not be worth more if he 
 were to put a halo behind it and call it Christ. He advances his 
 prices over and over again till even his warmest friends and richest 
 patrons have to bargain with him, and tie him down strictly before 
 they can give him a commission, and when he has received and 
 undertaken these commissions, we find him frequently unready to 
 complete them as stipulated, or give them up. 
 
 1 The origin of this mistake was that long after the three P.R.B.s had left the Royal 
 Academy Schools, and when their pictures were being exhibited and attacked most violently 
 by the Press, the mention of their names by one of the Professors was received with hisses. 
 At the time of their studentship, however, both Rossetti and Millais were extremely popular, 
 and Hunt does not appear to have been otherwise. 
 
 ^ A very bitter sonnet this was, a parody of Tennyson's " The Kraken." 
 
 56 
 
J 
 
 D 
 
 O 
 
 
I believe it to be within the truth if I say that there must be 
 a score^ of instances given in his brother's book alone, wherein 
 Rossetti undertakes work for a certain stipulated sum, and receives 
 an increased price for it before it is finished, or wherein he fails to 
 execute the commissions he has accepted. 
 
 W. M. Rossetti's account of the matter, that his brother " was not 
 likely to neglect his own interest in a bargain; and indeed he 
 constantly laid his plans well in such matters, and effected them with 
 tenacity and acuteness," certainly does not overstate the case; and the 
 complicated transactions of later years with regard to the purchase 
 and re-purchase of his larger pictures, the execution of replicas, and 
 the agency which Rossetti established with a gentleman of "versatile 
 resource" and "attractive personal qualities" for the disposal of 
 his pictures in the most favourable manner, are, if not models of 
 business dealing, at least abundantly demonstrative that the artist 
 thoroughly understood and. agreed with the principle of "caveat 
 emptor." 
 
 There is a sufficient reason for stating these facts without reserve, 
 for they, and they alone, sufficiently account for much of what is 
 undoubtedly the very indifferent painting turned out of this artist's 
 studio in his later years. ^ It is very desirable that there should be put 
 on record before it is too late a careful account of those works which 
 were executed wholly or principally by Rossetti's assistants : great 
 harm has been, and will be done to the artist's reputation, and a great 
 injustice is committed towards the picture-purchasing public, by the 
 sale of many of the Rossetti pictures which find their way into the 
 market nowadays. Of course it is hoping against hope that those 
 who are interested will reveal these secrets, but the public may at 
 least be clearly warned to this effect, that if they purchase a Rossetti 
 picture which is known to be a replica, or which is not known to 
 have an authentic history, there is but a great probability that they 
 are purchasing the work of one or other of Mr. Rossetti's assistants 
 — of whom Mr. Dunn was the chief; and this is especially the case 
 with the large red chalk drawings on coloured paper, of which I have 
 reason to believe there are large numbers spurious. Some which I 
 have seen sold at Christie's certainly were never done by Rossetti at 
 all — others have been worked up from sketches and failures. How 
 these drawings got into the market, the intimates of Rossetti may be 
 able to guess, that does not concern the public, but their being there 
 is a matter for serious consideration. 
 
 I have said at the beginning of these notes that I did not intend to 
 touch upon that part of Rossetti's life which could give pain to his 
 friends and relations, but as his brother himself alludes to his use of 
 chloral, and as all his biographers have had to mention that fact, I 
 
 » Of course the effect of his continual chloral-taking was partly responsible. 
 I 57 
 
may venture to point out that much of the above-mentioned work of 
 inferior quality may well have been partially executed by him of late 
 years, however great the subsequent alteration and addition ; and also 
 that in such a state of health, and under the influence of such a narcotic, 
 an artist would be little likely to consider what became of these tenta- 
 tive sketches which, under other circumstances, would have been 
 destroyed or at most carefully retained for his own use.^ It was in 
 1867 that Rossetti first took chloral in any quantity, and most of the 
 drawings above alluded to will be found to be executed after that 
 date. 
 
 I do not intend to say more upon this point than that the purchasers 
 of Rossetti must guard themselves in the future if they would be 
 certain of the authenticity of their possessions, and critics must be 
 very slow to judge the quality of this master's art from many of the 
 examples which are put forth as by his hand. 
 
 I have now shown with perhaps too great detail the character of 
 the early artistic careers and personalities of the two chief leaders of 
 the P.R.B. The third, -Sir John Millais, has been less minutely 
 dealt with, partly because that artist's work quickly separated itself 
 from the influence of the Brotherhood, and is now indistinguishable, 
 save for the genius of its author, from the ordinary Academic painting. 
 Also we must remember that Millais' early life, owing to the causes 
 I have mentioned, was less eventful, less harassed, than those of his 
 future associates, and he has cared to give to the world no record 
 of its aspirations and incidents. Where Rossetti has been made the 
 subject of book after book, more or less personally reminiscent, where 
 Hunt has told us in such detail as occurs in a previous chapter, the 
 story of the desperate struggle he had with parents and fortune 
 before he could even get leave to paint, Millais has been content to 
 remain silent, and let his record be read alone in the prizes gained as 
 a boy, the pictures painted as a man, the wealth and honours which 
 surround his age. But a few days ago a friend who has known him 
 for forty years told me the following story, which, whether true or 
 not, is typical enough to merit repetition. 
 
 Here it is. A short time since Sir John Millais was walking with an 
 acquaintance past the " Round Pond " in Kensington Gardens, when 
 he suddenly stopped and said, " How extraordinary it is to think I 
 once fished for sticklebacks in this very pond ! And now, here I am 
 a great man, a baronet, with a fine house and plenty of money and 
 everything my heart could desire " — and so happily he walked ahead ! 
 
 Well, who shall say that the triumph is not natural— is not even 
 justified ? But who shall deny that it is, for so great an artist, a trifle 
 
 1 I have good reason to believe that a considerable number of these were " ' conveyed,' the 
 wise it call," from the painter without his knowledge. 
 
 58 
 
mistaken, a trifle pitiful, and more than a trifle Philistine? The 
 success in such matters as those mentioned, contrasts almost harshly 
 with that quiet grave at Birchington-on-Sea, wherein Rossetti lies in 
 a last home made beautiful by the " abiding love of a few true-hearted 
 friends" ; and with the out-of-the-way " Lodge" at Fulham whence 
 Hunt still sends us every few years a picture — the best that he has 
 it in him to give ! " I am that I am," wrote Swinburne once, is the 
 best reply (of the artist) to any " impertinence of praise or blame," but 
 he did not mean the I of a great house, a title, and a big balance at 
 one's banker's. Is it necessary to point out what was his meaning 
 — or how the phrase applies in the present context ? Actually, was 
 not Millais a greater man when he was painting the " Eve of St. 
 Agnes" in a back room in Gower Street forty years ago? And 
 perhaps his " balance," rightly considered, was even greater in those 
 days, when he kept his money in a drawer in his bedroom, and offered 
 it all to his friend to prevent his giving up the " fight for art." Such 
 an old, insoluble question — this of success in the world's opinion, in 
 the tangible facts of life, as compared with the success of being true to 
 the light within you, faithful, if need be unto death, to your ideal life. 
 The " big house," I fancy, must always seem a little over-large if the 
 old friends come not there ; the splendid studio, but dim and shadowy 
 if none of the " light of other days " illumine it with the softness of 
 memory and the brightness of youth. Who shall hold the balance 
 justly in such a case ? Shall we bid the vision remain with us, and 
 let the reality " down the wind," or shall we " take the cash and let the 
 credit go " ? 
 
 I saw in early youth two lives, lived side by side, which silently 
 asked this question. One content, successful, material, high in the 
 world's respect, almost triumphant — and the other, striving after an 
 unfulfilled ideal, unrecognised and suffering, but shining brightly with 
 a steady light of noble pride and invincible resolution ; with self- 
 sacrifice and truth. No after years have taught me to forget that 
 lesson, or made me uncertain as to which was the successful life. 
 The present writer is therefore a prejudiced witness, and must have 
 his testimony regarded with consequent suspicion. 
 
 A hundred apologies for this my five-and-twentieth digression. By 
 Hercules! I will for the future stick to my "subject" like a Scotch 
 lawyer. 
 
 59 
 
VIII.— THE LESSER PRE-RAPHAELITES 
 AND THEIR FRIENDS. 
 
 HESE "people of importance" who filled up the 
 large Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (seven in all, like 
 the family of Wordsworth's most irritating child), 
 who were they, and what did they for " the honour 
 of the family " ? Their names were : 
 
 »^^.^MM%. 
 
 James Collinson. 
 William Michael Rossetti. 
 Frederick George Stephens. 
 Thomas Woolner, (now) R,A. 
 
 Collinson was a painter, and was afterwards succeeded as a 
 P.R.B. by Walter Deverell. Woolner, of course, was the celebrated 
 sculptor and poet of that name. F. G. Stephens started as a 
 painter, but afterwards became an art critic, and W. M. Rossetti, 
 after some coquetting with art, also took to criticism, chiefly literary, 
 though he for some time acted as art critic to the Spectator. 
 
 Collinson seems to have been the weakest member of the society 
 — a little bit of a painter, a little bit of a poet, and alternately being 
 converted, and perverted, from one form of religious belief to another. 
 W. M. Rossetti lets him down as gently as possible with the mild 
 observation that he " did not make the mark which in the early days 
 of Prseraphaelitism ^ his colleagues had hoped for," and "is now 
 perhaps almost forgotten." Holman Hunt calls him dull and sleepy, 
 and compares him to the fat boy in Pickwick in all but size ; and 
 Madox Brown dismissed him (in conversation with me) as having 
 "had nothing much to recommend him" ! In the account Woolner 
 gave me of the association, Collinson's work is described as not being 
 " much in the spirit of the others." Therefore he can hardly be said, on 
 
 1 Of the many ways of printing this word I generally follow in quotations that adopted by 
 the special author. 
 
 6q 
 
the balance of testimony, to have added to the strength of the P. R. body, 
 of which he was the first recruit, though Hunt speaks with some 
 admiration of "The Charity Boy's Debut," a picture exhibited by 
 Colhnson in 1848. On account of this work, Rossetti "declared 
 that CoUinson was a born stunner, and at once enrolled Collinson as 
 one who wanted only the enthusiasm we had to make him a great 
 force in the battle, and accordingly he was told that he had to put 
 the secret initials on his works, to attend our monthly meetings, and 
 to receive (and entertain) us in his turn." This last part of the 
 P.R.B.'s proceedings — no unimportant one, for all the members 
 appear to have had particularly good appetites, both for talk and 
 supper — Collinson appears to have faithfully carried out ; and Hunt 
 adds that, though, owing to a liberal allowance from home, he was able 
 to provide "quite a conventional entertainment," he invariably went 
 to sleep at the beginning of the evening, and had to be woke up at its 
 close. On the whole, he must have been a harmless, good-tempered, 
 vacillating individual, with a secret longing for a sort of decorous 
 Bohemianism — a Bohemianism as strictly limited as Mrs. Dpdd's 
 desire of "safe glory" for her son Edward.^ 
 
 As the " Brotherhood" developed, it seems to have been a favourite 
 amusement of the members to " draw" Collinson — to hunt him up out of 
 his bed at unholy hours, and take him still half-asleep for long walks 
 by moonlight, or stand under his windows howling P.R.B. till his 
 dragoness of a landlady, " six feet in height," came out with a candle 
 to ask if they "didn't know Mr. Collinson was asleep?" On one 
 occasion Collinson " came to his window piteously entreating to be left 
 to sleep, but we pointed out that we had chosen the northern course 
 solely on his account, and that we knew what was good for him 
 better than he did himself. He gave in, dressed himself, and came 
 with us on a walk — worth remembering even now for its many 
 delights of lovely moonlit heath and common and village, with the 
 whole on our return exchanged for ever-increasing dawn and sunrise. 
 I think our poor victim slept all the way, leaning on one or another 
 of us, and I must confess that neither this nor any treatment we 
 adopted for his good seemed thoroughly to wake him up. When I 
 first returned from the little continental tour, I lodged in the same 
 house with him at Brompton for about a month. There even in the 
 day he was asleep over the fire with his model waiting idle, earning 
 his shilling per hour all the time ; and as the home remittance for 
 some reason stopped, it seemed at one time as if bankruptcy must 
 come on like an armed man. But at the last moment he unex- 
 pectedly waked ^ up, sent in his resignation as a Pre-Raphaelite 
 
 1 Glory by all means, glory by the pailful, but safe glory if you please ! or she would have 
 none of it. 
 
 2 I do not alter this slip of the pen, as I have throughout all quotations thought it better 
 to give the exact text. 
 
 61 
 
Brother — ungrateful man ! — sold his lay figure and painting material 
 by forced sale, and departed to Stonyhurst to graduate. It is but 
 fair to give the further history of this Pre-Raphaelite Brother. At 
 the end of a twelvemonth or so he abandoned the idea of conventual 
 or priestly life, again took to painting and I believe executed many 
 very creditable pictures of a modest character. He subsequently 
 abjured Romanism, and died some eight years ago, very much 
 respected by those who knew him best, and with less, I am sure, to 
 reproach himself for than many more brilliant men may have at the 
 end of their days." Collinson wrote a long, blank- verse poem in the 
 Germ named "The Child Jesus," and W. M. Rossetti alludes to one 
 ambitious, in some respects very laudable, " Praeraphaelite" attempt, 
 entitled "St. Elizabeth of Hungary," but where this picture is I do 
 not know, nor have I ever seen it described. 
 
 Thomas Woolner, though an original P.R.B., was so rather from 
 the intellectual, and poetical point of view, than from the artistic. It 
 was no doubt Rossetti's poetic genius which attracted him, and his 
 work in connection with the Brotherhood was almost wholly of a 
 literary character. In his view of the association he minimises both 
 its influence, and the enthusiasm and conviction of the leaders, and 
 his own account of the way in which his name was associated with 
 the movement shows that from his point of view, at all events, the 
 connection was both slight and accidental. He tells me, for instance, 
 that "about the time the movement began — 1848 -1849 — I wrote 
 a poem called ' My Beautiful Lady,' and its sequel, ' My Lady in 
 Death,' which Rossetti declared to be written on strict pre-Raphaelite 
 principles, and they complimentarily placed them first, in the first 
 number of the Germ, published January 1850; and as these poems 
 were a good deal criticised at the time, my name became in this 
 way associated with the movement." The whole poem of "My 
 Beautiful Lady" did not come out in the Germ., but was subsequently 
 published and extremely successful. The whole story of the Germ, 
 its contributors, and contents, has been frequently told. Acting, 
 therefore, on the principle observed throughout these notes, I shall 
 only here refer readers to the excellent account given in Mr. W. 
 B. Sharpe's book on Rossetti, the slighter sketch in Mr. W. M. 
 Rossetti's account of his brother's poems and pictures, and in the 
 Reminiscences of Rossetti, by Mr. Hall Caine. This last is by far 
 the most readable account of the poet-painter with which I am 
 acquainted, though it deals entirely with the later years of his life, 
 Mr. Caine having, I believe, never seen Rossetti till three years 
 before his death, though their correspondence dated from 1878. 
 It is perhaps worth mentioning that both Coventry Patmore and 
 Madox Brown contributed to the first number of the Germ, though 
 their poems appeared anonymously. 
 
 62 
 
The important point to be noted in the contents of the Germ, is 
 that though it passed for, and indeed in a sense was the official journal 
 of pre-Raphaelitism, yet we find that of the three pre-Raphaelite 
 leaders one, Millais, never contributed to it at all ; another, Holman 
 Hunt, only contributed a drawing to the first number ; and the third, 
 Rossetti, confined his contributions to poems entirely unconnected 
 with, and irrespective of any P.R. theory. From first to last — not a 
 very long way, for the journal only lived through four numbers — the 
 dogmatic enunication of the supposed P.R.B, theories and principles 
 is left to the hands of minor contributors, some of whose very names are 
 unknown to the majority of artistic readers, and only two of whom, were 
 members of the Brotherhood. The Messrs, J. L. Tupper and John 
 Orchard are the authors of two dogmatic papers on " The Subject in 
 Art" and a "Dialogue on Art," and a third is contributed by John 
 Seward, who is now known as F. G. Stephens. Madox Brown sends 
 one on the "Structure of an Historical Picture," Coventry Patmore, 
 a " Criticism of Macbeth," and the other critical papers are from the 
 pen of W. M. Rossetti, and are devoted only to poetry. 
 
 It is thus the incontrovertible fact that, however eager in proselyt- 
 ising Rossetti may have been, he was not in any way eager in 
 enunciating in print the supposed P.R.B. principles, and neither was 
 Hunt nor Millais. How are we to interpret this silence of the oracles ? 
 It cannot evidently be accidental ; and was not the modesty of young 
 painters who thought their principles could be better expressed by 
 literary craftsmen, for Rossetti was at this time beyond all doubt a 
 more capable writer than any other contributor to the periodical, 
 and besides the failing of undue modesty was not to be laid to the 
 charge of any of the P.R.B. It appears to me that we can hardly 
 escape from the inference that if these men were silent at this time it 
 was because they were already too doubtful of their own aims and 
 principles, or it may be too little agreed between themselves of what 
 those principles and aims were, to dare to set them forth in a definite 
 and permanent form, and the absence of Millais and Holman Hunt 
 shows that the Germ really was chiefly a whim of Rossetti's, who 
 indeed, with the assistance of his sister Christina, his brother William, 
 his sleepy convert Collinson, and his teacher Madox Brown, practically 
 wrote the whole journal. The three Rossettis indeed wrote no less 
 than thirty-eight separate poems and articles out of the four numbers.- 
 But not one of these enunciates the P.R. theory, and only one deals 
 with the question of the painter's aim, and that incidentally, and m an 
 indirect and symbolic manner. This contribution is the allegoric 
 story of " Hand and Soul," by D. G. R., from which, so far as Rossetti 
 may be considered to be expressing his own point of view, we hnd 
 him at direct variance with the principles laid down in the dogmatic 
 papers above alluded to, by J. L. Tupper, Orchard, and Stephens. 
 
 63 
 
But enough of the Germ. The periodical has been criticised to 
 death ; its interest was not in criticism but, poetry, and with that we 
 have here nothing to do. 
 
 After Collinson we come to Mr. F. G. Stephens, who was at 
 this time endeavouring to be a painter, but, as Woolner says, " his 
 tendency being towards Hterature, he gave up pictures for books, and 
 by his writings did a great deal for the cause." Stephens was, I fancy, 
 at this early time rather a problem to his brother P.R.B.S, for he 
 was, to quote the graphic expression of one of them, " no good as a 
 painter." What was to become of him nobody knew, till the happy 
 chance arrived of getting him a berth as art critic of the Athenceum. 
 If I remember right this was effected through Holman Hunt's influence 
 (Hunt was his most intimate friend), but the exact date at which it took 
 place I have forgotten. In that berth he has remained ever since 
 — "sedet,in aeternumque sedebit" — and during thirty years at least, the 
 readers of that erudite periodical have suffered or enjoyed his per- 
 tinacious eloquence. Though he is, I believe, the most estimable 
 and well-meaning of men in private life, in his public critical capacity 
 I bear him a grudge. Not for his opinions, for I don't think, outside 
 a reverence for everything which reminds him of the P.R.B., that he 
 has any, but for his most detestable English. He has invented a series 
 of phrases to apply to pictures, painters, and art subjects in general, 
 which are absolutely excruciating in their combination of uselessness, 
 affectation, and incomprehensibility. Sarcasm, abuse, ridicule, re- 
 monstrance, and entreaty have been directed against him in vain — 
 nothing and nobody — not even his editor — will, or can induce him to 
 write words which are " understanded of the people." If in the 
 dimmest vista of the future he can see the gleam of a lengthy 
 epithet peculiarly inappropriate to his sentence, he will "go for it," 
 as quickly as Artemus Ward for the historical ''taller candle," The 
 longer, the more foreign, and the more incomprehensible that word is, 
 the better he will be pleased. He revels verbally in " yellow carna- 
 tions," luxuriates in the "morbidezza of the chiaroscuro," takes a 
 refreshing dip in iridescent luminosity, and completes his sempiternal 
 polysyllabic meanderings with every pedagogic synonym he can find 
 in the dictionary. Is it not permissible to " gently hate and mildly 
 abominate " such a persistent " deranger of epitaphs " ? 
 
 Seriously speaking, Mr. Stephens is to-day a painstaking though 
 a naturally dull and limited critic, who deserves the respect due to a 
 man who does his work to the best of his ability, and who would 
 do it much more worthily if he were not a little soured, a little anxious 
 to find fault with all art which does not remind him of the days when 
 he too lived, or wished to live, in Arcadia. He is not naturally a 
 man of a critical habit of mind. On the other hand, his industry is 
 untiring, his experience considerable, and his technical criticism, 
 
 64 
 
when unwarped by personal prejudice and stripped of its" mysterious 
 embellishments, frequently sound and reflective. 
 
 Of Mr. Woolner's art and poetry I need not speak. The world 
 has set its seal of approval upon the latter, and that greater world 
 in art, the Royal Academy, has in one of its many freakish moments 
 crowned the former. Only in relation to the pre-Raphaelites are we 
 tempted to ask, " Qtie diable allait-il faire dans cette galere?" 
 
 He says now the whole thing "was a joke," but this is to confuse 
 the movement and the Brotherhood. A joke of so poor a nature 
 does not last for forty years, and, indeed, if one thing about the 
 movement is more evident and interesting than another, it is the 
 delicious seriousness with which the P.R.B.S regarded themselves, 
 and, still more surprisingly, were regarded by the public, the painters, 
 and the critics. Rossetti, it is true, laughed in, and sometimes out of, 
 his sleeve — witness those moments in which poor Collinson was "told" 
 what he was to do, and taken for long moonlight walks when he 
 only longed for rest, and Holman Hunt's reminiscences suggest here 
 and there a subdued chuckle ; but did any one ever suspect William 
 Michael Rossetti of making jokes, or Stephens, or Collinson, or 
 W. B. Scott, or Coventry Patmore, or the brothers Tupper ? Nor is a 
 sense of humour the strongest characteristic of Millais and Ruskin. 
 No, I think we must receive Mr. Woolner's opinion on this point 
 with considerable hesitation ; his sympathies with the movement 
 have almost entirely disappeared ; his intimacy with the leaders was 
 cut short by an early departure from England (to Australia); and his 
 subsequent election to the Royal Academy for work from which all 
 signs of pre-Raphaelite influence had disappeared, no doubt all 
 helped to make him regard his youthful enthusiasm with doubt and 
 disapproval. Perhaps he had never really been a pre-Raphaelite in 
 intention, for we have heard that it was Rossetti claimed him as 
 one on account of the principles upon which he had written 
 (according to D. G. R.) "My Beautiful Lady." More unlikely 
 things have happened than that the poem in question was written 
 upon no "principles" at all, and that Rossetti, anxious as he then 
 was to find converts, thought, as he admired the poem, that his 
 admiration must spring from its pre-Raphaelitism. 
 
 The remaining member of the Brotherhood, W. M. Rossetti, is 
 unconnected with the artistic side of the movement, except as a 
 critic of painting. His work in this respect does not, it seems to 
 me, call for very special remark, and with his other literary produc- 
 tions I am not here concerned. But no one can read his account 
 of the artistic life of his celebrated brother without feeling for the 
 writer the respect due to a painstaking honest man, apparently wholly 
 desirous of telling the simple truth, and yet evincing in every Ime 
 K 65 
 
loyal unselfish devotion, and intense sympathy and admiration. This 
 is one of the men, I must believe, who has never had justice done 
 him by the English public. He possesses the two greatest merits 
 of a biographer — sympathy and justice. So far as he can ascertain 
 the truth he tells it simply and fully, and with as total an absence 
 of conceit, as of undue humility. The book is, one may perhaps be 
 justified in saying, dull as a literary performance. The author is 
 not, and would not be if he could, a smart journalistic writer, but I 
 should hesitate to say I know any record undertaken by a relation 
 of a great man's doings in art and literature, which was more com- 
 plete, more trustworthy, or more dignified, or which shows a more 
 earnest study of its subject-matter. As there are advantages, so 
 also there are drawbacks, in relationship to a genius, and W. M. 
 Rossetti's reputation would, I think, have been far higher than it is 
 had he not so loyally devoted a great part of his life to the considera- 
 tion, the encouragement, the explanation, and, to some extent, the 
 completion of his brother's work. 
 
 This finishes the list of the original members of the P.R.B., and 
 the facts given lead us clearly to some rather startling conclusions, 
 which I shall endeavour to sum up shortly in my concluding chapter, 
 before which, however, some mention must be made of those 
 painters and writers who are now commonly spoken of as pre- 
 Raphaelites, from their association in later years with Rossetti or 
 Hunt, or from some supposed likeness in their pictures and writings 
 to the work of the P.R.B.s. A few words must also be said as to 
 the influence of the so-called " school " upon contemporary art, 
 though it is, I hope, abundantly evident to all who have read the fore- 
 going with any care, that there never was anything in the nature of 
 a P.R.B. school properly so called. Two or three men working in 
 a somewhat similar direction, but with different aims and different 
 methods, holding at no time more than one principle in common, 
 and quickly abandoning even that single agreement, do not con- 
 stitute a "school" in any intelligible sense of that word's meaning; 
 and such was the case here. Nothing dies so hard as a word, 
 particularly a word which nobody understands, and there is little 
 doubt but that the one in question will survive all of us; but a 
 day will surely come when it will be seen that the essence of what is 
 now known as pre-Raphaelitism was not the influence of a school or 
 a principle, but simply the influence of one man, and that man, Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti. The early Italian Painters, the elaboration of detail, 
 the painting of each part of a landscape background to a picture on 
 the spot instead of from studies, simplicity, absence of convention 
 and pictorial artifice, and all the rest of the supposed aims and prin- 
 ciples, were the merest fringe of the movement, the accidents whereby 
 what Dobell would call "the imperceptible substans" revealed itself: 
 
 66 
 
the motive of the work, the real point of view, was neither simple, nor 
 entirely derived from the Italian mediaevalists, but was compli- 
 cated, personal, and essentially Gothic, imbued with the sadness of 
 the northern races, and the questioning, the unrest, the literary spirit 
 of the nineteenth century. Ruskin talks about a few casts from the 
 work of Ghiberti having inspired the leaders — and no doubt all three 
 did admire Ghiberti's work, but what does that prove ? There is no 
 work in the whole history of art which is so essentially and (splendidly, 
 mind !) conventional as Ghiberti's, as any one who has studied " The 
 Ghiberti Gates" must surely know. Not only did he adopt all the 
 conventions he could find, but invented new ones for himself, which 
 have remained and been adopted by all succeeding artists in such 
 bronze work ; and he remains to this day as an unique example of a 
 master who, in despite of all true art theory, endeavoured, and 
 succeeded by sheer genius and ingenuity of convention, in making 
 the art of sculpture do duty for the art of painting. No more 
 elaborate system of chiaroscuro was ever adopted by an artist, no 
 greater elaboration of composition ever shown, than in this old sculp- 
 tor's work, and many of his groups and figures might be reproduced 
 without the alteration of a line, as specimens of the utmost that 
 arrangement, balance, symmetry, and repetition can produce in 
 pictorial beauty. 
 
 Very easy is it to understand how the almost marvellous beauty, 
 elaboration, and inventiveness of Ghiberti's work could inspire the 
 enthusiasm of young artists — how could it do otherwise ? — but to 
 trace the inspiration of the movement, as Ruskin does, or rather 
 did, to this sculptor's simplicity, faith, and unconventional spirit, is 
 opposed to all common sense, and all the facts. If, moreover, we 
 may trust Holman Hunt's own words, Raphael himself, the greatest 
 master of convention that the world has known, was the master 
 most warmly admired of all by these young men. Hunt calls him 
 " the prince of painters," and says that the choice of name for the 
 Brotherhood was determined, not so much in adhesion to the painters 
 who went before Raphael, as in contempt for those English artists 
 who were considered to paint in his manner. In a word, not 
 admiration for the past, but revolt against the present painting 
 was the inspiring thought, and the conviction is reluctantly forced 
 upon me that Ruskin from the first misunderstood the movement, 
 and therefore, of course unconsciously, misled the public. That the 
 great writer's view was to some extent endorsed with the acqui- 
 escence of silence by the P. R. artists, I do not for a moment deny : 
 it would have been strange had the young painters not taken the 
 opportunity of conciliating so powerful an ally. And it must not 
 be forgotten that for Rossetti especially, Ruskin was not only an 
 ally but a constant and generous patron for at least ten years. 
 
 67 
 
Remember in support of the above view how the intercourse between 
 critic and painter commences. On the 14th April 1854 Rossetti 
 writes to Madox Brown : " . . . M'Cracken of course sent my 
 drawing to Ruskin, who the other day wrote me an incredible letter 
 about it, remaining mine respectfully (!!), and wanting to call, I of 
 course stroked him down in my answer, and yesterday he came. 
 . . . He seems in a mood to make my fortune." 
 
 That Ruskin did do a great deal is evident from W. M. Rossetti's 
 account of the relations between him and Dante Gabriel, which he 
 says he cannot precisely define, but believes that there was " a general 
 understanding that within a certain annual maximum Ruskin would 
 buy if he liked it whatever Rossetti had to offer him at a scale of 
 prices such as other purchasers would pay ; and under this arrange- 
 ment funds would be forthcoming at times to meet the artist's con- 
 venience without" rigid assessment as to value previously delivered." 
 
 Obviously, therefore, there was no likelihood of Rossetti pro- 
 testing publicly against his patron's views; in private, I fancy, he 
 often did so : at all events the relations between the critic and 
 painter were frequently strained, and about 1865 came to a some- 
 what abrupt termination. It may be noticed that nearly all Rossetti's 
 designs from the Morte d^Arthtcr, and the majority of his Scriptural 
 subjects, belong to this period of his friendship with Ruskin, and 
 that thenceforward — 1863 to 1882 — there is, broadly speaking, an 
 entire change both in the class of design, and the artist's treatment 
 thereof. 
 
 Directly we get outside the mystic circle of the seven P.R.B.S, 
 there is considerable difficulty in knowing whose work should and 
 should not be included as falling under the influence of pre- 
 Raphaelitism. For, as I have shown, the above term covered even 
 in the Brotherhood aims extremely divergent, and no common ratio 
 was to be found, save in a few rare instances, between the pictures 
 of even the three leaders. For the purpose of these notes, how- 
 ever, it will, I think, be convenient to group the sympathisers and 
 followers of Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais in three chief divisions. 
 The first division will include those contemporary artists who were 
 associated with, though not actually members of, the confederacy ; 
 the second, whom we will call the New Pre-Raphaelites, will com- 
 prise Mr. Burne-Jones, Mr. William Morris, Mr. Pater, and their 
 respective followers and imitators ; the third will show the artists 
 who were only partially or temporarily led astray (or put in the right 
 path) by the pre-Raphaelite idea. 
 
 These notes, over-long, I fear, already for my readers' patience, 
 draw towards a close, for both space and time are wanting to enable 
 
 68 
 
me to say more than a few words upon each of these classes ; but it 
 must not be forgotten that this portion of the History of Pre- 
 Raphaelitism is that which is really of the first importance. The 
 "snowball " set rolling in 1848 is rolling still, and in the forty years 
 since then has greatly increased in volume. What the three 
 painters did, and what Ruskin mistakenly but finely described them 
 as doing, have united together in one wave of influence, and with the 
 help of the literature and poetry of Swinburne, Pater, Theodore Watts, 
 and Symonds, the stained glass, furniture, tapestry, pottery, and 
 wall-hangings of Morris, Falkner, De Morgan, Walter Crane, and 
 others — have given the colour and shape to this most unique fine art 
 movement of the century. 
 
 To trace how this has taken place ; the part which literature and 
 painting have played therein ; the sharp attack, repulse, and final 
 defeat of the conventional newspaper criticism ; the conversion, 
 sullen and slow, of the Royal Academy ; the alteration effected in 
 art education and domestic environment ; and the gradual welding 
 together in our latest painting of this so-called pre-Raphaelite theory, 
 and the technique of the Foreign, and especially the French Schools 
 — this was the task which the present writer once proposed to himself; 
 the task which he hopes will some day be accomplished by a stronger 
 and younger hand. 
 
 Walter Deverell and Charles Collins (brother of Wilkie) were two 
 painters intimately connected with the P.R.B. Deverell, in fact, as 
 I said above, became a P. R. B. in place of Collinson (retired). Testi- 
 mony unites in declaring the first of these to have been a man of 
 singular gentleness and sweetness of disposition, and an artist of 
 genuine if delicate accomplishment. He died in 1854, and there 
 is a little allusion to him in one of D. G. R.'s letters, telling how, 
 after his death, " I have been doing one or two things to poor 
 Deverell's picture (from As You Like It), the chief of which has 
 been to attempt getting rid of what I thought unpleasant in Celia's 
 face." The " Brotherhood " here is real enough, is it not ? The 
 truth is, these men were always doing kind things of this sort for one 
 another, as witness the following account given me in a letter by 
 Hunt the other day in response to a question about an early chalk 
 drawing by him of Millais which I had recently bought, and which 
 I have reproduced here ; — ^ 
 
 " The sketch which you refer to was undoubtedly done by me — 
 executed in April 1851, on a day which R., M., and I devoted 
 in a spirit of self-sacrifice to a former companion, who, tired of 
 his struggle as an artist to gain a footing in England, had gone 
 
 1 i.e. in the quarto edition only. 
 69 
 
to the gold diggings ^ in Australia. At the date given, after 
 failure on Tom Tiddler's Ground, he had got to Melbourne, and 
 set to work again as an artist in taking likenesses ; and as we 
 were told he had difficulty in impressing well-to-do visitors, who 
 saw our names in English papers, we met at Miliais' to make 
 a set of one another's portraits for the studio in Australia. I 
 did on the same morning the drawing of Rossetti in pastile ; 
 but he was so impatient for his own chances that he curtailed 
 my time on the first task, and the second was threatened 
 altogether, until I determined to begin as he drew me ; so there 
 was but bare time for me to bring either of mine to a 
 termination. Miliais did a pencil drawing of W. M. Rossetti, 
 and of one of the drones of our party, who of course did nothing 
 in return. 
 
 " D, G. R., as a portraitist at the time, was given to unlimited 
 idealism if the position lent itself to his treatment ; but when 
 this, or the person, would not fit his pattern, he went all astray 
 unless he could correct to his heart's content. The portrait of 
 me was decided to be an example of the last order of refractori- 
 ness, inasmuch as in the end, instead of representing a man of 
 twenty-four, it was decided to be like one of forty or more, and 
 his brother said that the being could be no other than Rush, the 
 great murderer of the period. 
 
 " Still could not have drawn it either then or at any other 
 
 time, for it was a sterling artistic performance. It was sent out 
 with the rest to Melbourne, and the set royally served the pur- 
 pose of giving a professional cachd {catchef) to the antipodean 
 struggle inasmuch as it helped a long career of fortune worship, 
 until about three years since, he was able to turn an honest 
 penny by breaking up the collection and sending them into the 
 market." 
 
 To return to Deverell. Woolner writes me he "painted closely 
 from Nature, and was associated with the others ; but whether he 
 painted in this way from his own initial energy or was induced to do 
 so by Hunt's example I cannot now remember, if indeed I ever 
 heard. He had a sense of simplicity and grace so exquisite that his 
 early death was a great loss to our school." Madox Brown ranks 
 him above Collinson as more worthy of remembrance. He was the 
 son of a schoolmaster. Charles Collins is scarcely remembered 
 now as an artist, though he had every opportunity of early training, 
 being the son of William Collins, R.A., one of the finest English 
 
 1 Hunt gives no name, but this may possibly refer to Woolner, who did go to " the 
 diggings," and, failing to make his fortune there, returned to Melbourne, made medallions 
 (of the successful diggers, I suppose), and finally returned to England. 
 
 70 
 
landscapists of his day, and whose pictures still remain the best 
 records we possess of the sunnier aspect of peasant life in England 
 in the early years of the present centur.y. Wilkie Collins, as may be 
 even yet remembered, was a very short man with a large head,i but 
 his brother Charles was tall, finely proportioned, and one of the 
 handsomest young fellows of his day. And by this accident he has 
 become immortal, for Millais, seeking as usual for splendid models, 
 caught him and made him into a " Huguenot" and a " Black Bruns- 
 wicker," and other heroic individuals who combined dandyism and 
 devotion in equal proportions. As a matter of taste, the well-brushed 
 and greased hair and the brilliant polish of the Blucher boots in 
 the last-mentioned character of Mr. Collins have always grated 
 somewhat upon the present writer. No doubt they are pre- 
 Raphaelite enough, for the dandies of the year 1850 still used 
 bear's grease ad libitum, but in Millais' unsparingly realistic repro- 
 duction of them the sentiment of the picture appears to suffer. 
 
 A very splendid -looking man, at all events, Collins must have 
 been ; but, like the other minor P.R.B.S, he couldn't paint, and 
 subsequently he took to literature, and wrote rather a fascinating 
 book of travel entitled A Cruise upon Wheels. He married a 
 daughter of Charles Dickens, was indeed engaged to her at the 
 period of the " Black Brunswicker " picture, for which she also posed. 
 It was the painting of her white satin dress which really made 
 Millais' reputation amongst the dealers : no more wonderful piece of 
 purely imitative technique is to be seen to this day in English paint- 
 ing — not even Mr. Tadema's too-celebrated marbles. Collins died 
 young. 
 
 Arthur Hughes is still alive, and still painting, it seems to me, 
 with very much the same spirit as that of his early days. With 
 Madox Brown, I wonder why his work is not more widely appreci- 
 ated, and why his name is so seldom mentioned nowadays. Ruskin 
 indeed spoke generously of him on several occasions, and his pictures 
 are remarkable for much purity and delicacy of feeling, and are from 
 their own point of view carefully and well painted. I remember 
 seeing no picture from his hand which did not evidence refinement, 
 industry, and labour. I think in the following description of him 
 by Brown, sufficient stress is not laid upon a certain rather wilful 
 strangeness, bordering upon affectation, which the composition, sub- 
 ject-matter, and colour schemes of his pictures are apt to suggest. 
 Assuredly his art is one which appeals less in an exhibition than 
 in a home, and grows upon our favour with increased acquaintance. 
 Hughes must be a middle-aged man by this time, and a disappointed 
 one so far as public recognition is concerned, 
 
 1 His portrait is prefixed to the essay on his writings given here. 
 
 71 
 
Here is what Brown told me of him six years ago : — 
 
 " I have not seen Arthur Hughes for a very long time. He was 
 very ill-used because everybody ran him down ; and there were 
 designs of his full of beauty and poetry — King Arthur designs, 
 and things of that sort. A knight riding across a bridge in the 
 time of King Arthur; up above in the sky are three angels 
 flying above his head. ' The Shepherds and the Mahois.' 
 Three ladies playing the violin — the Misses Lushington, it is 
 said. In the Academy a few years ago I saw 'The Return,' 
 an orchard in apple blossom, some children in a garden, and a 
 father and son coming in in their working costume, as though 
 they had been working in the fields all day. It is not above 
 five years ago. It was hung in the best part of the Academy, 
 but no one took any notice of it. But it was undoubtedly one 
 of the best in the Academy. It was very strange, but it seemed 
 to be Hughes's fate. He undoubtedly produced pictures which 
 were most poetical. I saw a very pretty picture of his last year 
 at Liverpool ; it was called ' Rest by the Way.' It was marked 
 only thirty guineas. Not a single person knew that Arthur 
 Hughes was there. Yet a few years ago Ruskin would have 
 been writing about it, and everybody would have been talking 
 about it. He is so very gentle and philosophic, being gentle- 
 manly, and won't push himself forward. I have not seen Arthur 
 Hughes for a very long time." 
 
 There was one strange artist allied in sympathy with the pre- 
 Raphaelites, who is still alive, I believe, though where he is living, 
 or how, nobody seems to clearly know ; and I hear that he is 
 supposed to have given up painting some years since. This was 
 Windus, the painter of " Burd Helen," , a fine picture which, 
 "though hung nearly out of sight" in the Academy Exhibition 
 of 1856, was classed by Ruskin as only second to the "Autumn 
 Leaves " of Millais (in the same year), and a painting which 
 would hold its own "with the most noble pictures of all time." 
 All time is a " tall " expression, but, so far as time has gone since 
 then, Ruskin's words have not been unjustified. The exact price 
 paid for it by Mr. Miller of Liverpool, its original purchaser, is 
 unknown to me, probably between eighty and a hundred guineas at 
 an outside estimate. The work came to the hammer two years later 
 when this gentleman's collection was sold at Christie's, and then 
 fetched two hundred guineas ; time passed, Windus disappeared from 
 public view, the public — the picture-buying public I mean — and the 
 dealers forgot his very name, and three months since " Burd Helen " 
 appeared once more in the salerooms. I congratulated myself — for in 
 the meantime I had seen and fallen in love with the picture in a loan 
 
 72 
 
collection at Manchester, and here was a chance : I determined to 
 have it at any price, expected even to have little opposition. Not a 
 bit of it, the bidding mounted up quickly, and at about five hundred 
 guineas I gave up the contest in disgust. It was under all the circum- 
 stances a remarkable instance of a small picture by an unfashionable, 
 and almost unknown living artist, being sold upon its merits for a 
 very high price : the picture was by no means a popularly-conceived 
 one, and the drawing of the horse, especially, was, what an old artist of 
 my acquaintance used to call " rummy-funny." The picture fetched 
 the price purely because the comment of Ruskin upon it was true, 
 and with that comment the text was understood. Here is the 
 quotation : 
 
 " The work is thoughtful and intense in the highest degree. The 
 pressure of the girl's hand on her side ; her wild, firm, desolate look 
 at the stream — she not raising her eyes as she makes her appeal, 
 for fear of the greater mercilessness in the human look than in the 
 glaze of the gliding water — the just choice of the type of the rider's 
 cruel face, and of the scene itself, so terrible in haggardness of rattling 
 stones and ragged heath, are all marks of the action of the very 
 grandest imaginative power — shortened only of hold upon our feel- 
 ings because dealing with a subject too fearful to be for a moment 
 believed true." ^ It is memorable that Rossetti himself painted an 
 oil - picture with this title, though he spelt it in the older form of 
 " Burd Alane," but this was not (according to W. M. Rossetti) till 
 1861. 
 
 Another most able artist, more technically perfect indeed than 
 Windus, and more intimately connected with the pre-Raphaelites, 
 was Mr. Fred. Sandys, the painter of "Medea" and other pictures, 
 and even better known for his chalk portraits. In this latter 
 phase of art, Mr. Sandys has in the England of to-day no superior, 
 and few rivals : he is at once perfect in his handling of the 
 material and in the understanding of its capacities and limitations. 
 His work is fine as portraiture, and almost equally so as pictorial art. 
 At least this is so with all his spontaneous, sympathetic, examples. 
 Occasionally for a rich patron, or from weariness or haste, these 
 finer qualities of sympathy and insight seem to disappear, and the 
 result is only a piece of marvellous handicraft ; but at his best these 
 chalk portraits rival those of Mr. Watts himself in dignity and 
 expression, and far surpass that great artist in fidelity to their models. 
 The quarrel and the intimacy of Sandys and Rossetti are subjects 
 which I shall only allude to briefly for the sake of removing a very 
 mistaken notion which somehow has obtained popular acceptance. 
 This is that Mr. Sandys and Rossetti quarrelled because of a 
 caricature of the pre-Raphaelites published by the former. 
 
 1 Academy Notes, 1856. John Ruskin. . 
 L 73 
 
The picture burlesqued was the " Sir Isumbras at the Ford " of 
 Millais, a composition which, despite many beauties, lent itself easily 
 to caricature — and the treatment by Sandys was most ingenious. 
 The drawing was engraved and published, and did, I believe, give 
 great offence to some of the weaker P.R.B., but Rossetti simply 
 laughed at it, and his friendship for the author continued altogether 
 unabated. At this time Sandys was living with Rossetti_ at Cheyne 
 Walk, where there were also for some months at least Swinburne and 
 George Meredith. A nice quiet quartette they must have been in 
 those days, particularly when Joseph Knight and William Morris, 
 James Hannay (sailor and novelist) and Edward Burne-Jones dropped 
 in for the evening ! 
 
 The real reason for the quarrel was that Rossetti chose to imagine 
 Sandys had taken one of his subjects. I am assured by Madox 
 Brown, who remembers the circumstances perfectly, that Sandys was 
 entirely in the right, that the subject, which was one of " Beatrice in 
 Heaven," was his own, and that Rossetti's claim to it was " nonsense." 
 However this may have been, Rossetti delivered himself of a long 
 discourse to Sandys on the obligations of friendship, to the effect that 
 " everything he (Rossetti) had in the world was at the disposal of 
 his friends save only his subjects ! They were sacred : let no man 
 touch them " ; and much more rhodomontade of the same kind. To 
 this Sandys wrote a hasty reply, and Rossetti a hastier answer, and 
 — the friendship came to an end. 
 
 Another painter who is usually spoken of as a pre-Raphaelite, 
 though he was never in any way connected with the Brotherhood, is 
 Edward Burne-Jones, now an Associate of the Royal Academy, with 
 regard to whose art I have spoken at length in the other parts of 
 this book. 
 
 His acquaintance with Rossetti, begun in London, ripened into 
 intimacy at Oxford, when Rossetti and Morris went up there to paint 
 the Union frescoes. This came about through a Mr. Woodward, 
 the architect of the Union. He came to ask Rossetti what he should 
 do with the open spaces on the Union walls, and Rossetti in reply 
 made the proposal that Morris and himself should paint them. This 
 was on the condition that all materials were to be found and the 
 painters were to live in Oxford at free quarters till the work was 
 finished. In fact, very much Ruskin's ideal wage for an artist was 
 to be supplied — " implements, bread and cheese, and occasionally a 
 plate of figs to keep him in good humour." 
 
 A good deal has been said about the nobility and unselfishness 
 of this proposal, but the truth seems to be that the matter was 
 chiefly regarded by Rossetti as a good opportunity for trying his 
 hand at fresco — perhaps also for showing what he could do — and 
 after the first enthusiasm had faded, the projected decoration dragged 
 
 74 
 
c 
 
 5 
 
on for some years, and was finally abandoned. A good many of 
 young artists and Oxford men were associated in this scheme, 
 amongst others— Morris, Val Prinsep (now R.A.), Arthur Hughes, 
 Pollen, Burne-Jones, Spencer Stanhope, and A. Munro. The story 
 of the painters' haste, the want of preparation of the walls, and the 
 consequent fading of the frescoes, has all been frequently told, but 
 the following brief characterisation by Madox Brown of the construc- 
 tion put by the young enthusiasts on the "implements, and bread 
 and cheese," which were to be provided them, is new and not un- 
 ' amusing. (Rossetti, I may mention, began two frescoes, of which he 
 nearly completed one, the other was scarcely more than commenced.) 
 
 " They ran up a tremendous bill for paint-brushes, scrapers, scaffold- 
 ing, etc., and used to waste the materials frightfully. Rossetti 
 used to throw the scrapers all over the place, and had jars of 
 the most expensive paint, into which they used to let the 
 scrapings and dust get, and, of course, the paint was spoilt. 
 They also ran up an enormous bill for plum -puddings and 
 turkeys, which they used to dine off every evening, and then 
 finish up with whist." 
 
 William Michael Rossetti's dry comment on this scheme I take 
 from the memoir of his brother. It is probably written without 
 intentional sarcasm. 
 
 After naming the artists mentioned above, W. M. Rossetti says — 
 
 "These, along with Alexander Munro for sculptural work, were 
 all. Not any one of them was conversant with the processes 
 of solid and permanent wall-painting. The works were exe- 
 cuted, I understand, in a sort of water-colour distemper, and 
 were from the beginning predestined by Fate and Climate to 
 ruin. My brother allotted to himself two large spaces on the 
 walls ; painted one subject more or less completely, and began 
 or schemed at the other. . . . The scheme was in active opera- 
 tion in. 1857, stagnated in 1858, and was partially revived and 
 soon afterwards finally dropped in 1859." 
 
 There is practically nothing now left of these frescoes, and the 
 affair is only important from the intimacy produced and encouraged 
 thereby between Rossetti and the Oxford group. In this respect 
 its importance is very great ; for the literary side of pre-Raphaelitism, 
 and the relation thereto of decorative art, were due to this intimacy 
 of Messrs. Burne-Jones, Falkner, Swinburne, Pater, and Rossetti ; 
 and had it not been for these literary and decorative channels, and for 
 the culture stamp which they impressed upon the movement, there 
 is much reason to doubt whether Rossetti's influence in art would 
 not have gradually faded. 
 
 75 
 
With Burne-Jones, however, to carry on and develop the romantic 
 and mystical character of his painting ; with Morris and Falkner 
 to give a practical application of his principles to decorative art ; 
 with Swinburne and Pater to do sympathetic work in poetry and 
 criticism ; and with Ruskin to defend the movement with his 
 eloquence, and sustain it with his popularity and his money ; it is 
 not difficult to see how far and in how many directions the new 
 pre-Raphaelites extended their influence. 
 
 The new pre-Raphaelites — that is the point of the matter, for from 
 the time of these Oxford frescoes — possibly before, but certainly 
 from then — the old idea — the idea that, I have tried to show, was 
 always more honoured in the breach than the observance — passed 
 away entirely. 
 
 Having begun as a method of work, pre-Raphaelitism now became 
 a method of feeling, a question of sentiment. The word soon 
 grew into use as almost a synonym for mediaevalism, and is so 
 frequently used to-day. But it was mediaevalism with a difference ; 
 with the modern spirit added to the ancient form, and with a bias 
 overwhelming and unfortunate towards a view of life which was 
 neither wholesome nor manly. I have tried for many years to ex- 
 plain the effect of the spirit of this later pre-Raphaelitism, especially 
 as shown in the work of its chief master, Edward Burne-Jones, and 
 I shall only repeat here that, in my opinion, this very beautiful art 
 is not of a kind which will do the world much good, or upon which 
 any true school can be founded. 
 
 A very rich and vivid imagination, joined to unremitting industry 
 and an exquisite sense of colour, have resulted in producing Burne- 
 Jones's painting, have united to render his pictures uniquely attractive, 
 I acknowledge their beauty : I almost reverence their achievement. 
 But none the less do I see clearly how fatal is their influence, how 
 perverted their meaning, how vain their accomplishment. I see 
 how little suited is this spirit of sick-sad dreams to the country I 
 love, and the folks who have made England in the old time, and 
 who are making it to-day. And as I look back over the great art 
 of former times, I seek in vain for any painting or sculpture which 
 has based its appeal, or found its beauty in a panegyric of the 
 vanished years, in an endeavour to forget the circumstance, the 
 obligations, and the meaning of the artist's own generation. 
 
 And more than this, I regret to say that I am forced to believe that 
 these pictures are, irrespective of their mediaevalism and their arch-, 
 aisms of form and subject, unwholesome in themselves. They appear 
 to me based upon a view of the passion and the power of love which 
 is untrue and undesirable. The pictures are morbid, and not less so 
 
 76 
 
because the personages shown therein are apt to be epicure — though 
 perhaps we may not rightly term the work sensual, it is so ^uni- 
 formly and intensely sensuous, that perhaps the baser intention '^had 
 been less harmful in result. 
 
 After all, if we limit a teacher in books, ought we not also to limit 
 teaching by inference and suggestion ? and if we do not actually 
 limit such we ought at least to recognise that such teaching is no less 
 real, and perhaps even more effective. 
 
 I remember when Swinburne's Poems and Ballads came out the 
 outcry that was made, but Poems and Ballads was only the 
 poetical expression of pre-Raphaelitism as exemplified in Burne- 
 Jones's pictures — to whom indeed the book was dedicated. The same 
 criterion would approve or condemn both. Should the painter be 
 blamed for the aspect of his work, for its meaning, for the mystery 
 of the flesh and love of which his pictures hint ? Ah, that opens a 
 wide question, the question of an artist's duty to himself and his 
 art and to the public at large. I remember Swinburne saying, in a 
 brilliant preface to his edition of some Coleridge lyrics, that " in 
 the main we got out of every man (every artist) what he had in 
 him to give " ; and that " I am that I am is the best answer to any 
 impertinence of praise or blame," and so perhaps for the artist him- 
 self the point of view must be conceded, but we may at least make 
 our own deductions from admiration or gratitude, if the painter's 
 exquisite doing is such as to enfeeble our manhood, or relax our 
 energies. And this is the more necessary as the perfection of his art 
 increases, and the younger men begin to form themselves upon his 
 manner and re-echo his spirit. 
 
 Is it not strange, this outcome of the P.R.B. theories of simplicity, 
 earnestness, and fidelity to nature ? This queer half-ascetic, half- 
 voluptuous art ; occupied with Virgins Holy and otherwise, angels, 
 mermaidens, mediaeval knights, emblems of night and morning, 
 seedtime and harvest, virtue and vice. Yet throughout every mani- 
 festation of its quaint sexless beauty this art of Burne-Jones has 
 throughout splendour and delicacy. If we leave on one side the 
 subject of the work and its inner motive — or motivelessness ; if we 
 will condone the absence of all natural visual fact, and content our- 
 selves with a mosaic of beautiful lines and tints ; if we will let his 
 figures stand, as well they may, for fair-seeming shows to whom 
 humanity has no kinship — we may then gain from this artist the most 
 subtle, the most exquisite pleasure. Only, do not let us deceive 
 ourselves : don't let us attempt to call this a pure art or an ennobling 
 one. It is neither : its scent hangs heavy on the moral air as the 
 scent of tuberose in a heated room ; the involution of its fancies is 
 morbid and artificial as the twisted robes and strained attitudes of 
 
 n 
 
the characters in the pictures. Above all, the outward mediaevalism 
 of form is a sham ; as is the semi-asceticism, and above all the 
 religion. A sham, I mean, in themselves, not because of the painter's 
 wilful pretence, but because his imagination, delicate, prodigal, and 
 refined, is nevertheless distorted and unnatural. Once, in all jesting 
 friendliness, Rossetti made a rhyme about this artist, which, as was 
 his wont, went to the root of the subject. It was written, we must 
 remember, many years ago, when both rhymester and rhymed upon 
 were young — 
 
 " There is a young painter called Jones, 
 A cheer here, and hisses, and groans ; 
 The state of his mind 
 Is a shame to mankind. 
 But a matter of triumph to Jones." ^ 
 
 A "matter of triumph," that is the gist of the question : for Jones does 
 not feel, does not believe that any imperfection, any morbid bias exists 
 in his painting. I remember his telling me some years ago that 
 art was to him an enchanted world, to which Rossetti had given him 
 the key, and in which he had lived ever since. And this is, I think, 
 only a slightly exaggerated expression of his point of view. He does 
 rather pride himself on living apart, in this enchanted country, and on 
 refusing to consider himself as belonging to England and the nine- 
 teenth century. A pity in some ways that he was not born in Germany, 
 and did not have three years "with the colours" as a boy. Of his 
 followers, I must here give little more than the names. There is 
 Spencer Stanhope, who of late years has lived at Florence, and who 
 in the earlier years of the Grosvenor Gallery, was a faithful, if (as 
 Ruskin once unkindly said) a futile echo of his master. There is 
 Eveleen Pickering, now Evelyn de Morgan, whose work is almost 
 equally founded on that of Burne-Jones and Stanhope. There is 
 Mr. Henry Holiday, who, unless I am mistaken, used to work as an 
 assistant to Burne-Jones, and who has since made some reputation 
 as a decorative artist. There is " Tommy " Rooke, as his friends all 
 call him, and as even strangers are tempted to think of him ; surely 
 the most faithful and admiring of followers, the most patient and 
 delicate of assistants. There is Fairfax Murray, who knows silently 
 more about the inner life and details of the P.R.B. and their adherents 
 than any one living, and who keeps his information to himself, 
 and whose own painting is a peculiar mixture of Rossetti and Burne- 
 Jones. There is Mr. Strudwick, a most delicate workman, and full 
 of quaint decorative fancies. There is Walter Crane, plainly owing his 
 inspiration to the same source, and turning it to pleasanter, and more 
 inventive, and more practical uses for delighting children and making 
 our houses fanciful and pretty. All of these have fallen under the 
 
 * This rhyme (and others to a similar effect) has been so widely repeated during the past 
 twenty years, that I feel justified in inserting it here. 
 
 78 
 
spell of this later pre-Raphaelitism, as have numberless amateurs, 
 and many less well-known artists. At one time — almost twenty years 
 since — the disease was so catching, so prevalent, that it was happily 
 dubbed the pre-Raphaelite measles, and no student was supposed to 
 be safe until he had taken, and — perhaps — till he had got rid of them. 
 Who did not take them, from the President of the Royal Academy 
 down to Sidney Colvin, who indeed took them very severely — 
 witness the Portfolio about 1870! Of course there were different 
 kinds, suited to various constitutions. James Linton (not yet Sir 
 James) had them a la Rossetti, and used to produce wonderful long- 
 lagged pages and high-bosomed maidens, with legs five or six feet 
 long, slender waists, and gigantic flaxen plaits of hair. Brett (R.A. 
 now) had them d, la Holman Hunt, and won Ruskin's earnest 
 praise for painting every blade of grass in the Heme Hill fields, 
 through which the Professor took his daily walk. Poynter " had 
 them badly " : witness his illustrations to the Dalziel Bible (and first- 
 rate they are too !) ; and all sorts of people one would never expect 
 fell victims ; as, for instance, George Pinwell, and for a short time 
 Fred Walker and Houghton and Val Bromley, and of course 
 Prinsep, whose contribution ci la Rossetti hangs to-day on the 
 walls of the Arts Club, and is far away the best picture I have 
 ever seen from his hand. Queerest of all people to take them 
 were George du Maurier and Linley Sambourne: the latter has 
 them to this day. Du Maurier at the time was indeed profoundly 
 influenced, and the fine drawings to Thackeray's Esmond, for instance, 
 show Rossetti in every line — not as imitations, but with that resem- 
 blance in difference which is the way a great artist rightly influences 
 a younger one. Look, for instance of this, at the drawing I repro- 
 duce here, entitled " Death the Friend." We might almost fancy 
 the lady was Rossetti's favourite model, and the whole spirit of the 
 composition is his own. 
 
 And amongst the younger artists of the present time this P.R.B. 
 influence is still strongly marked. The work of Henry Ryland, 
 C. H. Shannon, C. S. Ricketts, especially, clearly derives its inspira- 
 tion from Rossetti and Jones, and all the clique who draw for that 
 extraordinary periodical The Century Guild Hobby-Horse are lineal 
 descendants pf the P.R.B. Examples of some of these painters 
 will be found in the later pages of this book, but space fails me to 
 mention their work in detail. These brief notes on a subject of great 
 artistic interest, and as it seems to me importance, must end here, as 
 my final chapters are entirely devoted to the consideration of the 
 special characteristics of Rossetti's and Holman Hunt's painting. 
 
 79 
 
IX.— THE PAINTING AND THE POETRY 
 OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.^ 
 
 IhERE are some men of whom it is the sad fortune 
 that throughout their lives the praise and blame that 
 they experience are given in an equally exaggerated 
 degree ; they are never free from the dust and con- 
 fusion of the fierce battle which partizans raise around 
 their work and their character. As to many such, 
 the temper of their friends, the spirit of the age in which they live, 
 the circumstances amongst which their lot is cast, are responsible 
 for the separateness of their lives, for the dust of praise or blame 
 which surrounds their achievements and their failures. _ But for 
 others — and these perhaps are the nobler spirits — friendship, circum- 
 stance, and surroundings, are less responsible than some strange 
 peculiarities of temper and intellect, sufficiently powerful to unite 
 with themselves a portion of the practices and theories of every- 
 day life, and to reject without hesitation all that is incompatible. 
 Such as these last are of the old prophetic temper ; of this race have 
 sprung those who in every generation have raised their voices in 
 denunciation or warning of the creeds amongst which they lived. 
 They may have no gospel to deliver ; their voices may carry no 
 message that the world can profit by. Clear messages, as George 
 Eliot tells us, are rare in this world of to-day, but if their discontent 
 is sufficiently genuine to affect their lives, if their personality is 
 sufficiently strong to affect the lives of others, and if their genius is 
 sufficiently great to proclaim itself as a thing apart, having a special 
 and inimitable character of its own, — then, whatever may be the 
 perversities and fantasies of such men, they are sure to become 
 
 * Written only a few months after Rossetti's death ; pubUshed in the Contemporary Review. 
 I have inserted this article mainly because I discovered with much pleasure, and even more 
 surprise, that Mr. Theodore Watts (the most intimate friend Rossetti ever had) was disposed 
 to consider the paper as in some respects adequate. Mr. Watts's own words on this subject 
 are so infinitely beyond anything I could ever write that I must refer all readers interested in 
 Rossetti to his article, entitled " The Truth about Rossetti," in the Contemporary Review, 1883. 
 
 80 
 
»,«--■-> un^ 
 
leaders of those who share their peculiarities without possessing their 
 power. And the resistance of the world at large to the eccentricities 
 of any such cult has the inevitable effect of intensifying the zeal with 
 which its eccentricities are manifested — of causing the statement of 
 the creed to be made in cruder and cruder terms. It sometimes 
 happens that the leader of the school, wearied by the desertion or 
 disgusted by the shallowness of his followers, breaks with them and 
 his old theories, and becomes like other men ; but more frequently 
 he is bound by the acts of his clientele, and what was at first a mere 
 youthful enthusiasm, and a passionate revolt against convention, 
 becomes the very habit of his soul. 
 
 It is too soon after Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's death, whilst 
 so many of his associates and relations are still alive, to discuss the 
 question how far the peculiarities of his painting and poetry were 
 due to inherent personal characteristics, and how far to the surround- 
 ings and circumstances of his life ; but it is almost equally difficult to 
 deal with the question of his art without making some mention of 
 those circumstances, for, perhaps, in no painter of modern times was 
 the personal and the artistic life so strangely intermingled. Those, 
 for instance, who criticise so severely the strangeness and the mourn- 
 ful tendency of Rossetti's pictures when taken as a whole, and who 
 do not scruple to attribute to the painter deliberate affectation and 
 assumed grief for the mere sake of eccentricity or effect, would do 
 well to take into account the circumstances of his Italian descent, his 
 father's exile from his native land, and his own great sorrow in 
 losing, in the first years of his wedded life, the wife to whom he was 
 so passionately attached. An alien in race and an alien in spirit, 
 suffering from keen private grief, and met without by an opposition 
 to his art, which made up in personal invective what it lacked in 
 reasonable judgment, it is perhaps little wonderful that young 
 Rossetti, conscious as he must have been of great and original 
 powers, isolated himself from the general public, and found a bitter 
 consolation in giving up to dreams of the past, those powers which 
 had no longer any object in the future. 
 
 Every one knows by this time jthat well-worn story of the pre- 
 Raphaelite Brethren, of the fury with which they were both attacked 
 and defended, and I do not intend to dwell upon these things here ; 
 but I must note that practically Rossetti was the chief artistic aiid 
 imaginative leader of the movement. Mr. Holman Hunt was a man 
 of supreme industry, undoubted keenness of observation, and 
 technical skill ; but, though an enthusiastic disciple, he had no great 
 original pictorial ability.^ What he has done — and much of it is very 
 
 * I hope I may be pardoned this repetition of criticism in the early portion of the chapter 
 on the history of pre-Raphaelitism. 
 
 M 8l 
 
beautiful and very noble work — has been done with an infinity 
 of labour, often prolonged over years, upon each single picture. Mr. 
 Millais was, as an artist, gifted with every faculty except that of 
 caring what he painted or drew ; he was as impartial as the sunlight 
 that falls upon the just and the unjust. The quickening influence 
 that fell upon both these men, and aroused their intelligence and 
 stirred their feelings, was the passionately emotional genius of 
 Rossetti, and looking back to early Millais pictures, one can see as 
 plainly as if it were written upon the canvas — Here I was painting 
 what Rossetti felt : ^ here his influence had passed away. 
 
 If any of my readers happen to have the early quarto edition of 
 Tennyson's poems with the illustrations, and will take the trouble to 
 compare the drawings therein by Millais, Hunt and Rossetti ; and 
 then, with these designs in their mind, go and examine the Rossettis 
 which are now being displayed at the Royal Academy, they will see 
 beyond doubt whose was the guiding influence amongst the so-called 
 pre-Raphaelites, and why traces of mediaeval Italy kept cropping 
 out in realistic pictures of English orchards, or illustrations of sacred 
 history. Look, for instance, at the drawing by Mr. Holman Hunt 
 in illustration of the Lady of Shalott. Why, this is a Rossetti in 
 all its main points ! Face and figure, and arrangement of drapery 
 and pose, are all due to the influence of the last-mentioned painter. 
 And any number of similar illustrations might be given. If the history 
 of this strange artistic movement — strange alike in its inception, its 
 fierce energy, and its brief, stormy life — ever comes to be told from 
 the inside, as alone it can be adequately written, it "will be found 
 that in every sense of the word Rossetti was the head, the brain, of 
 the Society, and that his extraordinary personal influence alone gave 
 any coherence to the practices of the various members. We can all 
 see now, though, perhaps, I may be blamed for saying it in so many 
 words, that neither Sir John Millais nor Mr. Holman Hunt is of the 
 reforming type of character. They were once, when they were 
 square men in round holes ; and, to this day, their art is the better 
 for the Sturm und drang period through which Rossetti hurled 
 it. But the influence is gone, — had faded long before he died to 
 whom it owed its origin ; and many an admirer of " The Awakened 
 Conscience" of Mr. Hunt, and the " Mariana " of Sir John Millais, 
 must have found the want, in the same painters' later pictures, of the 
 deep poetical feeling which sprang from the enthusiastic spirit and 
 vivid imag^ination of their brother pre-Raphaelite. 
 
 In speaking, therefore, of Rossetti's art, and trying to estimate 
 its worth, we must always bear in mind • that, as a set-off" against 
 
 ' I am bound to add that Holman Hunt's influence is also strongly perceptible in some 
 of Millais' early work. 
 
 82 
 
many eccentricities and deficiencies of treatment, and many limita- 
 tions of thought and feeling, we have this fact — that it was powerful 
 to trouble the artistic Bethesda to the very depths of its sluggish 
 waters, and to set artists upon new tracks of execution and new 
 impulses of thought. Surely no mean praise to a painter, that, 
 under his awakening power, other painters did better and more 
 vital work than they have done before or siace ; and that the 
 forward impulse in art which he was mainly instrumental in creating, 
 bids fair to widen out into issues of which no one can at present 
 predict the end. 
 
 But I am not concerned here to defend Rossetti as the leader of 
 the pre-Raphaelites, nor to ask for fame for him on any secondary 
 ground whatever. I am desirous to point out again what seem to 
 me to be the actual achievements of this master in the two arts in 
 which he laboured ; and I am the more anxious to do this (if my 
 readers will pardon me a single word of personal explanation), 
 because I have been accused of late by several persons of a desire 
 to depreciate the work of the pre - Raphaelites, and to attribute 
 thereto demoralising influences which it does not possess. The 
 sentence which so afflicted Ruskin that he left off writing criticisms 
 of contemporary painters — Damn the fellow, why doesn't he back his 
 friends ? — has been hurled at me directly or indirectly many times, 
 and the attempt seems hopeless to make painters understand that 
 we may admire great qualities without shutting the eyes to weak 
 ones, or that one can honestly enjoy a picture, and yet be forced 
 to consider its artist neither a Titian nor a Michelangelo. The 
 result is that because a writer is not a partizan upon one side, it is 
 straightway concluded that he must be a partizan on the other, and 
 if he ventures to find fault with a single pre-Raphaelite failing, he is 
 told that he is not entitled to admire a single pre-Raphaelite great- 
 ness. Of course such reasoning is absurd, but even absurdity 
 becomes wsrth demolishing when it gains universal acceptance ; and 
 in the art-world of London at the present day, we can hardly gain a 
 hearing for any view" of the matter which is not, either professedly 
 or actually, a partizan one. Are you for Belt or Verheyden ? That 
 is the form of question nowadays in other artistic matters than the 
 great libel case ; and the man who in reply murmurs gently " Arcades 
 ambo" is looked upon with contempt, or more probably still as a 
 spy in both camps. 
 
 In the first place, then, as regards Rossetti's work, I must say 
 at once that I propose to consider it as a whole, not confining one 
 portion of my remarks to the poetry, another to the painting, but 
 treating both manifestations of his intellect together. And this for 
 the simple reason that it does not appear to me to be possible to 
 separate them without doing both the painter and the poet gross 
 
 83 
 
injustice. Of the technical perfection of workmanship in each, a 
 few words may have to be said separately ; but for the discussion 
 of the more emotional, imaginative, and purely, intellectual qualities, 
 the two divisions of art must here be considered as one. Now, 
 throughout the whole of our subject's painting, and throughout 
 the whole of his poetry, there runs one dominant idea, and only 
 one — Love baffled by Death. It is on this that he rings the changes 
 — very beautiful changes they are, touching it deftly now on this 
 side and now on that, dressing it up in all kinds of strange and 
 fantastically beautiful garments, hinting at it subtly through images 
 of pleasure and pain, shadowing it forth in various allegorical ways, 
 proclaiming it fiercely as in the voice of one just bereaved. But 
 always, if we look long enough at poem or picture, we find the 
 trace of this idea ; speaking broadly, this is the beginning and the 
 end of his philosophy. We say the end, for with the victory of 
 death the master seems to close his story, though now and then *he 
 hints to us that he has heard of a heaven and a hell where all will 
 be set right. Still, these are not part of his saying or his painting ; 
 they may be true, but they are not the facts that impress him, they 
 are too faint, too far off, for his pencil or his verse. Or if he tells us 
 of them at all, he does so in such glowing sensuous images, with so 
 resolute an adherence to natural facts, that we recognise only another 
 earth in his Paradise or his Inferno. Mark, for instance, how the 
 Blessed Damozel leans out from the gold bar of heaven. 
 
 " And still she bowed herself and stooped 
 Out of the circling charm; 
 Until her bosom must have made 
 
 The bar she leaned on warm, 
 And the lilies lay |is if asleep 
 Along her bended arm." 
 
 It was said once by a writer anxious to make out a case against 
 the pre-Raphaelite school of modern poetry, that sensuality was 
 one of the chief characteristics of Rossetti's verse, and certain 
 quotations^ were given to prove this. Time has effectually dis- 
 posed of that charge, and the misrepresentations on which it was 
 founded have been adequately confuted ; but the fact has hardly been 
 sufficiently noticed, that the real ground of the accusation is due to 
 the fact of the poet-painter being unable to dissever his pictorial 
 from his poetic faculty. He habitually thought (if such an expres- 
 sion is allowable) in terms of painting. He could not dissever . 
 his most purely intellectual ideas, from colour and form,, and the 
 intrusion of these physical facts into his poetry, in places where they 
 are unexpected and unnecessary, gives to hasty readers and 
 superficial critics such a wrong impression. And in the same way 
 as he charges a poem with n^ore colour and form than it can well 
 
 ^ The above verse was one of the number. 
 84 
 
iM'^ ROSSKTTl WHEN MISS SIDDAL, 1.)RA^^■1NG 
 
 D. fj. ROSSKTTl 
 
 Facsimile of a I'cn dran-ui^' in the fosscs.sitn of the author 
 
bear as poetry, so does he charge his pictures with a weight of idea, 
 which their form and colour can scarcely realise, and in both he calls 
 upon the spectator to be at once the witness and the interpreter 
 of his work. From this there results in his poetry the following 
 effect — that he is at his finest when he has to tell some plain story, 
 or exemplify some comparatively simple thought, the insertion into 
 which of physical facts will heighten, rather than jar upon the 
 meaning ; or in verses which treat intellectual ideas from a purely 
 sensuous basis, such, for instance, as in those sonnets which are 
 concerned with the passion of love. When, however, he seeks to 
 treat either a purely intellectual, or a purely spiritual subject, he 
 fails almost inevitably, and that apparently in painting as well as 
 in poetry. Like Antaeus, if he is held off the earth too long his 
 strength fails him. This painter-like quality makes his verse puzzlingly 
 contradictory, for in idea, the poetry is almost without exception of a 
 singularly pure and intellectual character, and very often of high 
 spiritual significance. 
 
 Turning from his verse to his painting, the same curious con- 
 tradiction is forced upon our attention. We find continually in his 
 pictures, that the reproduction of the sensuous part of his subject is 
 interfered with by the strange half-refining, half-abstract, quality of 
 his intellect. This is especially evident in his treatment of the form 
 of the human body, in which he has two methods, both adapted to 
 the same end, or rather, perhaps, both unconsciously tending to the 
 same end. One is to leave out as much as possible all detailed 
 drawing, to suffuse the whole body in a mist of colour, in which no 
 modelling of flesh or structure of bone is clearly visible. The other 
 method is to accentuate those portions of the body, or the features, 
 which best help to express emotion, and so to use and arrange them 
 as to produce a definite emotional idea. The long necks in which so 
 many of his female figures rejoice, the slender hands with fingers 
 turning round one another, the heavy curved lips, and the other 
 physical peculiarities to be traced in his works, are all due to the 
 passionately sensuous, but equally passionately intellectual, nature of 
 Rossetti ; they are the record of a man whose sense of beauty was 
 always being disturbed by his sense of feeling. 
 
 When all is said and done, this sense of beauty is that upon 
 which his great praise must be founded, and is also the ultimate test 
 by which all painters must be judged. Artists and ci"itics may tell us 
 that this detail is impossible, and the other absurd ; the moralist may 
 preach that there is here too morbid an insistence upon one idea ; the 
 general public may deplore the lack of their much-loved catchpenny 
 subjects ; and the Philistine may laugh at the eccentric form in which 
 Mr. Rossetti's ideas are produced. But if the net result is beautiful, if 
 
 85 
 
the one idea is truly and finely expressed, the chief aim of the painter 
 has been achieved ; and the world, which is only unjust for a brief 
 space — too often, alas ! the space of a lifetime — will not let the work 
 die. This is the rock upon which so many artists, especially so many 
 modern English and French artists, split ; their pictures are frequently 
 possessed of every merit save that one which alone would justify 
 their existence. In this respect the subject of my article is entitled 
 to be considered as a supreme artist. In some of his works, 
 especially in his later ones, when the fatal influence of chloral was 
 beginning to wither his powers, there are distortions and even ugli- 
 nesses such as can scarcely be condoned, and we cannot help 
 regretting that, throughout a great part of his life, the influence of 
 one type of woman should have been so great as to appear in all his 
 pictures — now as Proserpine, now as the Virgin Mary, and so 
 throughout the range of his poetical fancies, and the old legends with 
 which he occupied his pencil. But when all these deficiencies are 
 subtracted, or allowed for, there remain a series of pictures which 
 have such marvellous glory of colouring, such intensely vivid feeling, 
 and such beauty of detail, that I at least know not where to find their 
 parallel. They are living, breathing poems, at once delicate and 
 strong, passionate and pure, and appear to say the last word possible 
 upon their various subjects. 
 
 Take as an example of this, the celebrated picture of the painter's 
 wife, done after her death, and entitled " Beata Beatrix." The subject 
 is simple enough — a three-quarter-length figure of a woman, whose 
 head has fallen slightly backward upon her shoulders in sleep, which 
 we feel will soon be that of death. Fluttering in froAt of her is a 
 crimson bird, bearing a poppy in its mouth ; behind her a sun-dial ; 
 while in the distance of the Florentine streets stand Dante and the 
 Angel of Love watching. Descriptions of pictures, as some one says, 
 are stupid things at the best ; but here they seem to me even more 
 than usually inadequate. No amount of description could convey 
 any hint of the intense and beautiful peace which marks this painting. 
 It is like that of summer woods at early dawn, before the first 
 bird has begun to sing, and the last star faded. Nor only are the 
 face and expression perfect ; the whole picture tells a story with 
 an emphasis only the more clear because of the intense quietude. Like 
 the whisper of a great actress, we hear, and feel the weight of every 
 syllable. And this is fine technically, as well as emotionally, for 
 curiously enough in this, probably his finest picture, Rossetti shows 
 little or none of that wilfulness so frequently present in his works. 
 The drawing, if not very markedly good, is unobtrusive and unobjec- 
 tionable ; the disposition of the drapery (always a strong point with 
 this artist) is simplicity and dignity itself, the position full both of 
 grace and suggestion, is at the same time markedly original, and 
 
 86 
 
represented with the utmost ease ; while of the colouring no one 
 can speak in terms of too high praise. The picture is suffused 
 with a misty sunshine, and all the hues therein are somewhat low in 
 tone ; but into their transparent depths the eye looks down and down, 
 as through the still waters of a lake ; and the effect of the whole is 
 that of some very marvellous piece of quiet music, played at a great 
 distance. This picture, too, gives us a good opportunity of noticing 
 the strange combination of realism and idealism in Rossetti's painting, 
 a combination which is of course due to, and is, indeed, scarcely more 
 than one manifestation of, that habit of mind of which we have spoken 
 above. What may be called the furniture of his pictures, the caskets 
 which his women hold in their hands, the censers and candlesticks 
 and musical instruments which they use, or the flowers or foliage with 
 which they are adorned or surrounded, is almost invariably drawn 
 and painted with the greatest delicacy and skill from the objects them- 
 selves. And those who went to the sale, which took place after his 
 death, of the painter's effects must have seen many of the strangely- 
 shaped instruments and brazen vessels which appear in these pictures. 
 
 But with all this attention to natural or artificial fact, Rossetti is far 
 from being a realistic painter ; indeed it is only in these subsidiary 
 facts that his realism shows. His manner of painting flesh and 
 drapery is utterly opposed to that which obtains so greatly in the 
 present day, which takes account of every variation of texture, which 
 in fact aims at producing the actual impression on the eye which is 
 produced by the real thing. In the sense that Alma-Tadema is a 
 flesh painter, or M. Lefebvre, Rossetti is none — and would not be if 
 he could. It seems strange that this man, who has been accused so 
 strongly of sensualism, would have undoubtedly said that the modern 
 practice of representing the nude model, was degraded in feeling and 
 inartistic in practice. 
 
 What he attempts to do in his painting of flesh, is to combine its 
 translucencies of colour with as much of the form as he can show 
 without making the details prominent, but never to suggest the 
 actual texture of the flesh itself — never to put a nude model on to 
 his canvas.^ When he paints a woman who shows breast or arm, 
 he does so as frankly as a Greek would have done, and with as 
 absolute a reliance upon its being the right and natural thing. The 
 coarseness which strikes so vividly one who enters the French Salon 
 for the first time, and sees hanging on every side life-size studies of 
 nude models, is entirely absent from his work, nor can any hint of 
 such feeling be found therein. One reason for this lies probably in 
 
 1 Perhaps I should ^dd here that Rossetti, to the best of my belief never painted a wholly 
 nude figure. I possess a rather curious pen-drawing of his of a nude woman getting out of 
 bed, and holding out her arms for some clothes which a maid-servant is reaching down 
 from a peg ; but what was the date of this, or the meaning of the subject, I do not know 
 
 87 
 
the fact, which is difficult to account for, but which the history of 
 art proves to be certain, that really great colour can hardly give an 
 impression of coarseness. It seems somehow as if colour were a 
 furnace whose fierce heat burned up all mean and unworthy things. 
 But a still stronger reason is probably that of the painter's own 
 personality,— one which, as I have been trying to show, sought 
 not to clothe physical fact with emotional and intellectual ideas, but 
 to express these ideas in terms of fact. The difference may very 
 likely appear to my readers to be slight and unimportant ; to me, I 
 confess, it is the reverse. The man was a poet by nature, he became 
 an artist by education, and owing to an intense desire to express 
 himself in painting as well as in song. The first medium afforded 
 his passionate. Southern spirit the glory which he needed ; the last 
 gave an outlet to the melody with which his nature was endowed. 
 The action and reaction were very subtle, and one can see now that 
 while the painting certainly prevented his poetry from being as fine 
 as it might have been ; the poetry invariably upheld and dignified 
 his painting even in its wildest moments. Across both, the reflec- 
 tion of the man's own vivid Italian disposition often fell with startling 
 effect, obtruding itself and its feelings into every variety of subject, 
 and in all kinds of diverse manners ; and one of the strangest qualities 
 in this painter's strange art, is the continual conflict, both in his 
 paintings and. his poems, of the passionate egoism which was the 
 natural bent of his mind, intensified by the circumstances of his life, 
 and the sense of dramatic fitness which is, perhaps, his strongest 
 intellectual characteristic. 
 
 I hardly know whether this conflict shows most clearly in poetry 
 or in painting; it is perfectly evident in both, and his finest 
 work in either art is to be found, as we should naturally expect, in 
 such subjects as those in which the dramatic presentment of the 
 poem or painting is little more than an echo of some personal 
 mood. This gives their intense power to such poems as Jenny 
 and The Last Confession, and in a minor degree to the ballad and 
 the paintings of The Blessed Damozel. This gives point and 
 meaning to the pictures of Beatrice and Dante ; and again, this inter- 
 feres continually with his dramatic realisation of many poetical 
 ideas with which he deals, but from which he cannot expel his own 
 personality, and which appear, in his presentment of them, so tinged 
 with subjective influences as to be dramatically feeble. 
 
 I have no wish to dwell on this point ; only we must remember 
 that the man being what he was, — out of suits with fortune, and 
 himself, from the beginning of his life, having suffered the great loss 
 of his wife almost as soon as he had been united to her, being sub- 
 sequently possessed by the strange beauty of the face which he has 
 
 88 
 
made so familiar to us, having his health ruined by indulgence in 
 chloral, and his spirit broken by one of the most .painful diseases 
 which a man can bear ; having become as suspicious of his friends 
 as his enemies, and living in almost complete isolation, it is not 
 wonderful that, towards the close of his life, his painting grew to have 
 little more than a desponding echo of the earlier beauty : an oft- 
 repeated cry of grief or weariness. 
 
 If, however, we take his work in the best period, between the 
 dates, that is to say, of 1850 and 1870, and look with especial care 
 at the earlier drawings, we find that if the painter repeated himself 
 *in later years, he did so from no lack of invention or imagina- 
 tion, and that his youth, indeed, shows an inventiveness and a fancy 
 which are only too exuberant and are apt to waste their power by 
 being too lavishly displayed. In the Fine Arts Club at Savile Row 
 there is at the present time ^ a collection of Rossettis which is especi- 
 ally rich in his early water-colour works, and in these alone is to be 
 found sufficient artistic material to supply an ordinary painter for 
 his lifetime. We cannot stay to mention these separately, but must 
 just call attention to the very lovely one which represents the first 
 meeting of Dante and Beatrice, a drawing which, for bright beauty 
 of colour, originality of treatment, and vivid grasp of its subject, is 
 perhaps the finest Rossetti ever conceived. In this, as in many 
 others of the same period, not a trace is to be found of the heavy 
 despairing state of mind which shows" in his later work. They are 
 bright, almost blithe, in conception, and are painted with a simple 
 purity of colour which is akin only to that used by the very early 
 Italian painters. Looking at these, we understand the early work 
 of Millais and Hunt, and see whence it derived its inspiration. 
 And it is curious to notice that these works are infinitely more 
 English in the style of face and personality than those of later years. 
 
 A word must be said of the one scene of English modern life 
 which the painter attempted — the picture known by the name of 
 " Found," and drawn in illustration of a ballad by Mr. W. B. Scott, 
 one of Rossetti's oldest friends. This represents ^. woman /ound in 
 London by her quondam Jover, after many a year of shameful life. 
 He is holding her hands and looking down towards her ; she has 
 shrunk away from his touch and gaze, and is crouching against a 
 low wall. In the background is a bridge over the river ; by the side 
 of the man stands, not without its added touch of terrible meaning, 
 a cart with a netted calf bleating piteously. The time is early 
 morning, and the bridge and distance are blue and misty ; the whole 
 picture is pale and cold in its effect of colour. This the Academy 
 catalogue informs us, not quite correctly, was painted in 1882 ; as a 
 
 ' i.e. 1883. 
 N 89 
 
matter of fact it was, I believe, painted in 1868, or thereabouts, and 
 was only slightly altered, and, my informant assures me, considerably 
 spoilt, in 1882. However this may be, there is some intrinsic 
 evidence for it to be found in the small pen-and-ink drawing for the 
 same subject, which is now being exhibited at the Fine Arts Club, 
 wherein the face of the countryman is different and far finer in 
 expression than in the finished picture. The chief interest centres in 
 the face of the woman, and it is the extraordinary power which Mr. 
 Rossetti has shown in this portion of the picture which renders the 
 whole so supremely interesting. Few artists have cared to grapple with 
 an idyll of London life such as this, painting the naked truth with no 
 extenuating circumstances, and many of those who see this picture 
 are no doubt excessively shocked at being brought face to face with 
 such a scene. But it is a fitting corollary to the painter's poem of 
 Jenny — the last word which was needed to render that story com- 
 plete. In very truth Mr. Rossetti has been able to imprint on a 
 woman's face, seen in one supreme moment, traces of all the gay, 
 reckless, shameful, shameless, horrible -life she has led since first 
 she lay amongst the blown grass in the meadows — 
 
 " And wondered where the city was." 
 
 It is all here — past innocence and present guilt, and almost-forgotten 
 love and honour, struggling to drown memory that will not die, and 
 shame, and terror, and despair. Not a pleasant picture, but one 
 which goes to the root of the matter with which it deals ; one which 
 is, as Ruskin once said of a somewhat similar- painting by Mr. 
 Holman Hunt, "powerful to meet full in the front the social evil 
 of the age in which it is painted ; to waken into mercy the cruel 
 thoughtlessness of youth, and subdue the severities of judgment 
 into the sanctity of compassion," Looking at this picture, at the 
 poem of Jenny and The Last Confession, and at the ballads of 
 Rose Mary and ' Twixt Holmscote and Hurstcote, we touch, I think, 
 upon the real strength of Rossetti, a strength which underlay all his 
 eccentricities and weaknesses. He never paltered with the facts of 
 the case, no matter how terrible ; but in the life of others, as well as 
 in his own, cut down to the truth. No wonder he gave offence to the 
 decorous, and was a stumbling-block to the shallow. What do either 
 want with unpleasant fact, told in the barest and least conventional 
 terms .? And Rossetti's frankness reached almost to the verge of 
 cynicism ; he spared others no more than he did himself 
 
 Throughout all, however, and despite the curious garb in which 
 he disguised his meaning, truth was always his aim; the nature 
 of the man was sincere throughout. In an age when painters 
 have few beliefs, and hold those very lightly, this man scarcely 
 stirred a step in art except in obedience to his own inspiration, 
 and was strong enough, despite all his failings, to modify the 
 
 90 
 
^-^jt^fe^*^ P;^^^^^; 
 
 4 %i^W^k 
 
 
 FOUND. — D. G. RossF.TTi 
 
practices, if he did not actually change the creeds, of half the artists 
 of his time. To him, as we have said, Millais owed his poetical 
 inspiration, and his most beautiful pictures were painted under that 
 influence ; to him Holman Hunt was even more indebted ; from 
 him, though soon able to strike out a line for himself, sprang Mr. 
 Burne-Jones, fully equipped for the fight, like a second Minerva, 
 from the brain of a second Jove ; to his early friendship with William 
 Moms at Oxford, when he went there to paint the frescoes in the 
 Union, we probably owe the determining impulse which set the 
 author of the Earthly Paradise on the road to that decoration which 
 has changed the look of half the houses in London, and substituted 
 art for ugliness all over the kingdom ; and to him probably, if we 
 could trace it back, we owe, almost equally with Ruskin, the growth 
 of the feeling that art was more than a mere trade, and that an 
 artist has duties to himself and his art, as well as to his pocket and 
 his public. 
 
 ^ For his fame it is probably unfortunate that he did not confine 
 himself to poetry, or that he did not begin painting earlier, study 
 it more rigorously, and confine himself to it more entirely ; but 
 for the world at large I doubt whether he could have done, being 
 what he was, better work. He was to all young artists and young 
 writers a tower of strength, a light to encourage them to despise 
 conventions, and to give up their lives to their art. He was, in 
 fact, a standing protest against the idols of the market — an influ- 
 ence that made, as Arnold would say, for artistic righteousness. In 
 the minds of hundreds of young men, who never even saw him, there 
 lurked a satisfaction that down at Chelsea a man was living, painting, 
 and writing, without caring a brass farthing for anybody's opinion, 
 for that is the one temper that produces good artistic work. The 
 difficulties under which a young artist, be he painter or poet, 
 labours, are so enormous, the circumstances of the age are so much 
 against his profession, and the confusion of counsellors is so great, 
 that unless he can close his ears, and possess his soul in patience, 
 it is a thousand to one against his producing first-rate work. The 
 comparative isolation of Rossetti's life did not produce his short- 
 comings, though no doubt it narrowed his range of sympathies ; it 
 was his persistent dwelling upon one idea, and the unfortunate 
 coincidence which gave him models of a physical type which 
 exactly fitted the artistic peculiarities of his temperament. The 
 conjunction of these circumstances forced him into one groove of 
 thought, and held him there like a vice ; and there are few things more 
 pathetically evident about any modern painter, than the way in which 
 he struggled, and struggled in vain, to free himself from the chain 
 of feeling and thought which his own hands had bound round him. 
 
 But his influence was scarcely the less for his personal short- 
 
 91 
 
comings — they proved him human even to his simple enthusiastic 
 disciples, and they were of the kind that bring pity rather than 
 contempt, for they were as much the result of idiosyncrasy and 
 misfortune, as of misconduct — from the first the man, with all his 
 genius, could scarcely have been successful or happy in the ordinary 
 way. 
 
 What place in the history of art and literature his achieve- 
 ments will eventually hold is difficult even to surmise, but one or 
 two points may be confidently asserted. In the future, Rossetti will 
 stand less as the painter -poet than as the leader of the great 
 artistic movement of England in the nineteenth century; his 
 work will be regarded and prized even more for what it effected, 
 than for its intrinsic merit. As we get a little farther removed 
 in time from the controversies which have raged round the 
 modern schools of poetry and painting, it will be seen that his was 
 the central figure of the combat, his hand raised the standard round 
 which the foemen rallied. Two or three only of the poems are 
 likely to survive the taste of the present day, and of these Jenny is 
 far the most important, and will always stand as a statement, in 
 singularly strong and beautiful words, of that problem of woman- 
 hood, for which, as yet, no one has found a solution. The Last 
 Confession is, perhaps, the most complete of all the poems, but it 
 touches on no such universal chord as that with which Jenny is con- 
 cerned, and is interesting chiefly as a study of morbid love and 
 jealousy ; and all the other poems, beautiful as they are, will, we fear, 
 be neglected in future years, if only because of their dependence 
 upon a special phase of feeling which is not one with which most 
 readers have any sympathy. They are not too egoistic to last, but 
 they are egoistic in too unusual, too subtle a way, and the strange- 
 ness of their form, natural as it was to the man who wrote them, will 
 probably in after years make them appear half affected, and half 
 incomprehensible. Perhaps the crowning misfortune for a poet, when 
 his chances of immortality are being considered, is that men should 
 read him less for what he says than for what may be called the atmo- 
 sphere of his verse — when he pleases our senses without stirring our 
 sympathies. This is to a certain extent the case with Rossetti. 
 The young, the healthy, and the brave may delight in his writing 
 for its music, and even find a half-pleasure in its iteration of grief. 
 But it is impossible that they should sympathise with the work as a 
 whole ; the cry of pain is too continuous, too long sustained, followed 
 out into too many various directions. The thought comes across us 
 as we read, that though the poet was sincere, his poetry is not ; that 
 these fancies which, wherever they begin, end only in the grave, are 
 not the realities of life and action, and have no true bearing thereon. 
 And the doubt is apt to rise as to the reality of the sorrow we find 
 so exquisitely expressed. The roughness, the impatience of great 
 
 92 
 
grief are wholly lacking ; we might even suspect occasionally that in 
 his own way the poet is enjoying his tragedies, is cherishing his 
 tears. And the consequence is that one grows into a habit of listen- 
 ing to him much as one does to the prattle of a child — glad when he 
 says anything wise, tender, or beautiful* but attaching little or no 
 importance to the thread of his discourse. 
 
 The place of his painting is even harder to determine. Many 
 artists would tell us that it is not painting at all, and from one point of 
 view they would be right. But is this really the question ? Another 
 age may deny that the modern French school are painters, or that 
 there is any painting save that of Germany and the Low Countries ; 
 or may erect some new standard, or return to some old one which 
 is now forgotten. Who shall decide what is and what is not paint- 
 ing, if we once leave the broad track of beautiful colour applied to a 
 plane surface so as to produce a beautiful result ? And if the deci- 
 sion can be made so as to exclude the work of which we are talking, 
 we should have to consider whether, if this be not painting, it is not 
 something else than painting which we require. This is at all events 
 — Art. There is no doubt of that ; and the best examples possess 
 three qualities, which it is excessively rare to find in combination. 
 They are at once passionate, poetical, and refined, and defy the 
 spectator to associate them with ideas of manufacture. Such as it 
 is, the work has evidently grown from its author's character, like a 
 flower from the earth, and bears scarcely a trace of another's influ- 
 ence. The hope of immortality lies in this fact. Copies die, but 
 for originals, however imperfect, there is always a chance. It is, I 
 imagine, as unlikely that future generations will understand the 
 meaning of their author, as that they will care to follow out his curious 
 life and character ; but the qualities of imagination and passion, and 
 the technical perfection of the colouring, will probably secure these 
 works a place in the history of art. For as poems in colour, the 
 world has seen nothing finer since the days of Titian. 
 
 I would apologise to my readers for the desultory character of 
 these notes, did I not feel, and feel most strongly, that the time has 
 not yet come in which it is possible to estimate in any complete 
 degree the scope and character of Dante Rossetti's work. Any 
 endeavour to do so would inevitably trench upon personal matters, 
 and give pain to many people. I have tried, probably with 
 unsuccess, to steer a middle course, and to suggest the truth so far 
 as this could be done without offence. And summing up that 
 truth in a sentence, it comes to this — that Rossetti's was a true 
 artistic genius, wedded to a nature which was almost equally 
 passionate and intellectual, an Italian rather than an English 
 character, and that though the circumstances of his life thwarted 
 
 93 
 
his powers to an unusual extent, they did not alter in any essential 
 respect the character of his work. Under no conceivable circum- 
 stances, I think, would the man's genius have driven him straight 
 and fast along any given road, and to a predetermined end : the 
 seeds of contradiction were in himself as well as in his surroundings. 
 His intellect and his senses were like two millstones, and would 
 have ground each other to pieces had there been no interposing 
 medium. In judging him we must not forget that he was an alien 
 in race and more than an alien in character ; neither his virtues nor 
 his vices were such as we display. We can at least thank him for 
 this, that he broke with one fierce wrench the bonds of artistic con- 
 vention, and taught English artists that they might dare to paint 
 and write their thoughts and feelings without regard to prohibition, 
 or convention. 
 
 94 
 
X.— THE PAINTING OF 
 HOLMAN HUNT. 
 
 HAT is the prevailing characteristic, the leading 
 " note," to use the art slang of to-day, in this painter's 
 work ? Well, Hunt has been painting for nearly 
 fifty years, and the main results of his life's work 
 could be got into one small room. Given that the 
 artist has been, as is notoriously the case, an in- 
 defatigable worker during all this period, we can see by this how 
 " thorough " has been his execution of each picture ; and thorough- 
 ness is, indeed, the most vital quality of his painting. Artists of 
 more spontaneous impulse we have amongst us, but for men who 
 have carried out that impulse to a degree equal to Hunt, we may 
 look in vain. Never, perhaps, in the history of art were there great 
 pictures with which it was so easy to find fault, and which it was so 
 impossible to disregard — pictures whose peculiarities irritated so 
 many and yet interested all. It is the old story, if a man has any- 
 thing to say he is always worth listening to, and this artist has much 
 that he wants to tell us. Briefly, then, the key to Hunt's art is this 
 thoroughness, this desire, and more than desire, this determination to 
 get to the very heart of his subject — to its very heart of hearts. And 
 this, too, is the reason why no one can pass his work by, and, perhaps, 
 partially the reason why so many find it unsatisfactory. For the 
 majority of people live in grooves of habit in their visual impressions, 
 just as they do in their daily occupations. Accustomed to look but 
 little at nature, and that little with languid, and for the most part, 
 preoccupied interest, they accept unhesitatingly whatever rendering 
 a painter gives them, so long as it is of the ordinary conventional 
 kind ; but directly the groove is forsaken, they are forced either to 
 acknowledge or defend their ignorance ; and what defence is so easy 
 as to say oneself is right, and the painter is wrong. It is a hard 
 saying, but the truth is always offensive, save to the true. People 
 will put up, either in pictures or life, with almost anything that does 
 
 95 
 
not come too closely home to them — does not force them to reconsider 
 their conventionalities, either of sight or action. Does any thinking 
 man in England — I ask this question in all seriousness — does any 
 thinking man in England who knows Holman Hunt's work, doubt 
 that he might have been a Royal Academician a dozen times over if 
 he had only conformed ever so little to the conventional creed? 
 Had he painted babies in white satin smocks, or old gentlemen in 
 ruffs, or Venetian vagabonds, or Highland cattle, how gladly he 
 would have been welcomed to the Academic ranks ; with what ease 
 and security he might have gained a fortune and a baronetcy, and 
 lived in a Kensington palace to the end of his days ! But fancy an 
 Academy rewarding or honouring a man who has simply done his 
 best for art, who has given every hour of his life to producing great 
 pictures, and neglected to fill his pockets. 
 
 Take, lest any one should think these only vague generalities, a little 
 detail. A few years ago half artistic London was raving about the 
 painting of the draperies of a picture by Mabuse, which was being 
 exhibited at the " Old Masters." Now, in " The Shadow of the 
 Cross," the blue robe of the Virgin is painted with a perfection which 
 has all the character of clear, brilliant colour, reality, and complete- 
 ness, of Mabuse's work on twenty times the scale, and possesses, 
 moreover, what Mabuse's art did not possess, the qualities of denoting 
 texture, while lending itself to the lines of the form beneath. Since 
 these Flemish painters, no one has ever painted drapery at all till Mr. 
 Hunt and Rossetti. Take another point — expression. Now, of all 
 the merits of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, this merit of expression 
 was perhaps the chief. Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt, all sought it, 
 and all in different ways gained their end. But as Millais is un- 
 doubtedly peculiarly celebrated in this respect, it is worth while to 
 note the difference between the emotions (and their expression) of his 
 men and women, and those of our present subject. The difference 
 is, in the main, one of sentiment — sentiment as opposed to passion. 
 A trick (I use the word in no contemptuous sense) of the eyes and 
 mouth — a pleading expression — which throws the character, as it were, 
 upon one's special protection, and which gives a peculiar softened 
 beauty to the face which he depicts ; this is, briefly speaking, Millais' 
 habitual way of exciting our interest. If we think of his most noted 
 subject-pictures, from "The Huguenot" to the present day, we find this 
 gentle, beautiful pathos always the main point. Sometimes we have 
 it tinged with the sentiment of self-sacrifice, as in "The Huguenot"; 
 sometimes with that of duty, as in " The Black Brunswicker " ; some- 
 times with that of love and terror, as in "The Proscribed Royalist" ; 
 sometimes with that of reflection, or appeal, or sadness, as the girl 
 considering what her answer should be to her lover's letter, "Yes 
 or No ?" the young wife asking her husband to "Trust Her" ; or 
 
 96 
 
in the many girl-pictures in which, undet various fanciful titles, this 
 artist has given us more of the dreaminess, the bearable sadness, and 
 the unconscious pathos of childhood, than has teen set down else- 
 where. A question, an appeal, a regret — is it not true that every 
 Millais picture is expressive of one of these ? Speaking quite clearly, 
 is it not true that it is emotion of the circulating-library kind which 
 we have here, in which sentimentalism is chosen in place of passion, 
 and in which love bears an undue relation to the other affairs of life ? 
 Turn to Hunt's work and we see the difference at once ; the painter's 
 mind is set in another key; the emotion does not interest him so 
 long as it is unconnected with thought. The faces of his characters 
 are rarely — we might almost say never — simply loving, trusting, or 
 mournful ; they are instinct with complicated feelings — are in process 
 of change from one emotion to another, even as the bodies of his 
 characters are almost invariably in change from one action to another. 
 For — and this, be it noted, is one of the vital differences between these 
 great painters — Hunt is always successful in painting action, Millais 
 in painting rest. 
 
 Broadly speaking, we may say that the sentimental finds no place 
 in Hunt's art ; love, with him, is too strong a passion, of too vital 
 issues, to be treated lightly. Compare for the extremes of differ- 
 ence such pictures as the famous " Light of the World " and the 
 "Awakened Conscience." The first showing us a face, beautiful 
 indeed, but even more powerful, beneficent and calm, in which kind- 
 ness and irresistible authority are most wonderfully blended; the 
 second, filled with jarring chords of emotion and perverted feeling, 
 of shattered peace and ruined life. It is no exaggeration and no 
 imaginative reading to say that from the man's face in the one picture 
 and the other, there look out at us a god and a devil ; for, as I read 
 it, the tragedy of the " Awakened Conscience " is hardly to be found 
 so much in the woman's face, instinct though it be with sudden, awful 
 remembrance of what she was and is, but in her companion's ghastly 
 indifference to her feeling. It is absurd to attempt a precise descrip- 
 tion of this picture when it has been once so finely given as by 
 Ruskin, but I may, perhaps, be pardoned for pointing out one detail 
 of real, if possibly unintentional significance, which our great writer 
 has left unmentioned. In the large looking-glass, which forms a 
 portion of the background to this composition, is reflected the window 
 of the opposite side of the room, and through it a garden bright 
 with sunshine and spring foliage. Against this, the reflection of the 
 woman shows as it would actually do under such conditions of light 
 — dark and almost shapeless, just as a blot upon the brightness. The 
 moral is too evident to need pointing out. But, indeed, in this picture 
 there are not one but a score of details which show the intense intel- 
 lectual effort of the painter, as well as his emotional perception and 
 power. 
 
 o 97 
 
Let us turn to the " Light of the World," a picture which is, 
 in some respects, a work apart from the rest. This is, if I may use 
 the expression, one painted from within rather than from without. I 
 find in every line the trace of an intense imaginative conception 
 which is somewhat at variance with the usual effect given by the 
 majority of Holman Hunt's works. Perhaps I shall make my 
 meaning clear if I say that the keynote of this picture is unity, 
 and of the others, diversity. We can imagine a spectator of the 
 most opposed artistic creed saying, " If this be pre-Raphaelitism, I 
 will become a convert to-morrow," for in this composition, varied 
 and minute as is the detail, the central thought and figure entirely 
 dominate the work. I doubt whether, out of every ten people who 
 look at this picture, there are more than two or three who see any- 
 thing clearly but the central figure ; nay, even to one who knows 
 the composition well, it is difficult to recall the details ; the barred 
 and ivy -bound door, the grass and brambles ; even the double 
 crown and the white robe are lost, or rather, are only dimly felt, in 
 comparison with the face of Christ. I have dwelt upon this subject, 
 for it leads to the consideration of why this work is so much more 
 popular than any other painting by this artist, and why so many 
 people are intolerant of Mr. Holman Hunt's paintings. The reasons 
 for the popularity and the power of this picture are (though it is 
 rarely that the same cause accounts for both) the same. The " Light 
 of the World " was painted under the stress of an intense religious 
 conviction, the subject being, to use the artist's own significant word, 
 " vouchsafed " to him. He believes firmly that subject, detail, and 
 treatment were revealed to him for a distinct purpose, and in elaborate 
 detail. Evidently a picture painted in such a manner will inevitably 
 touch the heart more nearly than any purely intellectual work. 
 Not only is the effect given to the work more powerful, but of 
 a different kind ; it mounts into the region of feeling, and is inspired 
 by a similar emotion to that of the subject ; and in a religious 
 picture this is three-parts of the battle. 
 
 Perhaps after the " Light of the World," the " Scapegoat " is the 
 most widely known of all Mr. Hunt's scriptural subjects, and practi- 
 cally this is a landscape picture. The goat, which gives the title to 
 the work, though finely conceived and painted, and truly striking 
 the intended note of suffering and isolation, is, after the first look at 
 the subject, forgotten in the consideration of the gaunt, desolate land, 
 with covering of crystallised salt, and bleaching skeletons, of the 
 narrow strip of sea, drearily dark under the shadow of the surround- 
 ing mountains, and above all of the peaks of the mountains, as they 
 rise flushed with the scarlet and crimson of sunset, into that 
 wonderful sky, which the artist seems to have painted with the actual 
 gold and purple of Nature herself There is a good opportunity to 
 
 98 
 
notice, with regard to this work, how infinitely the dreariness of the 
 scene is increased by the two matters which ought, from a conven- 
 tional point of view, to take some of it away — the presence of a living 
 animal, and the presentation of the landscape under a flush of beauti- 
 ful light. Under no grey sky, with no hint of human occupation to 
 connect it with ourselves, could this end of the Dead Sea look so 
 dreary as here. 
 
 " Strayed Sheep " takes us to another side of the painter's art. 
 The picture represents a kind of little glade of rocks, brambles, 
 ferns, wild-flowers, etc., with the sheep in the immediate foreground ; 
 in the distance we see the slopes of the downs and a bit of sea. The 
 whole is in the most brilliant light, and every item of grass and 
 flower, of the sheep's fleece, etc., is given with great elaboration and 
 distinction. The remark which I should like to make first about 
 this work is that the picture is peculiarly a happy one. Albeit 
 in every respect pre-Raphaelite, the work is one of those which the 
 people most opposed — as they think and say — to pre-Raphaelitism, 
 nevertheless like. This, moreover, is a picture in which the artist 
 seems for once not to have had any ulterior motive, but just to have 
 gone down to a lonely place in lovely weather, and worked away 
 happily, without too much thought. And, without dwelling further 
 on the technical character, this brings us to the consideration of 
 what is at the bottom of both Mr. Hunt's excellences and faults 
 as an artist. Of his excellences, since it spurs him on to over- 
 come difficulties which have seldom been grappled with, and to 
 realise his subjects in utmost minutiae ; of his defects, since it 
 prevents him from seeing the boundary between the possible and 
 the impossible, the desirable and the undesirable. He wants paint- 
 ing to do more than lies within its power, — to perform the office not 
 only of Art, but of religion and literature. He is so anxious to have 
 his meaning made clear to the utmost degree that he frequently 
 forgets that the most subtle meanings are sometimes, and not seldom, 
 those which vanish when they are too clearly brought forward. The 
 consequence is that he is always treading a narrow boundary -line 
 between the sublime and the ridiculous, for Art cannot be concocted 
 of so many beautiful, and so many emblematical objects. A picture 
 may be thought out till it is in description on paper a perfect demon- 
 stration of its subject, and may nevertheless fail to convey its 
 meaning as essentially as a rough sketch which has been drawn, so 
 to speak, in molten thought from the crucible of the imagination. 
 The rock upon which Mr. Hunt splits is, I venture to say, this — 
 that he does not sufficiently remember that true pre-Raphaelitism 
 does not insist equally upon every detail, but insists upon each 
 detail in relative proportion to the importance. When I say the 
 importance, I mean, of course, importance with regard to the chosen " 
 subject. The gain to significance of the perfect rendering of all the 
 
 99 
 
subordinate facts of a composition is right so long, and only so long, 
 as no fraction of significance of the main subject is lost thereby ; 
 directly the detail begins to encumber the meaning, directly it does 
 not fulfil a definite function in the realisation of the scene, the detail 
 is wrong. For a picture is not a treatise upon a subject, but a 
 rendering of a scene, a thought, or a feeling, and we cannot follow 
 out in it many complicated lines of thought ; what it really teaches, 
 must be taught through one comparatively simple idea. 
 
 I shall not describe here "The Finding of our Saviour in the 
 Temple ; " the picture has been exhibited so widely throughout 
 England, and is well known by both engraving and description. 
 Suffice it to say that this is the most elaborate of Hunt's religious 
 works, the most brilliant in colour and most painstaking in work. 
 Nor shall I speak of the dark maiden standing against a gorgeous 
 Egyptian sunset, entitled " The After-Glow," which was exhibited at 
 the Grosvenor Gallery. A few words, however, must be given to 
 the most quiet and perhaps the most poetic of all Hunt's scenes 
 of modern life, " The Ship," which bears a motto from the poem 
 In Memoriam, commencing — 
 
 " Fair ship, that from the Italian shore. 
 
 With my lost Arthur's loved remains, 
 Sailest the placid ocean-plains. 
 Spread thy full wings, and w^t him o'er." 
 
 This shows us the deck of a P. and O. steamer at night, with a 
 sailor at the wheel, a Lascar bending down to the saloon skylight 
 to talk to some one within, an old Anglo-Indian soldier with a white 
 puggaree round his wide-awake, a woman leaning her arm upon the 
 bulwarks and looking out into the night, — these are all the actors in 
 the scene ; and it is worthy of notice how entirely Hunt has suc- 
 ceeded in presenting them to us quite clearly and plainly, and yet 
 carefully avoided concentrating our attention upon any or all of them. 
 The passage of the ship through the night is the subject of this 
 picture, and the clearness with which the artist has realised this 
 scene, and given us its very essence is hardly to be overpraised. It 
 was the fashion when this work was first exhibited at the Grosvenor 
 Gallery to run it down, and call it ordinary and conventional ; but 
 time will remedy that, and people are beginning to pee, though 
 slowly, that there is more true imagination in realising the essence 
 of a contemporary subject, than in reproducing the outside form of 
 an antique life ; that we had better have true pictures of what is 
 nearest to us in feeling, thought, and action, than false ones of what 
 lies far behind, and is made beautiful, as are the shadows of the hills, 
 by remoteness only. 
 
 One other picture only shall be quoted here, and of this I will give 
 my impression written when the work was first exhibited in August, 
 
 lOO 
 
1885. It may be that I have exaggerated in recording the pleasure 
 I received from this work ; but I have not since seen the picture and 
 prefer therefore to leave the estimate untouched. 
 
 " Mr. Holman Hunt's great picture of ' The Triumph of the In- 
 nocents ' is at last finished, and is now being exhibited in Bond 
 Street, at the Fine Art Society's Rooms, A work which has 
 taken more than seven years to conceive and execute, has at 
 least one title to consideration which is wanting to most of the 
 hurried art of modern days, and seems almost to belong to 
 ^ those earlier times when pictures were painted in honour of the 
 Deity or praise of the King, and intended to be lasting monuments 
 of all that one man's skill could produce to glorify his religion 
 or exalt his patron. We live so fast nowadays, that to hear that 
 a painter in the midst of us has spent so long over a single 
 picture gives us something of a shock ; it appears to be an 
 anachronism, like Gordon's refusal of money - rewards for 
 ' simply doing his duty.' Nevertheless, in the centre of Bond 
 Street, with Mr. GulHck's 'great mirror picture' on one 
 hand, and Mr. Van Beers' cocottes on the other, here hangs 
 ' The Triumph of the Innocents,' attracting what notice it may 
 from the English public. Descriptions of pictures are futile 
 things at best, for no words that were ever coined can describe 
 the simplest piece of fine colour or fine form so as to realise it 
 for their reader ; and all that can be rightly conveyed is what 
 may be called the literary quality of the painting — the emotional 
 effect which its tints and shapes produce upon the mind. The 
 time is towards dawn : the scene, a long plain, bounded in the 
 distance with low mountains, amongst which watch-fires are 
 burning ; near the foreground some great trees break the 
 monotony of the fields, and stretch a net-work of foliage and 
 branches across the sky. In the foreground of the picture, 
 Joseph is leading the mule bearing the Virgin and Saviour, 
 and surrounding, following, and preceding him are a band of 
 spirit-children strewing the way with flowers, and accompany- 
 ing and protecting the pilgrims to Egypt. The scene is 
 painted under a double light — that of the natural scene and 
 that proceeding from the children. These, who represent the 
 spirits of the martyred innocents, are surrounded by haloes of 
 vivid colour, and tread upon prismatic bubbles. Such are the 
 bald facts of the design. The idea, it will be allowed, is a 
 singularly fine and significant one ; if ever art mystic has an 
 excuse, it is in the treatment of such a subject as this ; and it 
 would hardly have been possible to introduce supernatural 
 element into a picture with a more beautiful intention. It 
 should be noticed, in passing, that the children who accompany 
 
 lOI 
 
the flight of Joseph and Mary are supposed, in Mr. Hunt's 
 picture, to be invisible to them, and only seen by the infant 
 Saviour, who is leaning down towards one of them, laughing. 
 
 "It seems to the present writer that a work of this kind presents 
 several distinct problems to the critic and the picture-lover, 
 each of which deserves to be dealt with separately before the 
 work can be estimated as a whole. First comes the question 
 of whether the picture is technically so fine as to be worthy of 
 serious consideration ; then whether the painter has so told his 
 story as to justify his interpretation of the subject and his 
 departure from traditional renderings ; and, lastly, one has to 
 decide whether, with regard to both technical and emotional 
 characteristics, the painting is of such quality as to take rank as 
 a great religious picture — a picture, that is, which treats worthily 
 the greatest tradition of our race. 
 
 " First, with regard to its technical qualities. I am not going to tell 
 here the history, now well known, of the original picture, its 
 vicissitudes from the time when it was begun in Jerusalem, upon 
 a piece of Syrian linen bought in the bazaar, to its final abandon- 
 ment a year or two ago. Suffice it to say that the present work 
 is not the one that was first commenced, and which the present 
 writer saw two or three times in course of painting. It is, upon 
 the whole, very much finer, though it has possibly lost a little of 
 the freshness which an original conception possesses ; with regard 
 to its technique, it possesses all Mr. Hunt's peculiarities, both of 
 excellence and defect, though, owing to the peculiarity of the 
 subject, the deficiencies are, in my opinion, less noticeable than 
 usual. The excessive brilliancy and variety of the tints which 
 this artist habitually uses in his flesh-painting, and the absence 
 therefrom of any harmonising influence of atmosphere, is less 
 felt when all the bright faces are, as they are here, seen under 
 the influence of a supernatural light. Again, one of Mr. Hunt's 
 chief technical peculiarities is a certain hard veracity of detail, 
 which, as it were, forces truth down one's throat at the sword's 
 point. In the present picture, owing to the subdued light in 
 which all the natural details and the principal figures are painted, 
 this veracity is kept within tolerable limits. We do not feel, as 
 many of us felt in the same painter's picture of ' The Shadow of 
 the Cross,' as if the whole conception was full of some minor 
 detail, such as the shavings. There was a kind of realism about 
 many of Mr. Hunt's earlier pictures which sometimes drifted 
 perilously near to burlesque, and was only saved by the painter's 
 evident sincerity and earnestness. With regard to the colour of 
 the present picture, there will no doubt be very different opinions; 
 
 102 
 
as we have said, the flesh-tints of the children have that extreme 
 brilliant crudity, and show that tendency to see purples and 
 greens and yellows and pinks in little patches such as all Mr. 
 Hunt's earlier work has shown — most noticeable of all, perhaps, 
 in his portraits of his son and daughter, exhibited some time ago 
 at the Grosvenor Gallery. 
 
 " The landscape portion, however, and the principal figures, are very 
 fine in colour — deep, yet glowing, as the finest colour always 
 must be, with no tendency to blackness, and yet with the most 
 perfect harmony of the tints employed, giving a result of truth 
 to nature, both in the mystery and the beauty of an Eastern 
 night, such as the present writer at least has never seen sur- 
 passed. The great difficulty in pictures on this subject has 
 always been the face of the Virgin ; and in the present case, 
 it is doubtful how far Mr. Hunt has been successful. He has 
 chosen to represent her as rather an older, more careworn woman 
 than is customary ; and perhaps in avoiding the ' plum-box ' 
 style of beauty he has run into the opposite extreme. The 
 Joseph is a magnificent piece of drawing. Probably, from an 
 artist's point of view, the best thing in the picture is the move- 
 ment of his body as he leads the mule forward, while his head 
 turns for an instant to mark the watch-fires which are burning 
 behind the fugitives. The painting of the picture, as opposed 
 to its drawing and colour, varies in no essential degree from 
 the artist's previous work. It is careful in the extreme, laboured, 
 and, to use a studio word, ' tight.' From the point of view of 
 brush-work it has few merits, there is no hint of mystery in its 
 procedure, it is unlike anything but itself. Perhaps some notion 
 of its peculiarity may be gained by comparing it rather to a 
 mosaic than a painting. It seems to be done painfully, bit by 
 bit, and worked over till all trace of its process is removed. It 
 would be true to say that it is the absolute negative of all the 
 French theories of painting ; indeed, this is true of more than 
 the brush-work of the picture. A great deal more might be 
 said upon this question, but probably our readers would scarcely 
 care to follow out technical details further, and we shall confine 
 ourselves to noting that, as a piece of composition, this is the 
 finest of Mr. Hunt's works ; and the figures, both real and super- 
 natural, are combined in a very beautiful wavy line, which aids 
 the desired sense of movement very materially. 
 
 " As to the question whether the painter has so told his story as to 
 justify this interpretation, we should answer it in the affirma- 
 tive, and for this reason. When an artist deals with a well- 
 worn theme, there are only two courses — successful courses — 
 
 103 
 
open to him. One is, to treat it as all other men have done, 
 and to rely upon his transcendent power to make the ordinary, 
 unusually fine; the other, to select some new interpretation 
 which, by its ingenuity or beauty, will throw new light upon the 
 subject, or invest it with fresh attraction. Mr. Hunt has 
 chosen the latter, and has undoubtedly succeeded in rousing 
 great interest, and instituting a fresh conception of his subject. 
 His idea is a beautiful one in itself, and is thoroughly carried out 
 to the very utmost of the painter's ability. One sees this at once 
 on looking at the picture. This is a true man's work — beautiful, 
 imperfect, struggling, failing, and succeeding in various ways and 
 proportions ; but certainly there is in it that firm impress of a 
 human soul, that tendency to struggle towards the light, which 
 makes nearly all sincere effort beautiful, despite its partial failure. 
 Just think of what a different state English art would have been 
 in, if in the last hundred years or so we had had only ten pictures 
 a year such as this instead of ten thousand such as we have 
 had ! For every picture painted in this way, with the utmost 
 of the artist's strength and the keenest of the artist's emotions, 
 results in a definite gain to the world. It is literally true that 
 it is only art produced in this temper which is great for all time. 
 To have within the frame of a canvas or on the marble of a 
 statue all the power and all the feeling which one man had to 
 give— this is what a great piece of art means, this is why many 
 pictures and statues of early times touch us more keenly in their 
 incompleteness than others in their perfection. In the best 
 sense of the words, therefore, we think that, many defects not- 
 withstanding, this is a great religious picture. It is great in its 
 actual definite achievement, its fine colour, its mastery of natural 
 fact, its successful presentation of its subject, its originality of 
 conception, its vigorous drawing, and in the patient, unwearied 
 skill and thought which are evident in every line and every hue. 
 It is great, because it is the record of a man's endurance in 
 high aims, and his conquest over numberless difficulties ; it is 
 great because it is not produced from devotion to the idols of 
 the market, nor in deference to popular fashions. And it is 
 religious, not only in the consecration of its subject, but because 
 its artist has given every power of his mind and body to do it 
 justice, and because every line of its canvas owes its loveliness, 
 not only to the painter's skill, but to his fidelity to Nature, man, 
 and God." 
 
 ADDENDA TO THE 
 
 PAINTINGS OF HOLMAN HUNT. 
 
 The names and dates of both Millais' and Rossetti's principal 
 
 104 
 

 -' '^^■Lji£^ '^ 
 
works are well known, and complete lists of them exist in various 
 Memoirs and Critical Essays, but so far as I know there is no such 
 record of Holnian Hunt's work. The following list does not profess 
 to be exhaustive, but it, I believe, includes the more important 
 examples of the painter : the dates (where given) are only approxi- 
 mate, _ and chiefly refer to the year in which the picture was first 
 exhibited — 
 
 I. Dr. Rochecliffe at Woodstock (about) 
 II. Flight of Madeline and Porphyro 
 
 III. Rienzi 
 1 1 1 A. Portrait of Dante G. Rossetti 
 
 IV. Claudio and Isabella 
 V. The Christian Missionary 
 
 VI. Valentine and Sylvia 
 VII. The Hireling Shepherd 
 VIII, Strayed Sheep 
 
 IX. The Light of the World 
 X. The Awakened Conscience 
 XI. The Scapegoat 
 XII. The Finding of our Saviour in the Temple 
 XII I. London Bridge on the Night of the Marriage of the 
 Prince of Wales ..... 
 XIV. The After-Glow in Egypt .... 
 
 XV. The Shadow of Death 
 
 XVI. Isabella and the Pot of Basil 
 
 r An Italian Child ^ 
 
 XVII. <^ Street Scene near Cairo > (exhibited) 
 
 LThe Plains of Esdraelon J 
 
 XVI Ia. Holman Hunt's Son .... 1880 
 
 XVIII. The Triumph of the Innocents . . 1878-1885 
 
 XVI 1 1 A. Portrait of Professor Owen . . . . 1886 
 
 XIX. May Day on Magdalen Tower . . . 1890 
 
 The water-colours and drawings in pencil and ink are too numerous 
 to mention here. Most of the former were exhibited at the Old 
 Water-Colour Society between the years 1865 and 1885. Mr. 
 Hunt rarely paints in water-colour now. Replicas or finished 
 studies, mostly small, have been made by the artist of " The Scape- 
 goat," "The Light of the World," "The Finding of our Saviour," 
 and " The Triumph of the Innocents," and, I think, of " The After- 
 Glow." The " Strayed Sheep " was begun as a replica of a portion 
 of " The Hireling Shepherd." A very beautiful drawing of " The 
 Lady of Shalott" was contributed by Hunt to the illustrated Tennyson 
 published by Moxon, to which Rossetti and Millais also contributed. 
 
 1847 
 1848 
 1849 
 1850 
 1850 
 1850 
 1851 
 1852 
 1852 
 1854 
 1854 
 1856 
 i860 
 
 . 1862 
 . 1868 
 1869-73 
 
 1877 
 
 105 
 
CCELEBS AT HOME. 
 
 Happily, we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows. . . . O toiling hands of mortals ! 
 O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither ! Soon, soon it appears to you, you must 
 come forth on some conspicuous hill-top, and but a little way farther, against the setting sun, 
 descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness ; for to travel 
 hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour. 
 
 Virginibus Puerisque : R. Louis STEVENSON. 
 
 Do I view this world as a vale of tears ? 
 
 Nay, reverend sir, not I. — Robert Browning. 
 
 O begin is to end ; every fresh start is in one sense 
 a Jlnis, and ere the new things can be experienced, 
 the new countries seen, the new friends tried and 
 approved, there must come a change in the ancient 
 fashion ; a farewell to well-known scenes ; and to all 
 who helped, or hindered, as in the old days of joy 
 and sorrow. We must say good-bye or ever we can start on the paths 
 wherein we shall see their faces and touch their hands no more. 
 The adventure must needs be a perilous one ; we are for ever 
 enacting the old story of Pizarro, and as we plunge forward into the 
 heart of an unknown country, the sky behind is red with the flame of 
 our burning ships, and of that cargo of memories, associations, 
 friendships, and perhaps dearer things still, in which was once all our 
 interest and all our joy. 
 
 Few people realise till comparatively late in age how difficult to 
 fashion is even the smallest niche for a human life ; a niche which shall 
 provide some circle of sympathy and companionship beside the actual 
 provision of physical necessities, of food, shelter, and clothing. In 
 our hot youth especially we know naught of this : we rush gladly to 
 the most distant and alien lands ; we fling our loves and our friends 
 this way and that with a fine flourish of generosity, and cry Omne 
 solum forti patria, whilst fond hearts are troubling for our fortunes, 
 and fond eyes are hidden in tears lest they should see us go. I 
 often think that it is not wisdom which is so lacking to the young, 
 but feeling ; they are, for the most part, wise enough to enjoy ; and 
 
 1 06 
 
SWELTl-lliARI-S. - E. K. Jniixsux 
 
what better wisdom does age bring to them ? But how rarely are 
 they wise enough to feel ! and in the after-days, when we look up as 
 from our lesson-books, and see around us the relics of the passion 
 and the enterprise of youth, trying to realise what the years have 
 brought and what taken away, and the balance of joy or suffering 
 which remains to make life worth the living, our sharpest grief is apt 
 to be experienced not at those unavoidable, unspeakable losses, which 
 the death of a loved, or the dishonour of a trusted one has brought, 
 but at the memory of the hours when our hearts failed to estimate 
 the due worth of the affection given, or the trust reposed in us, and 
 we swaggered carelessly along the highway of life, laughing alike at 
 friend and foe. 
 
 Probably the bachelors have more of these old memories than 
 perplex our Benedictine brethren. We at least have not that com- 
 fortable, consoling consciousness of civic virtue which seems to 
 invest as with a halo of sanctity even the sorriest specimen of a 
 lawfully-wedded man. Unable to give hostages to fortune, we must 
 pay in our own persons the required ransom, and memory probably 
 exacts a fuller tribute from those whose habit of life does not draw 
 its emotional sustenance from the tranquil joy^, interests, and duties 
 of the holy estate of matrimony. 
 
 This much is at least certain, that if we may judge from physical 
 surroundings, the bachelors have the longest memories, the most 
 tenacious affections. Inanimate things play a greater part in their 
 lives — at all events in their lives within doors ; and while you may 
 enter a dozen well-to-do family houses, wherein from dining-room to 
 the connubial chamber itself, all upon which the eye rests is barren 
 of association alike to yourself and the happy couple, we rarely find 
 ourselves in the uncared-for rooms of Ccelebs without meeting at 
 every turn with evidence that the poor fellow's life, perhaps because 
 deprived of more material joys and comforts, clings with persistent, 
 if somewhat unreasoning, fondness to such waifs and strays as 
 recall to him the past. 
 
 Looking round his chambers thus is not alone the privilege of the 
 happily-married friend, the anxious elder sister. Oftentimes Ccelebs 
 takes the inspection into his own hands, and while the shadows darken 
 over the old Inn gardens, and the firelight capriciously brightens 
 first one and then another of his dusty, worthless household gods, his 
 thoughts and fancies follow fondly the shifting flame, touching into 
 the prominence of feeling the incidents and memories of the past. 
 Such a retrospect is rarely, I think, even to the most unfortunate, 
 wholly painful. Recollections of kindness and pity are hinted at here 
 and there, traces of past joys, no matter how momentary in their real 
 
 107 
 
endurance, linger round each cheap picture, each old-fashioned 
 ornament or shabby /^zy^^r, and some record of past achievement, 
 were it only the achievement of sacrifice, avails to soften the bitterness 
 of long defeat. Nor for the objects with which no interests of vital 
 nature have been bound up by that encyclopaedist, Circumstance, is 
 there wanting the quieter pleasure of memory ; and as our faithful 
 eyes turn from one to another oddly-juxtaposed possession, we live 
 once more the full life of earlier days. We hear once more the line 
 whistle above our heads, and the whir of the wheel in the fresh 
 morning by the river when we caught our first salmon, and remember 
 the almost incredulous delight of that successful shot, and the very 
 thump with which our first bird struck the earth ! 
 
 Here are our billiard cues, our racquets, the portrait of our first 
 sweetheart — perhaps of our last ; here the prizes we have won at 
 school or college, the photograph of our first picture, the proofs of 
 our first book. Here the memorials of old friends which say nothing 
 to any hearts but our own ; here the implements of our craft, what- 
 ever it may be, ready to our hand — thanks to the absence of the 
 cleanly but irritating housemaid. Here, in short, there are, for the 
 eyes which can read them aright, the little records of Coelebs' life, 
 where all upon which his eye rests has to him a significance, and is 
 entwined with a memory. 
 
 One such bachelor dwelling- room rises before me as I write, 
 wherein is nothing splendid, nothing specially valuable or curious, 
 and yet which possesses in my eyes an interest beyond any that could 
 be given by wealth or rarity. Some dark pictures, one or two with 
 dusky golden backgrounds, by unknown painters of the early Italian 
 school, hang upon the panelled walls ; a few faded photographs stand 
 amidst a chaos of books and papers upon a great writing-table near 
 the window ; a score of curios, from as mginy different lands, lie 
 about on bookcase or table, or are fastened untidily upon the 
 panelling. The bookcase is full, nay, bursting with books, papers, 
 and MSS. of the most heterogeneous kind ; the furniture is shabby 
 and — comfortable ; a brown velveteen coat hangs by the door ; an 
 atmosphere of ancient smoke and very modern dust fills the chamber ; 
 beneath the window is a green lawn, with ragged children playing 
 under the big elm-trees whose leaves rustle against the casement. 
 This little dwelling-place is high up, one of a score of such in an old 
 Inn of Court, and is approached by a grimy staircase which, nobody 
 having a special obligation to clean, never is cleaned, save when once 
 or twice a year the Inn has a fit of housekeeping, and appears in the 
 person of a contracting builder with a broom, a pail of whitewash, 
 and a pot of peculiarly offensive brown paint, the only colour supposed 
 to be known to the Benchers. Below, is a most respectable firm of 
 solicitors ; above, I suspect, a somewhat less respectable married 
 
 1 08 
 
couple, the female member of which is at present steadfastly 
 endeavouring to play " God save the Queen " with one finger on a 
 worn-out piano. How the notes come lumbering painfully along! 
 •' God — save — our — gra — shus Queen ! " That means that the time is 
 past office hours, and the respectable firm of solicitors has closed 
 business for the night. Ah! I thought so. The children are 
 trooping away noisily to their teas, the old lame porter, who also acts 
 as janitor of the gardens, hurrying up the last of them with his stick. 
 Closing-time has come, and the warm summer night is stealing 
 downwards through that reddish-orange mist which is the best we 
 Londoners know of sunset. The country must be fair this evening, 
 the flowers scentful in the warm still air ! The sailors are lounging on 
 the quays ; the maids hurrying up the steep paths of the down, or 
 along the lanes till they meet with their sweethearts ; there is tennis 
 in pleasant gardens ; but as the dusk grows apace the racquets are 
 cast down, and the antagonists saunter away beneath the trees (where 
 the game stands at love-all), while the old people, mindful of the dew, 
 and not wholly unmindful of the days when the dew was forgotten, 
 turn with a half-sigh towards the house. Down the river comes a 
 boat, the sculler scarcely breaking the still surface of the stream, so 
 lazily he pulls. In the stern sits, let us say, his sister, her hand 
 falling idly in the water, which ripples therefrom in long lines to right 
 and left. There is a broken-down old barge left amongst the reeds 
 by the bank. What are they saying, this brother and sister ? That 
 it would be well to sit there and watch the moon rise .■* Quick, let 
 us come away lest we spoil the effect. After all, they may have 
 other matters than the moon to talk of 
 
 Yes, these summer evenings are sweet to the lads and lasses in 
 the country now as they once were to us, and as sweet in town, in 
 the City streets, and squares, and courts where, forgetful of the rattle 
 of the traffic, the calling of the newsboys, the lovers meet, and 
 meeting tell, in words or silence, their old-new story. Despite 
 all his philosophy, an old bachelor is apt to feel a little lonely as he 
 sits in his rooms alone, and looks back upon that far countrie, far 
 and fair, in which he once travelled so hopefully. Especially in 
 summer-holiday time, when all the world goes an-Augusting, if not 
 a- Maying, will the aspect of his loneliness become vivid, and he will 
 turn for consolation, as I turn to-day, to those waifs and strays 
 which he has gathered through the past years from the wreck of 
 many a passion, ambition, faith, and enterprise. For as the years go 
 on all of us who are not spiritually bankrupt, turn more frequently 
 from the contemplation of the present, and the future, to the niemory 
 ' of the past. As the road before us shortens, the fair perspectives of 
 the dead years lengthen, and shine with a gentler radiance, for, towards 
 sundown, we all wend eastwards and see but a reflected light. 
 
 109 
 
Even for those exceptionally happy persons, the very-much-married 
 men, whose interests for the future are multiplied by the presence of 
 a numerous and exigent offspring, there must come moments, not of 
 regret — forbid it, Hymen ! — but of tolerant remembrance of some 
 youthful moments which would hardly be strictly in unison with their 
 present irreproachable domestic felicity, and which they would 
 scarcely care to discuss with Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi. For 
 myself, I am free to confess that, speaking as an erring and errant 
 man, as yet unbound in the sheaves of wedlock, I find my memory- 
 pleasures less remunerative with regard to the many occasions on 
 which I behaved with unblemished and immaculate propriety, than 
 when I consider those upon which my Mrs. Grundean friends' 
 relatives shook their heads with reprobation. 
 
 The hot fit and the cold fit of love ; the recklessness, failure, and 
 success of unconventional action ; the days when I did not work, but 
 lay fooling under the trees with pipe or sweetheart; the answer 
 which did certainly not turn away wrath ; the hours after midnight 
 which were not in bed ; the hours at midday which — were ; the 
 suppers, not of lentils, and the liquids, which both cheered and 
 inebriated ; the first dash at Monte Carlo, and that beastly day when 
 I saw Stirling beaten by a short head at Newmarket ; and quaint 
 experiences in China and Japan, Egypt and India, which I hoped, 
 and certainly ought, to have long since forgotten : these are the 
 memories of which the guardians stand beside my chair whilst I 
 smoke the pipe of contemplation. After all they were not very hurt- 
 ful save to their owner, these blind loves, aimless wanderings, wasted 
 hours, and occasional frailties ; and if I recall the least estimable of 
 them with great satisfaction, no doubt the reason is because I have 
 not yet reached that perfect state of life in which cakes and ale have 
 entirely lost their attractiveness. At all events, once more, all friends 
 and brother-sinners, let us look back at the eventful days ! 
 
 Come, dearest friend of my youth, whose love-affairs were only 
 less dear to me than my own, and who now are soldiering, with 
 more or less ineffectiveness, amongst pig-tailed Chinamen, and you, 
 old college chum, the best and least expansive of friends, who to- 
 day teach something of the mysteries of conveyancing to Melbourne 
 litigants, and even you, gentle counsellor of my early manhood, 
 whose bright spirit deserved a better fate than the dull, but gentle- 
 manly husband and ineffective progeny whom providence assigned 
 you. Come, one or all of you, this evening to these lonely rooms, 
 and bear me company. Let us chat together once more in spirit, 
 as we shall never do in life, and look forth from the safe harbour 
 of age, over those restless seas, long withdrawn, the thunder of 
 whose surf is still sounding in ouir ears. 
 
 no 
 
You too, fellow-bachelors, bound only to me by the tie of a common 
 misfortune — you, too, shall be welcome here to-night, and shall hear 
 your own stories told, with but little difference, in listening to ours. 
 For your experience or mine, or Jones's round the corner, what 
 matters it ? Are not the essentials of all experience and life much 
 the same, though the accidents vary eternally ? 
 
 What is it our most picturesque historian said in that book of 
 which he is now so needlessly ashamed ? A full-bounding exultant 
 youth, a strong vigorous manhood, a decline which refuses to believe it 
 IS a decline, and a deathbed made beautiful by the abiding love of a 
 few true-hearted friends^ such is the eternal course of nature through 
 the history of men, of nations, of creeds. Or, to strike a somewhat 
 different note, hear the view upon this question of the most genial 
 philosopher of to-day. " Childhood must pass away, and then youth, 
 as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom is to be always 
 seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circum- 
 stances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous 
 and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives into a 
 green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well 
 of yourself and your neighbour." It is even so, you have reasoned 
 well, O pleasantest of special pleaders, who, true to your own idling 
 and adventurous theories, are -now loitering on your yacht's careless 
 wings amidst the islands of the Southern Sea. We must be young 
 before we can be old, and the younger we have been, all the preachers 
 notwithstanding, the more fruitful will be our age. The follies and 
 even the peccadilloes of youth are but as the little green buds which 
 drop from the apple-trees in such profusion in an abundant year — 
 signs of the rich growth within, and their fall does but leave the way 
 clear for the future, and finer, fruit. Hundreds if not thousands of 
 these immature frailties the new brooms of experience must sweep 
 away into memory's dust-bin ; we forget alike the joy and sorrow of 
 the years. Yet, they have had their use in making us what we are. 
 Here and there still, however, certain events stand out capriciously, 
 and of these our first love is apt to be the chief. 
 
 How well I remember her! She was good-natured, tall, and 
 fair, with a rosy colour and the promise of a nutcracker chin, and 
 she spoke with a sharp snapping accent, which reduced all her 
 words as it were to the lowest common denominator, and gave no 
 quarter to redundant syllables. And it is horrible to think how 
 conventional it sounds — she was five -and -twenty, and I fifteen. 
 She — even at this distance of time I have not the heart to call her 
 
 ^ For this, and all other possibly incorrect quotations, kind readers, pardon ! these proofs 
 have come to me staying in a village by the western sea, where the nearest approach to 
 the Nemesis of Life is the local paper. — Calebs. 
 
 Ill 
 
by a false name — was one of a large family of girls who lived with 
 their father in a dull old-fashioned house with a large garden, in a 
 western suburb of London. The mother had even then been dead 
 for some years, and the father, who was a man of peculiar ideas, 
 used to train his dogs and his children with the same severity. 
 Perhaps he was making fun of me, but I believe it was in all 
 seriousness that he showed me a bundle of canes in a corner of the 
 dining-room, and explained that it was with those that he — but no, 
 the recollection is too painful ! I looked at the little dried -up 
 chip of a man, with his eyes twinkling maliciously, and thought of 
 an overruling providence. Anyhow, the girls were in deadly awe 
 of the little old gentleman, and used to scurry out of his presence 
 into the garden as soon as possible after dinner. There in that 
 garden I told my love, under an elm-tree. I had induced her to 
 sit down — she was much taller than I — and there, borrowing her 
 parasol, I wrote in the dust : I love you ! I remember thinking with 
 some pride that evening, at my private tutor's, of the ingenuity 
 of this declaration. For previous attempts had been made to get 
 this important confession out, and it wouldn't come. The parasol, 
 deus ex mackind, settled it ; she only laughed and blushed, but I 
 thought she was profoundly moved, and soon after, hugely content 
 with myself, I went back to my tutor's. Thence on every possible 
 occasion I would make my way to my sweetheart's house — it was 
 early autumn, I remember, and the train and a fourpenny 'bus were 
 the humble conveyances which my financial condition rendered 
 
 advisable — and then I would ask if Miss was at home, and be 
 
 ushered into the drawing-room solemnly — a horrible room, though 
 I did not think so then, with heavy early Georgian furniture, large 
 and execrable oil-pictures, and plenty of tapestry-woolwork, Dresden 
 china and skeleton leaves, and white and green ivory chessmen 
 under glass shades, etc. And then she would float in, smiling 
 divinely — she always floated and smiled, and had generally an 
 appearance as if some strong unseen wind. Zephyr, of course, was 
 blowing her curls and ribbons, about ; a jealous friend I remember 
 alluded to her once in my hearing as seven-stringed Jack, a low and 
 opprobrious title which was washed out in blood — from his nose. 
 But this by the way. In she would come, and I would sit on the 
 edge of my chair, and make desperate efforts to inveigle her into 
 the garden, feeling there always much more at my ease, partly 
 because of my elm -tree triumph. After some delay, she would 
 generally come, and there, behind one of the forcing-pits, I on a 
 halcyon afternoon kissed her solemnly, and felt that she was mine. 
 Oh, the bliss of that first kiss ! I wonder now what she thought of 
 it all, I was tremendously in earnest, and used to quote poetry, 
 and write letters a yard long, and generally must have made a 
 gorgeous and amusing ass of myself. About this period I bought 
 
 112 
 
her a ring, and haying once kissed her, made a point of keeping up 
 the practice — I recollect thinking with surprise how easy a thing is 
 when you've done it once. Nothing, however, in this world is 
 perfect, and this memory is darkened by two horrible incidents 
 which occurred towards the close of our engagement. After one of 
 those innocent debauches amongst the forcing-pits above mentioned, 
 I was asked to stay dinner — I always made a point of staying if I 
 could — but this time I was invited formally, and regretted it. For 
 old Mr. — Jones, let me call him — whether by thoughtlessness or 
 wishing to be well rid of me, made me as gloriously tipsy as a boy 
 of fifteen could very well be. I drank whatever was put before me, 
 and trying to remember afterwards what it had been, recollected 
 sherry and champagne and beer, and a peculiarly old and fruity 
 port, upon which Jones especially prided himself, and which he 
 always insisted on having decanted by his eldest daughter. Fired 
 by these generous liquids I overstayed my time, and the 'bus which 
 left at 10.45 '^S'd started when I reached the inn. Of course I had 
 no money, and — worse — far worse — the air had revealed to me that 
 I was remarkably unsteady upon my legs. Taking both sides of the 
 road at once, somehow I got back to the house, and mysteriously 
 borrowed five shillings of the butler, who I thought regarded rhe 
 with criticism not unmingled with approval — with which I took a 
 cab, and just caught the last train. I was not well — not at all well 
 — in the cab, and the cabman was — not polit* — but I was much too 
 far gone to care for that. Being, however, a few minutes too soon 
 for the last train, I walked up and down, up and down the platform, 
 trying after the straight line. At last I reached my destination — 
 my tutor's house was black, the gate locked, and I rang despair- 
 ingly. After some minutes a noise — the door was first half-opened 
 on the chain, then entirely, and my tutor's wife, in all the simplicity 
 of her night garments, and with her always awful politeness in full 
 working order, wished me good evening. Good evening ! O the 
 irony of those simple words ! I dared not speak ; I dared not stay. 
 Like a guilty thing — the phraseology is conventional but appro- 
 priate — I fled to my cubicle, and there slowly and sadly I laid me 
 down without further ceremony of undressing, and there in the 
 morning, a prey alike to love and liquor, my companions found me 
 asleep — in my boots ! 
 
 An awful incident, is it not? degrading in its foolishness and 
 error ; and yet when I think of those rides on the omnibus, those 
 autumn walks of ours in the garden, those kisses behind the forcing- 
 pit — ^What say you, my invisible friends, were such things not good 
 as a relief to propria ques maribus, and that exuberant horse who was 
 for ever careering through green fields ? 
 
 The end was not far off. She came to stop with us. I thought 
 Q 113 
 
her demeanour a little constrained, but did not suspect the awful 
 truth for some days. Then — one evening by the fire when my 
 sister left the room — she told me. Of course the old story. I think 
 I could have borne it if he had not had whiskers ! (People loved 
 whiskers in those days, and men were openly proud of them!) 
 Those whiskers sat heavy on my heart, they were bushy and strong ; 
 he was — no matter. I wrote her a letter — of burning sarcasm : I 
 trusted — the usual thing : I promised in the when other lips and 
 other hearts -style that I would shield and defend her ever, and so 
 we parted ; and the little ring — oh, bathos ! — was sent back to my 
 sister, who put it in a drawer and lost it. I fancy one of the 
 chambermaids had a hand in that loss ! And the worst of it was 
 that She never wanted shielding or defending at all. He didn't 
 turn out to be a brute, or anything but a very good fellow. They 
 live still placidly and happily enough, with plenty of olive-branches 
 and money; he is bald and grey, and she — stout. And she still 
 snaps her syllables as of old, but the Venus air has somehow 
 departed. I wonder if she ever thinks of the boy-lover she treated 
 so — was it badly ? No, I think it was kindly. She was good to 
 me, and let me dream. I believe in her heart she liked me well 
 enough ; but this is a practical age, and, as an old servant said to me 
 about this time, "A woman of five-and-twenty and a boy of fifteen, 
 why, it's ridiklus — that's what it is ! " 
 
 Let us leave such old-world memories, remembering that this is 
 holiday time, when all the world is rushing forwards. Cook juvante, 
 to sea or mountain, casino or bath, or where the foreign papa plays 
 tambourine and shuttle-balP on the Digue with shrill cries of 
 pleasure. We, too, have travelled in our time, witness those 
 Australian boomerangs which we never learned to throw, and those 
 lumps of coral from the Fijis, which we spent many a long morning 
 at sea trying to polish. Here, too, is a relic of the vagabond days, 
 an anomalous beast, half elephant, half camel, carved in a greenish- 
 white stone. He is worth looking at, though his tail does end in a 
 great flowery scroll, and though lesser scrolls come from his mouth 
 instead of tusks, and meander aimlessly around his body. I remem- 
 ber well the day he was bought. I had come up the Canton river 
 — the name always escapes me — and settled down disgustedly in a 
 
 horrible little hotel, for Archdeacon G y, universal Amphitryon, 
 
 was away, and I knew no one else in the city. And at the hotel two 
 jade merchants, on the look-out for the "foreign devil," beset me, 
 and sold me — at an exorbitant price, as I afterwards discovered — 
 several of their wares, and told me all sorts of cheerful intelligence. 
 
 1 I never could remember the name of this pastime, but it has a refreshingly innocent 
 and simple character as played by two or three stout Belgian papas and mammas, who toss 
 the ball from one to another with gambols and shrill whoops of delight. — Calebs, 
 
 114 
 

 a^S^Sm^^^ ^ 
 
A woman (she had killed her husband after betraying him) was 
 to be cut in pieces (a regular and peculiarly horrible judicial punish- 
 ment in China) that morning, and my commercial friends were very 
 anxious I should not miss the opportunity, and exhausted themselves 
 in description of the details of the execution. I went for a walk 
 instead, up that extraordinary Canton High Street, which still 
 seems to me the most wonderful business alley of the world, with 
 the swarming population, the deafening music -rooms, the long 
 narrow crimson and scarlet banners covered with quaint vertical 
 inscriptions in golden hieroglyphics, the strange wares, animate and 
 inanimate; and, what impressed me most of all, the butchers' 
 shops, where the little fat white dogs hung head downwards, looking 
 like idealised sucking-pigs. 
 
 That bit of jade has seen some queer things since then, and 
 lived in five different houses ere finally returning. There are 
 things of which no man can get rid, try as he will, and this is 
 one of them. One halcyon day I thought my elephant -camel 
 and I were indeed two, for I persuaded a relation, who must 
 have been temporarily deranged, to give me ten pounds for him ; 
 but his possession was only for a short time. I never knew whether 
 it was his wife who refused to have the ugly thing in the house ; 
 but in any case he brought the green brute back ; and from that 
 day to this I have made no attempt to get rid of him. Nay, 
 even a spurious attachment has sprung up between us, and I 
 have discovered that he possesses negative merits of remarkable 
 extent. He is phenomenally unsteady, for instance, and far too top- 
 heavy for his minute ebony stand, and he is unbreakable ! More- 
 over, if he falls upon anything he destroys that object utterly. I 
 view him now, mainly as a curious example of the height to which 
 the love of buying useless things can be pushed, and I remember 
 penitently that from that first trip of mine in the East I sent home 
 large cases from every available port, filled with such idiotic pur- 
 chases. Most of these, however, I sold at Christie's many years 
 ago, where they realised to my surprise about half what I had paid 
 for them in the East. A relation, however, who advised me not to 
 attend the sale, bought a lafge number, and was, I believe, satisfied. 
 Jade has this special attraction to an ignorant purchaser, that it is 
 almost impossible to tell the good from the bad, the real from the 
 imitation, without a great deal of experience. 
 
 Yes, that is a pretty frame. I bought it at Delhi in '74 ; there 
 was a miniature in it then of the Tdj, and an old Parsee sold it to 
 me in the verandah of the hotel. Carved ebony and silver as you 
 see. Look at the delicate convolutions of the pattern, copied from 
 the Italian ornament on the T4j itself! 
 
 115 
 
And the portrait ! You think it pretty ? You think you've seen 
 the face before — in the photograph-shops ? Possibly, my Achates. 
 Yet few portraits so expensive as this, are purchased and paid for. 
 What visions, what regrets, do not rise before me as I look through 
 the thin clouds of my cigar smoke at this, the one ornament of my 
 writing-table! A girl's profile exquisitely delicate in every line, 
 heavy masses of hair brought low down upon the forehead, the head 
 set finely upon a slender rounded neck, some stage pearls and a 
 morsel of a white dress ! 
 
 Yes, she was beautiful, and very brave, and would, I used to think, 
 have made a typical Queen of Beauty in old days. She would 
 have smiled upon the victor, who, as Lawrence once put it, " came 
 a- wooing with the blood of last night's favourite still red upon his 
 sword." For there was something of .pitilessness in her, potent and 
 ineradicable. Always in her nature were fighting the elements of truth 
 and falsehood, and the long struggle between feeling and pretence 
 took, perhaps, lasting shape from the theatrical surroundings of her 
 life. Hers was one of those natures in which vanity, when once 
 permitted to take root, quickly overshadows all the other qualities ; 
 from the first moment that the world recognised her as a beauty the 
 result was inevitable. That most damnable fashion of the day, which 
 sets the photographs of beautiful girls in every shop-window, has 
 much to answer for, and the effect of the society paper paragraphs is 
 perhaps more injurious still to the modesty and true dignity of 
 maidenhood. Poor Amy, she might have been a happy woman had 
 it not been for her one besetting foible of vanity. Under its influence 
 I lived to see her face gradually growing harder and harder, till at last 
 all the photographer's cunning could not conceal the cold brilliant 
 stare of the eyes, or the hardening of the delicate curves of the lips. 
 All that is long ago ; the photograph, you will see, is faded, but the 
 
 beautiful Miss is the beautiful Miss still. We were good 
 
 friends, nothing more, but I once met the man she loved (or at leeist 
 the man who thought that she loved him), who was engaged to her, 
 and whom she threw over three weeks before her marriage was to 
 take place, without hesitation or excuse. He seemed a queer fellow, 
 iDut there was something to be said for his point of view. " I did not 
 mind her throwing me over," he said, " so much, though it's always 
 
 unpleasant, you know, that sort of thing ; but I did mind her 
 
 having sent me with the other Johnnie's stick." This was sufficiently 
 ambiguous ; but I discovered on interrogation that the man for whom 
 my acquaintance had been jilted had shortly before left his stick at 
 the beauty's house, and with a refinement of ingenuity she had s6nt 
 it back to the club by the hands of hex fiancd, just before breaking off 
 the engagement! I sympathised with my "Johnnie" after that, and 
 when he had further been comforted by a whisky and Apollinaris he 
 
 Ii6 
 
departed, grumbling. What would have happened had they married 
 I wonder? Perhaps the "other Johnnie's stick" would have ap- 
 peared all the same ; perhaps, with that wonderful change which turns 
 reckless girls and men oftentimes into good husbands and wives, 
 they might even now be jogging along happily together. My friend 
 was, I fancy, capable of something more than the Club and whisky 
 and Apollinaris ; and she — ^well, it is a poor reward for courage, 
 purity, and beauty if they can gain no joy or reward for their 
 possessor beyond a flush of gratified vanity from the paragraphs in 
 the Fashionable Intelligence ! 
 
 One of those two oil sketches has a little history. The scene is, 
 as you may see, a shipwreck ; the fisher-people have rushed out to 
 see the vessel drift past. This was an actual experience. A howling 
 gale was blowing one Sunday morning, and, driven indoors by stress 
 of weather and the impossibility of keeping an easel up in face of 
 such a gale, I was making a study of the waves from the inn window, 
 when suddenly the wreck drifted in sight, the fishermen and their 
 wives rushed out, and the picture made itself without any thought or 
 care on the part of the artist. How well the evening of that day 
 comes back ! It was late autumn, and there were four of us ; two of 
 either sex. The women were staying at the inn, my friend and myself 
 in lodgings at the little village. We were, at all events for that time, 
 in a happy state of respectable Bohemianism. In the daytime we 
 painted ; in the evening there was good music from one of the 
 women, and the rest of us talked, and designed, and wrote villainous 
 sonnets, and were generally, but cheerfully, aesthetic. 
 
 How Mrs. Grundy would have stared and lifted her hands in 
 horror, for relationship, even of the most distant cousinly kind, there 
 was none between us, and we were not even in love with one another; 
 simply four good comrades, of whom two happened to be women. 
 
 Another memorial of that day hangs upon that wall in the shape of 
 a brace of queer designs very beautifully embroidered in coloured silk 
 on white cloth. On one of them a peacock, at least a couple of 
 inches high, gorgeous with outspread tail, and surrounded with a 
 trelliswork of vines heavy with clusters of purple grapes, stands above 
 the legend Qtiand mime, the significance of which is not immediately 
 apparent. And on the other is wrought in profusion of delicate 
 detail a flower-grown field by the sea, beyond which one delicate thread 
 of white silk marks the boundary of the chalk cliff, and over a line of 
 blue water hangs, in a morsel oi filoselle, the crescent moon. For we 
 had been chaffing about women and men, and their respective work, 
 and some had scoffed specially at needlework, and its incapacity with 
 regard to drawing, whereupon one said, " I don't think you could 
 
 117 
 
draw anything which we could not work," and so I scribbled three 
 designs as a challenge, lying on the sofa the while, while my friend 
 made a study of the needlewoman's head, and her May, who had a 
 genius for playing Chopin, drifted on from one nocturne to another, 
 quietly, tenderly. How long ago it all seems ! How utterly impossible 
 that quartette should ever sit, and work, and play together again ! To 
 quote Owen Meredith, " Since then, what is it we have won " but the 
 knowledge that such repetition is impossible ? Is not all repetition 
 impossible? On life's road as on the track to the lion's cave — 
 Vestigia nulla retrorsum. To attempt to re-enact such an experience 
 is to destroy even its memory ; to reduce to everyday prose, an 
 incident which, through some subtle touch of sympathy or circum- 
 stance, was in its way perfect — perfect in unreserve, in given and 
 merited trust, in frank enjoyment of one another's society, in the 
 practice of what artistic faculty we could boast, for the simple pleasure 
 of doing the work. The shabby low-ceilinged inn parlour rises again 
 before me, with May turning round from the piano. " Does it sound 
 — very awful ?" and the ruddy gold of the lamplight in Ethel's hair, 
 and the uncleared-away remains of the composite meal, in which beer 
 and tea, salad and prawns, cold beef and cherries, had all borne a 
 part. Ah, well ! one of us is married since then, and one is — not ; 
 and with the others Time has dealt after his usual fashion, diapering 
 the light and shadow from year to year. 
 
 And here, too, is one of my chief treasures ; an old altar-piece 
 perhaps by Guido of Sienna ; at all events, by some good painter of 
 his time and school ; a picture on whose genuineness even the experts 
 throw no doubt. No one who has not lived with them can know the 
 charm of these pre-Raphaelite pictures, and no one who has lived 
 with them, I think, can tell you exactly wherein the charm consists. 
 One is tempted to say that the sincerity of feeling is in such work the 
 chief source of attractiveness. I cannot see why other styles of 
 painting are less sincere — styles from which the charm of which we 
 are speaking is undeniably absent. Strangely as it may sound to the 
 ears of modern aesthetic readers, it is after all probable that much of 
 the secret of these pictures lies in their subject, in 
 
 " The old series. Virgin, babe, and saint," 
 
 and that they appeal to us in our deeper moods mainly because they 
 touch, even in their faultiest representation, those deeper springs of 
 feeling which have been the long-enduring possession of mankind. 
 For though religions change, though they rise, flourish, and decay, 
 the religious sentiment itself is permanent ; and feeling it as we 
 all do, in some shape or another, in our most thoughtful hours, 
 we like to have, and find in accordance with our own feeling, 
 the silent evidence which these pictures give us, that earlier genera- 
 
 ii8 
 
s 7 
 
 
 M A D O N N A 
 
 PERUOINO 
 
 In the possession of (lie author 
 
tions felt the same. Such pictures — where the religion has been, 
 above all, the motive of the painting, where it has dominated the 
 expression of the artist's thought, and restrained the exercise of his 
 genius within certain lines — are no doubt frequently imperfect in their 
 expression of the painter's genius ; but, on the other hand, much 
 errant, uncertain, and imperfect art was by this sentiment refined and 
 sobered, was educated, so to speak, out of its eccentricities and, 
 intellectually speaking, its aberration. I fancy this is why almost all 
 the pictures of a certain period are good to live with, not of course 
 good in the same degree, but good in the sense of not growing, 
 stale, not jarring upon us when we have exhausted their superficial 
 attractions. There is nothing easier than to laugh at the almond- 
 shaped eyes, the long boneless hands, the wooden limbs and 
 bodies, the dislocated necks and conventional surroundings which we 
 find in paintings of the Siennese, and other early Italian schools, 
 but such laughter is not an explanation of the fact that such 
 pictures do possess in a special degree the quality of harmony with 
 their surroundings, so long as those surroundings are unmeretricious, 
 and untheatrical. 
 
 ■Here is another face which the world would call fair, if only for its 
 colouring, and the depth and softness of the eyes, which recalls to me 
 another aspect of the river. Every Londoner will know one day, 
 and a few of us know now, how rarely beautiful at night is that long 
 curve of the Embankment which stretches from Westminster to 
 Waterloo Bridge ; and here a man whom I knew used to meet his 
 sweetheart "after the show." She was only a chorus-girl, he told 
 me, rather prettier than the rest, and did actually, what so many do 
 in theory, keep her relations on her slender salary, and disliking the 
 crowd and loungers of the Strand, would, whenever the night was 
 fine, walk down to Westminster. There one night I saw them, 
 walking swiftly hand in hand, she all in black, with a thick veil, 
 talking eagerly. The electric lights of the Embankment and 
 Waterloo Bridge cast long lines of brightness on the water ; the 
 lights of the cabs and omnibuses could just be seen above the parapet 
 of the bridge, and beneath the great arches looked dark and heavy ; 
 and on all the long pavement were only those two figures ! They 
 passed without heeding me, where I stood in the shadow of the great 
 bronze sphinxes which guard Cleopatra's Needle, and so away to the 
 lighted tower of Westminster. The clock struck midnight, and I 
 listened while the reverberations of the last stroke seemed to sink 
 into the ripple of the river, and float away seaward— when I turned 
 
 the street was empty. Not long afterwards they were parted : 
 
 he gave me that photograph. Why, you may guess ; for every now 
 and then he will come and chat here, and smoke, and talk of all 
 subjects but one, again and again his eyes will turn, as it were, un- 
 consciously, to where it stands. How it happened, and whose was 
 
 119 
 
the fault, whose (perhaps) the sin, I never asked. Men, you know, 
 do not ask these things of one another, but I never see him sitting 
 there, bright, prosaic, and apparently commonplace, without thinking 
 of that windy autumn evening, of her eager voice, his bent-down 
 head, of the hand firmly clasped in hand. I do not fancy he was bad 
 to her, I hardly think she was false to him. I fancy rather " domestic 
 necessity in the shape of relations," as George Eliot puts it, came 
 between them, and made this, too, an unfinished love story. 
 
 What shall be said of my one extravagance in pottery, this 
 Majolica plate whose shifting lustre brightens the dark corner of the 
 room ? The colour of the groundwork is blue, shaded with white, 
 and the whole design is painted thereon in a deep rich yellow, on 
 which the red, blue, and purple reflections of the lustre shine 
 splendidly ; indeed, in some lights the glaze of the -dish seems to hold 
 an imprisoned rainbow, and whatever quarrel the beautiful Sebastiana, 
 whose portrait occupies the middle of the dish, may have had with 
 the artist who gave her so much forehead and so little chin, she 
 certainly cannot reproach him with the rest of the design, for a more 
 beautiful piece of simple decoration is rarely seen. And it is especi- 
 ally worth noting to those who are believers in what may be called 
 the South Kensington style of decoration, that the design here 
 pleases as much by its freedom as by its ingenuity and repetition. 
 There are no two parts of this plate which exactly echo one another, 
 but everywhere we can trace that likeness in unlikeness, that frequent 
 and, so to speak, irresponsible variation of the pattern, which shows 
 that the artist who executed the work was in all human probability 
 the artist who invented the design, and that he allowed his hand and 
 mind perfect freedom to make what variation he pleased as the plate 
 proceeded. 
 
 And lastly, will you look with me at this shabby little black frame 
 enclosing a pencil sketch, done in a half-hearted, pre-Raphaelite 
 manner, of some reeds, and a broad stretch of river bounded by an 
 elm-shaded towing-path ? Midway there stands an old inn, with 
 landing-stage for the ferry, and beyond, the long wall of a park. 
 Half a score such scenes may be found between Putney and Oxford 
 on the river, as rowing-men are apt to call the hundred miles or so 
 of stream so dear to them, for the love of the Thames is almost 
 personal in its intensity and character ; no other stream is ever quite 
 the same to our "watermen;" no other is ever called simply /y|^ 
 river. Mark, that for real Thames lovers there is not even an 
 emphasis on the the — other streams are forgotten, non-existent. 
 Many a year before this drawing was done I had sculled past 
 the spot, little thinking I should ever stay there, for nothing invited 
 even the most irresponsible reviewer. One summer, however, 
 found me in a cottage almost within a stone's-throw of the old inn, 
 
 I20 
 
and nearer to our watery highway, a girl I cared for, lived with her 
 people. It was a perfect summer— perfect in weather, with bright 
 sunshine and warm showers, and fresh cool breezes blowing over the 
 flower-laden, sweet-scented fields. I had paddled up a decent boat 
 from " Messenger's "—is that deaf waterman, with the rolling eyes and 
 humorous thirsty mouth, still there, I wonder ?— and all day, till late 
 afternoon, we paddled about, or rested in the friendly back waters, 
 or drifted down stream idly. How the scenes rise ! The lingering 
 mist in the grey early morning, and the icy coolness of the water by 
 the island from which I used to bathe, the quiet pull back to break- 
 fast — not at my cottage— the cool dresses of the women— she gener- 
 ally wore her straw hat with a spotted blue ribbon in it at breakfast so 
 as to be ready for the boat — ^the long-legged brother who came down 
 to see us off, but who was allowed to come no farther ; the mother's 
 gentle insinuations that it would be as well to turn up at the midday 
 meal ; our impatience to be off; the rest which came when the first 
 dip of the sculls took us fairly out into the stream ! Summer can be 
 very pleasant, and it was very pleasant then. 
 
 Was it all a dream ? Did these things ever happen ? Did this 
 woman love me then ? Did I love her ? Is it nothing but a vision 
 of the Inn ? Who shall say ? Yet do I not hear her voice now, at 
 the time I thought there was an ominous foreboding in its accent, 
 " Have you had a pleasant time } " and I said Pleasant ! That was 
 the day before the summer ended, and in the evening we sculled a 
 
 friend who had been down for Sunday to to catch the 10.30 
 
 express. I remember he nearly drowned us, by the way, first by in- 
 sisting on sculling, then by steering us into every object, stationary or 
 locomotive, he could see, or couldn't see, for the night was dark then, 
 and he was shortsighted. At last, in terror lest he should miss his 
 train and have to be taken back, we persuaded him to be quiet in 
 the bows. We lost some time changing, a ticklish operation in our 
 skiff, and the train-time was not far off when I, to use an old boating 
 phrase, "laid down to my work." In those days I could still scull a 
 bit, and was, at all events, in hard training. The swish of the boat 
 through the dark water ; the dim silhouette of the girl before me ; 
 the freshening coolness of the night spreading its dark wings round 
 us ; the sulky silence of my friend in the bows ; the excitement of 
 the race against time and darkness ; the thought of the paddle back 
 when the moon would be up and the river quiet ; the camp-fires on 
 the bank ; the black silence of the open locks — all sights, and sounds, 
 and thoughts were good that night. So we raced down the stream, 
 silent by mutual if unspoken consent, till, at last — the indistinct 
 outlines of a bridge and church tower, and, farther off, the signal 
 lights of the railway, grew out of the shadows. 
 
 We landed him — a good fellow anywhere but in a boat. I hope 
 R 121 
 
he will forgive me if he ever sees these lines. We turned the skiff's 
 nose homeward; my companion would pull, "to rest me," she said, 
 putting her hand on my shoulder as she stepped lightly into the 
 boat, and so we started. It was growing late, the campers-out had 
 finished supper, and as we passed the first lock (where I took the 
 sculls) the moon rose. The stream glowed blue silver between the 
 shadows of the bank. There were scattered lights in the tents, and 
 as we passed up the stream Helen began to sing, and from the 
 shore the men's voices took up the burden, and as we swept gently 
 beyond each camp, good-nigkt and answering good-night went to and 
 fro between the singer and the chorus. What hour was it when I 
 drove the boat into the thick bank of reed from which my sketch 
 was afterwards taken ? How long did the quiet summer night look 
 down upon us there ? Who knows ? It was so long ago ! We 
 were very foolish, but very happy, and if we thought that the reeds, 
 and the river, and the little wandering breezes whispered of a 
 future, fairer even than that present, well, others have had similar 
 fruitless fancies. Exquisite moments are, Mr. Pater tells us, the 
 only things worth living for, and even in that very hour I told 
 myself that no fruition of love could be more exquisite than this 
 promise — never to be fulfilled. 
 
 So, as the shadows deepen, the memories come and go — the 
 memories of the long past days, and in vain we strive to stay their 
 fleeting presence, and vainly think — If we could but have those 
 days again ! If the clock would but for once run backward, then 
 should we not be blest indeed ? But, it may be otherwise. Perhaps 
 only loss gives the true sweetness to possession, perhaps only 
 change makes so dear that which we have left. Could we look 
 forward, as we look back, and with equal knowledge, might we 
 not envy our present secure seat in life, our thronged conscious- 
 ness, nay even those regrets in which so much of the past fondly 
 lingers, which, let us hope, make our actions kindlier, our hearts 
 less rudely selfish than in the old blossoming time .'' For, rightly or 
 wrongly, we have now gathered the fruit of life ; we have lived, we 
 know. And if the experience has brought us sorrow, has it not 
 also brought us some touch of that happiness which is akin to 
 sorrow, nay, which is only possible to those who have suffered, 
 perchance even to those who have sinned .>* For while the world 
 spins round in its accustomed way, and men and women are born 
 wingless and imperfect, so long will the best wisdom be bought 
 with pain, and the best happiness be that which has so well been 
 said to be only distinguishable from grief " because it is that which 
 our souls would choose, because we see that it is good." 
 
 Nor would I have even the most hurried reader imagine that the 
 
 122 
 
present writer would preach in any sense the superiority of the 
 single life, or exalt the delights of irresponsibility and change, at 
 the expense of the less exciting duties and affections of the wedded 
 state. When all is said and done there must always lie in wait for 
 the bachelor that worst of punishments, isolation. Sooner or later 
 his friends die, change to him, marry, or pass away into other 
 lands and are occupied with other interests. One by one his 
 intimates are gone from club or college, on 'Change or racecourse, 
 amongst the stubbles or on the moor; his young relations grow 
 up, and he becomes to them a fogey, and whilst the married man 
 lives again, more secure in the happiness of his children than he 
 ever was in that of his own youth, the bachelor grows older at the 
 sight, and loses touch with citizenship. He becomes an anachron- 
 ism, and has either to make a poor, imitation, cuckoo-like home 
 for himself in a friend's household, or harden into the confirmed 
 club or society man, a living protest against society. Better perhaps 
 any shipwreck than this abandonment of enterprise, any action 
 than this selfish quiet, any worries, exertion, and disappointments 
 of real life, than this fruitless dwelling amidst the memories of the 
 vanished years. 
 
 123 
 
IN MEMORIAM: FRANK HOLL.^ 
 
 ITHIN the last twenty years the best of the younger 
 generation of our artists have died before their 
 prime, and by the death of Mr. Frank Holl another 
 name has been added to the already long list. Let 
 us think for a moment of those who have thus been 
 taken from us, ere speaking of the latest loss. 
 
 First there comes to mind the name of George Mason, the lover 
 of English landscape and English children, the exquisite colourist, 
 the keen disciple of simple beauty, the painter of "The Evening 
 Hymn" and "The Harvest Moon." His was a strange life, artistic- 
 ally, for during some years he showed little trace of his characteristic 
 genius, and painted in Italy the most ordinary pictures of Campagna 
 peasant life. He was nearly starving, I have been told, when 
 Signor Costa ^ found him and took him into his Roman studio, and 
 there and thence, strange as it may sound. Mason learnt — poetry ! 
 — learnt from this grave, fastidious, thoughtful Italian, the beauty of 
 sentiment, the delicacy of hand, the pure classical grace of line 
 which he was subsequently to develop beyond his master's capacity, 
 and under our northern skies. 
 
 I like to think that the one thing wanting to Costa's minute, 
 graceful and elaborate art, the sentiment of humanity, the con- 
 nection of the artistic beauty represented with the every-day feelings 
 and actions of men, is just what Mason gained when he left that 
 Italian studio and turned for his subjects to the children whom he 
 found playing in English meadows, to the lovers whom he watched 
 
 1 This article was written in haste within a few days of Frank HoU's death. I have 
 thought it better to let it appear here without alteration, as unless I re-wrote the paper 
 altogether I could not remove its mark of a special occasion. 
 
 2 He exhibits in England still, and is not yet an old man. 
 
 124 
 
whispering in English lanes, to the reapers faring homewards under 
 the harvest moon, or the village girls singing in the twilight. For a 
 very few brief years Mason painted such pictures, and then, in the 
 prime of his art, died suddenly— an unparalleled loss to English art. 
 He left alive, however, in early manhood, two men who might to 
 some extent have carried on his art, or rather his character of subject 
 and the spirit in which he had treated it, and these were Fred Walker 
 and George Pinwell ; two names that should never be disassociated. 
 Friends in life and companions in death, there was also in their art 
 strange like-and-unlikeness ; they worked towards the same end from 
 different points of view. 
 
 _ George Pinwell was a painter whose work was never fully appre- 
 ciated during his lifetime, and is even now almost unknown to the 
 general public. But he was an artist of the rarest quality, with a 
 mind full of strange fancies, and a technical power of expressing these 
 in delicate and vivid colour which has rarely been rivalled. He either 
 learnt from Walker, or learnt with Walker, that curious water-colour 
 method, "half wash, quarter fresco," as Ruskin once described it, 
 which the latter painter carried to such perfection ; but he never quite 
 mastered the mechanical difficulties of his art, and he was but just 
 feeling his way towards painting in oils when he died. Yet with all 
 his technical deficiencies the sentiment of beauty was even stronger in 
 Pinwell than in the painter of the " Ploughing" and the " Old Gate." 
 At least, it was stronger for all imaginative work, and the character 
 of his pictures owed less to the artists of former times, for the grace 
 of Fred Walker's ploughman and labourers was adopted, it is impos- 
 sible to deny, from classic art. The very horses in the " Ploughing," 
 for instance, might have stepped down from the frieze of the Parthenon. 
 But in Pinwell's best work, such for instance as " The Elixir of Love," 
 " The Earl O'Quarterdeck," " The Saracen Maiden entering London," 
 etc., it is most difficult to trace the source from which the artist 
 derived his inspiration. And there is, moreover, in these works a 
 curious strain of morbid feeling from which Walker was entirely free ; 
 but on these points I must not here dwell. It is only necessary to 
 say, whatever may have been the contrast between the imaginative 
 beauty of Pinwell's work and the realistic beauty of Walker, that both 
 were artists of the rarest capacity, who dealt in the main with English 
 contemporary subjects, and succeeded in manifesting the poetry and 
 the artistic opportunities of every-day modern life. When these men 
 died (Walker was thirty-three, Pinwell thirty-four) they left a blank 
 which our art has as yet been unable to fill. No English painter of 
 to-day carries on worthily their idyllic tradition. Moreover, it is 
 worthy of notice that the direction which painting has taken since 
 their death — the direction, namely, of imitation of the French school 
 — is manifestly opposite in tendency to the whole spirit of Walker 
 
 125 
 
and Pin well's painting, which was in its essentials of Italian (and 
 pre-Raphaelite Italian too) descent, and which above all things was 
 founded upon colour instead of being founded upon " value." 
 
 About the same time that Pinwell and Walker died, there died, too, 
 another man whose art might possibly have rivalled theirs had its 
 possessor lived. Boyd Houghton was one of those designers of whom 
 the world knows but little, but who are greatly esteemed by their 
 artistic contemporaries. His work, chiefly consisting of designs for 
 woodcuts, has very rare imaginative qualities, his originality, and 
 occasionally his power, are extraordinary; but there was a lack of 
 sanity in the man's life, and to some extent this was reflected in his 
 art. With him, too, one thinks of Valentine Bromley, also an original 
 worker who never lived "to beat his music out." AH of these were 
 figure-painters, at least chiefly ; but the list would not be complete 
 without the mention of the only great landscape-artist who belonged 
 to the same generation — Cecil Lawson. He, too, was scarcely recog- 
 nised before he died ; and it only seems yesterday that the world was 
 talking about his first great landscape at the Grosvenor Gallery, and 
 discussing why the Royal Academy had always rejected him. He, 
 too, was in sympathy with the idyllic school : his landscapes were in 
 some sense " short stories." An intention ran through the work : a 
 hint of meaning as well as of beauty. A bit of nature, yes, but a bit 
 of man too — that was the subject-matter of his pictures as it has been 
 the subject-matter of all really great landscape-art. 
 
 And now, but slightly older than these men I have mentioned, but 
 with a fuller record and infinitely better known to the public, Mr. 
 Frank HoU has "joined the majority," and left a gap in the ranks of 
 our portrait-painters which will be difficult to fill. 
 
 HoU was when he died beyond all comparison the most popular of 
 our living portrait-painters : this may be confidently stated, without 
 even making the exception in favour of Sir John Millais, whose work 
 in this department of art, though possessed at its best of finer quali- 
 ties of painting and colour than are to be found in any of Frank 
 HoU's pictures, has been of late years so unequal, and frequently so 
 perfunctory in its execution, that it is little more than an even chance 
 whether any given example will be a success or failure. This uncer- 
 tainty is rarely felt with regard to a portrait by Frank Holl. No 
 doubt some of his likenesses are more successful than others ; some 
 of his sitters necessarily gave him fuller opportunities, or excited in 
 him a greater sympathy. But in each case, almost (as far as I can 
 remember) without exception, the portraits produced were sound 
 sterling pieces of work, executed throughout with the painter's utmost 
 skill and care. Indeed, few artists living or dead could be cited 
 
 126 
 
Imp. D 
 
 FRANK HOLL: A SKI:TCH FROM LIKE 
 
 RliNOUARD 
 
whose pictures are so level in quality, and have such a thorough 
 workmanlike aspect, touching manufacture in its uniformity, and yet 
 entirely free from dulness or conventionality. I have said in another 
 place that this artist threw, to some extent, the cloak of his own per- 
 sonality over all his sitters, but the transformation he effected was 
 consistent with a most vivid and faithful rendering of his subject — a 
 life-likeness, so to speak, which combined the vivacity and emotion 
 of life with an almost photographic accuracy of detail. Every one 
 who has studied Mr. Holl's art will admit the truth that he was at 
 once the most accurate and literal, and the most prejudiced (not in a 
 bad sense) and ideal of portrait-makers ; that he had two moods, in 
 one of which he grasped thoroughly every characteristic of the sub- 
 ject before him, and another in which he let himself go, and brought 
 his picture into accordance with his personal sentiment. 
 
 This is not the place to enter upon a lengthy technical criticism, 
 but it is perhaps permissible to point out that, in respect of his flesh- 
 painting and the general colour quality of his pictures, Holl was more 
 allied to the French than the English school. There is, in truth, a 
 considerable likeness in many of his portraits to those of Carolus 
 Duran, and there is something, too, of the same swift, certain execu- 
 tion, just on the good side of sketchiness, that is to be found in the 
 work of the great French master. The one colour which he loved 
 above all others, and which forms the keynote of almost every picture 
 of his which I remember, was black,^ and his dexterity in the manage- 
 ment of this tint was extraordinary. There is an often-quoted remark 
 amongst artists that you may tell a colourist by the manner in which 
 he treats black, i.e. by the amount of colour he gets into it. And if 
 this be true, Frank Holl's claims to be considered a colourist are 
 indisputable, though we must admit that he was a colourist in a 
 peculiar fashion, finding his greatest successes in a very restricted 
 scheme of tint. It is rash to prophesy, but future years will, I think, 
 bring the judgment that the great deficiency of his portraits is to be 
 found in the character of the flesh-painting, in a certain opacity and 
 paintiness of texture which bears little resemblance to the transpar- 
 ency and brilliancy of life. I think his too great devotion to a sharply 
 effective style of chiaroscuro is in great measure answerable for this, 
 and his exclusive preference for black may perhaps be traced to the 
 same source. But to whatever cause the effect may be due there 
 seems to me no doubt that the deficiency is a real one ; we do not 
 feel that the blood is pulsating beneath the skin, that the flesh will 
 bleed if it be pricked — that, in fact, it is flesh, not paint, at which we 
 are looking. 
 
 Thinking of Sir John Millais' work in this connection, I cannot 
 help feeling that there is here a whole world of difference in favour 
 
 1 If black may be called a colour. 
 127 
 
of the elder master. When every defect is fully noted, when the 
 haste and carelessness which are nowadays so plainly visible are fully 
 discounted, there still remains in the men and women painted by 
 Millais that feeling of living flesh of which in HoU we are forced to 
 note the absence. The place of the latter in English portrait-painting 
 in future years will probably rank after that of Millais and Watts. 
 There is in this last-mentioned artist's work especially an element of 
 style, an impression of bigness (if the expression may be tolerated), 
 which HoU did not possess. If we think of the great portrait- 
 painters of earlier times, we find there are two points in which almost 
 all their pictures agree, one being the possession of this element of 
 style, the other, a certain quietude and absence of emphasis in the 
 expression of the sitter. The early portraits do not shriek at you, 
 their voices hardly rise above a whisper, and their words are Sibyllic 
 in the variety of interpretations we may put upon them. Herein we 
 touch a great weakness of modern art ; it must always be explaining 
 itself, as if the spectator couldn't be trusted to interpret. And I 
 think Holl's painting "puts the dots on the i's" too blackly and too 
 frequently. Seeking to differentiate carefully, one is apt to imagine 
 peculiarities for which there is little real foundation ; but still, making 
 every allowance for fancy, it does seem to me true that all the people 
 Frank HoU painted are in the habit of saying,-' " I tell you I am the 
 Prince of Wales," " I tell you I am Sir William Jenner," or whoever 
 it may be, and calling you to witness the various details of their per- 
 sonality in support of the assertion. And this quality of insistence, 
 of rampant personality, is one of the many bad effects caused by an 
 artist having crowds of sitters all eager to have themselves painted 
 by the fashionable portrait-painter of the day ; they will not leave 
 him time to be himself, or to study anything in them but their outer 
 appearance. " Here I am ; come along quick, and paint me ! " they 
 cry ; and so the artist does, and when the picture is finished it has an 
 indefinable look of the outside of a man only. 
 
 Let me, if possible, prevent my meaning on this point being mis- 
 understood. A great artist may paint very excellent portraits and 
 yet may not be a great portrait-painter ; and this is not a paradox. 
 There is a difference between a vivid likeness and great portrait- 
 painting which it were too long to attempt to discuss here, but which 
 rests perhaps upon the power of the painter to understand the char- 
 acter and to feel in sympathy with the finer instincts of his sitter. 
 For in all great portraiture I fancy there is the feeling, if it may be 
 so expressed, of quiet personality. Not a man angry or haughty, not 
 a woman showing her teeth in a smile, or with her eyes full of tears, 
 but of definite people who would be either haughty, or angry, or sad, 
 or cheerful in a certain way. Now it has always seemed to me in 
 
 * In their pictured selves, of course, I mean. 
 128 
 
looking at HoU's portraits that their real deficiency was that they 
 always express a mood ; that the artist had not begun to paint them 
 till he had got the idea of a mood, of a, so to speak, mental effect, 
 before him, and then he had set to work and produced his picture. 
 This is true even of his finest work in this branch of art : as, for 
 instance, in the Mr. Gladstone, Sir William Jenner, and Lord Spencer 
 portraits in this year's Academy; in his less successful portraiture 
 the mood depicted is frequently the artist's own, and this gave to 
 many of his likenesses a curious resemblance. Some years ago — I 
 forget how many — I wrote upon this point as follows, and I see no 
 reason to change the main part of my opinion, though the manner of 
 its expression is more suited to the columns of a newspaper than to 
 the pages of a review. 
 
 Mr. Frank HoU is the most powerful and in some ways one of the 
 best portrait-painters of the Academy, as he is one of the most 
 original — an " Israels " of the middle classes. He is distinctly 
 a tragedian ; his very mildest pictures savour of the " dagger 
 and the bowl." I have seen portraits (and good portraits too) 
 by him of most estimable people — Deans and Masters of col- 
 leges, etc., etc., who never had a wrong thought in their lives, 
 but to whom Mr, HoU has given such a don't-meet-me-on-a- 
 dark-night kind of look, that one almost felt as if he must in the 
 course of his painting have discerned some dreadful secret in 
 those apparently blameless breasts, such *' damnable faces " 
 have his sitters shown. Portraiture which strikes the spectator 
 in this way is by no means necessarily the best, or even the 
 most true. The result is got by an exaggeration, very possibly 
 an unconscious exaggeration, of two or three leading traits ; the 
 work is really on the very verge of caricature ; it is a man seen 
 in a flash of lightning, not seen and painted after intimate know- 
 ledge. Nevertheless, of its kind it is wonderful ; and there is 
 a breadth of conception and a massive method of painting in 
 these portraits of Mr. HoU's which renders them very im- 
 pressive. In every case he seems to snatch at the main points 
 of his sitter's character. It is the finer intellectual and moral 
 gradations which are wanting, as are the finer gradations of 
 light and shade ; probably both are inconsistent with the general 
 aim of the painter. 
 
 But I confess it is not as a portrait-painter that I like best to think 
 of HoU, or that' I most deplore his loss. Good portrait-painters we 
 have always had, and probably always shall have ; the rewards are 
 great for such, the demand persistent ; the character of the English 
 is in sympathy with such work ; the tradition of our art is in its 
 favour. And, strange as it may seem, and violently as it will be 
 s 129 
 
denied, it was not portraiture for which Mr. Frank Holl was 
 supremely fitted. He had neither the coolness nor the intellectual 
 breadth of mind which are necessary for the greatest achievements 
 in this direction ; and the artistic gifts which he did possess fitting 
 him for this branch of art were of a superficial character, and, 
 though sufficient to render his portraits striking and popular, were 
 probably the very qualities which would have prevented their ever 
 becoming really great. 
 
 This leads me to the consideration of that side of Frank Holl's 
 art which was most genuine to him, and which, if more cultivated, 
 would have rendered him a far greater artist than he ever would 
 have' been as a portrait-painter. The native quality of his art was 
 pathos ; the true domain of his painting was tragedy. Friends' 
 advice, the blatant injustice of ignorant and prejudiced critics, and — 
 alas ! that it must be said — the temptation to gain instant popularity 
 and monetary success, turned this true tragedian, this man who was 
 endowed by nature with the gift of pathos as genuine and simple as 
 it was intense, into a fashionable portrait-painter. 
 
 With the recollection of his earlier subjects vividly present to my 
 mind, I can scarcely understand how it was that so many critics and 
 picture-buyers hailed his departure from the imaginative art of his 
 early manhood with so much enthusiasm. No doubt the subjects 
 which in these early days found favour in Mr. HoU's sight were too 
 entirely gloomy; people naturally resented the grave being forced upon 
 their attention, in and out of season, and even the beautiful burial- 
 service is apt to grow monotonous when its chief phrases are taken 
 year after year as the title of a pathetic subject-picture. Still thinking 
 of such works as " The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away," the 
 "At Newgate," and the " I am the Resurrection and the Life," with 
 their sure striking of the note of genuine pathos, their unbiassed 
 strong delineation of the beauty and dignity of sorrow, I have always 
 felt there was a loss rather than a gain when Mr. Holl, year by year, 
 put twenty portraits on his easel, and turned us out to order, with 
 the same underlying hint of tragedy, deans and doctors, princes and 
 painters, mayors and merchants. With the same underlying hint of 
 tragedy in their faces! Look at any portrait you please by this 
 artist, and say if this is not true ; if the nature of the artist did not 
 prove to the last stronger than his environment, and whether any 
 amount of commonplace in the subject of his canvas availed entirely 
 to conceal that tragic dramatic sentiment which sprang as it seemed 
 unbidden from the painter's hand ? 
 
 We do strange things with our artists in England : we are 
 desperately afraid lest they should not be respectable and successful ; 
 
 130 
 
we judge their art by the dwelling-place of its master in a fashion- 
 able locality, by the amount of material dollars he gains per annum. 
 How can a painter be expected to stand against such temptation ? 
 " Here is a palace for you and ten thousand a year, and a prince for 
 your model ! " So cries the world, and almost in a flash of light the 
 words come true, and the easels on each of which stands the effigy of 
 a celebrity throng the great studio, and between them paces rest- 
 lessly, anxiously, hurriedly, the poor, rich, heaven-endowed genius, 
 turning his back on those old sad, vivid dreams of tragedy and 
 drama, death and beauty, sorrow and resignation, duty and hope, 
 which had formed his ideal long ago. And the commissions 
 multiply, ^nd the critics applaud delightedly, and the carriages of 
 the nobility roll to the door faster and faster, and the income 
 increases day by day, and the facility and strength of the painter's 
 hand increase too : but further and further into the distance retreats 
 the old youthful ideal of his art — On the great canvases the gentle 
 English girl no longer bends her head in patient sorrow beside the 
 empty chair of her dead father ; the mourners stand no longer by 
 the grave, the old stories of the tragedy of life, of the felon, the 
 deserter, the pauper, the besieged woman and her starving child, are 
 hushed into silence. The great portrait-painter remains, but the 
 great emotional artist of modern days has, in obedience to the 
 bidding of society and success, stifled his soul within him, has 
 forgotten the folk of his own rank and stifled that habit of mind 
 which once called forth his truest sympathies. 
 
 Perhaps at a time when so many friends, relations, and admirers 
 are sorrowing for Mr. Holl's untimely death such words may seem 
 of undue emphasis, but that the death was so untimely is due in no 
 small measure to the facts hinted at above. " He worked himself to 
 death"; so all his friends and intimates are saying. "He would 
 take no rest ; he was strictly told that he must undertake less work." 
 " He went for a holiday, and returned quickly and set to work again 
 harder than ever." So, variously phrased, with more or less of truth 
 or exaggeration, runs the account of HoU's latest days ; and I hold it 
 to be part of the duty of a public writer, even at some risk of being 
 called uncharitable and unkind, to force home upon those who will 
 care to listen the truth that in all human probability it was simply 
 the fierce race for success, wealth, and fame which brought poor 
 Frank HoU to the grave. Fashion and wealth and genius are 
 a queer trio for one man to manage, and a painter who has to make 
 ten thousand a year to support his style of life, must sooner or later 
 either scamp his work, or increase it to such a degree that his health 
 breaks down. While hundreds of painters can make but the barest 
 livelihood, a cruel, thoughtless fashion dictates that some dozen or 
 two men shall be employed on every occasion, fitting or unfittmg, 
 
 131 
 
whether they have time or no ; and the artist once drawn into this 
 vortex of expense and popularity is no longer master of himself. 
 He must live to some extent as his patrons live ; he must be ready 
 at all hours to force his art to work to order; he must produce 
 a certain quantity to meet that huge expense into which he has 
 almost insensibly been drawn. And so when his health breaks 
 down it comes to pass that he has either to choose between leaving 
 the unnatural position (social position) into which his popularity has 
 forced him, or with weary hand and failing energies continue the 
 task. 
 
 Is there no help for it ? Must all our great artists nowadays 
 succumb to this devil in disguise who whispers to them of social 
 advancement and an income of ten thousand a year ? Believe me, 
 such things are inimical to art, if not inconsistent with it. The 
 artist has one great advantage over all the rest of mankind : it is 
 this, that his best pleasures cost — nothing ! Think what that means. 
 It means that his ten thousand a year, his social position are in 
 himself; they can never be taken from him, save by his own act. 
 But to preserve them he must live that straightforward honest life 
 in which alone they can flourish : he must see things as they are, 
 not as Mrs. Ponsonby de Tompkins chooses to represent them, he 
 must possess his soul quietly with a few true-hearted friends, not 
 strew it upon the highways of acquaintance ; and, above all, he must 
 do such work as it is in him to do, in obedience to his artistic 
 instinct and knowledge, and not work to order in whatever direction 
 he can make most money. 
 
 The woodcut given is a specimen of the work done by HoU in 
 book illustration, and for unforced dramatic quality there is only one 
 living English artist — Sir John Millais — whose early work in this 
 branch of art would compare favourably therewith ; and it is strange 
 and somewhat painful to remember that when Mr. Millais (as he 
 was then) produced work of this quality, he, too, was of Mr. H oil's 
 age, and has since been enticed almost entirely into work which 
 is less worthy of his genius. The worst part of portrait-painting in 
 modern days is this, that it necessarily becomes in the majority of 
 instances a question of money. An artist cannot feel a sympathy 
 with his sitter to order, nor can he, if he is a fashionable painter, 
 afford to decline all orders save from those with whom he can 
 feel some sympathy. In consequence, the work, as is frequently the 
 case with Sir John Millais, becomes hurried and insincere; at its 
 best striving for some mere technical excellence. 
 
 To return to this illustration by Mr. Holl : it is worth while for 
 those readers who care about such matters to compare the draw- 
 ing with those by Millais in Orley Farm and Framky Parsonage,^ 
 
 1 Both works, of course, by Anthony Trollope. 
 132 
 
which are, upon the whole, the best illustrations ever done for 
 English novels, and which are also excellent specimens of the older 
 fashioned style of wood-engraving now fast dying out. 
 
 In respect of the wood-cutting, these present plates are not to be 
 compared to the earlier ones, but in artistic quality, the comparison is 
 not wholly in favour of Sir John Millais. Mr. Holl's work appears to 
 me to be far less beautiful in line, and less attractive in what may be 
 perhaps called sentimental expression, but it is more intellectual and 
 decidedly more dramatic. In light and shade also, the advantage is, 
 I think, on his side. In Millais' earlier drawings there was always 
 a certain heaviness — a blackness about the shadowed portions — 
 owing, I think, to the minuteness of the manner in which they were 
 worked and the artist's attempt to express more of the form and 
 texture of the shadowed object than there was light enough to make 
 clearly comprehensible. This is shown clearly in such a drawing as 
 that of "Lady Mason after her Confession,"^ and, for a still better 
 example, in the " Cleopatra" of the illustrated Tennyson. Mr. Holl 
 does not err in this respect, and indeed in the drawing here repro- 
 duced, the chiaroscuro is most admirable, alike unforced, picturesque, 
 and brilliant. 
 
 Strong and good in drawing and composition from the technical 
 point of view ; most excellent in its arrangement of light and shade, 
 it is nevertheless chiefly delightful for the simplicity and truth to 
 nature of its sentiment, for the easy naturalness with which the 
 scene is shown. I have forgotten what incident in Phineas Redux 
 this drawing illustrates — nor does it much matter, the picture tells 
 its own story ; but it is worth consideration whether art of this 
 sympathetic, unaffected kind is not the very best of which we 
 Englishmen are capable ; whether our real strength is not to be 
 found, neither in imitating the liveliness and artistic originality, nor 
 the Gallic grace of our French neighbours, but in preserving that 
 somewhat stolid but sincere dignity and homeliness which are, to some 
 extent, a part of our national character. A Frenchman will always 
 beat us on his own ground (beat us artistically, I mean) ; but will he 
 beat us on ours ? I don't think any French artist with whose work 
 I am acquainted could have produced such a picture as that here 
 reproduced, in which strong artistic faculty is blended with a frank 
 homeliness and simplicity. Such a design is equally an honour to 
 the artist who conceived it, and to the writer whose book is illus- 
 trated, and is even an honour to the national life one phase of 
 which is faithfully shown. 
 
 This is not the place to carry these notes further. They were 
 undertaken by one who, personally unknown to the artist, has been 
 
 * In Orley Farm, 
 ^11 
 
an admirer of his art from the beginning, and who feels most keenly 
 the loss that his death will cause. If I have seemed to dwell less 
 upon the brilliant qualities of his portraiture than upon what I think 
 to have been his error (very unwillingly made and in obedience to 
 great temptation) in leaving that field of ideal and emotional art in 
 which he would have been so great, I have done so only because there 
 has been so much said, and justly, in praise of his portraits, and so 
 little remembered of his subject-work. Only last week I read in a 
 well-known Review that Holl had no imagination, and that he always 
 failed when he painted women portraits. As a matter of fact he never 
 failed in painting women portraits, because he never attempted 
 to paint one ; and if the artist of " The Lord gave and the Lord hath 
 taken away" had no imagination it would be interesting to know in 
 what manner of work the reviewer considers that quality to exist. 
 The truth is quite in the other direction, and the pleasantest thing 
 about his portraiture is, not its insight, but the imaginative element 
 with which the artist contrived to endow his pictures, A sense of 
 stress, of drama, if not of tragedy, is to be found in all of them, and 
 had he continued to paint subjects, that power, which was native to 
 him, would have made him the first English artist who had been 
 thoroughly capable of depicting the pathos and the tragedy of modern 
 life. 
 
 134 
 
AMY LEVY:i A REMINISCENCE 
 AND A CRITICISM. 
 
 IJHERE lies hidden deeply in the heart of the West 
 Country a secluded valley whose surrounding hills 
 are fledged with fern and slim, small small-leaved 
 elms ; while through the midst the tiniest of rivers 
 winds its way to sea. The surrounding country 
 is high and bare, with wind-swept fields and low 
 stone fences, in whose turf-covered interstices Nature has sown a 
 kindly crop of shrub-oak and wild flower. Here and there a poor 
 village or quaint church-town with square grey tower lifts itself 
 above the undulations of the moorland, and forms a centre alike 
 for social gathering and religious devotion. Oftentimes indeed the 
 tower served in the old days for sterner uses, and stood as a land- 
 mark for weary, storm -tossed sailors, or for a last stronghold of 
 defence against lawless robber or marauding lord. From the valley, 
 however, of which I speak no one would guess at the character of 
 the surrounding country, at the wild cliffs which are within rifle-shot 
 of its peaceful trees and waters, at the great breakers which roll 
 ceaselessly in from the Atlantic upon the little sandy Forth to whose 
 shore the valley -river hurries through the pleasant marsh -lands. 
 For, where the declivity begins — two miles from the sea — a tall wood 
 fills the hollow of the down, and clothes the descent thickly with 
 feathery pine and elm, so densely grown that even the noisy stream 
 flows unseen beneath the branches of the trees. The path beneath 
 the trees is verdant with fern and flower, and winds onward and 
 downward ever, till almost upon the sea-level it reaches a white 
 swing -gate, beyond which half-a-dozen cottage -roofs mark the 
 
 ^ Reuben Sachs (Macmillan and Co.) ; Miss Meredith (Hodder and Stoughton) ; A Minor 
 Poet (Fisher Unwin) ; The Romance of a Shop (Fisher Unwin). 
 
last descent of the hill. If we pass the gate, the village inn, cynosure 
 of the locality, lies before us at the base of a field orchard, backed by 
 a row of elms, above which in springtime the rooks and jackdaws 
 wheel and chatter noisily. On the right, the river rushes from the 
 woods under a rough bridge of stone and timber within a dozen 
 yards of the stables and farm-buildings at the back of the hostelry ; 
 on the left, a little brook borders the steep lane in haste to join the 
 larger stream, and on the side of the hill beyond the brook, a wide 
 path leads up to an old stone manor-house, which has now for many 
 a year been used as a convent by the nuns of Lanherne. 
 
 Here it was that one day some years ago, weary but not sated 
 with a long summer's painting on the Cornish coast, I came 
 almost by chance — having driven twenty miles across country from 
 my last resting-place in quest of fresh material. How easy to 
 recollect, how difficult, if not impossible, to convey the impression of 
 that first entrance to what became to me in after-time almost a home. 
 A dark doorway leading to two or three narrow rooms, equally 
 compounded, as I soon grew to know, of bar, sitting-room, and 
 kitchen ; a distant view of villagers over their beer in the furthest 
 room, and a shy girl with the true west-country rose-flush on her 
 cheek serving them ; gleams of pewter, glass, and a silhouette of a 
 stout, broad-shouldered man, who seemed to be silently master of the 
 situation ; the usual plain chairs and tables, dark with use and age, 
 in the front room, and, with a quiet, self-contained manner in which 
 dignity and kindliness were subtly blended, a lady waiting, in the old 
 phrase, to know my will. My will -^2^ to stop if I could — if I might 
 — for evidently here it was a question not of money so much as of 
 goodwill — so I proffered my request for accommodation somewhat 
 hesitatingly. " Would they put up a painter for a few days ? Could I 
 have a bedroom and a room to put my litter in ? " and so on. I was 
 conscious, not altogether comfortably, of a quiet, judging glance — an 
 estimation — a pause — before my interlocutress answered, having 
 apparently decided in my favour, " Would I come upstairs and see i'" 
 [the faintest note of interrogation would express the question]. So 
 she took me upstairs into a long low chamber, which certainly did 
 not provide the usual accotnmodation I had been accustomed to find 
 in country hostelries. The walls were covered with pictures, in one 
 of which I recognised a photograph from a friend's work, chiefly 
 sketches in oil and water-colour ; the piano was heavy with music, 
 most of which seemed to be Chopin and Beethoven ; and a volume 
 of Schubert stood upright in front of the keys. The bookcase 
 was literally crammed with books — Esmond standing by the side of 
 Newman's Apologia and Kingsley's Water Babies, and Hawker's 
 Cornish Ballads fraternising amicably with The Outcasts of Poker 
 Flat and the Inland Voyage. The mantelpiece too was crowded 
 
 136 
 
with photographs, and some big white lilies stood in pots in front of 
 the lattice windows. 
 
 Try to fancy it: a still July afternoon, the sun bright without the 
 house, shining on the grey elms and the gnarled apple-trees which 
 stood in an orchard close by, occasionally only the laugh of a child 
 or the sound of an unhurried foot passing down the lane seaward, a 
 faint suggestion of sound in the air which told of the unseen ocean, 
 and an intermittent clinking of mugs from the kitchen below, where, 
 as I discovered afterwards, the more respectable amongst the villagers 
 were allowed — the word is strictly accurate, for they were not invited 
 or encouraged — to take their afternoon beer. The interior of the 
 room was dim, for the house was an old stone one with very 
 thick walls, and the windows were but the ordinary cottage lattice 
 filled with diamond panes of indifferent glass, and cumbrous wooden 
 sashes and crossbars. My conductress stood gravely by the door, 
 expectant, but not anxious for my decision. I asked her if this was 
 the room that she proposed to give me, and she replied quite simply 
 
 that it was the only one she and her sister had, but anyhow the 
 
 matter was arranged, and I stayed. The days passed quickly, the 
 weather was perfect, and (fortunately) no one came to stay at the inn 
 but myself. My hostess and I grew to be very good friends, and 
 every evening when supper was well over, and the last of the respect- 
 able villagers had been gently suggested away to his wife and family ; 
 when the father, who was nearly fourscore, had creaked his solid way 
 to bed, and the son, who lived at an adjoining farm, had mounted his 
 nag and clattered homeward, she would come softly upstairs, and 
 opening the door of my sitting-room, start the evening's entertain- 
 ment, as it were, by asking if there were anything more that she 
 could do for me. This was 2i formula, as Charles Reade would put 
 it, to which I duly replied, generally with the request for a little 
 whisky and water, which she would bring, and still linger, standing 
 just inside the room with one hand resting against the half-shut door, 
 and the other holding her bedroom candlestick. I can see her now 
 — a tall slight figure, with deep-set, serious eyes, from which it struck 
 me that the light and colour had faded, a pale face, a lofty forehead, 
 and plainly-braided light brown hair, above all a sensitive nervous 
 mouth, the upper lip rather too long and straight for beauty, and 
 habitually pressed against the lower as though to conceal pain. The 
 dress, always very simple, of some grey or brownish-yellow stuff, the 
 whole expression of the ligure and face gentle, yet austere. I never, 
 in my life, met a woman so entirely mistress of herself, so secure in 
 her fortress of purity and unselfishness, so resolutely brave, not only 
 to do the thing which she thought right, but to make others do it, if 
 speech or action of hers could possibly avail. ^ Still, even a good 
 woman is but a woman after all, and her one innocent enjoyment 
 T 137 
 
indoors was — a talk. So night after night we chatted for a long 
 time in our respective positions, I sitting back in an arm-chair with 
 my pipe and grog, and she standing by the table or door — for no 
 entreaty would prevail upon her to sit down. 
 
 She told me many things — of the wild flowers and ferns that grew 
 in Carnanton woods, of the wrestling bouts in which her father had 
 distinguished himself a generation since, of her relations and friends 
 in London, of the awful weather "to the Forth " that winter, of the quiet 
 holy life led by the nuns at the grey stone abbey which looked down 
 ' upon the river and the inn, of the young couples who would come to 
 them now and again to spend their honeymoon, of her fondness for 
 the sea, the fields, and the wood, and yet how she could "seldom get out 
 for a walk " during the summer time ; of her brief visits to London, 
 of her intense love of music, of the books in the little bookcase I 
 had noticed when I first arrived, and how most of them had been 
 given her at various times hy friends who had "stayed with us at the 
 Falcon." Amongst the photographs on the mantelpiece, one was of a 
 small, dark girl, of unmistakably Jewish type, with eyes that seemed 
 too large for the delicate features, and far too sad for their youthful- 
 ness of line and contour. In its way I had rarely seen a face which 
 was at once so interesting, so intellectual, so beautiful, and, alas ! so 
 unhappy ; and somehow, after the first subjects of talk had been well 
 exhausted, our speech would be apt frequently to turn in the direction 
 of the original, and my hostess would tell me all about Amy Levy.^ 
 She had come down there ill, it appeared, some two years before, and 
 
 had been nursed — that was a matter of course (Miss nursed 
 
 everybody, if they would in the least give her permission — some- 
 times, indeed, when they would not) — and she had been a dweller in 
 Bloomsbury all her life, and knew nothing about the country ; and 
 my landlady had, in her capacity of nurse, taken her into the woods 
 and fields, and down amongst the caves on the Forth, and taught her 
 all those strange, hidden trifles of earth, sea, and air which only the 
 dwellers in, and lovers of, the country know, and the girl — for she 
 was quite a girl then — had taught her instructress — what ? Had 
 
 you asked Miss , she would have told you that there were few 
 
 subjects upon which she had not talked with her patient, and gained 
 from her some store of knowledge and thought. 
 
 In the Club the other night by chance I took up a very small, 
 quaintly -bound book, entitled Miss Meredith, and turning to the 
 title-page, found it was by Amy Levy ; and between the time at 
 which I first heard her name in the manner above described, and this 
 present time when I read her last work, there had come to her — or 
 
 1 Let me be accurate ; for though my hostess told me much of Miss Levy's charm, Rentle- 
 ness, and mteUigence, she seldom spoke of the details of her life. 
 
 138 
 
^ ° 
 
 w 5 
 
 O i- 
 
 X W 
 
rather she had brought herself to that terribly strange, sad ending of 
 which we all know. . In life I never met her, but during the last six 
 or seven years during which she has written, and at the close of 
 which she has died, I have always had this pleasant picture of these 
 two strangely-assorted women, the dweller in the country and the 
 dweller in the town, the undoubting believer and the undoubting 
 sceptic, the optimist and the pessimist, the old and the young, the 
 Martha of the village inn, and the Mary of the latest developments 
 of artistic thought, science, and unbelief, joining together on the 
 broad ground of a common humanity, and finding in the silence of 
 Cornish woods, and the beauty of Cornish streams and seas, equal 
 interest and equal delight— so that I read Miss Meredith as perhaps 
 a critic should read every book if he would do entire justice to its 
 author — that is to say, with personal sympathy, and a belief that I 
 should find the story extremely interesting; and so reading, I did 
 find it, not only interesting, but good, delicate, sincere, artistic work 
 — marked with strong originality, and full of nascent knowledge, and 
 perception which was rather hidden than displayed : a book, in fact, 
 conceived from the point of view of art, and adequately carried out 
 without weakness, affectation, or advertisement. It is hard that one 
 can only say this when it can be productive of no pleasure to the 
 author, and when praise or blame are equally futile. 
 
 Indeed I should scarcely have thought of now writing concerning 
 Miss Levy's work were it not that I feel that in some measure I 
 owe amends to her art. For it so happened, that the opportunity 
 came to me some years, ago, was offered me, indeed, by the authoress 
 herself, of accepting one of her stories.^ Rightly or wrongly — I 
 would fain think wrongly now — I did not consider it up to the 
 mark ; and — while asking her to give me a chance upon another 
 occasion — rejected it. Let me now therefore do whatever is possible 
 to repair my mistake. Works of art are not very common nowadays, 
 or indeed at any time, and we are not so glutted with writing of fine 
 quality that we can afford to let even little masterpieces pass away 
 quite unrecognised. Though it seems to be now agreed that it is 
 impolitic and unnecessary personally to honour any great writer who 
 can no longer work for us, no one has yet asserted that it is equally 
 blamable to endeavour to snatch good work from too early oblivion. 
 
 Miss Meredith is the story of the engagement of an English gover- 
 ness by an Italian family, of her sojourn with them at Pisa, and of her 
 love affair with the younger son of the house. The materials are there- 
 fore sufficiently simple. The story is, in fact — as Lawrence described 
 Sword and Gown to be — a chaplet of cameos with sufficient interest 
 to string them together. Nor are the characters, with the exception 
 
 ^ I was then editing the Universal Review. 
 
of the heroine, specially interesting or remarkable. Throughout, the 
 work is slight, but the slightness is that of intention, not of laziness 
 nor incompetence. The especial flavour of the writing lies in the 
 author's mastery over her material. This appears alike in the extent 
 to which each character is delineated, and the detail which is suggested 
 in relation to each part of the story. Nothing can in one sense be 
 more realistic than the descriptions of the various scenes and incidents 
 of the drama ; and yet the realism is so deftly introduced, so easily 
 dropped and taken up again, so interwoven with the thoughts and 
 characters of the principal personages, that this accuracy of detail only 
 strikes us upon critical examination, and never for one moment arrests 
 us in our perusal. The realism is, in fact, that of the best modern 
 French painting, in which detail is introduced //^^.y the light it is seen 
 in, plus its relative aspect to the scene of which it forms a part. If»I 
 did not fear to use a painter's expression, I should say that thQ planes 
 of this novel are especially well preserved, and with the single excep- 
 tion of one exquisite story by Miss Thackeray,^ I am acquainted with 
 no tale, professing to tell the love episode of a girl's life, in which 
 emotion and fact are kept so strictly in fociis. Compare, for instance, 
 the method of such narrative as that of Cometh up as a Flower, or its 
 masculine prototype, As in a Looking-Glass, with .that of Amy Levy 
 in Miss Meredith, and it is impossible to avoid noticing the ill-balance 
 (despite great literary ability) of the two first-mentioned books. The 
 truth is, that love, and its surrounding passions, do not fill up the 
 whole or even the major part of any human being's life, even of the 
 life of a young girl ; and all books which simply tell the story of the 
 heroine's emotional experience, omitting the account of her intellectual 
 and physical lives, must infallibly be caricatures of the passion they 
 profess to represent. Miss Meredith — who at the crises of her love 
 affairs gets tired, or hungry, or angry because she is snubbed, or feels 
 the marble floor cold through the threadbare carpets — is a human 
 being whom we can understand, and imagine to have possibly existed ; 
 and so, too, when she, as it were, frescoes her more intense interest 
 with her perceptions of the angularity and ridiculous coiffure of her 
 pupil, with irritation at the fussiness of her pupil's mother, and with 
 many little sharp commentaries, not in the least emotional or senti- 
 mental, and frequently rather ill-tempered, upon the life which is going 
 on around her. To write in such a manner as the above, and yet to 
 preserve the more ideal portion of the story, and render it in no way 
 trivial or commonplace, denotes very high art, and is equivalent in 
 fiction to such work as that of Israels in painting — work which is 
 apparently homely in subject, and simple in execution, but yet con- 
 taining many elements of beauty and pathos, and really the result, 
 from a technical point of view, of a complete mastery over its material 
 and its method. 
 
 '^ i.e. The Story of Elizaieth. 
 140 
 
I have selected the following passage to exemplify this, not so 
 much on account of its being a specially excellent one, as because it 
 appears to me to give a fair example of the mingled poetry and 
 realism which form the chief charm of Amy Levy's work, and also 
 because there is to be found therein something of that intense, 
 passionate, almost despairing, personal note which characterised the 
 author's habit of mind, and which — in a greater or less degree — is to 
 be traced throughout her writing. 
 
 CHAPTER VII.— "THE HOME COMING 
 OF THE REBEL." 
 
 THE covered gallery which ran along the back of the house 
 was flooded in the afternoon with sunshine. Here, as the 
 day declined, I loved to pace, basking in the warmth and 
 rejoicing in the brightness, for, mild and clear as the day 
 might be out of doors, within the thick -walled palace it was 
 always mirk and chill. 
 
 " The long, high wall of the gallery was covered with pictures — 
 chiefly paintings of dead and gone Brogi — most of them worth- 
 less taken singly, taken collectively interesting as a study of the 
 varieties of family types. 
 
 " Here was Bianca, to the life, painted two centuries ago ; the old 
 Marchese looked out from a dingy canvas three hundred years 
 old at least, and a curious mixture of Romeo and his sister 
 disported itself in powder amid a florid eighteenth-century family 
 group. Conspicuous among so much indifferent workmanship 
 hung a genuine Bronzino of considerable beauty, representing a 
 young man, whose charming aspect was scarcely marred by his 
 stiff" and elaborate fifteenth-century costume. The dark eyes of 
 this picture had a way of following one up and down the gallery 
 in a rather disconcerting manner ; already I had woven a series 
 of little legends about him, and had decided that he left his 
 frame at night like the creatures in Ruddygore to roam the 
 house as a ghost where once he had lived as a man. 
 
 " Opposite the pictures, on which they shed their light, was a row 
 of windows, set close together deep in the thick wall, and rising 
 almost to the ceiling. They were not made to open, but through 
 their numerous and dingy panes I could see across the roofs of 
 the town to the hills, or down below to where a neglected bit of 
 territory, enclosed between high walls, did duty as a garden. 
 
 " In one corner of this latter stood a great ilex tree, its massive grey 
 trunk old and gnarled, its blue-green foliage casting a wide 
 shadow. Two or three cypresses, with their broom-like stems, 
 
 141 
 
sprang from the overgrown turf, which, at this season of the 
 year, was beginning to be yellow with daffodils, and a thick 
 growth of laurel bushes ran along under the walls. An empty 
 marble basin approached by broken pavement, marked the site 
 of a forgotten fountain, the stonecrop running riot about its 
 borders ; the house -leek thrusting itself every now and then 
 through the interstices of shattered stone. Forlorn, uncared 
 for as was this square of ground, it had for me a mysterious 
 attraction ; it seemed to me that there clung to it through all 
 change of times and weathers something of the beauty in 
 desolation which makes the charm of Italy. 
 
 " It was about four o'clock on Thursday afternoon, and I was 
 wandering up and down the gallery in the sunshine. 
 
 " I was alone for the first time during the last three days, and was 
 making the best of this brief respite from the gregarious life to 
 which I saw myself doomed for some time to come. The 
 ladies were out driving, paying calls, and making a few last 
 purchases for the coming festivities. In the evening Andrea 
 was expected, and an atmosphere of excitement pervaded the 
 whole household. 
 
 " ' They are really fond of him, it seems,' I mused — ' these people 
 who, as far as I can make out, are so cold.' Then I leaned 
 my forehead disconsolately against the window, and had a 
 little burst of sadness all by myself. 
 
 " The constant strain of the last few days had tired me, I longed 
 intensely for peace, for rest, for affection, for the sweet and 
 simple kindliness of home. 
 
 " I had even lost my interest in the coming event which seemed 
 to accentuate my forlornness. 
 
 " What were other people's brothers to me ? Let mother or one 
 of the girls come out to me, and I would not be behindhand in 
 rejoicing. ' No one wants me, no one cares for me, and I don't 
 care for any one either,' I said to myself gloomily, brushing 
 away a stray tear with the back of my hand. Then I moved 
 from the window and my contemplation of the ilex tree, and 
 began slowly pacing down the gallery, which was getting fuller 
 every minute of the thick golden sunlight. 
 
 " But suddenly my heart seemed to stop beating, my blood froze, 
 loud pulses fell to throbbing in my ears, I remained rooted to 
 the spot with horror, while my eyes fixed themselves on a 
 figure, which, as yet on the further side of a shaft of moted 
 sunlight, was slowly advancing towards me from the distant 
 end of the gallery. 
 
 " ' Is it the Bronzino come to life ?' whispered a voice in the back 
 recess of my consciousness. The next moment I was laughing 
 at my own fears, and was contemplating with interest and 
 
 142 
 
astonishment the very flesh-and-blood presentment of a modern 
 
 gentleman, which stood bowing before me. 
 "'I fear I have startled you,' said a decidedly human voice, 
 
 speaking in English, with a peculiar accent, while the speaker 
 
 looked straight at me, with a pair of dark eyes that were 
 
 certainly like those of the Bronzino. 
 
 Oh, no ; it was my own fault for being so stupid,' I answered 
 
 breathlessly, shaken out of my self-possession. 
 '"I am Andrea Brogi,' he said, with a little bow; 'and I believe 
 
 I have the pleasure of addressing Miss Clarke ? ' " 
 
 The situation in the above, it will be observed, is not specially 
 original. We have all read something like this before, when the 
 hero that is to be, comes down the long gallery and startles the 
 heroine with his likeness to one of his ancestors' portraits. But it is 
 redeemed from the commonplace by the brisk, slight manner in 
 which the episode is touched, and the fulness of personal feeling with 
 which what may be called the mechanism of the scene is informed. 
 Few things could be better in their way than the little paragraph 
 describing the negkcted bit of territory, enclosed between high 
 walls, which did duty as a garden. That paragraph seems to me 
 to hit the exact mean between ordinary conventional description and 
 the too elaborate word-painting which has been of late in fashion. 
 There is just the suggestion of poetry, of romance, of feeling, but it 
 does not elaborate the first, magnify the second, or exhaust the third. 
 You have the bit of territory plainly before you, and as Miss 
 Meredith saw it, and there the matter is happily, easily left to take 
 its right place in the picture. Besides which, a writer may be 
 pardoned for remarking that the mere mechanism of these few 
 sentences is completely satisfactory. There clung to it through all 
 change of times and weathers — no one who was not a good work- 
 man would have written that phrase, no one who had not an ear for 
 the beauty of words and their fitting collocation. 
 
 Here again is another little piece of word-music : 
 
 " ' They are really fond of him it seems,' I mused — ' these people 
 who, as far as I can make out, are so cold.'" 
 
 Nothing can be less pretentious. The phrasing is almost bald in 
 its intense simplicity and the naturalness of its expression, but as 
 the words fall slowly one by one they have a strange, deliberate 
 music of their own. The end of the little sentence completes the 
 sound. We listen for it as for the final splash with which a pebble 
 reaches the water, after springing from rock to rock down the face of 
 a precipitous cliff. Here again, within four lines of the last quotation, 
 is another instance of the same merit : / longed intensely for peace, 
 
 143 
 
for rest, for affection, for the sweet and simple kindliness of home. 
 And here we get, not only the incisive, completed music of the 
 previous sentence, but the fuller, gentler tone wholly in accord with 
 the sentiment expressed. The old test after all is the best, and try 
 these sentences by it — namely, by the endeavour to substitute a 
 synonym for any of the words used, or by altering the arrangement 
 of those which the author has selected. 
 
 To pass to another matter, and to one of more interest to the 
 general reader than this of mere craftsmanship, let us ask what is 
 the one essential, vital characteristic of our author's writing ? What 
 is it that separates that writing from the work of her contemporaries 
 and her predecessors ? And here I find myself, not for the first 
 time, on very delicate ground. The English habit of mind is so 
 little accustomed to discriminate between art and personality, so 
 little accustomed to excuse any research into a writer's or a painter's 
 personal motives or feelings, that criticism which seeks to penetrate 
 the secret of these, is but too frequently esteemed impertinent, even 
 if it be not mistaken. Especially in the present instance am I, from 
 the circumstances of the case, extremely anxious to avoid causing 
 the slightest vexation to any living friend or relative of the author of 
 Miss Meredith. And yet, when so much has been said in praise, it 
 would be neither just, nor, in the long-run, kind, to hesitate to mark 
 the note which appears to the present writer to be out of tune in the 
 general harmony. That such a note does exist is beyond question, 
 and it is traceable alike in Miss Levy's poetry and her prose. 
 Perhaps the most easy definition of what is lacking would be to 
 characterise the author's habit of mind as a pessimistic one, 
 pessimist not only with regard to the expectations to be formed from 
 the circumstances of life, and from the actions, and with regard to 
 the motives of others, but the far deeper pessimism which not only 
 doubts, but scarcely regrets the absence of, any deep-seated happi- 
 ness, or possible sufficient good. The conjecture, the observation, 
 the thought, the pathos, and the humour, which are found so subtly 
 and skilfully blended in Miss Levy's work, are perhaps all, if care- 
 fully examined, a litrie thin, and more than a little hard. One can 
 hardly imagine that this writer would have been an easier person to 
 live with, than she found the world an easy place to live in ; and 
 finding it very difficult, having perception and knowledge and 
 intuitive feeling sufficient to perceive its incongruities, to estimate 
 its difficulties, and to gauge its sorrow, she does not seem to 
 have arrived at that further stage which renders such an experience 
 possible despite its sadness — the stage in which the recognition of 
 sorrow and pain turns freely, if not gladly, to action, which seeks to 
 lighten the one and decrease the other. Indeed, if we are not very 
 much mistaken, Miss Levy's habitual intellectual aspect towards men, 
 
 144 
 
women, and things in general, was not unlike that other celebrated 
 one which characterised Mr. Gedge, the landlord of the Royal Oak, 
 who found all his customers in the country village in which he lived 
 a poor lot, sir, big and little, and who, when he removed to a large 
 manufacturing town, was still followed by the same bitter experience, 
 and the most notable point in Reuben Sachs, at all events: the point 
 which struck the present writer most clearly, was the detachment of 
 mind which allowed its young Jewish author to write, not exactly so 
 bitterly, but with such absolute indifference, about the national and 
 social characteristics and peculiarities of her own people. There 
 was something positively inhuman in such work proceeding from 
 the lips of one who was scarcely more than a girl, and it seemed to 
 show not so much the result of bitter experience and thwarted effort, 
 as a preconceived determination to see the seamy side — a deliberate 
 attempt to banish from her work every gentle prejudice and kindly 
 affection which might have pleaded for a softer judgment. As is not 
 infrequently the case, the result of this determined, self-conscious 
 impartiality, was to produce the very bias against which such strict 
 precaution had been taken. 
 
 For fortunately it is just as easy to err on the pessimist as on the 
 optimist side of things, and if we set out very determinedly to make 
 no allowance for sympathy or sentiment, to suspect our own 
 emotions as well as those of others, and analyse to the utmost 
 possible degree our perceptions and our prejudices, we are very apt 
 to end by failing to see the use and attractiveness of sympathy, 
 feeling, or sentiment at all, and very apt to doubt whether one per- 
 ception or prejudice is not much the same as another, equally true 
 for the people, useful for the magistrate, and false for the philo- 
 sopher ; and so feeling, or at least so arguing — for some imperfection 
 of kindliness in thought and action is apt to linger with the most 
 cynical — there is apt to grow upon us that detachment of mind 
 which is, beyond all other qualities, the most fatal possession for the 
 story-teller. In the long run, readers will pardon all else but 
 superiority, and, strange as it may seem, an author is not at liberty, 
 qud the general reader, to treat his characters, or rather the emotions 
 and experiences of his characters, with utter indifference ; all else he 
 may do to and with them — plunge them into the most utter misery, 
 or reward them with a happiness such as few of us have the luck to 
 experience outside the covers of a book. But it is quite imperative, 
 if the author is to retain any hold upon his readers' sympathies, that 
 he should feel with the people he has created. So truly is this the 
 case, that if we read the lives of the great story-tellers, we find 
 that almost in proportion to their greatness, was the sense of 
 responsibility towards their dramatis personce, and their concern for 
 what was to happen to them in the pages as yet unwritten. It is an 
 u 145 
 
interesting chapter in the history of literature, this which tells us 
 how one by one, in many ages and many lands, the romancers fell 
 under the spell of their own creations ; and while the world stood 
 waiting to know how Becky Sharp would deceive her husband, 
 whether Paul Dombey would die, or what was to be the final 
 incident in Jean Valjean's pitiful history, Thackeray, Dickens, and 
 Hugo were sitting in their working- rooms in London and at Paris, 
 more interested than their youngest reader in the final catastrophe 
 of treachery, death, and suffering, of which they were slowly working 
 out the incidents. Much of the change which has come over fiction 
 of late years seems to me to be connected with this loss of interest, 
 this lack of responsibility and credence in the author, towards his 
 story and his characters. One belief has been substituted for 
 another. The writer of to-day believes in himself where he once 
 believed in his people ; and for such a faith he has the appropriate 
 reward, for if readers concern themselves with him at all, it is with 
 hini personally, and not the folk whom he creates. Many of us 
 in the old days sorrowed with Sidney Carton or Colonel Newcome, 
 with that kindly, personal sorrow that we feel when those who are 
 really near to us suffer ; but who would dream of being pitiful to the 
 dissected personalities who walk about without any of their seven 
 skins in Mr. Howells' stories, or to those of glorified country squires 
 who drag their elephant rifles and dress waistcoats through trails of 
 blood, and hordes of howling savages, in quest of buried treasure 
 or forgotten cities ? We feel that to sympathise with such heroes 
 as these would be certainly futile and probably impertinent. We 
 can imagine them saying, Dorit know you! to any proffer of 
 sympathy or comprehension. And, in a lesser degree but still 
 markedly, this change is manffest even in stories such as Miss 
 Meredith, which may be said to be in a measure built on the 
 old model, and in which analysis is still restrained within reasonable 
 limits, and the vagaries of filibustering romance are not substituted 
 for more accustomed and genuine sources of interest. Miss 
 Meredith's story, cleverly, suggestively, prettily, as it is told, is 
 nevertheless told with the author's sense of its slight importance 
 leaking out in nearly every line. There is a flavour of scorn in the 
 telling of each incident. 
 
 After all, however, it is by Reuben Sacks that Miss Levy's work 
 will be most fitly and finally judged. This is her most important 
 book, and is moreover the story which contains her most elaborate 
 studies of character and her most ambitious writing. And Reuben 
 Sachs is, despite all its power and originality, a disappointing book. 
 The divorce of sympathy between the author and the characters 
 depicted, is complete and manifest, and is forced upon us at every 
 turn in the narrative. A few touches of kindliness there are indeed 
 
 146 
 
here and there, m the delineation of the heroine, Judith Quixano, 
 but for scarcely another character throughout the book is there a 
 good word said unaccompanied by a sneer or a criticism, and one 
 especial trick of thought is continually recurring, which to the 
 present writer greatly militates against the enjoyment of the story. 
 This is Miss Levy's habit of setting down any unamiable peculi- 
 arity of one of her characters which she may have to notice as 
 a tribal peculiarity or Jewish characteristic, or some similar phrase 
 which drives home, as it were, against her own people, the general 
 accusation, by means of the individual instance. Throughout the 
 narrative is kept up this continual harping on the unamiable, vulgar, 
 or sordid traits of the Jewish race, till at last one feels inclined to 
 say pettishly, "Why can't the woman leave her ' people ' alone, and if 
 she sees nothing worthy of admiration in the Jewish community, go 
 elsewhere for the subject-matter of her story ? " Not that the author's 
 accusations, complaints, or criticisms strike us as much exaggerated 
 or unjust, but that so evidently she was not the right person to 
 say them ; and their continual recurrence is an error in art, as 
 well as taste, for reasons which are sufficiently obvious. The truth 
 is that Miss Levy's dissatisfaction had a far deeper root than dislike 
 to Semitic usages and peculiarities. The whole note of Reuben 
 Sachs is one of depression, of disgust with, or rather of distaste 
 for life; especially for ordinary middle-class uneventful life, with 
 its timid proprieties, conventional pleasures, and unaspiring ideals. 
 Despite these and other drawbacks of a similar kind, Reuben Sachs 
 must be counted as a remarkable tour de force for a young author, 
 if only because of the breadth of character-drawing, of the numerous 
 slight yet vivid sketches of various types introduced therein, and 
 of the ease with which the teller of the story stage-manages her 
 dramatis personce, and conveys to the reader the sense of reality 
 both in them and their surroundings. There are few cleverer 
 passages in latter-day fiction than that which describes the dinner- 
 party in Portland Place after the fasting of the Day of Atonement. 
 Not only is it good in humour and in varied penetration into the 
 varied idiosyncrasies of the numerous people who take part therein, 
 but the author has contrived to preserve the drama, the current 
 of her story, in a most subtle, skilful manner. We feel the on-coming 
 tragedy gradually revealing itself through the commonplace utter- 
 ances of Mr. Bertie Lee- Harrison, through the descriptions of Aunt 
 Rebecca and Uncle Samuel, through the squabbles of the children, 
 through even the silence of the heroine. Twice or thrice in later 
 portions of the book, the uneventful story rises almost to the level 
 of tragedy. The heroine loves and is loved by a man whose 
 ambition and common sense are stronger than hjs passion, and 
 having to choose between what is most prudent for his future 
 political career, and what is most pleasant and ideal to his own 
 
 147 
 
perception, he chooses without hesitation, and almost without regret, 
 the path of practicality and worldly wisdom, and the heroine scarcely 
 blaAies him. She recognises as clearly as himself his right to do 
 what is best from the world's point of view, and scarcely allowing 
 him time, to decide, much less to repent of his decision, she allies 
 herself to a small, estimable, polite, and well-connected gentleman, 
 who can give her a comfortable home, and who will not expect 
 from her any especial devotion. So the hero Reuben Sachs gets 
 elected to his constituency, and his sweetheart marries her slight 
 Sir Robert with his watery smile and educated whisker, and the 
 former duly sticceeds in the House, and the latter lives comfortably 
 enough we are led to suppose, or at all events quietly enough, in 
 a flat at Albert Hall Mansions, till one day suddenly her husband 
 tells her at dinner, just before the start for some evening reception, 
 that Reuben Sachs is dead : 
 
 "It was the first time for some weeks that they had dined alone 
 
 together, and conversation did not flow freely. 
 " Bertie looked up again, fixing his eyes, not on her face, but on 
 
 the row of pearls at her throat. 
 " ' My dear, you will be very much shocked.' 
 " 'Yes ?' said Judith interrogatively, eating her soup. 
 " ' Reuben Sachs is dead.' 
 
 " ' It is not true,' said Judith — and then she actually smiled. . . . 
 " ' . . . cardiac disease was the immediate cause of his death — 
 
 cardiac disease,' repeated Bertie, with mournful enjoyment of 
 
 the phrase, and pulling a long face as he spoke. 
 "Judith, sitting there like an automaton, eating something that 
 
 tasted like sawdust, something that was difficult to swallow, 
 
 was vividly conscious of only this — that Bertie must be silenced 
 
 at any cost. Anything else could be borne, but not Bertie's 
 
 fluent regrets. 
 " Another woman would have fainted : there had never been any 
 
 mercy for her : but at least she would not sit there while Bertie 
 
 talked of it. 
 " So she lifted up her face, her stony face, and turned the current 
 
 of his talk. 
 
 " He had gone at last, and she stood there motionless by the 
 mantelpiece, staring at the card for Lady Kemys' 'At home.' 
 
 " ' Infinite seons' seemed to divide the present moment from that 
 other moment, half an hour ago, when she had told herself 
 carelessly, indifferently, that she would meet Reuben that night. 
 
 "It struck her now that all the sorrow of her life, all the suffering 
 
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she had undergone would be wiped out, would be as nothing, 
 if only she could indeed meet Reuben — could see his face, 
 hear his voice, touch his hand. Everything else looked trivial, 
 imaginary ; everything else could have been forgotten, forgiven; 
 only this thing could never be forgiven him, this inconceivable 
 thing — that he was dead. 
 
 " Before the great mysteries of life her soul grew frozen and 
 appalled. 
 
 " It seemed to her, as she sat here in the fading light, that this 
 is the bitter lesson of existence : that the sacred serves only 
 to teach the full meaning of sacrilege; the beautiful of the 
 hideous ; modesty of outrage ; joy of sorrow ; life of death." 
 
 So with a little paragraph hinting at hope for Judith in the future, 
 through the germ of another life which was even then quickening 
 within her, the book ends. — ^With all its faults of temper, of taste, 
 of exaggerated requirement from, and too facile discontent with life 
 — a strong book, full of genuine if mistaken thought, full of keen 
 perception and minutely accurate observation. Full, too, of — bathed 
 in as it were — ^that atmosphere of personal feeling by which works 
 of art alone really exist ; for though the author is superficially 
 scornful enough of the puppets she has created, and the people 
 whose shortcomings she sees so clearly, she is nevertheless at heart 
 not scornful at all, but only simply, passionately, almost childishly 
 angry with the deficiencies and inconsistencies of life. An idealist 
 who has missed her way, she would fain be pessimistic, fain be 
 matter-of-fact, but the effort is palpably insincere, and is but the 
 reaction from the qualities which she professes to despise. 
 
 In view of what occurred subsequently, these last words which 
 we have quoted from Reuben Sacks seem to have been inspired 
 by some sinister presentiment, and to point to the frame of mind 
 which rendered it possible for a young and lovely girl in the first 
 flush of her genius and renown, to quit a life whose contrasts she 
 found unbearable, and whose lesson too bitter for endurance. 
 
 149 
 
THE UNFASHIONABLE ART OF ENGLAND. 
 
 OIV when it was too late I saw the folly of sitting 
 down to build before counting the cost,s&vdi. Robinson 
 Crusoe on a certain memorable occasion, and the 
 words come home to me to-day most painfully. For 
 to write truly, frankly, and usefully of the Art of 
 England to-day, many unpleasant things must be 
 said or hinted, many deficiencies and errors dwelt upon which are 
 habitually glossed over with flattering phrase, or allowed to linger in 
 that kindly obscurity where they may almost pass for merits. There is, 
 indeed, at the present time much that is rotten in the state of our 
 Art, arid in the conduct of those who are most intimately connected 
 therewith, though upon this latter point I do not in this article 
 propose to enter ; and there is, to the best of my belief, no hope of 
 reform whilst the present fashions of interested puffery, audacious 
 advertisement, ignorant patronage, and ill-informed and partial 
 criticism remain in force. For many years I have been to. a con- 
 siderable extent behind the scenes of the art world ; the dealer, the 
 patron, the artist, the critic have all been known to me, and I have 
 watched the influence which one has exerted upon the other, and the 
 extent to which that influence has been to the public advantage, or 
 to the benefit of the art itself Above all I have noted, with an 
 increasing conviction of the harm which is done thereby both to the 
 man and his work, the method in which fashion has of recent years 
 determined not only the reward, but the direction of painting ; and 
 the result, easily to be predicted from the first, of the gradual dis- 
 appearance of the older aims and qualities of English art in the 
 endeavour of artists to satisfy this new, capricious, and exacting 
 mistress, who, like a new Eve, has lately brought to many a poor 
 painter, her golden forbidden fruit of luxury, notoriety, and self- 
 indulgence. 
 
 The essence of Art is to be eternal, and the essence of Fashion is 
 
 150 
 
to change. How can there be true alliance between these two? 
 What has Fashion to do with that secluded inner country of the 
 heart and spirit ? — what even with that harvest of the quiet eye from 
 and in which the power and the beauty of art proceed ? What is 
 right to-day, was wrong yesterday, and will be wrong again to-morrow : 
 so says the arbiter elegantiarum in all ages. What is right to-day, 
 was right yesterday, and will be right for ever : so speaks, and must 
 always speak, the artist. What hope, then, can we have of obtaining 
 a good art if it is to change daily in obedience to the dictates of the 
 hour ? And yet this is what English painting has been doing since 
 the so-called art revival, and what it is doing more than ever to-day. 
 And, blinded as we all are by the attractiveness of things which are 
 new and progressive, and exactly in accordance not only with the 
 taste of the moment but with the spirit of change which modifies all 
 the thoughts and actions of this restless day, it is scarcely to be 
 wondered at that ordinary picture-seers and the public at large do 
 not notice the gradual disappearance from our pictures of what may 
 be called their distinctively English peculiarities. For the change, 
 it must be well remembered, is gradual, and we live in the midst of 
 the current with little opportunity for pause and quiet examination. 
 
 We shall have in the later articles of this series occasion to consider 
 at some length the various developments, methods, and manners 
 which the influence of society and the increase of attention given to 
 artistic concerns by the nation at large have brought into being ; but 
 in order to do this to the best advantage, it seems to me necessary 
 in this preliminary article to speak a little about some phases of 
 painting, and thought and life as expressed in painting, which were 
 well known to our fathers, and which, in fact, gave to them all the 
 pleasure which they derived from pictures. There is always some 
 probability that the art which has gradually grown up in any 
 given country, which has shaped itself as it were out of the needs and 
 aspirations, prejudices and beliefs of the people, will have some real 
 affinity with the national characteristics, will supply, in however 
 partial a manner, some want which is felt on that particular portion of 
 the earth and at that particular time. For national styles and 
 methods of painting are merchandise which cannot be sent by Parcels 
 Post, no matter how secure the package, which do not bear trans- 
 portation, and to which, in a new sense, the old Latin proverb may 
 be applied, caelum non dnimum mutant qui trans mare currunt. For 
 not only the physical world,* but its mental counterpart is different in 
 France and England, Italy and Germany. The attempt to make an 
 Englishman see after the same fashion as a Gaul, is hopeless, unless 
 you can first make him feel in the Gallic spirit. The death of Art 
 in all ages has been eclecticism ; the attempt to combine all excellencies 
 has always resulted in such works as were produced by the Bolognese 
 
 151 
 
School, works essentially nugatory, and bearing the same relation to 
 great art as the Encyclopcedia Britannica bears to great literature. 
 
 Whatever is true about fine art, there is no doubt but that it 
 always results from the desire to express primarily some one thing, 
 not from the desire to express all things equally. The great artist is 
 a man whose imagination is exceptionally aroused by this or that 
 beauty of natural fact or spiritual consciousness. He is not a man 
 who sets to work with the precision of a mathematical instrument, to 
 work out a problem in colour and form. This is not to say that the 
 artist never acts in the above manner ; on the contrary, he does so 
 habitually — it is a part of his business, of his artistic education. But 
 all such work pertains only to the mechanics of his profession, and 
 though perfection of technique will greatly increase his native artistic 
 faculty, it is by no means the essential circumstance by which that 
 faculty takes its rank. Extreme sensitiveness, whether of the mind 
 or eye, may easily be injured by the attempt to force the eye to see 
 or the mind to sympathise with sights, methods, or ideas which have 
 for that special individual no attraction, nay, which are perhaps in 
 themselves inconsistent with the exertion to the utmost of his 
 individual power ; and instances are by no means rare of artists who 
 have, so to speak, educated themselves into sterility, and whose 
 work, delightful despite its imperfection in youth, has become, with 
 fuller accomplishment, uninteresting, colourless, and weak. And if 
 this be the case with individuals, the theory is even more true when 
 it has to be applied to nations, for all national arts have a peculiar 
 idiosyncratic flavour, are all partizan speeches which can only be 
 justified from one point of view. 
 
 The question may be asked why, even granting the above to be 
 true, should it not be possible for the painters of one country to 
 adopt without loss of power the discoveries, improvements, and even 
 the habitual technical methods of another. The reason can only be 
 briefly indicated here, for the inability depends not only on the 
 education of the eye being different in every country of the world, 
 but on the fact that, while the actual physical details seen by the 
 eye are in themselves different in, say, England and France, all the 
 mental prepossessions which help to make up our conscious sight are 
 also various according to training and nationality. Thus the grass 
 is not only of a different colour in France from that which it is in 
 England, the whole effect of atmosphere greyer and cooler, but even 
 if these things were the same they would not look so to a French 
 and English eye. To which chief reason may be added that life is 
 very short, and the acquirement of even one method of painting so 
 supremely difficult, and the carrying out of that method in the 
 special direction which any given painter may choose is a matter of 
 
 152 
 
such long duration, and needs such single and Undivided effort, that 
 if the artist's time is taken up by the search for alien forms of 
 practice and methods of interpretation, he is likely to find his whole 
 attention absorbed in this formula-swallowing, and never to get any 
 time to do his real business in the world, which is simply to express 
 himself. 
 
 The more one knows of the history of art, and the more one 
 studies the works of great artists, the more clearly we see that the 
 latter are great, not because, but for the most part despite, of their 
 methods. Of their methods, yes — and even of their materials. It 
 hardly matters whether they work on paper or canvas, with chalk or 
 brush, or pencil or pen and ink, whether they model in clay or carve 
 their marble, or hammer iron into lace-work, as in the old days of 
 Nuremberg and Verona ; whether they put their fancies on tile or 
 glass, or build them into mountains of stone, as in the days of 
 Egypt, or carve them on the living rock amidst the jungles of India 
 or Assyrian caves. Everywhere we find methods and materials 
 varied and imperfect; everywhere, too, we find, save in work 
 which has no interest, faults and deficiencies which the child of a 
 future age can point out. But everywhere, too, we discover the 
 universal truth of this law, that the artistic spirit is greater than any 
 imperfection of form, or any deficiency of knowledge, so that if your 
 Michael Angelo knew so little about anatomy as to give his statues 
 any imaginable disproportion, the work would still maintain its hold 
 upon us so long as he communicated to it that strenuousness of 
 spirit, that power, grandeur, and impressiveness which are insepar- 
 ably linked with his name. This is no mere theory, but actual 
 indisputable fact ; and can be proved as such by a thousand in- 
 stances. We have all heard of Michael Angelo's David, and how 
 the lack of proportion therein (for the head and torso are far too 
 large for the lower limbs), was caused by the sculptor's haste. He 
 is said to have set to work without measurement on an enormous 
 block of marble, and in his haste to have made the upper portion 
 of the body on so large a scale that the block was of insufficient 
 size to complete the statue in due proportion. It is rather a 
 pleasant story this of the big sculptor chipping away with all the 
 eagerness of an art student, but the point of it in regard to our 
 argument is that, despite the manifest error, the statue remains to 
 this day of undisputed magnificence as a work of art. In the same 
 way a nation's art may be more perfect in imperfection than in 
 excellence, if it possesses the essential qualities of the nation's life. 
 And it is because our art is in some measure losing these qualities 
 that I want to say a word in favour of a few of those older painters 
 who, whatever may be thought of the range of their knowledge and 
 the value of their achievements, were indisputably English in 
 feeling, in the character of their subjects, and whose methods grew 
 X 153 
 
up slowly, tentatively, it may even be stupidly, bit by bit, in har- 
 mony with the life of their countrymen, and in harmony with the 
 traditions of English workmanship. They did not talk much about 
 their work, these men : I seem to fancy they did not even thmk 
 very much about it : and as to knowledge of the history of 
 painting, a student at Girton nowadays might easily have puzzled 
 the whole generation. But that they/^/^ it there is now their work 
 to witness; and that is, after all, as Paul Bedford used to say, 
 " the apparatus which can't lie." 
 
 We have at the present time a very beautiful National Gallery, 
 where the works of these men may for the most part not be seen ; 
 and in the cellars thereof, lit by what little light Sir Frederick 
 Burton and the London fog allow, there exist some two or three 
 hundred landscapes by a gentleman called Turner, who in a 
 moment of misguided liberality thought that the nation might like 
 to look at them, which are without question the finest collection of 
 water-colour drawings by a single artist in the whole world, and 
 which will one day be perhaps given their right place in the building 
 above them. Meantime just consider how ludicrous a thing it is 
 for us to go strutting and fretting about our art progress, to spend 
 thousands upon thousands in the purchase of old Italian pictures 
 which not one in a million Englishmen cares to look at, while 
 we cannot even see — not even those of us who are paid a thousand 
 a year on the understanding that they have the capacity of seeing 
 — that it is a national disgrace to let the masterpieces of the 
 greatest English painter, living or dead, moulder away in a half- 
 lighted cellar. Italian art, forsooth ! Yes, it is a fine thing if you 
 can understand the beauty thereof, and let those who can give 
 their ;^7o,ooo for a Raphael, or ;^ 10,000 for a Rubens ; but what 
 are those works doing in a National Gallery which is not large 
 enough to hold our own people if we had but the sense to hang 
 them there ? 
 
 Just think what this means ; just think what real consideration for 
 Art it shows ; just think what likelihood there is of the painters of 
 any country making real progress and receiving real encouragement 
 to do their utmost in the highest forms of art, when they know that 
 neither in life nor death will their country recognise their efforts, and 
 that, however famous they may become, they will have but small, if 
 any, place upon those walls which should be chiefly their own. 
 
 The one branch of painting which is exclusively English is that of 
 water-colour. In this branch there have been executed works of 
 such beauty and such breadth of achievement that they form, I do 
 not hesitate to say, the greatest advance which has been made in 
 pictorial art since the days of the Italian Renaissance. The land- 
 
 154 
 

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 THE DUKE OI' GEOUCESTER AND THE iMUmJERERS 
 
 SIR JOHN (Wl.IlKriT, R. A. 
 
 [From the orlgiujl \yatcr colour) 
 
scapes of Cox, Turner, and De Wint, of Bonington, MuUer, and 
 George Barret, Copley Fielding and Nasmyth, of Varley and James 
 Holland and Samuel Palmer, the figure and architectural drawings 
 of Prout, and old William Hunt, and John Lewis, and Sir John 
 Gilbert, ay, and even work executed by Sir Frederick Burton himself 
 in his earlier days, form a series of pictures which, in respect of 
 quality, are to the best of my belief not to be paralleled in the history 
 of painting. 
 
 And yet, incredible as it may seem, there is no place found for 
 water-colours in our National Gallery ; they are not even admitted 
 (above the basement) as elements in the collection ; for all that the 
 visitor to this exhibition sees, the English nation might never have 
 boasted of the above-mentioned artists. And if we turn from our 
 great national exhibition of the work of deceased artists, to our great 
 national exhibition of the works of living ones, we shall find the 
 same policy pursued with but little modification. For while oil- 
 pictures are hung there in a dozen large galleries, there is but one 
 small side -room set apart for the display of water-colours ; and of 
 those which are there hung, the majority are not the works of our 
 best artists in this medium, but of the second- and third-rate. The 
 policy of the Royal Academy towards water-colour has been so 
 notorious that nowadays the men who are masters in this branch of 
 painting will not submit their works to be treated with the lack of 
 consideration which is invariably shown to them. So in the National 
 Gallery and Royal Academy alike there is no representation of the 
 one branch of art which first arose and grew to final perfection on 
 English soil ; and while this is so, and is known to be so, there is no 
 one who cares to raise his voice in protest, or to suggest that we owe 
 to the work of the great water-colour painters and the honour of 
 water-colour art a deep debt of gratitude and recognition. 
 
 Now such neglect and injustice as I have described above do not 
 come to pass without producing injurious effects upon the taste of the 
 nation, upon the quality of its art workmanship, and upon the bona 
 fides of its artists ; and from those effects we are suffering to-day. 
 We have chosen to neglect that work which was distinctively Eng- 
 lish ; we have allowed the old school of water-colour to sink day by 
 day to the level of a forgotten art, and we have as a nation taken no 
 pains to cherish the masterpieces which have been produced therein, 
 and to hold them up to our younger painters for example and 
 encouragement. We have deified oil-painting at the expense of 
 more delicate medium colour, and, by that strange irony of fate 
 which so often mars our calculations, the result of our action has 
 been not only to depress the art which we neglected, but to drag 
 down with it that which we exalted. 
 
 Landscape painting in England rose with the rise of water-colour, 
 
 155 
 
and with the fall of water-colour it is falling. Where forty years a^o 
 we had a dozen great landscape artists, for the most part painters in 
 the last-mentioned medium, there is not now one great English land- 
 scape painter either in water-colour or oil. Unpalatable truth, but 
 truth all the same. Let us recognise it, for till we do so there is no 
 hope of remedy. 
 
 Most unfortunately I cannot put the actual works of which I am 
 speaking into the pages of this review, for could I do so my words 
 would need little confirmation. But I would ask those readers who 
 think that I have exaggerated the excellence of the last generation 
 of English landscape painters, and unduly depreciated the merit of 
 contemporary work, to go for themselves to the South Kensington 
 Museum, and to (the cellars of) the National Gallery, and look at 
 the Coxes, De Wints, Barrets, and Palmers which they will find at 
 the former place, and at the Turners in the latter. 
 
 Now note that while water-colour landscape flourished, the oil- 
 painting which ran side by side with it not only flourished also, but 
 maintained in its own medium, though perhaps not to an equal 
 extent, the very qualities which gave the peculiar charm to water- 
 colour. These were chiefly the qualities of transparency, delicacy, 
 freshness of impression, and one last crowning merit, extremely 
 difficult to define briefly, but which I may be perhaps allowed to call 
 the impromptu quality : the quality, that is, which produces the 
 impression of the painting having been done with ease and certainty. 
 If there is one thing more than another peculiar to English land- 
 scapes of the great school, it is this, that their artists seem to have 
 had no slightest doubt as to the attractiveness of whatever they chose 
 to paint. Some of them chose to paint classical landscapes out of 
 their head, like George Barret, and most extraordinary productions 
 they were, viewed from any standpoint of reason ; but Barret 
 painted away at them all his life, apparently with the calmest satis- 
 faction ; and he was so true an artist at heart, and had such a keen 
 insight into beautiful things, and had so real a devotion towards one 
 or two natural facts — as, for instance, the delicate gradations of 
 atmosphere, and the all-pervading influence of sunlight — that he 
 managed to make even his most impossible temples and imaginary 
 landscapes, in one sense real, and in all senses beautiful. Some 
 others, and these a great many, simply went out to the nearest field 
 or common — and there were plenty of fields and commons in Eng- 
 land fifty years ago — and took the first piece of scrubby gorse, or 
 gravel pit, or ragged hedgerow which they chanced to find, and with 
 that and a few sheep and wide expanse of tumbled clouds they 
 made their pictures. It is true that they made pictures : they did 
 not think of making them as much as we do nowadays, and their 
 
 156 
 
scientific and historic knowledge was of course infinitely less ; nor 
 do I altogether believe that, with two or three notable exceptions, 
 they were naturally greater artists than those we have amongst us 
 to-day, but they were artists working more sincerely than the majority 
 of modern painters. They were less influenced by the desire of 
 making large incomes, they were less cramped by the necessity of 
 meeting each vagary of the ever-shifting taste of the moment. Above 
 all, they were not men who had learnt to think very much of their 
 own performances, and whose art had consequently suffered. 
 
 Some years ago there were two water-colours by David Cox 
 sold at Christie's, which fetched between them — I forget the exact 
 figures — ^but about four thousand two hundred guineas. And con- 
 cerning one of these pictures there was a little history which happens 
 to have come into my hands. It seems that when it was first pur- 
 chased from Cox he had asked and obtained for the drawing (it was 
 a very large water-colour) the enormous sum of ;^8o ; and he had 
 been so greatly distressed on thinking the matter over lest the 
 purchaser should not have received good value for his money, that 
 he wrote to him, and after thanking him greatly for his generosity, 
 added at the end of his letter that he took the liberty of sending him 
 another small sketch to make up the value of the money he had 
 received. We happen to have this letter, and I must confess that it 
 seems to me to be one of those simple, honourable, kindly acts of 
 which it would not be a bad thing if we still kept up the tradition. 
 It points too a tremendous moral, for the frame of mind in which Cox 
 wrote and sent that letter and sketch, has in the artistic world perished 
 to-day as utterly as if it had never existed. The modern point of 
 view is exactly the reverse : a painter nowadays never gets enough 
 iqx his work (in his own opinion), and if he be a popular artist, he too 
 frequently even approaches his purchaser in what may be called the 
 auctioneer spirit, offering his work first of all for a price which he 
 knows it is not worth, and which he scarcely even hopes to get, on 
 the chance, as was once said to me, of finding a flat. And then if 
 the picture be not sold, as it generally is not, at the first-named price, 
 the sum asked is two-thirds, then half, then probably a quarter. 
 And finally, if none of these values are sufficiently attractive to the 
 purchaser, sooner or later the work finds its way to Christie's sale- 
 room, and is then sold, roughly speaking, for its actual value. And 
 as far as my experience goes, this value averages, except in the case 
 of a few of the very best men, from a quarter to a sixth of the price 
 at which the artist would first have estimated his work. 
 
 There is little progress that we can perceive in such a state of 
 things, and it is very questionable whether the artist is reall)r any 
 better off for fluking ;^500 or ;^iooo now and again for a picture 
 
 157 
 
which is worth ;^50, and raising his expenditure, as he invariably 
 does, on the assumption that the fluke will be perpetual. In the old 
 days if he only got ;^30 or ^40, he only lived at the rate of ;^300 or 
 ;^400 per annum, and he lived the life which was best suited to his 
 nature, and best suited to make him capable of producing pictures. 
 
 Again, the majority of people hardly understand the various ways 
 in which this influence of fashion works to the deterioration of art. 
 Consider for a moment the case of a landscape painter who is at the 
 present time fashionable, and receiving large prices for his pictures. 
 He must not only have a large house in some expensive neighbour- 
 hood, and entertain therein, but he must also be "seen about" as the 
 phrase is, in order to maintain his vogue. Where Society goes, he 
 must go also, and at the same time ; and in order to sell for those 
 large sums of money he must appeal to a very limited class, and a 
 class who are accustomed to have all their conventions and prejudices 
 consulted to the utmost possible degree ; moreover, to a class who 
 for the most part lead artificial, unwholesome town lives, and whose 
 predilections therefore are likely to be for unwholesome artificial 
 town art. The simplicity of subject which marked the earlier painting 
 of which I have been speaking, would have little attraction for the 
 fashionable picture buyer, either then or now, and, since the painter 
 now bows to Society, to the fashionable picture buyer he must appeal. 
 What do we find ? Look round the Royal Academy and say how 
 many pictures there are in which a plain, simple English sentiment 
 has been the motive of the artist's work ; and then look round and 
 compare with the few you have been able to discover, the multitudinous 
 representations in which artificiality, either of dress or sentiment, 
 plays the chief part. 
 
 Look at this picture by Mr. G. D. Leslie for an example of that 
 older, quieter, truer, and essentially more beautiful style and sentiment 
 which used to mark the majority of our pictures even when they were, 
 technically speaking, most awkward, most imperfect, and most unin- 
 teresting. Life to these two girls, who have opened the window to 
 enjoy the sunshine and the fresh air, may not be intensely exciting, 
 may be full of rather narrow, uneventful pleasures and pain ; but is it 
 possible to look, and not think of them as fresh and clean, 
 physically and spiritually, not to be glad that they have a quiet time, 
 not to envy a little their youth and innocence and the pleasant natural 
 surroundings of their lives ? It seems to me to matter here very little 
 whether in this Mr. Leslie has or has not idealised his facts. Perhaps 
 even the more honour to him if he has done so ; for it is no small 
 honour for a man to have so pure a conception of English maiden- 
 hood, and a touch at once so gentle, so firm, and so loving upon the 
 little everyday incidents of English life. 
 
 158 
 
V-- 1 
 
 x 1 
 
 b-_-. 
 
 *• 
 
 
 4 
 
 ■'"^ *' 
 
 •^ 
 
 
 
 *'*■-.-„ 
 
 HOME. — G. D. Leslie, r. a. 
 
Yes ! struggle as hard as we may, each of us is bound to remain, 
 Uke Mr. Gilbert's self-righteous hero, an " Englishman," temptations 
 to belong to other nations notwithstanding. And so why should not 
 our art be as essentially English as ourselves ? Indeed it must be, if 
 we hide it with as many fanciful foreign clothes as it takes to make 
 Mr. Beerbohm Tree into Sir John Falstaff. And as in that clever 
 personation, the clothes will never seem to quite belong to the body, 
 but be carried about by it more or less uneasily. 
 
 Perhaps the great secret of Sir John Millais' popularity lies in 
 his recognition, possibly his unconscious recognition, of the above. 
 His pictures have, beyond and above all other qualities, this English 
 quality, and they appeal to all classes for that very reason. A sort 
 of personal affection for this painter, as well as for his pictures, 
 obtains with very many people who have never set eyes upon him ; 
 he is in touch with them mentally and spiritually, and his little 
 maidens with bird's-nests and brooms, spiders, violets, or caller- 
 herrin', by whatever fanciful name they may be called, please from 
 their purely human quality even more than by their skill. And at 
 an early period of his career Sir John Millais, then little more than 
 a boy, did a large number of drawings for the illustration of 
 Anthony TroUope's novels, which not only showed him at his very 
 best, but remain to this day the most perfect presentment which has 
 ever been given by art of the character and the appearance, and 
 what may be called the local colour, of England and the English 
 people. Doubtless some of this achievement was owing to the 
 nature of the stories illustrated {Framley Parsonage, Orley Farm, 
 and The Small House at Allington), and the perfect reciprocity of 
 feeling between the artist and the author, but when all this is 
 allowed for, the perfect kindliness, grace, simplicity, and strength of 
 these drawings are most admirable. The extent to which they 
 reflect that decency of ordered life, that modesty of demeanour, 
 that fearless purity and absolute innocence which are, or at least 
 were, the ideals of English girlhood, is almost beyond belief; and 
 if we pass from the mental and moral aspect of the drawings to 
 their technical qualities, we find a most fitting correspondence 
 between the means employed and the effect produced. The execu- 
 tion is extremely simple and straightforward; the whole attempt 
 is to give the very kernel of the selected incident ; the representa- 
 tion of the scene seems to have been the only idea in the artist's 
 mind. And with this singleness of intention there has come — how, 
 who shall say? — such grace of gesture, such dignity of form, such 
 appropriateness and delicacy of hinted or wrought -out detail, as 
 would be hard to parallel, impossible to surpass. Lily Dale and 
 Lucy Robarts are no dearer and sweeter in TroUope's printed pages, 
 than as Millais has shown them us in the old garden at Allington 
 
 159 
 
or in the "Framley Parsonage"; and as for Johnnie Eames and 
 Crosbie, without the painter's help their characters would be but 
 half understood. 
 
 Mr. Luke Fildes is another artist who, though in a far inferior 
 degree to Sir John Millais, showed a similar capacity in illustration, 
 and the spirit of whose painting has remained wholly national. 
 His Venetian women, of whom he paints so many, are transparently 
 of British origin, and wear their coloured robes fresh from a laun- 
 dress in the Huston Road. They are far too clean, too buxom, 
 too fresh and unsophisticated for the Venetian flower-girls they 
 represent, and suggest the character of such women even less than 
 they reproduce their exterior. If we want a Venetian subject- 
 picture which shall be veritable, we must get Van Haanen or some 
 other foreigner to paint it for us, or be content with merest carica- 
 ture of reality. 
 
 It is strange, however, to notice how strongly our aesthetic ideas 
 are setting nowadays in the direction of the reproduction of foreign 
 methods, subjects, and ideas. An awful horror of being thought 
 British, seems to have seized upon our artists, and with the excep- 
 tion of that large class who confine their efforts to the nursery, and 
 the denizens thereof, I can hardly remember one popular Academi- 
 cian who does not seek either his subjects, or his method of treating 
 them, across the sea. Look, for instance, at Mr. Marcus Stone, 
 who one would think should be national enough if he gave his 
 idiosyncrasies fair play. He paints us English lovers in English 
 gardens, but he does it in such a way, with such accessories of big 
 hats and feathers. Empire dresses, painted furniture, and general 
 bric-a-brac, as to render his compositions akin to an opera boufife. 
 Then there is Mr. Phil Morris, who is patriotic enough at heart, 
 and has in bygone days done many deliciously dreamy pictures 
 of idealised rustic life, but who now has become so entirely fascin- 
 ated by the clothes which people, and especially babies, wear, 
 that he almost forgets there is any kind of humanity beneath them. 
 Mr, Orchardson has an excuse, for he is, if I mistake not, half a 
 Frenchman by birth, but even he has given up to furniture and 
 architecture a good deal of what was meant for mankind, and will 
 only allow us now and then to perceive how great is his power of 
 depicting human feeling. 
 
 As a little contrast to this art of the rich, look at the picture 
 by the late Paul Falconer Poole, R.A., of The Sisters.^ In it three 
 qualities speak for themselves — simplicity, grace, and naturalness ; 
 but though all the facts of the scene are here rendered truly and 
 clearly, yet the work has besides these merits a touch of style 
 which quite justifies it as a work of art; and it is just this last- 
 mentioned quality which is gradually disappearing from English 
 
 * On the opposite page. 
 1 60 
 
painting. Our artists are getting into a habit of dull realism with 
 regard to the outside of the matters with which their pictures are 
 concerned, and seem to think that if only technical qualities are 
 sufficiently thorough, all else can be dispensed with. Composition, 
 too, is growing day by day more rare ; the pre-Raphaelites uncon- 
 sciously struck it a hard blow in their search for certain essential 
 qualities which they thought the attention given to composition 
 had tended to obscure ; and the influence of the later French art, 
 and its devotees of value and impressionism, has helped to complete 
 the work. A few men like Sir Frederick Leighton and Mr. 
 Orchardson still make a study of composition, but, for the most part, 
 it has ceased to be cared for or greatly sought, and no small propor- 
 tion of the decrease of dignity and interest which is notable in 
 English painting at the present time is due to this fact. 
 
 Yet it may be doubted whether great landscape painting is possible 
 without the elenient of composition entering very largely into the 
 scheme of the painter. Certainly no great landscape art in England 
 has as yet existed which did not depend almost mainly upon this 
 quality. And it would be interesting to show, though I have no 
 space here for such a demonstration, how large a share is played by 
 this characteristic in the most apparently simple works of Cox and 
 De Wint. Cox especially was a great master in the art of compos- 
 ing landscape ; and there is a large and elaborate water-colour of 
 his, of " .^neas approaching Carthage," which is as elaborate in this 
 respect as Turner's more famous picture in the National Gallery.^ 
 Indeed, at one period there is no doubt that Cox studied most care- 
 fully not only Turner but Claude, and gained from his acquaintance 
 with the latter much of his power in delineating those calm and 
 sunny scenes and atmospheres, which at first sight come as a surprise 
 to those who only know the rough winds and rainy skies of his usual 
 work. A good example of the part rightly played by composition 
 in a landscape is to be found in the sea-coast scenes by Richard 
 Bonington, and still better ones in the classical landscapes of 
 Richard Wilson and George Barret. This last is indeed the most 
 conventional of all our older water-colour painters ; but he is also 
 one of the most delightful : this sounds a paradox, but is neverthe- 
 less true. 
 
 On one last point there is a marked change in the oil-painting of 
 the present day as compared with that of the earlier half of the 
 century, and that is in the absence of finish, in the incompleteness of 
 the work offered to the public. Painting (the actual brushwork) has 
 become altogether more hurried, more slap-dash, more incomplete. 
 It is no uncommon thing to find even in an Academy picture, portions 
 
 1 "Dido building Carthage." 
 Y l6l 
 
of the composition left in entirely different states as regards the actual 
 handling of the paint : you may even notice portions which have not 
 been painted at all. No doubt there are several reasons for this, 
 which, to some extent, excuse the alteration : we live in an age of 
 competition and hurry ; and we paint at the highest of high pressure ; 
 and if painters fare more luxuriously than of old, they must do their 
 work as quickly as may be ; and if it is sufficiently good to look well 
 in the exhibition and to please the patron, there must be a great 
 temptation to carry it no farther. But still, making all allowances 
 for our different civilisation, we might fairly expect a greater propor- 
 tion of completed work from our most popular painters than we get 
 just now. And it surely should be some inducement to them to give 
 us such work if they coftsider that not only have all the great 
 masters of former times given it ungrudgingly, but that even in our 
 own experience, the paintings on which such labour has been 
 bestowed, have brought most enduring fame to their artists, and so 
 from even the rough standpoint of pecuniary value the labour has 
 been by no means wasted. Finish, rightly understood, is not only a 
 grace, but a necessity in a picture. No incomplete thing is really a 
 work of art, if its incompletion has arisen from the artist's choice.^ 
 
 It is difficult to speak on this subject without being misunderstood. 
 A just-begun sketch might perhaps be called incomplete, and yet 
 be wholly free from the deficiency to which I am alluding. And an 
 unfinished picture no doubt may be a work of art as far as it goes. 
 But the point is this — that the master who deliberately refuses to 
 give to one portion of his composition the work which is necessary 
 to bring it into entire harmony and consistency with the rest, is 
 deliberately falling short of that implied contract which he has made, 
 if I may use the expression, with both nature and public. His 
 acquired and instinctive knowledge say to him this scene, or this man, 
 should be represented in such and such a way ; and if, knowing that, 
 he only chooses to partially so represent him, he has committed an 
 irredeemable sin, has forfeited his birthright as an artist, and has 
 betrayed the trust of the public. And mind this : he has betrayed it 
 the more, in proportion as he is a great and popular artist. For to 
 such men we come day after day, our minds full of business, our eyes 
 full of ugliness, and our hearts full of worries, and we ask them 
 silently but sincerely to make us forget the business, to substitute 
 beauty for the ugliness, and to quiet the worries with whatsoever 
 things they have found or thought to be of noble meaning or lovely 
 sight. And we trust them to do this to the utmost of their power, 
 and we pay them and honour them because we believe they can and 
 will do it. We, so to speak, are not on our guard with them ; but 
 they are on their parole with us ; and very many of them certainly 
 
 * Unless the incompletion is part of the artist's meaning, z.%par exemple in a sketch. 
 
 162 
 
LA MARCHESA 
 
 SIR FREDERICK BURTON 
 
 From the original water colour in possession of the author 
 [Preaidcnt of the National Gallery] 
 
keep their implied contract most thoroughly and loyally. I am proud 
 to say that I know several painters, men of extremely moderate 
 income, almost if not entirely dependent upon the sale of their work, 
 whose chief anxiety is that the picture should be as good as they can 
 make it, and who think of that first, and that only, till it is finished. 
 
 I know a great painter, perhaps the greatest now living in England, 
 whom I found one day at work on a small canvas of a girl's head. 
 It seemed to me the picture (it was a portrait) was one of the most 
 beautiful heads that I had ever seen, and I expressed this opinion with 
 tolerable frankness ; but the artist's reply rather startled me. After 
 thanking me for my courtesy, he said : " I am glad you like the head, 
 but it's not right, and what's more, I'm just going to take it out ; I can't 
 get the eyes right." I asked him what he meant, and his answer was to 
 the effect that he had had the head in and out five times, and couldn't 
 get the colour of the' girl's eyes to his satisfaction, and so was going 
 .to give up the portrait. And consequently give it up he did, to the 
 best of my belief. At all events the picture was never exhibited, 
 and I am almost certain never sold.^ 
 
 To those who know what is implied in the above incident it will 
 not seem a little thing that a great painter should nowadays so 
 frankly confess and struggle so hard to remedy his failure, and 
 should finally accept defeat, rather than give to the world what he 
 knew or believed to be wrong. And I shall not have written this 
 chapter altogether in vain if I can persuade some of those folk who 
 have much money to spend upon works of art, to spend it chiefly 
 upon such as evidence this desire of perfection ; for, believe me in 
 this, if you doubt all else in the present paper, that only in such 
 a spirit is fine artistic work produced. You cannot inspire fine 
 painting by money, you cannot produce it for money ; and you 
 can only encourage it by love and sympathy, and it can only be 
 produced by the man who puts his whole heart and mind and 
 strength into each portion of his work. 
 
 As some illustration of a painter who did this, look at the picture by 
 Mr. Lewis which faces the preceding page, and think of how impossible 
 it would be that such labour as has been spent thereon should ever be 
 actually paid for in hard cash. The work has been done in such 
 fashion because that was the only way in which the artist found it 
 possible to carry out all he saw ; and he has been profoundly 
 indifferent to the fact that he might have saved himself, in this or 
 that detail, so much unremunerated labour. Why, the very patterning 
 of the maid's shawl in the picture from which this reproduction has 
 been made, is a miracle of patient industry, needing the use of a lens 
 
 ^ Years afterwards I saw it in his studio. 
 163 
 
to appreciate ; and a result which, to nine hundred and ninety-nine 
 people out of every thousand, would have been equivalent, might 
 have been obtained in that portion of the composition for a tithe of 
 the labour. Of course there is no necessity for finish to be of this 
 missal-painting kind ; I take it only as an extreme instance of con- 
 scientiousness in work. For the lack of this conscientiousness is the 
 besetting sin of modern English painting ; at least of that portion 
 which is nowadays most popular. The elaborate, delicate, dignified 
 work of our earlier landscapists, has been succeeded by roughly 
 effective sketches, such as those of the Scotch school, or by con- 
 ventionally-finished studio paintings, such as those of Mr, Leader, or 
 by elaborate, but uninstructive realistic renderings of nature, which 
 have no real pretensions to be called pictures ; and the solidity and 
 finish of the handiwork itself have to a great extent disappeared. 
 
 The remedy is difficult, and at the present time probably impos- 
 sible : it is to be found for the artistic workman in a return to a 
 healthier character of life, in the forgetting of the patron and the 
 Queen Anne palace, for whom and in which, the painter has lived of 
 late, and the return to the two natures from which all the beauty of 
 art nas ever sprung — the inner nature of the heart and mind, and the 
 outer nature of the visible physical world. Not in dress, not in drama, 
 not in imitation of this or that passing fashion ; not in seeking to please 
 any special class, or in seeking to delineate any special kind of subject, 
 is his salvation to be found ; but in opening the mind and eye to the 
 truths which he alone can discover, the beauties which he alone can 
 feel, and the real pathos and interest of that drama of life which has 
 gone on since the world began. 
 
 164 
 
Dans cette dtude, nous avons voulu aussi et ^rincipalement dvoquer une Ville, la Ville 
 comfne unpersonnage essentiel, associi aux itats ePdme, qui conseille, dissuade, ditermine 
 a agir. " ■ ^^ j 
 
 ■Ainsi dans la rMitd,cette Bruges, qtiil nous a plud'ilire,ai>paraUpresquehumaine. . . . 
 
 Un ascendant s'dtablit d'elle sur ceux qui y sdjournent 
 Elle lesfaqonne selon ses sites et ses cloches. . . . 
 {fespere) que ceux qui nous liront subissent aussi la presence et Vinfluence de la Ville, 
 
 iprouvent la contagion des eaux mieux voisines, sentent a leur tour t ombre des hautes 
 
 tours allongde sur le texte. 
 
 LIFE, ART, AND NATURE IN AN 
 OLD-WORLD CITY. 
 
 HILE I was revising the article which follows a few 
 days ago, I came across a little book recently pub- 
 lished, called Bruges la Morte^ and in the preface 
 were the above words. They phrase so exactly 
 the feeling which I attempted to embody long since 
 in the following article : the feeling which pos- 
 sessed me most strongly during the months I spent in the Dead 
 City, that I have placed them as a sort of motto or keynote at the 
 head of the paper, that if the notes which follow are a little flat, I 
 may at least have the pleasure of referring my readers to a pleasant 
 author and an \\\Xsxq.s\xc\% 4tude passionnelle. — H. Q. 1892. 
 
 The first day in Bruges is apt to be a trial. The monotony 
 of this half-deserted Gothic town is of a more than ordinarily de- 
 pressing quality, and the effect of the angular roofs and windows 
 wearying to the eye as the diagrams of a book of Euclid. The low- 
 browed shops, the irregularly- paved streets, the dull, unrelieved 
 brown and grey of the houses, add to the dreary effect. " The old 
 houses are very interesting," says Mr. Baedeker ; but they are not, 
 to use an expressive Americanism, " gay." After an hour or two, one 
 takes them, and their staircased gables, grimly, almost as a necessary 
 
 1 Bruges la Marie, par Georges Rodenbach. Marpon et Flammarion, Paris. 
 
 165 
 
evil ; and morbidly wonders how such an impracticable architecture 
 ever came to be generally adopted. The little restaurants, too, with 
 their doorless doorways, their deserted rooms and sanded floors, are 
 hardly inviting ; and as the grey evening closes in, and the over- 
 tall belfry tower grows indistinct behind a veil of dull rain, the 
 forlorn impression deepens, and the stranger thinks that his Philistine 
 companion, who elected to sleep at Brussels, was not so wrong after 
 all. The ordinary tourist, indeed, rarely lingers here, and takes 
 away with him few impressions but those of narrow crooked 
 streets, tall houses thrusting jagged step-like gables against the sky 
 — cobble-stone pav-ements, which hurt his feet and disturb his equa- 
 nimity — and smells of an intensity and variety rarely equalled even 
 in Venice. 
 
 The sights of Bruges have chiefly the peculiarity of unobtrusive- 
 ness. The few good pictures are hidden in out-of-the-way corners ; 
 the finer examples of Gothic architecture are in by-streets ; and the 
 churches are big and bare, and for the most part badly decorated. 
 Indeed, these last are painted (it was done in the earlier half of the 
 present century) with what Mr. Baedeker calls "polychromatic 
 ornament," which sits with uneasy smartness on their pointed arches 
 and gaunt stone pillars, as out of place as a bit of Liberty silk cast 
 upon some old Crusader's tomb. So, unless the tourist be of the 
 School Board kind, an architectural student, or a mediaeval statistician, 
 he shakes the dust of Bruges off his feet without regret, and rarely if 
 ever returns. We must be really fond of art to take it in such con- 
 centrated, ungilded doses, amidst such dusky surroundings. And yet 
 apart from the pictures and architecture, if one gives this town a little 
 time, wanders about the streets without a guide-book, and allows the 
 old-world city, so to speak, to tell its own tale in its own way, the place 
 has a distinct charm. Not to mention the paintings, of which more 
 hereafter, the atmosphere of the town itself soon grows delightful. 
 The little sturdy brown houses of the poorer quarters, with their 
 irrelevant gables, and heavy woodwork carved quaintly here and 
 there, and the dark interiors lit up only by a gleam of light upon 
 some brass or copper water-jug or saucepan ; the rows of old women 
 lace-making, each in her long black cloak and neat cap ; and the long 
 curling canals which wind in and out amongst the streets, have all a 
 pleasant flavour of strangeness and interest. One soon learns to 
 lounge on the parapets of the frequent bridges, to get continual if 
 slight pleasure from noting the reflection of some bright mass of 
 flowers in the dull water, or trace with languid interest the blackened 
 carving of an arch or gable. 
 
 Even amongst the pictures themselves there is a quiet satisfaction 
 to be gained, such as could hardly be found amidst the long luxury 
 of the Ufiizi or Pitti galleries, or the cold corridors and chapels of the 
 
 1 66 
 
Vatican. It is nice to enter a grim, sparsely-windowed house, and 
 passing by the deaf custode up a rough stone staircase, to come upon 
 a small vaulted apartment not much .bigger than an ordinary bath- 
 room, and find one of the finest Van Eycks in the world hanging 
 there in an execrably bad light, and in a dirty old frame that Mr. 
 Agnew would not think fit to put on an oleograph. It shows that 
 art is not altogether devoted to the indolent pleasures of the rich, to 
 find pictures like this, which are of their kind inimitable, hung in 
 obscure corners of church, gallery, or hospital in their native place, 
 having been done evidently with little thought of public recognition, 
 and little desire of personal reward ; and it is pleasant to think that 
 these stolid Flemish citizens and peasants have been able to find, 
 since the first days of their national life, whatever comfort or delight 
 they could gain from pictures or statues, in records of their own 
 pec^le, done by their own artists} We see with pleasure when we 
 look at the St. Johns, and St. Matthews, the Virgin Maries and 
 Magdalenes of the great Flemish painters, that they are simply 
 portraits of the peasants or citizens one might meet to-day in the 
 Flemish fields or streets. These Virgins, with the big broad 
 rounded foreheads, and small full-lidded eyes, with tall solid figures 
 stiff in gesture, and placid homely faces ; who sit upon their thrones 
 as a poor tenant might sit on the verge of a chair in the Squire's 
 drawing-room — are but the women that we see everywhere on the 
 market-days at Bruges, walking in from the surrounding country in 
 their heavy black cloth cloaks, and narrow-bordered muslin caps. A 
 strong, tall, and as a rule good-looking race are they, though their 
 beauty is of a stern, thoughtful kind ; and their deep grey or dark 
 brown eyes are little troubled with modern fretfulness or speculation. 
 Conceive the very antitype of the brisk bustling French towns- 
 woman — and it will not be far removed from a picture of the 
 " Flamande," with her slow movements, her ox-eyed gaze, her 
 patience, her phlegm, and her massive physique. It is no uncommon 
 sight to see one of these young women towing a large two-masted 
 barge up to Bruges from Sluys or Ostend, while her husband or 
 father stands contemplatively at the tiller, and smokes his big china 
 pipe with great enjoyment. One day indeed, as I was sitting 
 sketching outside the town, there came a bigger barge than usual, 
 with the whole female side of the family for three generations 
 engaged in towing it. The grandmother, the mother, two daughters, 
 and a fifth woman, who must I think have been the Dutch substitute 
 for a general servant ; all harnessed abreast, all bent double with the 
 strain of the ropes ; while behind them the great boat deeply laden 
 with coal moved gently forward, and the big father smoked his pipe 
 in dignified ease, steering indolently with his foot. Such a sight as 
 this gives a shock to English notions at first, but on the whole the 
 
 1 The old secret of art: the thing which "lies nearest." 
 167 
 
Flemish peasant women look happier than peasant women do with us, 
 and though the poverty in Bruges and the surrounding country is both 
 deep and widespread, it does not seem to be of that grinding kind, or 
 to produce the same amount of misery as its English equivalent. 
 
 We have wandered away from the painters, in order to give some 
 notion of the people who form the subject of their paintings ; for 
 Van Eyck, or Memling, or any other of the great Flemish painters, 
 did not care for theories in their art, but for facts. They picked up 
 their St. Johns at the post-office or the bowling-green, and they 
 stuck them bodily into their pictures, in gorgeous robes, but with no 
 other alteration, and in every composition quaint little details and 
 domesticities of urban or rural life peep out in enthroned Virgin and 
 martyred St. Ursula, to find any parallel with which in Italian 
 painting one has to go back to its very earliest days, to the time of 
 Giotto and his followers. 
 
 The Northerners, in fact, used their art in a totally different fashion 
 from the Southern nations. They made of it a broom rather than a 
 banner; it was for use rather than for display. In the finest period 
 of Italian art there is little trace of this intimate relationship between 
 the painter and the everyday domestic life of his time, which is the 
 very keynote of all Flemish painting.^ Even as far back as the 
 days of Giotto, the simplicity of the Italian was not only inferior in 
 degree, but totally different in kind, to that of the Fleming. For 
 Giotto and the Giottesci, and indeed, speaking broadly, all the pre- 
 Raphaelite painters, strove to be simple, if we may use such an 
 expression, of malice prepense. Their simplicity was less a national 
 quality than a revolt against the strained tradition which had been 
 bequeathed to them by Byzantium. But in the early Flemish work 
 the simplicity is wholly unconscious, it depends entirely upon the 
 painter's inability to conceive his art in any other terms than those 
 in which he conceived his life. Intellectually a limited people, and 
 emotionally a restricted one, the Flemings held fast, with a devotion 
 that was intense in proportion to the scantiness of its material, to 
 the facts which they saw around them, and the truths which they 
 comprehended. 
 
 The best Van Eyck in Bruges, and the picture which has been 
 chiefly in my mind whilst writing the above, is an " Enthronement 
 of the Virgin," — with a saint on one side, of course, and a priest on 
 the other. The saint, though a magnificent piece of painting, is not 
 specially interesting ; and the Virgin herself differs little from the 
 usual mild-mannered lady who is generally cast for this part in 
 Flemish pictures. But the priest is an important personage, of as 
 
 * Let me not be misunderstood to mean that there was no trace of relationship between 
 the social life and the Italian painter's art : but the ordinary everyday domestic life which the 
 Fleming depicted and cared for, we do not find in the art of Italy. 
 
 1 68 
 
A'EXICE. — (jl.AKA MuNTALBA 
 
marked an individuality as a Dickens character; and becomes almost 
 a personal friend to those who pay two or three visits to the picture. 
 He is a stout, curiously- wrinkled, flabby-faced man, with a bald head 
 and a triple chin, small pig-like eyes half opened, and heavy 
 pendulous cheeks. Good humour, good living, and a little cunning 
 self-interest, have puckered and wrinkled his face into a thousand 
 creases; and he has just got into his splendidly-embroidered robe of 
 office, and is doing his devotion with a sort of perfunctory air, such 
 as one may see to this day in any of the Bruges churches. A 
 wonderful piece of Zola-like painting, no less admirable for its 
 characterisation, than for the magnificence of its technique. 
 
 There are some Memlings, too, at the Academy, but they are not 
 so good as the celebrated ones in the Hospital of Saint John ; about 
 which, too, there is a pleasant story, which has probably been proved 
 untrue by some German archaeologist, telling how Memling painted 
 them in return for the care with which the Sisters had nursed him in 
 their hospital. The "Chasse de Saint Ursule," as the cabinet 
 containing them is called, contains a series of eight panels, painted 
 in a small carved shrine, which I suppose holds some relic of the 
 holy St. Ursula. These paintings are very marvellous in several 
 respects, especially in the grouping of masses of figures, each 
 wrought with the utmost intricacy of detail, and with an apparent 
 power in the painter of realising the utmost minutiae, even in scenes 
 where he must really have worked from imagination. The colour 
 is when compared with the colour of Van Eyck rather of the missal- 
 painting order, though of its kind singularly beautiful, having a 
 clear richness of quality like that of a darkened Fra Angelico. But 
 the great pleasure of the series to most people will undoubtedly lie 
 in the marvellous rendering of character and expression in the 
 various faces, on a scale so minute as to seem almost incredible. 
 To my thinking, the religious element is in these works almost 
 entirely wanting ; at all events, the pleasure which they give is in no 
 way dependent on that sentiment, and in this respect the contrast 
 between Memling and the early Italian painters is very remarkable. 
 However, even plate -spinning, when it is carried to a certain 
 extent, gives intense satisfaction ; and surely no plate-spinning in 
 the world was ever so dexterous as this handling of Johannes Mem- 
 ling's. All round the room in which this wonderful shrine is kept, 
 there is hung a quaint collection of early Flemish pictures, which 
 will well repay examination, but of which I cannot here speak in 
 detail; for there was a pompous official on the day I visited the 
 gallery who shouldered every one round the room, much as one has 
 seen a collie hustle a flock of sheep through a gate. He was not 
 nice, this man, though he wore a shiny black dress-suit and the blue- 
 and-white scarf of office, and was, I believe, laid on by the hospital 
 z 169 
 
sisterhood for this occasion only ; for it was one of the festivals on 
 which the hospital was open to the general public. The house itself 
 is a long, rambling edifice, standing in a narrow street over against 
 the Church of Notre Dame, and entered by a low-browed circular 
 archway, with a finely-carved and dimly-coloured wooden statuette 
 of some bygone bishop in a niche above the keystone of the arch. 
 On the other side of the roadway, against the wall of the church, 
 rises a very realistic pieta, with kneeling figures of the Virgin and 
 St. John, and a heap of earth at the foot of the cross with a couple 
 of skulls on it. The whole of this erection — which was done, or at 
 least restored, somewhere about the beginning of this century — is an 
 eyesore, the only one of its kind in Bruges : it presents a very 
 repulsive combination of tawdriness, vulgarity, and make-believe 
 religion ; and if the old bishop who looks down upon it across the 
 street could have his way, I am sure that gilt pastoral staff of his 
 would be used to some purpose. 
 
 The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is only remarkable as an 
 architectural curiosity, being an exact imitation in every detail 
 of the original church of that name at Jerusalem. It was built 
 about two hundred years ago by a pious layman, who undertook two 
 separate pilgrimages to the Holy Land in order to carry out the 
 scheme on which he had set his heart, and to ensure the correctness 
 of each detail of the reproduction. I am ashamed to say this edifice 
 did not interest me in the slightest degree, but I have not the 
 strength of mind to omit it altogether, lest the disciples of Baedeker 
 should turn and rend me. 
 
 In the Palais de Justice the great attraction is a wonderfully- 
 carved mantelpiece, containing numerous panels with illustrations of 
 Scriptural scenes, garlands of flowers, statuettes, coats-of-arms, etc., 
 and this too is more curious than beautiful ; admirable, like so many 
 of these old-world decorative objects, chiefly for the long patience of 
 its originator, and the evident enthusiasm with which he has done his 
 work. There is an interesting and tragic story connected with its 
 execution, something to the following effect : 
 
 There were two wood-carvers in Bruges, of whom the inferior was 
 jealous of his rival, and succeeded, by means of false witnesses, 
 in getting him condemned to death by the town council for the 
 murder of a relation. But the council, being anxious to get the 
 services of this great wood-carver for nothing, adjourned the 
 execution of the sentence for a year, till he should have finished 
 the great mantelpiece in the town hall ; so he went to work every 
 day in the Palais de fustice, and was led back to his dungeon in 
 the evening. Towards the close of the time his innocence came 
 
 170 
 
o«/, and was conclusively established. Wherefore, on the morn- 
 ing after the mantelpiece was completed, the council came in 
 state to tell him that he was free — and found him in his dungeon, 
 dead. 
 Thus runs the legend. 
 
 But neither the mantelpiece, nor the Memlings, nor the archi- 
 tecture of Bruges, are the matters for which those who dwell within 
 the city walls care the most. The great feature of the place is 
 undoubtedly the canals, which in places are vividly reminiscent of 
 Venice. There is a curious double circle of these round the town, 
 the outer of which affords as pleasant a walk as could well be con- 
 ceived. Imagine a long, continually -changing curve of water, 
 bordered by tall ash and poplar trees, and dotted at irregular intervals 
 with great grey stone gates, generally in the form of a large double 
 tower and archway between, through which one catches sight of a 
 street leading to the interior of the town. I magine continual windmills, 
 standing on green banks of turf, irregular masses of red-tiled house and 
 grey tower, and occasional peeps down a long vista of canal, stretching 
 away into the surrounding country — for these canals sometimes run 
 from the gateways for miles, without a curve or bend to break their 
 long perspective. To the little village of Dam, for instance, which 
 is upon one of them, about four miles from Bruges, there is only 
 one slight deviation, scarcely sufficient to hide the houses from 
 any one standing on the bridge at Bruges. The description of 
 any of these canals applies to all — a huge avenue of trees on one 
 side, and a broad towing-path on the other ; and on both sides wide 
 stretches of flat agricultural country, growing chiefly wheat and flax. 
 This flax industry, by the way, is not altogether a pleasant one for 
 the pedestrian, since, after the flax is cut, it has to be steeped in the 
 waters of the canal, and then spread out upon the fields to dry, at 
 which time it smells abominably. Dam is a quaint little village 
 enough, more Dutch than Belgian, in which a great disused H6tel 
 de Ville alone remains as a sign of former prosperity. This building 
 is now turned into an hotel, or at least into a place where you can 
 have a cup of coffee in a great bare kitchen, with huge beams of 
 carved wood, and a fireplace as big as a bathing machine. The old 
 Flamand in charge shows you the pair of tongs, ten feet long, and 
 one or two other antiquities of a mild nature, and is perfectly content 
 with two or three sous, or indeed with nothing at all ; for Dam is 
 "out of the track of ships," — not mentioned in any guide-book, and 
 seldom visited except by artists, and they, like bicyclists and lovers, 
 go everywhere. 
 
 From the less-frequented portions of the town, and the environs 
 of Bruges, the stranger with abundance of leisure will derive indeed 
 much satisfaction. Betwixt the inner and outer circle of canals 
 which surround the city there lies a network of small quaint streets, 
 
 171 
 
and little, dusty, forgotten squares, in which nearly every house has 
 a history. One cannot leave the town without passing across a 
 bridge, and under a great fortified gateway — relics of the time when 
 the city held its own valiantly : a kind of Northern Venice.^ The 
 likeness, by the way, is not altogether fanciful ; for in the great square, 
 from one side of which the belfry "still watches o'er the town," there 
 is a large building which bears no slight resemblance to the celebrated 
 Ducal Palace, with its long tiers of low-browed arches beneath, and 
 massive wall above, pierced at wide intervals by pointed windows. 
 The legends about the gates, and the belfry, and the old houses, are 
 almost innumerable ; are they not all written in Delapierre's 
 Chroniques ? And of these tales, one told of the most picturesque 
 spot just outside the town, the Minnewater, is perhaps the prettiest. 
 The spot is, indeed, very beautiful ; for there one of the canals opens 
 out into a broad space of water to meet a little river which comes 
 down from the surrounding country. There is a low grey stone 
 bridge with two or three wide arches ; great banks of reeds, like 
 those in Millais' " Chill October " ; a long row of tall poplars, stretch- 
 ing from the end of the bridge towards the town ; and by their side 
 a solitary round tower, which stands out black against the sunset, 
 and is reflected darkly in the water beneath. By the side of this 
 bridge — which, by the way, is reported to hav'e been the original of 
 Longfellow's celebrated poem of the same name — and separated from 
 it only by a little weir, through which the river tumbles into the 
 canal, is a low marshy island, now cultivated as a nursery garden, 
 but still full of bushes, pollard willows, and rank luxuriant growth ; 
 and it is about this island that the story of Minnewater is told, as 
 follows : 
 
 In the days when the Romans and the Norsemen shared the for- 
 tunate country of Belgium between them, there lived a maiden, 
 whose father was one of the chiefs of the latter race, and, with the 
 usual perversity of women, she must needs fall in love, not with 
 the young Dane whom her father had selected for her, but with 
 one of the conquered Belgians. How they met, and how they 
 loved, and how they plighted eternal fidelity , differs but little from 
 all other stories of this nature ; nor are we surprised to hear that 
 the despised lover saved the father's life, and was thenceforth of 
 course hated more cordially than ever by the piratical old 
 scoundrel How her sweetheart went off to the wars, and 
 Minna put off her marriage to the young Dane whom her father 
 had chosen for her; and how, finally, when she could find pretext 
 for delay no longer, she fled, ivith a single faithful slave, from the 
 parental roof; and what trials and sorrows she endured in her 
 flight, all this follows naturally. But at last she came to a 
 place of pleasant waters and luxuriant grass, on the borders of a 
 
 1 Not a "vulgar" one like Rotterdam. 
 172 
 
little village, and, as the chronicler tells us, sat down in cheerful 
 . confidence to wait for news of her lover. The days passed on, and 
 still the lover came not, and the cheerful confidence wore away, 
 till one day the slave saw the light fade out of her mistress's eyes', 
 and Minna died quietly, by the side of the stream — and of course, 
 even as she died, there came a noise of footsteps, and a sound of 
 rending branches, and her lover com^s— faithful, but too late. So, 
 with the help of the slave, he diverted the water from one of the 
 little courses which intersected the island, and made her grave 
 reverently therefor her in the bed of the stream, and then set to 
 work to let the water into its old channel, till it flowed above the 
 grave of his sweetheart. Then— for they did such things in these 
 old days — he sat down to wait till his time too should come ; and 
 we fancy that the words of old Sir Godfrey Mallory about Lancelot 
 would apply here : " Then Sir Lancelot never spoke nor smiled 
 any more, and pined and dwined away till he died." And the 
 water is called the Minnewater to this day. 
 So ends the legend. 
 
 After living for some time in this old-world atmosphere, the most 
 contented grow desirous of a change, if only to make certain that 
 the nineteenth century is still going on — that we have not reversed 
 Rip Van Winkle's experience. The remedy is invariably to go to 
 one of the two lungs of Bruges — Ostend or Blankenberghe — either 
 of which is no more than a short half-hour's railway journey distant. 
 It is one of the many accidental ironies of fate, that both of these 
 towns should be, as far as their social life is concerned, of the most 
 brand-new, flimsy, stucco -like description. Ostend is too well 
 known to talk about here, but its little rival Blankenberghe is so 
 new as to be comparatively unknown to the majority of English 
 people. This little town is wonderful, and toy-like, stretching a 
 rampart, one house thick, along a mile of red-brick digue, in front 
 of a great waste of sandy beach, and a sea whose waters are too 
 remote to be terrible. Every variety of mock Grecian, fantastic 
 Gothic, and hybrid Moorish architecture, is represented in the 
 little villas that border the digu£, and which for the most part have 
 a somewhat staring, low-necked- dress appearance, from the prodi- 
 gality with which they display all the treasures of their interiors to 
 the promenaders. Asmodeus himself would have no cause to take 
 the roofs off these houses, as the whole of the front wall appears in 
 the majority of cases to have been bodily removed, so that the 
 inhabitants of each villa seem to be living in a section of a house, as 
 in stage interiors. This little town, despite a certain element of the 
 ludicrous, has one characteristic which is very delightful to those who 
 come to it from Bruges, and that is, its excessive brightness. Built 
 as it is on a ridge of sandhills, which border the whole line of this 
 coast, it lies twenty feet or so above the surrounding country, and 
 
 ^1Z 
 
 . J ^j 
 
overlooks at the back the green plain of the land and in front the grey 
 plain of the sea. The dazzling white of the little villas, freshly- 
 painted at the commencement of each season, beats back the 
 bright light reflected from the sea and the red bricks of the long 
 promenade ; till, on a really fine day, the effect is one of the most 
 dazzling possible, and reminds the stranger of the Chiaja at Naples. 
 
 Here one may see the ponderous German, and the even more 
 imperturbable Dutchman, taking his pleasure in the most childlike 
 fashion, to the music of perpetual bands, and with the help of 
 innumerable donkeys. For if you go to Blankenberghe, you must 
 mount one of the excessively small donkeys which stand in troops 
 at either end of the digue ; and so away along the shore, either for 
 a canter on the sand close to the sea, or a solemn promenade up and 
 down the hills and valleys of soft sand, which lie a little back from the 
 water. Hundreds of little red-and-white and blue-and-white bathing 
 machines; dozens of huge scarlet Japanese umbrellas stuck in the sand, 
 with whole families basking in their shadow ; an almost interminable 
 line of Dutch fishing-boats, all moored in precisely the same position, 
 at exactly equal distances from one another ; banners and streamers 
 and gilt balls, and pinnacles, turrets, and weathercocks above your 
 head, a mass of baking bricks beneath your feet ; a vision of many 
 big women in cool cream-coloured dresses and deep-red parasols ; a 
 white sand, a steel-coloured sea, and a blue vault with a great globe 
 of brightness in its midst ; all of these made up my first impression 
 of Blankenberghe. 
 
 Just think of the change from grim, grey old Bruges, with the 
 perpetually-chiming bells, the silent streets, the genteel poverty, 
 and the general air of having dropped somehow out of the last 
 century ; to this latest mushroom of civilisation, built of sand, sun- 
 shine, and stucco, and flaunting its money, its frivolity, and its 
 fashion, in the very face of Nature. Nevertheless, here come all 
 the worthy Brugeois, day after day throughout the summer, without 
 any apparent sense of incongruity, but rather, I fancy, with a notion 
 of being, in their way, Arcadian. Here do they gather sufficient 
 ozone, and here sufficient change, to make their dull town life toler- 
 able. And teethe stranger their manners by the seaside are entirely 
 delightful, — to see a stout Flamand of fifty or thereabouts solemnly 
 punting by the aid of a small tambourine a minute india-rubber ball 
 to another burgher of similar aspect, which is the favourite way in 
 which fathers of families take exercise on the digiie, is enough to 
 restore one's faith in human nature. How little can there be wrong, 
 morally or physically, with a sexagenarian who can still gambol, 
 though a trifle heavily perhaps, after the same toy which delighted 
 him half a century ago ; especially when he is able to do it under the 
 eyes of four or five hundred wondering strangers. 
 
 174 
 
The native element in Bruges consists of two classes : the small 
 shopkeepers and peasantry, and what one of the former described to 
 me as "/a haute aristocratic Belgiqiie." La haute aristocratic Bel- 
 gtque takes Its pleasure sadly enough, in a great empty clubhouse, at 
 isolated balls at the Governor's residence, and in sloppily-got-up 
 dogcarts, which it drives with square elbows and loose reins as fast 
 as the rough pavement of the streets permits. The peasantry turn 
 m froni the country, and the shopkeepers turn out from their houses, 
 every Saturday throughout the year ; and the whole town is then 
 converted into a great open-air shop, the merchandise of which is 
 either spread on the cobble-stones of the street, or Place, or dis- 
 played in little handbarrows and slightly-constructed sheds covered 
 with canvas, all of which are put up, or brought in, in the early 
 morning, and taken away at Rundown. 
 
 All this seems tame and uneventful enough, and the resident 
 strangers whom you meet with in the streets of Bruges are not of 
 a character to alter that impression. They are for the most part 
 waifs and strays, whose social life has for some reason or other 
 come to an end in their native land, and who have come to Bruges 
 to economise. The schools and convents are numerous there for 
 the children, and there are but few shops to attract the women, and 
 few temptations to expenditure for the men. Marked characters 
 are they who order a pint of champagne, or put on a clean shirt 
 for dinner. The town is permeated by a small stream of thin 
 perpetual gossip, which leaves nobody alone, and busies itself 
 about every detail of your personal appearance, your expenditure, 
 your relations, and your business. "What do you do with your- 
 self all day ? " said the old Scotch banker to me, before I had 
 been in the town a week. "What do you do with yourself all 
 day. How is it you are never seen about?" And from this 
 time forth the estimable old gentleman asked me question upon 
 question, and I supposed retailed the answers for the benefit of his 
 clients. The gossip of a small English county town is pretty busy, 
 but the gossip of a small English population in a town like Bruges 
 is perfectly incredible in its curiosity and pre-Raphaelite in its 
 detail. After some weeks in the town, however, we get accustomed 
 to this social inquisition, and even begin to take a share in it 
 ourselves. A hankering to know what Brown has had for dinner, or 
 why Miss Robinson didn't go to her convent yesterday, and how 
 much Smith lost at billiards at the Caf6 Foy, etc. etc., grows upon 
 us daily. We get in the habit of talking to waiters, and shopkeepers, 
 and children, and hotel managers, and in fact to any one who can 
 minister to our insatiable thirst for useless information. The stir of 
 the great world fades away, or rather concentrates itself into the rustic 
 cackle of our bourg; and a great indifference to all life which is 
 
 175 
 
not bounded by the canals of the town, gradually overcomes us. 
 Things are so much the same here, whether Bulgaria is united, or a 
 French Ministry overthrown ; even the records of a great bigamy 
 case, or a new crusade, reach us faintly, as in old days the songs 
 of the Sirens reached the ears of Ulysses' sailors ; and as we meet 
 day after day the same people, we say to them, and expect them to 
 say to us, exactly the same things. " One of the bells at the belfry 
 is a little flat," repeats my musical friend. * " Mr. Blank has not 
 paid for that jewellery which he gave to Mrs. So-and-so," "There 
 will be a fete in the square on the 26th of October, — only three 
 months hence ! " " Mrs, Smith really ought not to go to England for 
 a week, and leave that pretty daughter in charge of the children " ; and 
 so on, and so on. These are the things we say to each other day 
 by day. We take them down out of. our mental storehouse every 
 morning, turn them round and dust them, perhaps even polish them 
 up a little bit, and then sally forth to offer them gaily to the first 
 comer, who in due course passes them on. What does it matter that 
 there are in the great world without, 
 
 " Wars and rumours of wars, and stories of sieges and shipwrecks," 
 
 when we, like the mariners in the " Faerie Queene," have " come into 
 a quiet tide " ? 
 
 Not the least curious part of this life is the dulness even of its 
 scandal. There is a weariness in the way in which the men and 
 women here say nasty things to each other, which seems to confess 
 that even this too doesn't matter ; and nobody dreams of being 
 deeply offended, or taking any gossip very much to heart. After a 
 time, however, all these peculiarities of the people and the place 
 are accepted as a matter of course ; and a strange sort of pleasure 
 in the quiescence and the nothing-matter-i-ness of each day grows 
 upon you. You realise how it is that people came here for a week, 
 and stopped twenty years. It is like being on shore after a long 
 swim, and a distinct effort is required to plunge again into the water, 
 
 " Here, where the world is quiet, 
 Here, where all trouble seems 
 Dead leaves and stilled winds' riot. 
 In endless dream of dreams," 
 
 exactly expresses the character of the existence. And here come to 
 enjoy that quiet a strange patchwork of people, whose lives are only 
 alike in one thing, and that thing — failure. 
 
 176 
 
THE EAVESDROPPER 
 
 [•'I'jm tlio oi'iginal by William Hunt in llic possession of llio niiihov 
 
JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET AND WILLIAM HUNT, 
 OR IDYLLIC PAINTING IN FRANCE AND 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 T seems strange when we consider the matter care- 
 fully, that both in France and England there should 
 have been, nearly at the same time, a small group of 
 what may be called for the sake of brevity idyllic 
 painters, the members of both groups being few in 
 number and most exquisite in the quality of their 
 work, and that in neither country should they have left adequate 
 successors, or even determined the main direction which the 
 development of national painting should take. Still more strange is 
 the fact that the style of art which was carried to such perfection by 
 Corot, Millet, Rousseau, and Daubigny should have sprung up in 
 France at all ; for all its relations are on the hither side of the 
 Channel ; and we must look for them in such work as the water-colour 
 painting of Cox and Hunt, the landscapes of De Wint and Gains- 
 borough, and to some extent in the classical naturalism of Turner. 
 
 There was little wonder that the critics and connoisseurs of the 
 Salon scoffed at and rejected the work of Millet, when it first ap- 
 peared, for the painting ran counter to every artistic tradition of their 
 country. It was essentially unacademic, the qualities of style belonged 
 to the ancient art of Greece rather than the cold science of Ingres or 
 David ; and in place of the clear, smooth perfection and elaborate 
 finish at that time popular. Millet's painting gave only a rich 
 sympathetic presentment of natural fact, in which truth of action was 
 substituted for beauty of composition; and depth of feeling took the 
 place of pictorial art beauty. The critics and painters saw at once 
 that this art, if once accepted, would seal the condemnation of the 
 then existing style ; that it was no dry stick, but a sapling truth 
 ready to bud and blossom, if only it might be planted with due 
 tenderness in the cool shade. Fortunately, not all by chance perhaps, 
 2 A 177 
 
these things do happen now and then when the world most needs 
 them and is growing most dry and barren, when the paths of art are 
 being choked with noisy tricksters, scientific pedants, or hopeless 
 mediocrity, when fashion and frivolity are the notes and the aims of 
 painting and painters, and when the struggle is who can say least 
 in the loudest possible tone. Then one day there comes along, 
 stolidly, roughly, and alas ! for the most part sadly, one of those artists 
 who take us back into the clear light of real beauty and true emotion, 
 and who link the art of the day in which they live, to the great Art 
 of all former and future ages. 
 
 No doubt the world was to a certain extent prepared for the arrival 
 of such a painter as Jean- Francois Millet, for the ideas which he 
 embodied on canvas are those which are vital to the life of to-day, 
 and of which we are only just beginning to have real understanding and 
 perception. Perhaps more accurately this applies to Millet's subjects, 
 rather than his ideas, for the ideas after all are ancient enough, and 
 it was only in showing their relation to a new class that Millet made 
 his chief departure. The attempt to characterise the motives of such 
 a painter's work is probably futile. But, though impertinent and 
 useless with regard to the artist, it is neither if taken in connection 
 with and in illustration of the art which is at the present time popular 
 both in England and France. For the really fine things of the 
 world are all of the nature of touchstones, and by these alone can we 
 tell what is really worthy of our admiration. A library of declamation 
 against the artistic practice of some of our popular Academicians 
 would not carry a tithe of the conviction which the mere exhibition 
 of The Angelus by the side of their paintings would convey. Noscitur 
 a sociis is true here in a new sense, for the great picture not only 
 proclaims itself, but absolutely destroys inferior companions, and even 
 the people who are, as a rule, blind to the shortcomings of superficial 
 painters would be inclined to reconsider their judgment if they could 
 see the true work hung side by side with the false. 
 
 The ultimate condemnation of much of the superficial painting of 
 the present day is perhaps to be found in the consideration of the 
 fact, that the present century is above all others a century of thought 
 about man and nature, a century which leaves no belief unquestioned 
 and no phenomenon uninvestigated, and no shade of meaning or 
 significance unsought for which can help to realise, even if it does 
 not help to solve, the great problem of life — the problem of the why 
 and the whither, the problem of the connection between humanity 
 and the earth, the problem of the consolation and the suffering, the 
 rest and the action, which make up each man's experience of life. 
 And this being so, I think we must all feel, if we allow ourselves to 
 consider pictures which are merely pretty, by which I mean pictures 
 
 178 
 
in which there is no thought below the surface attractiveness, that 
 we are beholding something which has been confectioned expressly 
 for us, something which is out of tone and out of tune with our 
 genuine sympathy and real experience, and is so less bearable to us 
 than even the most unattractive rendering of reality. 
 
 The secret of Millet's greatness as an artist, apart from his 
 technical excellence, which is to be considered separately, may well 
 lie in his perfect, if unconscious, apprehension and exemplification of 
 the above truth ; for in nearly all his pictures, and in all his greatest, 
 there is to be found this union between man and nature, between the 
 physical fact and the emotional experience, of which I have been 
 speaking. To take an actual human being engaged in some ordinary 
 avocation of his or her daily life, and to weld together the personality, 
 the action, and the surrounding world, is what this artist did to 
 perfection. Just think for a moment how significant is the achieve- 
 ment when, for the first time in the history of Art, a painter is able 
 to take such a subject as sowing, or gleaning, or fetching water from 
 the well, and render it so impressive, so generic, so monumental, that we 
 not only forget the thousands of pictures which have dealt with similar 
 scenes, but that we feel every future rendering must, in so far as it 
 be good, partake of imitation! This is indeed Art, the one true 
 alchemy possible to man, the philosopher's stone by which each 
 commonest thing may be transmuted into the golden ore of beauty 
 and significance. 
 
 I said some pages back that the sentiment of this French idyllist 
 was far more English than Gallic, but it would probably be truer to 
 define it as being un-Parisian. For English painting, at least 
 English idyllic painting, would scarcely have risen to the impersonal 
 view of the peasant which we find held by Millet ; entire deference 
 to the squire and his lady, not even yet quite eradicated from the 
 mind of the English lower classes, is hardly consistent with this 
 representation of the dignity of labour which Millet showed us so 
 persistently, and in the truth of which he believed to the uttermost. 
 If we look at The Angelas, for instance, a litde closely, we can 
 hardly fail to be struck by the self-possession, the self-sufficiency, in 
 the good sense of the word, of the two figures. And though we 
 allow in England that a labourer may be picturesque, may be 
 healthy, may even be cheerful, we hardly allow, as far as our art is 
 concerned, that he may be unconscious that he is a labourer, and 
 may forget, even in his prayers, the position in which it has pleased 
 God, and the customs of his country, to place him. The only man 
 I know who did partially realise the peasant, apart from the restric- 
 tions of his position in life, was the late Fred Walker, in two of 
 whose pictures (the Ploughing, and The Old Gate) there are to be 
 found that freedom, dignity, and self-possession which, accordmg to 
 
 179 
 
th6 gospel of the fashionable novelist and the society journal, are alone 
 to be found amongst the upper classes. And it is not unamusing to 
 note how many people, who are firm admirers of Walker's painting 
 in general, pull a wry face at the action of his ploughman driving 
 the share through the furrow, and the pose of the workman in The 
 Old Gate, who is removing the pipe from his mouth in unconscious 
 deference to the affliction of the widow lady who meets him on 
 his homeward way. People object to the freedom of the one man 
 and the dignity of the other ; possibly from the point of view 
 of rural statistics both are improbable, but in the statistics of feeling 
 they are true, and that is all with which the artist need concern 
 himself. The sentiment is genuine, the art beautiful, the repre- 
 sentation adequate, and all will endure and be admirable when 
 the little Mrs. Grundyisms of to-day have passed into that limbo 
 where all dead things lie dead. 
 
 But it is hardly necessary to say that between the idylllsm of 
 Walker and the idyllism of Millet there is a great gulf fixed, and 
 that in one aspect of manhood our English master must vail his 
 bonnet before the Frenchman. For though Walker could see the 
 dignity of action that might be possible to a peasant or a workman, 
 he did not and could not conceive the dignity of manhood that 
 might reside within him ; he caught and rendered magnificently, 
 and with something of the old Greek nobility, the gesture, but 
 the mind escaped him. His labourers have been out in the sun 
 and wind, but have learnt nothing therefrom, and the earth has 
 not made them a part of itself, and their toils have not become, 
 as they have become with Millet's peasants, part of the very fabric 
 of their lives. And I have always felt, in looking at Fred Walker's 
 pictures, a curious inability to realise the personality of most of 
 the people depicted therein. They are as impersonal as statues 
 (I do not mean as likenesses of the Duke of Wellington or others 
 by Sir Joseph Boehm), and their lack of individuality seems to be 
 natural, and not to carry with it any sense of defect or incompletion. 
 This quality of Walker's work is more evident in his later than in 
 his earlier pictures, for he began by being rather pre-Raphaelite in 
 his delineation of character, and I have one of his earlier pictures in 
 which a shy child is being introduced to her new mamma, in which 
 the study of expression is the one fine thing in the picture, which is 
 injured by a considerable amount of ugly costume insisted upon by 
 the artist with somewhat objectless fidelity. 
 
 There is, however, only one Englishman with whom Millet can 
 profitably be compared, for there is only one who has as yet given 
 of the English peasant an absolutely veritable record. This is a 
 water-colour painter dead some forty or more years ago called 
 
 1 80 
 
LES AMOUREUX. — A. G. Binet 
 
William Hunt, and often for the sake of distinction — for there are 
 many Hunts who paint — nowadays "Old William Hunt"; he was 
 one of our great (almost of our greatest) artists, and though his 
 art is chiefly known for the exquisite perfection of his fruit and 
 flower pieces, yet his delineation of rural scenes and rural characters 
 was of even greater value, not only because it is a higher and more 
 difficult thing to paint a man well, than a dog-rose or a branch of 
 apple-blossom, but because when Hunt's work turned to the subject 
 of humanity, it became at once less elaborate, and more powerful. 
 The same hand which could mark and reproduce each faintest 
 change of colour in the petals of the primrose or the blush of 
 the grape, could, when it turned to the delineation of men and 
 women, forget, or at least disregard, in the pursuit of character 
 and expression, all the minutely laborious brushwork to which it 
 was habituated, and striking clean down to the heart of each rustic 
 model, comprehend his character and his life, and set him down for 
 ever in simplest, truest guise. 
 
 These words are no way exaggerated : for nearly a dozen 
 years I had the daily opportunity of studying forty of Hunt's finest 
 works, and it is my deliberate opinion that for absolute unpreten- 
 tious truth they stand alone in English art. For the heart of pre- 
 Raphaelitism is here without its weakness, without its morbid 
 feeling, and, niost wonderful of all, we see as we look at these 
 pictures, that the painter did not even know he was a great artist 
 — the simplicity and lack of pretentiousness of the work are beyond 
 all praise. Look, for instance, at this grand sketch of a Game- 
 keeper facing the next page. Titian himself could have given 
 no truer, finer dignity to Pope or Emperor than Hunt has given 
 here by dint of adhering to the plain truth of natural gesture, and 
 by reproducing that gesture without self-consciousness or straining 
 after effect. He was not making a picture of the Gamekeeper — 
 at least he was— but the picture as it were grew naturally out of 
 the subject. What a piece of work it is even bereft of its colour 
 and reduced to so small a scale ! We wish we could persuade a 
 dozen or two of our readers who talk or care about English art to 
 take the Universal Review to the Royal Academy Exhibition---it is 
 still open— and compare this figure by "Old William Hunt" with 
 any single figure, portrait or fancy, which they can find therein. We 
 would forfeit a large sum if the majority did not confess that, in 
 qualities of unaffected dignity, ease, untutored grace, strength and 
 vitality, our Gamekeeper could find no equal amidst the Academy 
 pictures. And as a matter of Art the comparison would be still 
 more in the old water-colour master's favour ; for this is of the 
 essence of fine art as surely as is the Tailor, by Moroni, in the 
 National Gallery, or The Angelus of Millet, or the Haymakers of 
 
 i8i 
 
Bastien Lepage. It is work in which every line is right, every 
 means properly employed to produce the desired effect. We talk 
 about the wonderful finish of Meissonier, but finish he never so 
 minutely, his work cannot be more complete than this — nay, it can- 
 not be as complete, for here Hunt has got to the heart of his subject, 
 not rested content with his outer man. . And in this Gamekeeper we 
 have a type of the class, as well as a representation of the subject. 
 The amateur will notice that the execution of this drawing betrays a 
 method which has at the present day passed into disrepute, and that 
 is the combined use of pen and brush ; the majority of the outline 
 portion of this composition having been sketched in with a broad 
 quill pen, with which very probably was combined a brushful of 
 colour ; in any case the outlines have been filled up with water- 
 colour of various tints subsequently. The method was one some- 
 times used by David Cox, and was indeed taught to the present 
 writer by that painter's son as lately as five-and-twenty years ago ; 
 but though it offers certain facilities for quick sketching, the practice 
 is one by no means to be commended, being, indeed, wholly opposed 
 to the manner of nature, and rendering it scarcely possible: for the 
 artist to treat the subject with sufficient delicacy. This was by no 
 means an ordinary way for Hunt to work, and is almost the only 
 very fine drawing by him which I have seen executed in this 
 manner, though there are a considerable number of early works in 
 which the pen has been used freely. 
 
 And now, bearing, this sketch well in mind, look at the engraving 
 which forms the frontispiece to this article, and is from William 
 Hunt's most celebrated picture of The Eavesdropper — a work which 
 embodies all the best qualities of the painter and many of the most 
 marked characteristics of English art. I remember Sir Frederick 
 Burton saying many years ago to my father — perhaps in a fit of 
 generous enthusiasm — that is the finest water-colour in the world. 
 And some long while afterwards, when The Eavesdropper was 
 exhibited at the Fine Art Society's Rooms in Bond Street, Ruskin 
 wrote almost as strongly as the President of the National Gallery 
 had spoken. So at least there are some good judges who would 
 endorse the present writer's opinion, for the work in question has 
 long appeared to me to mark the highest point to which water-colour 
 painting has ever attained. Of course it is not a drawing in trans- 
 parent colour only — none indeed of Hunt's finest works are so 
 executed — and in the present instance a full use of body ^ colour has 
 been made throughout. The extraordinary excellence of the drawing, 
 technically speaking, is in its preservation of the delicacy, brilliancy, 
 and transparency of effect of mere water-colour, while the strength, 
 solidity, and richness of a fine oil-painting are obtained by the 
 
 * Opaque white. 
 182 
 
THE GAMEKEEPER 
 
 peii drawing waslud witli >olour by William Hun' 
 
 (From the original) 
 
dexterous use of opaque tints. Those who have studied technically 
 the art of water-colour painting, especially in its later developments 
 under such great artists as Walker and PinWell, know that even in 
 the very finest examples of the art there is scarcely to be found this 
 union. In, for instance, the most admirable of the Fred Walker 
 drawings, beautiful as they are in colour and atmosphere, there is in 
 the aspect of the paint itself some lack of transparency and brilliance 
 — they in no way suggest the white paper beneath ; the colour might 
 have been mixed like mortar and laid on with some most Liliputian 
 trowel, of such mortar- like consistency is it. No trace of such 
 deficiency, for deficiency it is, is to be found here. Alike in the 
 opaque and transparent portions, the work appears transparent, 
 fresh, and lively, and in the modelling and texture of the flesh 
 especially is this to be seen — where the delicacy of work has been so 
 great and its result so exquisite, that it is almost impossible to mark 
 the portions wherein the opaque colour has been used. In other 
 parts of the picture, where the artist relied less upon delicacy than 
 strength, the use of white is far more apparent, especially in the 
 more brilliantly -lighted details. The painting, for instance, of the 
 boards which line this rough stable is a masterpiece of solid, almost 
 rough painting, as large and free in method of work as if the artist 
 had had a twenty-foot canvas in front of him. With passage from 
 the strongly-lighted side of the picture to the shadow behind, the 
 transparent colour comes into use again, and perhaps from a 
 technical point of view the greatest triumph of the drawing is in the 
 delineation of the old horse-collar and harness which hang in the 
 shadow. But apart from the mere handicraft of the picture, its 
 supreme quality is the marvellous richness and beauty of the colour. 
 This is at once deep and lustrous, full of subtle changes and pleasant 
 contrasts, shifting each moment, or rather, in each smallest fraction 
 of the composition, and presenting, when viewed as a whole, a piece 
 of mingled tone and colour which might hang between a Rembrandt 
 and a Titian without fearing the comparison. 
 
 The contrast between such idylHsm as Hunt's and that of Fran9ois 
 Millet could hardly be more complete as regards the temper of mind, 
 the point of view from which each regarded his subjects. They 
 might be called indifferently the optimist and the pessimist of nature, 
 for each was at once, as compared with the other, both optimistic 
 and pessimistic ; for instance, if we take the mere surface of things 
 and look at the people and their surroundings which William Hunt 
 gives us, we feel inclined to think that the country contains nothing 
 but pleasant, happy men and women, sunburnt maidens, laughing 
 stable-boys, and stalwart gamekeepers. The very gipsies (look 
 at our illustration else) are comfortable, comparatively well-to-do 
 people, who mend their gowns and peel their lemons in a pleasant, 
 
 183 
 
almost conventional manner. There is no hint of that harshness of 
 Nature towards the poor from which Millet finds so much of his 
 interest, and to which his pictures owe so much of their power. For 
 Hunt saw only the smiling side of Nature, regarded her only, if we 
 may so put it, from the still-life point of view, and liked best those 
 aspects of her the material of which he could pack up in a basket and 
 take home to paint at his leisure on the studio-table. But, though 
 the outside of the English painter was so cheerfully optimistic, I 
 think, rightly considered, his art was essentially, when compared 
 with that of Millet, a material, a negative, and even a pessimistic 
 one; for, in the rustics which he gave us, veritable and actual as 
 they were, there seemed to be no touch to redeem their rusticity, no 
 conception that life might hold finer things for them than beer and 
 skitdes, or unlimited provision of the fat bacon and big pies in which 
 their souls and bodies delighted. But in Millet's work there is 
 always, beneath the suffering inflicted by Nature, and the toil 
 imposed by man upon man, some hint of recompense ; the people are 
 weary, very weary, but they are neither ashamed nor altogether 
 hopeless : and Nature which has caused them so much pain has, in 
 many ways, also to some extent requited them. They are not small 
 figures of poor people in a landscape, these Gleaners or Sowers or 
 Tenders of Sheep ; they are rather the inheritors of the earth ; they 
 never suggest the presence, round the corner, of an employer of 
 labour, of some one who on Saturday night will dole out his shillings 
 to duly-thankful recipients. 
 
 This difference, which marks, perhaps, one of the great border- 
 lines between the art of France and England, is very real and very 
 important, for it represents the presence or absence of right feeling 
 for the dignity of labour and the worth of manhood, tells us that 
 the beauty of the world is not exclusively made for capitalists, 
 that much indeed of natural loveliness is impossible for the capitalist 
 to understand, until he brings himself into relations with the every- 
 day joys, sorrows, and experiences of those who serve him. 
 
 One curious thing about Hunt's work in this connection is that, 
 though it reflects the English conventional feeling in such matters, it 
 does so with absolute unconsciousness, and shows that the painter 
 himself is entirely sincere in his representation. All that he saw in 
 the rustic is here, quite untouched by affectation ; it never occurred 
 to him that there might be a reverse side to the medal, that there 
 were seasons when the trees were blossomless instead of fruitful, 
 when the fat bacon and the beer were wanting, when the sunshine 
 was veiled, and the leafless branches dripped heavily with the 
 rainfall. In the art of Hunt's time, moreover, no English painter 
 seems to have had such feeling ; and although, for instance David 
 
 184 
 
THE GIPSIES 
 
 WILLIAM HUNT 
 
 Fi'om [lie oiiaiiuil wjter c 
 
^Mj ^2- ^^ Wint would habitually choose sombre landscapes and 
 wild effects of wind and storm, yet they rarely dealt with autumn or 
 wmter, and you might look through a tolerably complete collection 
 of works by either painter without meeting with a single example in 
 which that quiet regretful poetry, so common a note of our modern 
 landscape painting, strongly predominates. 
 
 If I had to select one word to characterise the water-colour art of 
 the last generation, it would be the word cheery. The artists were 
 always making the best either of a good or a bad business, and there 
 IS an absolute freshness and joviality about David Cox's worst 
 weather pictures far more inspiriting than the majority of sunlit com- 
 positions which we might find in the Academy to-day ; and here is 
 another fact worth mentioning in this connection, which is that 
 nowadays our landscape painters are very chary of representing 
 windy weather. With the exception of one or two men who paint 
 the sea (above all, Mr. Henry Moore) I cannot at the present 
 moment remember a single English artist who attempts to depict 
 the hurried march of the clouds, or the wild tossing of the trees, 
 storm-driven ; and yet, after all, it is in such phases as this that 
 Nature becomes most alive, and most akin to humanity. Who that 
 has often struggled along a sea-cHfif in the teeth of the windy 
 weather has not sometimes felt a sense of exhilaration and oneness 
 with the turmoil round him which almost seemed to identify his 
 feeling with that of the storm itself, and by dint of much communion 
 with Nature, and much taking of her in her roughest as well as in 
 her mildest moods, our old water-colour painters got to understand 
 this feeling, and so rendered it that the freshness remains in their 
 work to the present day. 
 
 Compare a landscape by, for example, Mr. Keeley Halswelle, 
 with a landscape by David Cox, or, for the matter of that, with Old 
 Crome or De Wint : you will find that, though Mr. Halswelle does 
 frequently attempt to paint windy skies, yet that the clouds therein 
 are always stationary ; the reeds bend under the influence of the 
 breeze in his pictures, but they do not spring back again, they do 
 not blow to and fro as they would appear to do in a Cox land- 
 scape. Even in the Chill October, which, on the whole, is probably 
 the best windy landscape which has been painted for the last twenty 
 years, there is much of this stationary quality — the impression given 
 by the picture is one of stillness, although the scene itself is of 
 unrest. I think this lack of sympathy with the more impersonal phases 
 of Nature must spring from the increase of self-consciousness in 
 modern artists' minds, and partly, no doubt, from the introspective 
 habit of modern thought, partly from the increased luxury of their 
 lives, and partly from continual pressure upon them of public exhibi- 
 2 B 185 
 
tions. For remark well that Nature is far less personal in storm 
 than in calm ; from the very moment the wind begins to blow, the 
 personalities begin to disappear, even as the reflections of a boat 
 are scattered at the first breeze which ruffles the surface of the 
 water. And as the forces of Nature manifest themselves more and 
 more, as the breeze freshens to a gale, and the gale to a hurricane, 
 so does the personal element of a landscape, and the need of special 
 personal feeling with regard to it, decrease, to such an extent that, 
 when figures are introduced into such scenes, they please us best 
 when they are represented as suffering most from the elements, when 
 the belated traveller is crossing the moor with the greatest difficulty, 
 when the ship is shattered upon the rocks or driven helplessly before 
 the tempest. 
 
 There seems to be a strange contradiction in the fact that the 
 elder landscapists of whom I have been speaking, though they 
 painted such impersonal pictures, almost invariably introduced 
 figures therein, while their modern descendants, when they paint 
 landscape at all, do it almost exclusively from a personal point of 
 view and most frequently without the introduction of figures at all. 
 The whole modern landscape art of France, as well as England, is 
 touched with this personal and generally morbid feeling ; and such 
 work as that of Corot and Rousseau relies almost entirely for its 
 attractiveness upon your sympathy with the special mood of the 
 painter. When work of this character is carried to its highest point, 
 we do get no doubt the most noble forms of landscape, for we get 
 that union with human feeling and natural fact which lies at the root 
 of all the finest art. But, be it noticed, that unless the painter's 
 mind is one of extreme sensitiveness and wide grasp of feeling, it 
 almost certainly results either in his reproducing only some one 
 special aspect of Nature which appeals to him, or in his, so to speak, 
 endeavouring to lash himself into a state of sensitiveness on occa- 
 sions when he really feels nothing. 
 
 There are, and always will be, two kinds of art with regard to 
 which people will dispute which is the more admirable — the art 
 which paints adequately what its owner sees, and the art which 
 paints that which its owner feels. But for those who do not feel 
 anything special it must always be hopeless to attempt to paint in 
 the manner of those who do : the only secure foundation for great 
 landscape painting must be, not the feeling of Corot, not the feeling 
 of Rousseau, or Daubigny, or Millet, but the feeling, that is to say, 
 the facts of Nature herself; founded upon the latter, the artist may 
 learn to feel before his work is completed, and at all events as far 
 as his work goes it will be real, though it may be uninteresting. But 
 if it be founded upon imitation, if he strives to express a sentiment 
 which he does not possess, but only admires in others, it must be 
 
 1 86 
 
a sham, it must be worthless. Here, as elsewhere, the injunction 
 holds good : Touch not the sacred vessels rashly, for it is profanation. 
 
 These, it seems to me, are some of the reasons why the old 
 English school of water-colours might have formed such a solid 
 foundation for English landscapists ; for the members of the school 
 were for the most part sane, clear-headed men, who went and took 
 their art, as best they could, from Nature herself, and did not think 
 too much about what they meant by their painting. Think that in 
 this enlightened nineteenth century, under the wing of a nascent 
 South Kensington Museum, and the fostering care of the Royal 
 Academy itself, these men should have lived and died without 
 national recognition or reward; that they were never allowed to 
 share in the honours of the Royal Academy, and that not a single 
 picture of theirs is to be found in the national collection — that not the 
 slightest trouble was taken to keep their art alive; and that, if 
 another David Cox and another De Wint were to arise to-morrow, 
 all the art authorities of England would repeat the same neglect, 
 stupidity, and injustice with the greatest pleasure ! 
 
 The crew of interested persons who profess to reward and guide, 
 as well as represent, English art, have been guilty during the last 
 forty years of systematic neglect of their duty in many respects, but 
 in none more than this, that they have seen the fine landscape art of 
 their country dying slowly an unnatural death, and have stretched 
 out no finger to relieve it, but have, on the contrary, given it at 
 every possible moment a shove toward the tomb. And yet so 
 tough and of such vigorous frame was the invalid, that even yet it is 
 scarcely too late to save him. For, as I have often said, and as I shall 
 go on saying till I get them recognised, there are a few good 
 English landscapists still left among us, men who are not all 
 u*nworthy to be the successors of David Cox and Peter de Wint. 
 There is Robert Collier, for instance, and Hine and Wimperis, all of 
 the Institute of Painters of Water-Colours, and all sincere and 
 accomplished artists in a pure style of landscape painting, and there 
 is George Fripp and Hook the Academician, and Aumonier and 
 Henry Moore, chiefly known for his seascapes, to whom, by the way, 
 the Jury of the International Exhibition of Paris have just given one 
 of the only two medals of honour bestowed upon the English section, 
 though the Academy kept the painter waiting till he was nearly fifty 
 before they made him an Associate, and whom they have not elected 
 a full Academician even to the present day. 
 
 Look at the picture which is printed here on the opposite page. 
 Are any of our readers so blind that they cannot see the difference 
 between such a landscape as this and those which are presented for 
 
 187 
 
their admiration by the doyens of the Royal Academy ; by Messrs. 
 MacWhirter, Graham, and Leader ? I do not wish to say a word 
 against the work of any of these gentlemen, further than that it is 
 not in any way comparable in quality to such art as this — The Green 
 Lanes by David Cox. Think for a moment what it is which renders 
 the picture here given so superior, and dismiss from your mind if 
 possible any notion that it can be superior by accident, or that there 
 is anything in the subject chosen which will account for the excellence. 
 It is not in the subject, and it is no accident : it is because the 
 artist had both the power and the desire of representing Nature, and 
 exercised it without affectation and without prejudice. We can feel 
 the force andfreshness of Nature here, not onlybecause Cox was a great 
 artist, but because his work was done face to face with his subject, not 
 cockered up in the studio to please the public taste. And one proof 
 of this is that, out of all the thousand sketches and pictures which 
 Cox executed, there are not two which are even superficially alike in 
 the effect depicted. He was as happy on a calm river as on a windy 
 moor, on the sands as amongst the heather, in the field or in the 
 woods, and, indeed, one of the most exquisite drawings of his I know 
 was a seascape off Hastings. The present picture belonged to my 
 father, and belongs, I am glad to say, to myself, and having known 
 and loved it for many years, I may, perhaps overrate its merit ; but 
 it appears to me to possess all the essentials of the greatest art, 
 cataloguable and uncataloguable. There is magnificent composition, 
 arrived at in the most, apparently, accidental manner, and yet 
 scientifically, demonstrably perfect ; there is the most wonderful 
 rendering of a strong wind and rainy sky, and of the general aspect 
 of the country in stormy weather, which I have ever seen ; there is 
 great beauty of colour, and there is an amount of life and movement 
 throughout the picture which can be felt even in this greatly-reduced 
 reproduction. But the chief quality of the painting can hardly be 
 defined, for it lies in the sense of style with which the work is 
 executed. We cannot look at it without thinking of the great 
 masters of painting, and one immediately wishes to compare it with a 
 Gainsborough, or even with old Salvator Rosa. The work is big in 
 style and in execution ; it is man's work, standing firmly on its legs, 
 and going straight about its business, not whining because of the 
 destinies of humanity, or fiddling about with mere prettinesses of 
 sentiment and effect; above all — at least above all in the present 
 connection of which we are speaking, in the connection of English 
 art — the picture is one in which the national character is fully and 
 firmly expressed. The feeling is clean, healthy, out-of-door-English ; 
 the artist evidently cares no more for a wetting than do the old 
 fishermen who are getting ready their bait under the wind-tossed 
 trees ; and we know that the painter saw this thing and rejoiced at it, 
 and was altogether a robust capable person, though his art was so 
 
 i88 
 

 
 
sensitive and so true. I have often heard it said by more or less ill- 
 informed persons that such subjects as these were the only ones 
 which Cox attempted, or in which he was wholly successful. As a 
 matter of fact, almost the reverse is the case ; a very large number of 
 his works show us the most sunny skies and the calmest weather, 
 and for the close of this article I have selected a very beautiful 
 example of this manner in the picture produced on the preceding 
 page of Old Battersea Mill. No reproduction could possibly give the 
 softness and delicacy of this drawing, but even here sufificient is left to 
 show the sunny peace of the scene and the painter's absolute sympathy 
 therewith. This picture is not more than a sixth of the size of the 
 Green Lanes, and it may be worth pointing out that, as in all really 
 great artists' work, the diminution of the scale makes no difference to 
 the breadth of style and effect conveyed by the picture. This drawing, 
 as in the little three-inch vignettes by Turner, of the Holy Land, 
 might have been made of any size, but could not have conveyed a 
 more perfect sense of distance and atmosphere. Nothing is indeed 
 more certain than that great art is wholly independent of scale, and 
 that whether you paint the size of Le Vin du Curd of Meissonier, or 
 The Last Judgment of Angelo, your picture may contain the same 
 spaces. 
 
 189 
 
TWO DAYS OF A PAINTER. 
 
 T was in the early summer of 1883 that I first 
 seriously studied landscape - painting. I had, of 
 course, drawn and sketched ^ a good deal before, and 
 had been at an art school in England, and in studios 
 abroad, but this in connection with my writing upon 
 art. For that purpose also I had studied anatomy 
 and dissection and modelling at Rome. In the year named, how- 
 ever, for various causes which it is unnecessary to mention, I 
 felt the need of harder and more sustained work than my former 
 desultory practice, and I was, moreover, somewhat unwilling to 
 bear the reproach which is commonly made against critics — the 
 reproach, namely, that they at ease condemn, and ignorantly reject 
 good painting because of their technical ignorance of the craft. In 
 some ways the difficulties which lay before me were greater than 
 ordinary, not only from age, but because of my many Press engage- 
 ments. Moreover, I did not so much want to learn the technique 
 of any artist or school, as I wanted, if possible, to study unbiassedly 
 the aspects of Nature in their relation to painting, as I had previously 
 studied, from the literary point of view, the relative excellencies of 
 various schools and methods of art in relation to thought, emotion, 
 and aesthetic pleasure. 
 
 Of schools and styles I knew, it seemed to me, enough, and more 
 than enough, and the need was to learn what Nature could teach me 
 independent of any special artistic aim, — starting as little from the pre- 
 Raphaelite point of view as from the plein-air or the Impressionist 
 theories, disregarding alike Barbizon and the Royal Academy, 
 thinking no more of Cox than of Turner, of Millet than Walker, of 
 Peter Graham than Linnell,, — to forget all these, in fact, and just try 
 
 1 Two studies are inserted in this article (in the large-paper edition) simply to show the 
 character of this early work. They were done about 1881-82, and the first appeared in the 
 Graphic of the latter year with the addition of two figures drawn from my suggestions, and 
 with various alterations suggested by the inspiration of the wood-engraver. 
 
 190 
 
simply for reality. I thought that the experiment would be an 
 interesting one, especially if carried out thoroughly by one who, like 
 myself, had no artistic faculty above the average, and determined to 
 try it for five years, for my own satisfaction, in such intervals as I 
 could spare from my literary work. These resolved themselves 
 practically into about three months in the Long Vacation, though 
 in one or two halcyon years I managed to get a month in springtime. 
 
 Having no teacher, I constructed for myself a little code of rules 
 which, on the whole, were observed pretty faithfully, of which the 
 most difficult to keep was the one prescribing that at least one fresh 
 sketch was to be made every day. For the first three years I tried 
 to observe this regfulation, and, on the whole, did do so, but was 
 then finally vanquished, and I offered my creditor conscience a 
 composition of ten shillings in the pound, or a sketch every 
 other day, which was accepted reluctantly. The rule is, I think, 
 for all landscape students an admirable one, and so is the next 
 article of my code, which I believe to be even more admirable — in 
 the sense of taking more conceit out of the young painter. This was 
 the regulation which forbade the selection of any conventionally 
 picturesque subject, or the addition to the sketch of any such detail. 
 No sand-carts on the beach, no flower-gathering children or hay- 
 raking women in the meadows, no weary peasants in blue blouses 
 on the country road or sitting under the corn-stacks, no mowers at 
 morn or eve, no gleaners, fish-maidens, or weather-beaten sailors 
 pulling driftwood from the sea — norte, in fact, of the infinite series of 
 old hats — to use the studio slang — which make up the stock-in- 
 trade of the popular artist, dear to the heart of Cassell, welcome in 
 the halls of the illustrated periodicals. All such matters, incidents, 
 and people were to be taboo — the sketch was to rely on nothing 
 but its correspondence with the natural fact, the colour, the light and 
 shade, the form of its subject. If it had not some degree of fidelity, 
 at all events the weakness, the falsehood, were to be undisguised : and 
 very marked and undisguised they were in my efforts. 
 
 I doubt in very truth whether any one who ever tried seriously to 
 paint has produced such a collection of abominable daubs as I did 
 during the years mentioned. I doubt whether to this day any 
 painter living has a clumsier hand, or draws with more effort and 
 less touch. I would have given painting up in despair in that first 
 year, were it not for one thing in which I much delighted, and for 
 which I may have had some faint natural capacity, and that was 
 Colour. Perhaps because I had lived as a lad with pictures which 
 were finest of all English work in this respect ; perhaps because in 
 after years I had studied Italian painting continually, m Venice and 
 Florence ; perhaps only because the matter appealed to me above 
 
 191 
 
all other art beauties — for whatever reason, there did seem to me to 
 be now and again some progress in this direction in my own work, 
 and I grew to have some faint hope that one day I should beat 
 my music out, and so — I went on. Day after day I brought back 
 to the village inns in which my autumn was passed, one sketch 
 worse than another, day after day I set out again to fresh effort, and 
 fresh failure. Sometimes in rage the canvases were hurled into the 
 sea, trodden under foot, trampled into the beach sand, left anywhere 
 and everywhere, so that I might see them no more, and as the 
 possibility of any real progress grew, or appeared to grow, less and 
 less, so the daily humiliation and despondency increased — at times 
 almost unbearably. 
 
 My main subject was the most beautiful thing in Nature, and what 
 is surely the most difficult to understand and to reproduce — the sea, 
 and there I sat solemnly, stupidly, earnestly trying to copy it, as a 
 child tries to shape his letters. Of course the result was failure; 
 but — and this is why I have written the foregoing — though the sea 
 would not yield to me the secret I demanded, my effort gave me 
 another, and perhaps a better reward. I learned something of the 
 difficulties which painters conquer, and something of the under- 
 standing which they gain. I realised how false was all art which is 
 literally and solely reproductive, how worthless all art which has not 
 realism for basis and guide ; and also that hard lesson, of content in 
 personal failure, and, if I may dare to say so, of gladness that there 
 are others who succeed. Gradually in each changing aspect of the 
 great waters, in their varying voices and their myriad meanings, I 
 found peace and strength. The mystery and the meaning, the terror 
 and the majesty, of the sea stilled despondency and atoned for 
 failure — gradually I came to feel the poetry, which I could not explain 
 in terms of paint and canvas, of its changeful unchanging beauty. 
 And with this there may too have come some first faint promise 
 of good artistic work, which might possibly have been one day 
 realised had I been able to leave off writing, and — had I been ten 
 years younger. 
 
 I think the most intense pleasure I ever experienced was when I 
 heard casually about this time, that the hanging committee of a 
 certain gallery had said of one of my sketches directly it was brought 
 up, Well have that, at all events ! This was better than one's first 
 proof — and oh, how good that is — that flimsy strip of paper with the 
 "reader's" queries and the unintelligible printer's instructions! 
 
 So my self-imposed task had served a purpose though achieving 
 little. Artists are born, not made, and painting is not to be learned 
 by rule-of-thumb in a few months' work yearly ; and thirty-five is one 
 age, and fifteen another, and the latter much preferable for swallowing 
 
 192 
 
cc 5 .= 
 
formulae, and training the hand — all of this had been made pretty 
 evident to me : but then I had found out too, what no one but a 
 painter ever can know, the kind of effort, endurance, patience, and 
 knowledge a painter needs, and gains. I had learned more than a 
 hundred years spent in the study of styles and theories would have 
 taught me, of both the limitations and the possibilities of art ; of the 
 painter's feeling towards his work and his subject ; of his conscious 
 failure, his rare and fleeting contentment. I had come to realise 
 the truth so frequently mentioned, so seldom felt, that in proportion 
 to the knowledge and capacity of the artist, are his conviction of his 
 own incompetency to render the beauty of Nature, and his discontent 
 with the little that he is able to achieve ; last, and perhaps best of 
 all, I had grown to know that faithful work does even for the least 
 competent, in the long run bring some recompense in wider insight 
 and keener perception, and though you may be at the end of life 
 what you were at the beginning, a student rather than a master, 
 you will be neither base, nor altogether unhappy — for you will have 
 learned to be glad when others do that for which your hands are 
 unavailing, and proclaim the truths which you can only know and 
 feel. 
 
 The sermon is somewhat long for the occasion, too short for the 
 text ; and my only reason for saying these things was to explain how 
 the two following sketches were written. They are simply and 
 exactly what they profess to be — the untouched records of two 
 impressions of country life, written on each occasion after the day's 
 painting was finished. For this reason I have thought them 
 worth including here, and have prefaced them by an account of 
 the effort to teach myself painting. Taken together, I think they 
 have a certain value, both objective and subjective, as showing both 
 what was actually seen and heard on the occasions in question, and 
 as suggesting two phases of artistic feeling and experience, which are 
 perhaps new to some of my readers. They show at least how the 
 pictorial aspect of Nature mingles itself in a painter's mind with the 
 human environment, and makes, as it were, a special atmosphere, half- 
 mental, half-physical, the embodiment of which in his work is at once 
 his greatest problem and his keenest pleasure. 
 
 W 
 
 ILD WEATHER : 3RD NOVEMBER 1883.^ 
 
 There was certainly an unwonted bustle in the inn that 
 morning. The bar loiterers showed a brisk and some- 
 what excited air ; the landlord, one of the stoutest and best-tempered 
 
 1 Both these sketches have the titles they originally bore when published in the Spectator, 
 and are reprinted verbatim, for the reasons given above. 
 2 C 193 
 
men in the world, had rolled up his sleeves a trifle higher than was 
 usual at eleven o'clock. The old greyhound, ordinarily the only idle 
 person allowed on the establishment, wandered to and fro restlessly, 
 and poked his nose into one person's hand after another, as if to 
 discover what was afloat. Even the young lady from London, who 
 was chiefly notable for a crop of ginger curls and a dress-improver 
 of the largest size, showed signs of animation. Doors blew open, 
 windows rattled, bits of straw and seaweed flew cheerfully in at the 
 swing-doors, sea, sky, and wind somehow had gone astray, and were 
 poking their noses into the bar-parlour, in imitation of the greyhound. 
 
 It was past eleven ere I had got my camp-stool, canvas, etc., 
 packed up for the day's work, and was ready to start. It had been 
 blowing hard all night from the south-west, and this was the morning 
 of October i8th, when the high tide was foretold. It was strange 
 how the wind, or the expected water, or some subtle combination of 
 both, had affected the usually torpid inhabitants of Rye. A bold, 
 almost buccaneering look, pervaded the people ; the talk was all of 
 the river, the sea, and the wind. The dwellers on the march had 
 become for once dwellers by the sea, and were evidently proud of the 
 fact. 
 
 To my amusement, I was looked upon with considerable respect, 
 when it was found I was going down to the port, some two miles off", 
 sketching. " You'll find it main rough down there," said the local 
 carpenter, who was a bit of an artist in his way — at least so he 
 fancied, for he had made the frame for an engraving • of one of 
 Gustave Dora's pictures — and the landlord pressed a glass of ginger 
 brandy upon me before starting, as a sort of stirrup-cup, I thought, 
 in case we should meet no more. 
 
 It was wild weather, certainly : the sky was a misty, thin blue, with 
 thousands of small cumulus clouds drifting quickly onwards and 
 upwards from the horizon. Every now and then towards the sea 
 the wind tore a small space of the sky clear of the drifting rack, and 
 disclosed a glistening extent of fleecy clouds, lying in long, close 
 ranks against the blue, and looking as though they had never known 
 or even heard of wind and storm. The old church and tumbled 
 red roofs of the town showed clear and bright, with that brightness 
 in which colour seems to be lost even more than in shadow. The 
 noises of the shipyards, generally striking the visitor as the chief 
 element of life in the town, were gathered up and swept into unison 
 with the wind that rushed past them from the sea, and were only 
 distinctly audible now and then in a lull. Within two or three feet 
 of the old ferry-house, the old ferryman looked down bewildered on 
 a turbid, yellow current, which was substituted for the grey mud and 
 quiet flow of the river in ordinary times, and said, half proudly, half 
 
 194 
 
sadly, as he ferried me across to the marsh, " There'll be three feet 
 of water in my cottage, if the wind goes round to the north." I left 
 him contemplating this prospect, which, by the way, was not realised, 
 and set out along the sea-wall. Everything on the way spoke of the 
 tide and the gale. The sea-gulls walking about quietly on the fields, 
 and scarcely troubling to rise at one's approach ; the cows and sheep 
 lying down close to the shelter of the bank which separated the 
 marsh and the river ; the river itself spreading widely over its low 
 banks, and lapping eagerly against the sea-wall ; the submerged 
 fences and gates, and the bare tops of the piles which marked the 
 channel, alone showing above the water, 
 
 I must fail to describe, as I failed to realise distinctly, wherein lay 
 the keen sense of excitement and pleasure which this scene conveyed, 
 — whether it sprang from the contrast of the present appearance with 
 the wonted desolate calm of the marsh and low-lying river, whether 
 it was merely the bright sunshine mingling with the roar of the wind 
 and the shrieks of the sea-gulls, or whether it was the invasion of the 
 sea into its old territory — for long ago Rye rose above the waters 
 instead of the land. The scene, however, was worth looking at, 
 even independent of any such feeling ; and our countrymen who go 
 to much expenditure of trouble and money to gaze upon the Roman 
 Campagna, might find an easy substitute for many of its chief 
 beauties, in their homely Sussex. Here, too, are softly -moulded 
 lines of field and heath, here are long sweeps of hills bounding 
 a blue distance. Here, too, the colour shifts and changes moment- 
 arily with the drifting cloud shadows and flickering sunshine, and 
 the eye can rove at pleasure over a plain as apparently boundless 
 as the great Campagna sea. If Fairlight is not as high as 
 Soracte, it too has a bold precipitous outline, and a character of its 
 own ; and the simple tower of the church, which stands out so sharply 
 on the crest of its down, might be a campanile, as far as strength and 
 grace are concerned. There are no olive trees, and no aqueducts, 
 and no tomb of a loving husband to a faithful wife ; but there are old 
 houses, whose beauty is twined with the doings of our own people ; 
 there is the grey gateway,^ and the massive tower of Rye Church 
 crowning the irregular houses, which seem to crowd round and look 
 up to it, even as their inhabitants might do ; and underneath the 
 tower there are the black masts of the fishing-boats, pointing as with 
 outstretched finger in the same direction. And for those who want 
 more heroic architecture, and records of war rather than peace, is 
 there not Camber Castle to be seen across the foaming water of the 
 river ? And, strangely enough, inside its green quadrangle is a 
 circular tower, with a course of sculptured stone running around its 
 rude masonry, which, if it stood alone on the Campagna, not one in a 
 thousand folk would not guess to be Cecilia Metella's. And above 
 
 195 
 
all, is there not our old friend and safeguard, the sea, hinted at by 
 that group of masts on the edge of the marsh, by the sandhills which 
 stretch out in long perspective from the port into the distance, and 
 by the sea-gulls which fly shrieking above our heads ? Something 
 of the spirit of Kingsley comes over the scene, and shouts a glad 
 defiance of the wild weather in the teeth of the spray and wind. 
 
 But there was no reaching the port that day, for the rising tide 
 rushed feet above the little foot-bridge which led from the sea-wall 
 towards the sea, and I was forced to content myself with the view of 
 the flooded river and the town beyond. How it blew the palette in 
 my face, and plastered madder-lake on the nose, and cadmium 
 on the forehead ; how it tore the canvas from my hand (no easel 
 could have stood for a minute), and turned it face downwards on the 
 rough wiry grass ; how it blew the medium out of the dipper, and 
 spread it in a shower upon the middle of the picture ; how I lost hat, 
 handkerchief, and temper, need not be recorded, for these are all 
 usual accidents of sketching in a gale ; but the game was well worth 
 its candle. 
 
 Not often in one's life does one get the chance to see one of 
 Nature's best transformation scenes enacted in the very place and 
 under the very circumstances which could most enhance its beauty, 
 and for many a year the change of that quiet marsh into a seething 
 mass of yellow foam, the way in which the wind roared, the sun 
 shone, the sea-fowl shrieked, and the hungry water came rushing 
 over fence and gate to within a foot of. the crest of the sea-wall, will 
 be worth remembering. 
 
 It seemed like coming back to another life, to return to the little 
 inn, and find the landlord still serving his customers, the greyhound 
 still prowling restlessly, and all folk talking unceasingly of the wild 
 weather. 
 
 QUIET weather: Spectator, Zth November 1884 
 
 About a year ago I tried to make a word-photograph of a day's 
 doings in rough weather at an old-fashioned south-coast fishing 
 village : to-day I want to describe the aspect oF life in the calm, 
 grey weather we have been experiencing lately, as it appeared to me 
 in a far more out-of-the-way part of England, twenty miles from 
 a railway station on the Atlantic shore. 
 
 The slates of the cottages here have little of the cold, purple tint, 
 but are varied in faint green and bluish silver; and where the 
 gables slope against the grey sea, the sunshine laughs and dances 
 
 196 
 
upon them almost as it does upon the waves themselves. In front 
 of the jagged rocks which border our little cove, the great seine- 
 boats lie, massive and dark, dwarfing all the smaller fishing-craft 
 into insignificance, waiting for the pilchards, who seem loth to 
 appear. In front of the coastguard's cottage, cutting sea and sky 
 and rock, and dividing the little landscape into all kinds of irregular 
 triangles, rises the inevitable white mast and yard of the retired 
 sailor, carrying in this instance a weathercock of native design, 
 representing a pilchard whose tail points obstinately seaward, 
 irrespective of any change in the weather. 
 
 To the right of the inn window rise whitewashed stone cottages, 
 and to the left sink the same; beneath, the road dips by a red 
 geranium and a water-butt to the hidden beach. On the low wall 
 in front of the window, rooted securely in some crack of its coping- 
 stones, flowers a brilliant marigold — the one bright spot in the 
 picture. Such a queer, quaint little grey hamlet, where year passes 
 after year, bringing no alterations save a few more wrinkles to the 
 aged, and a little less laughter to the young, the blustering weather 
 of winter and spring, the coming of the pilchards, the flash of the 
 world seen now and then in the eyes of a wandering artist, the 
 sermons on alternate Sundays at two neighbour villages, — such are 
 the matters which form the talk and interest of these folks' lives. 
 A still, silent life enough, where small things have to be made the 
 most of if one would be content ; and yet one gets to be very fond 
 of its peace, which is hardly monotony, of watching the foliage 
 change from green to gold, sadden to its winter gown of russet ; to 
 note how, as the year declines, the sky covers up its bright summer 
 days and wraps itself in masses of fleecing cloud ; how the emerald 
 of the sea grows like beaten steel ; and where a band of purple once 
 sank into a rosy mist, there is now only a thin grey line against a 
 pallid sky. The whole population are fishermen and their allies ; 
 and all day the able bodied sit upon a great bank of timber, by the 
 side of the lifeboat shed, and smoke, rubbing shoulders together in 
 an uncouth fashion, much as one has seen birds upon a perch. They 
 all know each other, and are good friends after a silent, unexpansive 
 fashion. The property in the fishing-boats is to a certain extent 
 common, and brings them closer together, and, like most Cornish- 
 men, the habit of their lives is serious and a little sad. And they 
 are instinct, too, with a profound natural courtesy towards the 
 stranger, very different from the general distrust and suspicion which 
 we find in the Midland and Northern counties. Rough they are, 
 certainly — stupid, perhaps, according to our Cockney standard of 
 intelligence — but it was such men as these that Kingsley, who had 
 passed his life amongst them, described ^ finer men, body and 
 soul, than the landsmen ; and of all our seamen and fishers there 
 
 197 
 
are no more stalwart, simple souls to be found in England than 
 those who border the land of strangers. 
 
 The influence of the place is mesmeric ; and as day after day 
 passes, and autumn paces slowly by its road of golden leaves and 
 withered bracken into winter, it grows hourly more difficult to 
 believe in the existence of other life than this. The sea, the sky, 
 the fishermen lounging, the pilchards that never come, the picture 
 on one's easel, the walk after the day's work over moor and down- 
 land, the home-coming to the best of inns, with its bright fire 
 and brighter faces of welcome, the dinner with a friend, the smoke 
 and toddy in the evening, and then the night with the wind sighing 
 down the valley — these repeat themselves day by day. Gradually 
 one comes to know something about the people — how poor 
 Sullivan's wife is dying of consumption, and Stewart's boy must be 
 taken to Falmouth to be confirmed, and other matters less serious. 
 And occasionally the men come and talk as we paint, and resting 
 their broad backs against the wall, point out to each other the 
 various objects of the picture, rubbing slow hands over their bristly 
 chins meanwhile. There is a sort of tacit agreement that they are 
 not to establish themselves behind us while we are at work ; but 
 sometimes the temptation is too strong to be resisted, and one 
 becomes aware of a shadow on the canvas, and a gruff voice saying, 
 "Not that I want to interrupt you, sir." One old fellow of the 
 patriarchal age, past doing anything but hobble about the beach 
 very slowly, with the help of a couple of sticks, has been exempted 
 from the above restriction, and spends a good portion of his morning 
 breathing heavily into my ear, and giving me details of his career, 
 which presents fewer salient points during its duration of eighty- 
 four years than could be well believed. 
 
 "Yes, he has always lived here; and he minds the building of this 
 very place " (a fish-cellar, full of miscellaneous sea-lumber, nets, and 
 crab-pots, "anchors of rusty fluke^ and boats updrawn"), "ah, more 
 than fifty years ago." So, with a final wheeze, he departs, to return 
 the next day with the same story ; and in the room overhead the one 
 virago of the place recommences scolding and beating her children. 
 " Find it pretty noisy down here, sir ? " said a couple of the fish- 
 wives, whom I found standing before my easel yesterday. " Her 've 
 a long tongue, and a longer arm, her have." It's the old story of two 
 families — a dead wife leaving young children, and then a new mistress 
 for the house, and a new family, and temper and health alike giving 
 way under the double strain, and the result — that terrible chaos of blows, 
 reproaches, and tears which makes a hell of so many popr men's homes. 
 The boards that roof the cellar are thin, and the voices loud ; and 
 iiaving sat under them for three weeks, one is tempted to moralise. 
 
 198 
 
But this is the only seamy side to the village life. Even poor 
 Sullivan's wife, for whom we sent for the priest a few days ago, is 
 dying peacefully ; and her little girl stands, with an anxious wistful 
 face, at the open cottage door, whilst her big father passes in and 
 out, tender as a woman in his care. "She's alive, sir, and that's 
 all." Down the steep little path which winds at the back of the 
 village up to a ledge of rock, against which the great waves hurl 
 themselves for ever vainly, comes the one personage of the place, 
 Mr. , proprietor of the seine-boats and employer of the fisher- 
 men. He is something like Carlyle in appearance, owing the 
 likeness, perhaps, chiefly to his long greatcoat and broad-brimmed 
 hat, and he walks stiffly and slowly beneath his weight of seventy- 
 six years. Thirty-five of them he has spent here on that little shelf 
 of rock (it is literally a shelf, for it ends abruptly in a perpendicular 
 fall of cliff into deep water), doing practically nothing but live. 
 Despite his life, with only these fishermen for companions, traces of 
 a very different society are still clearly visible, touches of geniality 
 and social grace peep out in his dry old manner : and one is not 
 surprised to find in the little cottage on the rocky ledge a portfolio 
 of drawings, and etchings and good pictures upon the walls. All of 
 these, however, and all the furniture of his intellectual and social life, 
 date half a century back : there the man ceased, and what has lived 
 since is merely his outside. Still a pale phantasm of a gentleman 
 and a scholar, he walks in and out the rough folks here, amongst 
 them, but not of them ; and comes and hovers round the easel of 
 a^ wanderer like myself, wanting, not so much to look at the work, as 
 to hear the old language of books and pictures which he used to 
 speak long ago. After much pressing, he came in one night to chat 
 with us, but was pitiably ill at ease. It seemed to force upon him 
 too keenly the contrast of his present life with that which he had 
 previously known. What it was that scored his face and broke his 
 spirit, and sent him down to live in this unknown fishing-hamlet far 
 from the ways of men, who shall say ? But he intensifies the 
 stillness of the place: and when his tall figure is seen coming 
 down the path of a morning, even the sunlight seems to fall more 
 quietly upon his rusty coat, and the noise of the water to be almost 
 hushed. 
 
 And so the days go on, with life lying behind and before, and 
 twenty miles off the train waiting to carry all who will back to the 
 great city. Morning after morning out of the same silvery sky 
 shines the wistful sun, and the great grey plain of the sea stretches 
 softly away to the horizon. Still the pilchard weathercock points to 
 the long-expected shoal ; still the fishermen lounge, and growl, and 
 smoke; still our pictures grow slowly day by day amid the 
 comments, flattering and otherwise, of the villagers ; still we take 
 
 199 
 
long walks over the moorland, or to where the Lizard lights can be 
 seen streaming out into the waning sunset. After all, one cannot 
 photograph an atmosphere, and it is a photograph only which I am 
 trying to give you. A crude, literal picture of an environment of 
 humble life, of toils and duties which there are 
 
 " None to praise, and very few to love," 
 
 but which is, after the rivalries and jealousies of London, almost like 
 the peace of God, which passeth all understanding. 
 
 200 
 
-M. 
 
' We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by 
 having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves ; 
 and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from 
 pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it 
 is good." — ROMOLA. 
 
 " I read a record deeper than the skin." — The Spanish Gypsy. 
 
 THE PAINTING OF GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS, 
 R.A. : A COMPARATIVE CRITICISM.^ 
 
 HERE are certain poets whose verse is so melodi- 
 ous, whose meaning is so obvious, and whose 
 sympathies are so universal, as to attract at once 
 all who listen to them. And there are others 
 whom we only grow to admire slowly, as our 
 knowledge increases — whose language sounds often 
 at first uncouth in our ears — whose thoughts and emotions have 
 to be searched for diligently, and pondered deeply before they 
 are understood ; but who repay the effort of their students with 
 a richer harmony than is yielded by those who pipe but as the 
 linnets sing. Without wishing to depreciate the bird -like strains 
 of the first of these, I may be perniitted to suggest (as Longfellow 
 did in his Singers), that they give to youth the joy that their 
 more thoughtful contemporaries give to manhood. And though, 
 as Greg said, "the bees and the butterflies alike are happy," yet 
 they are happy in different ways and from different causes. Is 
 it a fanciful idea that there should be pictorial art of an analogous 
 kind to the less superficially attractive aspects of poetry and music ? 
 I do not see why we are entitled to refuse the same amount of time 
 to the comprehension of a great picture, that we should give without 
 hesitation to the understanding of a sonnet ; or why we should expect 
 
 * Written in the February number of the Contemporary Review, 1882, on the occasion 
 of a collection of Mr. Watts' paintings being exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery. Some 
 further articles on the same subject were published by me at this period in the Times 
 and Spectator. 
 
 2 D 201 
 
a composition which has probably taken months if not years of thought 
 and labour to produce, to reveal all its meaning to us as we stroll 
 hurriedly round a picture gallery. A wise man once said that no 
 great book required much less time in the reading than the author 
 had taken in the writing, and a picture, after all, is but an open 
 book, where those who have eyes to see can read strange matters. 
 
 This essay attempts to explain the characteristic qualities of Mr. 
 Watts' art, to note its imperfections as well as its excellencies, and 
 to consider what is its value and its teaching when taken as a whole. 
 That such an attempt, made at such a time, must of necessity fail of 
 complete success, no one will feel more strongly than the present 
 writer. However posterity judges, it will not be from the point of 
 view of to-day, and that verdict it is hopeless to anticipate. Without 
 attempting, however, to forecast what will be the ultimate value 
 assigned to Mr. Watts' painting, we may be pardoned for suggest- 
 ing the chief aims which the artist appears to have had in view, the 
 chief peculiarities of his style, and the chief points of difference 
 between his work and that of other famous English painters. And if 
 in this latter connection I have to speak with seeming disparagement 
 of those who are high in public favour, I would remind my readers 
 that the comparative criticism referred to must only be considered to 
 be a part of the truth. It were manifestly impossible, within the limits 
 of a Review article, to give more than a general description of the 
 aims and methods of the artists, who are incidentally referred to for 
 the purpose of comparison, and such general description must fre- 
 quently do but scant justice to their full merit. 
 
 In one respect the opportunity afforded by the present collection at 
 the Grosvenor Gallery is almost, if not quite, unique. It is, as far as I 
 am aware, the first time that anything like a complete collection of an 
 artist's pictures have been exhibited in his lifetime, and with his assist- 
 ance and approval. It is the more significant when we consider that 
 the works in this collection extend over a period of nearly half a cen- 
 tury, and that the painter has almost reached the allotted age of man. 
 This exhibition may well be considered as a question put by the 
 artist to those who are interested in art, and demanding a plain 
 answer ; and I can only plead for the answer that is attempted here, 
 that it is at least an honest one. It is needless to point out that 
 there is one vital difficulty in estimating the works of a living artist 
 that does not exist in the criticism of one who has passed over to 
 the majority — the difficulty, that is, of describing without offence the 
 influences to which his art has been subject through his life ; the way 
 in which circumstances have aided, thwarted, or modified the develop- 
 ment of his genius. For all imperfection arising from such a cause 
 as this, I can but beg my readers' forbearance, as I shall not attempt 
 to note any such details. 
 
 202 
 
Mr. Watts' training as an artist appears to have been a somewhat 
 desultory one. He went, first of all, to the Schools of the Royal 
 Academy, but gained little good there — at all events, if we may trust 
 his own words : Finding there was no teaching, I very soon ceased to 
 attend. 
 
 But in the year 1842 he gained a first-class prize of ;^300 for a 
 cartoon illustrative of Caractacus led in Triumph through the Streets 
 of Rome. This was in one of the competitions held in Westminster 
 Hall, which were instituted by the Government for the purpose of 
 discovering whether there was any artistic talent applicable to the 
 requirements of fresco. The subsequent history of this cartoon is a 
 somewhat singular one. For the design was sold with the other 
 successful compositions to a private purchaser, and was ultimately 
 cut up into pieces which were disposed of separately. The only 
 portion of this cartoon at present discoverable is in the possession of 
 Sir Walter James. With the money gained by this competition the 
 young artist went to Italy, and there devoted himself to the study of 
 the older Italian masters ; and only returned to England in time to 
 gain another prize of ;^500 for an oil painting representing Alfred 
 inciting the English to prevent the Landing of the Danes. This work 
 was ultimately purchased for the nation, and has since been in one 
 of the waiting-rooms of the House of Lords. It is remarkable for 
 the vigour of its composition, and for a certain purity of colour, which 
 has something in common with the clear atmosphere of the early pre- 
 Raphaelites ; but the chief motive of the picture is evidently derived 
 from Tintoretto, to the influence of which master the bold modelling 
 of the figures is evidently due. 
 
 The influence of these early works in fresco has never altogether 
 faded, and traces of it may be found throughout Mr. Watts' latest 
 work. To this time and its associations may be traced the large 
 manner, the bold conceptions, the dignity of form and gesture, and 
 the somewhat sombre motive of such pictures as Time and Death, 
 Tim^ and Oblivion, Love and Death, and many others ; to this, also, 
 is due, in considerable measure, many of the faults which, offend the 
 casual spectator of Mr. Watts' work. Before,' however, we dwell 
 upon this subject' it is interesting to note that the effects of Mr. 
 Watts' foreign study showed themselves more in the increased 
 scope of his conceptions than in devotion to any special master. 
 During his stay in Italy he seems to have been more receptive of 
 general impressions than actually engaged in studying the technical 
 powers of any individual painter, and he at no time lost sight of that 
 sculpturesque ideal of art which is evident even in his earliest works. 
 The only exception to this is one grand picture, entitled the Illusions 
 of Love, painted in 1849. In it there is more of the ^ctasX painter' s 
 quality, as opposed to the sculptor's, than in any other work by this 
 
 203 
 
artist, and in many ways it rivals the master, of whom it is a manifest 
 though unconscious echo. In what may be called lusciousness of 
 colouring this picture stands alone ; the glowing tints mix together 
 in the ^most exquisite harmony ; the paint seems to be floated on to 
 the canvas, rather than put on with a brush. It is an immorally 
 beautiful picture, and has the atmosphere of youth and strength and 
 passionate desire floating round it like a cloud. And yet there is 
 nothing more certain than that, had the artist gone on painting in 
 this manner, he would never have become truly great. For great- 
 ness in art never comes by repetition ; no matter how accurate, it 
 must be essentially new, if it exists at all. From this abyss into 
 which so many good men have fallen, Mr. Watts was saved by two 
 causes. The one was, that he was too intellectual and earnest a man 
 to rest contented with mere technical perfection ; the other was his 
 devotion to Greek sculpture. If it be true, as is no doubt the case, 
 that he would have in many ways painted better had he confined 
 himself to painting alone, it is true also that though his pictures 
 would have been more perfect, they would have been less beautiful 
 — they would have lost in dignity of form more than they gained in 
 beauty of detail. And another point in this connection must be 
 briefly touched upon. There is one difference between the best 
 sculpture and the best painting the world has ever known which 
 is very commonly overlooked — the difference in its appeal to the 
 purely human sympathies. Painting may claim, and, indeed, always 
 has claimed, our attention for kings, prophets, and warriors, martyrs, 
 angels, and madonnas, surrounded with every circumstance of their 
 glory. Its magnificence of colour, its elaborate combinations of form, 
 its sublimity of conception, are powerful, to some degree, to blind us 
 to the purely human fact that lies at the root of the conception, and 
 we may go away from many a glorious picture, thinking more of its 
 technique and accessories than of aught else. But sculpture has 
 none of these diversities to attract us from its main fact. At its very 
 finest it can but give us a perfect human body, instinct with one simple 
 emotion. Unless, therefore, its appeal is founded upon what we all 
 recognise as true and worthy, it must indubitably fail. It is this 
 quality which has been present in Mr. Watts' work throughout his 
 life — this power of, so to speak, stripping the soul-wrappings oflT his 
 subject, and getting at its real essence. And there is one point on 
 which it has affected his paintings very markedly. If you study 
 carefully the best Grecian sculpture, you cannot .avoid being power- 
 fully impressed by the fact of the strange impersonality of the statues 
 themselves ; the absence therefrom of all the little tiny individual 
 details that make up personality. I wish to guard against being 
 misunderstood to mean by this that they lack character; on the 
 contrary, there is the fullest and clearest expression of character in 
 each face, but it is character in essentials, not followed out into 
 
 204 
 
intricacies and eccentricities — there are no pollarded willows or 
 grafted roses amongst that noble company. An examination of Mr. 
 Watts' paintings reveals the fact that, in this matter, his practice is 
 identical with that of the ancient sculptors — his characters are the 
 most impersonal that can be conceived ; it is not only from their 
 faces, but from their bodies and movements, that every personal 
 detail is avoided or merged in the general impression. This would 
 not, perhaps, be wonderful, if the artist were to obtain the effect by 
 the adoption and repetition of a certain type, such as, for instance, 
 the type of face adopted by Mr. Burne-Jones from Botticelli, or the 
 type of drapery adopted by the same master from Mantegna. But 
 there is nothing of this kind to be noted in Mr. Watts' work. Take, 
 as an example, the pictures of Daphne and Psyche, the only two 
 entirely nude female figures in the exhibition. Here the faces and 
 the characteristics of the bodies are as different as it is well possible 
 for them to be, and yet the same impersonal air is clearly over 
 them both. The one stands straight and stiff by her broken 
 lamp, with a sorrow as yet unrealised upon her face ; she is 
 scarcely more than a child — her 
 
 " Poor girl's blood, 
 Scarce sun-warmed yet with summer " ; 
 
 her head droops, her arms hang listlessly by her sides, her whole 
 
 figure expresses dejection and innocent grief; the thin grey light of 
 
 early dawn wraps her body as a mist. The other is a woman in the 
 
 pride of her beauty, her limbs glowing with warm colour, her body 
 
 thrown a little backward, her arm, raised above her head, touching the 
 
 myrtle into which she is to be changed — a picture of infinite beauty 
 
 and power, 
 
 " Mixed with scent of roses over-ripe, 
 And murmur of the summer afternoon !" 
 
 The consideration of this peculiar quality of our painter's art is 
 closely connected with the old controversy between Realism and 
 Idealism, in the artistic, not the metaphysical, use of those terms. To 
 which camp does Mr. Watts belong ? I should say to neither, or to 
 both ; and this may, perhaps, be made best evident by a few examples. 
 A realist is simply a pre-Raphaelite, one who paints things as well as 
 he can, in a manner as like as possible to what he sees or imagines 
 to have been the case. And idealists are those who think they can 
 improve Nature by alteration, who like to paint events and actions, 
 not as they are or were, but as they prettily might have been. Such 
 is really the substance of the famous dictum of Mr. Ruskin on pre- 
 Raphaelitism, and will do equally well for our purpose. But these 
 words Realism and Idealism have got mixed up in a good many 
 people's minds with imagination and the lack thereof; till, perhaps, 
 most people who use them in art, give to every work which is at all 
 
 205 
 
poetical or imaginative the name of ideal, and to every literal copy of 
 Nature the name of real. The difficulty of using either word cor- 
 rectly with regard to Mr, Watts lies in the fact that, though he is in 
 his main points a decided pre-Raphaelite, as all of his imaginative 
 works prove, yet his practice, to some extent, is that of the idealist's, 
 inasmuch as he translates and generalises many of the facts he attempts 
 to deal with. Thus, for instance, in dealing with the nude model, the 
 last thing which Mr. Watts does in his pictures is to suggest details 
 of his subject as, say, Mr. Alma-Tadema suggested them in the 
 painting of The Sculptor's Model, exhibited at the Academy a few 
 years since ; ^ or as Mr. Millais did, in his picture of The Knight 
 Errant ; or as, to take a better example than either, Mr. Lefebvre 
 suggests them in all his later works. It is excessively difficult to 
 explain exactly in what difference of treatment this result consists ; it 
 is, at least, as much due to a method of mental action, as a method 
 of handling the brush, and the pencil, that produces the effect. Artists 
 regard (what they call in studios) the figure in very different lights. 
 To one man it is a collection of muscles, another sees chiefly the frame- 
 work on which the muscles are stretched, a third sees only the form 
 which some pet old masters saw, and models his conception from 
 that, another sees nothing under the skin, and another sees only a 
 woman stripped of her clothes. Now, any or all of these methods 
 are practised in modern art, and all are wrong ; neither muscles, 
 skin, bones, the treatment of the old masters, nor the representation 
 of an individual woman, is the true manner to study the figure. The 
 fact to be studied lies, not only on the outside of the body, or even 
 the inside, but it comprehends also that which makes the body noble. 
 Call it what we like — sense, spirit, intellect, soul — that is the added 
 factor that removes the painting of the nude from the region of the 
 hospital to the region of the studio. If a painter does not see that 
 in the human body, his pictures bear inevitable witness to the fact, 
 and, no matter how beautifully they are painted, can never be other- 
 wise than offensive. Ruskin said, long since, the souls of men are to 
 be studied in their bodies, not their bodies only. Mulreadys drawings 
 from the nude are more bestial and degraded than the worst grotesques 
 of the Byzantine or even the Indian image-makers. 
 
 Amongst our other great painters, there are only four who can be 
 said to seriously attempt to paint the nude figure : these are, Sir 
 Frederick Leighton, Mr. Edward Burne-Jones, Mr. E. J, Poynter, 
 and, occasionally, Mr. Albert Moore and Mr. Alma - Tadema, 
 the latter a Belgian by birth. Of these artists, Sir Frederick 
 Leighton's method is probably the hardest to characterise in a few 
 words, if only because it combines such various qualities. This most 
 accomplished artist has studied in the chief schools of England, France, 
 
 1 The model's feet, for instance, were quite red with standing in the cold. 
 
 206 
 
Germany, and Italy ; and one result of the various teaching he has 
 undergone has been to make him a sort of artistic Achitophel. He has 
 been too much taught to have learnt anything worth the learning; like 
 some of the unfortunate youths who take high honours at their university, 
 he has more knowledge than he knows what to do with ; and while 
 capable of painting anything in any style, he feels little inclination to use 
 his powers for purposes of expression. The contours of a woman's back, 
 the softness of a woman's limbs, the sweetness of a woman's eyes, and 
 the languor of a woman's love — these are nearly all the subjects that 
 occupy his pencil, and, as might be expected, the continual pruning 
 away of human imperfections and human emotions to which he has 
 subjected his pictures, has resulted in their having but little interest, 
 and even in the best sense of the word, but little beauty. The 
 loveliness that "comes from no secret of proportion, but from the 
 secret of deep human sympathy," is alien to Sir Frederick Leighton's 
 work, and he keeps, as far as his pictures tell us, no corner of his 
 heart for " the few in the fore-front of the great multitude whose 
 faces we know, whose hands we touch, for whom we have to make 
 way in kindly courtesy." This want of sympathy shows clearly 
 enough in the artist's treatment of the figure, which, with all its 
 delicate correctness, has a smoothness and softness that are not of 
 Nature. Under the delicate peach-bloom of his maidens' cheeks, and 
 the clear brown skin of his athletes, there is felt the same want of 
 reality ; his lovers whispering in the twilight, as in last year's Academy 
 picture, call forth little emotion ; they are as unhuman in their per- 
 fection as the voices of the earth and air in Shelley's Prometheus. 
 
 Hands that have done no work, and hearts that have known no 
 sorrow — soft robes that have never been soiled with rain or torn by 
 storm — a blue sky above their heads, and a fruitful earth beneath 
 their feet, and an atmosphere of the land where it seems always after- 
 noon — such are the actors and their surroundings of Sir Frederick 
 Leighton's later works ; is it any wonder that they have little appeal 
 for us who live, girt by the beating of the steely sea, in an age which 
 has certainly little in common with that of Arcady ? 
 
 In fact. Sir Frederick Leighton plays upon the human body with 
 as much skill and with as much indifference as a practised musician, 
 and one day, perhaps, he will be astonished to learn that 
 
 " There is much marvellous music in'this little pipe " 
 
 that he cannot compel to utterance. 
 
 With Mr. Poynter the case is very different. He stands, 
 indeed, with regard to his art, almost at the opposite pole to Sir 
 
 207 
 
Frederick Leighton. His training has been of the most insular 
 kind ; his sympathies with modern art are very slight ; his power is 
 of a peculiar, hard, resolute character ; his draughtsmanship has never 
 succeeded in making itself harmonious in general effect ; what the 
 French call les grands contours du dessin, are singularly absent from 
 his drawing of the figure, which commonly presents us with a man or 
 a woman whose limbs seem to have come together somewhat fortuit- 
 ously, and to be on the point of dislocation. With all this there is in 
 this artist's work an impression of earnestness and well-directed effort 
 that goes far to render it of real value. If some of his figures look 
 as if 
 
 " Some of Nature's journeymen had made men, 
 And not made them, well," 
 
 nevertheless, there is generally to be found in each some real truth of 
 action or form, and he is, perhaps, the only living English artist who 
 at the present time habitually struggles with the problems of drawing 
 presented by the muscles when in violent action. It is not my pur- 
 pose to give a description of Mr. Poynter's merits, but to point out 
 that his conception of the figure is inadequate for two reasons — of 
 which, indeed, either would be sufficient. It is not beautiful form : 
 there is some personal incapacity to understand or to care for beauty 
 of outline, and its place is supplied, as best it may be, by industry 
 and by delineation of varied action. Take any quiescent figure of Mr. 
 Poynter's you like as an example, and examine it carefully, and you 
 will inevitably find this lack of grace. The quality is one that evi- 
 dently does not appeal to the painter. The second reason is that Mr. 
 Poynter's conception of the human figure is not his own, but is bor- 
 rowed from Michael Angelo, and he has, like most imitators, copied 
 rather the accidents than the essence of his master's greatness. I 
 cannot spare time to dwell upon this characteristic ; it is sufficient 
 here to say that it causes him to give undue prominence to the muscles 
 and their action, and is in no small measure answerable for the ugli- 
 nesses of form which are of frequent occurrence in his work. 
 
 Mr. Edward Burne-Jones is an artist of very different calibre from 
 either of the above-named, and one whose most delightful qualities 
 are little connected with his drawing of the figure, which is, indeed, 
 in his work, almost always partially draped. But as he is at the 
 present time the representative man of the pre-Raphaelites, and as 
 his work is in its way of very exquisite quality, we must say a few 
 words upon his art. 
 
 The reading of life which Mr, Burne-Jones' compositions show is 
 as essentially mediaeval Italian in its character as Sir Frederick 
 Leighton's is degenerate Greek. The glory of the body itself, and 
 the fear of the body itself, is the keynote to these two painters' work 
 
 208 
 
— the conception, respectively, of the athlete and the ascetic. But 
 the curious turn of mind which has, in Mr. Burne-Jones, grafted the 
 passions of the athlete upon the mind of the ascetic, is one for 
 which we can scarcely find a parallel in the history of art. Never, 
 probably, before has an artist devoted himself to the representation of 
 love and beauty with so shuddering a conscience, and so overpower- 
 ing a sympathy. Not only loving but love-sick are all his char- 
 acters — their love oppresses as a physical suffering — their heads and 
 bodies droop beneath it. , 
 
 We have had discussions ad nauseam as to the morality or im- 
 morality of Mr. 'Burne-Jones' pictures, and I certainly do not intend to 
 enter upon one here ; but I wish to point out how incompatible with 
 any worthy rendering of the human figure is the state of mind that I 
 have just hinted at above. In art as in religion it is true that perfect 
 love casteth out fear, and the mediaeval conception of love was, as 
 Kingsley says in more than one of his books, a wholly vitiated one, 
 founded upon fear and ignorance. For the rest, Mr. Burne-Jones' 
 study and drawing of the nude have not been carried out to anything 
 like the same extent as the masters of whom we have been speaking, 
 and he has never attained mastery of the contours of the figure as a 
 whole. Something of the archaicism of Botticelli and Mantegna 
 clings to him still, and, to go no further than one of his peculiarities, 
 he is apt to reduce both men and women to a type which, while par- 
 taking of the character of both, is a perfect representation of neither. 
 
 This somewhat long digression was necessary to show why I rank 
 Mr. Watts' painting of the nude figure, in certain essential respects, 
 above that of any of our English artists, since it comprises a 
 greater number of the more vital requisites of figure-painting than 
 is to be found elsewhere in England ; nor do I know any living 
 artist, with perhaps the single exception of Henner, who excels Watts 
 in this respect. The vital requisites to which allusion . is made are 
 these, arranged as nearly as possible in order of value — dignity of 
 form and gesture (attained by the most thorough knowledge, com- 
 bined with the power of separating and rejecting all irrelevant and 
 incompatible details); purity, the result, not of one quality of mind or 
 hand, but of habitual thought ; power, the result of working habitually 
 on a large scale, and on subjects of adequate importance. These 
 three are the most essential qualities in figure-painting, and in all 
 these Mr. Watts' work leaves little or nothing to be desired. His 
 failures, indeed, are intimately connected with his merits, since they 
 almost invariably arise from the undertaking of some conception 
 too involved in meaning, or too gigantic in size, to be adequately 
 carried out in oil painting. Such works as the enormous head and 
 bust of Satan in this gallery, and the still larger composition entitled 
 2 E 209 
 
Time and Oblivion, are in their very nature unsuited for oil-pictures. 
 They are incomplete dreams upon subjects unadapted for pictorial 
 representation in any complete manner, and should have been done, 
 if done at all, only in the roughest description of fresco, over some 
 dark archway, or on the apse of some great cathedral. Not that they 
 do not possess many great beauties (the gesture, for instance, with 
 which Oblivion sweeps her dark robes round her face as she hurries 
 towards the grave, is one of the grandest pieces of expressional form 
 I remember to have seen), but that those beauties only serve to make 
 us regret the necessary incompleteness of the whole. Again, few 
 people, I think, can have noticed the half-nude figure entitled Arcadia, 
 without feeling that it strikes one of the few false notes in this 
 master's work. The reason is manifest : we only dwell in Arcadia 
 once in our lives, and never after the questions of life and thought 
 have begun to perplex and sadden us. Mr. Watts' female figure has 
 none of the innocent gladness and belief that she should typify. He 
 has tried hard to make her glad, and has only succeeded in making 
 her embarrassed ; it is one of the few occasions where he has not felt 
 his subject. Such failures are not numerous ; out of the two hundred 
 pictures here there are hardly twenty that miss their point in meaning, 
 and nearly all of these are examples in which the artist has departed 
 from what we may perhaps be allowed to call his usual line of 
 business. A thoughtful man playing at thoughtlessness, is a very 
 charming spectacle if successful, but approaches dangerously near to 
 failure. Few of those who habitually feel the significance of life can 
 lay aside their knowledge even for an hour. 
 
 And this brings me to the consideration of the chief imperfections 
 in our Master's work ; imperfections of which the presence is manifest 
 to all who look at the pictures, though few take the trouble to 
 thoroughly investigate their shortcomings, or seek for their origin. 
 The fact remains, that oi the. perfection which is the mark of the greatest 
 art, we find little trace here. Hardly any of the pictures strike us 
 with the irresistible impressions of Tightness that we gain from work 
 which has been executed with perfect knowledge. They are rather 
 like the actions of Dorothea Casaubon, the " offspring of a certain 
 spiritual grandeur, ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity." 
 The purely artistic side of art — the use, that is, in absolute perfection 
 of the brush, the pencil, and the colour — has always been the side 
 of his work which has had least attraction for Mr. Watts. Caring 
 very greatly for the result, he has never — or, at least, so I think — cared 
 quite sufficiently for the means whereby it could be best attained. 
 Both in thought and action, the superficial has had for him little 
 fascination ; and the life-long study of means, which so many artists 
 make the occupation and even aim of their lives, has been to him 
 only a stumbling-block. It was the habit of his mind, as it was of 
 
 2IO 
 
Savonarola's, to conceive great things, and to feel that he was the man 
 to do them ; and this has been at once his weakness and his strength. 
 His weakness, in urging him to the continual adoption of great 
 undertakings without reference to his powers of health and the 
 circumstances of his life ; and his strength, in encouraging him under 
 the neglect of his finest works. It is a somewhat pathetic little line 
 that appears under most of the largest works now exhibiting at the 
 Grosvenor Gallery, though it only contains four words — Little 
 Holland House Gallery ; for Little Holland House is, I need hardly 
 tell my readers, Mr. Watts' own dwelling, and the pictures therein 
 are his. Trying to trace the artist's mind in his pictures, I think, 
 shows us something more as to the causes of his comparative failures. 
 His is a dreamer with a purpose. And, alas ! dreamers should have 
 no motive. Kubla Khan would not be improved by the addition of a 
 moral. Perhaps the difference between the greatest art and that which 
 just fails to be the greatest (leaving out for the moment all question of 
 technique) is that the first is rather a motive power to great thoughts, 
 and that the second embodies, or strives to embody, some special 
 thesis — a difference that may be exemplified by that between a 
 symphony by Beethoven and an opera by Wagner. 
 
 In all Mr. Watts' large works, the thought has predominated 
 over the expression, or at least the thought has been enforced 
 to the utmost of the painter's power. And it is as distinctly an 
 error for art to be markedly moral as it is for it to be the 
 reverse. With stronger health, and with a slightly less sombre 
 habit of mind, Mr. Watts' works would have swept away their 
 excess of thought, in their splendour of colour and composition. 
 Had the artist not taken life quite so hardly, his pictures would have 
 gained to a very considerable extent. As it is, there is scarcely one 
 of the finest of the imaginative works which is not either distinctly 
 mournful in subject or depressed in spirit. And this is shown with 
 wonderful clearness on an examination of the landscapes. We can 
 fancy some robust squire saying, " Surely this cannot be meant for 
 England ; this sad, grey, green country, without life, or colour, or air, 
 whose leaden skies hang heavily over dull brown trees, and even the 
 green fields seem to have a livid unwholesome look." And yet 
 these landscapes are beautiful, if we take them simply for what they 
 are — notes of depression cast into the shape of pictures. With much 
 of the poetry of Corot, Millet, and Rousseau, but with a deeper, 
 more satisfying harmony of colour, they combine a solemnity of feeling 
 which is none the less remarkable for its being evidently unsought, 
 and they are curiously free from the morbid feeling of such land- 
 scapes as those of Mr. Cecil Lawson, or the academicism of M. 
 Legros. The matter may be shortly summed up by saying that the 
 life of beauty has had no existence for Mr. Watts, unless it has been 
 
 211 
 
of such a kind as to enable him to connect it in his own mind, or in the 
 mind of others, with great thoughts or interests. The one order of 
 beauty which, as George Eliot said in Adam Bede, " seems made to 
 turn the head, not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of 
 women," has had no attraction for him, or at least not until he could find 
 in it some trace of emotion, some hint of suffering, or thwarted circum- 
 stance. Thus the beauty of a woman's flesh, which may probably 
 be considered the most purely sensuous phase of beauty in the world, 
 has almost invariably been ignored by him ; while the lines of her 
 form, which he was able to connect with Greek art, have been 
 his greatest delight. Continually in his pictures do we find the flesh 
 of a crude and almost repulsive colour, and possessing none of the 
 finer qualities of surface. With these few remarks upon Mr. Watts' 
 shortcomings, I must leave the subject ; but before proceeding, 
 I must, at the risk of wearying my readers, say a few words upon 
 the peculiarities of colour and arrangement in his pictures. 
 
 Like most masters who have been engaged in fresco, he uses 
 but little medium in his work, and paints comparatively dry. In 
 this respect his later pictures differ considerably from his earlier 
 work, and the difference may perhaps be understood when I 
 say that they rather resemble Tintoretto than Titian. One of 
 his chief theories in painting is to depend a great deal upon the 
 purity of his ground colour ; and this he always strives to preserve 
 or restore throughout the painting. One result of this method 
 is that his newly -finished works are very frequently of somewhat 
 dead and heavy appearance, and only show their full qualities of 
 colour when, after the lapse of a year or two, they come to be 
 varnished. It will be noticed by the visitors to the Grosvenor 
 Gallery, that, chiefly from this cause, many of the early pictures 
 are apparently much richer in colour than those which have 
 been lately executed. Mr. Watts has also considerably modified 
 his scheme of colour of late years. This has altered from bright to 
 rich, and a certain quality of tint, which might almost be called 
 garish, has entirely disappeared. One of the chief peculiarities of 
 the artist is the very full range of his present colour harmonies, for 
 in each of the three primaries he seems to find almost equal delight. 
 Perhaps the majority of his works are chiefly concerned with modifi- 
 cations of yellowish brown and blue, but he is likewise very skilful 
 in the introduction of scarlet and crimson draperies, as, for instance, 
 in the great portrait of Sir Frederick Leighton, exhibited in the 
 Academy of 1881, and one of his latest pictures (not exhibited at 
 the Grosvenor) is a study in various tones of red. The drapery, 
 however, which the artist has employed lately for some of his chief 
 pictures, such as those of Love and Death, and Orpheus and Eury- 
 dice, is of a peculiar greenish grey, and is perhaps the least satis- 
 
 212 
 
factory note of colour throughout his work. When employed on 
 large surfaces, as in the pictures above mentioned, it gives a cold, 
 monumental character to the work, which, though dramatically 
 appropriate to the subject, is decidedly injurious to the beauty of the 
 picture. We can hardly tell what will be the exact effect of age 
 upon these grey robes, but the employment of so much cold colour 
 must always be injurious to the effect of the picture, and throughout 
 the work of the great colourists of the Venetian and Florentine 
 schools we rarely meet with tertiary hues disposed in such masses 
 as to practically form the keynote of the picture. 
 
 In main effect Mr. Watts' work may perhaps be best described 
 as bearing the same relation to Reynolds as that of Tintoretto to 
 Titian, and indeed this parallel would hold good in several ways. 
 His most peculiar powers in this respect are shown in his mastery 
 over low tones of grey and green, as, for instance, in the picture of 
 The Dove returning to the Ark, or the Psyche alluded to above. 
 In the management of these shades he may be called emphatically a 
 great colourist, one of the greatest ; and if I hesitate to bestow this 
 title upon him with regard to all his work, it is only because his 
 pictures, which are constructed on a scheme of full colour, seem to 
 me to lack the joyousness and serenity that always accompany the 
 work of really splendid colourists. A few shades of the prison-house, 
 always linger over their brightness ; there are to be found in every 
 one notes of imperfection, weariness, and — I had almost said — 
 failure. In several, too, of the earlier works, where brightness has 
 been ohiefly aimed at, and where the colours employed are kept 
 comparatively pure, there is a lack of that deep satisfying lustre, as 
 of a cut-open precious stone, that marks the greatest work. 
 
 Those of my readers who are acquainted with the works of Venetian 
 masters, will be at no loss to understand my meaning, and for those 
 who are not some hint of it may be gathered by them if they remem- 
 ber some of the early work of Mr. Millais, and the pictures of Mr. 
 Burne-Jones, Mr. Holman Hunt, and Mr. Rossetti. Or, perhaps, a 
 more perfect example still (more perfect, because unallied with 
 deficiencies of feeling or perversities of mind) is to be found in the 
 early pictures of Mr. Hook, R.A. Such compositions as The 
 Trawlers and Luff, Boy! have all the richness of the Venetian 
 colouring, if not all the splendour. To this beauty Mr. Watts has 
 never been able to attain, though in one or two pictures — for 
 instance, the work in the Grosvenor Gallery of A Lady playing the 
 Piano, and the Illusions of Life — we find sonie approach to it. 
 
 Into the causes of this failure to attain the power which is the 
 
 213 
 
rarest, and, I hold, the most precious of all artistic capabilities, it is 
 needless to inquire closely. I may, however, point out that the 
 colour harmonies of Mr. Watts' work fail, where they fail at all, 
 with a frank confession of imperfection that is very far removed 
 from total failure. Indeed, in his colouring, as in his draughtsman- 
 ship, and in the composition of his pictures, this artist's frankness of 
 speech is at once his greatest charm and the occasion of his severest 
 criticism. If any pictures ever told a spectator that their painter 
 saw heights to which he could not approach, depths which he could 
 not fathom, and meanings which he could not explain, these com- 
 positions tell the tale ; and as the majority of people admire the 
 cocksureness of Macaulay more than the pregnant hints of Carlyle, 
 so do most picture -lovers prefer artists whose pictorial speech is 
 clear and unhesitating, and who feel no incapacity because they 
 (like people who are short-sighted) have a keener vision for little 
 things near at hand. There are few topics more alluring to the 
 majority of commonplace minds than the imperfections of the great 
 in any walk of life, and it was not to be supposed that the general 
 public, which understood neither the aims nor the difficulties which 
 guided and perplexed Mr. Watts in his pictures, would refrain 
 from harsh criticism of an artist wh'o confessed himself only a 
 student in his art. And this became more certainly the case owing 
 to Mr. Watts' practice of exhibiting great works in an incomplete 
 state — a practice which, however objectionable in itself, was in this 
 case the only alternative to not exhibiting at all — an alternative 
 which, I may remark in passing, was frequently chosen. 
 
 I have said very little about Mr. Watts' peculiarities of drawing, 
 and shall hardly touch upon that subject, both because it is one 
 which can hardly be rendered interesting to the general reader, and 
 because any criticism of its technicalities that would be worthy of 
 the name, would stretch beyond endurable limits an article which is, 
 I fear, already too long. If it were possible to characterise his 
 method shortly with reference to draughtsmanship, I should say that 
 the leading quality was a large pre-Raphaelitism — pre-Raphaelitism, 
 that is, divested of its eccentricities and laborious shortcomings, 
 and directed to the heart of the subject-matter rather than to its 
 outside. It is quite certain, I think, that the body of man is 
 regarded by the artist much after the fashion of Carlyle in Sartor 
 Resartus — it is only "the garment thou see'st him by" ; and this 
 method of thought affects the method of the hand, and gives a certain 
 amount of subtle generalisation to the artist's compositions. Much 
 as a man who can read never looks at a book, even unopened on 
 a shelf, quite in the same way as a man who cannot, so an artist 
 who can read the soul, cannot ever draw form quite in the same way 
 as one who reads and draws the body only. Some foolish critics 
 
 214 
 
have spoken about not liking this figure's attitude, or that figure's 
 limbs, or the other figure's flesh-painting, not apparently remember- 
 ing that, in most cases, the works to which they were objecting 
 were wholly unfinished, and that, moreover, an artist may fairly 
 claim to be judged by the mass of his work, especially when it is all 
 exhibited together, as in the Grosvenor Gallery. It is as absurd to 
 talk or write about Mr. Watts not knowing the proportions of the 
 human figure, as it would have been to tell Mr. Street that he did 
 not know the elements of Gothic, or to explain to Mr. Huxley that 
 he was ignorant of the theories of evolution. And the absurdity 
 culminates when proceeding, as such criticisms generally do pro- 
 ceed, from critics who never drew a figure in their lives. Of all 
 things in the world to criticise with any chance of being right, the 
 drawing of the figure is the hardest, even in its most straight- 
 forward kind, and when it comes to criticising generalised form 
 — as opposed to anatomical form — it needs half a lifetime spent in 
 actual study of the nude, to tell when, how, and where a drawing is 
 wrong — and right. 
 
 I made, in an earlier portion of this article, a comparison between 
 the treatment of the figure by Mr. Watts, and by some other of the 
 greatest English living painters — somewhat perhaps to the dis- 
 advantage of the latter ; in justice, I must say a word or two to 
 explain the comparative rank of Mr. Watts as a draughtsman, and, 
 as I have hinted at his excellencies, mention his defect. It is, 
 undoubtedly, a deficiency of delicacy in outline, a tendency to 
 substitute masses for refinement of form, and to lose sight of the 
 beauty which comes from what is generally known as subtle draw- 
 ing. Much of this is connected inseparably with his methods of 
 thought and conception of art ; but he would probably never have 
 been able to gain a delicate beauty of outline such as we see in Sir 
 Frederick Leighton's work — outlines, that is, where each line seems 
 dependent upon the other, and where all blend together in perfect 
 unity.^ Or, to take another instance, he would never be able to 
 touch the tenderness of drawing with which Mr. Burne- Jones 
 executes his pencil heads. In this latter instance, the quality of the 
 work is as indefinable as the scent of a flower, or the touch upon the 
 violin of a great musician. We perceive the effect, and that is all. 
 In Mr. Watts' best drawing there is something of ruggedness, as of 
 one who, after a day spent in hot battle, should come home and try 
 to touch softly the face of his sleeping child — the hand is kind and 
 true, but it is heavy, and has been trained to sterner work. 
 These shortcomings are visible, too, in his treatment of drapery, 
 which is always well-disposed, but has an appearance as of the sharp 
 marks of the chisel left upon an unfinished statue. Sweeping finely 
 
 ^ I think now that the foregoing statement needs niodification. 
 
 215 
 
in the main contours, it hardly clings to and emphasises the form of 
 the body ; with much of the nobility of draperies in the Greek statues, 
 there is little of their mystery, intricacy, and softness. Those who 
 will think of the work of Mr, Albert Moore, will understand my 
 meaning when I say that Mr. Watts' work is, in this respect, 
 singularly imperfect for one who in other respects so thoroughly 
 understands and preserves the spirit of Greek art. 
 
 But it is a curious fact that much attention bestowed upon 
 draperies, and great excellence in their delineation, has always 
 been a sign of artists whose sympathies were less wide than 
 they were accurate — who preferred form to spirit. Compare, for 
 instance, the works of the Byzantines and Cimabue with that of 
 Giotto — the work of Mantegna with that of Andrea del Sarto — 
 the work of Carpaccio with Bellini, and that of Veronese with 
 Tintoretto. 
 
 Perhaps the truth of the matter is that the imaginative faculty, 
 when existing at all, can only exist as an imperious master, and 
 will not suffer the introduction into its domain of more than a 
 certain amount of alien matter. A man who can create, either in. 
 poetry, painting, or music, is hardly the master of how he will 
 create, or what — except in those rarest of all cases in which, as 
 in Shakespeare, the imaginative power is balanced by an equal 
 amount of intellectual judgment. Intensest feeling, and the power 
 to weigh and distribute that feeling with perfect impartiality, is, 
 I suppose, the highest outcome of genius, and gives us a Dante 
 or Shakespeare. Neither of these is our painter, but an imperfect 
 man, struggling with the utterance of noble conceptions, and ex- 
 periencing many a bad fall in the attempt. Not for that should 
 we despise his partial achievements, or forget Blake's wise dictum 
 that 
 
 " The errors of a wise man make your rule. 
 Rather than the perfections of a fool." 
 
 Mr. Watts' painting is open to the same reproach : " erring and 
 imperfect," as Mr. Stevenson says in Virginibus Puerisgtie, "but 
 filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with 
 ineffective qualities." 
 
 I must say a few words as to Mr. Watts' treatment of the various 
 imaginative subjects upon which he has chiefly expended his energies 
 — subjects which may be roughly classified as Religious and Poetic. 
 His manner of dealing with the former of these subjects is 
 essentially an undogmatic one, and is, perhaps, a typical example 
 of the present state of uncertainty and unrest. As far as I can 
 read these pictures, they shadow forth a state of mind in which 
 
 216 
 
the great problems of life and death, redemption and salvation, 
 have received no adequate solution, but in which Christianity and 
 its teachings form the symbols through which the artist expresses 
 his belief in a Creator, and in some moral government of the 
 universe. Such works as Dedicated to all the Churches, the 
 Sketches for the Progress of Creation, The Creation and Tempta- 
 tion of Eve, The Return of the Dove, and others, illustrate the 
 Christian legend with an amount of sorrowful unrest that has 
 nothing in it of dogmatic assurance. They seem rather symbolical 
 appeals to some unshaped faith, th.an records of facts in which belief 
 is certain ; but, however this may be (arid I am far from wishing 
 to draw any conclusion from the pictures that is at all strained), 
 there can be no doubt that the subjects are treated sadly, and the 
 personal motive of the pictures is depression. I do not remember 
 a sadder picture than that of the dove resting on the stump of 
 a tree, after her last flight from the ark,^ and the one which shows 
 her return with the olive branch, is almost equally dreary. In the 
 other pictures the sadness is impersonal, but they all seem troubled, 
 and the rendering of each scene frequently dwells upon the 
 element of disturbance, the motive of the conception being that 
 which Newman hints at, in the following quotation from the 
 Apologia : — 
 
 " Starting, then, with the being of a God, which, as I have said, is 
 as certain to me as the certainty of my own existence, — though, 
 when I try to put the grounds of that certainty into logical shape, 
 I find a difficulty in doing so in word and figure to my satisfac- 
 tion, — I look out of myself into the world of men, and there I 
 see a sight which fills me with unspeakable distress. The world 
 seems simply to give the lie to that great truth of which my 
 whole being is so full ; and the effect upon me is, in consequence, 
 as a matter of necessity, as confusing as if it denied that I am 
 in existence myself." 
 
 If we turn for a moment from the religious or quasi -religious 
 pictures, to the few where Mr. Watts has taken for subjects the 
 incidents of ihodern life, we see this bias of thought still more 
 strongly. Found Drowned, Under a Dry Archway, The Irish 
 Famine — such are the subjects of the artist's choice, and their 
 treatment is characterised by the sternest realism. No modern 
 painter with whom I am acquainted has touched with so unsparing, 
 and yet so sympathetic a hand, the problem of woman's degradation, 
 and we must notice as a curious fact that, in the treatment of 
 this subject, Mr. Watts' work becomes, for the first time, purely 
 realistic. His largest picture of this kind, another example of 
 
 1 This picture was not included in the Grosvenor Gallery collection. 
 2 F 217 
 
Found Drowned, is not in the Gallery. This is an early and com- 
 paratively hardly painted work, but possesses many good qualities, 
 and that interest that attaches to plain speech on a subject where 
 folks are habitually reticent. But the picture of the woman dying 
 in the dawn under the archway, which is here exhibited, is far 
 finer, and, despite the almost ghastly misery of the subject's face, 
 far more beautiful.^ Underneath, there hangs a portrait study of a 
 fair young girl, with not a line of trouble marring the softness of 
 her face, or the roundness of her cheek ; not a fold of her fresh 
 dress crumpled or awry. She is in profile, her sweet lips parted 
 as if in the act of speaking — delicate, fresh, and fair, and sweet as 
 English air can make her. She might stand there, in her gentle 
 beauty, 
 
 " Whole ages long, the whole world through, 
 For preachings of what God can do." 
 
 And above hangs the picture of the tramp, crouching against the 
 cold masonry of the arch, and shivering closer into her wretched 
 shawl. The juxtaposition — one, we suppose, of pure chance — is 
 very striking, but it is good to remember that the same hand 
 painted both works, and that, perhaps, if the artist had not felt 
 sympathy for the misery of the one, he had never been able to 
 express the purity and grace of the other. 
 
 The problem of such a contrast is too grave to be touched 
 upon here ; let me rather say a few words upon the large, 
 imaginative works, which form so striking an element in this 
 exhibition. Some of them are finished pictures, but most of them 
 can hardly be described as more than the first statements of the 
 thought which the painter intends to illustrate. They may be 
 divided roughly into works of fancy and works of thought — the 
 former being attempts at striking a lighter chord of meaning ; 
 the latter expressing chiefly the artist's habitual mood. Of these 
 classes we may say at once, that the first is the least attractive, 
 and few of the examples can be considered altogether successful. 
 Such pictures as Mischief, for instance, remind us painfully with 
 how much lighter a hand such a painter as Etty would have touched 
 the subject, and how little Mr. Watts has been able to express 
 any intelligible conception of the scene. The Arcadia, too, to 
 which we referred above, is a total failure in feeling, and 
 represents simply a half- nude model in a rather unfortunate 
 attitude. So, again, with such compositions as Fata Morgana, 
 The Infant Hercules tended by Nymphs (unfinished), and, worst 
 of all, Ariadne deserted by Theseus, we find no interest and 
 little beauty. They are awkward attempts to excel in a line 
 
 1 On going again to the Grosvenor Gallery, I found that I was mistaken in the place of 
 this picture. It hung in the East room, close to the large work of Aristides and the 
 Shepherd. 
 
 2l8 
 
which is not sympathetic to. the painter^ — trials of a skilful violin- 
 player to perform on the banjo and the bones. The two largest 
 works of the second class — that/ namely, which deals with subjects 
 of deep imaginative interest, ' and treats them seriously — ma:y be 
 dismissed very briefly. The composition of two heroic-size figures, 
 entitled Time and Oblivion, is a magnificent piece in line, but con- 
 ceived on too gigantic a scale to be worked out perfectly; without 
 many years of labour, and it may be doubted whether it would 
 ever make a wholly satisfactory picture ; the one entitled Satan, 
 a nude, half-length figure, also of gigantic size, with a head turned 
 away from the spectator, is open to the same remark, with the 
 added objection, that a picture in which there is only half a figure, 
 and that half only shows the back of his head, is hardly likely to 
 be specially interesting or intelligible, and that such a subject of 
 such a size should certainly be both, to justify existence at all. 
 Of the large work of Love and Death no such criticism can be 
 made ; its facts are stated with wonderful clearness and power ; 
 the picture is adequately finished ; and presents a novel and striking 
 treatment of a great subject, and is very beautiful in composition 
 and colour. 
 
 On the whole, this composition may rank as the finest of our 
 artist's imaginative allegories. 
 
 The conception of Love, standing upon the threshold of the House 
 of Life, striving ineffectually to bar the advance of Death, is very 
 beautiful, and both in drawing and colour, and the movement of his 
 figure resisting to the last the power which he feels must prevail, is 
 expressed with extraordinary ability. The problem of combining 
 the most violent exertion, with grace of attitude, has been solved by 
 Mr. Watts in this picture with complete success, and so has the diffi- 
 culty of expressing, in the two typical figures, the double action of 
 feeble violence, and quiet but resistless strength. All the minor details, 
 from the brushed feathers of Love's once bright wings, to the falling 
 petals of the roses that surround the porch, are finished with the most 
 delicate beauty, and the whole work is instinct with the best form of 
 pre-Raphaelitism. 
 
 There is another large composition, of somewhat similar treat- 
 ment, entitled Time, Death, and Fate, which may perhaps rank 
 with this ; but as this is at present, I believe, undergoing con- 
 siderable alterations at Mr. Watts' hand, and, as I have not seen 
 it for some years, I cannot speak of it with any detail. A small 
 first sketch for this work may be seen in the West Gallery here, 
 but is of inferior merit to the finished picture. The largest 
 work in this exhibition is one which reaches from floor to ceiling 
 of the largest gallery, and is entitled The Angel, of De.ath. 
 
 219 
 
This composition is in an excessively unfinished state, and I do not, 
 therefore, purpose to criticise it minutely. The picture is a symbolical 
 one of many figures, representing various types of men and women 
 who have come to Death to pray for release, or to sacrifice their lives 
 for others, and above them all sits the great compassionate Angel, 
 enthroned upon the ruins of the world, and holding in her lap the 
 form of a dead child. One of the finest figures is that of a beautiful 
 girl, who is wearily resting her head against the winding-sheet that 
 flows down from Death's robe ; and the form of the warrior laying 
 down his sword upon the altar in the centre of the picture, has much 
 simple dignity. Should Mr. Watts be able to finish this work, and 
 make it as beautiful in colour, as it is already grand in conception 
 and form, it will be one of the noblest pictures in modern art. 
 Even now this is a most beautiful and thoughtful illustration of a 
 sombre theme. 
 
 The other poetical pictures also deserve careful examination. The 
 Sir Galahad is the most perfect, and the Paolo and Francesca the 
 most tragic conception of their respective subjects that I remember. 
 I do not feel myself the latter picture has the perfection of love endur- 
 ing through suffering, that marked the great work on the same subject 
 by Ary Scheffer ; but that, despite the imperfections of colour, was 
 dramatically and emotionally perfect, and is hardly capable of being 
 surpassed. The Sir Galahad is noticeable for the colour, and 
 the painting of the armour and the woody background. The 
 face, too, of the knight, as he stands bareheaded, gazing before him 
 at the vision none else might see, expresses all the purity and 
 enthusiasm of the spotless knight, and the whole picture is far more 
 cheerful, both in colour and general conception, than is usual in Mr. 
 Watts' best work, and bears a considerable likeness to the manner in 
 which Sir John Millais would probably have executed a similar subject. 
 Less successful in this respect is Una and the Red Cross Knight, a 
 composition in low tones of colour, representing the first lines of the 
 Faerie Queene, and which appears to have little of the tender gaiety 
 of Spenser's verse. Another illustration to Spenser's epic treats of 
 Britomart and her Nurse before the Magic Mirror ; and even here, 
 though the artist has expressed himself with singular clearness and 
 power, we feel the want of the atmosphere that envelops the poem. 
 The work is beautiful, but with a certain roughness in its beauty : 
 in Loves and gentle Jollities arraid, but with underlying notes of 
 terror and disturbance, and a prevailing motive of unrest. I do not 
 mean so much that, in this respect, it runs contrary to the sense 
 of the original words, but is contrary to the spirit of the 
 whole poem, for, as we all know, the Faerie Queene has that 
 peculiar power of describing the most disastrous incidents with a 
 certain grace and courtesy of manner which cover their real 
 significance. 
 
 220 
 
I cannot attempt to notice in detail any more of the poetical works 
 in this gallery, as a few words must be said upon the collection of 
 portraits here exhibited. The collection is a very notable one. 
 
 During the last half- century, there has hardly been a very 
 great man in any calling who has not furnished Mr. Watts with 
 a subject : from Jerome Buonaparte to Mrs. Langtry we have 
 them all ; and the only difficulty is to know which to select for 
 notice ; for there is always, in the criticism of portraits, this diffi- 
 culty, that the faces of those we love, admire, or respect, seem 
 to us better pictures (unless they are distinctly failures) than those 
 which represent an unknown entity. I think best, therefore, since 
 I can but mention a few specimens of this branch of Mr. Watts' 
 art, to confine my remarks to the portraits of those men and women 
 of whom I have personal knowledge, and of whose likenesses I can 
 therefore speak with some degree of certainty. These, fortunately, 
 comprise some of the best examples of the artist's portrait-painting, 
 amongst them being Mr. Browning, Sir Frederick Leighton, Mr. 
 Morris, Mr. W. S. Lecky, Mr. Burne-Jones, Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
 and Herr Joachim. 
 
 Of these the last is, in all essential respects, the finest picture, 
 though only ranked by the painter as a lamplight study. The 
 celebrated musician is represented in the act of drawing the bow 
 across his violin, his head a little bent down towards the instrument. 
 Perhaps, as a likeness, a little flattering, but only in the sense of 
 taking the performer at his very best moment, and, if flattery there 
 be, it is more in expression than feature. The wonderful part of 
 this picture gives us the key to Mr. Watts' great renown as a 
 portrait painter — his capacity, namely, for seizing upon the main 
 points of his sitter's character, and impressing them upon his picture. 
 Without exaggeration of language, this portrait may be said to 
 express music, as truly as it expresses Herr Joachim. Technically, 
 the picture is very simply and quietly painted ; there is no Rem- 
 brandtesque effect of light and shade, no vivid flesh tints, no elabora- 
 tion of detail, but, out of a softly dark background, the face, hand, 
 and violin of the musician show with clear yet subdued distinctness. 
 The portrait of Mr. Leslie Stephen is in some respects even more 
 wonderful, since it was, Mr. Watts informs me, executed at a 
 single sitting. The execution is comparatively slight, but rather 
 brilliant in its flesh tints, and the painting of the hair and beard is 
 especially noticeable for quiet but effective suggestiveness. The 
 face is very peculiar — critical yet deprecating, sarcastic and mournful, 
 fastidious, thoughtful, and Bohemian : not one who ranks either 
 himself or others very high, or expects much from a life that appears 
 to him full of errors of taste, weaknesses of intellect, and futilities of 
 
 22 1 
 
aim. All, at least, of this may be traced in this portrait, which might 
 stand in some way as an antithesis of character to the musician's 
 picture — full of a discordant music. 
 
 If these two studies are truly penetrative of character in their 
 various ways, still more so is the likeness of Mr. Burne-Jones. In 
 this Mr. Watts has apparently had no overmastering sentiment to 
 express, nor has he altogether taken the face as a type of character ; 
 but has confined his efforts to rendering some of the most prominent 
 characteristics of his sitter. The face, though unmistakably like, 
 has grown more refined in colouring and form beneath his hands, 
 and shows less weakness than in life. But out of the misty blue 
 eyes there looks that curious expression of inner sight that is 
 never seen except in those who dwell in an ideal world. Mr. Burne- 
 Jones looks here as Kilmeny looked when she came back at sunset 
 to her old cottage home, and 
 
 " As still was her look, and as still was her e'e. 
 As the stillness that lay on the emerant lea, 
 Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea. 
 For Kilmeny had been she knew not where. 
 And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare." 
 
 Much as Blake drew the man who built the Pyramids, Mr. Watts 
 has here painted the man who drew the Laus Veneris and the Chant 
 cF Amour — those strange pictures whose glorious colouring is suffused 
 with a tragic splendour, and meanings that we scarcely care to trace — 
 
 " Dreamer of dreams born out of his due time." 
 
 The painter stands before us who can find nothing in modern life 
 that is beautiful, or in modern thought that is worthy, and who 
 expresses his sense of the discord between the beauty he craves, 
 and the ugliness he sees, in terms of sympathy with a mediaeval 
 world, with which he would have been far more out of harmony, had 
 he lived therein, than in this nineteenth century. Look, again, for 
 an instance of penetration into an alien character, at the portrait 
 of Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A., in his robes of D.C.L. A 
 fine face, a figure in an easy attitude and a gorgeous dress, and 
 behind, in the distance, an artist's palette and the legs of a bronze 
 statue. An accomplished man, and a highly-trained painter — a most 
 fitting President of the Royal Academy. It is noticeable that, 
 almost alone of Mr. Watts' later and finer portraits, has he given in 
 this one prominence to the dress, figure, and surroundings of the 
 sitter. Surely, this is an instance of unconscious sympathy, for is it 
 not true that in some measure the dress of circumstance, success, 
 and accomplishment have overlaid Frederick Leighton's power as 
 an artist ? ^ He paints more beautifully than ever ; but if any 
 
 1 The mordant sarcasm of Mr. Whistler comes to mind in this connection — "paints too " ! 
 was his addition -to the list of the President's social and intellectual graces. 
 
 222 
 
genuine lover of art was asked whether he would have the Cimabue 
 Procession, or his last year's Academy picture, would there be the 
 slightest hesitation in answering in favour of his earliest work ? ^ 
 When John Ruskin saw this picture in the Academy, in 1855, he 
 wrote a good deal about it, and wound up with the following words : — 
 
 . " It seems to me probable that Mr. Leighton has, greatness in him, 
 but there is no absolute proof of it in this picture ; and if he 
 does not in succeeding years paint far better, he will soon lose 
 his power of painting so well." 
 
 I must not enter into more details of these portraits, nor can 
 I spare space to allude, except in general terms, to the female like- 
 nesses. These latter are marked by an inequality that does not 
 extend to the male pictures, and, in several cases, the painter's defi- 
 ciency of sympathy with the purely frivolous views of modern-society 
 life has led him into producing work which is almost commonplace. 
 
 It seems strange that the prettiness of a thoughtless girl should 
 not be understood by a painter who can fathom so many secrets of 
 character, but there is no doubt of the fact. The only cases in which 
 Mr. Watts' portraits of ladies have been quite successful, have 
 been where he has found some sympathetic quality of thought and 
 expression other than that of simple beauty. Thus his pictures 
 of Lady Lindisay (of Balcarres), Miss Violet Lindsay, and Mrs. 
 Langtry, can only be considered failures. While the portraits of 
 Miss Villiers (Countess of Lytton), Miss Dorothy Tennant, and 
 Mrs. Percy Wyndham, are all excessively fine. The last-mentioned 
 is, indeed, the finest woman's portrait that has been painted of late 
 years. It has all the magnificence of action and surrounding of 
 Carolus Duran's work, with a power of colour and a simple dignity 
 to which the French artist could never attain. 
 
 I must not stay to say more upon the qualities of the landscapes 
 in this exhibition. They are almost invariably in low tones of colour, 
 and frequently in half light. Their chief motive is the sadness which 
 resembles sorrow, only 
 
 " As the mist resembles rain " ; 
 
 but occasionally there comes a bit of pure light colouring, like the 
 view of the Carrara Hills, which shows how keen is the artist's 
 appreciation of mountain form, and of the shifting lights and 
 shadows thereon. To the study of landscape, in fact, Mr. Watts 
 brings all the sympathies and methods of his figure-painting, and he 
 continues, too, to endow it with the same characteristic dignity. 
 
 1 The Procession in honour of Cimabue's Madonna was the first picture exhibited by Sir 
 Frederick at the Royal Academy. 
 
I cannot sum up this excessively fragmentary and incomplete 
 sketch of a modern painter's work and meaning, better than by 
 saying in what relation he appears to me to stand to the great artists 
 of the past, whose works he has taken as his chief inspiration. It 
 is, of course — as he would be the first to acknowledge — a relation- 
 ship of imperfection : judged by that standard, who would not fail ? 
 But perhaps Mr. Watts' failures are the more apparent to us all, 
 because they are made on the same lines as the ancient successes. 
 It is practically impossible to compare most modern English artists 
 with those great masters of mediaeval Italy, who give the inspiration 
 to Mr. Watts' painting. Work which has attempted no more than 
 the representation of passing fashions and costumes, or the literal 
 reproduction of a modern garden or old-fashioned village, escapes by 
 very poverty of aim all great failure, and is comparatively secure 
 of favour in the appeal to everyday scenes and actions. But the man 
 who tries to endue modern thoughts and sympathies with the 
 gorgeousness of Venetian colouring and the subtlety of Florentine 
 draughtsmanship, — who bases his appeal to us, not upon what is 
 most near to our lives, and most common to our sympathies, but on 
 thoughts of which we seldom speak, and graces of action that we 
 have never seen, — this painter attempts a task which all of us will be 
 only too ready to depreciate, if only because such depreciation will 
 excuse us from making the effort to comprehend his meaning. And, 
 of course, he must, in a measure, fail. Mr. Watts' comparative 
 failure, however, was rendered more certain by his devotion to 
 sculpture. Life is not long enough to struggle with the two arts, 
 save for, perhaps, one man in a thousand years, and our painter 
 has, we believe, always suffered from great drawbacks of health. 
 Much of the sadness that surrounds his best work must come, we 
 think, from this sense of imperfect achievement ; he has put before 
 him two ideals, and has attained neither — ^he is, if truth must be 
 told, only a broken statue on the great road of art. 
 
 And yet even his failures are most beautiful, for they are sincere 
 work in a great cause, and over the weakest of them there lingers 
 something of the glory and the dream. In his own straightforward 
 words, he has " a right to feel that my aim has not been without 
 elevation ; the greater right to find consolation in so feeling, because 
 such effort has certainly not met with general sympathy."' 
 
 In conclusion, I may say of the various divisions of his work as 
 follows : — The religious pictures are notable for their undogmatical 
 attempt to connect modern thought on that subject with artistic 
 expression ; they are probably the simplest form of Christianity ever 
 presented. The Greek myths that he has treated, if they do not 
 
 ^ Extract from a letter to the writer. 
 224 
 
"smell of Anacreon," are, as Mrs. Browning said of an early Christian 
 poet, great in a nobler sense : " the human soul, burning in the 
 censer, effaces from our spiritual perceptions the attar of a thousand 
 rose-trees whose roots are in Teos." The portraits are unique in 
 modern art for their reticence, no less than their power. The artist 
 will have his sitter's best part, and will insist upon that. The lines 
 of meanness, covetousness, weakness, and sensuality, have no attrac- 
 tion for him, and he does not dwell upon them in detail. His 
 portraits are, therefore, imperfect, photographically speaking ; they 
 are, nevertheless, as studies of character, finer than anything we 
 can find since the time of Titian, and they bear to the works of our 
 English Reynolds the relationship that Tintoretto does to Titian. 
 Less wonderfully painted, less glowing in their colour, less perfect 
 in their drawing ; but informed with far greater power of penetrating 
 to the essence of the subject, and never surrendering dignity to 
 attractiveness of colour or composition. 
 
 Mr. Watts' place in art must be determined by the relative value 
 we place upon great imagination and intellectual pow^r, and the per- 
 fection of technical skill. If he is to be judged by the latter alone 
 his rank must fall beneath that of Tadema and Leighton ; both of 
 these men are better painters. But if we consider that the actual 
 laying on of the paint is a matter of little importance compared with 
 the qualities of colour displayed in the work, the power of the drawing 
 and composition, and the meaning of the whole, then we can, in strict 
 justice, say that Mr. Watts, despite his imperfections, is the greatest 
 of our painters.^ No other artist has given us so many beautiful illus- 
 trations of poetry and religion ; no other has touched the old Greek 
 myths, and the poems of Italy and England, with so much human 
 sympathy ; no other has left such a living record of our greatest men. 
 After receiving such gifts at his hands, surely we can find a little 
 sympathy for his failures to achieve still greater triumphs, and a little 
 gratitude for a long life spent in such single-minded and earnest 
 devotion to the service of truth and art. 
 
 1 It must be remembered that this essay was written in 1882, when the majority of 
 critics (press critics, I mean) were still in the habit of sneering at Mr. Watts' painting, and 
 especially of deriding his imaginative work. To-day my defence of that phase of his art 
 may appear unnecessarily timid and hesitating, but in the year in which it was written I was 
 alone in the height of my estimate, and I was very proud to receive then a letter from this 
 great artist which told me I alone had understood his aim and appreciated his genius. 
 
 2 G 225 
 
THE AMATEUR. 
 
 HERE is a class of individuals which grows larger 
 every day, and for which few people have a good 
 word, though it forms the topmost twig of our tree 
 of civilisation, the very apex and crown of modern 
 life. The amateur — for it is of him and his class 
 I speak — is a great fact ; his work, or perhaps we 
 should rather say his idleness, is to be seen on every hand. As a 
 modern writer said, who conceals much kindly wisdom beneath the 
 interest of his stories, " Gentlefolks in general have a very awkward 
 rock ahead in life — the rock ahead of their own idleness. Their 
 lives being for the most part passed in looking about them for some- 
 thing to do, it is curious to see — especially when their tastes are of 
 what is called the intellectual sort — how often they drift blindfold into 
 some nasty pursuit." 
 
 It is not, however, the "nasty pursuits" which I am about to discuss 
 here ; for the person in question is the amateur of painting, whose 
 aims and practice might, I think, be made of real service to art, if 
 only they could be a little methodised, a little restricted. At the 
 present time such method and restriction of aim seems, it is true, very 
 far away ; for the line grows daily more difficult to define which 
 separates amateur and professional work, and, from the Grosvenor 
 Gallery downwards, there are few picture exhibitions in which the 
 two may not be seen side by side. Indeed, when we try to think 
 the matter out, there is considerable difficulty in framing a satis- 
 factory definition of professional and amateur. Clearly the ety- 
 mological meaning of the words will not help us. For most 
 professionals regard art with greater fondness than those who follow 
 it for pleasure alone ; and the professions of the amateur are at least 
 as frequent and insistent as those of his trade -following brother. 
 Nor does it take us much farther to define the rivals as those who 
 work for gain ^nd those whose only aim is amusement ; for this 
 
 226 
 

 w 
 
definition is unjust to both in almost equal degree : besides which 
 there is no reason, in the nature of things, why the working for 
 gain should necessarily produce the better result. I am inclined 
 to think that the difference really lies rather in degree than quality, 
 and that the true amateur is a younger brother of the professional 
 rather than a poor relation. There seems to be no reason why the 
 one should not be trained as thoroughly as the other up to a certain 
 point : the point of course being fixed with regard to the time and 
 capacity of each amateur student, whereas for the professional it must 
 remain invariably the same. In other words, it should be possible 
 to teach to any one sufficiently interested, certain elementary truths 
 of artistic sight-perception and technique of the same kind as those 
 on which the fuller accomplishment of the artist requires to be 
 founded. For the beginning of all right-doing in art is the edu- 
 cation of the eye rather than the training of the hand, and to teach the 
 latter without or before the former must necessarily result in utter 
 failure. And the reason why most amateur work§ of art are so 
 nugatory, and even so offensive, is less the imperfection with which 
 they have been" executed, than the lack of perception and motive 
 which have inspired their execution. The amateur fails in nine 
 cases out of ten, not because he cannot do what he sees, but because 
 he cannot see what to do : because he has no preference for one 
 thing over another, because he has never thought what are the 
 essentials of any given scene or subject, because he has never 
 even opened his eyes and looked at the objects before him with the 
 intent endeavour to see them as they actually appear to his eye, 
 independent of the shape and colour which he knows, or thinks that he 
 knows, they really possess. Now such deficiencies and hindrances 
 as these might be as easily removed from the path and the productions 
 of the amateur as from those of the professional, if only he were given 
 a little commonsense instruction. 
 
 I only profess in the following paper to mention a few of the 
 elementary matters which may help any one beginning to draw or 
 paint from Nature, and which would, if attended to, simplify the 
 pupil's work more than the kind of instruction so commonly given by 
 drawing-masters, and found in books on the art of landscape-painting 
 in water-colours, etc., which prescribes the method of laying on 
 washes, the right colours to be used for distance and foreground, the 
 right manner of expressing by different touches, clouds and trees, 
 rocks and water; the conventional choice and arrangement of a 
 subject, and all the other recipes by which machine-made teachers 
 have endeavoured during the last fifty years to block the pathway 
 of the amateur, and shut his eyes to all truth and beauty. I will 
 have nothing to do with such Abracadabra as these, or with those 
 who imagine that in such a way good work can be produced. 
 
 227 
 
Nor do I care very much for the approbation or encouragement 
 of that other class of amateurs who exaggerate humility to the point 
 of mania, and produce elaborate drawings of eggs and jam-pots, and 
 little bits of rock and shell and weed, with the excuse that such 
 subjects are the only fitting ones for unprofessional students.^ This 
 last method tends to an abominable self-sufficiency which is even 
 more detestable than sketches made upon the drawing - master's 
 pattern. I have known the conventionally -taught student sub- 
 sequently discard the corks and bladders, and general life-saving 
 apparatus kindly provided for him in early years ; but I have never 
 met one who had become thoroughly indoctrinated with the micro- 
 scopic study of detail, attain the power of seeing or enjoying Nature, 
 or of depicting any natural scene. 
 
 Let us now ask what it is that the instructor should first teach 
 his pupils — the very first thing he should say to them when, having 
 attained some small power of using the pencil, they sally out with 
 the object of making a sketch from Nature. Well, on my theory, 
 his first words should be somewhat to this effect : " You are now 
 entering upon a new life, in a country of which you know nothing, 
 and of which you should have no preconceived ideas. You are to 
 put down upon this piece of paper or canvas, in this first instance, 
 nothing which is the result of your previous knowledge, thought or 
 information : but simply and only what you see before you. Skies 
 are not blue nor grass green, nor trees made up of boughs and leaves, 
 nor water liquid, nor earth solid ; nor anything on the earth of any 
 shape or colour whatever, except in so far as these things may 
 appear to you at this present moment. Open your eyes, and put 
 down nothing more than they record. Everything which you will 
 see will appear in three chief aspects ; it will have some sort of 
 shape, some sort of strength of light or shadow, and some sort of 
 colour. Fill your paper or your canvas now from one end to the 
 other with masses regarded from this threefold point of view. 
 Never mind what the masses represent ; and leave out of account 
 all minute details of their form and surface : but let every one of 
 them be as near as you can make it to the original in colour, light, 
 and general shape. Make as it were a mosaic picture in which 
 these masses shall lie side by side." 
 
 Now this is not only the first instruction which should be given to 
 any one attempting to paint from Nature, but it is also almost the 
 last. It includes the whole art of seeing rightly, and when the 
 student has attained the power of following this instruction, he 
 needs no other teacher than Nature herself. This is the one thing 
 needful : to forget all else but the report of the eye, and to set down 
 the result of that report with entire fidelity. All work which is not 
 
 228 
 
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done on this principle is contrary to Nature, and therefore essentially 
 deficient. It may be very beautiful as a reproduction, in the same 
 way that the miniatures of an ancient missal, or the medallions on 
 Bohemian glass are beautiful, but it is work which starts from a 
 calculated imperfection, and the end attained is an entirely different 
 one. For Nature does not work with sharp boundaries, and does 
 insist upon value, as well as colour. Directly we omit from any 
 representation any one of the three elements which are universally 
 present in every object upon which our eyes have ever looked, our 
 work becomes proportionately imperfect and untrue. 
 
 After this general instruction nothing remains to tell the pupil but 
 matters of detail, which sooner or later he would find out for 
 himself, equally well. Nevertheless a little time may be saved by 
 his following some plain precepts such as those stated below. In 
 this connection I would entirely disclaim any responsibility for the 
 errors and difficulties into which these precepts may lead any 
 student. They are such as I believe to be true, and hope may be 
 helpful : but the idiosyncrasy of one art-student is so different from 
 that of another, and it is so necessary that each, if he is to do any 
 good, should find salvation after his own fashion, that all instruction 
 in details is almost as likely to be injurious as beneficial. And 
 wherever a student finds, after due trial, that the advice of his 
 instructor conflicts with his artistic predilections, he will probably 
 be more right in listening to the voice within him, than in obeying 
 the voice without. Moreover, the beginnings of all true artistic work 
 are so unattractive that the verdict of friends and even teachers must 
 be received with the greatest caution. The capacity of any human 
 being for art, so far as it can be gauged at all at the outset, is to be 
 gauged by intensity of desire, rather than facility of hand. The 
 drawings of men who have afterwards become great artists have 
 more frequently been remarkable for roughness than for beauty, and 
 there is no worse sign in a student's painting than the sign of 
 prettiness. 
 
 Every one who cares for pictures, or for natural beauty, in the 
 sense of wishing to reproduce it, may, if he chooses to give the 
 time, and go to work in the right way, attain to a reproduction of 
 Nature which shall be a real delight to himself, and even in some 
 measure a pleasure to his friends. But this is not to be done by 
 paying for any number of lessons, be the master ever so skilful ; but 
 only by continual study of natural fact and natural laws, by gradually 
 educating, not only the hand, but the brain, the eye, and the heart, 
 and bringing all of these to bear upon your work. It is in this latter 
 respect, as a rule, that the amateur fails so dismally and so inex- 
 cusably : he fails not so much for want of skill as for want of effort. 
 The labour required for seeing correcdy, is as definite and real, as 
 
 229 
 
that for drawing what you do see, and is never given by those whose 
 theory of life is to pay other folks to see for them. Art is the result, 
 in the first place of seeing rightly, and in the second oi feeling rightly 
 about what is seen. Amateur art is good, when it partakes of the 
 qualities which are admirable in professional art ; and is bad if 
 those merits are entirely absent. Therefore there is no reason why 
 the amateur should not see and feel as artistically as the professional, 
 if he will seek for the right way of doing so. But the expression of 
 his thought and feeling must invariably be inadequate. Indeed, in 
 some ways the unprofessional student has even an advantage, for his 
 work is rarely thwarted by pecuniary obstacles, and should not be 
 modified by considerations of what is popular and likely to sell. 
 There is no excuse for his being" dull or mechanical in his painting, 
 since the whole world is before him where to choose — since he need 
 never choose a subject for which he does not care for reasons of 
 popularity or bread. 
 
 Yes, after having been for some years a critic of a large and more 
 than averagely skilful amateur drawing club (some of the members 
 used to exhibit), and having had a far larger experience of professional 
 work, I am convinced that, incredible as it may sound, the amateur 
 does really care less for his subject than the average artist. It is 
 not the ignorance or the incapacity of the lady or gentleman student 
 which tries the instructor, but it is their extraordinary wilful obstinacy, 
 the way in which he or she comes dawdling down to the river, the 
 moor, the mountain, or the forest, with a heart empty, and a head full 
 of other things, and languidly takes out a brush and sucks it, while 
 gazing vacantly at the scene selected. Strange as it may seem, it 
 has rarely been my experience (on an average not more than once in 
 fifty times) to find an unprofessional drawing from Nature, in which 
 the faults were not caused chiefly by the laziness or the carelessness 
 of the student, rather than by his incapacity. Speaking crudely, one 
 may say of those who make sketches, that it is only artists who 
 try to do them as well as they can. The amateur, as a rule, with a 
 tenth of the professional's capacity, and a hundredth of his precedent 
 education, devotes a languid attention for a minute's time, and is then 
 surprised at the poorness of the result. The truth is, that as a rule 
 with these half-and-half people, effort ceases, when difficulty begins. 
 As long as their blotted colour looks pretty upon the paper or the 
 canvas; as long as no part of their subject forces their own in- 
 competence upon their attention ; so long, in fact, as they can either 
 evade, or shut their eyes to all the real obstacles in their picture, 
 they will go on swimmingly enough. But let the sun shine a little 
 too warmly, or the wind blow a little too rough ; let the ground be 
 damp beneath their feet, or the flies buzzing about their head, or a 
 little dust or sand spot their paper, and mix up with their colours ; 
 
 230 
 
let them come to a mass of clouds which wants careful drawing, 
 or some boughs which are waving in the wind, or some foreground 
 grass whose spears and blossoms cannot be indicated with a hasty 
 smudge — and behold, up shuts the colour-box, and down comes the 
 white umbrella, and home speeds the faint-hearted practitioner with 
 a sketch which he " had no time to finish," How sick every artist 
 gets of that phrase ; worse almost than the corresponding one, " It 
 only took me half an hour, you know," 
 
 Yet in art, as in other and greater matters, only failure teaches 
 us. No one who can go on quite bravely and sincerely making 
 mess after mess from Nature, but comes to the time, when, he does 
 not quite know how, he makes messes no longer. Somehow from 
 the failure, grows up the fruit. I remember Burne-Jones saying 
 to me, some years ago, on this subject, apropos of the designing and 
 arranging of drapery, that he had tried to do it vainly for nearly two 
 years, day after day, till "one morning the sun shone, the earth 
 cracked, the flowers bloomed, and he could design drapery for ever." 
 This is very much the experience of all genuine art-workers. " I 
 can't do figures," used to say the irrational members of my drawing 
 club, "and so I won't try"; as if "doing figures" was a God-sent 
 gift, that came down from heaven in a basket. This shivering on 
 the brink of any little deeper than ordinary water prevents progress. 
 Bad swimmers in their depth can always manage to keep up an 
 appearance (they leave one toe on the ground), but such never 
 learn to swim. Let them flounder about a little and get the deep 
 water, down their throat and up their nostrils, and after a certain 
 time of spluttering and gasping, and striking out wildly with both 
 arms, they will probably learn to take care of themselves. The 
 right frame of mind for any ordinary student when he sits down to 
 reproduce a bit of Nature, is one not far removed from terror — not 
 very different from what our imperfect swimmer might feel if sud- 
 denly flung into deep water. Let him nevertheless take heart ; he 
 is travelling the road that every artist in the world has travelled 
 before him, for there is this grand compensating law, that the 
 greater the native genius, the farther removed is the goal of attain- 
 ment. The best painter is, as a rule, more dissatisfied with his 
 work than the worst. Painting was never easy yet, except to those 
 who were incapable} 
 
 With this brief enunciation of some of the preliminary considera- 
 tions with respect to amateur and professional work, I proceed to 
 give an account of some of the chief difficulties usually experienced, 
 some idea of the capabilities and limitations of non-professional work, 
 and a very few remarks upon the broad questions of colour, form, 
 
 1 Pardon me, dear friends of the '* Beaux Arts " who have learned the whole art of " la 
 peinture " during your brief studenthood ! 
 
 231 
 
and composition. Before beginning, I must ask to be forgiven for 
 the necessarily disjointed appearance of the following sentences. It 
 is necessary, because in them I endeavour to condense in as terse a 
 form as possible, hints which, if fully expressed in due sequence and 
 connection, would cover ten times the space at my disposal. The 
 quasi-epigrammatic form of the paragraphs may perhaps be pardoned, 
 on the ground that I was either compelled to adopt it or omit half 
 my subject-matter. Still I must say again clearly that the following 
 hints are really worth nothing in themselves : constitute no Abra- 
 cadabra or Fi-fo-fum for the production of sketches. All that they 
 aim at is to put before students some plain facts in connection with 
 this subject, which they will have to consider and put in their right 
 connection. 
 
 Since the first obstacle that one who desires to study any form of 
 drawing or painting has to contend with is undoubtedly his relations, 
 let us say a few words upon their probable conduct. If they are of 
 the rare but pleasant kind who encourage the young beginner none 
 the less because he is one of their own kin, they may be left, with a 
 blessing on their heads, so long as they do not complicate their 
 kindness with advice. But should they do this, the student must, if 
 he is desirous of not wasting his time, refuse from the first to listen 
 to their precepts. Not because they are relations or friends, but 
 because it is necessary for every one who is setting to work in art to 
 be a law to himself, or at all events to have but one legitimate and 
 adequate master. If you follow the ideas in art of your maiden 
 aunt, or your bachelor uncle, either from love of their personality 
 or respect for their intelligence, you are wasting time entirely, and 
 preparing for yourself difficulties in the future, similar to those which 
 you might feel in making a freehand drawing after you had been 
 accustomed to use tracing paper. For the first beginning of art, 
 whether for amateur or professional, is freedom. You must run 
 alone, even if you stagger and fall in the attempt, from your first 
 moment. But having got rid of your relatives' advice, let us go a step 
 farther and get rid of their approbation. Perhaps this is even more 
 fatal than their blame. For in the first place they seldom care, save 
 for you personally, and in the second place they seldom know. 
 And in the third place, if they both know and care, they will 
 probably be silent. For in this last resort, they will be certain that 
 the less that is said about a student's work the better. " Continuez, 
 jeune homme," is what Carolus Duran says to his pupils when they 
 have done an exceptionally good piece of work : permission to labour 
 is the only reward which a student should receive. 
 
 Does this seem hard ? Do you require encouragement ? Do you 
 want to show results ? That is a fatal error — an error common, alas ! 
 to almost every amateur. The whole world of Nature is just begin- 
 
 232 
 
ning to talk to you ; it is the greatest boon, rightly understood, for your 
 little personal world to be silent while you learn the new language. 
 And never mind, though it be Christmas- time or New Year's Day, or 
 the anniversary of some one's marriage ; don't give away any of your 
 pictures at present. Give anything else, but don't part with incomplete 
 bits of yourself till they are worth having ; it's best to keep what you 
 produce in the workshop. Resist the temptation also to look too much 
 on what you have done. Do it with heart and brain to the utmost 
 of your power — there's something wrong if you don't feel washed- 
 out after each drawing ; but don't look at it all day and night, and 
 the next day, take down the shutters afresh, put a new bit of goods 
 in the window, and forget all about yesterday's sample. Drawings 
 look much better in gilt mounts, or framed neatly, but the drawings 
 themselves are no better — leave them as they are, for the present at 
 all events. I would not have you refuse to show your work to any 
 one who wishes to see it — that's making a mystery of the matter 
 which the thing is not worth. But I would have you be sure first, 
 that they do wish to see it, and then I would have you show it, 
 taking as little as possible of the praise or blame bestowed, and 
 desiring neither. If your heart is in your work, you will soon come 
 into this frame of mind. Most random praise is an impertinence, 
 though that hardly prevents our finding it sweet. Think of how 
 foolish it would seem if, when you were learning a foreign language, 
 some one who perhaps knew a few words of it, and possibly none at 
 all, were to ask you to pronounce the syllables you were acquainted 
 with, and compliment you on your acquirement. You are learning 
 now the universal language of Art, which great men in all times 
 have spent their lives in acquiring — do you want to hear the 
 irresponsible compliments of any one, while you are mastering its 
 alphabet, or even in the midst of its declensions ? 
 
 A little practical detail you will find of great help from those in 
 authority. Get them to allow some place where you can work by 
 yourself, where you can keep all the odds and ends of your artistic 
 life, free from disturbance or observation. A garret does perfectly 
 well if you are in town ; an outhouse or a shed if you are in the 
 country. And it probably won't hurt, if you are young, even if it 
 is bare and draughty ; or faces east, west, north, or south ; or is 
 cold in winter and hot in summer. For one of the first lessons of 
 art is endurance, and is rarely to be learnt on velvet cushions ; and 
 a habit of conquering small obstacles of surroundings, will be found 
 invaluable when the time comes for conquering great obstacles in the 
 art itself 
 
 Now as to the preliminary setting out — a word about parapher- 
 nalia. The traditional burnt stick and whitewashed wall, which is 
 all that some of the great artists have had to begin with, is, though 
 2 H 233 
 
somewhat exaggerated, nevertheless a type of the right way for 
 the beginner to set to work. The simpler your means the better ; 
 and even if the simplicity involves much limitation, it will be no 
 drawback for some time to come. Many of the finest drawings in 
 the world have been done with a simple pen and a wash of ink ; 
 and even if you haven't a paint-brush, with a pen, a penknife, and 
 the end of your forefinger, you can get nearly any effect in light and 
 shade that you are likely to want. I confess as a boy, I found the 
 pleasure of rubbing ink into an outline with the finger, very great, 
 and the triumph when you have attained with these blundering 
 means anything near your intention, is delicious in proportion to its 
 difficulty. And this, and corresponding limitations of material, not 
 only harden your spirit, and make you fruitful of resource, but take 
 away one considerable difficulty which beginners are wont to ex- 
 perience. They prevent us losing the way in the choice of imple- 
 ments and Colours. If there's only a big brush to do the fine and 
 broad strokies with, one can hardly help learning to use it both 
 broadly and delicately ; if we have only one colour in our paint- 
 box, we soon learn how varied is the range of effects which we may 
 gain therefromy and how to use it to the greatest advantage. Is 
 not all this very elementary ? and yet how few masters there are 
 who seek to enforce economy of this kind. Now we will suppose 
 that you are adopting water-colour, the medium that most amateurs 
 begin with, as your first method, and say a word about paper. Shiny 
 writing-paper is bad, because the colour will not lie upon it evenly 
 without the use of white, and blotting-paper is bad for obvious 
 reasons : and with these exceptions it scarcely matters what paper 
 you select. But there is then to be remembered that very rough 
 paper, while it increases the effect of your colour, puts considerable 
 obstacles in the way of accurate drawing. It is, so to speak, a 
 rough road full of stones over which it is difficult to walk circum- 
 spectly. As a rule, drawing -masters recommend it, because the 
 surface tends to conceal their pupils' defective use of the pencil ; 
 because the same amount of finish in painting is not required ; 
 because the surface is less easily disturbed by bad brushwork, and 
 many similar reasons. All of these should, I think, weigh in the 
 opposite scale ; and though the reverse of rough sketching- paper 
 — what is ordinarily called "hot-pressed" — is apt to make your 
 colouring reveal all its deficiencies, it is of the two more preferable. 
 A coarse, or rather a hard, line upon such a surface, shows all its 
 error, in the same way as a good line shows all its beauty. But 
 the beginner might draw outlines on a rough surface for weeks 
 without finding out how bad was his handling of the pencil. As 
 a matter of fact, few surfaces are more fitting for a student for 
 drawing than ordinary cartridge-paper; it takes the pencil easily, 
 it won't bear too much messing about, it does not require either 
 
 234 
 
the refinement of pencilling upon an excessively smooth surface, 
 or admit of the coarseness which passes muster on rough sketching- 
 paper. But, to sum up this part of the subject, take what material 
 you can get most readily, and afford most easily, and, when you 
 have taken it, dorit stint its use. Have plenty of material by you, 
 no matter how humble be its kind. Never think when you are using 
 paint, canvas, or paper, of how long your paints will last, or how 
 many sheets of surface you are using. The worst drawing is worth 
 the canvas or paper it's done on. Take a new sheet and start fresh 
 when you begin again. And you had better work from the first 
 upon an easel, no matter of how rough a kind, if only because so 
 doing helps you to acquire steadiness of hand, from the impossibility 
 of resting your hand upon the paper or canvas. Besides, with an 
 easel you can, either standing or sitting, more easily see the effect 
 of what you are doing ; you do not have the continual looking up 
 and down from your work to your desk, and vici versd. 
 
 Remember that what you are seeking, in the first instance, 
 is simply to express your subject ; that every touch which does 
 not aid, necessarily obscures expression. An irrelevant touch in 
 a drawing, or one which is put without special intention, is like a 
 superfluous or half-understood word in a sentence. And if there be 
 many such, the whole work becomes unmeaning. Besides which, 
 the materials of painting are always delicate, and will not bear rough 
 treatment ; they are like irritable people, and must not be teased 
 or worried. If paint is stirred about on the palette, the paper, or 
 the canvas, all the freshness of colour is soon lost, the tint ap- 
 proaches nearer and nearer to mud. Note also, that the surface on 
 which you work is in one sense a colour, and almost the most 
 precious of your colours. This will work for you, or against you, 
 according as you manage ; if you destroy the purity, you can hardly 
 preserve the brilliancy of your painting. The most salient point, 
 probably, of old English water-colour painting was the use which 
 the artists made of this paper ground for obtaining brilliancy and 
 transparency in their work. The whiteness of paper is felt through- 
 out their pictures ; pictures in which the truth of atmospheric effect 
 has never yet been rivalled in the history of art. 
 
 Clearly understand what this implies, before proceeding farther 
 with our subject. Every art, and every branch of art, has special 
 qualities, which should be preserved at any cost. These qualities, of 
 course, are held in subordination to the principles which govern art 
 as a whole, and consist chiefly in making the most of the special ma- 
 terial and the special opportunities which that material affords. In 
 this way methods, which would be intolerable in some branches of art, 
 are not only tolerable but right in others ; and the best way of working 
 
 235 
 
in any given medium, is the way which preserves most carefully, and 
 exemplifies most clearly, that medium's essential qualities. The best 
 stained glass is not that which seeks to possess all the gradations of 
 colour and subtleties of form and chiaroscuro which we find in 
 painting. The best woodwork is not that which is carved in imitation 
 of lace or drapery. The best mosaic is not that which we need a 
 magnifying-glass to tell from brushwork. The best etching does 
 not seek to give the calculated completeness of engraving ; and so on 
 throughout the list. 
 
 Now, if we seek the essential difference between water-colour and 
 oil-painting, we find that it consists in the foundation of transparency ; 
 that all the methods of the former are based upon the manner in 
 which one colour is seen through another. No doubt there are 
 opaque colours in water-colour, and transparent ones in oil ; but, 
 broadly speaking, the reverse is the case. Nor does this express 
 the whole of the difference, for in pure water-colour painting not 
 only are our colours transparent, but the foundation upon which 
 we lay them is a foundation of light, rather than a foundation of 
 darkness. It is the fact of the transparency of the paint allowing 
 this light ground to shine through the colour, which gives the inimi- 
 table delicacy and sunny aspect to good water-colour work. The 
 light is, so to speak, made for us before we begin throughout the 
 picture just as the light is made in the sky itself, and shines through 
 any number of encumbering clouds. The system of purity, there- 
 fore, in water-colour is, we may broadly say, the system of Nature ; 
 whereas the practice in oils is the reverse. To use the old studio 
 formula, in the first we " load our shadows and scumble our lights " ; 
 in the second we " load our lights and scumble our shadows." 
 
 Now, there are several dangers into which the young student is 
 likely to run, which may be mentioned in connection with this 
 definition. The first of these is the danger of not understanding this 
 quality of transparency, and of seeking to gain his effect by the juxta- 
 position, rather than the combination, of his colours. And the 
 second is, that from his limited experience, even if he keeps the 
 above facts steadily in view, he will lose the purity of his white paper, 
 and so get darkness instead of light behind his transparency. This 
 second result is inevitable at first. Patience, care, and practice alone 
 are the cure. The third danger may be seen exemplified in most 
 young ladies' sketches, and may be called briefly the danger of 
 washiness. For colour put on in thin washes with the object of 
 being partially transparent, must, if the exact medium be not at- 
 tained, either lose or exaggerate its transparency. And as all objects 
 upon earth are solid, and all objects in the sky are round, this lack 
 of sufficient opacity and rotundity produces a spectral, shadowy 
 
 236 
 
ALMOND UI.OSSOAL— AijRKii lv\s 
 
appearance throughout the drawing. The operation, it will be seen, 
 is a nice one. There is a Scylla and a Charybdis on either hand. 
 On this side we have the danger of losing the essential quality of our 
 art— the quality of transmitted light ; on the other, the danger of 
 losing all the solidity and reality of natural objects. Speaking 
 roughly, we may say that into one or other of these pitfalls an 
 amateur is bound to tumble. No instruction upon earth can save him, 
 simply because the matter is one of technical skill, only to be gained 
 by experience. It is well, however, that he should understand 
 that there is no possible comparison in oil - painting, with some 
 of the effects which can be produced in water-colour. The infinite 
 delicacy and softness — the gradation, and the atmospheric effects 
 of the best water-colours, are inimitable in any other medium what- 
 soever. 
 
 We come now to the question of whether this method of art is 
 more suitable to the student than that of oil-painting. And here I 
 am sorry to say I find myself opposed to nearly all art-teachers with 
 whose opinions I am acquainted. I admit the superior facility with 
 which in water-colours a slight sketch can be made in a few minutes, 
 and just tinted with the help of a little box which will go in the 
 waistcoat-pocket. I acknowledge that it is at once less cumbrous, 
 less, costly, less troublesome, less pretentious, and likely to be more 
 pleasing in its results, than any amateur work in oil. But holding as 
 I do the opinion that all student-work is important, not so much for 
 what is produced, as for the instruction given in seeing Nature and 
 understanding the works of artists — I think that, a student's time 
 being necessarily limited, and as he can hardly expect to master both 
 methods, the best way is to select the one in which the great majority 
 of the world's finest pictures have been executed : the one to which 
 all the merits of water-colour are in comparison, "as moonlight unto 
 sunlight, and as water unto wine." Nor is this all ; for the most 
 elementary qualities of good painting can be emphasized in an oil 
 sketch, in a manner which is impossible in water-colour. It is 
 difficult to explain this shortly, but it results from the fact that it is 
 comparatively easy in oils, from the very nature of the medium, to 
 put on at once a mass of colour, of the requisite strength and form. 
 The colours do not run into one another, but lie side by side, and 
 may be joined or altered in shape without great difficulty. The 
 effect is obtained, so to speak, at once, and a good oil sketch rarely 
 needs strengthening. The medium is more tractable, and will stand 
 comparatively rough handling without losing much brilliancy ; and 
 there are many other considerations of like kind. No doubt there is 
 a great deal to be said on both sides of the question : if the student 
 sketches in oil, he should do a considerable amount of minute work 
 in pencil or pen-and-ink, in order to keep delicacy of form and 
 minuteness of detail well before his eyes. If he does this, however, 
 
 237 
 
it is scarcely possible but that he will escape some of the most crying 
 vices of ordinary unprofessional painting. He is little likely to be 
 weakly, washily pretty, the temptations are all the other way. The 
 sham picturesque is the last subject which will come readily to him ; 
 nor will he find his work encumbered with a mass of irrelevant 
 details. The facility with which all sorts of intricate forms can be 
 drawn on paper and tinted with a brush, has no analogue upon 
 canvas for a beginner, who is almost forced thereby to take broad 
 simple subjects. Of course such a student will be to a certain 
 extent like a youngster in a riding-school, riding, without stirrups, 
 on a rough raw-boned charger, and getting a good deal knocked 
 about in the process. There is another thing too — a bad oil sketch is 
 such a gruesome thing, and speaks with such a loud, insistent voice, 
 that praise is impossible, and so the daub is little likely to be stuck in 
 a book, or shown round to admiring friends. 
 
 Again, if you want to draw, you must do a lot of work which won't 
 be recognised, except by those who have undergone similar labour, 
 and then you will find out how many things there are which go to 
 make a picture. Up to a certain point, everything you attempt to 
 represent, is paint on paper, or on canvas ; carry it a degree farther, 
 and you have a marble column, a woman's dress, or whatever you 
 want to paint. The labour that changes the one to the other, never 
 shows, and is always there. 
 
 Let us now, before proceeding farther, give a few practical dicta 
 to the student, especially with regard to some technical matters which 
 he probably would not discover for himself for a long time. 
 
 Remember that in any natural scene, there is a landscape of the 
 sky, as well as a landscape of the earth, and that, though the latter 
 may be sometimes flat, the former is always round. Round objects 
 in a hollow vault cannot be expressed by thin ungradated washes of 
 colour : therefore clouds must be gradated and their roundness indi- 
 cated. The same rules which apply to the perspective of terrestrial 
 objects, apply also to that of aerial ones, and if violated, produce the 
 same results. The ordinary amateur invariably forgets this, and 
 becomes Japanese in the upper part of his picture. Local colour is 
 obscured by distance and altered by sunlight, almost as much as it is 
 hidden by shadow. A red coat a mile off is almost grey. Every- 
 thing has, broadly speaking, a light side and a dark side, and one 
 of the first and most necessary pieces of art education is to learn to 
 see this. In nine amateur drawings out of ten, objects are drawn 
 rather in plan, than as they appear to the eye. 
 
 Objects appear round to the eye, because of the gradation of light 
 
 238 
 
upon their surface. This rule applies to everything in Nature, and 
 therefore form cannot be indicated without attention to this gradation. 
 This applies equally to the slope of a down and the shape of a tea- 
 pot. Painting is not tinting a flat surface, but gradating a flat surface 
 so that it appears to project or retreat, or of whatever form may 
 be required. 
 
 An egg, a man's head," and a tree, are all, broadly speaking, round 
 objects, though the first is smooth and white, and the two last- 
 mentioned coloured and irregular. There is no more reason why 
 you should neglect to have the spherical form of trees, or of a person's 
 head clearly expressed in your drawing, than that you should omit 
 the roundness of a ball or an egg. Only, as a rule, the amateur 
 fastens on the easily-seen features of nose and eyes, or bough and 
 leaf, and does not notice or think about the delicate gradation 
 which gives the effiect of solidity, and which makes, as the French 
 would say, the object in question turn. 
 
 Any object, or any part of Nature, has a definite shape, if it be 
 only the shape of a mass of colour, light or shade. Every stroke of 
 the drawing which does not set down some definite shape, or some 
 portion of a definite shape, must inevitably be entirely wrong. 
 Nature is not made up of strokes, or blots, or little scrabbles in 
 various directions, like worms wriggling, but of masses. Nor is 
 there a border round objects, as a rule. They simply end where 
 others begin, such and such a mass relieved by value, as well as 
 colour and form, against such another. 
 
 Roughly speaking, if you look at a landscape in the direction of 
 the sun, the colour is more or less invisible. If you turn your back 
 towards the sun, the reverse is the case. If therefore your picture 
 is to depend upon colour, you must look away from the light ; and 
 this is in nineteen cases out of twenty the best thing to do. 
 
 The trunk of a tree is not stuck in the ground ; but holds it as the 
 fingers hold the glass. In fact, the two are parts of the same 
 organism — connections, at all events, by marriage. 
 
 Boughs, no matter how wavy and slight, or how gnarled and 
 twisted, are seldom or never disjointed or weak. Each portion of 
 them depends on another, and may be traced in dependence and in 
 general line of spread, to the parent trunk. 
 
 Leaves are not independent of branches, yet frequently the 
 amateur draws the outside form and lays the branches of the tree 
 upon it. The shape of a tree, however, is made up of masses of 
 leaf and branch, each having a distinct relation to the other, and 
 each expressive of growth, character, and spherical nature. 
 
 239 
 
A leaf has a definite shape, which is to be drawn if you are near ; 
 a group of leaves has also a definite shape, which is clearly per- 
 ceptible when the individual leaf is not. When you can see 
 neither the leaf nor the group because of distance, you may still see 
 that the tree forms itself, as a rule, into masses which have relation 
 to growth, which indeed express growth, to any understanding eye ; 
 and these you have to set down. Trees are not made by splodging 
 about with browns and greens and yellows, in little patches without 
 definite intention. Nor will any amount of rubbing and scraping give 
 you the texture of a rock or other object, if you can't make the 
 form clearly perceptible by your gradated light and shade. Elabora- 
 tion of work, is not finish. Many minutely stippled -up drawings, 
 are, in the true sense of the word, utterly unfinished. For finish is 
 not putting more work into a drawing, but more fact. A complicated 
 means of expressing any natural fact or pictorial incident, is, other 
 things being equal, inferior to a more simple means. Never use 
 two lines where one would represent the object equally well. 
 There is another side, too, to this question, for all added labour 
 upon a drawing or picture tends to obscure the individuality of 
 the artist, and to a certain extent to take away from the impulse 
 of the work. And so, unless there is a definite gain in completeness 
 or beauty produced by the elaboration of the idea, the work loses 
 both on the sides of ease and motive. 
 
 Neatness is one of the greatest vices of amateur work. Not that 
 it is in itself either a good or a bad thing ; but that it shows the 
 worker to have been occupied with irrelevant matters. For neatness 
 is essentially one of the leisurely virtues, valuable chiefly in lives 
 and occupations of an unimportant kind. When every faculty of 
 brain and hand is being brought into play upon a work of art, there 
 is no time left to consider dabs of paint upon the coat -sleeve, or 
 whether a few drops of varnish are or are not spilt upon the floor. 
 For the mind refuses to work at the same moment freely and 
 restrictedly, and if you think about the small outside impedimenta of 
 your occupation, you take away so much of the power which you 
 require for the occupation itself. 
 
 Carelessness on your picture is still less tolerable than neatness, for 
 carelessness in painting is incompatible with any genuine attempt to 
 paint well. A work of art may sometimes be produced swiftly, but 
 never idly or by chance. And though the finest and quickest lines 
 and bits of brushwork are frequently the best, they are never so 
 swift as not to be done with deliberate purpose, and with the utmost 
 strain of the worker's power. 
 
 Complacency is generally found with neatness, and generally 
 
 240 
 

 
 ^.-JK" 
 
 
 'I 
 
 Ifi^^--^^ 
 
 
 
 H 
 H 
 W 
 N 
 N 
 
 W 
 
arising from having mastered, more or less fully, some inferior system 
 of drawing. For if one believes that a splodge of green for a field, 
 and a splodge of purple for a mountain, and a little blue slopped 
 here and there on a piece of white paper for a sky, and other similar 
 renderings of Nature, are sufficient for the purposes of art ; then, 
 when one has acquired the small amount of skill necessary for put- 
 ting such splodges in their right place, there is every reason why 
 one should be complacent. With every added sketch done upon 
 such a system, the mental and physical eye gets duller, and grows 
 to have less power of perceiving the minutiae of form and colour and 
 chiaroscuro. And with every added sketch, the hand grows more 
 capable of its mechanical practice, and produces with greater ease 
 a splodge of the required shape and tint. 
 
 When you are not certain of what to do to a drawing, do nothing. 
 Nothing is so fatal a bar to future good work as the habit of splodg- 
 ing about indefinitely. And, on the other hand, the habit of putting 
 down no touch or line without a clear perception of the end which 
 you intend to gain thereby, is the most wholesome habit in the 
 world, and one which must inevitably result in progress. Part of 
 the pleasure which is given by a good sketch is that whoever sees 
 it, perceives the utmost carrying-out of this definite intention, the 
 continual selection between twenty or thirty different matters, and 
 the clear undisguised presentation of the one chosen. 
 
 We will now suppose that our student has attained a certain pro- 
 ficiency in the use of the pencil and the brush, and is desirous of 
 beginning to sketch from Nature, and see what are likely to be his 
 chief elementary difficulties. We will suppose that he has done up 
 his colour-box, his umbrella, his camp-stool, his little folding easel, 
 and a couple of canvases, in a neat parcel (a long luggage-strap is 
 the best kind of fastening), and is setting out for his day's work. 
 What is likely to be the course of events ? In all probability, unless 
 his subject has been chosen beforehand, he will wander about for 
 two or three hours, till he is so tired, so dusty, and so disheartened, 
 that he is good for nothing, and finally will return home without 
 having unstrapped his luggage. The number of times that that has 
 happened to the present writer is more than he cares to remember. 
 The remedy is twofold. Either you must choose your subject be- 
 forehand (which is best), and go straight awa:y and begin thereon, or 
 you must make up your mind to plump down in the first available 
 spot which you come across, and do the best you can. Judging 
 from personal experience, I should say that if you are in at all a 
 pretty part of the country, the latter proceeding will generally find 
 you a sufficiently good subject for student -work. And there is no 
 doubt that the habit of drawing from subjects which are not at first 
 2 I 241 
 
sight attractive, is the greatest help in after years in educating the 
 eye to see the beauties of ordinary scenes and circumstances. And 
 remember that ordinary scenes and circumstances are those from 
 which the artist must, as a rule, extract the material for his pictures. 
 Think of the great painters of English landscape and their finest 
 works, how trivial and commonplace seems their character. Gains- 
 borough's "Crossing the Stream," Constable's "Mill," "Valley 
 Farm," David Cox's " Hayfield," De Wint's "Cornfield," Turner's 
 " Frosty Morning," such are the names of six of the greatest land- 
 scapes that English painters have ever produced. Indeed, go a step 
 farther, and look at .Old Crome's "Mousehold Heath " in the National 
 Gallery, and notice how a magnificent picture can be made out of a 
 sweep of moorland and a stormy sky. 
 
 This difficulty of subject, which is taught in no book, and rarely 
 touched on by any art-instructor, must be faced from the very first. 
 Each of us must learn to discover for himself that which appears- to 
 him to be beautiful, and the qualities in a scene which appeal to his 
 imagination, or his feeling. Subject is really the diet of painting, 
 and must be regulated according to the personal wants of the painter. 
 But it is strange to discover how seldom any subject which is inarti- 
 ficial does not afford distinct opportunities for artistic purposes. The 
 student, I think, should not be in a hurry to devote himself to one 
 given class of work ; he will soon learn to know what scenes he cares 
 most for ; and, till then, it is no bad way for him to take without 
 grumbling, as a subject of study, whatever lies in his way. Perhaps 
 a few dogmatic principles may be laid down, though even to these 
 there are a great many exceptions. 
 
 All things out of their usual place are generally unfitting for pictures, 
 unless their incongruity is useful for some definite purpose. For 
 instance, cut flowers, plucked fruit, shells, and in general all objects 
 which have an accustomed place in Nature, make bad subjects for 
 pictures when divorced from that position. But it by no means follows 
 that they therefore make bad portions of subjects ; that a plate of fruit 
 may not be most delightful in some genre composition, that flowers 
 will not help the beauty of a woman's dress, or perhaps the signifi- 
 cance of her gesture, and so on. What the student has to consider 
 is whether he has sufficient object to gain in depriving flower or shell 
 or fruit of its natural surroundings, and to take care that, if he has 
 not, he paints the object as found in Nature. 'Tis but common 
 sense after all, for to take anything from its entourage without a 
 motive, is evidently to lessen the significance, to decrease the beauty. 
 For the least patt of the beauty is that of the thing per se independ- 
 ent of all relations. Think how little admirable, as a rule, is the 
 ordinary garden shrub in a picture, for a reason which is allied to the 
 
 242 
 
one of which I have been speaking. It is almost invariably an object 
 which has been evidently placed in position, it is rarely allowed to 
 grow freely, and surrounded by other shrubs of varying kinds, each 
 of which is as evidently and wilfully jammed into holes in the ground 
 and forms no unit of natural beauty, but rather one of show and 
 artificial life. There is something in these unchanging, irregular 
 walls of evergreen which, when we come to think, seems incongruous 
 with our English gardens. We know that summer will not make 
 them more green, nor winter bare, nor autumn vary the monotony 
 of their colouring ; they seem to have no personal life, and to make 
 no demand upon our sympathies. Reasons of this sort will be found 
 to apply to nearly every subject, and to determine suitability, or the 
 reverse. If we push the matter to an extreme, we can see this 
 truth at once. No one would think of painting a boat lying upon a 
 turnpike road, or a plough lying on the beach instead of in the 
 furrow. But few students bestow sufficient thought upon their 
 painting, or rather upon the selection of their subjects, to follow out 
 a principle into its subtler phases. 
 
 I repeat, that no matter how limited may be an amateur's powers, 
 he can always select a subject which has some definite meaning, no 
 matter how simple. If the motive is only to tell the colour of the 
 grass on a certain slope of hillside, or the movement of clouds on 
 a given afternoon, or the circling lines of water in the stream, or 
 the straining of a bough in the wind, or the plunge of a ship in 
 the waves, it is still quite sufficient. For — and I think this is a 
 consideration which does not often occur to amateurs — the minds of 
 people who look at and care for pictures soon grow to be eminently 
 sympathetic, if only they have the least chance of feeling sympathy. 
 The eye seeks, unconsciously to itself, for the slightest hint of the 
 painter's intention, and the mind, getting hold of such a trace, follows 
 our meaning eagerly, and sympathises with the failure or glories in 
 the success, with an almost personal emotion. I don't know that 
 there is to be gained from ordinary pictures by inartistic people a 
 greater pleasure than that when the beholder says to himself, " Yes, 
 I see what the artist was trying to do." And the reverse is as certainly 
 the case. The perception of the no-meaning in a picture causes a 
 revulsion against it of great intensity. "What on earth have you 
 dragged my attention into this gilt frame for," we seem to ask of the 
 artist, " if you had nothing to tell me when you got me there ? " 
 
 But if the student must beware of having no subject, he must be 
 careful also not to render his drawing too complicated, nor to over- 
 burden it with attempted subtleties of meaning. His motive should 
 always be a simple one, simple in proportion to the paucity of his 
 powers, and, speaking broadly, should refer to some of the ordinary 
 
 243 
 
facts of life or Nature. For there is no such thing as commonplace 
 motives in art, apart from the way in which they are treated. There 
 is nothing commonplace in the ordinary human affections, and the 
 natural objects of the world, unless they are seen through a vulgar 
 mind or eye. "Who ever saw an ugly woman look unattractive 
 when she was kissing her child ? " as Wilkie Collins says somewhere. 
 There is too the advantage in the commonplace, of a general appeal 
 to every one. And if your work \sfine commonplace, you have for 
 your audience not the Upper Ten alone, but those of every estate. 
 
 One obstacle which is likely to check the beginner and greatly 
 discourage him, must be noted in this connection. And that is, that 
 if he attempts, as I urge him to attempt, never to execute a drawing 
 without a definite intention to tell some story, no matter how simple 
 or how short, he will suffer at first grievously for his inability. He 
 will find himself incapable of saying the smallest thing clearly ; he 
 will, to use common language, feel like a bigger fool every day. I 
 remember speaking to a great artist once about the difficulty of 
 learning to draw animals in motion, and his telling me how he had 
 learnt to do it. 
 
 " There is only one way," he said ; " you can't attempt to do the 
 whole thing at once, you must do it piecemeal. Say you want 
 to do a dog running, you must watch till you get one going the way 
 you want, and seize what part of his action you see most clearly 
 — say the line of his back, or the angle of his hind-leg, or the 
 pose of his head, or whatever it is. Stick that down in your 
 note-book, and nothing else ; and watch him again till you get 
 another morsel of action, and so on day after day till you have 
 got all the facts of the matter. Then you can begin to put your 
 running dog together." 
 
 Well, something in this way must a beginner think of doing his 
 subject, and he must be content if he can get only a very little bit of 
 it in this or that rendering ; let him get that little bit as clear as 
 possible, and not be disheartened at the incompleteness or failure of 
 the whole. 
 
 But the greatest drawback to amateur art is, as a rule, that it 
 means nothing. Incomplete, poor, and erroneous as is its technical 
 part, the spiritual part is perhaps even on a lower level. And even 
 if the technical speech is at all attained, how rarely is it used for any 
 intelligible purpose. We are all prone to forget, I think, that there 
 is little object in being able to reproduce upon paper any scene 
 or action whatever, unless something else is gained beyond the mere 
 reproduction. If an image is produced which only repeats a visual 
 impression, and that poorly (as must always be the case), without 
 enforcing either the significance or the beauty of what has been 
 
 244 
 
seen, without enforcing a connection with our sympathies, and 
 enabling us to see more in the subject than we should have seen our- 
 selves, we can hardly call the work one of art. The best result that 
 can be obtained by the great majority of amateur students, is not the 
 capacity to do drawings of more or less inferior quality themselves, 
 but to gain sufficient knowledge of the subject-matter, methods, and 
 principles of art, to enjoy the works of great artists, and see their true 
 relation to the world at large. Not only does this produce a pleasure 
 of far wider scope than the gratification of mere personal vanity, but 
 it is one of those productive feelings, which tend by their very 
 existence to increase the amount and the power of good art. 
 
 If the enormous body of amateurs in England were to work from 
 this standpoint, their influence not only upon all who knew them, but 
 upon our painters, would be simply incalculable. We should hear no 
 more from the artists those bitter words which are so frequent in the 
 present days concerning amateur work ; nor should we have from 
 the artists a litter of those cheap pictures which rely for their 
 attraction upon flashy renderings of Nature, or cheap tricks of senti- 
 ment. I sometimes wonder why no one has noticed that during the 
 last thirty years in England, in which there has been such an 
 enormous spread of art-education, the essential qualities of English 
 art have distinctly declined. Technically, no doubt, at all events in 
 oil-painting, the reverse has been the case ; we have learnt far more of 
 Continental methods, always in advance of our own — a slightly more 
 enlightened system of instruction has been pursued in our art-schools 
 — and we have had opportunities of comparing our artistic products 
 with those of other nations, and noting their greater deficiencies. 
 But the motive of the work has, it appears to me, almost entirely 
 * altered. We used to be dull, respectable, and honest ; our sympathies 
 were limited, but still they were true as far as they went, and at all events 
 we were distinctly national. Add to this, that there was still living, or 
 but lately dead, a group of landscape painters who may be said broadly 
 to have been the greatest which the modern world has ever known — 
 Stanfield, Linnell, Muller, Turner, Cox, and De Wint — who com- 
 bined with their truth to Nature a breadth of idea, a simplicity of 
 intention, and a sturdy contempt for insincerity or affectation, such as 
 could scarcely be surpassed. What has our art-education given us 
 in exchange ? What has become of the simplicity and honesty of 
 English figure-painting ? Which of our modern men will give us a 
 picture like Mulready's " Choosing the Wedding Gown," or the elder 
 Leslie's " Uncle Toby and Widow Wadman " ? — pictures which are 
 not only works of art, but are fine national works of art, which 
 breathe the spirit of the land, and that which made the land great, in 
 every line. What have we substituted for these ? Futile classical- 
 ities, which the people neither care for nor understand ; and sham 
 
 245 
 
renderings of a Parisianised society life, such as is alien to the very 
 heart of the English nation. 
 
 " One Spaniard lick two Portugee, 
 One jolly Englishman lick them all three," 
 
 is no doubt a very boastful saying, and one of very questionable 
 taste ; but after all it is the spirit which won Agincourt, and destroyed 
 the Armada, and a more wholesome one than this half- shivering 
 imitation of Parisian chic, or this puling longing after the outside 
 form of an ancient life, which has nothing in common with our own, 
 or for the matter of that with the manner in which we represent it. 
 
 How does this bear upon the work of the amateur ? In this way, 
 I think, that such a change would have been impossible, had the 
 unprofessional students of painting directed their efforts to the com- 
 prehension of more than the superficial aspects of art. We must 
 remember the artist is a younger son after all, he must do some- 
 thing for his living ; and that something must be, in the long-run, 
 what is demanded from him. He may keep up a technical standard, 
 but it is not his business to keep up an emotional or intellectual one — 
 for that, he is only " the glass and abstract chronicle of his time." His 
 pictures tell us only what we are, but not what we could be. Nearly 
 every household in England at the present day has at least one 
 member who in some form or another, in the sweet slang of the 
 period, " goes in " for art. What an effect would be produced upon 
 the nation as a whole, and the professional painters in particular, if 
 all of these amateurs were to understand and endeavour to carry out 
 in their own practice, and seek for in the pictures of artists, a few 
 simple principles of good art, such as those which are indicated 
 above. 
 
 246 
 
N - 10. ,v , •, 
 
IN MEMORIAM AMICI : WILKIE COLLINS. 
 
 JHE following study is from the critical point of view 
 open to one very grave objection, since it omits all 
 discussion of the imperfections of Wilkie Collins' 
 work : the cause of this omission should be plainly 
 stated. The first portion of the essay was written 
 some years ago and appeared under the title of "A 
 Living Story-teller" in the Contemporary Review, and had for avowed 
 purpose not criticism, but the endeavour to obtain some public 
 recognition of Wilkie Collins' long service to the English public, and 
 his achievements in the art to which he devoted his life. The second 
 portion of my essay was written nearly three years later, on the 
 occasion of the novelist's death, and was necessarily, therefore, 
 wholly uncritical. In the interval between these writings I had 
 come to know the subject of my essays, and had received from him 
 much unostentatious kindness and literary help, for which I had no 
 shadow of a claim. Under these circumstances, and with these 
 remembrances, I feel no disposition to-day to repair the .critical 
 deficiency which my essay shows so clearly. Let other hands insert 
 the shadows- here, I will deal only with the sunnier aspects of the 
 picture. Indeed in any case, it were the basest of ingratitude for the 
 present writer to enlarge upon the limitations and imperfections of 
 this author, for during my whole life his books have been to me the 
 most enjoyable stories in the world, and what I have learned during 
 these years of sympathy and help for the weak, intolerance of 
 pretence and Philistinism, compassion for the erring, and reverence 
 for the good, has been taught me in no small measure by this sensa- 
 tion novelist. How far others may be able to gain from these books 
 what I have gained of pleasure and profit I do not know, but I feel 
 sure of this, that no books more instinct with wide-reaching sympathy 
 and charity, and with the essential spirit of Christianity as distin- 
 guished from its outward forms, have been writteiT in our day, and 
 if they are viewed apart from such considerations simply as stories, 
 
 247 
 
that there is no novelist living who can rival the author of No Name 
 and The Woman in White. 
 
 The endeavour, therefore, of this paper is to show some grounds 
 for this belief, and if it may be to lead a somewhat forgetful public 
 to a fuller appreciation of the writer than has been as yet bestowed. 
 
 What then are the qualities of Mr. Wilkie Collins which separate 
 him from the other novelists of his time, and which constitute his 
 special claim upon our admiration .>' The chief of these can fortu- 
 nately be stated very shortly and simply : this author has told stories 
 better than they have ever been told in the world before, and 
 probably better than they will ever be told again. 
 
 Now, in this art of story -telling, Charles Reade, Dickens, and 
 Wilkie Collins were all past masters, but they were masters with a 
 difference, and, since the art is almost a forgotten one, it is worth 
 while to note in what the difference consisted. In some ways it is 
 true that Dickens told his stories rather badly : he was always 
 wandering away from his point ; he seldom overcame the temptation 
 to put in half-a-dozen new characters, whether they were needed or 
 not ; he exaggerated his types to such an extent that one continually 
 feels personally angry with them and him ; and in all sorts of 
 irrelevant places he sticks in superfluous eccentric people and amus- 
 ing incidents which it needs our utmost ingenuity and tolerance to 
 weave into the substance of his plot. But in another way he tells 
 his story equally well, giving to it an overpowering sense of vitality 
 and truth, touching it on one side and another till the plot gains 
 something of the multiplicity, and the light and shadow of life itself ; 
 above all, just when the reader's interest is on the verge of escaping 
 him, he compels his attention by sheer force of genius. 
 
 Charles Reade's method is more methodical, and far less elaborate : 
 its science consists in a perfectly clearly conceived, dramatic, and 
 continuous narrative, the progress of which is never arrested from 
 commencement to finish, which is subject to no interruption, and 
 burdened with no unnecessary additions. The essential difference 
 between his method and that of the other writers whom I have 
 mentioned, is that it is entirely a personal one ; he has always his 
 characters by the throat, and, so to speak, pinches their windpipes 
 hard, and shouts in their ear, "You say so-and-so",; he then takes 
 his unfortunate puppet by the throat, and shoves him lustily through 
 whatever part he has to play in the drama. Bristling with facts and 
 arguments, bubbling over with power and wit, indifferent to rebuffs, 
 and impervious to ridicule, this author's personality and his story 
 shoulder their way together through each of his books, till, after 
 reading two or three of them, we almost doubt of whom we know 
 
 248 
 
the most, the man who writes, or the men and women whom he 
 writes about. 
 
 And now let us turn to the subject of our article, notice the 
 peculiarities of his method, and see how entirely it differs from that 
 of either Dickens or Reade. 
 
 With that of Dickens, in so far as the method of narrating the story 
 is concerned,^ there is evidently little affinity. The narrative is 
 not only plain and direct, but unencumbered to an extraordinary 
 degree ; we scarcely exaggerate in saying that in several of his books 
 there is hardly a phrase, much less a character, which could be 
 spared without loss to the story. The plot is only elaborate in the 
 sense of being intricately woven, not for its possession of any large 
 amount of detail, or for the development necessitating many char- 
 acters. On the other hand, the method diverges from that of Reade 
 by its absolute impersonality ; the author practically never speaks in 
 propria persona, or, if he does so, he speaks as a voice only, leaving 
 us quite in the dark as to all personal idiosyncrasy. But the differ- 
 ence to be noted lies deeper than that, for in Wilkie Collins' stories 
 the result is brought about by a sustained and definite action and 
 reaction of character and circumstance, which is only in a very minor 
 degree present in either Dickens or Reade. 
 
 It would be fair to say of the latter authors that their characters 
 might have acted in many other stories, but of Collins that his stories 
 could not have been acted by any other characters. The connection 
 with the special plot is, in the first case, superficial ; in the second, 
 essential. I am not seeking now, remember, to compare these men 
 to the advantage or disadvantage of any one of them ; I am trying 
 only to point out differences. What is needed at the present day 
 is that we should admire all three a great deal more than we do, not 
 that we should admire one at the expense of the others. 
 
 Mr. Wilkie Collins' first essay in novel-writing was an historical 
 romance entitled Antonina ; or, the Fall of Rome, and is remark- 
 able ^chiefly for the fact that though possessing various merits, such 
 as considerable power of descriptive writing, and clear perception of 
 character, yet the work affords us no hint of the author's special faculty 
 — the power of concentrating the interest of the story, and bringing 
 all the actions of his characters into close relation therewith. In my 
 opinion, a very dull, and quite unreadable book ; and so the public 
 apparently thought, for the work created no stir, and even after the 
 author had achieved popularity, was seldom spoken of, much less 
 read. 
 
 Well, we need only say that the book was a failure ; whatever Mr. 
 Wilkie Collins' gifts might be, evidently he had not as yet found 
 their right direction. Accordingly, in the next story there is an 
 2 K 249 
 
entirely jiew departure, and Basil takes us from ancient Rome to 
 the very centre of modern London life : the story practically begins 
 in an omnibus, and the chief characters are a managing clerk, and a 
 linendraper's daughter. 
 
 When I think of the period in which this novel was written and 
 published, I confess I find it difficult to understand the tolerance that 
 was shown by the Press. The story deals as frankly with a certain 
 phase of the affections as if by Daudet himself, and, indeed, I believe 
 it was attacked in certain quarters on this score. ^ 
 
 Shortly put, the story recounts how a young man of ancient family 
 marries secretly the daughter of a successful linendraper, and submits 
 to a restriction, imposed on him by her father, of leaving his wife at 
 the church door, in order that, if possible, his father's consent may be 
 obtained before the marriage is openly acknowledged. The motives 
 of the linendraper in making this somewhat extraordinary arrange- 
 ment are explained by a fear of losing his well-born son-in-law on the 
 one hand, and the desire to gain time for completing the education 
 of his daughter, and for selecting a favourable opportunity for 
 winning the consent of his son-in-law's father. In the meantime, the 
 managing clerk, who has hitherto assisted in educating the girl, and 
 who has always intended to marry her himself, acquires great 
 influence over her, and finally seduces her the very night before the 
 year's probation expires. Through a series of accidents, Basil 
 becomes a witness to his own dishonour, and the remainder of the 
 book is taken up with his vengeance on the seducer and its con- 
 sequences. 
 
 This, it will be observed, is a tolerably strong story, and can 
 hardly be said to be a pleasant one ; nor would it be worth while 
 dwelling on the subject were it not that it shows the rise in our 
 author of that peculiar faculty, the development of which was after- 
 wards to render him unrivalled in his line. A single powerful motive, 
 a single sustained purpose, runs throughout the book ; thereto every- 
 thing tends, and in connection therewith every incident occurs. 
 Characters come and go in entire subordination to the part they have 
 to play in the story, and yet they do this naturally. The action of 
 the book depends on the influence exercised by character over cir- 
 cumstance ; the determining impulse of each event can be traced back 
 to a mental idiosyncrasy. This treatment makes the plot organic, and 
 from this method Mr. Wilkie Collins has seldom departed. Those 
 interested in physiological contrasts, can trace with pleasure through- 
 out Basil the manner in which the varying idiosyncrasies and motives 
 of the people concerned, combine to produce the catastrophe of the 
 
 1 Ten years after the book was published, Collins wrote in the preface to a new edition, " I 
 allowed the prurient misinterpretation of certain perfectly innocent passages in this book to 
 assert itself as offensively as it pleased, without troubling myself to protest against an 
 expression of opinion which aroused in me no other feeling than a feeling of contempt" 
 
 250 
 
book— the pride of Basil's father; the over-credulity and timorousness 
 of Basil himself; the terrified submission of Mrs. Sherwin, the mother 
 of the heroine ; the meanness and selfishness of her husband ; the 
 vanity and heartlessness of Margaret herself, are all as much factors 
 in the catastrophe, as the deliberate, cold-blooded scheming of the 
 villain of the story. Gradually, as one reads the book, a sense of 
 inevitable calamity mingles with our interest : the final catastrophe 
 comes almost as a relief. Here is the secret of Collins' power as a 
 story-teller; other authors may construct a plot with as great in- 
 genuity, or tell us a story of as entrancing interest, but no other 
 writer has so well succeeded in producing upon his readers the same 
 sense of inevitableness and reality; these plots are not ov^y possible, 
 they are imperative ; not only might things have happened thus ; 
 they could not have happened otherwise. 
 
 Let us consider the means by which the author attained this 
 perfection of tale-telling. Before we speak of his method in detail, 
 hear what, in Mr, Collins' personal opinion, a work of fiction 
 should be. 
 
 " Believing that the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters in the 
 family of Fiction ; that the one is a drama narrated, and the 
 other is a drama acted ; and that all the strong and deep 
 emotions which the Play-writer is privileged to excite, the Novel- 
 writer is privileged to excite also, I have not thought it either 
 politic or necessary, while adhering to realities, to adhere to every- 
 day realities only. In other words, I have not stooped so low 
 as to assure myself of the reader's belief in the probability of my 
 story, by never once calling on him for the exercise of his faith. 
 Those extraordinary accidents and events which happen to few 
 men, seemed to me to be as legitimate materials for fiction to 
 work with — when there was a good object in using them — as 
 the ordinary accidents and events which may, and do, happen to 
 us all. By appealing to genuine sources of interest within the 
 reader's own experience, I could certainly gain his attention to 
 begin with ; but it would be only by appealing to other sources 
 (as genuine in their way) beyond his own experience, that I 
 could hope to fix his interest and excite his suspense, to occupy 
 his deeper feelings, or to stir his nobler thoughts." 
 
 No statement could be more precise, or, with regard to the art of 
 fiction, more correct ; this is not only true, but covers, either expressly 
 or by implication, the whole ground of legitimate story-telling. To 
 have something worth the telling, and to say it in the clearest and 
 most vivid manner, and in such a way as to excite the reader's 
 suspense, stir his emotion, and excite his nobler aspirations — this 
 is to be a story-teller indeed ; and who would not be proud if 
 
 251 
 
his work satisfied such conditions ? At the risk of wearying my 
 readers, I will repeat that on such or similar principles all our great 
 novelists have hitherto worked. The chief foundation of the art of 
 fiction is the drama, as every one who has heard a Neapolitan or an 
 Eastern story-teller will readily admit ; and the reason of this is that 
 the most perfect presentment of a human being is not the analysis of 
 his motives, but the embodiment of himself ; the presenting him, so 
 to speak, on the stage of your book, and letting him act there as he 
 would do "on the boards," or as he would in that life of which his 
 action "on the boards" is an imitation. In other words, for the 
 purpose of story-telling, the dramatic is a more powerful form than 
 the literary, than the analytical. Moreover, this form becomes 
 more imperative in proportion to the interest of the story which is 
 being told ; indeed, at crucial moments even the most analytical of 
 fiction-writers are forced into the simpler dramatic method ; when 
 they come to the point, their characters act their parts, not narrate 
 them. One great difference between Wilkie Collins and other 
 writers who more or less appreciate the force of this truth, is that he 
 constructs his stories throughout on the above-mentioned principle ; 
 his characters reveal alike themselves and the work on which they 
 are engaged, by their actions and speech. The author tells us com- 
 paratively little about them, and in many minor instances he tells us 
 absolutely nothing. Think, for example, of the old servant, Gabriel 
 Betteredge, in The Moonstone, who exhibits himself so clearly by 
 means of his diary in the first few pages of the book that we know 
 him as intimately as our personal friends. 
 
 " Well, there I was in clover, you will say. Placed in a position 
 of trust and honour, with a little cottage of my own to live in, 
 with my rounds on the estate to occupy me in the morning, and 
 my accounts in the afternoon, and my pipe and my Robinson 
 Crusoe in the evening — what more could I possibly want to 
 make me happy ? Remember what Adam wanted when he was 
 alone in the Garden of Eden ; and if you don't blame it in 
 Adam, don't blame it in me. 
 
 " The woman I fixed my eye on, was the woman who kept house 
 for me at my cottage. Her name was Selina Goby. I agree 
 with the late William Cobbett about picking a wife. See that 
 she chews her food well, and sets her foot down firmly on the 
 ground-when she walks, and you're all right. Selina Goby was 
 all right in both these respects, which was one reason for 
 marrying her. I had another reason, likewise, entirely of my 
 own discovering. Selina, being a single woman, made me pay 
 so much a week for her board and services. Selina, being my 
 wife, couldn't charge for her board, and would have to give me 
 her services for nothing. That was the point of view I looked 
 
 252 
 
at it from. ^ Economy — with a dash of love. I put it to my 
 mistress, as in duty bound, just as I had put it to myself. 
 " ' I have been turning Selina Goby over in my mind," I said, ' and 
 I think, my lady, it will be cheaper to marry her than to keep 
 her.' 
 
 " My lady burst out laughing, and said, she didn't know which to 
 be most shocked at — my language or my principles. Some 
 joke tickled her, I suppose, of the sort that you can't take unless 
 you are a person of quality. Understanding nothing myself but 
 that I was free to put it next to Selina, I went and put it 
 accordingly. And what did Selina say ? Lord ! how little you 
 must know of women, if you ask that. Of course she said, 
 Yes. 
 
 " As my time grew nearer, and there got to be talk of my having a 
 new coat for the ceremony, my mind began to misgive me. I 
 have compared notes with other men as to what they felt while 
 they were in my interesting situation ; and they have all acknow- 
 ledged that, about a week before it happened, they privately 
 wished themselves out of it. I went a trifle further than that 
 myself; I actually rose up, as it were, and tried to get out of it. 
 Not for nothing ! I was too just a man to expect she would let 
 me off for nothing. Compensation to the woman, when the man 
 gets out of it, is one of the laws of England. In obedience to 
 the laws, and after turning it over carefully in my mind, I 
 offered Selina Goby a feather bed and fifty shillings to be off 
 the bargain. You will hardly believe it, but it is nevertheless 
 true — she was fool enough to refuse. 
 
 "After that it was all over with me, of course. I got the new 
 coat as cheap as I could, and I went through all the rest of it as 
 cheap as I could. We were not a happy couple, and not a 
 miserable couple. We were six of one and half-a-dozen 
 of the other. How it was I don't understand, but we always 
 seemed to be getting, with the best of motives, in one another's 
 way. When I wanted to go upstairs, there was my wife 
 coming down ; or when my wife wanted to go up, there was 
 I coming down. That is married life, according to my experi- 
 ence of it." 
 To return to our analysis of Mr. Wilkie Collins' method ; we find, 
 on examining the books closely, that the essential strength of the 
 various stories consists in their possession of two attributes which at 
 first sight seem somewhat conflicting. These are the attributes of 
 mystery and simplicity. No books are ever at the same time so 
 straightforward and so intricate ; the straightforwardness is in the 
 execution, in the march of the narrative, the clear presentment of 
 the characters, but the goal is nowhere in sight, nor to the end of 
 
 253 
 
the book does the reader know whither he is being led. There are 
 throughout, however, a feeUng of sustained purpose, a connection of 
 action, and a development of character, which impress the reader 
 with the conviction of the author's sanity and trustworthiness. 
 However intricate the plot may be, however numerous the people, 
 we feel more and more certain, with every page we read, that every 
 detail and every action, nay, and even every speech, is helping on 
 the development of some purpose, which we cannot guess, but dimly 
 foreshadow. The conviction that this is so, holds the interest as in 
 a vice, and excites an attention to the less obvious parts of the 
 story, which is proportionately intensified in the more exciting 
 portions. I know no writer, for instance, living or dead, who has 
 been able to touch the facts of Nature with so keen a human 
 interest, and weld them so firmly to the incidents and emotions of 
 his story. Descriptions of Nature in Mr. Wilkie Collins' hands, no 
 matter how simply realistic they may appear in every detail, become, 
 when viewed as a whole, in entire harmony with, and of consider- 
 able importance to, the purpose of his book; and it is strange to 
 notice how uniformly successful this author has been in imparting to 
 each description the exact sentiment which was dramatically appro- 
 priate to the part of the story in which it appears. Here is an 
 instance from Armadale — a description of a picnic party to the 
 Norfolk Broads, remarkable not only for its delicate truth to 
 Nature, but for a suggestiveness and underlying sense of mystery, 
 which help to prepare the way for the fulfilment of the first vision in 
 Armadale's dream : — 
 
 "An hour's steady driving from the Major's cottage had taken 
 young Armadale and his guests beyond the limits of Mid- 
 winter's solitary walk, and was now bringing them nearer and 
 nearer to one of the strangest and loveliest aspects of Nature, 
 which the inland landscape, not of Norfolk only, but of all 
 England, can show. Little by little, the face of the country 
 began to change as the carriage approached the remote and 
 lonely district of the Broads. The wheat-fields and turnip-fields 
 became perceptibly fewer, and the fat green grazing grounds on 
 either side grew wider and wider in their smooth and sweeping 
 range. Heaps of dry rushes and reeds, laid up for the basket- 
 maker and the thatch er, began to appear at the roadside. The 
 old gabled cottages of the early part of the drive dwindled 
 and disappeared, and huts with mud walls rose in their place. 
 With the ancient church towers, and the wind and water mills, 
 which had hitherto been the only lofty objects seen over the 
 low marshy flat, there now rose all round the horizon, gliding 
 slow and distant behind fringes of pollard willows, the sails of 
 invisible boats moving on invisible waters. All the strange and 
 startling anomalies presented by an inland agricultural district, 
 
 254 
 
I 
 
 V* 
 
isolated from other districts by its intricate surrounding network 
 of pools and streams — holding its communication and carrying 
 its produce by water instead of land — began to present them- 
 selves in closer and closer succession. Nets appeared on 
 cottage palings ; little flat-bottomed boats lay strangely at rest 
 among the flowers in cottage gardens ; farmers' men passed to 
 and fro, clad in composite costume of the coast and the field, in 
 sailors' hats and fishermen's boots, and ploughmen's smocks, — 
 and even yet the low-lying labyrinth of waters, embosomed in its 
 mystery of solitude, was a hidden labyrinth still. A minute more, 
 and the carriages took a sudden turn from the hard high-road 
 into a little weedy lane ; the wheels ran noiselessly on the damp 
 and spongy ground. A lonely outlying cottage appeared, with 
 its litter of nets and boats. A few yards farther on, and the 
 last morsel of the firm earth suddenly ended in a tiny creek and 
 quay. One turn more, to the end of the quay, and there, 
 spreading its great sheet of water, far, and bright, and smooth, 
 on the right hand and the left — there, as pure in its spotless 
 blue, as still in its heavenly peacefulness, as the summer sky 
 above it, was the first of the Norfolk Broads." 
 
 It is worth while looking at that passage carefully for a moment, 
 if only to notice the excessive ingenuity with which the author 
 passes, without the slightest jerk, from pure description of Nature to 
 the continuation of his narrative. You are taken, as it were^ into 
 the carriage which passes these various details of house, and field, and 
 labourer ; and still, as the horses trot, you are thinking of the Broad, 
 and wondering why you cannot see it, till at the very last moment 
 the reader arrives with the picnic party, and is ready to share their 
 forthcoming experiences. This may seem a small point to dwell 
 upon, but it is by the observance of small points such as these that 
 Mr, Collins succeeds in impressing us with the reality of his stories. 
 No reader can skip a description such as the one we have quoted ; 
 it is welded into the story. 
 
 The fact is, our author feels what every great landscape painter 
 has always felt, and shown in his pictures, that the interest of 
 landscape for most people depends on its relation to ourselves, the 
 associations aroused thereby, and the significance which we find 
 therein; and, feeling this, he immensely heightens the power of 
 his narrative, by connecting the occurrence of certain incidents, 
 with places which lend themselves, by their natural characteristics, 
 to the emotions which he wishes to excite. In this special 
 portion of Armadale he is seeking to prepare the reader's mind 
 for the fulfilment of a dream vision, in such a manner as is to 
 leave the reader in doubt whether the fulfilment be accidental or no. 
 
 255 
 
Every line of this description of the Broads echoes back to the 
 former description of the dream, and helps to arouse that sense of 
 mystery, strangeness, and loneHness, which will prepare the reader's 
 mind for " strange matters." 
 
 Let us recur to those characters which, as a rule, are the pivots on 
 which the interest of a novel turns — the hero arid heroine, and their 
 love relations. Throughout all Collins' finer novels the interest turns 
 not on these characters alone, but is almost equally concerned^ with 
 every personage mentioned in the book. The hero and heroine in 
 Basil, for instance, are treated with neither more nor less respect by the 
 author than the rest of the "cast." The so-called hero of The Woman 
 in White disappears for some hundreds of pages in the most vital 
 portion of the book, without our even noticing his absence. Arma- 
 dale and The Moonstone have quite certainly no hero or heroine 
 at all ; and though No Name is concerned almost entirely with the 
 fortunes of one erring girl, she is never regarded from the heroine 
 point of view, and is indeed, considering her earlier life, perhaps the 
 most faulty character in the book. The result, to the present writer 
 at least, is a delicious sense of freedom — one's interest has not been 
 concentrated entirely in the fortunes of two personages, both of 
 whom may to special readers be personally uninteresting — and our 
 trust in the author's impartiality becomes absolute, when we mark 
 the even-handed justice he displays towards his creations.^ 
 
 Hide and Seek, the book which followed Basil in order of 
 date, shows a great advance in the development of Mr. Wilkie 
 Collins' literary power. Here is at once a more pleasant story, and a 
 better work of art ; the interest, instead of being centred in a solitary 
 figure, is distributed amongst the characters of the story, and there 
 is a far less strained action necessary on their part to bring about the 
 final solution. The book, too, has a definite moral purpose, which, 
 though never obtruded, is, in the end, satisfactorily achieved. The 
 author tries to show that happiness is perfectly possible, with a little 
 kindness on one side, and a little resolution and patience on the 
 other, to the life of a girl afflicted with even such a terrible calamity 
 as that of being deaf and dumb, that such an one need not neces- 
 sarily be either herself sorrowful, or burdensome to her companions. 
 In fact, in Hide and Seek, instead of representing the person 
 afflicted in this manner as an object of pity, the author insists 
 throughout, and in the end wins the reader's assent to his assertion, 
 that Mary Blyth's was a happy life. 
 
 I have called this the main purpose of the book, but the pur- 
 
 * A younger reader would probably not experience this pleasure, for indeed the old fashion 
 of hero and heroine has almost passed away. 
 
 256 
 
pose, though always traceable, is for the most part kept in the 
 background. The plot turns upon an incident (or rather upon the 
 consequences of an incident) which has happened before the story 
 begins, and, briefly put, shows how a brother who, with infinite 
 difficulty, discovers the story of his only sister's desertion and death, 
 foregoes his vengeance upon the man who was responsible for both, 
 for the sake of his friend, the betrayer's son. 
 
 In the order of Mr. Wilkie Collins' novels this work holds a very 
 important place, not only for the increase of power of which I have 
 spoken, but because this is the first time that the author's peculiar 
 gift of humour distinctly shows itself; neither Antonina nor Basil 
 contains, to the best of my recollection, any indication of humorous 
 faculty; they are, to use a painter's expression, "a little tight" in 
 their workmanship, the youth of the writer showing in a sort of self- 
 conscious restraint, which does not allow him to look to the right 
 hand or the left, to let himself go for a moment. But in Hide and 
 Seek the author is not a bit afraid of his reader; he is not only 
 going to tell him a story, he is going to tell it in his own way ; and 
 the result is a book which, despite a somewhat stern narrative and 
 sorrowful episodes, yet literally brims over with humour, and shows 
 the keenest appreciation of the humorous points of the various situa- 
 tions. I use this word "humour" advisedly, for "funny," in the 
 correct sense of the term, Mr. Wilkie Collins is not, either here or 
 in his later novels. There is a mordant quality about his laughter 
 which is alien to the spirit of fun ; he laughs like a man to 
 whom sorrow is not unknown. In conclusion, I would say that 
 the detailed charm of Hide and Seek lies in the minor sketches, 
 especially in those of the artist and his bedridden wife, which are 
 touched with the most gentle and yet incisive hand, and which show 
 us two entirely lovable, and generously imperfect people. In a 
 slight way, I know nothing in fiction prettier or more genuinely 
 pathetic than the study of the good-hearted, ambitious, but com- 
 paratively incompetent artist, who, after his wife's first attack of 
 serious illness, gives up his dreams of becoming a great historical 
 and mythological painter, and, finding that he can sell for a few 
 pounds his studies of still-life, deliberately restricts his art to the 
 purpose of producing these insignificant pictures, in order to give his 
 ailing wife every luxury and resource which she might have had, had 
 he been a man of fortune as well as a man of heart. 
 
 Those who call Mr. Collins a sensational writer, would do well to 
 study many passages such as these, which occur throughout his 
 works — passages which show that he can not only deal with the 
 strongest motives or the greatest eccentricities of human nature, but 
 that he can understand, and love to linger long over, these tender 
 2 L 257 
 
everyday affections, "which have one by one, and little by little, 
 raised man from being no higher than the brute, to be only a little 
 lower than the angels." * 
 
 Here is the account of how the apparently fruitless, unselfish de- 
 votion to his art in happier days, recompenses the artist in the time 
 of his affliction, when, after the first shock of his grief is over, he is 
 able to turn his big canvases to the wall, and set to work again on a 
 humbler scale, which is sanctified by a more human interest : — 
 
 " On the first day when, in obedience to her wishes, he sat before 
 his picture again — the half-finished picture from which he had 
 been separated for so many months — on that first day, when the 
 friendly occupation of his life seemed suddenly to have grown 
 strange to him ; when his brush wandered idly among the 
 colours ; when his tears dropped fast on the palette every time 
 he looked down on it; when he tried hard to work as usual, 
 though only for half an hour, only on simple background places 
 in the composition, and still the brush made false touches, and 
 still the tints would not mingle as they should, and still the same 
 words, repeated over and over again, would burst from his lips : 
 ' Oh, poor Lavvie ! oh, poor, dear, dear Lavvie ! ' — even then 
 the spirit of that beloved art, which he had always followed so 
 humbly and so faithfully, was true to its divine mission, and 
 comforted and upheld him at the last bitterest moment when he 
 laid down his palette in despair. 
 
 " While he was still hiding his face before the very picture which 
 he and his wife had once innocently and secretly glorified to- 
 gether, in those happy days of its beginning that were never to 
 come again, the sudden thought of consolation shone out in his 
 heart, and showed him how he might adorn all his after-life with 
 the deathless beauty of a pure and noble purpose. Thenceforth 
 his vague dream of fame, and of rich men wrangling with each 
 other for the possession of his pictures, took the second place in 
 his mind ; and, in their stead, sprang up the new resolution that 
 he would win independently, with his own brush, no matter at 
 what sacrifice of pride and ambition, the means of surrounding 
 his sick wife with all those luxuries and refinements which his 
 own little income did not enable him to obtain, and which he 
 shrank with instinctive delicacy from accepting as presents 
 bestowed by his father's generosity. Here was the consoling 
 purpose which robbed affliction of half its bitterness already, 
 and bound him and his art together by a bond more sacred than 
 any that had united them before. In the very hour when this 
 
 * John Morley. 
 258 
 
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thought came to him, he rose without a pang to turn the great 
 historical composition, from which he had once hoped so much, 
 with its face to the wall, and set himself to finish an unpre- 
 tending little 'study' of a cottage courtyard, which he was 
 certain of selling to a picture-dealing friend. The first approach 
 to happiness which he had known for a long, long time past, 
 was on the evening of that day, when he went upstairs to sit 
 with Lavinia, and, keeping secret his purpose of the morning, 
 made the sick woman smile, in spite of her sufferings, by asking 
 her how she should like to have her room furnished if she were 
 the lady of a great lord, instead of being only the wife of 
 Valentine Blyth. 
 
 • ••«.. 
 
 " No one but himself ever knew what he had sacrificed in labour- 
 ing to gain these things. The heartless people whose portraits 
 he had painted, and whose impertinences he had patiently sub- 
 mitted to; the mean bargainers who had treated him like a 
 tradesman ; the dastardly men of business who had disgraced 
 their order by taking advantage of his simplicity — how hardly 
 and cruelly such insect natures of this world had often dealt 
 with that noble heart! how despicably they had planted their 
 small gadfly stings in the high soul which it was never per- 
 mitted to them to subdue ! " 
 
 It would be pleasant to say that The Dead Secret, which followed 
 Hide and Seek, showed a further development of our author's art 
 in the qualities of which I have been speaking. But this book is, on 
 the contrary, less humorous, less genuine, and less tender than the 
 one which preceded it ; on the other hand, it is certainly more con- 
 centrated, and therefore, taken as a whole, more powerful. The 
 weakness of the story, as a work of art, consists in the fact that our 
 sympathies are never aroused for the protagonist of the story ; 
 despite the author's utmost efforts, we are not interested in Sarah 
 Leeson. I think the reason for this is twofold. In the first place, 
 Sarah Leeson is introduced to us from the very beginning with the 
 burden of the secret overshadowing her ; there is no special reason 
 why we should care for this woman, who, from our first acquaint- 
 ance with her, passes shrinking up and down the staircases, and sits 
 trembling in the corridor. And, in the second place, the author in this 
 instance has prepared his subject too elaborately ; he makes his 
 secret like a pancake, and keeps tossing it about from one pan to the 
 other, hiding and seeking it ; missing, getting nearer to, and farther 
 from it, till at last the poor thing is scrabbled over with incident and 
 description, like an Assyrian palimpsest, and still we do not know 
 what it is, and, when we do know, we feel inclined to say : "Oh ! 
 is that all ? " as at the end of a pointless story. And yet the book 
 
 259 
 
is full of ingenuity, and, as in a house built by some misguided 
 architect, we are continually opening doors that only reveal dark 
 cupboards, and running up and down passages and steps, only to 
 find ourselves where we started. The book is especially poor in its 
 minor characters; Uncle Joseph, the German upholsterer, for 
 example, with the music-box that Mozart gave to his grandfather, 
 becomes, despite his virtues, a perfect nuisance to the reader. He 
 is that most annoying of all the creations of the novelist, a good 
 man with a tiresome eccentricity which we are not allowed to forget 
 for a single moment, introduced, of course, as a Deus ex machind, 
 and to give relief to the more sombre portions of the story. Uncle 
 Joseph never fairly gets into the plot at all ; he, so to speak, dances 
 about outside, to the sound of his eternal music -box, and to the 
 weariness of the reader. Perhaps one exception should in justice be 
 made concerning the minor characters of The Dead Secret, and that 
 is in favour of Mr. Phippen, the dyspeptic philosopher, who weighs 
 his bread, and measures his tea, and yet, nevertheless, sees bilious 
 spots dancing in front of him as he takes his morning constitutional. 
 Mr. Phippen is delightful, but, most unfortunately, he only occurs in 
 one scene of the story. 
 
 The Dead Secret would have been much improved had the 
 author allowed his humorous faculty to have a little freer play. As 
 it is, the book has sufficient interest to make you read it, but not 
 sufficient to make you regret the revelation of the secret when it 
 comes at last. With The Dead Secret ends what I should feel 
 inclined to call the early period of Mr. Wilkie Collins' art ; by the 
 time the next book (The Woman in White) is published, the writer 
 has entirely mastered his business, his "soft-shell" stage is at an 
 end, and, as he would say himself, for good or evil the man stands 
 revealed before us. 
 
 I do not purpose to say much, or indeed anything, in detail, about 
 the plot of The Woman in White, which is too well known to need 
 description, nor is the story such as can be easily explained in a 
 brief outline ; but of the character-drawing in this book, and its con- 
 nection with the plot, I must speak somewhat minutely. This 
 is the first book in which Mr. Wilkie Collins succeeds in entirely 
 holding the reader's interest by the story alone, taken in con- 
 nection with the characters by whom it is carried out. Gradually 
 to this point has the author's power grown — to this point of welding 
 together circumstance and character, and showing their inter- 
 dependences, and the results that arise from their mutual action and 
 reaction. Two weak points, and only two weak points, I find in the 
 construction. Anne Catherick ^ is of necessity uninteresting, not only 
 
 ^ Otherwise, "the Woman in White." 
 260 
 
■1 
 
 on account of her imbecile character, but because by the exigencies of 
 the plot she is bound to be sacrificed fruitlessly, and so the author 
 is forbidden by every rule of dramatic propriety to really arouse our 
 interest in her ; this, therefore, is felt as a deficiency necessitated by 
 the plot itself, and as such may be excused, if not pardoned. 
 
 The second point is to me a far more important one : an error 
 in the actual art of the novel-writer — an error which would be 
 almost unpardonable, did not our inartistic English public practically 
 insist on such a mistake being committed in nine books out of 
 ten. The point of which I am speaking is the anti- climax of 
 Count Fosco's death, and Walter Hartright's trip to Paris. The 
 book should end^the book actually does end, as far as all interest 
 is concerned — in the scene between Count Fosco and Walter 
 Hartright, in which the former confesses his share in the conspiracy ; 
 this is not only the finest situation, but the finest scene, in the 
 book — a scene which in combination of dialogue, narrative, and 
 dramatic power, has probably never been surpassed in fiction ; and 
 then, lo and behold! we have some twenty more pages, contain- 
 ing a perfectly useless narrative of the erasure of Laura Fairlie's 
 name from the tombstone, and the subsequent journey of Hartright 
 to Paris, followed by his discovery of Count Fosco's body in the 
 Morgue. Let us commit that worst of all impertinences — that of 
 teaching a man his own business — and say boldly that the last 
 episode should have been Hartright's departure from Count 
 Fosco's lodgings, and his catching sight, as he left, of that Italian 
 member of the " Brotherhood " (to which the Count belonged) whom 
 Hartright had noticed on two previous occasions watching him. So 
 the villain would have departed into the darkness whence he came, 
 with the shadow of Nemesis stealing after him, and we should have 
 been spared that irritating feeling, so common to readers of English 
 fiction, that all our stories must be saddled with a definite moral 
 ending, wherein every personage is rewarded or punished according 
 to his deserts ; must also have all their incidents neatly finished up 
 — as if the world ended at the end of the third volume. With these 
 blemishes, and perhaps a slight feeling of disappointment with regard 
 to the character of Hartright himself, the adverse criticism of T^e 
 Woman in White must end. 
 
 This is a book which made an era in novel -writing, and may 
 be said to have opened up a new view of the art — a view on 
 which a whole subsequent school has been founded ; and yet, 
 despite the thousands of so-called sensational novels which the last 
 thirty years have seen, the prototype remains easily first, and 
 this results from simple conditions, and rests upon the fact that 
 the author has been able to combine a very true and noble human 
 
 261 
 
feeling with his more passionate and tragical interests. The crimes 
 of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde would lose half their dramatic 
 intensity, were they not contrasted with the unswerving sisterly 
 devotion of Marian Halcombe, and the unselfish love of Walter 
 Hartright ; and these again would have little power to move us, were 
 they not surrounded and, as it were, upheld by a multitude of other 
 characters, for the most part indicated by slight touches, who are 
 yet living, breathing realities. Walter's mother ; Signor Pesca, the 
 teacher of Italian ; Miss Vesey, the old companion ; Mr. Gilmore, 
 the lawyer ; Mr, Fairlie, the selfish dilettante ; grim Mrs. Catherick 
 herself — all of these are there, and not there only to play their part 
 in the story, but to impress us with a sense of the everyday world, 
 with its commonplace interests and actions, and so relieve and 
 render natural the more salient portions of the story. 
 
 The most interesting character of the story is of course Count 
 Fosco, who stands out from the villains of contemporary fiction as an 
 almost solitary example or a scoundrel who makes no "damnable 
 faces " over his villainy, and whose part in the story is not only to 
 bring about the catastrophe. For Fosco in The Woman in White has, 
 as he had in life, two almost distinct individualities, one of which 
 issues in his overflowing vanity, his resplendent waistcoats, his white 
 mice, and his passion for Rossini's music ; while the other sits silently 
 by in the shadow, waiting its time to strike the long-planned blow ot 
 the conspiracy. Perhaps the strongest part of the interest which 
 The Woman in White inspires, is due to the conviction with, which 
 the author succeeds in impressing us of Count Fosco's capability for 
 better things, of the strange recesses in his character. We keep 
 saying to ourselves, "What might not this man have done?" 
 The overpowering influence of great strength of character, even 
 when the direction of that strength is in the main an evil one, 
 has never been shown in a work of fiction at once more subtly 
 and more powerfully than here ; every reader feels the fascination 
 of this villain, and feels it, too, without losing his horror at 
 his cold-bloodedness and crime. By clear, bold, broad touches is 
 this effect produced, without a moment's pause in the course of the 
 story. 
 
 I can only extract a small portion of the description of the Count 
 which appears in Marian Halcombe's diary, but even this will be 
 sufficient to show the power and subtlety of the author's analysis, 
 and the clearness of outline with which from the first this character 
 is presented : — 
 
 " And the magician who has wrought this wonderful transformation 
 — the foreign husband who has tamed this once wayward 
 Englishwoman till her own relations hardly know her again 
 — the Count himself? What of the Count ? 
 
 262 
 
ORPHANED 
 
 E. IV. JOHNSON. K. W. S. 
 
"This, in two words. He looks like a man who could tame 
 anything. If he had married a tigress instead of a woman, he 
 would have tamed the tigress. If he had married me, I should 
 have made his cigarettes as his wife does — I should have held 
 my tongue when he looked at me, as she holds hers. 
 
 " I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these secret pages. 
 The man has interested me, has forced me to like him. In two 
 short days he has made his way straight into my favourable 
 estimation — and how he has worked the miracle is more than I 
 can tell. 
 
 • • • • • ■ 
 
 "It may be his face. He is a most remarkable likeness, on a large 
 scale, of the Great Napoleon. His features have Napoleon's 
 magnificent regularity ; his expression recalls the grandly calm, 
 immovable power of the Great Soldier's face. This striking 
 resemblance certainly impressed me, to begin with ; but there is 
 something in him besides the resemblance, which has impressed 
 me more. I think the influence I am now trying to find is in his 
 eyes. They are the most unfathomable grey eyes I ever saw ; 
 and they have at times a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible glitter 
 in them, which forces me to look at him, and yet causes me 
 sensations, when I do look, which I would rather hot feel. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 "All the smallest characteristics of this strange man have some- 
 thing strikingly original and perplexingly contradictory in them. 
 Fat as he is, and old as he is, his movements are astonishingly 
 light and easy. He is as noiseless in a room as any of us 
 women ; and, more than that, with all his look of unmistakable 
 mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the 
 weakest of us. He starts at every chance noise as inveterately 
 as Laura herself. He winced and shuddered yesterday when 
 Sir Percival beat one of the spaniels, so that I felt ashamed of 
 my own want of tenderness and sensibility, by comparison with 
 the Count. 
 
 " The relation of this last incident reminds me of one of his most 
 curious peculiarities, which I have not yet mentioned — his extra- 
 ordinary fondness for pet animals. 
 
 "Some of these he has left on the Continent, but he has brought 
 with him to this house a cockatoo, two canary birds, and a 
 whole family of white mice. He attends to all the necessities 
 of these strange favourites himself, and he has taught the 
 creatures to be surprisingly fond of him and familiar with him. 
 The cockatoo, a most vicious and treacherous bird towards any- 
 body else, absolutely seems to love him. When he lets it out of 
 
 263 
 
its cage, it hops on to his knee, and claws its way up his great 
 big body, and rubs its top-knot against his sallow double chin in 
 the most caressing manner imaginable. He has only to set the 
 door of the canaries' cages open, and to call them; and the 
 pretty little cleverly -trained creatures perch fearlessly on his 
 hand, mount his fat outstretched fingers one by one when he 
 tells them to 'go upstairs,' and sing together as if they would 
 burst their throats with delight when they get to the top finger. 
 His white mice live in a little pagoda of gaily-painted wirework, 
 designed and made by himself. They are almost as tame as the 
 canaries, and they are perpetually let out, like the canaries. 
 They crawl all over him, popping in and out of his waistcoat, 
 and sitting in couples, white as snow, on his capacious shoulders. 
 He seems to be even fonder of his mice than of his other pets, 
 smiles at them, and kisses them, and calls them by all sorts of 
 endearing names. If it be possible to suppose an Englishman 
 with any taste for such childish interests and amusements as 
 these, that Englishman would certainly feel rather ashamed of 
 them, and would be anxious to apologise for them, in the 
 company of grown-up people. But the Count, apparently, sees 
 nothing ridiculous in the amazing contrast between his colossal 
 self and his frail little pets. He would blandly kiss his white 
 mice, and twitter to his canary birds, amid an assembly of 
 English fox-hunters, and would only pity them as barbarians 
 when they were all laughing their loudest at him." 
 
 In this description it is that the author's genius for depicting 
 character shows its utmost height, for if Count Fosco had not been a 
 human villain, the story of The Woman in White would have been 
 unbearable : the cowardly, tyrannous selfishness of Sir Percival 
 Glyde, the weak submission of his wife, the magnificent devotion to 
 her sister of Marian Halcombe, would have had no foil and no relief. 
 As it is, the woman and the man, Marian Halcombe and Count 
 Fosco, the good and the evil spirits, stand opposite to one another, 
 and fight for their respective interests amidst the weaker characters 
 whose fortunes they decide, and, as I have said, so subtly is the 
 villain conceived, that the balance of sympathy is never altogether on 
 the side of his antagonist. Ought it to be ? 
 
 That is the question to which the answer would not have been 
 doubtful fifty years ago, and that is the question to which the 
 affirmative answer, given by many people, has caused so much 
 adverse criticism on Mr. Wilkie Collins' novels. 
 
 The answer which I should give here would be as follows : ^ — 
 
 * A very partial answer, I admit, but space fails me to discuss the subject adequately. 
 
 264 
 
That directly our sympathies are entirely withdrawn from any char- 
 acter whatsoever in a work of fiction, that character has for us 
 practically no existence. He is a mere compound of words and 
 phrases, and has no more the power to affect as a warning, than to 
 encourage as an example. Out of the pages oi Frankenstein there is 
 no such thing as an unadulterated monster. Unless we can trace in 
 any given character of fiction some possible likeness to ourselves, we 
 cannot be either with or against. Take away the little touches 
 which make Count Fosco human — his fondness for his wife, his 
 bravery, his tenderness to animals, his love of music, his overflowing, 
 harmless vanity — and you take away the whole vital quality of the 
 man, and leave merely a bundle of attributes, for which no human 
 being can afford to care. Another, and perhaps a better, instance of 
 our author's perception of this truth is in the sympathy which he 
 arouses in us for Captain Wragge (who is an unscrupulous little 
 swindler in No Name), in the description of one of his interviews 
 with the heroine, Magdalen Vanstone. The girl has been tried past 
 her power of endurance, and has, in an outbreak of temper, said hard 
 things to the Captain. Her apology touches some kindly feeling in 
 the little swindler's heart, and there seems to be an instant glad 
 recognition of the fact that he was not wholly base, in the way in 
 which this momentary impulse is described by the author. 
 
 Magdalen Vanstone is speaking : 
 
 " ' You are a kinder man than I thought you were,' she said ; ' I 
 am sorry I spoke so passionately to you just now. I am very, 
 very sorry ! ' The tears stole into her eyes, and she offered 
 him her hand with the native grace and gentleness of happier 
 days. ' Be friends with me again,' she said pleadingly ; 'I'm 
 only a girl. Captain Wragge ; I'm only a girl.' He took her 
 hand in silence, patted it for a moment, and then opened the 
 door for her to go back into her room again. There was genuine 
 regret in his face as he showed her that trifling attention. He 
 was a vagabond and a cheat ; he had lived a mean, shuffling, 
 degraded life ; but he was human, and she had found her way to 
 the lost sympathies in him, which not even the self-degradation 
 of a swindler's existence could wholly destroy. ' Damn the 
 breakfast,' he said, when the servant came in for her orders ; ' go 
 to the inn directly, and say I want a carriage and pair at the 
 door in an hour's time.' 'She has rubbed the edge off'my 
 appetite,' he said to himself, with a forced laugh ; ' I'll try a cigar 
 and a turn in the open air.' " 
 
 Some two years subsequently to The Woman in White^ (our author 
 has rarely had less than two years to prepare each of his important 
 novels). No Name, from which the above quotation is taken, appeared; 
 2 M 265 
 
— a book which, despite several minor blemishes, is, in my opinion, 
 the most fascinating, as Armadale is the most important, of all Mr. 
 Wilkie Collins' works. " Here is one more book that depicts the 
 struggle of a human creature under those opposing influences of Good 
 and Evil which we have all felt, which we have all known." These 
 words, which I have extracted from the Preface, form the keynote of 
 the book which tells the story of Magdalen Vanstone, her sins, her 
 repentance, and her punishment. Space forbids me to say anything 
 of the plot or the details of this work, but, in justice to the author, it 
 must be pointed out that no better proof could be desired of his 
 genuineness as an artist than its mere existence, considering the 
 circumstances under which it was written. Think for a moment how 
 keen was the temptation to an author, who had at last, after ten years 
 of fiction-writing, made a gigantic and indubitable success in a very 
 special and original manner, to repeat in his next work the same 
 method, and try to catch the public in a similar way. On the con- 
 trary, he waits for two years, and then starts on an entirely different 
 plan, content to let the author of The Woman in White be forgotten 
 while he solicits our favour as the author of No Name. And why ? 
 Here is the explanation in his own words : — 
 
 " To pass from the characters to the story, it will be seen that the 
 narrative related in these pages has been constructed on a plan 
 which differs from the plan followed in my last novel [The 
 Woman in White\ and in some other of my books published at 
 an earlier date. The only secret contained in this book is 
 revealed midway in the first volume. From that point all the 
 main events of the story are purposely foreshadowed before they 
 take place, my present design being to rouse the reader's interest 
 in following the train of circumstances by which these foreseen 
 events are brought about. In trying this new ground, I am not 
 turning my back in doubt on the ground which I have passed 
 over already ; my one object in following a new course is to 
 enlarge the range of my studies in the art of writing fiction, and 
 to vary the form in which I make my appeal to the reader, as 
 attractively as I can." 
 
 Nowadays, I confess that I know no novel-writer who could honestly 
 put the above in a Preface. 
 
 From this work of No Name I take the following extract, 
 typical of the author's power both in giving the dramatic intensity of 
 a situation, and connecting it with our sympathies by little touches 
 of _ natural effect and sympathy. Driven to the brink of committing 
 suicide by the horror with which her contemplated marriage inspires 
 her, Magdalen Vanstone is sitting by her open window in the early 
 
 266 
 
morning, watching a little fleet of fishing-boats drift past She 
 determines to set her life upon the hazard of the number which cross 
 the wmdow m a certain time. 
 
 *' If in half an hour an even number passed, the sign given should 
 be a sign to live ; if the uneven number prevailed, the end 
 should be death. With that final resolution she rested her head 
 against the window, and waited for the ships to pass. . . . Two 
 minutes to the end of the half-hour, and seven ships ; twenty- 
 nine, and nothing followed in the wake of the seventh ship. 
 The minute-hand of the watch moved on half-way to thirty, and 
 still the white, heaving sea was a misty blank. Without moving 
 from the window, she took the poison in one hand, and raised 
 her watch in the other. As the quick seconds counted each 
 other out, her eyes, quick as they turned from the watch to the 
 sea, from the sea to the watch, looked for the last time at the 
 sea, and saw the Eighth Ship. She never moved ; she never 
 spoke. The death of thought, the death of feeling, seemed to 
 have come over her already. She put back the poison mechanic- 
 ally on the ledge of the window, and watched, as in a dream, 
 the ship gliding smoothly on its silent way, gliding till it melted 
 into the shadow, gliding till it was lost in the mist. The strain 
 on her mind relaxed when the messenger of life had passed 
 from her sight. ' Providence ? ' she whispered faintly to herself, 
 ' or chance ? ' Her eyes closed and her head fell back. When 
 the sense of life returned to her the morning sun was warm on 
 her face, the blue heaven looked down on her, and the sea was 
 a sea of gold. . . . The maid entered the room, remained there 
 a moment or two, and came out again, closing the door gently. 
 ' She looks beautiful, sir,' said the girl, ' and she's sleeping as 
 quietly as a new-born child.' " 
 
 The book which succeeded JVo Name was Armadale, which, 
 on the whole, must be considered the greatest of Mr, Wilkie Collins' 
 novels. It has all the interest and sustained purpose of The 
 Woman in White, while drawn on a much larger scale, and showing 
 a much wider knowledge of character. If only for the intricacy of 
 the plot, and for the manner in which that plot is worked out over 
 the lapse of years, and by means of a large number of diverse 
 characters, the work would remain of typical excellence ; but the 
 merit is more than this. The romance is a successful attempt to 
 deal from the imaginative point of view with the doctrines of heredity, 
 both physical and moral. The causes of the story are all in the first 
 generation, and all the incidents in the second generation are the 
 results of the earlier action. It is a story of the effects produced 
 by a woman's weakness and a man's crime — a weakness which is 
 
 267 
 
reflected, though on the good side instead of the bad, in the succeeding 
 generation ; and a crime, of which the strength alone survives in the 
 child of its author, inspiring him with a passionate determination to 
 shield the life of the son of the man whom his father murdered, at all 
 hazards to his own life, and at all costs to his own happiness. This 
 is the better nature of the chief actor of the book, but therewith 
 exists a more morbid strain of feeling, which prompts him to 
 doubt whether, despite all his efforts, he will not bring fatal mis- 
 chance to his friend, and the vital portion of the book is the story of 
 his mental struggle, of the incidents which determine his action, and 
 of the final catastrophe through which the solution is found. 
 
 What I have ventured to call the mental and moral doctrine of 
 heredity, is, amongst other causes, worked out by the author making 
 the instrument of danger to the son, the same woman, who, as a 
 child, was the instrument of his mother's deception. This character, 
 who stands to the female villains of fiction in the same relation that 
 Count Fosco does to the male, lingers in the memory, despite her 
 crimes and her heartlessness, with an almost terrible insistency ; 
 and in her final punishment, brought about, with a daring truth 
 to reality, by her fulfilment of the one good instinct of her nature, 
 we feel almost as much for her as though all her acts had been 
 equally blameless with her death for the man she loved. I am here, 
 no doubt, treading on delicate ground.; we should have, the moralists 
 tell us, no sympathy with a criminal who only suffers for her sins, 
 without abjuring them ; but, human nature being so piebald, I confess 
 to a sympathy with Mr. Wilkie Collins' disposition to find something 
 which is admirable, or at least lovable, in even the black sheep of 
 the community. They are so much in the hands of fate, that we may 
 well afford to be a little extra kind to them. Such is a hint of the 
 story and the motives of Armadale ; but I can give no idea of the 
 richness of incident with which these main objects are surrounded, or 
 with which they are worked out, or of the wealth of character- 
 perception which the book displays, or of the unforced and many-sided 
 humour, or of the power of the culminating tragedy. 
 
 In an earlier portion of this paper I have given a quotation from 
 Armadale in order to show Mr. Collins' power of interweaving 
 natural scenery and human emotion. Here is another little extract 
 to substantiate what I have said as to the humour of the book : — 
 
 "The gardener, who still stood where he had stood from the 
 first, immovably waiting for his next opportunity, saw it now, 
 and gently pushed his personal interests into the first gap of 
 silence that had opened within his reach since Allan's appearance 
 on the scene, 
 
 268 
 
LE JOUR DE LA VISITE A L' HOPITAL. — ,1, Geoffrov 
 
'"I humbly bid you welcome to Thorpe Ambrose, sir,' said 
 Abraham Sage ; beginning obstinately with his little introduc- 
 tory speech for the second time. ' My name ' 
 
 " Before he could deliver himself of his name, Miss Milroy looked 
 accidentally in the horticulturist's pertinacious face, and instantly 
 lost her hold on her gravity beyond recall. Allan, never back- 
 ward in following a boisterous example of any sort, joined in her 
 laughter with right good-will. The wise man of the garden 
 showed no surprise and took no offence. He waited for another 
 gap of silence, and walked in again gently with his personal 
 interests, the moment the two young people stopped to take 
 breath. 
 
 " ' I have been employed in the grounds,' proceeded Abraham 
 Sage, irrepressibly, ' for more than forty years ' 
 
 " ' You shall be employed in the grounds for forty more if you'll 
 only hold your tongue and take yourself off!' cried Allan, as 
 soon as he could speak. 
 
 K < 
 
 Thank you kindly, sir,' said the gardener, with the utmost 
 politeness, but with no present signs either of holding his tongue 
 or of taking himself off. 
 
 "'Well?' said Allan. 
 
 " Abraham Sage carefully cleared his throat, and shifted his rake 
 from one hand to the other. He looked down the length of his 
 own invaluable implement with a grave interest and attention, 
 seeing, apparently, not the long handle of a rake, but the long 
 perspective of a vista with a supplementary personal interest 
 established at the end of it. 'When more convenient, sir,' 
 resumed this immovable man, ' I should wish respectfully to 
 speak to you about my son. Perhaps it may be more convenient 
 in the course of the day .-' My humble duty, sir, and my best 
 thanks. My son is strictly sober. He is accustomed to the 
 stables, and he belongs to the Church of England — without 
 encumbrances.' Having thus planted his offspring provisionally 
 in his master's estimation, Abraham Sage shouldered his invalu- 
 able rake, and hobbled slowly out of view." 
 
 I have said that with Armadale the power of Wilkie Collins, in 
 my opinion, culminated, but the book which succeeded it was certainly, 
 more immediately popular, and, by those who like their fiction of a 
 light character, is generally regarded as this author's most amusing 
 work. It is certainly one, if it be the least important, of his four 
 
 269 
 
finest novels ; and, if we consider it purely fi"om the point of view of 
 handicraft, I do not know that it does not deserve to be placed first 
 of all, if only because of the unhesitating clearness and rapidity of the 
 narrative, and the manner in which the reader's attention is never 
 allowed to falter for a single instant. It contains also two studies of 
 character which are, in their way, unique — that of Gabriel Betteredge,^ 
 the old family servant, devoted to his pipe and his Robinson Crusoe, 
 and that of Sergeant Cuff, the one detective in fiction whom it is a 
 pleasure to remember. The story of the book is well known. It 
 deals with the theft of a celebrated diamond, entitled the Moon- 
 stone, and its final restitution to the Hindoo idol which represents 
 Brahma in his character of the Moon-god. I have given instances 
 before in this article of our author's tenderness, his perception and 
 delineation of character, his natural sympathy, his humour, and his 
 concentration of dramatic effect ; let me here give a single instance 
 of his imaginative faculty — the account of how the stone is set once 
 more in the forehead of the great idol by the three Brahmins who 
 have compassed its recovery : — 
 
 " Looking back down the hill, the view presented the grandest 
 spectacle of Nature and Man in combination that I have ever 
 seen. The lower slopes of the eminence melted imperceptibly 
 into a grassy plain, the place of the meeting of three rivers. 
 On one side the graceful winding of the waters stretched away, 
 now visible, now hidden by trees, as far as the eye could see. 
 On the other, the waveless ocean slept in the calm of the night. 
 People this lovely scene with tens of thousands of human 
 creatures, all dressed in white, stretching down the sides of the 
 hill, overflowing into the plain, and fringing the nearer banks of 
 the winding rivers. Light this half of the pilgrims by the wild 
 red flames of cressets and torches, streaming up at intervals from 
 every part of the innumerable throng. Imagine the moonlight 
 of the East pouring in unclouded glory over all — and you will 
 form some idea of the view that met me when I looked forth 
 from the summit of the hill. 
 
 "A strain of plaintive music, played on stringed instruments and 
 flutes, recalled my attention to the hidden shrine. 
 
 " I turned, and saw on the rocky platform the figures of three men. 
 In the central figure of the three I recognised the man to whom 
 I had spoken in England when the Indians appeared on the 
 terrace at Lady Verinder's house. The other two who had been 
 his companions on that occasion, were no doubt his companions 
 also on this. 
 
 " One of the spectators, near whom I was standing, saw me start. 
 
 1 See quotation on p. 252. 
 270 
 
In a whisper he explained to me the apparition of the three 
 figures on the platform of rock. 
 
 " They were Brahmins (he said) who had forfeited their caste in 
 the service of the god. The god had commanded that their 
 purification should be the purification by pilgrimage. On that 
 night the three men were to part. In three separate directions 
 they were to set forth as pilgrims to the shrines of India. Never 
 more were they to look on each other's faces. Never more 
 were they to rest on their wanderings, from the day which 
 witnessed their separation, to the day which witnessed their 
 death. 
 
 "As those words were whispered to me the plaintive music 
 ceased. The three men prostrated themselves on the rock 
 before the curtain which hid the shrine. They rose — they 
 looked on one another — they embraced. Then they descended 
 separately among the people. The people made way for them 
 in dead silence. In three different directions I saw the crowd 
 part, at one and the same moment. Slowly the grand white 
 mass of the people closed together again. The track of the 
 doomed men through the ranks of their fellow - mortals was 
 obliterated. We saw them no more. 
 
 "A new strain of music, loud and jubilant, rose from the 
 hidden shrine. The crowd around me shuddered and pressed 
 together. 
 
 " The curtain between the trees was drawn aside, and the shrine 
 was disclosed to view. 
 
 " There, raised high on a throne— seated on his typical antelope, 
 with his four arms stretching towards the four corners of 
 the earth — there, soared above us, dark and awful in the 
 mystic light of heaven, the god of the Moon. And there, 
 in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond, 
 whose splendour had last shone on me in England from the 
 bosom of a woman's dress ! 
 
 " Yes ! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks 
 forth once more over the walls of the sacred city in which its 
 story first began. How it has found its way back to its wild 
 native land, by what accident or by what crime the Indians 
 regained possession of their sacred gem, may be in your know- 
 ledge, but it is not in mine. You have lost sight of it in 
 England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have 
 
 lost sight of it for ever. 
 
 271 
 
" So the years pass and repeat each other ; so the same events 
 revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures 
 of the Moonstone ? Who can tell ? " 
 
 I would fain deal with the remaining works of our author in 
 some detail, but this already over -long essay warns me, if I would 
 not exhaust my readers' patience, to a conclusion. Perhaps, it is 
 as well, for with The Moonstone comes to an end the best work 
 of our author. In greater or lesser degree each of the succeeding 
 books shows either a decline in the interest of the story, or in the 
 relation between the story and some thesis which the author desired 
 to enforce, or some problem of moral eccentricity or physical 
 deficiency which he sought to solve or analyse. 
 
 The use of the Scotch marriage laws in Man and Wife is 
 perhaps permissible, but who has ever read that book without 
 regretting the special pleading against athletic sports, and the mis- 
 representation into which it betrays the author. 
 
 Poor Miss Finch, despite passages of much tenderness and 
 beauty, and many of exquisitely unforced humour, errs in a similar 
 manner in the epilepsy incidents ; and The Law and the Lady 
 takes us back again to Scotch law, and an unpleasant study of 
 human deformity, mental and physical, in one of the principal 
 characters. 
 
 The New Magdalen, which appeared between the two last- 
 mentioned books, is, it is true, free from any similar unpleasant- 
 ness, but the story is very slight, and scarcely to be regarded as 
 more than a plea for the possible social and moral regeneration 
 of a repentant Magdalen ; and in a lesser degree for a more 
 enlightened and Christian view of political economy than is to 
 be found in Mill or Ricardo. To these succeeded other works 
 of which I will not here speak in detail ; their names and dates 
 are given in the bibliography. 
 
 One peculiar characteristic of Wilkie Collins' writing is its great 
 popularity with the reading public, not only in England, but in 
 many lands ayont the sea. This is hardly to be explained by a 
 little easy talk about the skill with which the plots were constructed, 
 for a book is not a piece of mosaic, admirable for its ingenuity 
 alone, and, to tell the truth frankly, nine-tenths of the reading public 
 neither know nor care whether a plot be' constructed well or ill. 
 The hypothesis of plot construction simply does not explain the 
 facts, and has to be abandoned. Was it possibly the case that the 
 writer's popularity and the frequent critical censure sprang from 
 the same or an allied cause ? and if so, what was that cause ? Could 
 
 272 
 
there be found in these novels any single quality inimitable by, or at 
 all events usually unpossessed by, other writers, and any defect from 
 which the ordinary English novelist is free ? and were both defect 
 and quality such as would probably call down the Olympian fire from 
 the Critical Heaven? Before attempting to answer this question 
 let us think for a moment, what is the necessary possession 
 of a story-teller whose books are to become popular in other 
 countries than his own, and through the medium of a foreign tongue? 
 At first sight we shall be tempted to say that the question of 
 subject is ail-important ; that the incidents should be such as are not 
 wholly foreign to the experience of the alien nations; that there 
 should be a comparative absence of local allusions and topics, such 
 as are peculiar to the land of the author; and that the general 
 sentiment of the story should not be an exclusively national one. 
 As a matter of experience, however, we find that this is not the 
 case. If we think, for instance, of the French novels which have 
 been and are most popular, we shall be met with the infinite detail of 
 Balzac and Zola, the local colour of Victor Hugo, the provincialisms 
 of Georges Sand, the intensely Gallic sentiment of Dumas, Feuillet, 
 and De Musset, and the phases of Parisian and provincial social life 
 which form the staple of the art of Daudet, Sardou, and Ohnet. 
 
 But I think we do find, in all these authors who have stood the test 
 of translation sufficiently long to enable us to say that their popularity 
 is due to more than accident or whim of fashion, that the local 
 colour or detail, the sentiment or the social life, the provincialism or 
 urbanism of the story must, if we are to accept it in a foreign tongue, 
 be not an end in itself, but simply the vehicle of expressing some 
 idea, some truth, which is common or interesting to all nations, and 
 that in proportion as this truth, this idea, is valuable, originally 
 stated, vitally bound up with the incidents narrated, so will the work 
 retain its reader's interest amidst scenes and people, and by the help 
 of customs and incidents, of which he may know nothing, and 
 care less. 
 
 The secret of so much fine English artistic work remaining incom- 
 prehensible to foreigners is, that we have too often neglected to found 
 our themes upon a sufficiently far-reaching and unparochial idea. 
 Over and over again do we find in English writers and English 
 artists this neglect of the essential, in favour of the superficial. The 
 realism which stops short at the delineation of the outside of the cup 
 and platter, is a realism which is wholly and almost exclusively our 
 national possession. There is a deep-seated distrust of idea in 
 the English character, which is as evident, in our art as it is in our 
 politics; and as we cannot live entirely upon disconnected and 
 unsystematised facts, we take to bind them that which is the very 
 antithesis of idea, namely convention. 
 2 N 273 
 
No doubt a great deal of trouble is saved by having a substitute for 
 thought in the shape of some ready-made doctrine, to which, willy- 
 nilly, circumstances must be shaped. And in this, our special intel- 
 lectual torpidity, we, consciously or unconsciously, have resented and 
 do resent in our painting, as in our fiction (we hardly tolerate it even 
 in our poetry), the introduction of novel views of life, passion, and 
 action, which have for their sanction thought and truth, rather than 
 usage and convention. 
 
 But the novel or unconventional ideas which we Englishmen dis- 
 like so much, are found by foreign readers a welcome change ; with 
 them they receive the acceptance which we only give to methods we 
 have ourselves proved to be sound, and the French, German, or 
 Italian reader who once gains a safe foothold in the leading motive 
 or idea of an English story, can easily surround it with such details 
 of local colour, custom, or incident — no matter how alien to his 
 experience — ^as the author may furnish. 
 
 Now, in this connection be pleased to look at the following tables, 
 which give, with briefest notes of subject-matter, the titles of Wilkie 
 Collins' chief (and some of his minor) works. It will be easily 
 seen therefrom, how fully justified I am in claiming for him an under- 
 lying purpose, idea, or theory which vitalises the story through which 
 it is enforced, which gives to the work that cosmopolitanism, which 
 makes it readable alike in London and Paris, New York or Yokohama, 
 Sydney or Timbuctoo, or wherever men and women meet, live, love, 
 suffer, and enjoy, 
 
 THE PRINCIPAL WORKS OF WILKIE COLLINS 
 
 Biography of William Collins, R, A, . . .1848 
 
 (His father.) 
 
 Antonina; or. The Fall of Rome .... 1850 
 An historical novel. A failure (his only one). 
 
 Rambles beyond Railways . . . . .1851 
 Notes on a Cornish tour. 
 
 Basil : a Story of Modern Life .... 1852 
 A powerful story, with an unpleasant motive. Written as an autobiography 
 of the hero. Essentially a tragedy, the oncoming calamity felt in every 
 successive page more and more clearly. Note that in this first book there 
 is no humorous relief whatever. 
 
 Hide and Seek ....... 1854 
 
 As tender and pathetic a story as Wilkie ColUns ever wrote, and very full 
 of humour. Here the motive of the tale is the study of the affliction of 
 deafness and dumbness. It is remarkable that the author represents the 
 compensations and alleviations of the calamity, more than its sorrows. 
 Note also, that the author's protests against conventional religion and 
 Pharisaism here make their appearance for the first time. 
 
 274 
 
After Dark 1856 
 
 A good collection of stories, with a connecting thread of narrative. 
 
 The Dead Secret 1857 
 
 A study of character. Here blindness is treated on the same principle 
 as in Hide and Seek, 
 
 The Queen of Hearts 1859 
 
 A collection of stories bound together with a narrative thread after the 
 Charles Dickens fashion. Remark, however, that the intense dramatic 
 realisa,tion of Collins shows clearly in the vivid life here given to this 
 narrative connecting-link, and that all the personages therein are careful 
 and, in their way, elaborate character-studies. 
 
 The Woman in White i860 
 
 Kept Thackeray up all night to read ; ran into seven editions in a few 
 weeks, and probably excited greater pubUc interest than any novel of even 
 that period. 
 
 No Name ^ 1862 
 
 On the whole the finest of Wilkie Collins' works. There is in it no 
 study of disease, no secret worth speaking of, and curiously little incident. 
 The story hinges entirely on one character, Magdalen Vanstone, and she 
 sustains the burden easily. Round her from the very first all the other 
 characters are grouped, and it is worth notice that in the opening chapter 
 of the story, Wilkie Collins deliberately sets the stage for the entry of 
 his heroine, just as might be done in the theatre : first the comedy of the 
 servants, next the minor dramatis persona, all leading up to the sudden 
 burst of action with which Magdalen in another moment dashes into view 
 on the dingy old oaken stairs with the suddenness of a flash of light, and 
 clearing the last three steps into the hall at a jump, presents herself breathless 
 in the breakfast-room to make the family circle complete. 
 
 My Miscellanies 1863 
 
 Sketches of various kinds. 
 
 Armadale 1866 
 
 A study of heredity, and the first appearance of the supernatural in 
 Collins' important novels. The most elaborate of the author's works, 
 and in some respects the most powerful. Specially notable for revealing 
 more clearly than in earlier books Collins' descriptive power. See, for 
 instance, the account here of the Norfolk Broads, with its underlying 
 suggestion of mystery and terror ; the description of the German water- 
 ing-place, with the townswomen knitting and gossiping while they wait for 
 the invalids ; and, perhaps finest of all, the picture of the wrecked ship 
 and the Sound at night. 
 
 The Moonstone 1868 
 
 After The Woman in White perhaps the most generally popular of his 
 stories — a Chinese puzzle in literature, of which, perhaps, no reader has 
 ever yet guessed the secret. Principally delightfiil, however, for two 
 characters — the old house-steward, Gabriel Betteredge, and the rose- 
 growing Detective, Sergeant Cuff. Note that here again Collins returns 
 to his medical and scientific experiences, and makes the irregular action 
 of a narcotic the pivot of the whole book. 
 
 * See also the Preface to No Name, quoted on page 266. 
 275 
 
Man and Wife 1870 
 
 The much-attacked attack upon the brutalising effect of athletic sports, 
 or rather of the undue enthusiasm aroused by, and attention given to, 
 athletic sports in England. Here in great measure the author not only lived 
 to see the first criticism on his work reversed, but even to see the public 
 growing to be of his mind with regard to this subject Athletic sports 
 as a means of arousing natural enthusiasm have had their day; they 
 are now rightly regarded as good things in their place and in moderation. 
 That here Wilkie Collins overstated his case there is no doubt. But 
 how far it was necessary at that time to so overstate it in order to gain 
 a hearing, is difiicult to say. This book has also a second aim, the exhi- 
 bition of the injustice which may be caused by the present condition of 
 the Scotch Marriage Laws. 
 
 Poor Miss Finch -1872 
 
 A corresponding study of blindness (in a woman) to that of dumbness in 
 Hide and Seek. Note also the epilepsy and its cure, and their intimate 
 relation to the plot. 
 
 The New Magdalen 1873 
 
 A plea for the regeneration of a fallen woman, and for a more Christian 
 view of political economy in so far as it is concerned with the labour 
 question. 
 
 The Law and the Lady 1875 
 
 Chiefly directed against the Scotch verdict of Not proven, as Man and 
 Wife was against the Scotch marriage laws. 
 
 Two Destinies ....... 1876 
 
 A mystic tale, founded on the old notion of two souls destined from their 
 birth for one another. 
 
 The Haunted Hotel 1878 
 
 A weird but not wholly successful Venetian ghost story. 
 
 The Fallen Leaves ...... 1879 
 
 A further advance in the direction of Socialism, and another and more 
 daring treatment of the Social Evil question. Perhaps the most daring 
 book from the Philistine point of view which has ever been published in 
 England. 
 
 'A Rogue's Life from his Birth to his Marriage 
 
 The Black Robe . 
 
 Heart and Science 
 
 I say No 
 
 The Guilty River . 
 
 (A shilling dreadful.) 
 
 The Evil Genius . 
 
 Little Novels 
 
 The Legacy of Cain 
 
 Of these later novels, fine in detail as several of them are, I would, here 
 and now, be silent. Any adequate criticism of them, even in the shape of 
 a note, would have to take account of the author's failing power, and this 
 is not the place or the time at which that can fitly be done. 
 
 276 
 
 1879 
 1881 
 1883 
 1884 
 1886 
 
 1886 
 
 1887 
 
 1887-8 
 
THERE^S NONE SO DEAF AS THOSE THAT WON'T HEAR 
 
 E. BLAIR LEIGIITON 
 
Blind Love. 
 
 ti course of publication, the last chapters being finished, according to 
 Wilkie Collins' scenario, by Mr. Walter Besant, this arrangement having 
 been made some little time before the author's death. 
 
 MINOR WORKS OF WILKIE COLLINS 
 
 The following are some of the chief short stories, plays, and 
 sketches published separately, chiefly in Household Words and All 
 the Year Round'. — 
 
 The Dream Woman — published in Household Words. (Subse- 
 quently rewritten and enlarged for reading in America.) 
 
 Mr. Wray's Cash-box. 
 
 The Yellow Mask. 
 
 A Terribly Strange Bed. 
 
 Please Employ Major Namby. 
 
 The Cruise of the Tomtit. 
 
 John Jago's Ghost. (Published first, I think, in America.) 
 
 Miss or Mrs. ? (Holiday Number of Graphic or Illustrated (?).) 
 
 Plays — ^^ The Woman in White. (Olympic Theatre. Successful, keeps the 
 stage.) 
 
 ^The New Magdalen. (Olympic Theatre. Has been several times 
 revived ; very successful.) 
 
 ^ Man and Wife, (Prince of Wales' Theatre. Successful, but not a 
 good play, saved by Coghlan's magnificent acting; Bancroft also was 
 very good.) 
 
 The Moonstone 1887 
 
 Miss Gwilt. (Version of Armadale, adapted chiefly by M. Regnier. 
 Globe Theatre. Unsuccessful.) 
 
 Rank and Riches. (Adelphi Theatre. A failure.) . . 1883 
 
 The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep . . 1856-7 
 
 Both written for amateur performance, but played in semi-public, first at 
 Tavistock House, and afterwards at the Gallery of Illustration, and both 
 received with great enthusiasm, partly, no doubt, owing to the acting of 
 Charles Dickens ; but both are good forcible pieces, with plenty of strong 
 situations. The Lighthouse was afterwards played at the Olympic. The 
 Frozen Deep was,played by special command before the Queen.* 
 
 1 Continental (translated) and American versions of these plays were subsequently pro- 
 duced successfully. 
 
 ^ No Name was, I believe, dramatised by the author, but never put upon the stage. I 
 think I remember his telling me that it would not " come right." 
 
 277 
 
We are now in a position, I think, to answer the question why it 
 is that Wilkie Collins' books are at once so popular with foreign 
 readers, and so frequently sniffed at by literary critics. The reason 
 being that nearly every one of them, and every one of the finest, is, 
 as will be seen from the foregoing list, inspired by a single and 
 important motive, is governed by one dominant idea, which is to 
 the action of the characters, and the scenes of the story, as is the 
 principle of life in the human body, to the muscular and nerve action. 
 
 With this, these notes, in which I have endeavoured to show 
 something of the nature, and give some idea of the extent, of Wilkie 
 Collins' genius, may fitly come to a close. My endeavour has been 
 less to criticise the writer's style than to reveal the breadth and power 
 of his genius, by the most indisputable of all methods, the method of 
 quotation, I have endeavoured to advance nothing which I was not 
 prepared to prove, and which, so far as my space has allowed me, I 
 have not afforded the reader the opportunity to verify ; and I have 
 carefully forborne to contrast Wilkie Collins' work with that of 
 special living writers, who are at the present moment in greater 
 popular favour. No one will feel mofe keenly than myself the 
 inadequacy of this paper from a literary point of view ; but I shall 
 be content if it help ever so little in the appreciation of this author, 
 who has probably given more keen and harmless pleasure to the last 
 and present generation than any living writer, and yet for whom I 
 seldom hear a generous word spoken, or read a criticism which 
 recognises the service he has done, the genius he has shown, and the 
 noble purpose which always directed his work. 
 
 Let me now, leaving for the moment the question of the merit of 
 Wilkie Collins' writing, say here one word as to those personal quali- 
 ties which have endeared him to his friends. Those friends know, 
 beyond the reach of controversy, that he was one of England's greatest 
 novelists, and also that in an age of self-advertisement, jealousy, 
 and pretence, Collins was a type — not without faults, but still a 
 type — of a genuine, kind-hearted, helpful-to-others man. He had 
 blood, as well as brains, generosity, as well as intelligence, artistic 
 pride and purpose in his work, as well as popular success. Well, as 
 he could do his work, that work was done ; truly and rightly as 
 he could think, he wrote ; and in the pride of his craftsmanship, 
 and the security of a few faithful friends he lived his life, seeking 
 for no reward of public appreciation or honour that did not come to 
 him legitimately, and incidentally from the performance of his art. 
 Perhaps, as I have said elsewhere, it is a little thing to have written 
 stories so well that the whole world has listened to them gladly for 
 forty years, and listens to them still. Let us grant to the Daily 
 Telegraph and the Saturday Review, and the Zolaists and the ballade- 
 
 278 
 
mongers, that this was a little thing ; but very certainly it was much 
 to remain unspoiled through fame and censure, through popularity 
 and neglect, through youth and age, through the long years when 
 famous friend after friend passed away, and left him lingering here, 
 still faithfully toiling in the service of his art, and still to keep that 
 fresh,^ unspotted, kindly heart, with which he had won his way to 
 equality of friendship and honour with those great dead writers from 
 whom the critics would to-day disassociate him. 
 
 Men and women writo to me in a confidence which I must 
 respect, and tell me the same story of how unselfishly this man 
 helped them when they were young and struggling. I, whom the 
 journalistic world is always calling cynical and contemptuous, know 
 how, with no slightest call upon him, towards the end of his life, 
 jaded, suffering, and with but insufficient strength for his daily 
 work, he helped me freely, unaffectedly, and continually ; and when 
 I read, as I have read lately in paper after paper, from writers who are 
 unworthy in a literary, much less in a personal sense, to unlace the 
 latchet of his shoe, that this was a man whom the nation should not 
 honour, I wonder, indeed, where honour should be bestowed by a 
 nation upon an artist, if not here — where world-wide fame, unsparing 
 artistic effort and achievement from youth to age, unite with a 
 private life which respected alike the sanctities of friendship, the 
 claims of literary brotherhood, the duties of mercy, charity, and 
 truth, the obligation to speak in censure of every worldly convention 
 that made for unrighteousness, affectation, or injustice. Whether 
 it be wise in men to do such deeds I do not know ; at least it is wise 
 in States to honour them. So, or in some such fashion, spoke Sir 
 William Temple, and his words apply well here. A sensation 
 novelist only! Yes, if you will have it so ; but a novelist whose 
 sensations never exalted an unworthy cause, whose tongue never 
 faltered in obedience to public whim, and whose words pleaded the 
 cause of suffering humanity, of the animal creation, of all things and 
 people against whom the self-righteous, the unthinking, and the cruel 
 are wont to be banded together. 
 
 From one point of view it matters not a whit — whether England 
 says, in raising some remembrance to him. This is one of those 
 sons of whom I am proud — but to England it matters much. She 
 can receive honour from him, from her dead writer, in bestowing, 
 even now, that recognition which in another land would have been 
 given in life, or she can stand on one side and ignore the claim, and 
 refuse for the last time the tardy recompense. At least this man's 
 monument is secure, even though it be not builded at St. Paul's or 
 Westminster, for it stands firm in the hearts of his friends, in each 
 unselfish humanitarian impulse which inspired his pen, and in the 
 
 279 
 
pleasure he has given to millions for wellnigh half a century. That 
 it should have been left to me, the youngest of his disciples, to plead, 
 and possibly plead in vain, his claims upon our national regard, is 
 surprising and pitiable enough ; but so it is, and I trust that the older 
 and more famous men, whose words would have carried more weight, 
 will have patience with the inadequacy of mine, for at least the plea 
 is genuine. For thirty years I have honoured and enjoyed his work, 
 for a few too brief years I have known and loved the man, and if I 
 have succeeded in even making one Englishman feel more gratefully 
 towards the last of our great novelists, I shall be able to bear without 
 repining the many sneers and insults which have been levelled at me 
 during the past few days for seeking to give him this last poor honour 
 of remembrance.^ 
 
 1 This was written at the end of 1889. In the next few months I did what I could to get 
 erected some worthy memorial of Wilkie Collins. My success was very partial : the press 
 held aloof, or were adverse ; the authorities of Westminster and St. Paul's alike refused to 
 allow any monument to be erected in their precincts ; the general reading public were in- 
 different. A few of Collins' friends and some brother artists in literature, painting, and the 
 drama, only subscribed. I undertook to form a small Wilkie Collins Memorial Library of 
 works of fiction to be presented to the People's Palace. This is being done, and will, I 
 trust, be completed before these lines come before the public. The long delay has not been 
 entirely due to my own fault, but I feel that I owe for it an apology to both the People's 
 Palace and the subscribers to the Memorial. 
 
 280 
 
1^3^13" 
 
 
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE 
 TENDENCIES OF FRENCH ART IN 1883. 
 
 HERE is not only a difference of degree, there is 
 a distinction in kind, between the annual exhibitions 
 of pictures in France and England, known as the 
 Salon and the Royal Academy. The former is not 
 only a national, but an international show ; the latter, 
 though adniitting specimens of foreign work, is 
 practically a collection of English paintings, and is chiefly the expres- 
 sion of the prejudices and sympathies of our own people. Paris is 
 still the great art-school of the world, and the pupils who study under 
 Parisian artists are drawn from every country to that great centre. 
 Here they learn theit* business and imbibe their art principles ; and to 
 the great annual exhibitions they send their works long after their 
 student days have passed away, secure of space for their pictures, and 
 confident of the liberal consideration of what is after all the greatest 
 artistic community in the world — the community of French artists. 
 
 The immense space at the disposal of the jury, no less than the 
 principle of universal suffrage by which that jury is chosen, affords to 
 every comer the chance of favourable consideration, and indeed the 
 defect that is most frequently urged against the Salon, especially by 
 Englishmen, is that it includes, not excludes, too many pictures. There 
 is something almost maddening in the apparently unending range of 
 the galleries, as well as in the gigantic size and interminable number 
 of the pictures which they contain, in view of the attempt to grasp 
 within the compass of an ordinary visit — or even of many ordinary 
 visits — the merit and meaning of so many works of art. Many folks, 
 I fancy, leave the exhibition, wishing for the moment that there was 
 no such thing as a picture or a statue in the world — satiated not so 
 much with beauty as with the gigantic diverse endeavour of this 
 heterogeneous army of artists. 
 
 2 o 281 
 
From the dance of Herodias' daughter, to the interior of a Parisian 
 hospital ; from vast historical compositions, to the interiors of butchers' 
 shops ; from shipwrecks at sea, to half-dressed ballet-girls ; from Rameses 
 II. to the last hero of Parisian journalism, the unfortunate spectator's 
 mind and eyes are dragged, in his progress down the Salon, some 2500 
 times. Is it any wonder that long before he has seen a tithe of the 
 exhibition his artistic palate is jaded and repelled ? Michelangelo, 
 Titian, and Velasquez might appeal to him in vain long before he has 
 come to M. Zwiller, whose picture, Un Philosophe (No. 2521), closes 
 the list of paintings. And this, I fancy, is why so few English people 
 are at all just in their estimate of the Salon, and why, also, we so 
 frequently hear it spoken of with a passionate dislike, almost personal 
 in its intensity. We English folks are accustomed to swallow a gallery 
 at a gulp, as we swallow our medicine, and to swallow this French 
 exhibition whole is an impossibility. The pictures cannot be looked 
 at under an appreciable amount of time, and it is even more difficult 
 to pass without looking. 
 
 A collection of paintings where a work such as Mr. S. J. Solomon's 
 Samson and Delilah, the largest picture of this year's Academy, would 
 appear of but ordinary size, is apt to be very glaring in its imperfec- 
 tions ; and it must, at best, demand an amount of consideration and 
 attention such as few people, who are not extremely interested in 
 pictures, are ready to bestow. And these imperfections will be the 
 more repellent, and this mental fatigue the more intense, in propor- 
 tion as the painters of such pictures are less conventional, and are 
 occupied in fresh artistic departures. We bear much with the men 
 who are making history ; can we not bear a little with the men who 
 are making painting ? We do not expect the perfect adaptation of 
 means to end from the former ; why should we from the latter ? From 
 those who are repeating dead formulae, contented to follow the tracks 
 of the men who have gone before them, much should indeed be ex- 
 pected, and for their errors little forbearance should be shown ; but to 
 those who are seeking some new development in the sphere of beauty, 
 some new means by which to express Nature, and facts which have 
 hitherto been but imperfectly recognised in the domain of art, there 
 should, I think, be every toleration given, for such men have the 
 world against them as it is, and established fame, indifference, and 
 conventionality are sure to deal them sufficiently hard blows ; and the 
 least those who care for pictures and painting can do is to try to under- 
 stand for what these eager students are seeking, and to give them 
 what encouragement may be possible, if they seem to be seeking it in 
 humility and earnestness. For the life of art, like that of all created 
 things, depends on change. To cease to change is to cease to 
 live ; and the art of one era can no more be wholly adopted by the 
 people of another, than a method of thought or a fashion of its 
 
 282 
 
LI sirrTi; 
 
 Krnin til, 
 
behaviour. It is useless our protesting against the rising of the tide, 
 or to sit, like pictorial Canutes, with our backs to the incoming waves ; 
 and if the tendencies of modern art are to enlarge the sphere of sub- 
 ject, and to modify the technical methods and aims of the artist, all 
 those \yho care to consider the matter seriously, must examine both 
 the object, and the manner of the new departure, to see how far 
 they can be reconciled with the finer qualities of ancient art, and 
 whether they hold out reasonable promise for the art of the future. 
 
 The Salon affords a good opportunity for making this examination, 
 as it contains examples of the most modern developments of painting, 
 and I shall in the present article only mention such works as illustrate 
 the changes which are gradually taking place. The chief difficulty 
 of such an examination is to distinguish between what is merely a 
 temporary development due to the fashion of the moment, and its 
 effect upon the national character ; and what is the result of a per- 
 manent alteration induced by fuller knowledge, or necessitated by the 
 requirements of a more elaborate form of civilisation. We must 
 remember that a certain parochialism has always distinguished 
 English art. It has, like the upper middle classes of our country, 
 been considered estimable, but not of the highest social importance. 
 We have always wanted to have pictures, especially of late years, but 
 have desired to have them in a certain passionless, discreet, limited 
 way ; desired to have them only so long as they did not interfere 
 with our prejudices, or traverse our ideas of propriety. In fact, the 
 question of price has always been present with us ; we have only 
 been prepared to pay emotionally and intellectually a fixed amount 
 for our art ; and, above all, we have restricted the sphere of subject 
 and method of treatment, in the interests of conventionality. There 
 is no doubt much to be said on either side of this question. The 
 French, as a nation', have always been free from this coloured-glass 
 style of art ; there has consequently seemed to most of our country- 
 men to be a certain violence, and, so to speak, nakedness of statement, 
 about our neighbours' fiction and painting. We must not therefore 
 be surprised if, in the Gallic pictures of the present day, which are 
 the most in accordance with the ideas of the advanced school of 
 painters, we find a choice of subjects such as at first sight appears to 
 be even more abnormal, even more opposed to the reticences and 
 conventions of English painting, than of old. For the great change 
 which is coming over the feeling of artists, and is in one way or 
 another modifying all they think and all they do, is a change in the 
 direction of reality. They draw the subjects of their pictures more 
 and more from the occurrences of everyday life, and admit into the 
 manner of their representations less and less modification of the 
 manner in which these occurrences took place. 
 
 There is no need to point out that, when once the above idea had 
 
 283 
 
firmly taken root, it necessarily, or at all events probably, would pave 
 the way for the almost indefinite extension of the picturesque. When 
 subjects were not alone confined to those matters with regard to 
 which our sentimental or sensuous emotions were connected, but 
 embraced all matters relative to life which the painter could adequately 
 depict, it was inevitable that many of the new pictures should appeal 
 not so much to our sense of beauty, as to other emotions which had 
 hitherto been considered to be beyond the province of art. Suppose 
 that a band of artists had become convinced that beauty was dependent 
 more upon the realisation of the natural aspect of things than upon 
 the arrangement and modification of that aspect according to estab- 
 lished tradition, they would be naturally likely to choose for the 
 materials of their work, such subjects as the elder school would have 
 considered entirely mistaken. They would seek out things trivial, 
 things common, things in themselves even repulsive, and try to show 
 how kindly the light of heaven fell upon them, and how they too 
 had their fitting place in the great Palace of Art. We might expect, 
 aprioriy that they would act in this manner, and that the result would 
 necessarily be in the first instance grotesque, and even objectionable to 
 those who were brought up under the old rule ; and indeed it is to this 
 cause we owe many of the pictures in the present Salon — pictures 
 which deal with such conventionally unpictorial subjects as a bedside 
 lecture in a hospital, the interior of a restaurant, even the contents of 
 a butcher's shop. 
 
 I am not saying whether this new development be right or wrong. 
 I am simply at the present moment engaged in stating the fact, and 
 seeking to suggest the cause. It seems to me that the study of 
 Nature, once admitted into poetry, fiction, or painting, necessarily 
 must — I will not say end — but pass through, a phase in which the 
 purely scientific aspect to a certain extent obscures the purely 
 artistic intention. Wordsworth was the inevitable precursor of Zola, 
 who is by the irony of fate probably the very last 'writer of whom 
 Wordsworth or his admirers would have approved. And just 
 as Wordsworth in his day threw off almost entirely the shackles 
 of tradition, and sought from Nature herself the materials for 
 his work, so the French naturalist painters, as they may appropriately 
 be called, are, and have been for the last twenty years, getting rid 
 of their traditional swaddling-clothes, and trying to walk about the 
 world alone, and unaided by their old nurse — Conventionality. It 
 is curious to note that this revolution, which has slowly accomplished 
 itself, started— as did the revolution of English painting— in the 
 department of landscape. The school of Corot, Millet, Rousseau, 
 and Daubigny, which practically rules the whole of French land- 
 scape art of the present day, was firmly established long before the 
 new school of figure-painters received recognition ; and indeed at 
 the present hour the conventional characteristics of French figure- 
 
 284 
 
painting are still in preponderance amongst the majority of the 
 artists. That this is so arises from several causes. To begin with : 
 the change to be effected was not so great, the way being prepared 
 to a certain extent by the English landscape painters ; for in 
 essential characteristics, Gainsborough, Bonington, Linnell, Constable, 
 Cox, De Wint, and Turner, to a considerable extent inspired the 
 work^ of Rousseau, Daubigny, etc. But in the line of figure- 
 painting no such preparation had been made, and artists felt, so 
 to speak, the sanction of the old masters, far more strongly. 
 To paint a landscape, as it appeared, was bad enough, but to paint a 
 figure, without regard to the manner of the grand style, seemed to the 
 elder artists almost an impiety : besides which, to the outside public, 
 accustomed always before-time to what might be called an artificial 
 representation of figure subjects, the attempt to put them down in 
 everyday prosaic manner, was far more alarming than if the .picture 
 merely treated of such a comparatively impersonal matter as natural 
 scenery. 
 
 Like most other popular moveinents, the work of the new school 
 ran into a thousand extravagances, and gave much occasion to its 
 enemies to blaspheme. Not content with clinging to the new truths 
 which they had caught sight of, they disdained all other means of 
 support, and would accept nothing less from their adversaries than 
 the entire remodelling of ancient practices, and a confession that the 
 only saving grace was the one which had been so recently dis- 
 covered. Not pausing to consider that in all probability the three or 
 four thousand years of artistic example which the world had experi- 
 enced, contained some kernel of what was right and requisite, they 
 threw overboard, with light hearts, all the ancient equipage of art as 
 mere useless lumber, and prepared to navigate their ship without 
 compass or rudder — simply with the one bran-new sail of atmo- 
 spheric truth. What wonder that tiie bark has been drifting on a 
 somewhat erratic course ever since, and that no man knows whither 
 it is bound, or whether it will ever reach its destination ? For, with 
 Mark Twain's friend the negro, we may say of atmospheric truth, 
 that though it may be our brother, it is not our father and mother 
 and our uncle and our aunt, and our wife's relations down in the 
 country. We are to disregard all the ideas of a subject, all desire for 
 beautiful arrangement, all notions of composition, and simply accept 
 as the one sufficient subject of a picture, a piece gouged out of Nature, 
 as it were with a cheese-scoop, from the first place to which the 
 artist came : this, or something very like it, is what our new artists 
 would have us believe. It doesn't matter if they paint a picture of 
 a crucifixion, or a dish of lights,^ so long as they represent it en pkin 
 air. To an ordinary common -sense person the proposition will 
 hardly seem worthy of refutation, nor indeed. would many members 
 
 1 There is actually a picture in the Salon of this subject, of the very largest life-size. 
 
 285 
 
of the school dare to state it in so crude a form. This thesis is, 
 however, implied, and is tacitly accepted, by a very considerable 
 number of connoisseurs and picture-fanciers ; and slowly but very 
 surely this conception of art is making its way amongst our English 
 artists, and so needs to be dealt with as a potent factor in con- 
 temporary art. It is the development of this proposition to the 
 utmost extent which has given rise to the so-called impressionist 
 school in France, and to its English modification. 
 
 These artists hold that truthfulness to the impression of any given 
 scene is the utmost result which can be accomplished by a painter, 
 and that therefore in this first imperfect vision, on the details of which 
 the mind is not to be allowed to exert its influence, all the loveliness 
 and poetry of art consist ! To paint that which is impressed upon the 
 retina jvithin the space during which an eye can be rapidly opened 
 and shut — this is the end to which the artist's effort should be 
 directed ; so alone can he obtain perfect truth, and in perfect truth 
 alone can he find salvation. The theory, one may observe in passing, 
 is a specious one, and very fascinating to young men who are eager 
 for novelty. It makes every one as good as his neighbour — ay, and 
 to use the old expression — a great deal better, — as it sweeps away at 
 once all other criteria than the individual impression. 
 
 If a picture is not to be in the future considered good because 
 of beautiful form, glow and depth of colour, dignity of aim, tender- 
 ness and poetry of meaning, or patient, industrious endeavour to 
 depict every portion of its subject with completion and loveliness ; 
 but is to rely wholly upon accurately representing the effect of 
 a cursory glance, and that at one thing or scene just as well as at 
 another, it is evident that art will become at once a matter of very 
 different import from that which it has always been considered in past 
 times. For, we are tempted to ask, why should we want to decorate 
 our houses with, and spend hours in looking at representations of 
 what Tom, Dick, and Harry see as they wink their eyes rapidly ? 
 We can wink our own eyes if it comes to that, and at the things them- 
 selves, all day long, if we find the occupation sufficiently amusing. 
 If the painter is to have no special vision, no subtle message, to 
 exercise no power of selection or combination, to give us, in fact, no 
 result but the reproduction of the quickest impression of Nature 
 that we may all see in our winking moments, is there much use, 
 for us at least, in his existing at all ? When ordinary everyday 
 people want to enjoy a scene in Nature, or to look at an interesting 
 object or action, do they set to work to wink their eyes, oi: do they 
 simply open them as wide as possible, and look out of them as hard 
 as they can ? But the impression is everything, say these young 
 men ! Why .■* And why one impression more than another .? Why 
 
 286 
 

 
 '^^ 
 
 
 ■J^h2^.^,^'^-'^'' '; 
 
 A PRIMEVAL BATHING PLACE 
 
 C. II. SIlAXNiiN 
 
 [•"rem the orisiiia) drawing in the possession ol' tlie aullior 
 
the incomplete vision rather than the completed one ? Because, say 
 they, the first impression is the only visual one — that is, the 
 picture imprinted on the retina ; and, consequently, that is the one 
 you should reproduce. It will be evident to everybody that this is by 
 no means logically sound, even if it be true that there is" one actual 
 moment at which the picture on the retina is visually true, unaffected 
 by the operation and previous knowledge of the brain. But this 
 contention is manifestly erroneous ; we receive no impression, no 
 matter how imperfect, without the assistance and the report on it, 
 so to speak, of the brain; and there is no one point at which we can 
 arrest this modification, or any at which we can say it begins. 
 
 The whole theory is based on a mistaken idea that the report of . 
 the eye, if I may use such an expression, can be dissevered from 
 all our previous knowledge, from all mental experience; an idea 
 which the slightest acquaintance with physiology would suffice to 
 disprove. Even, however, as I have said, if it were correct, there 
 would still remain to be proved the conclusion th'at because this first 
 impression could be set down, that is the result to which the efforts 
 of artists should be directed — which seems to me somewhat as if one 
 should say that because the alphabet is the first step towards learn- 
 ing to read, we should prefer a jumble of letters to more highly 
 developed literature. 
 
 But enough of this impressionist theory : it is one which will 
 refute itself in time, and already it is losing its hold over the best of 
 its followers.^ The naturalist art of such men as Duran, Gervex, 
 and others, which is the most prominent characteristic of the present 
 Salon, is only but faintly allied to the ultra school of which I have 
 been speaking, and it is this of which I must now speak. 
 
 The most popular picture in the Salon is by M. Gervex, and 
 shows a clinical lecture by Dr. Pean in the ward of a hospital : 
 
 " En somme, I'harmonie noire des v^tements de nos jours est 
 charmante dans les tonalit6s claires ; elle peut varier k chaque 
 ceuvre de peintre, selon les milieux, I'heure, I'^clairage, et a au 
 moins I'inappreciable avantage d'etre constamment vue, et ^ 
 port^e des yeux de tous. A cet 6gard le tableau de M. 
 Gervex est absolument remarquable. II est impossible de 
 donner mieux I'impression d'un jour d'interieur, de cette atmo- 
 sphere impalpable, dclairde par la fen^tre aux rideaux blancs 
 releves, modelant de reflets froids les visages, et circulant sur 
 les murs nus de la salle d'h6pital. Ce qu'il y a d'air dans 
 cette perspective restreinte, en somme est imaginable. On y 
 
 * These words have now been verified. Impressionism is dead amongst the French 
 (advanced) school, and has naturally found its home in England : like last year's Paris 
 bonnets. 
 
 287 
 
p^netre, on y est, on y respire. Allons! I'art moderne a du 
 bon. Avouez que la redingote n'est pas si redoutable et que 
 M. Gervex est un peintre privil6gi4 d'une exquise sensibilite 
 d'ceil et d'une rare delicatesse de palette." 
 
 So far, M. Paul Mentz in praise of the modern art and this 
 especial sample; and the merits which he finds therein are, really 
 there beyond all doubt : the pure tones of the blacks, the impression 
 of indoor light, the bold reflections cast on the faces by the white 
 hospital curtains, the sense of reality — all these are shown us by 
 M. Gervex, not only adequately, but as it were by authority, so 
 masterly is his rendering of the subject. And the list of admirable 
 qualities is not exhausted even now, for the action and expressions 
 of all concerned in this picture are as natural and lifelike as is the 
 technical rendering of the atmosphere, light and shade, and colour. 
 The Doctor Pean himself, whose demonstration forms the subject 
 of the work, is a most admirable piece of character painting — his 
 expression full of keen if somewhat pompous intelligence, and the 
 little gesture with which he holds his instrument in one hand, while 
 he explains its use, tells its story most admirably. What more, 
 then, is wanting ? Why should we not carry this work, too, 
 through the streets of Paris, as Cimabue's Madonna was carried 
 once through Florence in glad rejoicing ? We may with advan- 
 tage consider this question a little closely, for on the answer thereto 
 depends the future of painting, and indeed, not of painting only, but 
 of all the arts. 
 
 Let us get back, if we can, to the most elementary view of the 
 matter. Art evidently cannot be good unless it be good for some- 
 thing, unless we get from it some result not to be obtained 
 otherwise. It must be surely in the highest development of its 
 special characteristics that the best kind of art will be found ; 
 whether these be or be not conjoined with the qualities of other 
 developments of human energy will be comparatively unimportant. 
 At all events, let art first of all give us that which she alone possesses ; 
 afterwards we will accept from her hands every other good gift. 
 What is, then, the vital quality of art? What do we first want 
 from pictures ? Why do we desire to have them at all ? Think a 
 little ! Is it because of the wonderful workmanship of the painter — 
 simply to admire his dexterity, as we would that of a Japanese 
 juggler ? Is it only as records of things which are or have been — 
 coloured diagrams of life, from which we ask nothing but accuracy 
 and plainness of statement ? When we hang pictures upon the 
 walls of our rooms, do we do so only as so many columns from a 
 pictorial dictionary, so much information that when the barometer 
 was low, and the sun at a given altitude, such and such an object 
 cast a shadow of a certain value, colour, and shape ? If this be our 
 
 288 
 
o 
 
 
 
reason for wanting pictures, art is surely a very tame Board-school 
 sort of matter. If the vital characteristic of art is only, that its 
 record is shaped in form, and expressed by the help of light and 
 shade and colour, instead of being written in ordinary characters, 
 the world has been making far too great a fuss over painting 
 and sculpture for the last three thousand years. The world is too 
 full of learning which life is too short to comprehend, for folks 
 in general to hang their houses with long statements as to the 
 appearances of all things, even though those statements are bounded 
 by the four sides of a frame, instead of by the covers of a book. 
 
 Then, if it be not true that this scientific record is the object 
 and the characteristic of art, what do we seek therein which we 
 could not obtain elsewhere ? The answer is very simple : not fact, 
 not learning; but — delight. We seek at once that double gratifi- 
 cation of sense and spirit, of what we see and know, and of 
 what we feel and dream. The power of art over mankind lies 
 in this appeal to both sides of man's nature ; to those emotions 
 within him which are gratified by beautiful forms and colours, 
 exactly in the same way as the body is gratified by being plunged 
 into a warm bath, and to those thoughts, dreams, indefinite and 
 half-shaped spiritual perceptions, which make up the life within 
 us. And the power of the great artist is, that he can trace this 
 life of beauty, and its connection with our life of thought and 
 action, through channels whose source and windings are invisible 
 to our duller eyes. By his exquisiteness of perception, no less 
 spiritual than physical, he can endue the gesture of a tired child 
 with a significance as well as grace of which we know nothing, and 
 reveal to us, beneath the roughest exteriors, that throbbing pulse 
 of beauty, which beats for ever through all natural things, and all 
 true development of human emotion. But to do this he must feel 
 as well as know; he is not the surgeon, but rather the Sister of 
 Mercy of hiankind, and tends his patient not only with skill, but 
 with tenderness and prayer. And since the artist is to interpret 
 beauty to us, to find it in out-of-the-way places of humanity and 
 Nature in which we should pass it by, above all things must he be 
 eager in his search, and very human in his emotions. Perhaps no 
 very good picture which the world has produced was cold in its 
 emotional aspect ; no amount of technical skill in the least atones 
 for lack of feeling. 
 
 These considerations prevent me caring greatly for M. Gervex's 
 picture, and they seem to me applicable to much of the modern 
 French painting, which is at once profoundly skilful, and as pro- 
 foundly heartless. Gallic — and I am sorry to say some English — 
 artists have of late years grown so absorbed in their pursuit of 
 2 p 289 
 
technical excellence as to have forgotten that painting, aft6r all, is 
 but a means to an end, not the end itself; and, as in the old days, 
 the gods have granted them their heart's desire, and therewith 
 has come the accompanying retribution. The power, the skill, 
 and the industry shown in this present exhibition of the Salort are 
 simply incredible in their extent ; and despite them all, the visitor to 
 the gallery goes away fatigued and depressed, conscious of a multi- 
 tude of paintings of consummate ability, and scarcely remembering 
 half-a-dozen beautiful pictures. 
 
 There is at the l^cole des Beaux Arts at the present time a small 
 collection of works by a dead painter (Jean Frangois Millet), 
 which in extent would, if all of them were put together, not cover 
 half the space of canvas of many a single picture in the Salon ; yet 
 I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that, regarded from the 
 point of view of art, the Millet collection (chiefly of pastels, charcoal, 
 chalk, and pencil drawings) is worth a hundred exhibitions such 
 as the Salon. ^ In it we find a man not only seeing beauty in 
 ordinary things, but endowing that beauty with new meaning 
 and new pathos, without altering the truth of its appearance. To 
 be at the same time simply veracious in statement, and pathetic 
 and beautiful in the works in which these statements are made, is 
 about the highest praise which can be bestowed upon an artist, 
 and this praise is Millet's most certain due. The Breton peasant- 
 painter did thoroughly for the real life of the French rustic, a very 
 similar work to that which Walker and Mason did for the imaginary 
 life of the English countryman — touched it, that is, to fine issues of 
 poetry and pathos ; made it at once significant, pictorial, and true. 
 
 The comparison between these artists tells immensely in favour oj! 
 the French painter. He was not only a simpler, truer soul, in himself, 
 but he drew his inspiration of beauty from a purer, deeper source. 
 Examine Fred Walker's peasants and labourers, and one finds them 
 beautiful indeed, in both form and gesture ; but the grace which 
 they have is not the special grace that belongs to them in life, but 
 that which the artist attributes to them from his genius, and, as it 
 were, in their own despite. Take as an example one of the 
 grandest compositions which this artist ever painted, Speed the 
 Plough, and notice the actions of the only two figures therein — the 
 man driving the plough through the furrow, and the boy guiding 
 the horses. The actions of both are magnificent, and might have 
 been copied from a vase of the finest period of Grecian art ; but 
 only the slightest acquaintance with country life is needed to inform 
 us how little like the actual operation of ploughing — how essentially 
 (not untrue, but) uncharacteristic are these poses. The same words 
 
 1 The Angelus by this painter has since been sold for £yi,oiX) — and in Paris ! 
 
 290 
 
%: 
 
 X'-. 
 
 
 •\v. 
 
 O. C - ^^5)^ 
 
apply to the splendid gesture of the labourer removing the pipe 
 from his mouth in The Old Gate, and to that of the mower in The 
 Harbour of Refuge. These figures are all beautiful in actioii, but 
 beautiful despite the characteristics of country labourers, rather than 
 because of them. But if we turn to a shepherd or a shepherdess 
 by Millet, we find a very different manner of obtaining the result of 
 loveliness. The artist clings tenaciously to every indication of the 
 effect of labour and exposure— clings to the rough, shapeless 
 garments, the slow paces, the exhaustion, the endurance, the 
 isolation, and, I might almost say, the terror, of life in the fields and 
 the woods ; and it is by realising for us these facts, by bringing 
 them into accordance with the dew of the morning and the gloom 
 of the twilight, with the shifting seasons and the inconstant sky, 
 that he gains the material for his poem. Occasionally, it is true, 
 as in The Sower, and again in a lesser degree in the Two Men 
 Digging, we have a free unconstrained action, but only where such 
 is of the very heart of the subject. It would be correct to say 
 of Fred Walker that he made country life beautiful, and of Millet 
 that he found it to be so; that Walker's was a townsman's country, 
 and Millet's that of a son of the soil. However this may be, 
 the collection at the Ecole des Beaux Arts of the latter artist's 
 work, emphasises the defect of such painting as that of Gervex and 
 his imitators. If in these flat fields and toil-worn people, engaged 
 in shearing sheep or cutting faggots, planting potatoes or breaking 
 stones, there resides such an intimate secret of loveliness that a 
 few scratches of charcoal on a bit of paper, representing them, 
 give us so much delight, must there not be something very wrong 
 indeed with this elaborate, highly- trained, elaborately -wrought- 
 out, gigantic-scaled work of the Salon, which, with all its pounds 
 of paint and acres of canvas, awakens no emotion within us but 
 that of wonder at the apparently causeless industry of its pro- 
 ducers } There is something very wrong ; and, at the risk of 
 wearying my readers, I repeat that it is the substitution of technical 
 skill for the old end of painting and sculpture, which was to 
 express and to excite emotion : to give delight by painting matters 
 in which the artist delighted, things which he believed, loved, felt 
 to be true. 
 
 What was the secret of Millet's success against every opposition, 
 against lifelong poverty and total want of education. It was that he 
 understood and cared for the things he depicted ; saw their meaning 
 and their connection with life. Do you doubt it ? Here are his 
 own words : 
 
 " I must confess, even if you think me a Socialist, that the human 
 side of art is what touches me most, and if I could only do what 
 I like — or, at least, attempt it — I should do nothing that was not 
 
 291 
 
an impression from Nature, either in landscape or figures. The 
 gay side never shows itself to me. I don't know where it is. 
 I have never seen it. The gayest thing I know is the calm, the 
 silence, which is so sweet, either in the forest or in the cultivated 
 land — whether the land be good for culture or not. You will 
 admit that it is always very dreamy, and a sad dream, though 
 often very delicious.^ 
 
 " You are sitting under a tree, enjoying all the comfort and quiet 
 
 of which you are capable ; you see come from a narrow path a 
 
 poor creature loaded with faggots. The unexpected and always 
 
 surprising way in which this figure strikes you, instantly reminds 
 
 you of the common and melancholy lot of humanity — weariness. 
 
 It is always like the impression of La Fontaine's Woodcutter in 
 
 the fable : 
 
 " ' What pleasure has he had since the day of his birth j 
 Who so poor as he in the whole wide earth ? ' 
 
 " Sometimes, in places where the land is sterile, you see figures 
 hoeing and digging. From time to time one raises himself and 
 straightens his back, as they call it, wiping his forehead with the 
 back of his hand. ' Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy 
 brow.' Is this the gay, jovial work some people would have us 
 believe in ? But, nevertheless, to me it is true humanity and 
 great poetry ! " 
 
 I have lingered perhaps over-long in this contrast of Millet's work 
 and the naturalistic compositions of the present time, but this artist 
 forms a link between the old and new schools, and, with the landscap- 
 ists allied to him, inaugurated the revolution which has determined the 
 chief direction of modern French Art. Yet these men, who saw poems 
 in unaltered Nature, and produced them in colour and form, have 
 opened the way for the men who see no poems, nor feel any regret 
 at their absence, but prosecute their art with a cold accuracy of 
 endeavour, substituting the solution of problems for the delineation 
 of beautiful things ! 
 
 Meanwhile it must be confessed that, if we grant the desirability of 
 their aim, the industry and ability of the artists of this school are 
 almost beyond praise. Not to speak of the work of such masters as 
 Gervex and Brouillet, there are men such as Girardot, Raffaelli, Duez, 
 Dantan, and many others, producing pictures which, for truth of 
 out and indoor light and effects of atmosphere, are unsurpassable. 
 Girardot 's great picture in the present exhibition, of Ruth and Boaz, 
 .is a composition of this kind, which, though almost repellent at the 
 
 * Finding this quotation in Sensier's Life of Millet gave me, I own, the keenest pleasure. 
 This is the theory of the power and right use of art, in which I have always believed and tried 
 to teach. To find it shared by one of the greatest artists of modem times was indeed good ! 
 
 292 
 
first glance, becomes most technically admirable when closely ex- 
 amined, from the truth of effect and the evidently desperate 
 struggle of the painter to get the strongest possible rendering of the 
 fact he had selected. The subject here (Ruth and Boaz) might be 
 Jack and Jill as far as the interest of the picture is concerned, which 
 depicts simply the effect of a bright moonlight without and within a 
 dark farm-shed, in which Ruth and Boaz sit resting. Without and 
 within— that is the keynote of the artist's idea ; the flood of light, 
 soft, brilliant, and tremulous, breaking in through the open door of 
 the shed, and bringing into relief portions of the seated figures, and 
 then gradually fading away into darkness amid the beams and wood- 
 stacks and farm implements. A really marvellous piece of work this, 
 in its daring, and the success of its main attempt ; nor is it without a 
 certain vague poetry, which seems to show that M. Girardot might 
 also have made the picture delightful from the point of view of sub- 
 ject, if he had not been too busy with his special problem to care 
 about so doing. 
 
 It is hopeless to speak at any useful length of the general landscape 
 work which we find in the Salon ; it is beyond all comparison finer 
 than our English work in the same department, whether we regard 
 it from the point of view of style, of truth, or of technical accomplish- 
 ment. Our English Academy has to the best of its ability killed the 
 landscape art of England, by neglecting the men who studied that 
 branch, and by electing to its ranks only the more superficial land- 
 scape painters of the Scotch school. But the Scotch school of land- 
 scape is not only a school without poetry and depth of meaning — a 
 school of half-a-dozen effects of mist and sunshine, which it repeats 
 without variation from year to year : it is also, and beyond all else, a 
 school without style — with no connection with any of the great quali- 
 ties of bygone art, and which has substituted nothing for that defect. 
 Such painters as Harpignies, Duez, Rapin, Nozal, Vernier, Laurens, 
 Flandrin, Penet, Hanoteau, and perhaps above all (if only for his 
 beauty of colour) Le Roux, have no rivals at the present time in 
 English art. They are simply miles and miles beyond us, not only 
 in their technical skill, but in the scale of their impressions. They 
 see the scene as a whole, not in detached bits ; they see the scene as 
 it is, not as it prettily might be; they see the scene too with a 
 certain dignity, a certain quality of style very difficult to describe, 
 but which continually saves their work from being merely a sort of 
 natural history painting, as it for the most part restrains them from 
 weakening their pictures with the flabby parochial sentimentality of 
 which our own artists are so fond. Take the green depths of the 
 forest as painted here by Pelouse ^ (one of the very greatest land- 
 
 1 I know it is the fashion in Paris to laugh at this old master, but— fashion passes, and 
 good work remains. 
 
 293 
 
scapists living), and notice how entirely convinced the artist appears 
 to have been that in the slender stems of his trees, the quivering light 
 that falls on trunk and leaf, the thick moss which covers the stones 
 of the little brook — that in all these things there was quite enough 
 interest, not to say beauty, to justify his great picture. And there 
 is enough as he has painted them ; he has touched them all with a 
 general, if not a particular sentiment ; we seem, on looking at the 
 picture, to lose sight of the special wood, and only remember the 
 stillness, the shadow, the broken light, the peace and fragrance which 
 we have known in similar scenes. Call it abstract quality or style, 
 or by whatever name you will, this characteristic of French landscape 
 is one which enhances its merit very greatly — at all events to the 
 present writer. It takes the picture from the category of mere repro- 
 duction, and brings it into perceptible relation with the great art of 
 the past, and if it does not suggest the poetical or pathetic charm 
 of the relation of Nature to man, which is probably the highest 
 development of which landscape painting is capable, it does succeed in 
 treating the multitudinous facts, in obedience to a definite intention. 
 Why should a human being with brains and a soul, as well as eyes, 
 simply go out into the first field or hedgerow, and stick his spade 
 into Nature, and, bringing home the result triumphantly, call it a 
 landscape picture ? Not pictures at all are nine out of ten of modern 
 English landscapes : studies for pictures they frequently are, but 
 rarely more : they are bits taken here, there, or anywhere, without 
 relation, combination, or object. 
 
 Let any one who doubts the above fact examine carefully the 
 pictures at the Royal Academy, and he will find that there is 
 only one real landscape in the present exhibition, and that is by a 
 man over sixty years old (Mr. Hook, R.A.), who belongs to the 
 last generation. To depict a patch of light on a hillside, the trans- 
 parency of a wave, the glow of a sunset, is a worthy and desirable 
 object for an artist ; but the result^ is not 2, picture, but -a, study. And 
 as folks ought to know, but as our English painters will ignore, a 
 picture is made up of many studies affected by a special purpose. It 
 is the recognition of this purpose by the spectator which removes the 
 work from the purely reproductiveness of a study, to the artistic rank 
 of a picture. It is the knowledge that a human intelligence, as well 
 as a skilful human hand, has been at work on the materials of Nature, 
 subduing them to settled predetermined ends, using (not abusing) 
 them for a definite purpose. This is the human element in landscape 
 painting, and it is in proportion as this intelligence is elevated and 
 in sympathy with our deepest feelings, that landscape pictures gain 
 in beauty. 
 
 One cause no doubt of this superiority of French landscape, of 
 which I have been speaking, is the superior thoroughness of their 
 
 294 
 
1i V 1^ ~ir )•■ 
 
 ''"^b 1^1 
 
 ■f, 
 
 ■r. 
 
artistic education, and the habit of working on a large scale. I have 
 no space to dwell on the details of these facts — they are well enough 
 known to need but little comment ; but I cannot leave this subject 
 without pointing out, especially to English students, how humiliating 
 this Salon exhibition is to us in the extraordinary industry and pluck 
 which the young artists display. Knowing what I do of the straits 
 to which many of them are reduced, and of the difficuhies of every kind 
 which attend the production of a large picture, there is something 
 splendid in watching these young men, who generally are far poorer, 
 and live far more economically than English painters, spend their 
 last dollar upon a huge canvas — twenty feet square or so, and hurl 
 thirty or forty life-size figures thereon — with as great a determination 
 as if they had the Bank of England at their back, and the reputation 
 of Michelangelo. 
 
 No doubt their works are crude, exaggerated, most defective in 
 various ways — often insolent, sometimes brutal. " But," as Tom 
 Thurnall would have said, " these painters are men at least " ; they 
 are alive with pulses throbbing in obedience to a vigorous 
 humanity ; there is about them none of the whine, the fine-finger 
 affectation, the sickly morbid fear of spoiling their genius by bring- 
 ing its results before the world, to which many of us Englishmen 
 are prone. I like to think of these shabby-coated young fellows, in 
 their garrets of the Latin quarter, standing before huge Death of 
 CcBsar, Triumph of Joan of Arc, or Apotheosis of Victor Hugo, or 
 whatever be the subject of their picture, plastering on their great 
 pounds of unpaid-for paint, with cheerful confidence, and dining after- 
 wards, midst a great deal of noise, and practical jokes, and thick clouds 
 of cigarette smoke, at a twenty-sous restaurant. They are types of 
 the race who shove the world along in their profession ; they mean 
 business, to use an expressive slang phrase, and they have their 
 reward : the fierce competition for the prizes, the watchful eye of the 
 Government always to put Commands par IE tat upon any unusually 
 good ambitious attempt by an unknown painter, the habit of tackling 
 subjects of tremendous difficulty, and, well or badly, pulling them 
 through — all this keeps them up to the mark, till their business is learnt, 
 and their reputation, if it may be, assured. It is no use for English 
 artists or critics to minimise these facts ; no use for us to bestow an 
 easy sneer at the horrible subjects, and the vast sizes of these Salon 
 pictures. The subjects are frequently horrible, it is true ; but why ? 
 Because they are wholly unconventional ; because they cover, or 
 attempt to cover, the whole ground of human interest. We who go 
 on repeating from year to year our Vicars of Wakefield, our Georgian 
 costumes, our pictures of Scotch moor and Cornish coast, our silver 
 birch tree or shining waves, are safe enough from such a condem- 
 nation ; but the safety is on the whole inglorious. The material 
 
 295 
 
of our artists is, I believe, as fine as that of any nation, but their 
 training — in narrowness and blindness, in absence of all encourage- 
 ment and all guidance — is contemptible, and unworthy of a great 
 nation. 
 
 The Government and the Academy between them might remedy 
 this state of things in no small degree, but it will never be really 
 altered till there grows up amongst our people themselves, a less 
 pettifogging, less parochial view of art ; till our countrymen cease to 
 place Mrs. Grundy in the seat of judgment on their books and their 
 pictures, and allow to the arts the freedom on which alone they can 
 really flourish. Pictures are, after all, but experiences of life, and life 
 is not constructed with a view to the axioms of the copybooks, or 
 the cheek of the young person. 
 
 296 
 
\ I. 
 
I.— ART AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY— TRADITIONS 
 AND CHANGES, 1872-1890. 
 
 HE first portion of the following essay (i 872-1 882) 
 was originally written in Rome, where I was then 
 studying sculpture in Signor Spelta's studio in the 
 spring of 1883, and without books of reference other 
 than the catalogues of the Royal Academy Exhibi- 
 tion, which I was fortunate enough to be able to 
 borrow from an old artist friend. This may perhaps explain if it 
 does not excuse the omission of many pictures which certainly 
 deserved notice, but which had passed away from my remembrance, 
 or so nearly passed as to preclude their criticism. The introductory 
 remarks I leave as written. The second portion (1882-1890) is 
 mainly composed of revised extracts from my Spectator articles. 
 
 But it seems to me that there is a great need in England just now 
 of Art writing which can be definitely traced to its first principles. 
 Believing that the power and beauty of Art are intimately connected 
 with its relation to life, and to the great passions, desires, sufferings, 
 and joys of humanity, I have tried for some years to show how such a 
 belief may be substantiated. The question of how far this relation- 
 ship is inextricably entwined with the beauty of the form in which it 
 is expressed is, perhaps, the greatest crux in art, and sometimes one 
 sees very splendid art in which the relationship is almost invisible. 
 But if sought for sincerely, it is, as far as my experience goes, always 
 there. A beautiful thing — statue, picture, or building — may always 
 be traced back to its connection with the great facts of life ; remove it 
 utterly therefrom, and its true beauty fails. Boucher's cherubs are 
 pretty, not beautiful — Raphael's are beautiful, not pretty ; the one 
 altogether unakin to life, the others simply children touched with 
 some divine influence. The one man in England who might have 
 2 Q 297 
 
seen this truth and made others see it, and recognises all its 
 significance, is Mr. Ruskin; but, and I say it with the profoundest 
 reverence for his genius, and gratitude for the work he has done, he 
 has been led away by the necessity (the fancied necessity) of tracing 
 a special moral and religious principle throughout. What Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer calls the theological bias is evident in most of his 
 reasonings on this subject, and, where that enters, like any other 
 bias, the judgment is vitiated. For art is limited to no creed, any 
 more than beauty is limited to one country, or one race Wherever 
 men and women live and love, and suffer and enjoy there art, too, 
 can live, and will do so, not only in accordance with their virtues, 
 but with their failings— perhaps, even with their crimes. This is 
 the truth that Ruskin resists. He refuses the name of art to work 
 in which the morality appears to him to be false or even wanting. 
 Such at least is the tendency of his writing. He forgets those wise 
 words- of the old circus-master in Dickens' Hard Times, " Folks can't 
 alius be a thinkin', 'thquire, nor yet alius a learnin' ; folks must be 
 amuthed ; make the best of us, 'thquire, and not the worst." 
 
 All true art is a true expression of life, and life is very complex, 
 very faulty, and often very base. The relation does not cease 
 because the artist chooses to represent that which is a defect rather 
 than a glory of humanity ; nor because he is himself erring. We 
 may blame his choice from a moral point of view, we may even 
 banish his pictures as we do Rousseau's Confessions, or Gauthier's 
 great love-story, but don't let us stultify our reason and our judgment 
 by saying that the art itself must be bad, because its motive is 
 imperfect. The world is not made better by perfect means : mixed 
 motives produce all the good we know. What we do want in art 
 is that it should never lose its grip upon life, upon the great facts of 
 nature, feeling, and thought with which we are all concerned. All 
 else is nihil ad rem, useful for a moment's pleasure, but alien to 
 everything that helps on the day. 
 
 Certain things in the world are beautiful in outside form or inner 
 meaning; certain others become so through their connection with 
 their surroundings or with alien facts, or by their appeal to true 
 human interests — within this range (is it not a sufficiently large 
 one ?) lies the field of true art ; concerned to gather and bind into 
 a whole the scattered threads of beauty and interest which lie 
 unheeded about the world. And such as is the quality of the mind 
 and heart of the artist, so must be in the main his art. He may 
 confuse our perception of his ignorance by the dexterity of his hand, 
 and use his knowledge of technique to conceal the emptiness of his 
 heart, but he can never touch us with his skill, save when he has 
 previously been touched himself, can never make us feel where he 
 has not previously felt. One wanders through the French Salon, 
 
 298 
 
and is amazed at the power, dexterity, or technical excellence of the 
 great mass of the pictures, and wonders why the effect of the whole 
 should be so unutterably wearying and depressing — should leave 
 so little impression. Is it not because the artists are painting to 
 show us what they can do, rather than tell us what they feel ? 
 
 Those who think that art is a great mystery, of which only its 
 high priests hold the key, who fancy that a painting can be great 
 for some inscrutable, unexplainable reason, lose sight of the fact, that 
 if this were so, half the real power of art would be gone. Pictures 
 are only great when they express with deeper perception or 
 intenser feeling than that of the majority — some fact of thought 
 or emotion which is true in its relation to life. It need not be a 
 noble one — for all men are not noble, nor all emotions worthy. 
 Veronese's devotion to Splendour produced as true, though not 
 as exquisite, an art as Titian's devotion to the beauty of the human 
 form ; and Rubens' coarseness and vulgarity of nature did not 
 prevent his art possessing the beauty of strength and imaginative 
 freedom. 
 
 Previous to the last twenty years, our traditions were in the main 
 derived from the Dutch rather than the Italian schools. For this 
 there were many reasons — the prevalence of Dutch influence on the 
 nation, the comparative propinquity of the country, the greater 
 similarity between the character of the inhabitants of Holland and 
 England, the solid technical excellence of the Dutch painting — and 
 many others. For whatever cause, the majority of English figure 
 paintings were founded upon the principles of the Dutch and Flemish 
 schools, and aimed rather at solidity of workmanship, and careful 
 attention to chiaroscuro, than at vivid imagination, splendour of 
 design, or brilliancy of colouring. The school was not a great one, 
 but was safe, and on the technical side sound. It had, moreover, a 
 certain simplicity which was in harmony with the English character. 
 A little stupid, a little dull, and perhaps a little brutal (think, for 
 instance, of Wilkie's Village Festival), it was sincere, sturdy, and 
 national. Not unlike the novels of Sir Walter Scott, in honesty of 
 purpose, freedom from morbid feeling or minute analysis. The 
 danger of the style as a national one was the foundation upon 
 excellence of technique, rather than upon natural fact — for the Dutch 
 work owed its greatness not only to technique, but to what George 
 Eliot with her usual insight calls "the rare, precious quality of truth- 
 fulness in these Dutch paintings." 
 
 And when the English schools first followed in the track of the elder 
 masters, they too clung a little to this precious quality. Look at the 
 earlier figure pictures of this century, and much of their charm will 
 be found to reside in their truth. The main principle of the Dutch 
 
 299 
 
schools, which is the sacrifice of colour in shadow, for the sake of 
 relative brilliancy in light, is too technical a one to speak of here. 
 Still, it must be noticed, that the adoption of this principle produced 
 the sham Rembrandt kind of chiaroscuro of which we have had in 
 England so many examples. 
 
 But the great defect of the Dutch school, the exaltation of 
 technique into a sufficient motive for a picture, irrespective of its 
 subject, soon began to obtain in England, and before the decade of 
 which I have to speak, the Academy traditions had entirely lost sight 
 of all but the technical excellence and completion of brushwork in 
 Dutch painting, to which they still clung firmly — as a sailor to the 
 last morsel of wreck. Dim feelings were no doubt stirring in the 
 Academic mind as to whether something was not rotten in the state 
 of Denmark, even before Mr. Ruskin wrote Modern Painters, and 
 the young pre-Raphaelites stirred the muddy waters with so vigorous 
 a hand, and at any rate from that time — say from 1850 to 1872 — 
 the symptoms of the coming change were evident. 
 
 And when the pre-Raphaelite idea was once fairly grasped, the 
 death knell of the old regime sounded. Now, the pre-Raphaelite 
 idea was partly at all events an Italian one ; the Academy tradition 
 was, as I have said, Dutch, and between these, from 1850 to 1872, 
 there was fought a good fight, none the less real because silent, and 
 never clearly proclaimed ; for not only, or indeed chiefly, the pre- 
 Raphaelites themselves were affected by this movement, but it 
 stirred the blood of antagonists as well as sympathisers, and those 
 who least agreed with the so-called pre-Raphaelite^ manner, adopted 
 to a very considerable extent the idea of which that manner was but 
 the crude expression. Those, too, who disdained the earlier Italian 
 masters, began to study in defiance the later painters of the same 
 school, and to imagine that the traditions of Titian and Tintoretto 
 might have as much to recommend them as those of Rembrandt, 
 Teniers, and Ostade. No wonder that those who adhered to the old 
 traditions felt the ground to be slipping away from under their feet, 
 and despairingly endeavoured to effect a compromise between the 
 old and the new, between Holland and Italy, between prose and 
 poetry. No longer a Village Festival, or a Crossing the Brook, or 
 Choosing the Wedding Gown, etc. etc., formed the subject of the 
 painting, but a sentimental scene from Pamela or The Vicar of 
 Wakefield, a semi-imaginative historical episode, or some dream of 
 classical legend, or religious history. 
 
 The leaven, however, was too real to be resisted ; the truth, or, at 
 all events a hint of the truth, had got abroad and was beginning to 
 be recognised. The painters, whose predecessors had been conven- 
 
 1 See the Essay on the Pre-RaphaeUte Brotherhood. 
 300 
 
tional in their treatment, but sincere and simple in their feelings, had 
 been succeeded by a generation who were equally conventional, but 
 far less sincere, and who, in deference to the supposed wish of the 
 time, endeavoured to supply the place of truth with sentiment, and 
 beauty with picturesqueness. Though these latter had formed for the 
 twenty years we have mentioned, and the twenty preceding, the bulk 
 of the Academy — their hour was come, and their fall and that of 
 their theories is already matter of history. But in their stead, and 
 side by side with their last efforts, there sprang up, what ? Well, 
 such a war of opposing creeds and theories as, perhaps, was never 
 before seen. On the one hand the pre-Raphaelites, real and imitation, 
 on the other the Scotch Impressionists; here, echoes from the " Beaux 
 Arts" there, fresh dry traditions from Munich or Dusseldorf. Realists 
 on the one hand, idealists on the other, and everywhere of course con- 
 ventionalists, treading despondently yet safely in their habitual road. 
 Every one doing what is right in his own eyes and wrong in his 
 neighbour's ; not a single principle generally admitted, not a single 
 practice in common. 
 
 The old days of contented dulness were over for ever, the days 
 of unrest, and diversity of aim and method had arrived. The last 
 trace of the old order of things faded with the death of Sir Francis 
 Grant, and the election of Sir Frederick Leighton in his stead ; but 
 we are still no nearer to an artistic creed than we were before. Out 
 of the divine forty who constitute the Royal Academicians, it would 
 be hopeless to extract any agreement as to either the aims or the 
 methods of the art they practice ; to parody Tennyson — 
 
 " They do but draw because they must, 
 And paint but as the linnets sing." 
 
 The majority, indeed, would probably deny that any principle or any 
 aim in common was possible. As one of them once said to me, 
 apropos of his own work — " Meaning in a picture ! I hate the word ; 
 who wants any meaning in a picture ? There's no meaning in my 
 pictures ! " I remember humbly suggesting that possibly people in 
 general preferred one, but I was laughed to scorn. 
 
 However, to return to our subject. For much of the hopeless 
 diversity of aim amongst our painters Mr. Ruskin is in one way 
 responsible, for he headed the revolt from tradition to nature, 
 and many of those who either adopted or were influenced by his 
 teaching, have stuck fast in the clutches of a dull realism which is as 
 far removed from great landscape art as if it were the most conven- 
 tional of methods. The race of English landscapists which during 
 the first half of the present century seemed to promise such great 
 things has died out ; we have no one living in this branch of art who 
 
 301 
 
is equal to Turner, Linnell, David Cox, De Wint, or even Samuel 
 Palmer, most limited and most delightful of painters. Indeed, we can 
 hardly be said to have a living landscapist at all. The most sincere 
 landscape artists living are Mr. Hook, Mr. Alfred Hunt, Mr. Albert 
 Goodwin, Mr. Thomas Collier, and Mr. Aumonier.^ Of these Mr. 
 Hook is more of a sea and seaside painter than a landscapist in 
 the usual sense of the word, and is besides one of the elder genera- 
 tion who has almost ceased to paint. Mr. Collier and Mr. Aumonier, 
 both chiefly known as water-colour painters, carry on worthily the 
 tradition of Cox and Linnell. In my review of the 1877 Exhibition, 
 I have spoken more at length of the various kinds of landscape art ; 
 it is sufficient to say here that much of its deficiency arises, doubtless, 
 from the peculiar temper of the present day. Confidence in elder 
 theories is gone, and nothing as yet has taken its place but a study 
 of nature, which will no doubt bear fruit in time, but its season is not 
 as yet. 
 
 The look-out in the direction of figure -painting is still more 
 depressing. The English figure-pictures in the Academy of late years 
 have with scarcely an exception been either cheap, sentimental scenes 
 of everyday life, costume compositions of little merit and less interest, 
 or echoes, more or less indistinct, from the schools of France, Antwerp, 
 or Munich. Here and there an artist like Mr. Watts or Mr. Poynter 
 is struggling to do serious work in a worthy manner, but the excep- 
 tion is rare, and a strange foreign element is working its way amongst 
 us, and giving an air of boulevard and casino to much of what should 
 be our best painting.^ 
 
 One thing is evident, the simplicity of English painting is gone for 
 ever ; we must now go through the same mill as our continental neigh- 
 bours, and if we are to have a great art in the future, it will have to 
 be founded upon a wider basis than of old. The fashion of the day 
 has had much to do with this. An artist is no longer a simple work- 
 man doing his work for rational pleasure and honest pay. He has 
 of late been erected into a little Society god ; he lives in a palace, 
 and is courted by the world, the Society papers (which have done so 
 much to ruin English social life) chronicle his doings and applaud his 
 eccentricities, and so he becomes a hot-house plant and lacks vitality. 
 He knows more, but he feels less. He is cultivated rather than 
 sensitive, instructed rather than wise. And, being a patron of Society, 
 he must perforce comply with its conventions of many kinds, and 
 loses his old sincerity of purpose. 
 
 Outspokenness is very rude now in pictures, as well as at flower- 
 shows ; and with this new life there has come for the artist the 
 
 1 Mr. Hine (the elder), Mr. Alfred Parsons, and, at his best, Mr. Wimperis should be 
 added to the above list of painters, of whom one only (Mr. Hook) is a member of the Academy .' 
 
 2 Let me remind readers once more that this essay was written in the spring of 1883. 
 
 302 
 
TIS NOT THE HABIT MAKES THE MONK 
 
 G. F. WATTS. H. A. 
 
necessity of increased expenditure, and therefore increased gains ; 
 and so he, like all the rest of us, gets scrambling for the mighty 
 dollar, and paints not what he likes best or believes in most, but that 
 of which the public will buy most. The fashion for art, of which we 
 hear so much praise, has, nevertheless, nearly destroyed our painters. 
 
 And there are many other causes which I must not dwell on here 
 — the decay of religious belief, the decadence of national morality, the 
 growing tendency to copy the worst fashions of our Continental 
 neighbours, and to despise the insularity of feeling of which we were 
 once so proud ; all of these militate in some measure against the 
 growth of any great national school of painting. The Universality of 
 Sir Frederick Leighton, on the one hand, is as distracting as the 
 eclecticism of Mr. Ruskin on the other ; and, while the former will 
 admire a cocotte, a contadina, or a countess with equal ardour, the 
 other will look at nothing but an English Girl by an English Painter: 
 the truth, however, is more nearly with the last than with the first 
 mentioned of these. 
 
 It must be ourselves by ourselves which shall form the foundation of 
 our future art. Englishmen painted by Bavarians, Americans, or 
 Belgians, will never have a truly national life ; and foreigners painted 
 by ourselves are equally hybrid, whether they are ancient Greeks or 
 modern Parisians. There are a few great traditions which are the 
 property, not of a nation, but the whole world, and in these all 
 painters, poets, and musicians have an equal share, but for the rest 
 we are what God made us and shall be, and our painters must make 
 what they can out of the rude material. After all there has been a 
 good deal of stuff m the nation in former days, perhaps even traces 
 of the old divine fire may linger yet if they are sought for. 
 
 The truth is best, however unpalatable, and the truth is that there 
 is no very great art in England just now. Much art there is of 
 exquisite merit in its minor way, and some of which is imperfectly 
 striving after the highest qualities. Butof art serenely accomplishing 
 work which will live, there is little or none. The perfection of Sir 
 Frederick Leigh ton's technique will not save his dainty -skinned 
 damsels from the oblivion that awaits them ; they will not die, for 
 they have never lived, but they will cease to charm. The portraits 
 of Mr. Watts approach most nearly to the dignity and suggestiveness 
 of great painting, and they have occasionally qualities of colour such 
 as entitle them to rank with the highest. But they are imperfectly 
 realised, and far too unequal to form a type of excellence ; the painter 
 has never entirely mastered his method, or rather he has never had 
 a method that was not an experimental one.^ 
 
 Probably the most vital of contemporary English art, is that of Mr. 
 
 1 But see the paper on Watts. 
 
Burne- Jones, and Mr. Holman Hunt, the representative pre-Raphaelite, 
 but this is so totally distinct from all Academy traditions, that it is not 
 to be considered here ; ^ and it is, besides, one in which the strength 
 and the weakness are so curiously intermingled, that it seems doubtful 
 whether its merits could ever exist without its characteristic defects. 
 It expresses the unrest, the soft regret for lost beauty of life, the 
 sense of transitoriness and futility, which are so deeply impressed upon 
 most of our best modern poetry and thought ; in a healthier time, its 
 appeal to us would be less powerful. His painting is classic to our 
 failures, but not to our joys. 
 
 And here, before I pass to the notes upon each special Academy 
 exhibition, I would say a word in remembrance of one great artistic 
 genius of our day, who was not a member of the Academy, and who, 
 throughout his life, was neglected and misunderstood. This was 
 Alfred Stevens the sculptor, an artist who, with the capacity for being 
 the greatest man of his day, was occupied by our discriminating 
 English public during the chief part of his life in designing decorative 
 stoves and ornamental chimney-pieces. The one great work of his 
 life, the Wellington Memorial, is to be seen huddled away in a corner 
 of St. Paul's, and, lacking the statue of the soldier which was to have 
 crowned the monument — very literally Hamlet, with the character of 
 the Prince of Denmark left out. It is amusing at the same time that 
 it is pathetic, to know that the wise authorities who so deal with the 
 greatest piece of sculpture of our time, and who refuse to expend the 
 2^5000 or so necessary to complete the artist's design, are going, at 
 the present time, to expend, perhaps, twenty times that sum, in covering 
 the interior of the dome with sham mosaics, which, in all human prob- 
 ability, will not be able to be seen when they are constructed. It is 
 a strange piece of the irony of fate, that the President, and one of the 
 chief Academicians, have been called in to complete with their designs 
 this scheme, the architectural skeleton of which was originally designed 
 by Stevens himself.^ However, I must not linger over this question, 
 but, leaving generalities here, speak of the exhibitions in detail] 
 beginning with that of 1872. 
 
 y Q ^» ^ This exhibition was remarkable for possessing the two 
 ±0/2 ^^^^ pictures of that idyllic school which Mason and 
 / Walker may almost be said to have founded in Eng- 
 
 land. The Harvest Moon, by the first, and the Harbour of Refure 
 by the second of these artists, were then both exhibited for the first 
 time, and mark the highest point to which either artist attained. 
 
 1 Of course Mr. Burne-Tones has since been elected an Associate, but that does not render 
 his art Academic. Indeed, he has only exhibited once since his election, and has. I am told 
 announced his intention never to exhibit again! ' 
 
 !, \!J^ ^.xf^T^ "^If recognised Alfred Stevens as a sculptor, but prefen-ed Mr Weekes 
 and Mr. Woolner. Now nine years after the above words were written, Sir Frederick 
 Leighton has discovered that the Wellington Memorial would look better if t were to stand 
 in the nave, and a subscription is being raised for the purpose ! 
 
 304 
 
There is also a certain similarity between them of subject, style, and 
 method of thought ; and, though both are marked by an exquisite 
 sense of colour, there is also to be found in them a quality of design 
 which is more akin to the art of sculpture than painting. Or which, 
 perhaps, it would be more rightly said, is only to be found in those 
 painters whose sympathies are allied rather to the Greek than to the 
 Italian schools. This was the case with both artists. Mason, during 
 his two years' residence in Italy, had imbibed much of the spirit of 
 classic art, and in Walker the grace of action and propriety of gesture 
 of ancient sculpture, were visible from the very first. The paintings 
 were yet very different in their main effect, and showed clearly the 
 distinction of character between their respective artists. The Harvest 
 Moon, a long low picture with many figures of reapers and their 
 sweethearts going home after the day's work, had scarcely more 
 affinity with facts, than an idyll by Theocritus has with the everyday 
 life of the peasant. One felt irresistibly on looking at it, that the 
 work was justified by its beauty ; but that this thing was not, and 
 never could be, true. Not false, for it was too frankly unpretentious 
 to reality ; and not futile, for it had that exquisiteness of beauty which 
 sanctions art, if it does not morality ; its appeal to the spectator was 
 purely unconnected with the reality of the story that was told. In 
 Arcadia, such labourers and girls might have moved thus slowly 
 homeward to the sound of their pipes and violins ; but not in Eng- 
 land, not in Italy, not in any land that we see, save in dreams. 
 
 The Harbour of Refuge, on the other hand, relied for its power 
 upon truth alone. It was a picture of some red alms-houses flushed 
 with sunset light, a few figures of the old inhabitants dotted about 
 under the trees, or in the gravelled walks ; and in the foreground a 
 grass plot half covered with daisies, which a mower was swiftly reap- 
 ing. The chief figures of the picture were those of the mower, and 
 two women who were coming slowly down the long walk towards 
 him. Moral we can hardly say the composition had, or was meant 
 to have ; but it was full of delicate hints of meaning. The young 
 woman in the pride of life and beauty, supporting, with somewhat 
 disdainful ease, the steps of her aged companion ; the free, careless, 
 toil of the mower, indifferent alike to the beauty of the daisies beneath, 
 and the sunset above ; the unalterable patience and self-concentration 
 of age ; all of these were there, expressed with grand impartiality, 
 and framed and suffused with a beauty that greatly enforced their 
 meaning. A most true, exquisite, and pathetic picture, missing, 
 perhaps, the perfect dreamy loveliness of balanced form and tender 
 grace, to be found in The Harvest Moon, and just shadowed with 
 a gloomy feeling of weariness and futility, but secure in just appeal 
 to the facts of life and death, and to that unheeded beauty of Nature 
 which surrounds us all. In the sense of great art there was nothing 
 2 R 305 
 
to compare with these, and it is worth noting that a melancholy 
 interest attaches to them of being almost the last works of their 
 authors. Mason never exhibited at the Academy again, and died 
 (if I remember rightly) in the following year. Walker sent one small 
 picture in 1875, The Right of Way, and died the same autumn. 
 About that time died also George Pinwell ; and so within three years 
 perished the three English painters who stood alone in their power of 
 combining figures and landscape. 
 
 The next painter whose work was memorable in this year was John 
 Lewis. The Prayer of Faith shall heal the Sick was one of those 
 Eastern scenes of which this artist painted so many, and represented 
 the interior of a house with an old priest reading the Koran, and 
 grouped round him the women of the family. Though technically 
 of great perfection, it was a large and somewhat uninteresting picture, 
 as Mr. Lewis' compositions of many figures were wont to be, for 
 this artist was singularly incapable of seizing the dramatic meaning 
 of a scene, and was at his best in subjects where his marvellous 
 powers of execution could be concentrated upon details of dress, 
 flowers, or architecture. Emotion worried him, his work required 
 absolute calm, unfailing certainty, and inexhaustible patience. How 
 inexhaustible that patience was could be seen in the second picture. 
 The Lilium Auratum. In it there are only two figures, a young 
 Persian lady and her maid, and the scene is at the door of the house, 
 behind which we catch a glimpse of an orange grove and a patch of 
 bright blue sky. The girl has been to pick a bouquet of roses, etc., 
 for her lover, and the maid-servant is standing behind her, laughing 
 at her sentimentality. Such, at least, seems to be the meaning, but 
 it is of little importance. The really valuable part of the work is the 
 work itself, the absolute putting on of the paint. A good deal is 
 said, just now, about delicacy of execution, but here is execution of 
 which the delicacy is scarcely conceivable. The chief effect, in fact, 
 produced upon a painter by the picture, is amazement, not only at its 
 delicacy, but at the prodigality of labour which has been bestowed 
 thereon. The figures are surrounded by flowers of various kinds — 
 are clothed with elaborate robes of many colours, each covered with 
 elaborate design, and there is very literally not a square inch of the 
 work into which minute and unsparing labour has not been poured 
 almost wantonly. Execution such as this is akin to genius in its 
 rarity, and akin to it too in the pleasure which it gives, though the 
 pleasure is, of course, not that of creative work, but depends on the 
 perfect realisation of things which may be trivial or uninteresting in 
 themselves. In truth a Missal painting art, and admirable more for the 
 loving skill and patience of its workman, than in itself. 
 
 Mr. Frank HoU's / am the Resurrection and the Life might well 
 
 306 
 
THE SISTERS. — GioRi,L Pinuiii, 
 
be placed as a counterpoise to Mr. Lewis' brilliancy, but in its 
 way was equally sincere. A dark funeral-picture, with mourning 
 figures gathered round an open grave, under the greyest of skies. 
 Could we have a greater contrast than this to Persian sunshine, 
 trailing robes of crimson and gold, and a maiden gathering roses 
 for her lover ? This was one of the finest of those delineations 
 of the mournful side of life by which Mr. Holl made his reputation, 
 and should be ranked with his earlier composition of The Lord gave, 
 and the Lord hath taken away, to which it was perhaps intended to be 
 a companion. Mr. Holl set a difficult problem to his admirers in 
 those days, and one that was tolerably new to the English public. 
 English painting had aforetime been confined to pleasant things ; 
 or, at all events, if it touched tragedy, had done so in a frank 
 Shakespearian manner, meant to be interesting, or exciting, but 
 scarcely heartrending.. But here was a painter who deliberately 
 set himself to harrow our feelings, and who was no doubt successful 
 in so doing. Anything more dreary and more depressing than the 
 two pictures above-mentioned is not to be found in the whole range 
 of art, ancient or modern : even Israels himself, who carries joyless- 
 ness to the pitch of mania, is more frank and therefore more bearable 
 in his want and woe than Mr. Holl, and hides in the merciful 
 darkness of his cottage interiors, hints of peace and comfort.^ Yet 
 these were genuine, and in one sense, almost great pictures ; they 
 struck a note in modern art which may possibly rise to be the 
 dominant one. The traditions of the schools are passing away ; 
 the costume art is dying fast, and it is pictures like these which 
 devote unsparing power to the facts of everyday life that are 
 hastening the change. It is perhaps inevitable that the most 
 picturesque elements in modern life should be those which are con- 
 nected with the sorrowful emotions, or perhaps it is only the reaction 
 from the days of pleasant futilities which makes such work acceptable. 
 
 Mr. Holl has now deserted his former style, and become almost 
 entirely a portrait painter — the finest f)ortrait painter we have, with 
 the exception of Watts and Millais — but the scent of the roses clings 
 to him still ! and often in the delineation of a decent father of a 
 family, a grave senator, or a reverend dean, there flashes out a 
 little of that dark tragical feeling which marked his earlier painting. 
 Like Hamlet, his mourning livery lies deeper than his outward garb, 
 and probably he could not, if he would, paint a picture which had 
 not some trace of desolation in its beauty.^ 
 
 Mr. Cecil Lawson, the young landscape painter who died so 
 suddenly last year, had a small picture called A Lament in this 
 
 ^ The feeling of these works by Mr. Holl is probably due to the study of modem French 
 art. They have a shadow of " Montmartre " cast upon English daisies. 
 * See the Essay on Frank Holl. 
 
exhibition commemorating the establishment of the works for the 
 making of the Chelsea Embankment. It was slight, a little affected 
 in its abnegation of colour, and little likely to be noticed, but it 
 had that truth to atmospheric effect which the painter subsequently- 
 developed, and a certain quality of style difficult to describe, but 
 probably due to the study of the older schools of landscape. For 
 years after this Mr. Lawson exhibited at the Academy, having his 
 work almost invariably hung where it could not be seen, or rejected 
 altogether. And it was not till Sir Coutts Lindsay gave it the 
 place of honour at the Grosvenor Gallery^ that most people even 
 knew of the existence of this painter. It is a grave reproach to 
 the Academy hanging committees and councils of selection, that they 
 should have shown either such ignorance or such indifference as 
 was betokened by this neglect. And it does not make their action the 
 more tolerable that in after years they hung Mr. Lawson's pictures 
 upon the line, and just before he died elected him an Associate. 
 
 The two most popular landscapes of this year were Sir JoKn 
 Millais' Flowing to the River and Flowing to the Sea. Both, as the 
 name denotes, river scenes, both large in size and realistic in treat- 
 ment ; both full of skilful painting and carefully-studied detail, and 
 both unsatisfactory to the painter's most sincere admirers. The 
 preceding year had brought the Chill October (practically the painter's 
 first landscape) and seen its marvellous success. Sir John Millais 
 was undoubtedly then, as he is probably still, the most generally 
 popular painter in England, and the public delight in his taking a 
 new departure and making such a success therein, was unmistakable. 
 I confess that, after seeing the Chill October several times during 
 the dozen years that have elapsed since its exhibition, I think its 
 merits were overrated. It does not seem to possess the merits 
 of a great landscape, but to be simply a piece of keen observation of 
 Nature, presented with great clearness. As a picture the composition 
 is somewhat insipid. One is tempted to turn away and ask why this 
 dull sky, and cold water, and shivering reeds should have been painted 
 so well. 
 
 And this feeling is equally inevitable with the two succeeding 
 pictures. They do not miss their point, but they have none — they 
 offend our sense of selection, and style, and all that we are accus- 
 tomed to find in great landscape work, and they do not give us 
 in exchange even the pre-Raphaelite beauty of each individual stick 
 or stone, wave, bough, or cloud. A coarse realism pervades them, 
 realism which has little relation to fondness for the thing painted, and 
 which is only redeemed from worthlessness by its technical excellence.^ 
 
 1 About four years ago. 
 
 ^ For those who remember how lovingly Mr. Millais painted inanimate nature in such 
 pictures as the Ophelia, The Huguenot, and the Autumn Leaves, will not confound these later 
 landscapes with true pre-Raphaelite work. ■ 
 
 308 
 
The truth is a very simple one, albeit most visitors to the Academy 
 did not and do not see it. A landscape is not to be painted casually 
 by a figure -painter, just because he can reproduce a little bit of 
 Nature. It takes more than that to make a great landscape picture. 
 There are only two kinds of great landscapes; the one depends 
 on the painter's power of animating a scene with some human 
 interest or emotion, till he makes it akin to humanity, and the 
 other depends on the painter's power of selection and composition ; 
 on the power, that is, of so arranging his subject as to create in 
 the mind of the beholder an impression of its sufficient beauty, 
 dignity, and interest. Broadly speaking these may be called the 
 modern and ancient schools, and within their boundaries falls all 
 really great landscape painting. But Sir John Millais' art has no 
 kinship with either of these, he is essentially a figure-painter, and 
 there could be no more terribly significant sign of the utter absence 
 of all critical perception in English art judgment, than that his 
 landscapes should have been hailed with such joyous acclamation. 
 That there are beautiful bits of work in them, and that they have 
 considerable superficial truth to nature may be readily conceded, 
 but they have little meaning, dignity, or interest ; they show no 
 perception of the finer beauties of nature, and they must be considered 
 simply as studies of everyday natural effect. As such they are far 
 inferior to the work of Mr. Brett, of whose painting more anon.^ 
 
 In the same exhibition Millais had some fine portraits, including 
 the celebrated picture of the three Miss Armstrongs, entitled, 
 Hearts are Trumps, but the best portrait in the Academy was Mr. 
 Calderon, by Mr. Watts. It was a life.-size head, painted on a plain 
 and very dark background, without accessories of any kind. Mr. 
 Calderon's face, with its traces of Spanish- and Jewish origin, its 
 handsome features, and its somewhat stern expression, formed doubt- 
 less a splendid subject, and one peculiarly suitable to Mr. Watts' 
 tastes, but even so the portrait is a very remarkable one, full of con- 
 centrated power and dignity, and singularly successful in its beauty 
 of colour. The character of Mr. Watts' finest portraits is, indeed, 
 unrivalled in contemporary art ; they have no relations nearer than 
 Reynolds. In some ways they are finer even than Reynolds' ; for they 
 go deeper into the character of their sitters. In England there are 
 at present only these three first-rate portrait painters, Watts, Millais, 
 and HoU,^ and each has a method of his own. Watts ponders his 
 sitter, and tries to express him fully, sometimes with too great an 
 
 1 I should dearly like to alter this last sentence. It is most entirely mistaken ; but this 
 paper is inserted to show what I thought in 1883 and not in 1892. So it must stand. 
 
 ^ I fear that all readers of this pamphlet will be unanimous in thinking that I should have 
 included " Ouless" in this list, but it has always seemed to me that his work, earnest, solid, 
 and life-like as it is, lacks all essentially fine artistic qualities. A portrait painter who is 
 not sympathetic is an impossibility, and, to my mind, Mr. Ouless' work is absolutely defi- 
 cient in this quality. 
 
indifference to superficial characteristics. Millais gives us a splendid 
 outside splendidly painted; keenly observed glittering with life, 
 vigour, and brilliancy. HoU drives his sitter into some corner, and 
 then flashes a dark lantern upon him, and paints him sternly, 
 strongly, and, if I may use the expression, implacably. All are fine 
 workmen — Millais is incomparably the finest — but only one is a great 
 portrait painter ; it is only in Mr. Watts' likenesses that we find that 
 depth of insight which renders portraiture interesting, even when 
 the name of sitter and artist have alike faded. There was another 
 portrait here which must be noticed, as it represented the only work 
 of the artist which was exhibited at the Royal Academy. This was 
 the likeness of Mrs. Whistler by her son. It was called an arrange- 
 ment in grey and black, and it excited considerable attention at the 
 time by the vigour and the peculiarities of its method. Mr. Whistler 
 has since then become a tolerably well-known figure in artistic 
 circles, and his works have found a home in the Grosvenor Gallery, 
 where their merits can be adequately appreciated. I was unwilling 
 at this time, for private reasons, to express any critical opinions upon 
 Mr. Whistler's work. I have since ceased to feel that his numerous 
 personal attacks upon me in the World form any reason for silence, 
 and I therefore may insert here that when I saw this portrait again 
 some years later, I considered it of great beauty and originality. 
 
 There was little else in this exhibition which calls for special 
 notice. Sir Frederick (then Mr.) Leighton had no important work, 
 Sir Edwin Landseer was showing signs of age and failing power. 
 Mr. Briton Riviere's Daniel, though well drawn and dignified, was 
 wanting in life, and the figure of the prophet was tame, and the 
 whole picture far inferior to the Circe, to which it was a companion. 
 Mr. Poole's diploma work was hardly a favourable specimen of his 
 imaginative graceful art, and Mr. Marks' Waiting for the Proces- 
 sion less successfully humorous than usual. Messrs. Redgrave, 
 Pickersgill, Horsley, Cope, Hart, and Charles Landseer were 
 neither better nor worse than usual, and Messrs. Faed and Nicol 
 painted their peasants, sad or merry, in their wonted manner. Mr. 
 Alfred Hunt, Mr. Brett, Mr. Peter Graham, were all painting good 
 landscapes or seascapes, and Mr. H. Moore was painting the sea 
 itself, with increasing power, but a dulness of colouring which took 
 away much of the beauty of his work. Mr. Albert Moore, who had 
 exhibited two of the most exquisite of his designs the preceding year, 
 had nothing in the exhibition, and Mr. Poynter had the Perseus and 
 Andromeda, one of the four large pictures painted for the Earl of 
 Wharncliffe's billiard -room. On the whole, the exhibition was a 
 representative one, but had only two pictures that deserved to be 
 called memorable — The Harvest Moon, and the Harbour of Refuge} 
 
 * And perhaps Frank HoU's I am the Resurrection and the Life. — 1893. 
 
 310 
 
y Q ^ ^ The most notable event of this year's exhibition was 
 A O / ^ the first of those seashore compositions by Mr. Brett, 
 ' ^ which subsequently became one of the yearly features 
 of the Academy. Having been one of those who vainly urged the 
 right of Mr. Brett to academic honours for years before the 
 Academy tardily elected him an associate, I may perhaps be par- 
 doned for pointing out that this artist has since produced no work of 
 finer quality than this picture of wave, and sand, and seaweed 
 covered rock which he called Amongst the Boulders} If, as seems 
 to be the case, the present doctrine of the Academy is that land- 
 scape art is to be no more than a realistic copy of Nature, here was a 
 picture to which the highest honour was due on the spot ; for, in 
 truth, realism pure and simple could go no farther. After ten years' 
 interval the painting of rock, and sand, and water herein, remains in 
 my memory as clearly as when first noticed, and I seem still to see 
 the bright sunshine, the blue waves, and the glistening of the sand 
 round the half-buried rocks. 
 
 Perhaps an exception to the doctrine of landscape painting laid 
 down in the last chapter may be made in favour of those who can 
 light up our walls with sunshine such as Mr. Brett's ; for there lurks 
 within it a joy of its own which almost dispenses with other mean- 
 ing. However, we may note that Mr. Brett went on painting and 
 exhibiting analogous works to this year by year, and was elected a 
 member of the Academy about eight years subsequently. 
 
 Mr. Leslie's Fountain — some girls in classical draperies grouped 
 round an ancient fountain, with a background of leaves very care- 
 fully painted — was another of the pleasant pictures of the year, but 
 one in which the painter's peculiarly delicate powers scarcely showed 
 to advantage ; for Mr. Leslie has little in common with Greek art, 
 except the simplicity and directness of his intention, and these are 
 best seen in his painting of national subjects. The School Re- 
 visited, which he sent two years later, shows him at his best, giving 
 a simple grace of his own to a commonplace, almost trivial, 
 incident, and finding a way to make youth and innocence beautiful, 
 without endowing them with artificial beauty or sweetness. 
 
 His work is an anachronism truly, and smacks of our forefathers, 
 and knows nothing of board schools and electric telegraphs, being 
 indeed almost too exclusive in purity of atmosphere. But the artist 
 shows Englishwomen and children such as we like to fancy they may 
 have been in the days when George the Third was king. 
 
 It was this year that Sir Frederick Leighton exhibited the small 
 1 And since 1883 none so good. — 1892. 
 
coloured oil sketch for the fresco of the Industrial Arts of Peace in 
 the South Kensington Museum. The design was fine, though it 
 showed traces of that German influence which occasionally appears 
 in the President's work. There was a companion sketch to this of 
 the Industrial Arts of War, the fresco of which has been lately 
 finished.^ Not at all inspired work, but refined, cultivated, and skilful 
 in the highest degree. 
 
 Look for a contrast to this at Sir John Millais' young lady picking 
 the Newlaid Eggs out of the nest — one of the sweetest, freshest, and 
 prettiest of all his girl pictures — and one sees in a moment the 
 difference between a man who is born, and a man who has learnt, 
 to paint. Here we have Sir John Millais at his best, as in 
 the same gallery we have him, perhaps, at his worst in the over- 
 dressed, over-laboured, and over-coloured likeness of Mrs. Bischoff- 
 sheim. Mr. A. Moore sent this year a largish picture (badly hung, 
 if I remember right), called Follow my Leader — a bevy of girls in 
 the thinnest classical draperies, playing at the old-fashioned game, 
 amongst grey tree trunks in a daisied meadow. 
 
 This is, perhaps, scarcely to be thought of as an oil painting, so 
 deficient is it in depth and luminosity^ of colour, so slight is its 
 texture, so little of solidity does it possess ; but regarded as a deco- 
 rative panel the composition bears comparison with anything of its 
 kind. For the painting is absolutely right in apparent ease of 
 execution, freedom and grace of movement, lovely lines combined 
 with the greatest and apparently the most unconscious science, 
 simplicity of effect, and in the general air of unrestrained enjoyment 
 which pervades the whole. A pleasant picture, pleasantly painted, 
 with a thoroughly Greek feeling in the girls' easy movement of body 
 and limb, their happy unconsciousness of aught but the joy of living, 
 while faces are fair, and skies blue. I have said that some minor 
 things in art were being now done better than they ever had been 
 done before. One of these is the painting of thin draperies by Mr. 
 Albert Moore. To the best of my belief no painter, past or present, 
 has grasped the beauty and the character of such robes with any- 
 thing like the success which this artist habitually attains. Practi- 
 cally, he has given his life to this subject, and he has succeeded in 
 making it his own. 
 
 * This is in a lunette in one. of the Galleries of South Kensington Museum ; the other will 
 face it, but it is not yet begun. There is too great a preponderance of purple and white in 
 the finished painting for the work to be thoroughly successful, and apparently the President 
 has found himself somewhat cramped by the medium employed (Gambler Parry's), but 
 both designs are remarkable for their splendid figure drawing and for considerable beauty 
 of line. 
 
 2 I dishke using this word, which is so continually in the mouths of the newspaper critics, 
 but I know no other which will express without paraphrase that quality, as of a cut -open 
 precious stone, which all really great colour really possesses. Flat tints are one thing, 
 colour another. 
 
 312 
 
Mr. Marks comes naturally after Mr. Albert Moore, if only because 
 of the utter contrast — as perfect a one as could be conceived between 
 two painters, both of whom work more for a decorative than any 
 other purpose.^ Both are fine craftsmen, and there all similarity 
 ends. Mr. Marks' painting (take The Ornithologist, The Page of 
 Rabelais, or any other of his humorous works, as an example) is solid, 
 good work, very unobtrusive in its method, and perhaps a little flat 
 and monotonous in its execution. And if the painting is skilful and 
 industrious throughout, so is the drawing in a somewhat rigid 
 mechanical manner. The subjects of his picture are originally treated, 
 and their points are struck clearly and sharply. A burgess or a 
 serving-maid by Mr. Marks is just a little different to all other 
 burgesses or serving -maids. But in all essentials of art, as Mr. 
 Moore sees art, these works are wanting. For beauty of any kind 
 is absolutely unthought of within their limits. Strange, quaint, 
 humorous, satirical and amusing, Mr. Marks is frequently ; interesting 
 always — beautiful never. It is work which is far too good for its 
 motive, its attraction would be equally great in a woodcut to a 
 weekly paper — it is, in a word, wasted art — the art of the gargoyle 
 out of its niche, useless and fruitless. 
 
 The miserable state of artistic ignorance amongst our cultivated 
 classes may be gauged by the fact that this modern form of Gothic 
 humour is what is supposed to be most suitable for decorative 
 purposes, and that the public, in fact, have probably employed this 
 artist to paint more friezes, and make more designs for glass and 
 decorative panels, than any painter in England. The truth being, 
 that of all conceivable styles of painting in the world, this is essentially 
 the least decorative. I cannot stop here to discuss the subject, but 
 any one who cares to think of what qualities are desirable in deco- 
 rative work, will find that those are exactly the qualities which are 
 lacking in this style of art. And in speaking of the Academy, and 
 estimating its effect for good or evil upon English art, it is well to 
 remember this instance : that the Academicians select to form one of 
 their body, the Gothic painter, and despise the Greek ; that is to say, 
 they, being artists, deliberately prefer the art which is based upon 
 grotesquerie,^ to that which is based upon beauty. As I shall not 
 have occasion to mention Mr. Marks' painting again, it is desirable 
 to note here that his most serious, and, on the whole, most admirable 
 picture, was the one entitled St. Francis preaching to the Birds, 
 exhibited previously to the years of which I am writing, and 
 after this the Capital and Labour (1874), which showed the 
 
 ^ This is hardly an accurate expression. Mr. Marks has, probably, done more work of a 
 decorative than any other character, but his oil paintings in the Academy are decorative only 
 in a secondary degree. Their main motive is not to make a space beautiful, but to tell a 
 story amusingly. 
 
 ^ I don't know whether there is such a word as this, but if not there ought to be. 
 
 2 S 313 
 
humorous side of a dispute between a mediaeval employer and 
 his workmen. 
 
 A word or two must be said here about Mr. H. W. B. Davis — a 
 peculiarly industrious and clever workman — who was elected an 
 Associate in this year. His pictures were always carefully composed 
 and painted, full of pleasant effects of cloud and sunshine, and 
 generally made up of green trees, and grass, and a few rough-coated 
 cattle. Cows and oxen he drew especially well ; and it was probably 
 to this that he owed his election ; for he was always more of an 
 animal painter than a genuine landscapist. The peculiarity about his 
 early painting was its excessive want of geniality — if I may use such 
 a word. His pictures were like a schoolmaster's joke, irreproachable, 
 but a trifle heavy. Partly his colouring was responsible for this 
 impression, but probably it was mainly due to a somewhat precise 
 habit of mind, which calculated, or seemed to calculate, too nicely all 
 its pictorial effects. One felt before his pictures that it was ungrate- 
 ful not to like them better, when one admired them so much. Since 
 his election, Mr. Davis has improved greatly, and may now be 
 considered the first of our cattle painters ; but something of the old 
 unsympathetic quality still lingers, and he seems never to have quite 
 made up his mind as to what he seeks in Art. 
 
 The strength of this year's collection did not lie in the figure 
 pictures, but in the general high quality of the land and seascapes. 
 The Hook's, the Brett's, the Henry Moore's, the Alfred Hunt's, the 
 Davis', and the Leader's were all fine and numerous, and made up 
 the average of what would otherwise have been a very indifferent 
 exhibition. The two vacancies in the list of Associates, left by the 
 death of Mason, and the promotion of Mr. Dobson, were filled by 
 Messrs. Davis and Hodgson, of whom the latter was a good 
 draughtsman and a careful, somewhat old-fashioned painter, chiefly ot 
 domestic incident in Eastern life. He is a clever, somewhat dull 
 artist, addicted to semi-farcical subjects, but treating them with a 
 heavy hand, and one who has since scarcely justified his election. 
 There was, however, at this time, and for some years subsequently, 
 a great bias in the Academic mind towards domestic painters of 
 an absolutely colourless and unobjectionable character, and Mr. 
 Hodgson's pictures had considerable merit of a technical kind. 
 
 J Q — ^ 'Seventy-four was an eventful year at the Academy, 
 
 1 O Z^- ^^ °"'y because it comprised Mr. Alma - Tadema's 
 
 /I Picture Gallery, Mr. Millais' North -West Passage, 
 
 Scotch Firs, and Winter Fuel, Mr. Fildes' Casuals, and Miss 
 
 Thompson's Roll Call The last of these was certainly in popular 
 
 estimation the picture of the year. Fortunately it is too well known 
 
 314 
 
■fl 
 
 O 
 
to need description. How much the intrinsic merit of the picture 
 had to do with success, would be hard to say, but certainly 
 in a snobbish land like ours, no amount of intrinsic merit would 
 have produced half the excitement about a work of art that the few 
 words of the Prince of Wales produced about this picture. Now that 
 that excitement has faded, I may perhaps be allowed to say, without 
 failing in courtesy, that it appears to have been greatly overstrained. 
 The picture was a cleverly conceived, and carefully painted one, of a 
 sentimental type. It was remarkable for resolute adherence to truth 
 in so far as the artist could discover or imagine what the truth had 
 been, but had no great qualities of colour or design,^ and touched no 
 feeling other than a sentimental one. The subject, which was bound 
 to attract sympathy from every Englishman, was represented in 
 at once a popular and possible way. Its sentiment was contained 
 in the facts. For power it could not compare with the picture of 
 Quatre Bras, which the same lady painted the next year, and in 
 which, taking a subject of infinitely greater difificulty, she succeeded 
 even more strikingly than before. 
 
 Mr. Tadema's Picture Gallery is one of his largest, if not his best 
 paintings, and represents the interior of a Roman picture-house, with 
 a connoisseur showing the works to his friends. In execution 
 inferior to none of his later pictures, and in realisation of the scene 
 scarcely to be surpassed. How far the skill of the execution, 
 and the accuracy of the research which are here displayed, atone for 
 the artistic purposelessness, is a difficult question. There is some- 
 thing essentially futile in the endeavour to render with elaborate 
 realistic detail the minutiae of ancient life — the labour, even if 
 successful, must be so infinitely out of proportion to the worth of 
 the result.^ What is gained after all by this marvellous painting of 
 objects collected, invented, or discovered by the research of the 
 artist ? As I sit here writing in the Forum, at the foot of all that 
 is left of the Temple of Saturn, it seems as if the chipped bits of 
 drapery round me everywhere, are worth all the details of Mr. 
 Tadema put together, and that they tell more truth about Rome 
 than could ever be got out of his work. However, this is no place 
 to argue such a subject, and if I do not give greater space to this 
 artist it is because he is not an English painter in any right sense 
 of the word. 
 
 Mr. Millais' North-West Passage and his two landscapes of this 
 year, show almost the last trace of his early pre-Raphaelite proclivities. 
 
 * In fact, the composition was singularly ugly. Nor had the artist any real knowledge of 
 what she painted. This picture was sentimentally true, but had not the unmistakable look 
 of having been done from nature. 
 
 * From an art point of view such pictures have only great value if they are to be considered 
 as pictorial school-books, but to this Mr. Tadema would hardly consent. 
 
Neither of the landscapes has quite the old directness or charm, 
 but there are portions which remind one of the painter of the 
 Ophelia and the Vale of Rest. In spite of a little dressed-up look 
 and a suspicion of theatrical pose, the picture of the old sailor showing 
 the track of his ship on the chart to the girl who kneels by his side, 
 is a beautiful one, tenderly thought out and strongly painted. It may 
 be said to form the last of that series of subject pictures which built 
 up the painter's reputation.^ The Scotch Firs and the Winter Fuel 
 are also remarkable for the minuteness of their execution, and for bits 
 of colour put on to bark, bough, and foliage, with something of the 
 frankness of earlier times. Indeed, Mr. Millais never had such a 
 triumphant exhibition as that of this year. From this point he began 
 to decline — to decline at any rate in the fascination of his work, for 
 his technical skill is, when he chooses to exert it, as great as ever. 
 
 There were two idyllic pictures of modern life in that exhibition 
 which deserve a word of mention, though little notice of them was 
 taken at the time. These were Le Chaudronnier, by M. Alphonse 
 Legros,^ and Phyllis on the New-mown Hay, by Mr. Robert Macbeth. 
 No two pictures could be more dissimilar in their representation of 
 rural life. The Frenchman's is cold, grey, gloomy, and almost cruel 
 in its unsparing truth. The Englishman's is cheerful, pretty, and 
 bright, and full of pleasant suggestions of waning sunlight and quiet 
 enjoyment. One is the life of the poor as Millet, the other as Walker, 
 painted it. Both were fine, Le Chaudronnier strong in its truth and 
 dignity of treatment, Phyllis strong in its resolute adherence to the 
 sunny side of youth and nature, and in its frankness of conception. 
 Mr. Macbeth's Phyllis is only a country lass after all, but she is 
 bonnie and young, and has that largeness of mould to which Mr. 
 Macbeth has gradually accustomed the visitor to the Academy. I 
 remember when the critics grumbled hugely at the proportions of his 
 peasants, and objected to their strong arms and thick ankles ; but all 
 that is over now that he can write the magic initial after his name.^ 
 M. Legros is a painter who may be said to be exceptionally unfor- 
 tunate. He can do certain things well, but he cannot render anything 
 pleasant, and even the good qualities of his art are apt to be stern 
 and unbending. He is in some ways a magnificent draughtsman, 
 but it is in a hard, severe style — such as is scarcely appreciated out 
 of France — and he has little sympathy with any but the more desolate 
 aspects of Nature. The finest works he has produced here have been 
 his etchings, one of which, a supremely desolate one, entitled La Mort 
 dun Vagabond, is almost terrible in its tragedy. As a remembrance 
 
 1 For I omit the Crown of Love exhibited subsequently, that love story in which, as Mr 
 Ruskin tersely said, the lady had a head without a body and the gentleman a body without a 
 head. 
 
 2 Since Slade Professor at University College, London. 
 ^ He was elected Associate three months ago. 
 
 316 
 
that there are pleasant things in the world, Mr. Albert Moore's Shells, 
 a damsel wandering along the seashore with wind-blown hair and 
 garments, came as a good antitype to M. Legros, and Mr. Marks' 
 Page of Rabelais was also welcome. Perhaps this last is the most 
 perfect of all Mr. Marks' smaller pictures. Mr. Watts' portrait of 
 Martineau, Mr. ^^XX\€s Juliet and Friar Lawrence, and Mr. Orchard- 
 son's Ophelia and Hamlet and the King, and Mr. Poynter's Rhodope, 
 were all in this exhibition, which was, on the whole, an unusually 
 interesting one. 
 
 But most famous of all was the Casual Ward, by Mr. Luke Fildes, 
 talked of within a month all over England as The Casuals. This 
 picture of the squalid crowd waiting at the workhouse door is too 
 well known to need description, but it is worth while to point out 
 that its power resided entirely in its appeal to a vital fact of life. Mr. 
 Fildes is a good, not a great painter, but he here hit upon a subject 
 which is perhaps the most significant of all subjects for Englishmen 
 at the present time. He painted it with absolute truth, and a con- 
 siderable amount of dramatic insight, and his success was perfectly 
 genuine and unmistakable. 
 
 Q This was probably the best exhibition of the decade, 
 
 T Q 'T ^ not only as representative of the Academicians and 
 / O Associates, but in having several pictures of worth by 
 outside artists. The Babylonian Marriage Market, by Mr. Long ; 
 The Last Muster, by Mr. Herkomer ; The Bearers of the Burden, 
 by Mr. Boughton ; The Spires and Steeples of the Channel Islands, 
 by Mr. Brett ; The Quatre Bras, by Miss Thompson ; and The 
 Charge of Cuirassiers at Waterloo, by M. Philippoteau, were all 
 paintings of indisputable merit, and might well remain to this day 
 as first-rate examples of their respective artists ; whilst within the 
 Academic circle there were to be found, the finest portrait Sir John 
 Millais ever painted (Miss Eveleen Tennant) ; The Slinger of Sir 
 Frederick Leighton ; the grand design dedicated To all the Churches, 
 of Mr. Watts ; The School Re-visited of Mr. Leslie ; the Rachel 
 of Mr. Goodall, and The Samphire Gatherer oi Mr. Hook; while the 
 sculpture gallery possessed what, if we may trust Mr. Ruskin, was 
 the most precious work of the exhibition, the life-size statue of Carlyle, 
 by Mr. Boehm. 
 
 And first, of the four painters who have since been elected Associates, 
 and who probably owe their election in no small measure to the pictures 
 sent to this exhibition. Mr. Herkomer's Last Muster was a large oil 
 painting, the design for which had previously appeared as a double- 
 page illustration to the Graphic, as an illustrator to which paper the 
 artist was at this period chiefly known. It was a study of Chelsea 
 pensioners attending service in their chapel. It was hardly to be 
 
 1^1 
 
regarded as an oil painting in the sense in vfhich. painting is correctly 
 spoken of, but was a piece of strong, unaffected, and direct work 
 applied to a worthy subject. Amongst much sham and sickly senti- 
 ment the composition stood out in sincerity, and showed a certain 
 manly sympathy with its subject, neither overstrained nor sentimental. 
 In fact, to use an artistic phrase, this was a big thing not concocted in 
 the studio. Since then Mr. Herkomer has risen rapidly in reputation, 
 but he has done no better work, and little which is as good. He has 
 always been far too busy to learn to paint, and except that his pene- 
 tration into character is so keen, and his industry so untiring, his 
 work would almost warrant the name of insolent. The huge land- 
 scapes, for instance, which he exhibits at the Academy or the Grosvenor 
 are scarcely more than dexterous scene painting. 
 
 Mr. Long's Babylonian Marriage Market was a work in which the 
 merit was of a totally different kind to that of the last-mentioned 
 picture. This showed great industry, and a power of combining the 
 various results of untiring research into a consistent whole. The 
 subject was a happy one as far as popularity goes, admitting of the 
 introduction of many gradations of womanly beauty, and with an 
 amount of dramatic interest rare in these elaborate reproductions of 
 ancient life. The picture had, however, the defects which are ap- 
 parent in all Mr. Long's work, a want of freshness and ease, and a 
 certain lack of artistic feeling. Despite the good painting and the 
 composition it bore the same relation to fine art, that Southey's epics 
 do to fine poetry. In fact multiplicity of detail is not fine art, though 
 the fact is apt to be overlooked in paintings which take us back four 
 thousand years or so, and realise for us all the details of ancient life. 
 
 Great paintings are not alone skilful handling of the brush and 
 pencil, and introduction of suitable surroundings. For a great picture 
 must either tell us old things in a newer and more perfect way, or 
 must tell us new things of which we feel the beauty and the truth. 
 The great artist either sees more deeply or more widely than the rest 
 of us. But this is what Mr. Long does not do : his art is all on the 
 surface, a thing of shreds and patches. What matter that they 
 are cut from ancient and precious tissues. To see what he lacks, 
 we must compare his paintings with similar compositions by M. 
 Gerome. There is no unity, no spontaneity, no artistic fire about his 
 work, like there is in that pf the great French artist. And it is strange 
 to note that Gdrome, whose manner is probably more cold and less 
 sympathetic than that of any living painter (except M. Legros), has 
 the power of giving to his scenes of ancient days an amount of reality 
 and meaning such as Mr. Long, with all his elaborate machinery, 
 entirely lacks. The truth is that the one gives us the surface aspect 
 of his subject, the other penetrates into its essence. Mr. Long's 
 
 318 
 
SIR WILLIAM BOWMAN, OCULIST 
 
 W. W. OULESS. R. A. 
 
 From a photograph 
 
Assyrian maidens, or Christian converts, or Roman soldiers, are 
 merely correctly dressed dummies, using appropriate gestures ; but 
 M. G6rome's Arab, who sits by his dying horse in the desert, is a real 
 character ; we feel that we know him and his grief and love, almost as 
 we know an old friend. Let the English artist have all the merit to 
 which he is entitled for his careful painting, his picturesque arrange- 
 ment, his unquestionable ability of realising the superficial aspect of a 
 dead civilisation, and the industry and accuracy with which he has 
 collected and displayed his facts.^ But telling us many things is not 
 equivalent to telling us much, and the picture's" merit does not depend 
 upon the amount of its artistic patience and research. 
 
 As usual, in artistic matters, the truth lies in an exactly opposite 
 direction to the popular impression. The only excuse for these grim 
 historical, semi-archseological works is, that the artist should feel that 
 he must paint them, and should justify that feeling by showing in his 
 work the effect of his prepossession. Then the ancient life lives 
 again in the modern artist's sympathy, and through that sympathy 
 affects all who see. This is, of course, the gift of genius, and we may 
 sufficiently say of Mr. Long's work, that such a gift is the last one 
 with which he could be credited. 
 
 Miss Thompson's Quatre Bras has already been alluded to, and 
 The Spires and Steeples of the Channel Islands by Mr. John Brett 
 must pass with the remark, that the picture showed all the power of 
 his brilliant realistic painting. Probably this was the finest pictorial 
 rendering of sunshine which had ever been executed. A pity that 
 Mr. Brett's sunshine has less meaning than many another artist's 
 shadow. He is like a millionaire in a desert, he does not know 
 what to do with his gold. 
 
 Mr. Boughton's Bearers of the Burden, touched with a less faithful 
 and less sombre, but equally vivid, hand the chord which Mr. Fildes 
 had sounded the year previously in The Casuals. Most of us will 
 remember this incident of country life, with the vista of dull road, 
 the scarce, loveless foliage of bush and tree, the brutal men, the 
 draggled weary women. It might have been called The Nineteenth 
 Century, and served as an illustration to Burke's lament. And it 
 was and is terribly close to the truth of the relations of the sexes 
 amongst the English poor. The fact makes one's heart bleed 
 to believe, but being so, perhaps the sooner it is clearly under- 
 stood the better. No Englishman probably would have painted this 
 picture,^ and never (to my knowledge) did Mr. Boughton before or 
 
 1 Perhaps the most vital defect of Mr. Long's work is a weak washy prettiness, which is 
 more hopeless than any amount of crudity, or harshness of colour form. It's the preference 
 of" Shanklin Chine" to Alp or Moorland." 
 
 ' Mr. Boughton is an American. 
 
since, do any similar work. Technically the painting was executed 
 in a somewhat spotty ragged manner, and the colouring was more 
 remarkable for the relative harmonies than the actual truth to nature. 
 Altogether indeed, akin to French rather than English art, but 
 certainly one of the most masterly pictures in the exhibition, and 
 holding a little sermon told with an incisiveness which no one could 
 mistake — this is what an American thought of English chivalry, and 
 rightly. 
 
 The return of a French soldier to his home, by Mr. Marcus Stone, 
 called Sain et Sauf, must be just mentioned here for the strong and 
 careful painting, and for the honesty of purpose. Mr. Stone is always 
 a little over-dramatic perhaps, but he is one of those artists who put 
 all their power of painting into their work, and who rarely miss the 
 point at which they aim. Of late years he has dwelt (pictorially 
 speaking) in a shady garden, in the green depths of which he places, 
 now a graceful woman, now a gouty squire, now an amorous sports- 
 man, and his art has become trivial and somewhat weak. But he is 
 nevertheless one of the Academy's most genuine artists ; he touches 
 his subject with a delicate vivacity which is all his own, and he has 
 a rare sense of womanly grace and beauty.^ 
 
 About no picture was there more diversity of opinion than Sir 
 Frederick Leighton's Slinger, an Egyptian lad shying stones at 
 sparrows, according to the unkind description of the author of 
 Modern Painters. This magnificent life study hardly reached the 
 point of a picture, and the figure seemed to overpower all the rest of 
 the work, which looked like a theatrical background at a minor 
 theatre, too small and thin for reality. Nevertheless, as a repre- 
 sentation of a grand form in vigorous action, this was so fine that 
 few things in the Academy could stand the comparison, and the 
 study was remarkable as practically the last in which Sir Frederick 
 painted manhood — in future years women and waxwork were to form 
 his ideals. Mr. Watts' design of the Ascension of Christ, which he 
 dedicated "to all the churches," stood, somewhat as an alien stands, 
 amidst the fripperies of Mr. Frith, the aristocratic vacuities of Mr. 
 Wells, and the cheap sentiment of many another Royal Academician. 
 There were several points of beauty and meaning in the work, but 
 such were scarcely to be appreciated here. The picture was literally 
 crushed by the conventionality of the surroundings. 
 
 _ Mr, Prinsep, soon to be an Associate, had his Minuet in this exhi- 
 bition, and on the whole the picture was the best he had painted. 
 The subject suited him, requiring little passion or power, and the 
 atmosphere of perfume and powder, never wholly absent from his 
 
 1 Something of the flavour of Paris is to be traced in his domestic episodes ; they are 
 thoroughly elegant, even when they are not sincere. 
 
 320 
 
work, was fully appropriate. His clear sharp painting showed to the 
 best advantage in the silk stockings and satin skirts of the dancers ; 
 and the slow mo'O'ement of the figures, and the old-fashioned grace of 
 the dance, were caught to perfection. If a contrast to this were 
 needed it might have been found in Miss Starr's Hardly Earned, a 
 woman in a threadbare shawl, who has sat down wearily by her fire- 
 side after a hard day's work. Each part of this picture was studied 
 with a patience and elaboration beyond all praise, and the result 
 could scarcely have been more successful. Of many hundreds of 
 pictures, representing this and other similar well-worn subjects, I 
 remember none which told its tale at once so simply, so powerfully, 
 and so well. 
 
 Of all the pictures in the exhibition this was the most pathetic, but 
 it was nearly approached by Mr. Briton Riviere's War Time, a 
 country scene in winter, with an old shepherd gazing desolately 
 across a dreary waste of snowy fields and hedges. Mr. Riviere's 
 touch upon the feelings is very keen at times, and in this work 
 he was quite at his best, the horrible dreariness of the landscape, 
 and the pose and expression of its single figure, told the story 
 intended, better than a page of description. War Time^ was a 
 genuine poem of daily life, which had this advantage over the pathos 
 of the Last Muster and The Bearers of the Burden that the motive 
 was drawn from a deeper well of feeling, and combined therewith a 
 greater amount of natural beauty. 
 
 Q jT In reference to this year's Academy exhibition the 
 J Q y (_) late Lord Beaconsfield, with his usual happy audacity 
 / of statement, and contempt for the intelligence of his 
 
 hearers, expatiated upon the originality and power of the English 
 schools of painting, and told the delighted artists who clustered 
 round him, that the eyes of Europe were fixed upon the walls of the 
 Academy. Now, however, that the roses of that Academy banquet 
 are dead, and the polished periods of the great earl have ceased to 
 confuse our judgment, we must confess that this was as dull and 
 uninteresting an exhibition as any one of the decade. 
 
 There were two large pictures by Leighton and Poynter, and half 
 a dozen interesting ones by little-known painters. There was one 
 of Mr. H. W. B. Davis' best landscapes (sufiiciently criticised else- 
 where), and a beautiful little Alma-Tadema, An Audience with 
 Agrippa. Notable this last, amongst many other merits, for com- 
 plete mastery over different conditions of light and shade, and for the 
 excessive difficulties of perspective ^ which the artist had vanquished. 
 
 * The poem illustrated by this picture was by Sidney Dobell. 
 
 2 Owing to the point of view chosen. Mr. Tadema's perspective, however, is always 
 carefully worked out for him by a draughtsman who performs the same duty for seyeral 
 well-known artists. 
 
 2 T 321 
 
Mr. Brett, in A certain Trout Stream, was ill at ease, away from 
 his favourite ground — or rather water — and Mr. Moore's little work 
 called Beads was exquisite in quality, but scarcely more important 
 than a cameo. Mr. Briton Riviere, who turns to subtler modern 
 instances a similar power to that which Landseer possessed of giving 
 human meaning and emotion to animal life, had this year left his true 
 region of pathos, and in his Stern Chase is always a Long Chase ^ 
 burlesqued the power which he should have honoured. Herkomer 
 had returned to his native Bavaria for a subject, and his At Death's 
 Door distinctly failed to touch the chord of pathos at which it aimed. 
 Millais' child picture, Forbidden Fruit, lacked much of his usual 
 charm, and his portrait of Lord Lytton was one of the worst he ever 
 painted. Mr. Orchardson's Flotsam and Jetsam, and Mr. Leslie's 
 My Duty towards my Neighbour, were fair examples of their re- 
 spective artists, but neither specially representative nor interesting, 
 and Mr. Watts' three portraits were open to the same remark. A 
 portrait by R. Herdman of Thomas Carlyle was finely and quietly 
 painted, and Mr. Prinsep's Linen Gatherers, a companion picture to 
 his Gleaners ^ of the preceding year, only missed its meaning by being 
 too disdainful of the subject. These linen gatherers were neither 
 work-women nor ladies, but something between the two. 
 
 The great picture of the year both in size and importance was the 
 Daphnephoria of Sir Frederick Leighton, a very large canvas repre- 
 senting one of the ancient Grecian festivals in honour of Apollo. 
 The composition was a purely decorative one, the subject being 
 chosen for the opportunities afforded of introducing beautiful things, 
 people, and scenery. The picture was, save in this respect, motive- 
 less, and looked out of place in the gallery. There was a lack of 
 concentration and meaning, or rather the meaning wanted concen- 
 tration, and the long line of beautiful figures was uninteresting 
 because aimless. We cannot fix the point of interest in a panorama. 
 In some ways this painting marks an epoch in Sir Frederick 
 Leighton's artistic life, for he has not since painted compositions of 
 more than one or two figures. 
 
 From this work to Mr. Poynter's Atalanta's Race the change was 
 at first very great, but for once was little to the younger painter's 
 disadvantage. Atalantds Race failed as a dramatic presentment of the 
 subject, and was injured by that dulness (I had almost said ugliness) 
 of colouring which affects Mr. Poynter's painting so frequently and 
 so injuriously. Nevertheless this was a picture of considerable power, 
 
 eat his'°rf '™^ °^ '^"'^^^ chasing a drake, who has caught a frog— and has not had time to 
 2 The Gleaners should have been mentioned in 187S ; it was one of Mr. Prinsep's best 
 
 322 
 
and showed long continued industry and study. No one could help 
 seeing that the painter was striving after an exceptionally high ideal 
 of art, and giving up much in the struggle ^ — there was little grace 
 in the picture, no softness or splendour of colouring, and no beauty 
 of drapery, but there was much grappling with difficult problems of 
 muscular action, scientific drawing of arrested, and continuous move- 
 ment, and there was a certain strong individuality about the whole 
 painting, which gave it vigour and reality. This was the third (if we 
 mistake not) of the pictures intended for Lord Wharncliffe's billiard- 
 room, and certainly the best. 
 
 Mr. P. R. Morris' Sailor's Wedding excited a good deal of com- 
 ment, and very justly, for though in a poor style of art, the picture 
 was clever and amusing, and represented a sailor and his bride, 
 followed by their friends and bridesmaids, walking by the sea after the 
 wedding ceremony. The composition was full of wind and spray, the 
 bridegroom holding on his hat with one hand, while he grasped his 
 wife with the other, and every one was being well blown about, and 
 drenched with salt water. It was the kind of painting which, with 
 substitution of French for English people, you might expect to see 
 at the Salon, and in the manner of the misty execution resembled 
 the work of the Beatix Arts rather than that of the Academy. Mr. 
 Morris was two years after this elected an Associate, but he has since 
 made no success at cill equal to that of this picture.* 
 
 Mr. Andrew Gow's Relief of Ley den was of very different merit : 
 one of the few genuine and valuable historical paintings in the 
 Academy, though the historical portion was of the slightest, as the 
 subject was treated mainly from the point of view of character and 
 picturesque incident. The scene represented the quays of Leyden, 
 when the vessels, laden with bread, were entering the harbour. 
 Certainly Mr. Gow's most sympathetic, if not his finest, painting, 
 carefully studied in all accessories, and full of good drawing and 
 right expression. Not a great picture, for it lacked genius, and was 
 too evidently painted without any strong emotion, but a bit of honest 
 craftsmanship well bestowed, shirking no difficulty, and justifying its 
 daring by success. A little picture by Mr. George Clausen, called 
 High Mass in a Fishing Village on the Zuyder Zee^ gave promise of 
 considerable powers in a then little known painter. Mr. Clausen has 
 since become successful, but he has done no better work, and very 
 
 1 Mr. Poynter's work, we need hardly say, is founded upon the style of Michelangelo, 
 and in the endeavour to attain the dignity and force of his great original, the painter sacrifices 
 
 elll clSC> 
 
 2 Their First Communion, a scene at Dieppe, was probably the artist's most popular work 
 next to this. A small replica of this last is, I am told, in the Grosvenor Gallery for the 
 present year (1883), but I have not seen it. . 
 
 3 Dutch people by a Dutch painter, a good reason for the picture's success ; the mterest 
 
 and truth of feeling are manifest. 
 
little as good as this. At present he paints Haverstock Hill, and- 
 Girls' Schools coming down its slopes, and such like subjects. 
 
 In conclusion of this year's exhibition must be mentioned The 
 Old Soldier of Mr. Orchardson. The Old Soldier was a good 
 specimen of the painter's art, homeless, ragged, and lanned throughout. 
 With nearly every defect of subject and method that a painting could 
 have, this composition nevertheless possessed the indefinable charm 
 which lurks somewhere in Mr. Orchardson 's pictures. Perhaps the 
 truth is that of all English artists this is one of the least conventional 
 and the most artistic. Philistinism never seems to have touched him : 
 he paints how he pleases and what he pleases ; and as for the pro- 
 prieties, why, they may all go — elsewhere. I only offer this as a 
 possible explanation of the reason why his ragged, yellow, half-empty 
 canvases have so much attraction. One other merit must be men- 
 tioned, that he has, when he chooses to exert it, a very special faculty 
 of delicate colouring. Some faint harrnonies of pink and yellow, 
 greyish green and buff colour, he manages with a tact and chic which 
 are quite French — not a colourist, but a wonderful master of tint.^ 
 Mr. Macbeth's Lincolnshire Gang was one of the fine pictures of the 
 year ; but I must only mention it, and Mr. Buckman's Tug of War 
 (a clever piece of decoration this last), and pass to the year 1877. 
 
 y Q ^ ^_ The right word for this year's exhibition was 
 1 O / / respectable ; nice sentiment, pretty painting, small 
 ' / ideals, and large prices, would describe nine-tenths of 
 the collection, and the absence of striking pictures was more 
 noticeable. Nearly all the painters of whom I have spoken most 
 in the preceding pages, Leighton, Watts, Poynter, Leslie, Marks, 
 Alma-Tadema, Albert Moore, and Marcus Stone, send unimportant 
 contributions, while M. Tissot, whose pictures are always among the 
 events of the Academy, has deserted the exhibition, and Miss 
 Thompson has wisely opened an exhibition of her pictures by 
 themselves, where soldiers (in uniform) will be admitted free, and 
 the ordinary public at the price of one shilling.^ 
 
 As, with the exception of Mr. Watts' Dove, and Mr. Dicksee's 
 Harmony, there were few pictures of great interest, it will be a good 
 year to speak generally of the landscape art which was prevalent at 
 this time. This may be divided roughly into three classes, as in the 
 followmg list, though of course any such division can only be 
 an approximately correct one, as several of the painters mentioned 
 therem are upon the border-land, and might, with almost equal 
 accuracy, be placed in one class as the other. 
 
 1 Since then Mr. Orchardson has done some magnificent work. 
 Permissible at the time when Miss Thompson's work received much bold advertisement 
 
 324 
 
Academic Landscape {more or less conventional). — Leader, Vicat 
 Cole, The Linnells, C. E. Johnson, Oakes, Redgrave ; and with 
 Animals — Ansdell, Cooper, Davis, Birket Foster, 
 
 Modem English Landscape {chiefly realistic). — Wook, Brett, 
 Alfred Hunt, Henry Moore, Albert Goodwin, Aumonier. 
 
 Scotch Naturalist Landscape. — Peter Graham, MacWhirter, Colin 
 Hunter, Hamilton Macallum, Lockhart. 
 
 I do not name these as necessarily the best of the school, but as 
 fair representatives ; the list is not intended to be exhaustive, nor can 
 it be said to be strictly accurate. Pages would be needed to define 
 the exact sense in which each of these painters is conventional. 
 Academic, or realistic, and the label I have affixed must only be con- 
 sidered as a rough and ready generalisation, useful for purposes of 
 description. None of this first class are really conventional in the 
 sense that Poussin and Claude were so, but their style may be 
 described as a half-naturalistic, half-conventional one, founded upon 
 an inability to resist the influence of modern art, and yet hankering 
 after the restrictions and dignities of the ancient methods. The 
 necessity of formal composition, for instance, which I have alluded 
 to above as characteristic of Claude, is accepted by all these painters, 
 but they are unprepared to pay precisely the price which is necessary, 
 to surrender, that is, the naturalism of modern art, and so they 
 attempt to give something of the outside form of earlier work ; 
 to balance their composition, to arrange their light and shade, etc, 
 in a similar manner, and all the while to twist Nature into accordance 
 with this. The proceeding is a half-hearted one, and the result is 
 necessarily poor. The old landscape painters were not great 
 because of what they rejected, but for what they gave ; they viewed 
 Nature as a whole, in subordination to their traditions of dignity and 
 meaning, and painted her in relation to men of like traditions ; their 
 works were grandiose often, erroneous frequently, and limited 
 always ; but they were never timid and never unmeaning. But a 
 landscape which is constructed somewhat in their manner, and yet is 
 informed with nothing of their spirit, must be always both feeble and 
 contradictory. Feeble, because it was the spirit rather than the form, 
 in which lay the power of these painters, and contradictory because 
 the artist will profess to be ignorant of much that he must know, 
 Mr, Vicat Cole, for instance, paints with infinite dexterity, and com- 
 poses his picture with great care (so do Mr, Oakes and Mr, C, E, 
 Johnson, so did Mr, Redgrave), but his pictures leave us cold and 
 uninterested, for the simple reason that they have neither the 
 dignity of the old school nor the truth of the new. If Nature is to be 
 painted without any relation to man — as it was never painted by the 
 
 325 
 
old masters — then by all means let it be done literally. Let us have 
 our sturdy Brett, denying that relation and meaning are possible. 
 That is the only excuse for such work. Why should a landscape be 
 composed, except for a special purpose ? Why take away truth 
 and simplicity if we are not going to add to meaning ? What 
 is the defence for those compositions of Turner's which we are all 
 agreed to admire, except that they do give the meaning, for which 
 they sacrifice the truth ? And this is really the whole secret of com- 
 position. He is a mere tyro in art who imagines composition to 
 consist only or chiefly in the superior pleasantness of the arrange- 
 ment of certain lines above others ; its chief faculty is to increase 
 the enjoyment by adding to the strength, the meaning, or the clear- 
 ness of the impression, which the painter wishes to convey — and if 
 he has nothing to convey — What then ? 
 
 These remarks apply to all the painters in the first class — they are 
 working on wrong principles — they are doing clever but futile work. 
 The only men living at this day who had done genuine landscapes, 
 based upon the principles of ancient days, were the elder Linnell 
 and Mr. Samuel Palmer. Both men were over seventy at this 
 period, and their art had consequently been formed before the newer 
 school came into existence.^ This is sheer plain truth, unpalatable as 
 it may be to painters and their friends, that what used to be under- 
 stood (and what, according to history, is properly meant) by land- 
 scape art, is absolutely dead in England at the present day. We 
 have men who can paint Nature — in bits. We have not a single 
 man who can paint a great landscape picture. Had Mr. Cecil 
 Lawson lived, he might, perhaps, have done so, had he ever settled 
 his style, and made up his mind exactly what it was that he intended 
 to do ; but when he died (last year) he was still swallowing formulce, 
 as Kingsley has it, and with his death all hope disappeared. Linnell, 
 for nearly half a century the best landscape painter at the Academy,^ 
 died in the same year, and in the year before died Samuel Palmer. 
 
 But if the Academic landscape fails us, what shall we say of the 
 Scotch (so-called) naturalistic school .? Of all pictures of scenery 
 exhibited at the Academy, this has been, for the last ten years, the 
 most favoured by the authorities, and, speaking broadly, if a large 
 landscape has been exhibited on the line during that period, it 
 was in seven cases out of ten by a member of this school. 
 Messrs. Graham and MacWhirter in landscape, and Messrs. Colin 
 Hunter and Hamilton Macallum in sea and river landscape, have 
 had their habitual places of honour, usque ad nauseum, so let us say 
 a few words upon this special development of our national art. 
 
 1 Mr. "Toots" would call it cheek. 
 
 3 Never a member, though he was a candidate for about twenty years, after which he 
 withdrew his name. 
 
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The first and chief peculiarity is size and confidence — the second 
 characteristic triviality and haste. But allied witt these qualities, 
 there are to be found in the works of this school, or at all events of 
 the leading members, merits which partly redeem the work. To 
 understand these we must bear in mind that most of the most earnest 
 painting of Nature in the present day is either wearied, over-subrie, 
 or morbid. The pre-Raphaelites, amongst much good, have done 
 some harm to landscape art, and have this to answer for, that they 
 have caused many painters either to despair of painting landscape at 
 all, or have forced them into missing in their research those broad, 
 simple aspects of Nature, which all know and all can appreciate. 
 With characteristic keenness, the Scotchmen perceived that there was 
 a great opening for those who would relieve the public mind from 
 the oppression of these laboured, over-minute, almost over-faithful, 
 paintings, which needed knowledge to. be understood and feeling to 
 be appreciated, and so they chose their part. Ignorant of the tradi- 
 tions of the great masters on the one hand, and contemptuous alike 
 of the difficulties and the aspirations of the pre-Raphaelites on the 
 other, they covered large spaces of canvas with such simple matters 
 as a mass of mountain mist, or a flash of sunlight on the side of a 
 green hill. Now and then a broken bough, a herd of rough-coated 
 oxen, a flock of sea-birds, some stormy water, or a blasted pine-tree, 
 was introduced to give emphasis to the composition, but the painting 
 was chiefly representative of simple natural truths, and its relation was 
 as distant from great landscape art on the one hand, as from great 
 realistic art on the other. 
 
 I am not denying either the skill or the power of these men. I 
 am denying that their art is worthy to be called great in any way 
 whatever. The truth is entirely of the superficial kind ; succeeding 
 when at all successful, by ignoring all the finer qualities of form and 
 colour, all the subtler eflects of sun and shadow, all the more refined 
 and glorious facts of Nature. 
 
 I must not, however, enlarge upon this topic, and will only de- 
 scribe briefly the third class of landscapists. These are to be spoken 
 of with, at once, reverence and pity. Reverence, because they 
 are painfully, and with little applause and personal success, 
 building up the foundations on which must rest the landscape 
 art of the future; and pity, because that art will never be seen 
 by them but as Moses saw the Promised Land from the top of 
 Pisgah. The microscopic minuteness and brilliancy of Mr. Brett ; 
 the no less wonderful delicacy and iridescent colour of Mr. Alfred 
 Hunt; the gentle simple veracity of Mr. Aumonier; the vivid 
 impressions of the Wyllies ; the delicate imagination and truth to 
 atmospheric effect of Mr. Albert Goodwin,— all of these things are 
 
 327 
 
precious in their way, and all of these are preparing the road for a 
 new landscape art. But as yet these men are working, as it were, 
 at the different parts of a pin, and in ignorance of their ultimate 
 destination. Whatever this may be, theirs is the only vital painting 
 of Nature in England at present — their mission, though humble, is 
 neither fruitless nor insincere. 
 
 It seemed better in a review like the present to speak thus gener- 
 ally of this branch of art before giving especial mention to this or 
 that picture. In all these classes many individual pictures are 
 worthy of admiration, from the Scotch mountains of Mr. Graham, to 
 the fairy voyages of Sinbad by Mr. Goodwin. Mr. Halswelle 
 paints a long stretch of rolling clouds, with a truth of power and a 
 consistency of series hitherto unknown, gives us sky landscapes, as 
 an Irishman might say ; and the grey mystery of a stormy sea is 
 shown us by Mr. Henry Moore for the first time in its full and 
 dreary beauty. Calm waters, in sunshine and in shadow, have been 
 drawn by Mr. Macallum and Mr. Aumonier to a point which is 
 very near to perfection, and so throughout the list.^ A last word 
 must be given to the veteran artist who has brightened twenty years 
 of the Academy with his work, and never sent a single picture 
 which did not breathe of English breezes, and glow with English 
 health. To Mr. Hook belongs the supreme praise of having found 
 beauty and truth in what lay nearest to his hand, and of having 
 succeeded in creating a series of landscapes and seascapes, which 
 are as national in their truth, as they are universal in their loveli- 
 ness. Technically, too, this painter must rank at the head of all 
 our landscape artists, though of late years his work has been some- 
 what slighter and coarser than of old. Such pictures as the Luff 
 Boy and The Trawlers glow with a loveliness of colour, which has 
 scarcely a parallel in English painting, and are at once true in their 
 feeling, worthy in their subject, and dignified in their conception and 
 treatment. 
 
 Amongst the younger artists the chief success of the year was 
 won by one just emerged from studenthood, named Frank Dicksee 
 — Harmony, so he called this scene of a lover and his mistress playing 
 the organ, was remarkable both in a technical and a sentimental sense. 
 The execution was careful, skilful, and patient in a high degree, and 
 the quiet interest of the scene was exactly hit off. It was, to uSe 
 an artist's phrase, a happy picture. Everything had gone right 
 therein. The contrast of feeling especially, between the devotional 
 
 ' No one who reads this description of the landscape painters, will feel more keenly than 
 the present writer its excessive imperfection, and my only excuse must be that I had to 
 choose what I would leave out. 
 
 328 
 
enthusiasm of the girl, and the very human passion of her lover, was 
 rendered with great distinctness, if not great subtlety, and the 
 success of the whole picture was as genuine as it was undoubted. 
 Since^ then Mr. Dicksee has gone on steadily improving in his 
 technique, till he may now be considered one of our most skilful 
 painters.! A great artist he is not at present, despite what his 
 admirers tell him, for his compositions are too cold, too mechanical 
 in their perfection ; but his skill of hand is really marvellous, and 
 should he ever discover that there is a third organ in a painter's 
 composition besides hand and brain, he may do very great things. 
 At present he only does v&xy praiseworthy ones.^ 
 
 The Dove returning to the Ark, by Mr. Watts, formed perhaps 
 the strongest possible contrast to the Harmony just mentioned. 
 And yet this was a harmony too, of rainy sky and ruffled plumage, 
 and troubled water. The least describable, and the most poetical 
 picture ever hung upon the Academy walls. It was little appreci- 
 ated at the time, but a few people cared for it very much, even then, 
 and since it has been exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, the 
 opinion of the few has become that of the general public. 
 
 Contrast again with these faint harmonies of blue and grey the 
 tour de force of Mr. Millais, called The Yeoman of the Guard, in 
 which a scarlet uniform blazed into insignificance the poor mortal 
 whose healthy, vacuous face loomed above its splendour. Or con- 
 trast, with Mr. Watts' sad -tempered, thoughtful reverence, and 
 hinted poetry, the matter-of-fact dextei'ity and prose with which Mr. 
 Long painted his Egyptian Feast, and chose perhaps the most 
 significant of all ancient customs, as a medium for showing off his 
 acquaintance with the forms of Egyptian furniture. Or for a con- 
 trast of a different kind, think of the romantic historical painting of 
 Sir John Gilbert, and notice how his dressed-up, over-accentuated 
 picture of Cardinal Wolsey at Leicester, almost vulgarised its really 
 patriotic subject, and reduced the interest of the spectator to a mere 
 question of champing steeds, flashing armour, and smoky torchlight. 
 
 The succession of Sir Frederick Leighton to the post left absent 
 by the death of Sir Francis Grant was the great event of this year's 
 Academy. It inaugurated a new era of change, and an advance 
 to a more liberal policy. It foreshadowed a greater tolerance for 
 Continental forms of art, and, in fact, as liberal a policy as could 
 be maintained under the circumstances. All of this has been fulfilled, 
 and the Academy is in many respects, notably in its general interest, 
 greatly improved. If English painting is not what it once was, or 
 
 1 He was elected to the Academy rather more than a year ago. 
 
 * This of course was written nearly six years ago. Since then Mr. Dicksee has shown 
 conclusively that he will only do in the future the work which has rendered him popular 
 in the past. His painting grows more Philistine, more respectable, and less interesting 
 yearly. — 1892. 
 
 2 U 329 
 
now might be, there is more of good foreign work to be seen at 
 Burlington House, and traces of that influence can be seen in the 
 painting of many of our artists. Sir Francis Grant was a sportsman 
 and a kindly-hearted gentleman, rather than an artist ; Sir Frederick 
 Leighton is a man of rare artistic talent, who has seen much of 
 many forms of art, and acquired a tolerance for all. Artistically 
 he is something like Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch, and we can fancy 
 him saying to a young student, Ah, Titian now ; I went in a good 
 deal for him at one time, and so on throughout the list. But he 
 has a keen eye for merit of any kind, he is no less kind-hearted 
 than his prototype, and with far more judgment has helped many 
 a young artist who would otherwise have had but a bad time, and 
 he makes, as people are almost tired of saying, an ideal President. 
 Possibly a man whose genius was greater, and whose education had 
 been less widely gathered, might have done something towards 
 bringing into some accordance the different aims and practices of 
 English artists at the present time, but short of this. Sir Frederick 
 Leighton has done everything. And the very last election to the 
 Academic ranks, that of Messrs. Macbeth and Gregory,^ was the 
 most tolerant and liberal one which had ever taken place. 
 
 The compositions which attracted most attention this year were 
 the portraits of a Society -beauty (Mrs. Langtry), and the series 
 of pictures by Mr. Frith, R.A., entitled The Road to Ruin. The 
 former we need not criticise further than to say that they were three 
 in number, of which Mr. Millais' was a fine graceful picture and 
 a good likeness, Mr. Poynter's a very elaiborate and very dull piece 
 of good painting, and Mr. Weigall's indifferent as a likeness, and 
 poor as a work of art. 
 
 But the series of The Road to Ruin demands attention as a 
 good type of a species of art which has been for the last thirty 
 or forty years very popular in England. These compositions pro- 
 fessed to represent the career of a modern spendthrift, and were 
 perhaps intended to rival the celebrated series of Hogarth. I have 
 said nothing hitherto of Mr. Frith's art, for the same reason for 
 which I have omitted (and shall omit) the names and works of many 
 another Academician of the same school.^ Whatever their merits 
 may be, and there is much careful thought and occasional good 
 painting bestowed upon them, their shortcomings are too evident 
 to need description, or to warrant interest. It seems inconceivable 
 to many people that some of these painters should be deemed 
 worthy of Academic honours, and I prefer to omit them altogether 
 
 1 I have said nothing of Mr. Gregory's work in this paper, chiefly because none of his 
 best paintings have appeared at the Academy. 
 
 ^ Again I do not mention the names for obvious reasons, but the diligent art-student will 
 be at no loss to supply the omission ; it may be gathered from this paper, by what. I think 
 the late Mr. Mill called The Method of Residues. H F . y "i4 ^ imns, 
 
from these notes, rather than spend time and patience in explaining 
 defects which should be evident to every one who cares for art. 
 If they give pleasure to the public, and it must be supposed that 
 in some inscrutable way they must do so, or their pictures would 
 not continue to be painted, so much the better for those artists ; 
 and the sooner a critic or a painter arises to tell us what single 
 great artistic merit is to be found in such work, the better for every 
 one. But when, speaking generally, we see year after year a mass 
 of pictures exhibited, which possess neither beauty of form, beauty 
 of colour, nor beauty of meaning, when we find the subject of these 
 pictures devoted to the most trivial of domestic incidents, or the most 
 used-up specimens of domestic fiction, we are, I think, justified in 
 assuming that,, until some explanation be given us of their merit, 
 we may pass them by in silence. 
 
 Mr. Frith, however, is a typical instance of a painter who has 
 been immensely popular, and whose work must have some great 
 attraction. The Road to Ruin shows us what that attraction is : 
 it is the attraction of subject, carefully chosen and clearly expressed. 
 Now to expression of a certain kind artistic capacity is only a 
 hindrance. Advertisements, the trader will tell you, may be too 
 artistic. And in some way Mr. Frith 's pictures may be considered 
 as moral or social advertisements. They are, so to speak, printed 
 in big type, for those who run to read, and those who run (round 
 picture galleries) do read them easily. They occupy nearly the 
 same relation to serious figure - painting, that the Scotch realists 
 do to landscape art, i.e. that of broad elementary statements of 
 facts. It would be wrong to say there is no art in them. There 
 is great art in saying anything so clearly that the biggest fool in 
 the world can understand it. But noX. fine art, that's another matter. 
 And it is this which Mr. Frith has reduced to a science. If he 
 paints the Derby Day it is a concentrated essence of everything 
 which is connected in the popular mind with Epsom and racing. 
 If he paints a Railway Station it is the typical railway station. 
 Every dot is put upon every " i " ; no imagination is necessary to 
 complete the picture. Given this, given also great dexterity in 
 the marshalling of his facts and figures, and an utter absence of 
 any predilection for one kind of incident over another, and the 
 reason for his popularity is evident at once. Add to this the fact 
 that the painter never offends by any undue lack of conventionality, 
 but gratifies in all his work that cautious avoidance of disagreeable 
 truth, and love of observance and propriety, which is characteristic of 
 the middle-class Englishman. This was the secret of the success of 
 The Road to Ruin, round which an excited mob struggled day after 
 day, under the guardianship of two friendly policemen. A young 
 gentleman^ playing cards in his rooms in college — A young gentleman 
 
 ^ Singularly unlike what undergraduates used to be in my time. 
 
in a white greatcoat, betting at Ascot — A young gentleman being 
 arrested for debt — A young gentleman writing for the papers while 
 his wife nurses the baby — and, finally, A young gentleman blowing out 
 his brains in a garret, — such were the incidents of The Road to Ruin. 
 All honour to Mr. Frith for the clearness with which he preached 
 this little sermon. The advertisement was as clear as one of the 
 placards of the Salvation Army; but the place for such homilies 
 is not on the walls of the Academy. All these fashionable frock- 
 coats and gloves and white ties, and polished boots and dressing- 
 gowns ; all these details of rosewood furniture, green table-cloths, 
 and cut-glass decanters ; all this stage business of life, in spasms 
 of gambling, scribbling, and suicide — this is not fine art, not even 
 nature. It is simply cheap shoddy, manufactured sentiment — 
 sentiment of the scene -shifter and the costumier — and the sooner 
 it is estimated at its proper value the better. 
 
 It is not as if the evil stopped at the waste of power of the clever 
 man who gives us this rubbish, it affects every one whom his ability 
 forces to take an interest in such work ; all appreciation of true art 
 becomes impossible to folks who are accustomed to futilities. The 
 painting bears as much relation to art, as the abuse of a Society 
 paper does to literature, and is about as valuable, and has, moreover, 
 this in common, that those who become accustomed to its personalities 
 care little for any other species of information. I have mentioned 
 Mr. Frith's name in connection with- it, and omitted others, because 
 he is a man of such great ability that it renders the mistake of his 
 painting the more pitiable.^ Had he turned his strong powers of 
 delineating fact to painting the real, instead of the sham, life which 
 he saw round him ; he might perhaps have been another and a more 
 genial Hogarth, but, as it is, he has never descended below the 
 superficial aspects of his facts, and has not given us a single picture 
 in which the sentiment, the passion, or the feeling, has not been 
 purely conventional. 
 
 Mr. Eyre Crowe was elected an Associate in this year, and sent a 
 fair specimen of his precise, hard, and unpleasant-coloured painting. 
 This was, to the public, one of the inscrutable elections in which the 
 Academy used so frequently to indulge, for whatever may be thought 
 of Mr. Crowe's merits by his admirers, they have certainly never 
 entitled him to Academic rank. 
 
 Mr. Armitage sent a very important work to this exhibition : 
 a composition of many figures, entitled Serf Emancipation. It 
 represented a Saxon noble giving freedom to his slaves on his death- 
 bed. It was as good an example of this painter's work as could be 
 
 1 And besides that, because he is so popular that there is little fear of my words making 
 any difference to his reputation. I believe this to be true, but it is like everything I wrote 
 at this period, too strongly expressed— a very bad habit writing for the press almost invariably 
 produces. — 1892. 
 
A SUMMER SHOWER 
 
 C. E. PERI_(j1NI 
 
wished, dignified and carefully composed, accurate though very harsh 
 and unlovely in its drawing, and aiming more at the qualities of 
 fresco than oil painting. Notable as an attempt at a higher ideal 
 than ordinary, it could net justly be said to be successful. It was 
 like a Scotch sermon, too long, too ponderous, and too dogmatic. 
 
 Very little else in this exhibition of more than average merit. A 
 pleasant society picture of Mr. Perugini of a woman having her hair 
 powdered, and an equally pleasant bit of Nature by Aumonier, of 
 Easton Broad, Suffolk. Large landscapes of inferior interest and 
 equal skill of those of former years, by Messrs. Brett and Millais, 
 and a clever bit of dramatic painting by Mr. Pettie, of a half-naked 
 Highlander, Hunted Down. This was a picture as unpleasant as it 
 was powerful. A magnificent study of Palm Trees and Bananas, 
 by Mr. E. W. Cooke, and a fine unfinished picture by Mr. J. G. 
 Lewis, R.A.1 
 
 Two interesting pictures by Mr. Hodson, one humorous, the other 
 poetical ; a pretty group of children by Mr. Leslie, and four of Mr. 
 Tadema's most successful small pictures, entitled The Seasons. Quite 
 admirable these last, accepting the artist's exclusively sensuous point 
 of view. Mr. Long's Egyptian Feast has already been incidentally 
 noticed, and with a glance of pleasure at Mr. Watts' lovely portrait 
 of a lovely woman, Miss Dorothy Tennant, I must pass to the 
 exhibition of 1879.^ 
 
 Q This was a collection in which the lesser-known men 
 
 \Q/ \J bore the chief part — a strong average exhibition, very 
 / j^ disappointing in the main features, or what should 
 have been the main features. Sir Frederick Leighton's Elijah was 
 large, ambitious, and unsatisfactory, unpleasing in the attitude of the 
 prophet, and uninteresting in the angel. Clever only as an anatomical 
 study of a difficult posture. Mr. Poynter's Nausicaa was even less 
 satisfactory ; poor in colour and composition, and lacking in all the 
 delicate grace which the story required. Mr. Fildes' Return of the 
 Penitent was important in size, but missed the dramatic point ; one 
 had to look for the penitent, who was huddled up in a corner of the 
 picture, the main part of which was occupied by a conventional group 
 of labourers and villagers — a composition, not a picture. Mr. Pettie 's 
 Death Warrant, though impressive and powerful, scarcely showed 
 sufficient study of character, or refinement of work, to justify the 
 scale adopted ; it was conventionally dramatic, and grew less attrac- 
 tive upon each successive examination. Mr. Goodall's companion 
 
 > The last picture on which Mr. Lewis worked. 
 
 2 I have omitted the 1878 exhibition, unintentionally in the first place, and I do not supply 
 the omission, since I wish these notes to represent only what was written in the essay here 
 reproduced. 
 
 333 
 
pictures of Hagar and Ishmael, Sarah and Isaac, were comparatively 
 unimportant; and might, perhaps, not be unfairly described as 
 vGUxgions pot-boilers. They had the simplicity of Mr. Goodall's best 
 work, but neither the insight nor the dignity. Mr. Sant's Adversity 
 showed him at his best, but this Academician is not one of our great 
 painters ; he is the Frith of portraiture. 
 
 The portraits were very good, however. The Gladstone of Sir John 
 Millais, strong, serious, and life-like, equally unaffected in pose and 
 painting; and the Samuel Cousins, R.A., by Mr. Frank Holl, 
 sufficiently true and good to make his reputation in this line. This 
 was Mr. HoU's first great success as a portrait painter; and since 
 then he has never lacked sitters, and in fact now does little 
 work of other kinds.^ 
 
 And some of the younger men did very good work. Sir John 
 Macallum's Water Frolic, with its sunny sea and larking swimmers, 
 was bright and fresh as Nature itself; Mr. Ernest Parton's Waning 
 of the Year, a wonderful specimen of elaborate study of Nature, though 
 the chief charm of the work was the extreme delicacy of its har- 
 monious grey and green. Mr. Alfred Parsons' Ending of Summer, 
 and Mr. George Reid's Norham, and Mr. Aumonier's Norfolk 
 Broad, and Mr. Hennessy's Aftermath, and Ernest Waterlow's 
 Midsummer Day, and Mr. James Macbeth's Scotch Mountains, were 
 all good careful landscapes, and marked by a suggestion of poetry and 
 thought. Their Only Harvest, by Mr. Colin Hunter, almost recon- 
 ciled us to the ruggedness of the painting by the force with which the 
 meaning was driven home. No work in the whole of the Academy 
 told the story so clearly as this picture of the fishermen gathering 
 seaweed from the waves on a stormy evening. The danger and 
 dreariness of the sea were perhaps never more powerfully expressed. 
 Good, too, in this manner, was the pathetic picture of The Empty 
 Saddle, by Mr. S. E. Waller — a servant bringing home his master's 
 horse, and Mr. F. A. Bridgman's Royal Pastime in Nineveh showed 
 an amount of thought, and care in details, which would not have 
 disgraced Mr. Tadema himself. Mr. Blair Leighton's Till Death 
 do us Part, was an idyll of society life, told with an incisive force 
 which Mr. Frith must have envied — for it vanquished him on his 
 own ground ; the work, moreover, was relieved from commonplaceness 
 by the extreme solidity and sharpness of the painting, and by an 
 amount of expression rare in this style of picture. Mr. C. Green, 
 most skilful and original of illustrators, sent A Consultation, which 
 
 ' A pity, but who can blame an artist for being tempted by the prices paid just now for 
 portraits ! In fact, all prices now are preposterous for people with a fashionable reputation. 
 While this was passing through the press, Mr. Briton Riviere's Sympathy, a portrait of a 
 little giri sitting upon the stairs with a white dog by her side, has been sold at Christie's for 
 two thousand five hundred guineas. This picture was neither large nor exceptionally well 
 painted, nor remarkable in any way whatever. 
 
 334 
 
is probably the best work he ever did ; a pity that its ability should 
 be so fruitless, and Mr. Barnard,^ whose ability equals Mr. Green's, 
 but is less subtle and, perhaps, less refined in its humour, contributed 
 At the Pantomime, a contrast between the pleasure of a child at her 
 first play, and the weariness of an old man at his last. Mr. H. M. 
 Paget, but lately an Academy student, sent an illustration to Enid, 
 which showed power and study, and Mr. Lockhart's Gil Bias was 
 vividly conceived and expressed. These, with the Bailiff's 
 Daughter of Mr. Brewtnall,^ were all interesting, and in one way or 
 another good work, and made up in some measure for the deficiencies 
 of better-known artists. But the exhibition was on the whole dreary 
 and uninteresting, and never had the want of high aim amongst the 
 Academicians been more painfully evident. As one passed from 
 room to room only to encounter the same worn-out themes, treated 
 in the same conventional manner, the heart and brain grew weary 
 as the feet, for, speaking generally, there was to be found here in the 
 majority of the work, neither thought nor beauty. 
 
 Three artists aimed, however, at this last, Messrs. Long, Brett, 
 and Goodwin, and their work deserves attention. Mr. Long in his 
 Esther and Vashti, two large companion pictures, showed us two 
 types of Eastern beauty, richly adorned, and surrounded with all 
 appropriate accessories. Attractive and powerfully painted as these 
 were, they lacked depth of feeling, and real penetration into their 
 subjects, and presented only a superficial book-of-beauty sort of love- 
 liness, something akin to those large-eyed young ladies whom Miss 
 Florence Claxton draws for the advertisements of How small these 
 gloves mxike ones hands look ! or the something-or-other corset. Mr. 
 Brett sought his realistic beauty of sun and sea successfully in 
 his Stronghold of the Saison, but the scene was almost oppressively 
 still and hot, and lacked the freshness with which this artist 
 usually invested his landscapes. 
 
 Mr. Albert Goodwin had two Voyages of Sinbad, which were the 
 only works in the Academy deserving the epithet of imaginative. 
 Delicate compositions these, in . which reality and unreality were 
 mingled so gently and so inextricably, that the mind accepted them 
 as frankly as the incongruities of a dream. I remember no touch of 
 nature in modern art more beautifully introduced, than the painting 
 of the pools of sea-water in one of these pictures. The wrecked 
 ship lay stranded upon one side of the shore, and Sinbad was 
 going hurriedly up the beach towards the cliffs ; but, in the fore- 
 ground near the wreck, a great case of oranges had been burst open 
 
 "• Mr. Barnard's best picture, however, should have been noticed previously, in 1877. A 
 Saturday Night in the East End of London. A work which, although almost repulsive 
 in its details, realised very powerfully a scene which is perhaps as significant a one as any 
 in English life. 
 
 ' Hung where it could hardly be seen. 
 
 335 
 
by the force of the waves, and the golden fruit was floating in the 
 clear pools amongst the rocks, with little fishes nibbling at it eagerly.^ 
 On the other side of the moon, were the little atmospheric gems of 
 Mr. Cecil Lawson ; in which imagination showed clearly, but con- 
 fusedly. The work surrendered too much to mystery, and all its 
 meaning was only shadowed forth. One word must be given to 
 the industrious, enthusiastic, but, alas ! futile work, of Mr. Rooke, an 
 artist who is chiefly known as an' admirer of " Mr. Burne-Jones." 
 At this time he painted habitually a series of subjects in the same 
 frame, generally illustrative of the Old Testament. This year it 
 was Ahab's Coveting which formed his subject-matter. This work 
 was notable only for its attempt at making the qualities of design 
 and meaning into a beautiful whole. Neither a great painter nor a 
 good draughtsman, Mr. Rooke nevertheless might read a lesson to 
 most of those who exhibit at the Academy, in the height of his 
 aim, the patience of his endeavour, and in the almost sublime per- 
 sistency with which he follows the best art with which he is 
 acquainted, and he has at all events grasped two truths, that a picture 
 should be beautiful, and should mean something.^ 
 
 -^ OG ^^ This year there were three pictures, two of them 
 
 X O O O ^y Academicians, which were deservedly the chief 
 
 favourites, and were upon the whole the best works 
 
 of their respective artists — these were The Visit to ^sculapius, by 
 
 Mr. Poynter ; On Board the Bellerophon, by Mr. Orchardson ; and 
 
 Britannia's Realm, by Mr. Brett. 
 
 The Visit to ^Esculapius was an oil-painting enlarged from a 
 small water-colour, which had been in the Dudley Gallery some 
 years previously.^ In many ways this was an especially fine work, 
 its chief defect being that inability to realise any type of female 
 loveliness which Mr. Poynter has always shown. This Diana would 
 have attracted no Endymion, nor, indeed, was she more attractive 
 than the nymphs who accompanied her. But the pose of each figure 
 was excellent ; the background was constructed with great care and 
 success; the painting good throughout, and the colour, though a 
 little lifeless and dull, by no means unpleasant. A seriously-intended, 
 scholarly picture, produced with labour and skill, and thoroughly 
 deserving of the favour met with. 
 
 » I cannot resist stating here, that this picture of Mr. Goodwin's and its companion have 
 since been purchased for the Gallery of his native town, Maidstone. A rare instance of 
 honouring a prophet in his own country— before death ! 
 
 n ^'■~?°??'^'^ best picture was exhibited the previous year, if I remember right, and was 
 called The Story of Ruth. It was purchased by the Academy with the Chantrey funds 
 
 It IS strange how critics and the public are affected by increased size and a change from 
 water-colours to oils. The earlier and smaller edition of this picture was very superior to the 
 oil-painting, but no one would see at the time that it was a work of really exquisite qualitv 
 and I remember papers, which shall be nameless, that did not even mention it. 
 
Mr. Orchardson's work has been already criticised, and I have 
 only space here to say of his Napoleon on the Bellerophon that it 
 showed him at his very best. Always dramatic and powerful, in a 
 more or less irresponsible fashion, the painter here manifested a 
 restraint and a concentration which even his admirers could scarcely 
 have expected. The situation was treated gravely and without 
 exaggeration, and the composition was of a simple, natural kind, free 
 from apparent artifice, and yet thoroughly good. 
 
 Mr. Brett's Britannia s Realm was a curious companion in patriotism 
 ^-or Jingoism — to Mr. Orchardson's Napoleon. It represented a 
 sunny sea, and in the distance many ships dotted here and there making 
 up. channel, with what little breeze they could discover. Though not 
 perhaps better than the painter's other works, this wide stretch of 
 blue water was certainly more attractive to English eyes — there was 
 a delicate compliment in the title, to each of those who looked at the 
 broad expanse, and felt that in some sort it belonged to him. Any- 
 way the popularity of the picture was undoubted ; the hint of meaning 
 was just what Mr. Brett's work had always lacked to render it 
 irresistible, and no one was surprised when Britannia's Realm was 
 bought by the Academy ^ (together with the two other pictures of this 
 year that I have mentioned), and when shortly afterwards Mr, Brett 
 was elected an Associate. As he had been one of the chief attrac- 
 tions of the Academy for nearly ten years, it was perhaps about time 
 to recognise his merit. 
 
 In this year public notice began to be attracted to the Venetian 
 street scenes of Mr. Henry Woods, full of what I must consider to be 
 a degraded cleverness, and founded upon the manner of a still more 
 clever Venetian painter called Van Haanen.^ It would not be worth 
 while to mention these were it not that Mr. Woods, to the surprise of 
 every one, save the few who had noticed that his works were always 
 hung on the line, has been lately elected an Associate of the Academy. 
 His style of work is like that of dozens of foreign painters, but is 
 tolerably rare in England. It is painted from dark to light, with black 
 shadows and a deficiency of chiaroscuro. The painting possesses 
 great manual dexterity of a coarse kind, and is probably as sharply 
 opposed to all the methods of great Italian painting as any work could 
 be. In subject it is exclusively vulgar, in the sense of invariably 
 selecting incidents of little meaning and no elevation, a dirty Italian 
 surrounded by bric-a-brac, a crowd of tourists and print-sellers on the 
 Rialto, the interior of some Venetian garret or workshop — such are 
 the themes on which Mr. Woods expends such talent as he possesses. 
 
 1 With the funds supplied by the Chantrey bequest. .. , , . ^,. , ,,■ 
 
 ' Van Haanen is indeed a man of genius, though he does httle that is worthy ot Jus 
 
 powers. The study of a nude model in this year's Grosvenor Gallery is magnificent from a 
 
 technical point of view, and utterly degraded from any other. 
 2 X 337 
 
A bad art, industriously and cleverly exercised, and thoroughly unfit 
 to be recognised by an English academy as worthy of reward. 
 
 There were two beautiful landscapes in this gallery, if landscape 
 be the right word to apply to a seaside cliff and the Beachdd Margent 
 of the Shore. These were Mr. Alfred Hunt's picture of Whitby 
 Churchyard, called Unto this Last, and Mr, Henry Moore's coast- 
 scene, entiried as in the above quotation. The former represented 
 the summit of a sandstone cliff, to the very edge of which came the 
 scattered tombstones, from the midst of which rose darkly the tower 
 of the old church. By the side of and beneath the cliff, showed the 
 roofs of the fishermen's dwellings, and on the other side of the 
 harbour glimmered here and there the lights of the New town. Over 
 water, churchyard, and dwelling, a soft shadow of twilight was settling 
 slowly, but far above all these the sky was purple and gold, as with 
 a promise, or a hope. In all ways this was a beautiful picture, 
 impressive without being morbid, and sad without being dreary. It 
 would be difficult to explain to any one who did not know Whitby as 
 a painter knows it, how essentially accurate and true this work was to 
 the character as well as to the details of the scene. The magnificent 
 painting of the sky, and the subtlety of colouring in the twilit town 
 and churchyard, every one could see for himself, but the truth of such 
 points as the character of the church and its scattered gravestones, of 
 the manner in which the old houses lift themselves at evening against 
 the side of the cliff, and of the aspect at sunset of the new town — all 
 these little things peculiar to the scene can hardly be appreciated 
 by a stranger. Perhaps the hardest thing to explain in the picture 
 was the difference from a simple sketch of Whitby at evening, for it 
 was far more than that, being penetrated through and through with 
 the feeling hinted at in the title, a complex feeling, best perhaps to be 
 described by the lines of two poets of different ages and nationalities, 
 Gray and Longfellow : — 
 
 " Each in his narrow cell for ever laid. 
 The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep " ; 
 and 
 
 " It crossed the churchyard with a sigh, 
 And said ' Not yet ! in quiet lie.' " 
 
 Mr. Henry' Moore's picture was a very different kind, and was 
 perhaps the finer of the two, though possessing little of Mr. Hunt's 
 tender feeling. The effect is a fleeting one of great pictorial 
 difficulty, given with perfect truth. The scene is a beach from which 
 a rough sea has just ebbed, the waves beyond, and above a sky of 
 heavy cumulus clouds, lurid with a flash of stormy sunlight. In the 
 distance, close to the margin of the water, are a cart and horse, and 
 a man presumably gathering seaweed or wreckage, and perhaps the 
 subtlest piece of observation shown in the picture is the manner in 
 
 338 
 
which Mr. Moore has painted these objects, quite firmly and distinctly, 
 and has yet managed to give them that air of being swallowed up in 
 the vast expanse of sky and sea by which they are surrounded. 
 That inexplicable sense of majesty and immensity, which most of us 
 have at some time or another felt in the presence of some of the 
 wilder effects of Nature, has been caught fas.t hold of by Mr. Moore 
 in this work, where Nature seems big, and man small, yet not some- 
 how quite insignificant, if only because he can stand there with his 
 horse and cart carrying out his daily work in face of all that blind 
 power of sea and sky. In every sense of the word, this was a fine 
 picture, and one of which an English painter might well be proud.' 
 
 For the other extreme of merit, which received (in its painter) the 
 Academic recognition always denied to Mr. H. Moore, it is instructive 
 to think of Mr. MacWhirter's Lord of the Glen, an enormous (con- 
 sidering the subject) picture of a single Scotch fir on a ledge of rock ; 
 or of the same painter's still more important composition of two bee- 
 hives and a hay-rake. ** The contrast is advisable and instructive, as 
 Mr. MacWhirter was at this time the only pure landscape painter 
 who had received Associate rank for some years, and it was a very 
 curious question for what qualities of execution or feeling he was 
 selected. As far as I am aware, his chief qualification for election, 
 was his capacity for painting a birch tree, a subject on which he had 
 several times displayed his ability at the Academy. In any case, a 
 study of the actual brushwork on his pictures may be recommended 
 to dispirited students, as showing them how low is the standard of 
 merit which the Academy fixes for its members. 
 
 Q Q I must say but a very few general words as to the 
 
 J Q Q J exhibition of this last year. Mr. Cecil Lawson's 
 Pool was the most impressive and significant, if not 
 the best landscape. The dark trees overhung the still, unhealthy- 
 looking water, with an apparently sinister meanmg, even the light on 
 the landscape beyond looked wan and ghostly. A fine picture from 
 its own point of view ; abandoning beauty of colour and definition of 
 form for a purpose, and gaining its end sternly. Those who 
 admired the modern French School, found a good example of les 
 
 valeurs in Mr. Fantin's portrait of Mdlle. L R. , a dark 
 
 woman in a black dress against a grey background. And Signor 
 Gaetano Chierici's Frightful State of Things showed a power of 
 
 » 5ome part of the description of these two pictures appeared in an article written at the 
 time. I have repeated it here, because I believe that, though perhaps a httle over-enthusi- 
 astic, the words are essentially true, and more accurate to detail than I could be after the 
 
 *^^I forgS die name of this work, but it was probably The Three Inseparables, or Golden 
 Summer, or some other such frequent title. 
 
 339 
 
elaborating the plumage of various fowls, and the squalid details of 
 a cottage interior, such as Gransommeer himself might have envied. 
 The picture represented a child alarmed by the intrusion of various 
 turkeys, hens, ducks, etc., all intent on seizing the piece of bread 
 and butter he had been given to eat. It was wonderfully painted — 
 the animals not too well drawn, but full of expression, and the child's 
 face, in its terror and disgust, beyond praise. His very toes were 
 curling up with anger and fear, Mr. Leader's February fill Dyke 
 was one of the wet-road, evening-light landscapes, by which he 
 is so well known, and is only noticeable here because Mr. Leader 
 has since been elected an Associate. Mr. Long's Diana or Christ 
 — his least meritorious picture — utterly failing to tell its story, or to 
 realise the scene intended. 
 
 Mr. Millais' Cinderella, as pretty a child model as one could wish to 
 see, the same as he has painted several times before and since.^ Mr. 
 Tadema's Sappho showed his imitative dexterity at its highest point, 
 but told no story — had, in fact, none to tell. It might as well have 
 been called playing at marbles. Mr. Poynter's Helen, notable for 
 some very good painting of the gold necklace ; but as for the Helen, 
 the remark made upon his last picture applies equally here. 
 
 The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson, of Mr. John Collier, was one 
 of the pictures purchased this year by the Academy with the 
 Chantrey bequest funds, a large, somewhat dismal composition repre- 
 senting the explorer after his crew had set him adrift, with his young 
 son, in an open boat. It was a dull but meritorious picture, carefully 
 drawn and painted, and telling the facts of its story unmistakably, ii 
 not reasonably ; the work of a patient, conscientious painter failing 
 to touch the chord of pathos which would have been the only 
 excuse for the choice of such a subject. With this should, perhaps, 
 be placed Mr. Gow's large Montrose at Kilsyth, which, according tb 
 Mr. Gow's usual custom, depicted a stirring semi-historical scene, but 
 did so coldly, and with a thoroughly Scotch lack of enthusiasm. 
 Carlyles Chelsea, by Mr. Frederic Brown, I must give a word of 
 praise to, despite its unimportance, from my knowledge of its truth 
 to the locality. Mr. Herkomer's Missing was certainly the pathetic 
 picture of the year — at all events in subject and importance. It was 
 a very large composition of life-size figures, showing the sad crowd 
 which gathered round the posters placed upon the dockyard gates 
 at Portsmouth, respecting the loss of the Atalanta. A finely con- 
 ceived picture, insufificiendy thought and worked out, but good and 
 true in intention, and instinct with a great deal of rugged power. 
 
 It seemed to me that Mr. Arthur Stock's At Last was even more 
 truly pathetic than this, though it was of a simple, somewhat 
 
 } One of the daughters of the late Mr. Buckstone, the comedian. 
 
hackneyed subject: the return of a bronzed soldier to his aged 
 mother's home. Its difference from other works of the same class 
 lay chiefly in the intensity of the expressions in the two faces, and 
 the dramatic power with which they were contrasted. Mr. Stock had 
 given the soldier a look of reckless, careless pleasure, of genuine, 
 but superficial gladness, at seeing the old lady again ; but he had 
 given to the mother's face only patience, a patience which told of 
 many days of past longing for her boy, of hope deferred, which had 
 at last brought about almost the loss of feeling. Not a great picture 
 artistically, but a very true, and, in one sense of the word, a 
 beautiful one. 
 
 To be compared with it on this latter score of truth, was the 
 composition of The Queen's Shilling; by Mr. P. R. Morris ; the last- 
 mentioned artist, though possessed of equal, if not superior artistic 
 feeling to Mr. Stock, has failed entirely, because, as in Mr. Fildes' 
 Penitent, he forgot the meaning of his work in the execution. He 
 painted a picture, and incidentally illustrated a subject, and so, from 
 all but a strictly technical point of view, the work was a failure. 
 Mr. Walter Shaw's two studies of waves, Atlantic Rollers and A 
 Comber, were worthy of attention and praise from their conscientious- 
 ness, but one had only to turn from them to the work of Mr. H. 
 Moore and Mr. Hook, to see the difference between painting waves, 
 and painting and loving the sea. The mystery and the gladness of 
 these latter artists' work has no correspondence in Mr. Shaw's 
 painting, elaborate and skilful as the latter is ; it knows almost 
 too much, and feels _/ar too little. 
 
 I should like to have contrasted the studious elaborate art of Sir 
 James Linton with the sincerity of aim, multiplicity of detail, and 
 the broader, more superficial, and more dramatic manner of Mr. 
 Seymour Lucas, but it is quite time to bring these already over- 
 long notes to a close, and only mention those artists as doing good 
 work, and with them Messrs. Crofts and Caton Woodville, the battle 
 painters, the latter of whom was to do in the following year the 
 best English battle - picture I know — that of the Retreat from 
 Maiwand. 
 
 To sum up the results of these scattered notes on the exhibitions 
 of the Royal Academy from 1872 to this date (1881) a few points 
 may be noticed. 
 
 The old traditions of the Academy, gathered mainly from the 
 Dutch and Flemish schools, and consolidated by the practice and 
 influence of such men as Mulready, the elder Leslie, and \yilkie, 
 have passed away, and at the present time every one is painting in 
 his own wild way. The time is not one of decline, but of change. 
 Foreign art is powerfully affecting English; its merits, eccen- 
 tricities, and failings are all visible. English painting is no longer 
 
 341 
 
so dull nor so good as of old, but more lively and less settled. 
 Landscape is practically dead, and Scotch impressionism, pre- 
 Raphaelite minuteness, and French Values divide its field between 
 them. The group of idyllic artists, who promised at the be- 
 ginning of this decade to do such great things, are dead ere 
 they have properly founded their work or created a school, and no 
 one has taken their place. We have no equivalent at the present 
 moment for such art as that of Sir Edwin Landseer in animal 
 painting, Lewis in Eastern life, and Linnell and Palmer in land- 
 scape, all of whom were painting ten years ago. We have no 
 Walker, no Mason, no Rossetti. On the other hand, never was 
 portrait painting so strong, or so little conventional. And never 
 were there three living artists who could show a prouder record 
 of laborious earnest work than can be shown by Sir Frederick 
 Leighton, Mr. Watts, and Mr. Poynter. I have left out of all 
 account those artists whom the insolence, the eclecticism, or the 
 indifference of the Academy has excluded from its exhibitions, 
 but I should be giving a wrong impression of my estimate of 
 English art, if I did not add my conviction that the painting of the 
 so-called pre-Raphaelites, Mr. Madox Brown, Mr. Rossetti, Mr. 
 Burne-Jones, and Mr. Holman Hunt, has been the most vital develop- 
 ment of art in England during the last twenty years, and that it is 
 to their influence that English painting is mainly indebted for the 
 increased earnestness and truth which are to be found therein. 
 
 They have prepared the way for the changes that have come and 
 that are still coming. They have struck a blow at conventional and 
 costume painting, from which it can never recover, and they have 
 shown the possibility of painting landscape from an entirely different 
 standpoint from that of the old classical one. At present they look 
 simply like destroyers, but hints of reconstruction are to be found 
 here and there in their work, and at any rate it is something to 
 have gained a broader and more worthy view of art as a whole 
 — of its vitality, its meaning, and its beauty — than we had in the 
 old days of placid and contented ignorance. 
 
 And as to the Academy — well, one is tempted to say with Beppo, 
 " with all thy faults I love thee still." The institution might be a 
 little more liberal, and perhaps will some day ; but, in the meantime, 
 it is what we English people have made it — a genuine product of an 
 inartistic soil. A trifle commercial, a trifle obstinate, and a trifle 
 dull, but representative of the sturdy common sense of the nation, 
 and identified with many interests and traditions which are not lightly 
 to be cast away. 
 
 jVijfe— Here ends the essay which I wrote at Rome in the early spring of 1883 • the 
 notes which follow are collected from my criticisms written from year to year in the Spectator. 
 
 342 
 

THE ROYAL ACADEMY. 
 PART II. 1882-1890. 
 
 Q Q This year introduced Jan van Beers to the English 
 
 X O O 2 public ; and is so specially notable, in view of the 
 frequent exhibitions of that painter's work which 
 have since been held in Bond Street, and of the high estimation in 
 which the artist is now held by a certain section of the critical public. 
 Here is my remark, written at the time, on his picture The Yacht, 
 La Sirene : 
 
 " In its way a very remarkable work; a perfect specimen of sensually 
 suggestive French art. We say French, because the motive 
 and style of the picture are entirely French (the painter is a 
 Belgian). Taken as a pictorial expression of a page of Arsene 
 Houssaye or Adolphe Belot, it leaves absolutely nothing to be 
 desired. Some of us may perhaps think that this is hardly one of 
 those fair-seeming shows which lift the soul up higher — but of 
 that the Academicians are no doubt the best judges. Next 
 year, perhaps, we shall have the original studies for the illustra- 
 tions to La Vie Parisienne exhibited in the Great Room, while 
 the Grdvin sketches for the Petit Journal fill up the odd 
 corners." 
 I had never before seen any of this artist's painting ; but his 
 subsequent exhibitions confirmed the idea suggested above. For it 
 is distinctly the baser side of modern life, and the unmentionable 
 half of the world in which Van Beers chiefly delights. His art 
 is essentially caricature : caricature not only of clothes but emotion ; 
 he revels almost equally in elaborations of dress and undress ; and it 
 does not need to be a very strict moralist to feel a considerable 
 dislike to his frequent pictures of little improper girls sticking their 
 silk-stockinged legs as far beyond the limits of their frilled petticoats 
 as the artist thinks suggestively desirable. It was a curious experi- 
 ence to me, a year or two later than the period of which I am 
 speaking, to find that many decent English maids and matrons thought 
 it the proper thing to frequent the Van Beers collections, for not 
 only the subjects, but the motives of the compositions were simply 
 detestable. The pictures were worse than coarse, and their prevailing 
 characteristic was morbid indecency. The painter has lately, I 
 notice, become a contributor to one of our newest illustrated period- 
 icals, entitled Pick-me-up, and there the admirers of his work will find 
 several choice examples of that peculiar art which has for so many 
 years been a favourite with the Parisian public, and of which it now 
 seems we are to become the latest exponents. 
 
 One is glad to remember that in this same year of 1882 the 
 President of our Academy sent what might fitly be classed as an 
 
 343 
 
antidote to the above. This composition he entitled Phryne, of 
 
 which I then wrote : 
 
 " The President has done his best to escape from that slough of 
 waxy women and brown -skinned men in which he has dis- 
 ported himself so long, and has given us a work great in size 
 and execution, and almost great in intention. His Phryne 
 recalls the painter of the Hercules and Alcestis, and is 
 certainly the finest work he has produced since The Slinger. 
 For on the whole, the Phryne is a great picture, though 
 hardly a natural one, and crushes all the surrounding pictures 
 for one single reason, that it is beautiful, and the majority 
 of them are not, and the motivelessness is less irritating to 
 us from the nature of the subject. Phryne, we may con- 
 ceive, was neither very loving nor very wise, but a fine animal, 
 and this is a very fine animal indeed, strong and glowing, 
 yet delicately moulded, full of life and health, and yet with 
 something of sculpturesque purity and dignity about her — a 
 golden -brown woman, with slight draperies of crimson and 
 orange clinging here and there to her soft limbs, and standing 
 in a flash of sunlight against a blue sea." 
 
 I have called it an antidote because of the purity with which Sir 
 Frederick Leighton endowed his subject, raising the courtesan almost 
 as much as Van Beers lowered his silk-stockinged lady, and the 
 tailored ape of a man who hands her down the pier steps. 
 
 The President's Wedded was also exhibited this year ; a composi- 
 tion which has since- become too popular to need description. Here 
 for once he wedded grace of line to true feeling. 
 
 Mr. Poynter sent, too, a work rather interesting at the present time, 
 a design for the decoration of St. Paul's, which was never destined to 
 be executed : I criticised it at the time as wanting in simplicity and 
 decorative suitability, and I believe that when the height and size of 
 the dome of St. Paul's is considered, and especially the absence of 
 light therein, the remark was correct.^ 
 
 One portrait of this year for old sake's sake I must repeat my 
 delight in — the portrait of my old Master — the Master of Trinity : 
 
 1 After ten years, the St. Paul's authorities have entrusted the decoration of the choir to 
 Mr. Richmond, the first part of whose work thereon, consisting of large single figures on a 
 ground of gold mosaic, is about half completed. And the same remark may be applied 
 thereto as to the suggested desigii of Mr. Poynter ; that is, that in a couple of years the 
 more delicate portions of the design will be wholly invisible through smoke and dirt, and 
 in ten years probably we shall see nothing but the golden ground <y the mosaic. It should 
 be noted that Mr. Richmond's designs, though somewhat feeble and commonplace, are yet 
 of simpler character, and so far more appropriate than the Poynter cartoon ; the least satis- 
 factory feature of the present mosaics being that the figures do not adequately fill the 
 architectural spaces allotted to them, but are, as it were, plumped down in the centre of 
 each spandril, leaving the comers empty. 
 
 344 
 
" One of those marvellous if unpleasant likenesses which haunt 
 the memory like a too-persistent nightmare. The rigidity and 
 dull immobile smile that Mr. Herkomer has fixed upon the 
 canvas are wonderfully characteristic of Dr. Thompson, and 
 though perhaps his friends might wish for a less stern reading 
 of the character, it is a vitally true one. This might well be 
 the man of whom we used to tell the story that when he was 
 preaching to us in our chapel one Sunday morning, he looked 
 round with a cold smile as he gave out his text on the Parable of 
 the Talents, and began his sermon in the following words : Now, 
 you have all of you one talent (a pause), and some of you have 
 two talents (a longer pause), perhaps one or two of you have 
 even three talents ! " 
 
 The only other remarkable work of this season was the Perseus 
 Arming : the first work exhibited by Mr. Alfred Gilbert in London, 
 of which I may reproduce my criticism : 
 
 " We cannot close this notice better than by referring to a little 
 piece of sculpture, which is in reality the most delightful thing 
 in the Exhibition. It is called Perseus Arming, and is by Mr. 
 Alfred Gilbert, a young artist who is, we understand, studying 
 at Rome, and who should do great things." 
 
 This work was not in the Academy but in the Grosvenor Gallery, 
 and Mr, Gilbert's sculpture has since become well known to the 
 public, and even, I believe, received notice from the press. 
 
 The second portrait painter I care to remember this year was M. 
 H. Fantin, whose painting is entirely French in its method, and 
 whose pictures have absolutely no attractiveness of colour or acces- 
 sory to recommend them : they win what favour we have to give, 
 by their sheer truth to certain effects of dull atmosphere upon the 
 human face. It is a kind of winter-afternoon light, in which M. 
 Fantin poses his sitters in their black dresses, against their dark 
 grey backgrounds ; everything else is surrendered to what the French 
 call les valeurs! The result is a strange and, in some ways, un- 
 attractive art, but one in which fine results of tone, and a certain 
 unity of impression, are undoubtedly gained. These pictures are 
 extremely subtle in their gradations of colour, and the work is such 
 as to grow upon the liking, more than to arrest the attention. The 
 effort of the artist is to combine a picture and a portrait, and in this 
 process the dress and background of the sitter, and the light and 
 shade upon the face and body, become of primary importance.^ 
 
 1 I have some pleasure in remembering that, about this period, M. Fantin, who was 
 entirely unknown to me, wrote to say mine was the first word of praise, or even sympathetic 
 criticism, he had ever received in England. WeU, he cannot say that to-day, at all events— 
 for no one's reputation is more secure. 
 
 2 Y 345 
 
O O "At Burlington House this year there were only two 
 
 J Q Q ^ works of art which are likely to live, as being of 
 O absolutely first-rate quality. One was a picture"; the 
 other a bronze bust. Let us take the picture first. It was 
 by Mr. W. L. Wyllie, and was called, Toil, Glitter, Grime, 
 and Wealth on a Flowing Tide, and showed a scene upon the 
 Thames just below the Pool. The work was admirable in 
 several ways. A significant bit of national life was depicted 
 with truth and clearness; the power shown of combining an 
 aspect of Nature with the doings of men, which is at the root of 
 all great landscape painting ; and the picture also succeeded in 
 making a scene significant and beautiful without in any way 
 violating the facts of the case. Mr. Wyllie had had the heart to 
 feel and the brain to understand that in art, as in life, beauty may 
 lie in unexpected places, and depend no less upon contrast than 
 harmony, and so he had made the dark strength of his barges 
 beautiful against the glittering sunshine of the unstable water, 
 and given to the rough forms of his watermen the true pictur- 
 esqueness which is their birthright; the freedom and power born 
 of the sea and wind, and of a life in which action is bereft 
 of uncertainty, though beset with danger. I can imagine no 
 higher praise for this picture than to say that it might -be 
 worthily placed in our National Gallery as a companion to the 
 Old Tdmdraire of Turner. It shows the life of the men who 
 helped to make the tradition of England, and I cannot see why 
 we should refuse that sympathy to the everyday labour and 
 danger of the living, that we bestow so plentifully upon the 
 vanished heroism of the dead. 
 
 " In any case Mr. Wyllie is to be congratulated upon his achieve- 
 ment. He has succeeded in giving one more disproof to the 
 doctrines of those shallow, morbid sentimentalists who groan so 
 loudly that modern life has nothing picturesque or beautiful, 
 and he has painted a picture which, for truth of action, natural 
 effect, and vividness of delineation, may rank with any painting 
 of the present day. 
 
 " The other work to which I have alluded, is the bronze entitled. 
 Study of a Head, by Alfred Gilbert. This is a very fine 
 though very unpretending work, done with equal skill and 
 smcerity, and instinct with a feeling for the antique, which 
 is difficult to explain. The truth is, that Mr. Gilbert's 
 work is like the antique less from the outside than the in. 
 He is penetrated with the Greek spirit rather than the 
 Greek form, and he is gaining from Nature and himself what 
 the Greek gained from like sources. The chief works of 
 
 346 
 
modern sculpture fail, as a rule, from being either too brutally, 
 
 or, perhaps, I should say, too exclusively, realistic, or from 
 
 being simply echoes of the work of the Italian or Greek 
 
 sculptors ; and the peculiar quality of Mr. Gilbert's work ,is, 
 
 that it avoids either of these extremes, and that it succeeds in 
 
 reproducing much of the Greek simplicity and unconsciousness, 
 
 without imitating the mere outside form in which those qualities 
 
 are displayed." 
 
 There was a small collection exhibited in this year at a minor 
 
 gallery, which should not pass unrecorded. This was a series of 
 
 terra-cotta plaques, modelled in very high relief, by Mr. George 
 
 Tinworth, who was at that time, and is, I believe, still, a workman 
 
 at Messrs. Doulton's pottery works. I find written of these in my 
 
 notes of the year's art,^ that — 
 
 " All of these were Scriptural subjects, mostly compositions in high 
 relief of many figures, very rough and naturalistic in treatment, 
 and full of a spirit of sincere and somewhat dogmatic belief. 
 They reminded us a- good deal of early German work, notably 
 of such sculptures as those on the walls of St. Sebald's at 
 Nuremberg ; but it seemed strange to see the naiveU of the 
 early Bavarian sculpture reproduced in the nineteenth century, 
 and exhibited in a Bond Street gallery for a shilling. That Mr. 
 Tinworth is a genuine and talented artist is beyond all doubt ; 
 that he is a sculptor who will or who could develop, we think more 
 than doubtful. His very virtues will probably prevent him 
 carrying his work any farther than he does at present ; if it 
 became more perfect it would become absurd ; it is only while 
 it remains childlike in its execution, that we can condone its 
 simplicity of thought and its frankness of expression. It is a 
 sort of Watts' hymn in clay, and would never bear elaboration." 
 
 On the whole, it must be said that this was a somewhat uninter- 
 esting Academy. The President's frieze was uninteresting, and, 
 impossible as it may seem, almost awkward in its arrangement. Mr. 
 Albert Moore sent nothing ; and Mr. Goodwin, whose landscape is in 
 some ways analogous to the last-mentioned artist's figure composition, 
 did not show at his best in his Enchanted Lake, which was but a 
 coarse and spotty reproduction of his former Voyages of Sinbad. I 
 confess to have been personally very much charmed by Sir John 
 Millais' Grey Lady flitting drearily up a dimly-lighted stairway in 
 some old manor-house. A fine shadow of a picture this, very literally 
 a nocturne in grey. There was, too, a splendid Millais portrait, that 
 of the Duchess of Westminster, a fresh young English lady in a black 
 silk dinner-dress, black gloves, and with a fan in her hand, turning 
 1 In the Contemporary Review, from which also the first quotation is taken. 
 
 347 
 
little more than a profile to the spectator. One of the best of Sir John 
 Millais' ladies' portraits, absolutely lifelike in its reality, without in 
 the least straining after effect. And if this was good, the same 
 artist's presentment of Mr. Hook, R.A., was even better, and was 
 the finest portrait in the exhibition, and one of the painter's strongest, 
 freshest, and most brilliant pieces of painting. The old sea and sea- 
 coast painter has been taken in his habit as he lived, in a rough frieze 
 suit, with a palette on his thumb, and his face glowing as if it were 
 fresh from wind and wave. 
 
 For intense cleverness — cleverness as distinct from genius — I think 
 there was nothing in the '83 exhibition comparable to Mr, Logsdail's 
 Piazza of St. Mark, which represented the evening gathering in the 
 great Venetian square in front of Mr. Ruskin's favourite cathedral, 
 Mr. Logsdail, whose later work is criticised elsewhere, has since 
 developed his amazing power of realisation, till at the present day 
 there is, I believe, no living artist whose work has so much apparent 
 solidity and relief His pictures this present year of 1892, chiefly of 
 Venetian architecture, were simply marvellous in this respect. There 
 was in one of them some painting of sculptured bronze, which for 
 texture, and the management of its light and shade appeared to me 
 absolutely perfect. 
 
 Q Q This year is set down in my notes as a better one 
 
 J Q Q A than usual, and the reason given is that there were in 
 I the Royal Academy " four works which are distinctly 
 first-rate." Of these, two are works of sculpture and two are paint- 
 ings, and three out of the four examples are by members of the 
 Academy. The two sculptures, one of which is a smallish bronze, 
 something under three feet high, and the other a life-size plaster cast 
 from the clay model, are, without comparing their different methods, 
 finer in their kind than the paintings ; and one of them is so good 
 that it alone would justify us in thinking this year's exhibition 
 especially interesting. 
 
 As it is very much the fashion to go to the Academy and alto- 
 gether disregard the galleries devoted to sculpture — a neglect, by 
 the way, for which the behaviour of the Academicians themselves 
 has been mainly responsible — our readers will, we trust, pardon us 
 for asking those of their number who care for art, as distinguished 
 from caring for a popular subject for conversation, to go, while their 
 eyes and attention are still fresh, and they are as yet unwearied with 
 trying to see a thousand pictures in two hours, and give five minutes' 
 time to the bronze figure of Icarus, by Alfred Gilbert. It is not only 
 the best sculpture in the Academy of this year, but it is an essentially 
 fine work of art ; fine for any time and any age of the world's history 
 
 348 
 

 
 '-C 
 
 .^az,- 
 
 
 a 
 
 o 
 tJ 5 
 
 H 
 
T— one of those bits of truth seen through the glass of genius which 
 enrich the world for ever. 
 
 We of the art criticism in the Spectator have been blamed a good 
 deal of late years for seeing everything modern and national in a 
 pessimist light — of being too cantankerous to admire anything. Well, 
 here is something we admire to the uttermost — admire so much, that 
 if we had our will it should be put in a little room at the Academy 
 by itself, and it should be a condition, equally with the paying of the 
 shilling, that those who enter the Academic portals should go first of 
 all to see the masterpiece of the exhibition. Two years ago this 
 young sculptor, who has been working at Rome for some years, and 
 who before that was at Paris, had a statuette of Perseus at the 
 Grosvenor. Gallery, of which we then wrote that it was really the 
 most delightful thing in the exhibition, and that its author should do 
 great things. It did not need any ghost come from the grave to tell 
 us that — it was, or should have been, evident to every one who looked 
 at the statuette ; but we may be pardoned for feeling pleasure at the 
 accomplishment of even so safe a prediction, as of all perilous paths 
 in art, a sculptor has perhaps the most perilous to tread, and, as a 
 rule, only escapes from slavish imitation of the Greeks, to fall into 
 the fascinations of Michelangelo, and leaves that master for the 
 asceticism of the early Italian, or the voluptuousness of the modern 
 French schools. Let us for once give due honour to a young artist, 
 not yet too proud or too weary to thank us for our praise, that after 
 a dozen years of unappreciated and unsparing toil, through every 
 doubt of friends, every temptation to inferior work, every hardship 
 of life — hardships such as only those of his own profession can 
 understand — he has brought us out into the light of day an art 
 which is at once simple, manly, and sincere ; and which has, besides 
 those merits, that subtle quality of style, that touch of creative power, 
 that peculiar grace of mingled truth, and beauty, and insight, which 
 we label conveniently — genius ; a useful x which solves many an 
 enigma. 
 
 Our readers would not thank us, probably, for going at length 
 into the reasons why we speak in such terms of extreme praise 
 of this work, and why we claim such immediate recognition for 
 its author. The one is a technical subject of extreme difficulty; 
 the other is founded upon the knowledge of how often a great 
 artist has his powers crushed and his mind embittered by the non- 
 recognition of his powers whilst he is young; whilst he yet, as 
 Mr. Ruskin once wrote, runs his race through the asphodel meadows 
 of his youth. But we may, perhaps, be forgiven for just saying 
 a word or two upon the more evident merits of Mr. Gilbert's work. 
 And firstly, from the technical side, it evidences extreme knowledge 
 not only of the muscles and other anatomical details of the human 
 
 349 
 
body, but of its capabilities — its strength, grace, and freedom of 
 action. The difference .between a figure which is graceful and 
 correct in one position, but stands there for ever and is inconceivable 
 in another, and a figure at which we look and see that before 
 it was in this position, but a minute ago it was in another, and 
 a minute hence will be in a third, is one of the great and essential 
 differences between mechanical and vital work in sculpture. The 
 latter lives — lives in that it is connected with past and future ; lives 
 by virtue of its affinity (unspoken but expressed, and realised by 
 the spectator) with himself and all the natural creation ; lives, perhaps, 
 by the perception of a subtler law still — that law of change which 
 is the law of life. In the conveyance of this impression of the 
 changeful vitality of human life and action, lies one of the great 
 merits of the statue of which we speak, Icarus is resting upon 
 his right foot, the other just touching the ground. His arms, upon 
 the upper part of which are bound the heavy wings, are slightly 
 bent; the head looks downward to the earth he is about to leave. 
 The whole figure is alive ; and in another moment we feel that 
 the wings will be brought into motion, and the boy will spring 
 into the air. The sculptor has understood his subject thoroughly ; 
 the figure has all the slender length of lower limb and* strength 
 of arm and shoulder which we feel would be wanted for such a 
 task. If any man might fly, this youth, with his strength and 
 lissomness, would be the one. This is no made-up Icarus, labelled 
 for the part, but a being of whom every muscle, and every detail 
 of attitude and expression, tell his story. One other technical 
 excellence we must just mention, which is the beauty of line which 
 this figure possesses. Owing to the position of the arms, which 
 are bent at slightly different angles, the arrangement of the wings, 
 and the general pose of the figure, it results that from whatever 
 point of view this work is regarded, the eye is met with varieties 
 of different and beautiful curves, crossed, but not broken, by poise 
 of head or line of limb. How enormous the difficulty, and how 
 rare the attainment of this in its full perfection, can only be told 
 by sculptors themselves and those who have given long time to 
 the study of that art ; but any one who goes to the Royal Academy 
 can, in a measure, test the truth of our words for themselves in 
 this respect, by comparing the Icarus with the other works of sculp- 
 ture. And it is worthy of note how even Mr. Thornycroft's great 
 work, with all its science and manly grace, fails in comparison. 
 
 We have left the consideration of this second work in the 
 Academy, Mr. Hamo Thornycroft's statue of The Mower, a little 
 too long to enable us to do it entire justice. It is inferior to 
 Mr. Gilbert's work in two important respects. It is purely and 
 simply realistic in its motive, rather than ideal ; and it has, despite 
 
 350 
 
all its grace and beauty, which are very great, some touch of that 
 heaviness, that Britannic quality of mind, which dulls so much of 
 our artistic work. It is strong, and graceful in strength; but it 
 is not delicate, not dainty ; it does not seem to have been wrought 
 with the finger-tips, and touched lovingly from beauty to beauty 
 till it reached perfection. From this there results some limitation 
 of its artistic merit, and the statue lacks style ; it is distinctly of 
 a period, and its place is limited by the nationality of its author, 
 his English parentage, his Greek sympathies. Just a hint of 
 imitation rather than inspiration defaces the work. With all this, 
 Mr. Thornycroft deserves very high praise indeed; his statue is 
 the finest attempt to express modern English labour in terms of 
 plastic art which we have ever seen ; it is equally fine in its way 
 with the two figures of the ploughman and his lad leading the 
 horses, in Walker's celebrated picture. Mr. Thornycroft has had 
 to struggle with great difficulties, and rather prejudices us against 
 his statue at first, by having taken his mower's shirt off and suspended 
 his short leather breeches round him by a single brace. It seems 
 a rather strained device to show the pectoral muscles, though in 
 the retired parts of England, no doubt, it is common enough for the 
 mowers to work in this airy costume. But the position,, the face 
 of the man, the unconscious dignity of strength and labour, are all 
 fine in the extreme in this statue. 
 
 Both of the sculptures of which we have been speaking are good, 
 even great, works of art, of which England and the Academy may 
 be proud. And we cannot resist mentioning here the fact that Sir 
 Frederick Leighton was one of the very first to appreciate Mr. 
 Gilbert's talent, and that we believe the present work of which we 
 have been speaking was a commission from him. It is no mean 
 honour to a man in such a position as that of the President, that he 
 can habitually find time to help and encourage those young artists 
 who might otherwise in many instances have sought for such aid in 
 vain. 
 
 To pass to a very different work — a picture by Mr. Orchardson. 
 On the whole, the Mariage de Convenance which he sends this 
 year is the finest picture he has ever painted. Like all his work, it 
 has many faults ; the canvas is half empty, the painting unequal and 
 somewhat ragged, the drawing and modelling harsh and unpleasant. 
 Look, for an instance of this, at the woman's bare arm, which is, 
 perhaps, the ' most prominent portion of the picture, and should 
 certainly have been one of the most delicately and tenderly treated. 
 It is like a badly-cut piece of stick ; there is not the least attempt to 
 give the delicacy, the modelling, or the transparency of human flesh. 
 Little bits of the colour, too, are garish and unlikely, if not impossible — 
 see the hue of the wine which the servant is in the act of pouring. 
 
 351 
 
But to all these things we are habituated in Mr. Orchardson's work, 
 and when the figures are, as here, on a smaller scale than usual, the 
 faults do not tell so much. In every other respect this is a very 
 magnificent piece of painting. Magnificent is the right word for it, 
 for the picture is neither lovely, delicate, nor attractive in the right 
 sense of these words. It is a drama of modern life, treated with 
 Zola-like realism, but not touching those themes upon which his 
 realism expends itself It is at once a satire, a sermon, and an 
 illustration upon the most common instance of society — the case of 
 a woman who marries without love. And, to our thinking, the 
 power of the picture lies in the fact that the artist has left it entirely 
 to tell its own story, without the faintest hint of pictorial artifice to 
 help out his meaning, and — that the story is told. The husband is 
 not represented as especially old or unattractive ; the woman, though 
 beautiful, is neither very young nor very angelic. Two perfectly- 
 dressed people of our modern world, there they sit opposite to each 
 other over their dessert, while an irreproachable man-servant pours 
 out the claret — and there one feels they will sit, and sit for ever. At 
 least that for ever is the thought of the picture — the thought in the 
 woman's mind that the loveless years will go on and on to all eternity. 
 He has what he wanted, not being of a very intellectual or very 
 exalted frame of mind, and liking his claret perfectly warmed ; and 
 she — well, she has what she bargained for. The story is old enough, 
 but Mr. Orchardson has made it live anew. There is not a single 
 detail which does not help the effect: the fruit on the table, the 
 glasses and the plate, the care with which the servant pours the wine, 
 the perfectly immaculate perfection of costume, and conventional air 
 of the husband, and the traces underneath of the life he has led 
 and the passions he has worn out, — everything tells. The picture is 
 quite French in its unsparingness, its absolute refusal of surrender to 
 the domesticities and the goody-goodyism with which we cloak 
 our vices. After all, the thing is true. Let us have it in naked 
 hideousness, and let our girls go and look at it ; and perhaps some of 
 them will one day thank Mr. Orchardson. For a glimpse at the 
 other side of the moon, they can walk across the gallery and look at 
 the fourth work which we have to mention to-day — Sir Frederick 
 Leighton's great picture of Cymon and Iphigenia, hung, as it deserves 
 to be hung, in the centre of the great room. The story is too well 
 known to bear repeating, but Sir Frederick has treated it very much 
 from the high-falutin' (we do not mean these words ironically) point 
 ?^ V^T' r ^^^ Cymon has a rather fine, thoughtful face, and is clad 
 m thick folds of scarlet drapery ; his Iphigenia lies on a couch under 
 some great trees, covered with a wide-spreading gold-embroidered 
 drapery, while beyond is the deepest of blue seas, and the moon just 
 shmmg above the horizon. This is at the very opposite pole of art 
 to Mr. Orchardson's— lovely composition, and nothing else— and his 
 
 352 
 
O 
 
is nothing less than lovely ; but then Sir Frederick's work carries 
 beauty so far as to be justified. The colour here is ifull and strong, 
 compared with much of the President's later painting ; the head and 
 arm of Iphigenia are delicious in softness, without having the pinky 
 waxwork quality with which one has of late associated his faces, and 
 the disposition of the great drapery about the woman's limbs, and 
 over her couch is very fine. But it is as a whole we like the picture. 
 This is not nature ; we cannot imagine nature like this under any 
 circumstances ; but as a decorative composition of beautiful lines and 
 forms, delicate modelling, and softest contrasts of glow and shadow, 
 the picture is very fine and very beautiful. We can imagine no wall- 
 space which would not be made fairer for having such a panel, and 
 the artist himself would probably be the last to claim for his work any 
 other office. 
 
 In connection with these Academy contributions there should be 
 remembered in 1884 the King Cophetua of Mr. Burne-Jones, and the 
 Lady Archibald Campbell of Mr. Whistler.^ The former I have 
 spoken of elsewhere — of the latter I wrote at the time : * 
 
 " Look at the portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell by Mr. Whistler 
 which hangs in the large east gallery — a work which is of its 
 kind excessively fine, and by far the best example of its artist 
 which we have lately seen. Circumstances have rendered it 
 difficult for us to write of Mr. Whistler's work without consider- 
 able hesitation, but we shall at least not be suspected of any undue 
 partiality in our admiration of this portrait. We do not find it 
 possible to take the artist's point of view — we do not believe in 
 his conception of what painting and portraiture is and should be — 
 but if we accept this difference, if we judge this work from its 
 own standpoint, it is difficult to see how it could have been better. 
 The drawing is delicious throughout — easy and anasterly as Mr. 
 Whistler's drawing can be when he takes the trouble ; the tones 
 of the black dress, and its colour and its relief against the dark 
 background, are all good ; the attitude and poise of the figure are 
 natural and graceful, and the whole picture is fresh, powerful, 
 and striking, — on the whole, a masterly piece of work, complete 
 and good, full of distinct individuality and great artistic insight." 
 
 O O -1^ Was a year marked by the election to the Associate- 
 J Q Q U ship of two artists whom the Academy had for years 
 •^ passed by. These were Edward Burne-Jones and 
 Henry Moore. The latter had been the best sea-painter in England 
 — that is, in the world — for at least ten years before this date ; the 
 former is one of the greatest artists of modern times, and had done 
 his most exquisite work from 1865 to 1880: both when elected to 
 the Academy were past fifty years of age, and only received election 
 
 1 Both at the Grosvenor Gallery. ' Spectator, May loth, 1884. 
 
 2Z 353 
 
from those motives of policy which have always rendered the Royal 
 Academy willing to recognise painters who became too strong to be 
 
 crushed. , r- , -r- i 
 
 Another artist since elected an associate, Mr. Stanhope Forbes, sent 
 a very interesting picture of a fish-sale (at Newlyn) to this year's 
 exhibition. This was somewhat sneered at by the critics, who had 
 not at that time become familiar with the words the Newlyn School, 
 and who found it uninteresting, etc. Its artistic qualities, however, 
 were very remarkable, and it appeared to me to be one of the two 
 most successful pictures in the Academy. 
 
 " An interesting and pleasing picture. The composition is careful 
 and good, the pose of the figures natural, and the facts of the 
 subject are all there unbeautified, and yet (if we may make an 
 apparent paradox) made beautiful. As a specimen of the best kind 
 of pre-Raphaelitism, look in this picture at the painting of the 
 various kind of fish that lie upon the wet sand in the foreground. 
 Not only have they accuracy of form and colour, with just sufficient 
 detail to make each one individual ; but they have, too, that right- 
 ness of value which puts them in perfect relation and subordination 
 to the rest of the work. The same may be said of the figures, 
 the big boat in the foreground, and the fishing-boats at anchor 
 in the distance. All that is in the composition is right in itself, 
 and also right in its place. Farther than this, literal truth of out- 
 door effect could scarcely go. On this special subject, perhaps, 
 the present writer has some justification for speaking strongly, 
 as he spent last summer painting upon this very coast." 
 
 Mr. Stanhope Forbes was elected last year (i 891) to the Associate- 
 ship of the Academy, and his picture in this year's exhibition (1892) 
 oi Forging the Anchor received the most undiluted praise from the press 
 — but in essential qualities the above-mentioned earlier work was far 
 finer. 
 
 Q Q jT This season's collection of pictures stands in my 
 J^ Q Q \j notes as a comparatively uninteresting one, owing 
 chiefly to the number of absentee artists — Sir John 
 Millais, Messrs. Herkomer, Tadema, Brett, Alfred Gilbert, E. F. 
 Gregory, and many others were either absent altogether or repre- 
 sented by small or unattractive examples ; on the other hand, there 
 was the single contribution from Mr. Burne-Jones alluded to below, 
 the President sent his bronze statue of The Sluggard, and there was 
 a picture by Mr. John Sargent which aroused strong controversy — 
 this was a portrait group of the three Misses Vickers. Notable, too, 
 was the second of Mr. Orchardson's Mariage de Convenance series. 
 
 " The Depths of the Sea, by Mr, Burne-Jones, is a high, narrow 
 picture, somewhat the shape and size of a shutter, of a nature to niake 
 
 354 
 
Mr. Horsley shut his eyes modestly, unless he has recanted his art 
 lecture upon the undraped model. And yet it is, whatever may be 
 its faults, absolutely without true reproach in this respect. No one 
 who has eyes to see can doubt this picture of the mermaid, who drags 
 down through dim, still green water her mortal lover, unconscious 
 that he is dying in her arms, to be absolutely pure in intention and 
 significance, — 
 
 " ' Habes tola quod mente petisti 
 Infelix.' 
 
 A strange picture in many ways, — strange in its colouring of 
 tender shades of yellow-brown, green, grey, and purple ; strange in 
 cramped, twisted gestures, strange in mixture of human and 
 un-human interest ; strangest of all, perhaps, in curious mingling of 
 great imaginative power, and almost childish simplicity of detail. 
 The mermaid's silver tail, for instance, is fitted neatly on to her pale- 
 yellow body as if it had been done at a silversmith's ; and the floor of 
 her rock palace is covered with hundreds of little brown pebbles, like 
 the bottom of an aquarium. The picture does not look well in its 
 position on these walls, — the work all round is so entirely opposed in 
 character ; and, moreover, while taking this into consideration, it is not, 
 in our opinion, one of the artist's finest works, though it possesses 
 many beauties. 
 
 " Mr. John Sargent's life - size portrait group of The Misses 
 Vickers is in its way probably the cleverest thing in the exhibition. 
 This is the ne plus ultra of French painting, or, rather, of the French 
 method as learned by a clever foreigner, in which everything is 
 sacrificed to technical considerations. The effect of a white dress or 
 arm against a purple chair, the value, in short, of one object against 
 another ; the effective disposition of masses ; the concentration of the 
 attention upon the main point, to the comparative neglect of all the rest 
 of the picture ; the losing sight of the object of all painting — that is, 
 the production of pleasure to the beholder — in the pursuit of 
 painting itself, that is, of smart, clean brushwork, undisturbed from 
 the moment when the paint was taken from the palette and transferred 
 dexterously to the canvas, — all these are the marks of modern French 
 painting, as taught by, say, Carolus Duran ; and all of these Mr. 
 Sargent has mastered, or is in a way to master. And yet, when all is 
 done, what good is it .? Could we fancy any one a hundred years 
 hence caring to possess such a picture as this, where colour and 
 imagination have really no place, which calls aloud for us to admire 
 its artistic dexterity, but seems never to have felt at all that there was 
 anything more in its subject than a good opportunity of displaying 
 the painter's power ? 
 
 " Let us look at a very different kind of art : Sir Frederick Leighton's 
 statue of The Sluggard, of which so much has been said. Tersely told, 
 
 355 
 
the subject is a young man stretching himself, the arms raised in a 
 horizontal position, and bent double at the elbow, with the hands 
 towards the neck, the fingers of one closed and the other partially 
 open. The body stands on one foot, and is slightly twisted, in the 
 act of yawning. The work has neither great merits nor very atrocious 
 defects, though both its good and bad points are clearly marked. 
 And first we will take the good ones. The attitude carries the intention 
 of the artist, — the man is in the act of stretching, and stands 
 only for a moment, as it were, as we see him. And there is great 
 knowledge shown, — not only anatomical knowledge, but that much 
 rarer knowledge of what we are accustomed to call ideal ^ form. 
 Certainly this is not a servile copy of any living model. Again, the 
 figure has a merit which is very hard to characterise shortly, but 
 which may be called the merit of style. It takes us back to great 
 works of antiquity, and claims kinship with them. There are many 
 other merits, but these may, perhaps, stand as the chief. What is 
 there on the other side ? If the truth must be told, all the objections 
 to this statue may be summed up in one, which is, in truth, fatal — it 
 is not a sculptor's work. By this we mean simply that the merits are 
 such as might be possessed by the work in clay or bronze of any 
 genuine painter who possessed the knowledge of form which dis- 
 tinguishes Sir Frederick Leighton ; but, on the other hand, the 
 shortcomings are such as no sculptor would tolerate or condone. 
 
 " It is almost impossible to define in words the great difference 
 between the handling of a master in sculpture, and of one who is 
 practically only a tyro in the art, — that this is akin to the touch of a 
 great painter is nearly all that one can say, though the result is to give 
 the impression of life, of the various substances of bone, muscle, and 
 skin of which the body is made, and especially of the congruity and 
 uniformity of the whole. Look at Hamo Thornycroft's Sower in 
 this Gallery ; and note that, blundering in some respects as the 
 conception is, yet the vitality of the body therein is felt in an entirely 
 different manner from that which Sir Frederick shows. Turn, again, 
 to the small, unpretentious statuette by Onslow Ford, which stands 
 near The Sluggard; and the same thing, though manifested in a 
 different form, is again visible. The laody, throughout all its 
 diversity, has a suavity of contour, and a continuity as of one 
 organism; whereas, when we look at The Sluggard, despite great 
 artistic qualities, despite style and anatomical knowledge, we find 
 that we think of parts — of legs, arms, ribs, and so on. Again, 
 dismissing this point, we see the painter's, not the sculptor's, instinct 
 in the position. And why ? Because the position is essentially very 
 good only from one point of view. Looked at from right or left, the 
 general form is unpleasant, in one or two places acutely displeasing, 
 resembling that of an irregularly-planted cross, of which the long, 
 
 356 
 

 1^ S 
 
upright leg has been split into two portions. The head doubled up, 
 and arms apparently joining it and the trunk, give a clumsy and 
 over-toppling air to the whole figure ; and it is not till we get im- 
 mediately in front or behind the statue that this is removed. This 
 is evident, indeed, in some measure, even when either a back or 
 front view is chosen. A defect of this kind is almost always visible 
 in the statues of those who are not professional sculptors, and arises 
 simply from the habit of thinking of a figure from the pictorial, that 
 is, one point of view, rather than on every side. These are, we 
 think, the most notable points both in praise and dispraise of this 
 work, which is rather a painter's graceful exercise in another art, 
 than a fine statue." 
 
 Beyond all question the most important statue of this year was 
 Mr. Alfred Gilbert's life-size group in plaster, entitled The En- 
 chanted Chair; but I must leave this unmentioned here, as I have 
 already criticised this artist sufficiently, 
 
 I think a good many people felt with me this year that the hang- 
 ing of M. Carolus Duran's great portrait of a woman in a black 
 dress was very disgraceful, when we consider the great reputation 
 of this painter in Paris, and the extreme merit of the example in 
 question. Certainly this was one of the best portraits in the Academy, 
 especially if regarded from the technical point of view ; and it was 
 an interesting experiment to stand in the doorway of the room in 
 which it was hung, and notice how its vigour and lifelikeness seemed 
 to obscure all the surrounding pictures. The more the figure was 
 looked at, the more vividly truthful it became ; the slightly-parted 
 lips seemed to be unclosing in the act of speech ; the little foot, in its 
 delicate shoe and silk stocking, was tapping the floor eagerly. A 
 fine example of a great artist, which sunk the babies and sentimental 
 damsels, Scotch landscapes, and classical futilities, hanging around 
 and beneath, into utter insignificance. And there was a large portrait 
 group by Fantin, also skied in this exhibition, which was beyond 
 doubt the work of a master. 
 
 " This represented a group of Frenchmen, in black clothes, stand- 
 ing round one of their number, who is seated, playing. It is a 
 large picture, and the figures life-size ; painted in M. Fantin's 
 well-known manner, in deep, almost grim, tones of grey and 
 black. The whole realisation of each individual is remarkable 
 in its clearness, and in the apparent simplicity of the means by 
 which it is obtained. The impression given by the whole work 
 is almost purely an impression of reality, such as one might gain 
 from looking at the actual scene; but we find on examination that 
 this effect is by no means obtained from a slavish repetition and 
 emphasis of each detail, but from the painter's grasp of the 
 
 357 
 
situation as a whole, and from his perfect mastery in subduing 
 each portion into harmony with all the rest; for — and this is 
 the gist of the matter — this picture is essentially a work of 
 art, as well as a work of truth." 
 
 Q Q This year's is an April Academy, one of shine and 
 
 J Q y^ shower, but as a whole bright with the breath of the 
 / spring and the early promise of the year. It is an 
 Academy where the young men are doing the best work, and is so far 
 full of hope and productive of pleasure. There were three specially 
 successful pictures by the younger artists : the Royal Exchange of Mr. 
 Logsdail, of whose painting I have spoken sufficiently elsewhere ; the 
 Mariamne of Mr. Waterhouse, who had just been made A.R.A. ; 
 and the Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose of Mr. John Sargent, whose life- 
 size portrait of the Misses Vickers had been in the previous Academy 
 probably the cleverest thing in the exhibition. Carnation, etc., 
 showed us two fair-haired children surrounded by tall lilies and 
 other flowers, lighting Chinese lanterns in a garden. 
 
 " The time is that of a summer's evening ; the attempt has been 
 to show the conflict of lights between the fading day and the 
 (illuminated) lanterns, and its effect upon the various coloured 
 flowers — carnation, lily, lily, and rose. Had Mr. Sargent only 
 succeeded in rendering this effect truthfully as a study, he would 
 have done a supremely difficult thing, and would have deserved 
 high praise for technical success ; but he has done far more — he 
 has succeeded in painting a picture which, despite the apparent 
 bizarrerie of the subject, despite the audacious originality of 
 the treatment, is purely and simply beautiful as a picture. 
 The introduction and painting of the children's figures, the 
 disposition of the masses of flowers and leaves with which 
 they are surrounded, the delicately bold colouring of the roses, 
 carnations, and lilies, — in all of these respects is this picture an 
 exquisite work of art. And even now we have left some chief 
 merits untold, and must leave them undescribed. For how is it 
 possible to describe in words that subtle rendering of brilliance 
 and shadow, that united mystery and revelation, which render 
 this composition so adrhirable ? Honour to the young artist 
 who has succeeded in combining, as we at least have never yet 
 seen combined in a painting of this impressionist school, truth 
 of effect and beauty of colour ; who has given us in the little 
 world of his picture the subtle mingling of fact and fancy which 
 exists in every great work of art, and renders its subject freshly 
 beautiful, while leaving its details true." 
 
 Subsequently, this painting was purchased by the Trustees 
 of the Chantrey Fund, who have, on six or seven other occa- 
 
 358 
 
— .•«»«fS^_ 
 
sions, been kind enough, with more or less delay, to corroborate, by- 
 purchase, my opinion of the meritorious work of the younger artists. 
 I mention this fact with the more pleasure, because I am tolerably 
 certain that the Trustees did not make these purchases from any 
 special desire to substantiate my judgment — for which, indeed, I have 
 reason to believe they have a most wholesome and unbounded con- 
 tempt — and therefore the compliment is as valuable as uninten- 
 tional. It is quite true that these purchases were accompanied in 
 nearly every instance by those of other paintings of, naturally, far 
 greater importance — and value, from the easels of the Academicians 
 themselves, which I could not have conscientiously recommended, 
 but this fact is easily explicable. 
 
 From a twilit garden to the crowded circus in front of the Royal 
 Exchange is an abrupt transition, but the latter formed the subject 
 of the cleverest (not the best) picture in this year's exhibition. This 
 was by Mr. Logsdail, subsequently mentioned, and was a marvellous 
 piece of dexterous handling and keen perception. Clever, too, in the 
 extreme was the Mariamne of Mr, Waterhouse (recently elected to 
 the Associateship), though the intellectual aspect was but thinly 
 dramatic. A Sarah Bernhardt conception of the scene, the tragedy 
 of a star actress surrounded by lay figures. Mr. Herman Herkomer 
 had a fine portrait of his uncle, the Professor of that name; and 
 Frank HoU — now, alas ! to exhibit no more — a very delightful one 
 of Mr. W. S. Gilbert, the dramatist ; and perhaps best of all was 
 Professor Herkomer's Briton Riviere, R.A., admirable as a likeness, 
 dignified and characteristic, and painted in a masterly, unaffected 
 manner. Herkomer, I think, never shows to such advantage as in 
 his best portraits. Of course Mr. Henry Moore had a fine seascape 
 with tumbling masses of blue water and a great expanse of cloudy 
 sky. Messrs. Bartlett and Stanhope Forbes were well represented ; 
 Mr. MacWhirter sent a fresh sketchy impression of a Highland Loch ; 
 and Mr. Ernest Crofts had a Retreat from Moscow sufficiently good 
 to make us think how much better Meissonier had done it before 
 him. I liked the big Hook landscape this year very much : it was 
 Hook at his best doing what all our old landscapists used to do, i.e. 
 painting a picture instead of making a study. The Royal Academy, 
 however, does not care for such work, so we must content ourselves 
 with Colin Hunter, Peter Graham, Leader, and Davis, and their 
 scenic effects for the future. It was in this year that, thinking 
 bitterly of what English landscape had been in the days of Cox and 
 De Wint, Nasmyth and Muller, Turner and Linnell, William Collins 
 and Barret, I perpetrated the following atrocious parody, my first 
 and last attempt at rhymed criticism. It was supposed to be written 
 a few years later when the special vogue of the painters named 
 had passed away. 
 
 359 
 
A BALLADE OF DEAD ACADEMICIANS'^ 
 {a.d. 1890) 
 
 Tell me now in what hidden way is 
 Every R.A. we used to know, man ? 
 Hindoo Prinsep, and sturdy Davis, 
 And veteran Cooper, the life-size- Cow-man 1 
 Where is Eyre-Crowe, who paints like no man, 
 " Sunset Leader^' and Herbert drear ? 
 He whose models were scarcely human ; 
 But where are the daubs of yester-year ? 
 
 II 
 
 " Kid-glove Fred" like an Amaryllis, 
 With fluent phrases and flowing curls, — 
 " Childe Morris," who better known as " Phil" is. 
 And Sant, the painter of bronze-boot girls ? 
 * Wher^s purist Horsley, who casts his pearls 
 Of wisdom (fj vainly in student's ear? 
 O shade of Titian 1 my memory whirls 
 In quest of the daubs of yester-year. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Where's Peter Graham, who leads the van 
 Of cannie Scotchmen, through mist and moor? 
 Mac Whirter, Pettie, and all their clan ; 
 And Colin the Hunter, who haunts the shore ? 
 Can it be that their days are o'er. 
 Praise departed and garlands sere; 
 That we shall see on the line no more 
 Such fine old daubs as in yester-year ? 
 
 L'ENVOI 
 
 " Yes, never again at festive board 
 
 Will they list to praises from Prince and Peer, 
 
 But only this whisper, sharp as sword, 
 
 ' Say, where are the daubs of yester-year ? ' " 
 
 ' With apologies to the shades of Villon and Rossettt. 
 
 360 
 
-.Nin \\ MMiis. .\. k. .\. 
 
Mr. Gow had this year one of the very best works which have 
 come from his hand — a garrison marching out with the honours 
 of war (Lille, a.d. 1708), which is the best military picture in the 
 Academy. It is a work somewhat low in tone, the colour being 
 chiefly in pale greys and buffs, and the figures are both numerous 
 and on a smaller scale than is usual in Mr. Gow's painting. The 
 chief peculiarities of the composition are the absence of clap-trap, 
 and a somewhat methodical and almost commonplace conception. 
 And yet the picture has that best kind of reality which makes the 
 spectator feel not only that the facts might have been as they are 
 rendered, but also that if they were, the scene was touching and 
 beautiful, — in other words, they give evidence of the artist's grasp on 
 reality and beauty. 
 
 The painter has seen the poetry of his chosen piece of life, and its 
 capabilities of awakening unstrained emotion, and has set down the 
 poetry for us on his canvas in legible language. To the best of our 
 recollection, Mr. Gow has painted nothing so good as this since his 
 Relief of Leyden, about ten years ago. Just above Mr. Gow's 
 picture hangs one which has probably been more talked about than 
 any in the Academy, one which forms a very complete contrast to Mr. 
 Gow's work. This is the gigantic Samson of Mr. S. J. Solomon, a 
 young artist of great ability, and perhaps even greater ambition. It 
 represents Samson struggling with the Philistines, who have already 
 wellnigh secured him, while Delilah (who, by the way, is of a rather 
 commonplace type, as conceived by Mr, Solomon) shakes at him 
 derisively a bunch of the hair which she has just cut off. Mr. 
 Solomon has received plenty of praise for the pluck and ability 
 shown in this work, and we should not have mentioned the picture 
 in detail did it not afford a good moral to many young English 
 artists in the strength and courageousness with which the artist has 
 encountered great technical difficulties. We think that though Mr. 
 Solomon may not be a great artist, yet that, if he has got the stuff 
 in him, he is going the right way to become a painter ; he is, sis 
 rowing men used to say up at Cambridge, putting his back into it : 
 trying to overcome every kind of technical difficulty, and in the 
 attempt overcoming very many. We should recommend those 
 who are interested in seeing the result to which the contrary 
 method has led in one instance, and is likely to lead in many 
 others, to look at Mr. T. M. Rooke's little picture in the first 
 room, entitled Autumn's Pipe, a composition of two figures 
 sitting under a hedgerow, piping, surrounded by small flowers 
 and leaves delicately painted. Now, Mr. Rooke is a genuine 
 artist, and a good dozen years or so ago did this pretty, poetical, 
 gentle work, which he is doing to-day. But he was too timid to 
 attempt more than he felt to be within his grasp ; he confined 
 3 A 361 
 
himself to his little figures, a foot or less high, which he painted for 
 the most part out of his head, and to laboured surroundings of leaf 
 and flower, such as we have in the present picture ; the consequence 
 is that now his work is nerveless, boneless, trivial to a most irritating 
 degree ; he dare not do wrong, and has never learnt to do right. 
 The contrast is an instructive one in many ways, for Mr. Rooke has 
 what Mr. Solomon lacks — reverence, tenderness, poetical imagina- 
 tion, and a love for all beautiful things — and Mr. Solomon has the 
 virility, the pluck, the dash, the atmosphere of life and effort, which 
 are sadly wanting in Mr. Rooke's pictures. 
 
 Mr, Shannon's portrait is of a Mrs. Nichols, and shows markedly 
 the influence of his French training. It is well drawn, well posed, 
 and well painted, but can hardly be called pleasant, for, in con- 
 sequence of a fault which is very prevalent in English portraits of the 
 foreign school, viz. a tendency to exaggerate the shadows, the flesh 
 looks dirty. The chief merit in this work, however, is that its aims 
 are entirely removed from the conventionally pretty style in which our 
 English portrait painting — especially of women — has so long been 
 executed. Compare, for instance, with Mrs. Nichols, one of Mr. 
 Sant's young ladies— say No. 275 or No. 312,— one feels directly that 
 the younger artist is more nearly on the right track than the Royal 
 Academician. Mr. Shannon's flesh-tints and shadows may get clear 
 and brilliant some day, but no amount of change which was not 
 entirely revolutionary could render Mr. Sant's portraits natural, or, 
 in the true sense of the word, artistic. 
 
 X Q O O '^^'^ ^^ ^^ interesting year at the Royal Academy. 
 
 1 O O O There were a splendid series of Mr. Frank HoU's 
 portraits ; a great landscape study by Sir John Millais, 
 of which more anon; Mr. Alfred Gilbert's seated statue of the 
 Queen ;^ the Captive Andromache of Sir Frederick Leighton ; Her 
 Mothers Voice, most sympathetic of all Mr. Orchardson's scenes of 
 Hgh life; and a wonderfully elaborate piece of sentimentalism by 
 our popular ^aint&r par pmiscite, Mr. Frank Dicksee. And amongst 
 the outsiders and the younger men, there were our old friends Albert 
 Moore and Alfred Hunt at their best, Mr. Logsdail and Mr. Loudon 
 with important pictures on which their excellent foreign training 
 showed conspicuously, Mr. F. D. Millet with a Love Letter, and a 
 portrait of Pasteur by M. Carolus Duran. 
 
 A glance at the Academy as a whole shows us that the chief 
 strength of the collection is in portraiture, the chief deficiency in 
 imaginative work, the chief mediocrity in scenes of modern domestic 
 life, and the chief decline in the department of landscape. 
 
 Some of the portraits are excellent, notably three by Mr. HoU, 
 
 362 
 
ON T H 1-: T E M P L 1-: STEPS 
 
 E. J. I'llVXIKlt, A. R. 
 
each of which is good enough to make a painter's reputation ; and 
 we here take great pleasure in saying that we are too glad to find 
 that the slight decline in merit which has been occasionally observ- 
 able for the last two years in Mr. HoU's work, has this year been not 
 only arrested, but that the artist in question has attained an average 
 excellence higher than in any previous exhibition. The sitters for 
 the three pictures in question were Mr. Gladstone, Lord Spencer, 
 and Sir William Jenner, so that the artist had no lack of interesting 
 subjects for his pencil, and he has done them justice. It is worth 
 while noticing that Mr. Holl has this year discarded in some measure 
 the sharp chiaroscuro effects — reminding one of electric light — of 
 which he has hitherto been so fond, and adopted a quieter method 
 and a richer scheme of colour ; and attention should be called, also, 
 to the magnificent painting of the hands in Sir William Jenner's 
 portrait, and the strength and solidity of modelling in the portrait of 
 Mr. Gladstone. In expression, Lord Spencer's picture is perhaps 
 superior to either of these. 
 
 Those of our readers who think that Art should be restricted to 
 the representation of pleasant and mildly sentimental stories, will 
 probably be much pleased with Mr. Frank Dicksee's Within the 
 Shadow of the Church, which may be described on the one hand as 
 being cleverly painted, graceful, and popular; and, on the other, as being 
 theatric and superficial, both in representation of natural fact and 
 emotional feeling. This picture raises the whole question — which we 
 have no adequate space to go into here — of how far it is permissible 
 (artistically permissible, we mean) to paint merely for the purpose of 
 catching the applause of the unthinking portion of the public. If a 
 plebiscite were taken of the works in the Academy this year, Mr. 
 Dicksee's picture would very probably be named as the most popular 
 one in the exhibition, as was the case last year. Whereas on the 
 other hand, if a plebiscite were taken only of the opinion of the 
 artistic and intellectual visitors to the Gallery, it is probable that 
 this work would be placed in the lowest rank. This is the subject : 
 a fair-haired young mother leads a fairer-haired young child past the 
 gate of a church, into which a monk entering pauses for a moment 
 to look at them regretfully. The monk is in shadow, the child in 
 sunlight, the woman in mingled light and shade, and above the child's 
 outstretched hand, relieved against the dark robe of the priest, two 
 butterflies are fluttering. Now, it is evident that the subject of this 
 picture, though ordinary enough, and painted perhaps a thousand 
 times before, is still a genuine and pictorial motive, and we may also 
 grant, with a fair presumption of certainty, that seven out of ten 
 uninstructed people will be, in the vulgar phrase, " fetched " thereby. 
 Fetched either by the pretty girl's face, the pathetic glance of the 
 priest, the fluffy golden hair, sunlit, of the child, or the pretty colours 
 
 363 
 
of the draperies, the butterflies, and the rose-bush. So that we have 
 here a man who can paint cleverly and draw adequately well, choosing 
 a subject which affords him full ground for the development of his 
 artistic faculty, and producing a picture with which the majority of 
 people will be pleased ; and it would seem hard if all these capacities 
 and achievements did not make up a work of art. And yet they 
 have not done so in the present case. In these days, when critics 
 are so closely watched, there would be rashness in using the only word 
 which could rightly characterise this composition, from an emotional 
 or intellectual point of view, and calling it bosh. But though we do 
 not dare to say so, bosh it is. Everything therein is really wrong. 
 The rose-bush is a property rose-bush, the monk has strayed from 
 the Lyceum Theatre, and the angelic innocence of the fluffy-haired 
 child is, thank goodness, unknown on earth. The truth is this, that 
 when a painter chooses an ordinary subject, which thousands have 
 taken before him and thousands will take after him, a subject which 
 deals with human feelings which are as old as the race itself, he 
 may do anything he likes except one thing, and that is to be 
 conventional. Mr. Dicksee has heaped together pretty things and 
 graceful postures, and chosen a well-worn theme for the opportunity 
 afforded him to arrange such matters in a becoming way ; but he 
 has not thought out his subject, nor has he found in it anything 
 sufficiently new to warrant him in telling us this old, old story, in 
 such an old, old way. 
 
 In this same First Gallery, Mr. F. D. Millet has what is probably 
 the best genre picture in the Academy after Mr. Orchardson's. This 
 is called A Love-Letter, and shows us the interior of an old-fashioned 
 room at breakfast-time, with a crusty father reading the newspaper, 
 and a pretty daughter who has just received her love-letter. The 
 work is remarkable for delicacy of touch, both in the rendering of 
 the subject and in its technical treatment. Fancy one of Mr. Marks' 
 pictures, which had been copied and a little altered by Mr. Marcus 
 Stone, and you would have a work not altogether unlike the one of 
 which we are speaking. In these days, it would perhaps be thought 
 a term of abuse to say that this is a piece of Dutch painting ; but to 
 those who, like the present writer, remember with pleasure the clear, 
 solid, unhurried perfection of the old Dutch work, the term may 
 perhaps convey something besides reproach. This is, indeed, a 
 picture which you do not take in at the first glance, and one which 
 does not pall upon you at the second. You may look about the room 
 here, and notice the different things therein, and even be interested 
 m their arrangement, and consider whether it is likely that that 
 arrangement is the ordinary one, and how much trouble the servants 
 must take to keep the old furniture up to such a state of polish. 
 In other words, one is impressed with the reality of the things 
 
 364 
 
shown to us ; a belief in their existence, and therefore an interest in 
 their quaintness or their beauty. Nothing recalls the painter, — we 
 do not feel that there is an easel somewhere on the premises ; no 
 shadow of the white umbrella falls across the picture. Still, techni- 
 cally the work is as dexterous as could be desired, and shows a fine 
 perception of harmonious colour, and a very clever rendering of 
 subdued light. On the whole, an excellent picture, and one which, 
 like all really good artistic work, will never be fashionable and never 
 out of date. 
 
 Take, as a contrast to this, Mr. John Pettie's Clash of Steel, a 
 street scene of bygone times, wherein a woman in a Mary Stuart 
 cap is trying to prevent her lover from joining in a brawl. The 
 picture is full of dramatic force of a certain kind ; but in our opinion 
 belongs to a class of art almost the exact opposite to that of which 
 we have been speaking, and though likely to be popular enough, and 
 certain to arrest the eye in an exhibition, the work possesses no quality 
 of permanence. One feels inclined to say. Yes ; that's a fairly good 
 Pettie ; but we never for a moment believe that these things were so, 
 nor care, indeed, to consider whether they could have been. And 
 as the sentiment, so is the technical character of the painting, — at 
 once able and careless, dirty and brilliant, successful and imperfect ; 
 everything in it forced a little too far for the sake of effect ; action, 
 colour, chiaroscuro, sentiment, all with their e's dotted half-a-dozen 
 times, so that no fool who passes by can fail to recognise the letter. 
 This is the curse of so much of our painting nowadays ; triviality 
 enforced by emphasis, as of a child shrieking at some one who 
 stepped upon one of his toys. 
 
 Let us look at a very different composition. Here is Mr. 
 Orchardson's Her Mothers Voice, a quiet piece of feeling, and a 
 first-rate piece of art, waiting to welcome us when we have escaped 
 from the solid rose-showers of Mr. Alma-Tadema's Heliogabalus, or 
 grown tired of listening to Mr. Armitage's very prosaic Siren ; a 
 maid who surely would never have tempted Ulysses, his master- 
 mariners, and not even the little cabin-boy. Mr. Orchardson's pic- 
 ture has been sufficiently described; we need not linger over the 
 details, I would only ask my readers to consider this picture 
 with reference to the work by Mr. Dicksee of which I just now 
 spoke. For here, too, is a well-worn theme — a daughter singing to 
 her widowed father one of her mother's songs. We might have had 
 here, too, any amount of property surrounding, and prettily-contrasted 
 light and shade, and graceful poses, and general bric-ci-brac, had the 
 painter so wished. This artist, however, was thinking of other 
 things. We might almost fancy that he had forgotten how to com- 
 pose a picture, if, on looking at his work, we cared to remember 
 
 365 
 
that such a thing as artistic composition existed ; and what could be 
 more stupid, from the point of view of cheap melodrama, than to let 
 the girl be a comparatively insignificant figure in the background, 
 and have the uninteresting old father in full light in the front of the 
 picture ? Still, somehow we do not think of these things in looking 
 at this work. We do not think of Mr. Orchardson at all ; we do not 
 care a bit about him, Royal Academician though he be ; but we do 
 wonder about the girl and her fate in after years, and are more than 
 a little sorry f9r the father, and enter into his feelings and .his 
 memories, and all that long dead drama which is over now for him, 
 as everything, in Thackeray's words, is over in life ; as flowers and 
 fury, and pride and passion are over. 
 
 As (I believe) the first writer in England who mentioned favour- 
 ably Mr. Gilbert's work, and predicted his fame, I may perhaps 
 take a legitimate pride in his magnificent achievement of this year, 
 when all men speak well of him, and he can write A.R.A.^ after his 
 name. Royal patronage (or at all events royalties for subject- 
 matter) is apt to try an artist's Capacities to the utmost : witness the 
 Jubilee coinage, and the statues of the Queen and the Prince of 
 Wales which look coldly down upon the new Law Courts from the 
 ancient site of Temple Bar. But Mr. Gilbert has been, not superior 
 — that of course would be- impossible — but equal to his occasion. 
 The good people of Winchester in the year of Jubilee decreed a 
 statue to the Queen, to adorn the market-place of that ancient and 
 loyal city, and chose Mr. Gilbert to execute the same. He has justified 
 the choice to the fullest extent. It may be doubted whether a finer 
 out-of-door statue has been executed during the present generation. 
 Speaking personally, none that I have seen has at once so much 
 artistic intention, so much reasonableness, and so much dignity. 
 And to these qualities — no mean ones, forsooth ! — there is to be 
 added another, probably more rare at the present day than any other 
 artistic grace — the quality of inventiveness. This is not only a. grand 
 statue, but a new one. All the details, all the plan, and the whole 
 execution are alike novel, personal, and unforeseen. The very union 
 therein of individual resemblance with ideal dignity is one which has 
 rarely been attempted since Colleoni first shook his fist at the 
 Venetian populace in the quiet square of San Paolo.* Like all other 
 great original work, this looks strange at first sight. All art does do 
 so that is not platitude in plastic form. One queries the propriety of 
 being at once so realistic and so ideal ; we fret at the delicate detail 
 here, we revolt from the breadth of treatment there. In one breath 
 
 1 Or more strictly A., for the Royal Academy have substituted that for the more significant 
 initials, thinking, I understand, that the single initial is more befitting the Associate, in the 
 same way that this body describes its full-fledged members as Esquires, but only allows the 
 Associate to be plain Mr. So-and-So, for which detail see the Academy Catalogue /ojjzw. 
 
 2 More correctly, in front of the Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. 
 
 366 
 
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we say the Queen cannot be so plain, in another that we are sure she 
 was never so dignified. Too much of a Queen, and too much of a 
 woman, of what could the sculptor have been thinking when he 
 modelled this Janus-natured Victoria for the good people of Win- 
 chester? So at least I fancy many people at the private view 
 thought. 
 
 Well, Mr. Gilbert is a reticent man, and keeps his thoughts to 
 himself as much as he can (for his work reveals many of them), 
 but I fancy that he was full, not only of his subject, but of the 
 occasion on which he had to produce his statue. A statue of the 
 Queen was wanted, nor only that, but a statue of the Queen who for 
 fifty years had ruled a great kingdom with honour, if not in peace. 
 This was no occasion for beautifying, for softening the features of his 
 model; the harsh lines which age, and thought, sorrow, and the 
 cares of empire had written on the once smooth face, were necessary 
 portions, necessary adjuncts to the personality which the occasion 
 was to honour, and above all the character of the Queen, her woman- 
 hood, her individuality, were what the sculptor was set to com- 
 memorate. There once lived such a woman as appears here in this 
 great bronze statue, and she was a Queen who for fifty years ruled our 
 empire. So with no uncertain voice will Mr. Gilbert's statue speak 
 to the Winchester people ^ perhaps for centuries to come, just as the 
 CoUeoni statue speaks to this day to the people of Venice, of a time 
 long since forgotten. Thus much may at least be said with pleasant 
 certainty : there are very few great sculptors, and by God's mercy we 
 have got one of them in Mr. Gilbert ; there is no doubt about the 
 fact, and since having been made an Associate of the Academy has 
 not deteriorated his powers, we may hope they are past the spoiling. 
 There is probably one greater artist living, Auguste Rodin (whose 
 work, by the way, the sapient Hanging Committee of the Academy 
 rejected two or three years ago), but he is a sculptor of sterner 
 mould altogether, and bears to Gilbert much the same relation that 
 Michelangelo does to Benvenuto Cellini. For Gilbert's genius is 
 essentially a genius for bronze work. Marble would fetter his hand 
 and cramp his inventive faculty, which last is evidenced in bronze in 
 a hundred quaint devices, and intricacies of thought and detail. 
 
 Worth noting is the fact that in both these men (Rodin and 
 Gilbert) the spirit is not only peculiar to themselves, but peculiar 
 also to their century. Rodin almost exactly expresses the revolt of 
 the natural man against a century of over-fastidiousness, of corrup- 
 tion, of enervate civilisation ; he strips the clothes violently, almost 
 savagely, from his models ; he discards the thoughts as well as the 
 
 1 That is to say, if the good people of Winchester allow any portion of the statue to remain. 
 Already I hear they have knocked it about considerably. The town council and the vestry 
 disagreed perhaps on its artistic merits. 
 
 367 
 
dress of to-day, and creates for us men and women who have a rude 
 primitive grandeur of their own which owes nothing to tradition, which, 
 so to speak, shows its teeth at the Academy, seeking for another 
 truer, more human, more deeply-implanted dignity than any which 
 has been invented by a school, or sanctioned by a precept. For 
 Rodin of all men is least naturalistic in the ordinary use of that 
 term ; no man feels less the sensuous charm of the body, no man is 
 more sternly ascetic in all that the modern Frenchman adores. 
 Gilbert, on the other hand, if the expression may be pardoned, is a 
 pure sensualist ; the life of the body, of the flesh, the skin, the warm 
 blood coursing through the veins, the grace of long limbs, of certain 
 attitudes — these are the things which form the substratum of his art, 
 and round which he weaves his most delicate fancies. We feel this 
 even in the statue of the Queen ; there is an almost unpleasant 
 insistence upon the aged appearance of the skin, etc., and it is only 
 his innate sense of form, and perhaps his long study of classical 
 models, which prevents his approaching that perilous gulf of un- 
 diluted naturalism into which the best Italian sculptors of to-day 
 frequently fall. 
 
 Sir Frederick Leighton's work comes next to this in importance, it 
 not in actual merit; indeed, with all its drawbacks, the picture is 
 such as no other member of the Academy could achieve, or (with one 
 exception, Mr Watts) rival. The President's subject this year is 
 Captive Andromache ; Andromache, after the fall of Troy, fetching 
 water for her Grecian Lord. The scene — did this strike the artist, 
 we wonder ? — is almost the Faust scene at the well over again, with 
 a Trojan Marguerite, and affords Sir Frederick Leighton an ample 
 opportunity for showing all his artistic knowledge. There is no 
 need to describe the picture, since most of my readers are doubtless 
 well acquainted with the work : but I should wish to say a word or 
 two on what seemed to me to be the chief defect in the com- 
 position. The defect, that is, of knowledge trying in vain to do 
 duty for spontaneity and life, of grace of deportment (such as 
 might have been taught by a Greek Turveydrop) being substituted 
 for feeling and action, of an absence of contrast, and of all those 
 common, jarring, but necessary ingredients of life which prevent its 
 being over-sweet, at the same time that they render it tolerable. 
 For this is but a copybook Greece with which Sir Frederick 
 is so much enamoured ; life was not all cakes and ale in Attica, any 
 more than in Clapham, and indeed, if my classical friend Mr. 
 Sacheverel Coke is to be believed (and he knows more about these 
 subjects than most men), a Greek damsel clothed herself in gaudy 
 robes covered with spots, stripes, and chequers, made of good thick 
 serviceable stuff, much after the fashion of that indulged in by the 
 bourgeoisie of to-day, and even went in for tight jackets, those 
 supposedly modern inventions. 
 
 368 
 
However this may be, our artists know and care very little about 
 the archaeology of the matter, nor is it worth while to upbraid Sir 
 Frederick because he does not put his Andromache in a tight jacket, 
 or sow her gown all over with stars and palm branches, dots or 
 stripes. But it is worth while to point out that a picture of this 
 size and elaboration should derive its claim upon our attention either 
 from accuracy to historical fact, or from accuracy to the repre- 
 sentation of some emotion or action which is beyond the reach of 
 time. Scarcely worth while we feel is it to drag poor Andromache 
 from her two-thousand-year-old tomb to make her figure in a deco- 
 rative show in which the first nameless damsel might have played her 
 r$le mtiet. And the feeling is just ; no one plays slow music save at 
 the crisis of the melodrama, and this Captive Andromache is slow 
 music of a pictorial kind. 
 
 Mr. Ruskin once said of another work by the President (then 
 plain Frederick Leighton) something to the effect that it irritated 
 him to find that all this grand straddling and turning down the 
 lamps, etc., only meant practically an Egyptian lad shying stones at 
 sparrows, and a similar remark is not inapplicable here. AH this 
 paraphernalia of elaborate gesture, of duplicate actions, of graceful 
 poses, of careful composition, is only to introduce us to the merest dea 
 ex machind of an Andromache, who attracts no whit of our .sym- 
 pathy, whom we shrewdly suspect of being only a super carefully 
 trained for the part. 
 
 So much for the motive of the picture. On the technical side there 
 is much to be said, both in praise and objection, on which I have no 
 space to linger. The science of the composition is evident at a 
 glance, and yet, great as this is, it is insufficient. The groups are 
 composed together, and yet — the de'il's in it — they are like opposing 
 cliques at an At Home, and won't mix. There are six distinct 
 masses in the picture ; indeed we might (with a little Irishism) say 
 there are seven, and that Andromache makes a group all to herself 
 in the middle of the composition. Worse still, she divides the work 
 into two nearly equal halves, and has three groups on her right hand 
 and three on her left. Much too might be said about the colour, 
 which is discordant in several places, especially in the bright yellow 
 robe of the woman with the child in the foreground, and in the 
 crimson fez of the man on her right hand. And, again, it were 
 scarcely hypercriticism to object to the fact that all the personages on 
 the right hand of Andromache, are turning their backs upon her, the 
 principal actress in the scene. 
 
 All these matters are faults more or less important, but worth in- 
 sisting upon is the fact that the picture might possess all these and 
 3 B 369 
 
yet be great, and justify the painter's commission. The true reason 
 why this work does not do so is that it seeks beauty by the wrong 
 road ; by the mere scientific addition of beautiful details. Almost all 
 these groups are individually beautiful, but they injure rather than 
 complete one another. Andromache's figure is also both elegant and 
 magnificent, but the emotion she should have caused us is frittered 
 away in the arrangement of her drapery, in giving a sculpturesque 
 quality to her pose ; and so throughout the picture all is artificial, and 
 is felt to be so of malice prepense. The painter has not seen, he 
 has concocted, this subject — deliberation, not impulse, has presided 
 over its birth. In consequence the labour is, plainly speaking, labour 
 thrown away, and the beautiful incidents lead nowhither. This is 
 no picture of a Grecian land where Andromache lived captive after 
 her good days of Troy ; but only a decorative panel by a skilful 
 artist who can do almost anything except allow himself and us to 
 forget that he has learnt his business in half-a-dozen Academies. 
 
 Exactly opposite to Sir Frederick Leigh ton's great classical panel 
 hangs Sir John Millais' only contribution to this year's Academy, 
 Murtly Moss, Perthshire : a beautiful landscape study ; not a picture. 
 I say not a picture, because it shows us the sum of one impression 
 of Nature only, not the result of many ; because its beauty is motive- 
 less, as if the painting had been done by a camera instead of a 
 human hand ; because there is no evidence of selection of arrange- 
 ment ; because there is no personal note, no completed (or even 
 incomplete) idea. 
 
 Here is a very simple proof of the truth of these objections. Look 
 at the work for a short time carefully and a strange sense of incom- 
 pletion — a deficiency of which we do not at first perceive the reason 
 — comes over us. What is it that we lack .? After a moment the 
 answer comes clearly ; what this study wants, is — the rest of the 
 landscape ! What does this mean ? That the work has neither 
 beginning nor end ; that it is a piece snatched out of the middle of 
 Nature's storehouse. We feel inclined to cry stop thief! as Sir John 
 makes away with his booty. Where, Sir John, is the rest of the 
 panorama? Consider this point a litrie! We go to Scotland, or 
 wherever it may be, in a railway train, and straightway before our 
 eyes there flash a continual series of scenes from Nature as the train 
 rushes on. Are these pictures ? Not a bit of it. We have no 
 preference for one moment's view over another, unless it be that 
 we catch sight of some little incident of rustic or urban life — a girl 
 standing beside her sweetheart watching the train, a boy shepherding 
 in the fields, some labourers toiling homeward through the evening 
 shadows, or resting under the elm trees after their mid^day meal. For 
 all or any of these trivial matters will, so to speak, identify the scene 
 
 370 
 
Imp. DnAEnRR et Lssisunj Paris 
 
 THE SLEEPY POOL 
 
 Facsimile of an original drawing by Ernest Parton 
 
with ourselves, and a quicker than electric interchange of sympathies 
 takes place between us ; and though the express be flying along at 
 sixty miles an hour, our hearts have outstripped its speed, and are 
 the richer for one more of those definite human impressions, by 
 which, all unconsciously, the fabric of our life is built. I feel this the 
 more strongly in the present picture because of the accomplishment 
 of its painting. Accomplishment is here the right word, for there is 
 a prettiness about the colour, and a finish in the execution of this 
 work, which is akin to that of porcelain painting, and perhaps no 
 more severe blame could be justly given to this representation of 
 Nature than to say that it could be satisfactorily reproduced upon a 
 china plate. Scattered pools fledged with sedgy grass and closed in 
 by a belt of Scotch firs (which stretch across the picture), above 
 which we see the crests of distant mountains ; a grey-white sky, with 
 long ranks of horizontal cloud ; some reeds and flowering grasses 
 which fill the foreground — such is the subject-matter of the chief land- 
 scape in the Royal Academy. Yes, that is the worst of it. Though it 
 be a study and not a picture, though its execution is in its finicking 
 dexterity but the apotheosis of a young lady's pottery painting, it is 
 nevertheless the landscape of the exhibition ; and having spoken of 
 several of its deficiencies (or what seem to me to be such), let me 
 do entire justice to its admirable merits of light and atmosphere. 
 Through these ranks of cloud, a soft yet brilliant flood of light over- 
 spreads the whole scene and bathes every detail therein with bright- 
 ness and translucency ; a cool freshness seems to reach us from the 
 distant mountains, driving away the mist which still lingers by the 
 borders of the fir wood. The whole scene is as faithful, as it is vivid, 
 in representation of these facts. 
 
 For the rest, shall we say with Swinburne that we can only get 
 from a man what he has in him to give, and that we should accept 
 that gratefully ? Only before Millais was Sir John, there were two 
 or three pictures, not quite forgotten yet, called The Huguenot, 
 Ophelia, The Vale of Rest, etc. ; and when I think of these, and still 
 more when I remember those splendid illustrations to Framley 
 Parsonage, and Orley Farm, which showed us English womanhood, 
 and English manhood too, at its healthiest and best, then I grudge 
 the painter of Murtly Moss his salmon river, his baronetcy, and his 
 thousands, and should like to put him back on the Bloomsbury back 
 floor where he painted the pictures which moved the heart of a 
 nation. He might be as pre-Raphaelite as he pleased, or the reverse ; 
 the manner of the execution was not the essence of the matter. The 
 essence of the matter was that the heart within the man was beating 
 responsive to a genuine feeling — that he was expressing himself; 
 saying much, and saying it definitely and truly. To-day he is 
 expressing nothing but his power of painting. 
 
 371 
 
Mr. Blair Leighton's work^ has been inserted here less for the 
 intrinsic merit of the picture than because this artist is one of those 
 who have seemed to me to bring to the study of painting qualities of 
 earnestness and worthiness of aim such as are very rare amongst 
 our younger men. 
 
 It is a relief to find a capable artist of the younger generation who is 
 not led away by the flashy dexterities of the French school, who 
 does not leave his work half finished to show how dexterously he 
 laid on the paint, who does seek for adequate subjects, and when he 
 has found them shirks no difficulty which lies in his way. 
 
 Mr. Alma - Tadema's painting is in actual handicraft the most 
 accomplished in the Academy, and his knowledge of the subjects he 
 treats — or rather of the hard facts on which these subjects depend 
 for their pictorial realisation — is enormous, but I think in no other 
 country than ours would he have risen to such eminence of fame, 
 amongst painters as well as laymen. No French artist would care 
 very greatly for his work, if only for its Gothic character ; its 
 stolidity would offend a Gaul, as much as it delights us Anglo- 
 Saxons. In the pernianence of these marble pillars, in the clear-cut 
 detail of each patterned robe, chased cup, or carved sofa, we English 
 people find fresh material for admiration and fresh food for dis- 
 cussion ; but accomplished painter, scientific draughtsman, learned 
 student though he be, Mr. Alma-Tadema is in some artistic matters 
 merely as a boy playing at marbles. Look in imagination at the 
 single work he contributes this year, The Roses of Heliogabalus. 
 It does not need to be a very profound student of ancient history to 
 have some recollections evoked by the name of the cruel wanton 
 boy whose brief reign of mingled folly and debauch was fitly closed 
 by the swords of the legionaries. Not perhaps the most edifying of 
 subjects for a great painter, even if rightly understood, but at all 
 events one which might have made a grand picture, not without a 
 stern moral lesson. But Mr. Tadema has treated it in another 
 fashion, as a good decent father of a family who pays his butcher 
 and baker with due regularity might be expected to conceive the 
 scene. A group of carefully-posed figures round the couch of the 
 emperor, who looks placidly down on the scene below him; the 
 foreground is filled with a tumbling mass of rose leaves, which fall 
 not singly but in great solid lumps, as if they had been stuck 
 together for the purpose. Amidst these are seen here and there 
 
 — rari nantes in gurgite vasto — 
 
 the heads and arms of guests who have been submerged beneath 
 this flood of roses ; a corner of the velarium, with a broken rope 
 
 ' Reproduced on the opposite page. 
 
attached, shows how the shower has been achieved. This is but a 
 Whiteley kind of Heliogabalus — an emperor of furniture and bric-a- 
 brac, and his revelry that of a schoolboy's play. I do not here enter 
 into the wider question, whether it is artistically ever permissible to 
 Bowdlerise a subject for the sake of the cheek of the young person ; 
 but there is no doubt that there are some subjects which you cannot 
 Bowdlerise without extinguishing their meaning altogether. If you 
 must paint Heliogabalus, at least paint what that name implies if 
 you want intelligent people to believe in your work. Give us the 
 luxury, the recklessness, the mad, lustful impression of this debauch 
 which you have selected from all subjects in heaven and earth to 
 expend your powers upon ; and then, Mr. Tadema, when you have 
 got at the heart of your subject, and set it down in those clear 
 accents which we all know so well, we will say whether the beauty 
 of the scene or the meaning of the lesson has justified you artist- 
 ically or morally (or both) in ferreting out the most disreputable of 
 Roman -emperors, and bringing him back to earth on the walls of 
 Burlington House. But you must be single-minded ; no one with 
 any artistic feeling will accept such a subject as this because of the 
 excuse it affords you for painting a mass of blossom. The picture 
 is therefore a failure, rightly considered ; it just touches the fringe 
 of its supposed subject, but in reality its motive is to be found in the 
 superficial details rather than the essentials of the scene, for the 
 essentials are — absent. 
 
 Our greatest portrait painter, Mr. Watts, is practically unrepre- 
 sented this year, but his honours are worn very worthily by another 
 artist whose work has this year surpassed itself, and, as far as the 
 exhibition at Burlington House is concerned, distanced all its com- 
 petitors. Never has Mr. Frank Holl painted so well, with such an 
 entire absence of affectation, with so much power and dignity, and in 
 such good colour. The work of this artist has for the most part 
 been a little extravagant in pose and gesture, a little forced in its 
 vivid contrasts of light and shade ; but now there is nothing of all 
 this, and of the two best portraits, those of Mr. Gladstone and Earl 
 Spencer,^ not a word can be said — or at all events shall be said 
 here— which is not a word of praise. The Spencer is the finest 
 picture, the Gladstone the most noble portrait, and indeed with such 
 a subject the painter might well be successful. Mr. Holl had a hard 
 task; Sir John Millais had painted Mr. Gladstone in one of his 
 happiest veins, and had made a most beautiful, impressive, and 
 delightful picture. In the respect of colour Mr. H oil's work can- 
 not rival this, but in the solidity with which the head is modelled, 
 and the penetration with which the painter has expressed the sitter's 
 character, I prefer the present work. Indeed, the painting of this 
 
 1 Perhaps the portrait of Sir William Jeniier should also be classed with these. 
 
 373 
 
head is a masterpiece, and makes everything around it look weak, 
 sketchy, and coarse. 
 
 The picture on the opposite page^ is the best that Mr. Logsdail 
 has as yet painted, and if he were to sit down and consider it as a 
 stranger, it might work a revolution in his art ; and this for the 
 reason that the faults, the wrong tendencies of his painting, are here 
 seen upon the surface, equally with his merits, and a child can mark 
 that the picture is at once coarse and clever, true and uninteresting, 
 stirring and motiveless, vivid and tame. No city, least of all our 
 London, was ever quite so prosaic as this, no passers-by so char- 
 acterless, no light and shade at once so brilliant and so harsh. Said 
 a friend to me as we stood before this work. If ever a photograph 
 represents colour, that is what would be the result. But though the 
 remark had a certain plausibility, it did not touch the root of the 
 matter. Mr. Logsdail has tried hard in this work to actually render 
 the scene as it was before him. It is an open secret that he sat in 
 a kind of van by St. Martin's-in-the- Fields (by the kind permission 
 of the police) through half this cheerful spring-winter, and he has 
 succeeded in getting into his picture some atmosphere of a queer 
 cold lilac hue, and putting his figures therein. A photograph (in 
 colour) would prove him to be not right but wrong. The atmo- 
 sphere has not this cold quality ; could not possibly have unless the 
 sun threw the same coloured light as the electric lamps in the Place 
 de rOpera. But the great defect of the picture is its lack of 
 sympathy, its want of poetry. The people therein are worse than 
 lay figures ; they are human beings in whom the artist has seen, and 
 for whom he has cared — nothing. Now, we may allow that if a 
 painter seeks ideal beauty of any kind — if his nature leads him to 
 feel most keenly, for instance, the beauty of arranged draperies — as 
 in the pictures by Mr. Albert Moore — we may perhaps allow him to 
 neglect that rarer beauty still, the beauty of deep human sympathy. 
 But if he paint us the scenes, costumes, and people of to-day — and I 
 hold that these form his best and most vital subjects — he must show 
 us that he does so because he understands, knows, and feels with 
 them, that he sees in them, too, some quality of loveliness, that he 
 does not take them by chance, and leave them with indifference. 
 This is Mr. Logsdail's deficiency at present. I hope the time will 
 come when he will turn his splendid powers of realisation to realising 
 something which will make us glad, interested, or sorry, and not 
 leave us coldly admiring. 
 
 1 I owe especial thanks to this artist for his kindness in not only allowing me to reproduce 
 his work, but for his taking the trouble to. do a very brilliant black and white sketch thereof 
 especially for me. I trust my very plain words will not offend him 
 
 374 
 
Y QQr\ ^^^ ^"" ^^^ ^°"^^ ^^ ^^^'' ^^^ ^^'^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^'■^^ 
 1 O O O Monday in May which is annually marked by the 
 
 -X opening of the Royal Academy.^ The banquet has 
 
 been eaten, the speeches made, the graces sung, the patrons have 
 
 purchased, the President purred, the Prime Minister patronised and 
 
 promised, the Prince been present, the (well-behaved) painters 
 
 praised, and the press has paragraphed to its heart's and pocket's 
 
 content. All is for the best in this best of possible institutions, and 
 
 so in his usual cow-like state of content John Bull stands in the 
 
 sunshine happily chewing the cud of his year's art. And in these 
 
 old Gray's Inn gardens as I write, the trees are budding fast, the 
 
 birds singing blithely, and beyond and above blossom and song 
 
 there rises the mighty inarticulate voice of London. How the birds 
 
 sing, and how bright is the green of these first spring leaves which 
 
 rustle against my windows ! How tender are the shadows of the 
 
 tree-trunks and boughs upon the well-kept grass, how beautiful the 
 
 colour of those dull, smoke - stained old houses seen in the blue 
 
 distance through the mist of sunshine ! The broad paths have been 
 
 swept and garnished, the benches fresh painted, and beneath the 
 
 window there are strolling idly two friends — college chums, I fancy, 
 
 from little intangible signs and gestures — of whom one wears a long 
 
 black clerical coat and the orthodox tall hat, whilst the other has 
 
 anticipated the summer, in light tweed suit and a brown wideawake. 
 
 Their footsteps loiter beneath the window, and their young voices, 
 
 fresh, insistent, and eager, float up to me. They are dreaming, 
 
 planning the future ; the world is opening out before them, and there 
 
 is not a note of bird or a whisper of the great city voice which does 
 
 not suggest to them a fancy or inspire them with a hope. Oh ! my 
 
 Posthumus, how the years go by ! Thirteen have passed since I 
 
 first sat in Gray's Inn writing notes on the Royal Academy with 
 
 great hopes of what I would do, or help in doing, for English 
 
 art and artists in the coming years. Thfs, and that, and the other 
 
 good thing should be done. How well I remember the self-made 
 
 promises ; how all the dreams come back to-day, and the ghost of 
 
 that long dead first press view at Burlington House rises before me. 
 
 Is it conceivable that any human being should be proud of the post 
 
 of art critic ? ^ Well, I was that day, and am conscious now that I 
 
 betrayed myself thoroughly to the keen-eyed porter, who, noticing a 
 
 new face, keenly scrutinised my admission ticket. We grew to 
 
 be great friends, this functionary and myself, though we never 
 
 recognised each other except upon this annual occasion, and 
 
 a certain little ceremony of a pecuniary nature somehow grew 
 
 into observance between us, accompanied by the following 
 
 * Part of an article written for the Universal Review. 
 
 ' " No," say Messrs. Andrew Lang and Spielmann, and they are officially art critics, and 
 ought to know. 
 
 375 
 
profoundly original dialogue, which I reproduce here as typically 
 English :^- 
 
 " Good morning, sir. Another year gone, sir." 
 
 " Yes. How are you getting on ? " 
 
 " Little rheumatism, sir, — thank you, sir." 
 
 Such, sometimes varied by the nature of his complaint, was our 
 conversation till it changed to — 
 
 "Good morning, sir." 
 " Hullo! You're not my old friend." 
 "No, sir." 
 
 " Where is he, then ? " 
 
 "He was pensioned last year. He's quite comfortable, sir. I 
 spent most of my last holiday with him." 
 
 So the red official gowns change owners, and the faces we know 
 slip one by one away, till we stand in a world we scarcely recognise, 
 and look vainly round for a face, even of an enemy, which belongs to 
 the time of our hot youth. 
 
 All of which, I confess, has little enough to do with the Royal 
 Academy Exhibition, which grows yearly green as the spring-time 
 grass, and is oblivious of all persons of such low degree as journalists 
 and critics, save on one day of the year. It is matter of public 
 history now that these last inferior persons (I am glad to say that I 
 anticipated the result, and refused to sign the humble petition) had 
 the presumption to beg the Academicians to allow them a second 
 day on which to do their work, pleading the absurd excuse that they 
 could not give careful consideration to 2196 works of art in a single 
 day. " Absurd ! " replied the Academicians with one voice — " utterly 
 absurd ! You need not look at them. You've only to write about 
 them, and if you'll come to our studios beforehand we'll tell you what 
 to say." So nowadays all the good little critics go and learn their 
 lessons beforehand, and the dignity of art is much advanced thereby. 
 Also, there is avoided by this ingenious arrangement much of that 
 unpleasantness which results from the writer's imperfect apprehen- 
 sion of the merits of the work of art on which he discourses, and 
 the public gains the inestimable advantage of hearing the Titians 
 and Michelangelos of the nineteenth century sing their own 
 praises, though, with touching modesty, the singer for the most 
 part conceals his identity. 
 
 Few people outside the artist world recognise how much the art 
 of landscape painting in England has suffered from the practical 
 boycott which is placed upon water-colour art by the Royal Academy, 
 and especially from the substitution of foreign methods and foreign 
 art ideals for those of our own country. Although in the earlier 
 
 376 
 
MV HEART'S IN THK HIGHLANDS 
 
 .KiSKlMI I'WRqrirARSriX 
 
years of this century we led the world in this art, we have allowed it 
 to perish from amongst us in order to enable our young artists to 
 produce third-rate copies of the work which is done at Barbizon or 
 Gres, or in the lofty studios which look down upon the Seine. 
 English art has not been good enough for us Englishmen, forsooth ! 
 — the art of Gainsborough and Bonington, Constable and Wilkie, 
 of "Old Crome" and Cox, of Turner and De Wint, of Nasmyth 
 and Richard Wilson and William Collins, of Stanfield and David 
 Roberts, and, in our own day, of George Fripp, Samuel Palmer, 
 J. W. North, Thomas Collier, H. G. Hine, Alfred Hunt, and last, not 
 least, James Aumonier, So when the tottering feet of our students 
 have learnt the first elements of artistic progression, we nowadays 
 find it necessary to buy them a third-class ticket to Paris in order that 
 they may finish their education with Gervex or Duran ; and finish 
 their education they do, in the fullest sense of the term, for thence- 
 forward they learn nothing ; that whole art of painting, which took 
 our greatest artists a lifetime to imperfectly acquire, being taught to 
 this younger and wiser generation in a dozen or two brilliant lessons 
 from a fat French model. Since this is the case, it was with the 
 greater pleasure and with the more fervent admiration that I found 
 in this year's exhibition of the Royal Academy a landscape by Mr. 
 Fred Goodall which possessed several of the best qualities of our 
 older landscapes, and in which there was no trace of foreign influ- 
 ence, of eccentricity, incompletion, coarseness, or exaggeration. The 
 subject speaks for itself,^ for there are few of us Londoners, at all 
 events, who do not know the view over Harrow and the Surrey 
 Hills which Mr. Goodall has chosen. There was at first some 
 doubt as to the exact name to be given to the picture, and the 
 present writer ventured to suggest that the title should be simply 
 England, for it seemed to him to embody much that was distinct- 
 ively national. The green fields with their grazing sheep, cattle, 
 and horses, the shepherd and the peasant girl in the foreground, the 
 great public school in the distance, the tapering spire of the little 
 church on the hill with its famous memories, the blue hills and 
 woods in the distance, the soft rainy brightness of the atmosphere, 
 the rich freshness of the grass, even the long line of white smoke 
 which shows where the North- Western express is hurling itself sea- 
 ward — these seem to me to make up a whole not unworthy of the 
 typical title. Mr. Goodall, however, quite wisely, no doubt, thought 
 otherwise, and has called his picture — rather elaborately, Harrow- 
 on-the-Hill, from the field known as Polly MandrilFs, Harrow 
 Weald. However, the title matters but little. What does matter, is 
 that everyone will _/^^/ this to be England, though it does not chance 
 
 1 By the great kindness of the artist, I am enabled to give in my quarto edition a faithful 
 reproduction of this beautiful work in the autotype 'facing this page, which has been made 
 from a monochrome oil painting, specially executed for me by Mr. Goodall. 
 
 3 c zn 
 
to be called so ; and is it not a pleasant thing to find that this 
 veteran painter, who has spent all his youth and prime of artistic 
 manhood in painting the scenery and traditions of Arabia and 
 Egypt, has come back now unshackled in spirit, unabated in enthusi- 
 asm, and undimmed in eyesight, to illustrate the beauties of the 
 land which gave him birth, and the fields in which he played as 
 a boy ? If we could but see it, pictures such as this are those that 
 Englishmen should love and English art encourage — they exhibit 
 one side, and that no ignoble one, of the national life which has 
 made us what we are. They are comprehensible and beautiful 
 alike to every child, youth and maiden, man and woman, who walks 
 through the gallery ; and fifty or a hundred years hence, when the 
 English imitations of French method and sentiment which are so 
 popular to-day will long have been swept away into the rubbish 
 heap, people will come and look at this landscape, and other pictures 
 of the same unpretentious, pleasant truth, and tell one another that 
 that was what England looked like in those long-passed days when 
 there were still green fields to be found within a dozen miles of 
 London. Do not let me be misunderstood. I do not claim for this 
 picture any vast amount of high artistic value. I do not think it 
 to be, either in beauty of colour, or power of composition, or in 
 strength, or delicacy, the equal of the works of the great masters of 
 English landscape painting who have been named at the beginning 
 of this article. The composition does lack, no doubt, the spark of 
 divine genius with which De Wint or Turner would have endowed 
 it, but when this is said, all hint of disparagement must cease. This 
 is essentially a picture as opposed to a study — one which not only 
 faithfully, but beautifully, records the facts with which it is concerned, 
 and which has been wrought out, to the utmost of the artist's ability, 
 face to face with Nature herself; and so powerful is the influence of 
 these qualities and this method, that to the delight of all lovers of 
 genuine work, Harrow, etc., hung here at the end of the great room 
 of the Academy, makes even the finer artistic work in the gallery 
 seem by comparison stale and laboured. Mr. Goodall has opened 
 for us a window in the walls of Burlington House, through which we 
 see and hear — not the shops of Piccadilly and the rattle of hansoms — 
 but the sunlight falling softly upon English meadows, and the sheep 
 tearing at the fresh, sweet grass. This is a good object lesson for 
 young English painters, a lesson in humility as well as skill, a visible 
 repetition of the old, ever true lines of Longfellow : 
 
 " That is best which lieth nearest ; 
 Shape from that thy work of art" 
 
 Here as elsewhere the extremes touch, and for once we have that 
 painter who should be our greatest — who perhaps is our greatest, 
 if purely technical capacity be reckoned with — in an unwontedly 
 
 378 
 
humble frame of mind, and doing, I had almost said unconsciously, 
 his best work. 
 
 No one who has even the slightest touch of poetical feeling can 
 pass by Sir John Millais' The Old Garden without experiencing 
 both intense pleasure, and that touch of sadness which the sight of 
 very peaceful, secluded scenes, marked with the traditibns of bygone 
 days, is wont to awaken. The story is perfectly told ; not, some 
 would think, a hard matter, since there may be said to be none to 
 tell, in the sense that there is no hint of special incident or experi- 
 ence ; nevertheless the canvas is crowded with memories and fancies 
 none the less actual because they are only comprehended — perhaps 
 unuttered speech is indeed the only form of language which is 
 essentially true. And the speech of colour in this picture, and the 
 association and arrangement of form, will, whether the artist knew 
 it or no, tell to many of us the story of the lives which have been 
 pcissed in the grey stone house which peeps out above the close- 
 clipped garden hedges. Mr. GoodaU's picture, with many merits, 
 lacked the touch of genius which is to be found here. Is it not 
 strange to notice that the whole inner atmosphere of Sir John Millais' 
 work belongs, not to his later years of world-wide reputation, rank, 
 and riches, but to those days when he painted The Eve of St. Agnes, 
 and Christ in the Home of his Parents. 
 
 Fortunately there is in the Royal Academy at the present time 
 plain proof of the capacity of English sculptors in a group which has 
 more power and more individuality than any which has appeared 
 since Alfred Gilbert first exhibited — this is The Hounds held in Leash, 
 by Mr. Harry Bates, a life-size group of horizontal shape, in which 
 the hounds straining forward have almost pulled their keeper to the 
 ground, whilst he with one foot pressed firmly against the rock is 
 just able to restrain them. The group is singularly fine, both in 
 force and originality and in beauty of composition. The lines of 
 limb in the man, repeat and continue themselves in the form and 
 position of the hounds, and give a sense of unity to the whole group, 
 at the same time that they satisfy the eye. But the pre-eminent 
 quality of the work is strength and manliness. The nude figure 
 is modelled boldly — almost roughly — and his face is strong : finely 
 conceived in the expression of power, resolution, and struggle. How 
 a man whose work has hitherto (at least so far as the present writer 
 is aware) been delicate low-relief plaques could produce such a 
 magnificent, heroic group in the round as this — a work which places 
 him at a bound in the foremost rank of our sculptors — is a puzzle. I 
 can only imagine that he has long been concentrating himself upon 
 this group. If so, he has his reward, for though by no means 
 perfect, his work makes all the other sculpture in the room look 
 mean, lifeless, and small, and would do so to an even greater degree 
 
 379 
 
but that the Hanging Committee, with their usual indifference to the 
 merit of sculpture by outside contributors, have placed the group 
 where it can only be seen properly from in front. 
 
 I cannot leave the consideration of this work without pointing out 
 how completely Mr. Bates has fulfilled one great condition of fine 
 sculpture, and that is the condition of making his statue look well 
 not only from one or two, but practically from all, points of view. 
 One may walk slowly all round this group nor find a single spot 
 whence the lines are ugly, awkward, or insignificant. By the 
 majority of English sculptors this condition is much ignored, and 
 Academy sculpture especially has been habitually constructed to be 
 seen only from in front, in a position exactly facing the statue. 
 
 Mention may be made of the fact that both the Academy and the 
 press practically ignored this sculpture of Mr. Bates, in 1889, and 
 until a year or two afterwards, when the same statue was cast in 
 bronze. Two years later an inferior work of Mr. Bates' was pur- 
 chased with the Chantrey Fund, and of course the artist made an 
 Associate. 
 
 One painter was absent from the Royal Academy for the first 
 time, to the best of my recollection, for the last twenty years, and 
 this was Mr. Albert Moore, who could not get his great picture 
 finished in time for exhibition. I saw this well on towards completion 
 some time before the sending-in day ; but the artist then told me he 
 saw no hopes of "getting it through." So I asked him to let me have 
 a little sketch, which I reproduce on the opposite page as a specimen 
 of his slighter work — wishing to say once more, in this article, what 
 has been frequently said by me elsewhere during the last dozen 
 years, that it is a disgrace to the Royal Academy not to have made 
 this artist an Associate many a long year ago. Those who remember 
 such of his pictures as Daffodils, The Painters Tribute to the Art 
 of Music, the Venus, the Follow my Leader, and many others, will 
 know I have the fullest reason for my words, in stating that Mr. 
 Moore's quality as an artist of the highest scientific knowledge, of the 
 most exquisite perception of the beauties of the draped and undraped 
 figure, as a subtle, most refined colourist, and as a delicate and 
 learned draughtsman, is such as to challenge comparison with that of 
 any member of the Academy. And with all this he is a painter who 
 has never gone one step out of what he considers the true path of 
 art to conciliate the taste of the multitude or to enrich himself! If 
 such as these are not men whom the Academy should delight to 
 honour, for what purpose does an Academy exist ? If the artists 
 themselves, when they have the power, will not reward first-rate and 
 long-sustained work, who can we hope will be likely to do so .■• For 
 several years before the election of Mr. Henry Moore, the sea- 
 
 380 
 
^/l.>r 
 
 ■HtX 
 
 
 
 ,-/■ 'i/t 
 
 4S^-" 
 
 STL'DV OF A MEAD. ~- Albert Moore 
 
painter, who was kept outside the Academic ranks till he was nearly 
 fifty years old, though he had been acknowledged for twenty years to 
 be the finest sea-painter in England, I challenged the Royal Academy 
 annually in the Spectator to produce a single reason, good, bad, or 
 indifferent, why they excluded these two men, Albert and Henry 
 Moore, from the ranks of the Associates. I now renew the challenge 
 on behalf of the former, only this time I ask, not the Council of 
 Burlington House, but the people of England, to express their 
 verdict. We all know the oft-quoted proverb as to the relative value 
 of fact and theory. Well, against all the theoretical praise which has 
 been lavished during the last week upon the management of Bur- 
 lington House, take as a slight counterpoise the fact that they have 
 managed in the course of thirty years to practically kill English 
 landscape art, and that, of the greatest painters of the present 
 generation, a large proportion of the best are either outside their 
 ranks, or have been admitted to them grudgingly in late middle age, 
 in order that they might strengthen with their glory, the institution 
 which had nothing but derision and neglect for them during their 
 time of manhood and struggle. Such a course of action may perhaps 
 be, from the narrow shopkeeper point of view, worldly wise, but that 
 it is worthy of a great nation, and conducive to the progress of a great 
 art, the present writer at least must be allowed to deny. 
 
 Q The most purely artistic work of this year's exhibi- 
 
 J OOO ^^°" ^' '■^^ Royal Academy, was to be found in the 
 >^ pictures of the outsiders — those artists whose initials 
 
 are, like the hero's wounds, all in front. Of these, two contributions 
 stand out as pre-eminently interesting — the one for having been 
 painted by a young and comparatively unknown artist; the other 
 for being the last of a long succession of beautiful pictures, one or 
 two of which have for the last quarter of a century or so formed a 
 chief element in the attractiveness of each annual collection at Bur- 
 lington House or the National Gallery.^ Of Mr. Swan's Lioness 
 defending her Cubs we will speak later, and first talk a little of Mr, 
 Albert Moore's Summer Night — a portion of which composition 
 faces this page. Purposes of copyright frequently interfere with the 
 reproduction of new pictures, and this was the reason which forced us 
 in the present instance to give such a maimed presentment of the 
 work in question. The picture, a very large one, hung in a corner 
 of the fifth room by the door, in an extremely unbecoming light, and 
 we may safely say looked as bad as would be possible under any 
 circumstances. Still, the Hanging Committee (or let us say Fate, or 
 chance) notwithstanding, the work, like all really great art, asserts its 
 quality irresistibly. Thank God for beautiful women, said the old 
 
 1 Perhaps my younger readers may have forgotten that up to about 1870 the Royal 
 Academy had no separate building for either their schools or annual exhibitions. 
 
Greek, and we may well echo his saying, and add a rider of recog- 
 nition and thankfulness to the artist who can see and set down on 
 canvas so much of the beauty of women as Mr. Albert Moore 
 has here moulded to his artistic purpose — has woven into a 
 wavering line of graceful gesture and lovely forms and faces, and 
 surrounded with pale harmonies of golden flowers and snowy 
 draperies, beyond which the moonlit sea rises softly - splendid in 
 the hush of the summer night. 
 
 Look at this composition— remembering that this is only a fragment 
 of the original picture — and judge whether the words are exaggerated, 
 when we say that the quality of beauty in this work is the same as 
 that which can be traced in a fine Greek statue; beauty, that is, 
 which is independent of detail, and pathetic, dramatic, or interesting 
 circumstance, but which springs from a deep understanding and love 
 of what is truly beautiful in Nature, and of the power to so use that 
 affection and that knowledge as to quicken them with the keener, 
 newer, more personal life of art. 
 
 At the risk of being wearisome in justification, I venture to indicate 
 the basis on which this criticism rests. We will omit all reference to 
 what may be called the purely technical beauty of the picture, i.e. the 
 selection of beautiful lines and forms, the harmonies of composition 
 and inventiveness of design, and mention only the actual, so to 
 speak the piece-meal, evidences of the painter's insight into the 
 beautiful. Of these, the first — which must be the first of every worthy 
 painting of the nude or partially nude form — is the sense of the 
 mingled delicacy and strength, softness and dignity, of the human body. 
 In all great Greek sculpture and design, and Italian flesh painting, we 
 are made to feel first of all, chiefly, and in many instances exclusively, 
 the beauty of the whole mass of the human body. Directly the 
 Roman copyist or the painter of the later Renaissance days comes 
 in, he begins to linger fondly over details and elaboration of the 
 sinews and muscles, and delights in showing his knowledge by 
 analysis instead of synthesis ; but all really great sculpture or painting 
 (or architecture, for the matter of that) is and must be synthetic. 
 Analysis belongs to the scientific aspect of nature, not the artistic ; 
 and directly a painter makes us think about the deltoid and the 
 supinator longus, he has gone a long way towards making us forget what 
 George Eliot once called the infinite beauty of a woman's arm. It is 
 strange that there should be in the drawing of the nude three distinct 
 stages, of which the last and the first are superficially the same, for 
 first the student draws his contours with but little reference to the 
 bones and muscles which underlie and shape them, and then almost 
 invariably he draws those bones and muscles so elaborately (compare, 
 for instance, much of Mr. Poynter's most laborious and learned work) 
 
 382 
 
that the result is more like a map of a human being than a true 
 picture of him ; and lastly, if he has eyes, and perseverance, and 
 sense of what is fine and subtle in forms, he begins to draw the body 
 as a whok — the body, that is, of which contour, and bones, and 
 muscles are but a part, and that in a sense the least important, most 
 obvious part — the body which has not only shape but mass, not only 
 members but life, not only facts but mystery — in which every form 
 passes slowly, imperceptibly into another, changing like a great 
 passage in immortal music, rising and falling in gradations as softly 
 unmarked as the long swell of the mid-sea wave. 
 
 One old painter we have, who has grasped this finest rendering of 
 the nude most perfectly, and who told me one day many years ago 
 that he learned it first from studying Phidian sculpture, and I do 
 not assert that Mr. Watts has not turned his knowledge to finer 
 issues than Mr. Albert Moore. I think he has done so, since he 
 has not stopped short at the realisation of beauty, but welded into it 
 an amount of spiritual and poetical suggestion for which we can find 
 no parallel in English art ; but with this single exception, there is no 
 member of the Royal Academy, and certainly no outsider, who can 
 even be mentioned, in the respect I am considering, of beautiful treat- 
 ment of the nude figure, as a rival to the latter. Sir Frederick 
 Leighton's name may occur to some as a possible competitor, but 
 that artist's figures have never approached sufficiently near to the 
 realm of the actual to be mentioned in this connection. The learned 
 President of the Royal Academy has used women and men in his 
 pictures as elements in his compositions, as vehicles for his thought, 
 or his sense of the beautiful, but he has never for an instant sought to 
 make us realise the soft, pulsating warmth of flesh, nor its infinite 
 delicacy of hue, rugged smoothness of texture, independent life 
 and reality, mystery, dignity, and significance. Thinking quietly 
 over the matter, it seems to me that perhaps because he has not done 
 this is one great reason why he is — perhaps why he should be — in 
 such a country as ours. President of the Royal Academy ; but how- 
 ever that may be, the fact is certain, that on the delicate waxen 
 surface of his graceful figures no blemish of humanity lingers even so 
 softly as a falling rose-leaf— the people he creates, we feel we need 
 neither love nor hate — they are not of our mortal nature. 
 
 To return to Mr. Moore's sense of the beautiful and speak of a 
 merit which is at once less difficult to appreciate, and even less 
 disputable than the first. After the perception of the beauty, and 
 dignity of form and surface of the human body, there may fairly come 
 as second in importance the conception and rendering of gesture, and 
 here again if we turn to our illustration there is sufficient proof of 
 the artist's power. The present writer at all events knows of few 
 
 383 
 
more beautiful things in modern art, as far as the expression of 
 unconscious action is concerned, than the pose of the hands, arms, and 
 head of the sleeping figure on the left of the picture— the fall of the 
 right arm across the body, and the soft clasp of the hand upon the 
 drapery beneath, are admirable alike in the pleasure given to the eye 
 and in truth to nature, while the upright pose of the left arm with the 
 hand lightly drooping from the wrist, represents an action which is 
 so entirely characteristic of sleep, yet so original, unexpected, and 
 unstudied, that despite its consonancy with the rest of the composition, 
 I can hardly believe this was not originally suggested by the artist 
 accidentally seeing it. Similar praise might not unjustly be given to 
 the action of the waking figure — though in this case the gesture 
 depicted is a momentary one. One last special grace of Mr. Moore's 
 picture remains to be noticed — the exquisite refinement, inventive- 
 ness, and beauty with which the draperies are arranged and painted., 
 I have in former years so frequently pointed out and criticised this 
 point in detail that it need not be dwelt upon here further than to say 
 that the present instance is a fine specimen of Mr. Moore's skill in 
 this respect. 
 
 If I have dwelt disproportionately long in the above paragraphs 
 upon the qualities of Albert Moore's art, and the great merits which 
 that art possesses, it was because I would once more lead readers to 
 recognise and admire the fineness of this work which the Royal 
 Academy have persistently refused to reward or acknowledge. 
 Many years ago in the Spectator, and in even a greater paper, whose 
 name its very contributors whisper with bated breath, I challenged the 
 Royal Academy, or any critic or painter who upheld as impartial and 
 adequate the administration of that Institution so far as regards the 
 election of deserving artists, to give any single reason for the already 
 long-enduring exclusion of Messrs. Henry and Albert Moore from 
 the honour of Associateship. And I then pointed out, and continued 
 to point out yearly, that the first of these was by far the greatest sea- 
 painter in England (which meant in the world), and that the second 
 was the only living artist of our country who could paint drapery 
 adequately, was the greatest master of pure design whose pictures 
 were to be seen at Burlington House, and was literally the only 
 Englishman who was capable of treating the combination of drapery 
 and nude figure with the true Greek feeling, not only for the beauty 
 of both, but for the essential dignity and purity of the latter. As far 
 as this could be shown in the half-dozen lines or so of a daily or 
 weekly journal, I did show it by comparison, description, and criticism, 
 and in the result my words, repeated during ten years, were never 
 once challenged by any human being, at all events so far as the 
 public press was concerned. Time went on, and at length, driven to 
 the act by a more splendid sea-picture than usual, the Royal Academy 
 
 384 
 
A SUMMER NIGHT 
 
 ALDERT WOORE 
 
 rrom a platinot\pc 
 
Council did, after twenty years'^ delay, elect the first of these brothers, 
 but the second, and, on the whole, the greater artist, remains still 
 outside and has his masterpieces hung in a corner of a back room, lest 
 they should interfere with Mr. Cooper's Cows, or the bronze-boot 
 girls with which Mr. Sant, R.A., still gladdens the heart of the 
 British matron. 
 
 These are the things which make us despair of English art, of 
 English taste, and of English justice. Can we not yet see, for all 
 our South Kensington Museums? Is there nobody who cares to 
 give his due to a great artist who works for his art firstly and chiefly ? 
 When I was a lad yet at Cambridge, Albert Moore was already 
 painting the most beautiful pictures which were then being exhibited 
 at the Royal Academy — pictures which were even more beautiful 
 than his work of to-day, for though they were perhaps less absolute 
 in completed science, they had that glow of tender feeling, that fresh 
 fragrance of poetic suggestiveness, which can remain in age in its 
 first vigour and delightfulness, no more than we taste the freshness 
 of April mornings, in the completed glory of June. 
 
 I do not suppose he cares much now whether he be made a 
 member of the Academy or no ; he has won his fame and done his 
 work, despite the long-refused recognition ; but all lovers of art 
 should care, for it is by the watching for, finding out, and helping of 
 such artists, that English art will prosper, if it prosper at all. When 
 they are great and old, what good can official patronage do for them ? 
 They can do good for it — as Ruskin said so splendidly long ago — 
 can strengthen the body which, having despised them during their 
 youth, desires to profit by the fruit of their age ; but their hearts are 
 so bitter with experience, their aims so thwarted with neglect, their 
 aspirations so deadened with lack of sympathy and encouragement, 
 that the too-late-won honour is scarcely more than pain, and they 
 look at the sharp laurel -crown which we thrust into their hands, 
 wistfully — ^with sadness rather than joy. 
 
 The election of such men as Burne-Jones and Henry Moore to 
 be Associates of the Royal Academy at the age of fifty — after two- 
 thirds of a lifetime of great work — is not only a farce, but almost an 
 impertinence. The election may be accepted because painters are 
 no less influenced by commercial considerations than other men, and 
 the actual money value of an Associateship, or Royal Academician- 
 ship, is considerable ; but that does not render it less ludicrous and 
 improper that it should be possible to withhold the honour for 
 a quarter of a century from men whom the whole world knows 
 
 1 Mr. Henry Moore had exhibited at the Royal Academy, I believe, even longer, but at 
 least that. 
 
 3D 385 
 
not only deserve recognition, but who are absolute masters of their 
 
 craft. 
 
 Let us return to the Royal Academy Exhibition, and speak of the 
 one really fine piece of animal painting which is this year to be found 
 therein. The picture in question is the Lioness defending her Cubs, 
 by Mr. John Swan, a painter who, trained in M. Gerome's studio, 
 has long exhibited (and sold) in France and Holland, but who is 
 comparatively new to the English public. Mr. Swan is one of the 
 rarer species of birds — a painter who is also an artist— and who at 
 present, at all events, cares more for the quality of his work than 
 for its popularity or price. He is also rara avis in another respect, 
 since he is both draughtsman and colourist — a combination as easily 
 fancied as the mermaid, and almost as rarely found. That he is a 
 draughtsman, his reputation as the head of Gdrome's studio may 
 perhaps be" taken as sufficient p.roof, for Frenchmen do not say 
 men ca.Ti draw lightly, nor is Gerome likely to think highly save of 
 an exceptional draughtsman : even the younger French artists who 
 have decided in their omniscience (de vingt ans) that this old master 
 cant paint, still grant him some little knowledge of drawing — but 
 this by the way. Of Mr. Swan's power as a colourist, proof absolute 
 is, from the nature of the subject, more difficult to obtain. I have 
 known folk — some of them even (professionally) critical — who have 
 considered Leighton a colourist, and compared in that respect, to the 
 disadvantage of the latter, Poynter with Watts. Possibly it may be 
 safer to say that in the same sense that Mr. Watts is a colourist, so 
 is Mr. Swan — a master, that is, of whatever tint he depicts, choosing 
 preferentially the darker, richer hues of the palette, and making even 
 gloom of evening lustrous in his work by the variety and gradation 
 of shadowy colour. If we may be pardoned a brief technical diver- 
 sion on a subject which is frequently misunderstood, we would point 
 out that even amongst those painters whose pictures are in colour 
 pleasant — and rightly pleasant — to look upon, there are two classes 
 almost as separate as those of the sheep and the goats. These 
 are the camps of the colour ists and the tintists. In the first of 
 these are the men who seek not only a total pleasurable effect of 
 tone in their pictures, but who seek from each tint employed therein 
 the utmost possible beauty and variety : who consider such a thing 
 as ajlat tint — a tint which has been, so to speak, mixed in a pail, and 
 then spread from one part of its mass to the other, with a big flat 
 brush — as unworthy of the name of colour, and who seek to modu- 
 late, and, technically speaking, play into each colour, till it possesses 
 infinite variations, unknown depths, and lustrous brilliancies into 
 which the eye looks gradually, which only reveal themselves 
 slowly, yet upon the perception of which the effect of the picture 
 depends. 
 
 The tinter's camp, on the other hand, is the home of those who 
 
 386 
 
treat the colour effect of a picture as they would the decoration of 
 any plane surface, seeking for harmony by juxtaposition of various 
 tints of which each individual portion may be unattractive or even 
 ugly, but of which the combined effect is either pleasant or significant. 
 
 Were it not for the passing fashion in art, it were scarcely neces- 
 sary to say that the former of these methods is the more estimable, 
 and has been the method of every painter of earlier days whom the 
 world recognises as having been a great colourist. It is pre- 
 eminently the method of painting, as opposed to the method of 
 mosaic. But our digression is too long already, and with one last 
 remark — that the French, broadly speaking, are almost universally 
 colourists in the latter, and that the best English, artists are some- 
 times colourists in the former and higher sense — we must leave this 
 point to the consideration of our readers. Mr, Swan, then, is a 
 draughtsman as understood by Gerome, and a colourist as under- 
 stood, shall we say, by Tintoretto (that is, that Tintoretto would 
 have accepted him as in the right road). What else is he ? Well, 
 he is essentially a big man — a man who treats his subjects bigly — has 
 broad and deep ideas concerning them — goes to the root of the 
 matter. Practically our public nowadays — having forgotten James 
 Ward, who knew as much as both of them put together — considers 
 only Landseer and Briton Riviere as our representative animal 
 painters. Landseer in the immediate past, full of sentiment of the 
 kindly Jingo type, and intellect of the quality of a Macaulay ballad, 
 but broad-shouldered, genial, and English ; good-tempered, sane, and 
 with a proper discernment between the merits of the aristocracy, 
 and the lesser, but still occasionally admirable qualities of endurance, 
 pathos, or heroism in people who are born in dimmer vesture than 
 the purple ; and Riviere, who wears Landseer's rue with a poetical 
 difference, who is neither broad-shouldered (artistically), sane, nor 
 particularly healthy, but who has hankerings after poetical, if popular, 
 treatment of his subject-matter, who has read Omar Khayyam in his 
 leisure moments, and heard of Adonis and Endymion ; and generally 
 may be said to represent the sufficiently cultured sentiment of a 
 more instructed day than that for which Landseer painted. 
 
 Mr. Swan's merit is to steer equally clear of both the rocks on 
 which these painters have wrecked their art : as capable a draughts- 
 man as Landseer, a better painter, as the Frenchmen understand 
 painting, and an infinitely finer colourist, he has combined with his 
 study of animal nature a sentiment, or rather a quality of sentiment, 
 which gives to the beasts he depicts the dignity which is their own, 
 instead of the sentiment which is alien to them though natural to us.^ 
 
 1 Perhaps in much of this he has adapted or rather caught the inspiration of the French 
 sculptor, Barye, but this is to examine too curiously. 
 
Seeing and understanding that the tragedy of an animal's life might 
 well b,e sufficient for the motive of any animal picture, and that there 
 was no necessity to go to humanity for ideas, in order to, as it 
 were, fresco the outside of the brute with interesting matter, he has 
 been able in the picture before us, and will be more able as time 
 goes on, to make his lioness not only interesting and pathetic in her 
 suffering, but even grand and terrible. This is no tame beast, we 
 feel, who has spent her life in cages at the "Zoo," and looked into 
 so many bun-laden human beings' eyes that she has forgotten the 
 jungles and deserts of her native land, but a wild beast raging and 
 despairing ; ready to mangle and destroy her enemies ; resourceful, 
 powerful, cruel, — blindly, impotently wrathful. Even more attractive 
 to the present writer, and even more significant of the painter's 
 knowledge, is the little nude study of the Piping Fisher Boy, who 
 lies prone on a rock by the shore of a grey sea, from which the 
 fishes are dancing at the sound of his pipe. A beautiful piece of 
 subdued colour, a charming, lightly-touched fantasy of thought, a 
 fine piece of powerful draughtsmanship, graceful and natural, imagin- 
 ative, easy, and ""right." 
 
 Next to these paintings of Mr. Swan's, I think the picture which 
 received less of the praise which was its due, if only because of its 
 unobtrusiveness and subdued key of colouring, was one — entitled 
 The Silver Lining of the Cloud — by Mr. Aumonier, afterwards 
 purchased for the Chantrey Trustees. 
 
 It is strange how long it takes in England to make work of this 
 quality in the least popular, or obtain for such the recognition deserved. 
 In France such painting would be appreciated at once ; in England, 
 and especially in exhibitions, where the key of colour in the majority 
 of the pictures is forced up to an unnaturally high pitch for the pur- 
 pose of attracting attention, these delicate representations of Nature 
 continually escape notice, not only by the ordinary visitor, but even 
 by the critic whose business it should be to discover them. Mr. 
 Aumonier's landscape art, however, merits far higher praise than 
 that which is connoted by the words delicate and unobtrusive. He 
 is a painter who more worthily carries on the traditions of English 
 landscape than perhaps any other now living, though possibly he 
 may be said to be rivalled in this respect by two or three water- 
 colour artists, notably Mr. Thomas Collier, ^ Mr. Hine (the elder), 
 and Mr. George Fripp. He should be ranked above all of these in 
 the respect of originality, and especially in the great merit of 
 belonging to his time, for Mr. Aumonier's work, though possessing 
 much of the freshness and apparent ease which were such dis- 
 
 1 Mr. Collier is since dead, unrecognised, throughout the whole of a long and honourable 
 life devoted to his art, by the Royal Academy. Mr. Hine is a very old man, a very exquisite 
 artist, quite neglected by the public. > j -i 
 
 388 
 

tinguishing characteristics of old English landscape painters, and 
 combining with them an almost equal care for, and efficiency of com- 
 position, is nevertheless marked by later nineteenth century feeling, 
 and is in no sense an echo of the motive, though it repeats the 
 quality, of a former time. And of the present picture, what higher 
 praise can we give than that it is interesting without affectation, and 
 natural without being naturalistic ? For this last we may indeed, in 
 the old phrase, give hearty thanks, for of all the many disabilities 
 under which our modern art labours so heavily, the disability of a 
 spurious realism is the most grievous and the most wearisome. 
 How hardly our younger painters labour under the task of repre- 
 senting themselves as possessed of only eyes and hands, and feeling 
 nothing, caring nothing, thinking nothing about the subjects which 
 they select for their pencil, only those who are forced, for their sins, 
 to habitually wander through London picture-galleries can really 
 imagine. The distressing part of the matter is that the best and 
 cleverest of the youngsters are those whom this nil admirari, nil 
 amare disease attacks most violently. Jack Horners, with a difference, 
 who have found no plums in nature's pudding, they go about con- 
 gratulating themselves on that negative achievement with a fervour 
 which would be comic if it were not exasperating, and unfortunately, 
 by help of inconstant fashion and foolish scribes, many folks are led 
 to believe that really this is the be-all and end-all of art, to cover a 
 superficies of canvas with a certain amount of harmonious painting, 
 from which no idea can possibly be extracted, save the idea of the 
 extreme dulness of the gentleman who was responsible for the 
 execution of the work. Such is not Mr. Aumonier's ideal. Like all 
 the really great artists in the world — for in his modest way he is a 
 great artist — he retires into the background, and causes his pictures 
 to talk for him. We do not say This is a landscape according to 
 Aumonier, as we do say. This is a landscape according to Vicat Cole 
 or Mr. Leader. We simply consider the subject depicted. 
 
 There is pleasure in turning to design as facile and impetuous as 
 that of Sir John Gilbert, whose hand has lost nothing in vigour 
 although the artist is now almost the oldest of our painters, _ Old- 
 fashioned no doubt is the character of the design ; the motive too 
 simply picturesque and romantic to find much favour nowadays ; the 
 values of which the critic — well instructed — loves to talk so sapi- 
 ently, are here conspicuous only by their absence, and as for la 
 lumiere — well, probably Sir John knows as little and cares as little 
 for that great fetich of the modern impressionist, as the most Philis- 
 tine of his comrades of earlier days — shall we say Sir Francis 
 Grant ? Still, all defects notwithstanding, this is a work of art, and 
 has about it something which better painting is apt to lack nowa- 
 days. Certainly the design is fair to see, gallant and fresh, full of 
 
 389 
 
go and spirit, happily audacious. And the boldness is not that of 
 The ignoramus or the bungler; one sees very clearly that whatever 
 we may think of this young knight and his pawing charger, he is 
 exactly what the artist wished him to be— his imperfection, if he 
 be imperfect, or exaggeration, if he be exaggerated, is intentional, 
 calculated, and deliberate. The finest actions, says Louis Stevenson 
 in one of his most brilliant essays, are the better for a bit of purp e. 
 So thinks Sir John Gilbert also, and he dashes on hts bit of purple, 
 not in vainglorious speech, but in grandiosity of line, and in gesture 
 and action, a little theatrical and high-falutin'. For the rest, the 
 present picture is to us pleasanter even than usual, for it lacks the 
 bewilderment, the crowding of men and horses, which is a frequent 
 characteristic of Sir John Gilbert's work. When the motive of his 
 composition is simple this painter is happiest, since he is always 
 capable of making even a single figure tell a story sufficiently— 
 afford us sufficient interest. Something indeed it is, if considered 
 carefully, to have painted for more than half a century without 
 having produced one thoroughly dull composition — something to 
 have towards the close of life an imagination so unwearied and a 
 hand so strong. 
 
 Mr. Poynter had this year no large picture, but for the third 
 time repeated the motive which he found so successful in a Corner 
 of the Market-place, which was, plainly speaking, a study of a young 
 girl in a classical robe, and with a background and surroundings of 
 similar character. The present work is one of almost equal charm 
 with the first of the series, and is considerably richer in colour. 
 Classical it is not, in any but the most superficial sense — but 
 English, and nineteenth - century English, to the core; but few 
 visitors to the Royal Academy will care for that, though all will 
 admire the refinement and thoroughness of the execution, the grace 
 of the girl's pose, the variety and care with which the various 
 marbles, potteries, robes, fruits, and mosaics are painted, and the rich 
 colour effect of the whole. We confess that personally these sham- 
 classic pictures are almost wholly objectionable to us in all their 
 several varieties, from the West-End, waxen delicacy of Sir Frederick 
 Leighton's Psyche, down to the coarse and blatant realism of Mr. 
 Solomon's Htppolyta ; but On the Temple Steps, as Mr. Poynter 
 calls his little maiden, is certainly of them the most possible, and 
 humanly speaking, the most pleasant. At least one quality of great 
 art belongs thereto, and that is independence of scale — the picture is 
 quite small, but the execution and the motive are large, and largely 
 treated. This is the work of one who, though extremely limited in his 
 conception of art, and hampered in the execution of his conception 
 by a continual liability to stray from beauty into ugliness (witness 
 else the right shoulder of the girl in our illustration, and the hideous 
 
 390 
 
):go irr ri^x Mi;rs 
 
 I'"acsimilc ijf an uriL;iiial drawing b)' Sir JcniN Giliiert. k. a. 
 
shoulder-of-mutton line it makes owing to the arrangement of the 
 drapery), is always a conscientious and on the whole a capable 
 workman — an artist, moreover, who has no sympathy with sloppy, 
 cheap, or meretricious art, but toils to produce something artistic — 
 sometimes with success, and sometimes with marked but worthy 
 failure — to the utmost of his ability. The utmost that is in him, as 
 Carlyle put it, is what Mr. Poynter brings to the common stock, and 
 with all his shortcomings there is no man living who has a better 
 right to be a member of the Royal Academy, or whose example 
 could be more safely recommended to young artists to follow so far 
 as perseverance, energy, and single-mindedness are concerned. 
 
 Amongst the younger men of the Scotch school there is no one 
 who is just now working more strenuously, or, on the whole, more 
 successfully, than Mr. Farquharson. His landscape — My Heart's in 
 the Highlands — despite the abominable, catchpenny maudlin title — 
 is solidly well drawn, and well, though somewhat heavily, painted. 
 Well composed and by no means unpleasing in colour, is the little 
 picture, too, of Cairo. This is the kind of work produced by the 
 men who, in the professional phrase, are running for Associate- 
 ship, and we should never be surprised to hear one morning 
 that Mr. Farquharson had been gently lifted to that empyrean 
 where the gods of Burlington House lie beside their nectar. There 
 are truly too many Scotchmen already within the portals ; but 
 comradeship is strong in council, and within the Academy, the 
 canny Scot plays a not dissimilar part to that of the Irish party 
 in the House of Commons, and votes solid for the election of 
 his countrymen. 
 
 Look, however, at Mr. Farquharson's work, honest and pains- 
 taking as it is, by the side of any little sketch of a comparatively 
 unattractive subject by Aumonier, and you will see at once the 
 difference between the work of the man who will probably get into 
 the Academy, and the man who almost certainly will not ; and the 
 difference you will note is not in favour of the former. One is 
 education and persistence ; the other is simply — art. 
 
 In the foregoing pages I have endeavoured, probably at too 
 great length for the interest of my readers, to point out a few of the 
 pictures which are for one reason or another notable in this year's 
 Exhibition of the Royal Academy, and in the remaining portion of 
 the space devoted to the notice of this year's paintings I shall only 
 say a few plain words as to other works of interest, some of which 
 were exhibited in the New and Grosvenor Galleries. 
 
 "Few things are more perfect in the present gallery than the 
 
 391 
 
chrysanthemums painted by M. Fantin against a plain grey back- 
 ground ; and for quiet fidelity to nature these may be rivalled by the 
 small river scene which Mr. La very calls The Bridge at Gretz, 
 with its resting oarsman talking to a girl who leans across the 
 parapet : we can almost hear the words they say pass from the 
 bridge to the boat, from the boat to the bridge, through the still, 
 twilight air. A very happy, successful picture this, completely 
 telling the story and entirely justifying the artist's aim. 
 
 "No. 1 146, By Order of the Court, is Mr. Stanhope Forbes' 
 rendering of a country auction, probably either in or near the neigh- 
 bourhood of Newlyn. As we have never shared in the exaggerated 
 praise which has been freely bestowed upon this clever artist's later 
 works, so we cannot join in the depreciation which has this year 
 followed upon the exhibition of the present picture. Granted by all 
 means, that it is inky and black, as the critics affirm, we would point 
 out that there is an absolute necessity from the nature of the scene 
 that this should be the case, if the artist works on the same prin- 
 ciples as those which he has hitherto always observed. Figures in 
 a small room, as they are here represented, seen against a narrow 
 window, must, in comparison with the light outside, be as dark as 
 Mr. Forbes has represented them ; for the very principle of the 
 plein air school is to give to the utmost extent the effect of outdoor 
 light ; and as it is for the doing of this that they are always praised, 
 it seems worse than inconsistent to blame one of the cleverest of 
 their number for being true to himself and his school. For the 
 rest, the picture is extremely clever, full of original gesture, evi- 
 dently studied from life, and instinct too with a subtle mixture of 
 drama and comedy, which is not in the least overstrained or unduly 
 insisted upon. Not a great picture, but a cleverly-constructed and 
 adequately-painted one, and at all events possessing this indubitable 
 virtue— that the facts which it depicts are genuine and actual, relevant 
 -to the life of to-day, not echoes from an imaginary past." 
 
 Saturday Night at the Savage Club, by Mr. W. H. Bartlett, was 
 excluded from the Royal Academy Exhibition, but was nevertheless 
 an exceptional instance of successful treatment of a most difficult 
 subject. 
 
 A special interest attached this year to Mr. Ernest Waterlow's 
 work, of which we give a reproduction on the following page, 
 because the painter had just been admitted to the honours of 
 Associateship. Outside the Council of the Royal Academy the elec- 
 tion must have surprised many, for Mr. Wateriow is essentially one 
 of those artists of whom the word prettiness, expresses almost the 
 first and last characteristic. He is pre-eminently an inoffensive 
 pamter, full of gently-pleasing sentiment, and attractive colour, not 
 
 392 
 
o 
 
 •f) 
 
 X 
 
 2 
 
 
good colour, note, which is an entirely different matter, but colour 
 which is taking and popular, and such as can be successfully repro- 
 duced by the chromo-lithographer or the colour - printer. The 
 present picture shows him, I think, at his best, and one feels it 
 almost harsh to criticise work which is so unassuming, so domestic, 
 and so proper, I should do better probably to note that the sheep 
 are well drawn and cleverly grouped, that the little fisher-boy shep- 
 herd has evidently passed the fourth standard, and never given the 
 good folks at home one moment's anxiety, that all the natural 
 surroundings of the scene are delicately drawn and add to the 
 impression of quiet, comfortable life ; and yet, once more, this is 
 evidently not the real thing. This is art of the studio, not of the 
 field and shore ; it only palters with the real character and meaning, 
 and is oblivious of the real beauty, of its subject-matter. 
 
 Compare with this Mr. Phil Morris' Poor Jack ! a reproduction of 
 a rough sketch of which is given on the following page. Mr. Morris 
 is one of the most uneven of our painters, and has the credit of 
 having started the dressed-up baby type of picture, which for the 
 last ten years has been so deadening an influence on English art. 
 But he is nevertheless a genuine artist, with a strong feeling for the 
 sea, and for the sea's effect upon those who live habitually in con- 
 nection with it. His first successes at the Royal Academy, of which 
 he is now an Associate, were made in idyllic pictures of seafaring 
 and country life, and I cannot but think that these subjects are his 
 real province, and that if, giving up painting millinery infants for the 
 Christmas numbers of the Graphic and "S^t Illustrated, and rather 
 blatant, over -dressed portraits, he would return to the matters in 
 which he takes real interest and for which he has real sympathy, it 
 would be well for his fame and better for himself. The present 
 picture tells its story simply, graphically, and well. This may, of course, 
 be bunkum, but certainly does not look like it. We can hardly fancy 
 but that the artist has seen this lowering sky and these rough 
 fishermen carrying their comrade to his last resting-place. At^ all 
 events here is a possible presentment of the life of to-day, instinct 
 with a natural emotion which is of all times, and, as such, is a fitting 
 subject for a picture worthily carried out. 
 
 Turn back to Mr. Waterlow's more superficially attractive work, 
 or onwards to Mr. Henry Woods' graceful Venetians selling fruit 
 on the Giudecca, and see into what utter insignificance the human 
 motive, even in this rough expression, reduces the manufactured 
 and artificial work. No quainter contrast could perhaps be taken 
 to the picture of which I have just spoken than that which is to be 
 found in Mr. T. M. Rooke's Triumph of Saul and David in the 
 New Gallery (reproduced hereafter). Without in the least wishing 
 3E 393 
 
to be unkind (and indeed the present writer has frequently shown 
 his admiration of Mr. Rooke's work in the most practical form 
 which admiration of an artist's pictures can take), can we possibly 
 regard the point of view indicated by this picture as anything but 
 ludicrous ? Observe, the painters of whom I have lately been 
 speaking regard men and women and nature very differently, but at 
 least they regard, they take into account, such subjects; but here 
 we may almost say that humanity and nature have disappeared 
 entirely from the scene, and have only left — what ? These funny 
 little beings, with their extraordinarily disproportionate little legs, 
 and feet which are smaller than their hands, and queer little 
 cockly draperies, seem wholly unlike anything that ever existed, or 
 could exist, upon the face of the earth. 
 
 Now supposing that Mr. Rooke painted these figures from 
 ignorance of anatomy, or even from laziness or insufficient study, we 
 might, I think, pardon him. But is this the case ? Is not every 
 error here calculated, deliberately adopted, preferred to truth ?^ I 
 think the intrinsic evidence is very strong in favour of this view, 
 especially when we consider that we can trace most of Mr. Rooke's 
 peculiarities to the fountain-head in the work of the artist whom he 
 long served faithfully as an assistant, and whom he still delights to 
 call " Mr. Burne-Jones." His painting and his ideas have alike taken 
 colour from this long associateship, but unfortunately the peculiarities 
 which in the master are but blemishes, are in this faithful pupil sore 
 disfigurements. The curious, morbid twists of Mr. Burne-Jones' 
 mind have taken root in Mr. Rooke's humbler and more religious 
 intellect, and brought forth most extraordinary fruit, in which the 
 Bible and the laus Veneris struggle together in eternal contest, like 
 that of Ormuzd and Ahriman ; and as Mr. Burne-Jones made man 
 and woman into one composite, quaintly-conceived being, partaking 
 of the characteristics of both sexes, so has Mr. Rooke, not to fail in 
 loyalty to his master, abstracted all manhood and womanhood what- 
 ever from the little doll-like creatures in whose presentment he 
 delights. All this is true, but is not the whole truth, for unhuman, 
 doll-like, comic as they are, these little beings are as attractive 
 as the African pigmies appeared to Mr. Stanley. The reason is not 
 far to seek ; for this little painter has in him what most of the more 
 robustious spirits of the Academy lack — a strong sense of beauty, 
 His pictures are frequently jewel-like in colour, his faces quaintly, 
 pleadingly pretty, his cockly draperies full of invention, arrangement, 
 and grace of line. Moreover, from one corner of his pictures to 
 another we always find every morsel of space has been thought of as 
 precious, and made as delightful to the eye and mind as Mr. Rooke 
 could compass. There are here no wastes of canvas, no spaces to 
 let, to use the old studio phrase, no lack of interest or thought to be 
 
 394 
 
'J 
 
 O E 
 O S 
 
found anywhere. The art is perverted, almost ludicrous, certainly 
 feeble, but genuine and true to itself, or rather to the inspiration of 
 Mr. Burne- Jones, upon which it has been founded. 
 
 Mr. Arthur Hacker's Vae Victis ! — The Sack of Morocco by the 
 Almohades, is one of those pictures which are more common in the 
 French Salon than in an English exhibition. It is large, grandiose 
 in treatment, and evidences the thorough training of the artist. In 
 fact the composition is such as a clever student would produce in 
 competing for the Prix de Rome, or any other of the great Beaux 
 Arts prizes. In the Academy, however, such pictures are rare, and the 
 work is useful less for intrinsic attractiveness than as marking the 
 point of performance to which foreign painters habitually attain, and 
 which the successful students of foreign schools rarely fail to reach. 
 Useful too at Burlington House as a silent protest against the 
 timid and restrained proprieties which distinguish the majority of the 
 pictures. Though the treatment of the nude can scarcely be said to 
 form the main motive of this composition, yet the portion of the 
 picture in which that treatment occurs has been dealt with by Mr. 
 Hacker as simply and frankly as the rest of his subject. We do not 
 feel that this artist has been above all things afraid of offending the 
 delicate susceptibilities of the British matron ; he has not sought to 
 shock them, it is true, and has arranged the bodies of his murdered 
 women with considerable grace and dexterity to that end, but other- 
 wise the fear of the censor has not been before his eye. The picture 
 is well painted, and the composition, though perhaps not very original, 
 is ingenious and pleasant, and Mr. Hacker is hardly to blame if in 
 looking at his work we are forced to think of that of Benjamin 
 Constant. For as a rule these Eastern subjects, especially such as 
 involve elaborate figure-composition, are almost entirely the property 
 of French artists. The present is a notable attempt on the part of 
 an Englishman to compete with the last-mentioned on a ground 
 which they have made specially their own. 
 
 Mr. Henry Woods' Fruitsellers in the Giudecca is a pleasant 
 change from these massacred women, and has not only this merit to 
 recommend it, but is extremely clever from the artistic point of 
 view, and if a little wanting in subject, full of accurate detail and 
 brilliant colour. I always feel, however, that the broad-shouldered 
 English quality of Mr. Woods' art is a little out of place in depicting 
 the life of the lagoons. The charm of Venice, at all events to those 
 who know her well, is a charm of dirt rather than cleanliness, of 
 Bohemianism rather than respectability, of freedom rather than 
 restraint. Beauty there breaks forcibly as it were through the 
 opposing uglinesses of poverty and vice, or lies side by side with 
 them in the strangest places ; and Mr. Henry Woods' Venice has 
 
 395 
 
always been what Venice herself never is — swept and garnished — for 
 clean rather than unclean spirits to dwell in, and there is a pretty- 
 mildness and comely health about his women's faces, such as we 
 may frequently see, or at least expect to see, in an English dairy- 
 maid, but such as the present writer — who knows Venice well — has 
 never seen there. 
 
 Mr. Arthur Lemon's Conversion of Si. Hubert, though not to my 
 thinking one of his finest works, strikes at least a more real and 
 far more genuine artistic note than that of which we have been 
 speaking. Amongst all our painters who take their chief subjects 
 from animal life, Mr, Lemon is the one who at present shows most 
 poetic feeling, and whose work has most trace of originality. It is 
 curious to notice that, despite a certain roughness of execution, the 
 brushwork of this painter, and the whole manner and method of his 
 art, have far more affinity with ancient painting than with that of the 
 present day. He has a peculiar and enviable faculty of giving both 
 to his horses and men large free gestures, which are at once graceful 
 and vigorous, and which are, above all, momentary, not reminding 
 us at all of the studio-posed model, or a movement which has been 
 arrested for the purpose of the picture. Look for instance at this 
 Conversion of St. Hubert, and note therein the startled gesture of 
 the horse, and the half-frightened, half-warlike appearance of the 
 Saint. The clenched fist and arm drawn back to strike, combined 
 with the pose of the head and body of the latter, tell their story of 
 half-fearful curiosity, and readiness to resist, most thoroughly ; and 
 it is also notable how admirably Mr. Lemon's landscape here, as in 
 most of his contributions, echoes and reinforces the sentiment he 
 wishes to depict. Emphatically this young painter is doing good 
 and original work, and deserves full recognition. 
 
 Mr. Keeley Halswelle is another of the artists who have this year 
 forsaken their accustomed subjects ; and he gives us here not a land- 
 scape pure and simple, as is his wont, but the high street of a country 
 town on a wet day. True, he would not be Mr. Halswelle if he did 
 not manage to get the satin reflections (which he usually shows us 
 upon the surface of lake or river) on the wet pavement and slushy 
 road ; and in the brief space of sky above the houses, we see, with 
 almost the satisfaction that we welcome an old friend, his cumulus 
 clouds with their wan lights and faint shadows. Still, though he 
 has prettified his market town, and thereby lost much of the reality, 
 and, if only he could so persuade himself, of the beauty of the scene, 
 he has made it into a successful picture, and has rendered the effect 
 of falling rain and the atmosphere of absolute dulness and boredom 
 very happily. We can almost imagine a dejected traveller, way- 
 
 396 
 

 
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bound by some unhappy accident, at the coffee-room window of the 
 red commercial hotel, watching drearily the passing sheep and 
 scattered townsfolk, and wondering what in heaven and earth he 
 shall do with himself till dinner-time. 
 
 There were two pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery this year which 
 I must mention as fine examples of modern Anglo-French work. 
 
 If we at all accept its style of art, there is no work of such import- 
 ance in the Gallery as Mr. La Thangue's large Leaving Home. In 
 any case this would be a notable picture for strength and marvellous 
 freshness of impression. The subject is a simple one enough, a 
 village girl leaving home for service for the first time. She is sitting 
 in a carrier's cart with her face covered by her hands, the carrier is 
 whipping up his old grey horse with professional indifference, her 
 parents, and brothers and sisters, are all at the cottage gate to say 
 good-bye. The horse is trotting plump towards us out of the picture : 
 one feels almost tempted to get out of the way, so realistic is the 
 impression of movement. If the work, however, had only possessed 
 these merits, we should have scarcely thought it deserving of such 
 high praise, but Mr. La Thangue has in the present instance 
 succeeded in painting not only an extraordinarily realistic picture; 
 but one in which the study of sentiment and character is very highly 
 above the average. The difference in the expression of grief in the 
 mother's and father's faces is very subtle and profoundly natural, so 
 are the varying expressions of the younger children, so is the uncon- 
 cern, or rather obliviousness, of the driver. Note, too, for a little 
 piece of genuine insight, the gesture with which the girl, through all 
 her sorrow, still clings to the band-box upon her knee. Certainly 
 we will not quarrel with realistic art if it will frequently give us such 
 work as this, and feel almost inclined to say that Mr. La Thangue 
 shall have a license to be as ugly as he pleases — and he does some- 
 times please to be very ugly indeed — if only he will stray into 
 beauty now and then, as he has done here. This artist's second con- 
 tribution, which is the portrait of an unnamed painter (is it his own ?) 
 is also intensely clever; but in this the vice of the Impressionist 
 school shows prominently, and the strength is coarse, almost blatant. 
 
 At the very opposite pole of artistic endeavour stands the large 
 work by Mr. Sargent entitled Ightham Moat — Ladies Playing at 
 Bowls. In its way, this is as clever as Mr. La Thangue's Leaving 
 Home ; but to call the way peculiar, would be but a mild character- 
 isation. The picture is utterly peculiar, and at first sight we might 
 well be excused for finding it utterly abominable. The grass lawn 
 on which the players are standing is, in this picture, a vast expanse 
 of raw and almost ungradated green, which the painter appears to 
 
 397 
 
works criticised at their date of exhibition, than to avail myself of 
 subsequent experience and judgment, which I could scarcely hope 
 would be unmodified by the public estimate. If the notes show any 
 good quality, I venture to hope they will show the writer endeav- 
 oured to express his views clearly, and without partizan feeling. In 
 so far as the objective truth and value of the criticism are concerned, 
 the public can judge for itself how far time has corroborated or 
 falsified my testimony. 
 
 399 
 
INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 
 
 Alma-Tadema, L., R.A. 
 
 Angelico, Fra 
 Antwerp . 
 Armitage . 
 Aumonier, James 
 
 B 
 
 Barnard, Fred 
 
 Barret, George 
 
 Bartlett, W. H, 
 
 Bates, Harry 
 
 Bellini 
 
 Bicknell . 
 
 Blankenberghe 
 
 Bonington, R. 
 
 Boucher . 
 
 Eoughton, George, A.R.A. 
 
 Brett, John, A.R.A. . 
 
 Brewtnall, E. F. 
 Bridger . 
 Bridgman, F. A. 
 Briton Riviere, R.A. . 
 Bromley, Valentine 
 Brown, Ford Madox . 
 Brown, Frederick 
 Bruges 
 
 Bunting, P. W. . 
 Burgess, Sophy . 
 Burne-Jones, E., A.R.A. 
 
 Burton, Sir Frederick 
 
 C 
 
 Camber Castle . 
 3 F 
 
 87. 
 
 206, 
 
 314. 
 
 315. 
 
 321, 
 
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 156 
 
 392 
 
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 319 
 
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 208, 
 
 353. 
 
 355 
 
 
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 154 
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 Carey, F. S. 
 Carpaccio . 
 Casey 
 
 Chiferici, Gaetano 
 Claude 
 
 Clausen, George 
 Cobden, Richard 
 Cole, Vicat, R.A. 
 Collier, John 
 Collier, Thomas 
 Collins, Charles 
 Collins, Wilkie . 
 CoUinson, James 
 Colvin, Sidney . 
 Constable . 
 Cooke, E. W. . 
 Cope, John 
 Copley Fielding 
 Corot 
 
 Costa, Michel . 
 Coventry Patmore 
 Cox, David 
 Crane, Walter . 
 Crofts, Ernest 
 Crome 
 Crowe, Eyre 
 
 155 
 
 D 
 
 Dam 
 Dante 
 Daubigny . 
 Daudet, Alphonse 
 Davis, H. W. B. 
 De Musset 
 Deverell, Walter 
 De Wint, P. 
 Dickens, Charles 
 Dicksee, Frank, A. R.A 
 
 29 
 
 31 
 14 
 
 340 
 161, 325 
 
 • 323 
 
 26 
 
 • 325 
 322, 340" 
 
 302 
 
 70 
 
 169, 247-280 
 
 60 
 
 78 
 
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 310 
 
 19. 155 
 
 177 
 
 124 
 
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 • 332 
 
 171 
 
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 273 
 
 314 
 
 273 
 
 69 
 
 55. 242, 24s 
 
 36, 44, 248 
 
 328, 363 
 
 401 
 
Dor^, Gustave . 
 Dumas 
 Du Maurier 
 Duran, Carolus 
 Diirer, Albrecht 
 Dyce 
 
 Egg 
 Etty 
 
 Faed, T., R.A. . 
 
 Fantin 
 
 Farquharson, J. 
 
 Feuillet, Octave 
 
 Fildes, Luke, R.A. i6o, 
 
 Forbes, Stanhope 
 
 Ford, Onslow, A.R.A. 
 
 Francia 
 
 Frith, W. P., R.A. . 
 
 Gainsborough 
 
 Garafola 
 
 Gdrome 
 
 Gervex 
 
 Ghiberti 
 
 Gibbons 
 
 Gilbert, Alfred . 345, 
 
 Gilbert, Sir John, R.A, 
 
 Giotto 
 
 Girardot 
 
 Godfrey 
 
 Goodall, Fred, R.A. 
 
 Goodwin, Albert 
 
 Gow, Andrew, R.A. 
 
 Graham, Peter, R.A. 
 
 Grant, Sir F. . 
 
 Green, Charles . 
 
 194 
 
 273 
 
 79 
 
 127, 357 
 
 31 
 
 43 
 
 36 
 
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 287 
 
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 293 
 
 27 
 
 333. 377 
 
 335, 347 
 
 323, 361 
 
 310 
 
 329 
 
 • 334 
 
 H 
 
 Hacker, Arthur 
 
 Hall Caine 
 
 Halswelle, Keeley 
 
 Hart 
 
 Henner 
 
 Herdman, R. 
 
 Herkomer, Herman 
 
 Herkomer, Hubert, A.R.A. 
 
 Hine 
 
 • 395 
 
 62 
 
 185, 328, 396 
 
 310 
 
 209 
 
 322 
 
 • 359 
 317, 340, 
 
 344, 359 
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 Hodgson, J. E., R.A. 
 
 
 • 314 
 
 Holbein . 
 
 
 31 
 
 Holiday, Henry 
 
 
 . 78 
 
 HoU, Frank 
 
 124-134. 307 
 
 Holland, James 
 
 
 • 155 
 
 Holman Hunt, W. 
 
 1-105 passim 
 
 Hook, J. C, R. A. 211 
 
 ,295.30: 
 
 '.328,348 
 
 Horsley, J. C, R.A. 
 
 . 
 
 . 310 
 
 Houghton, Boyd 
 
 
 79, 126 
 
 Hughes, Arthur 
 
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 • 71-75 
 
 Hunt, Alfred . 
 
 , 
 
 • 338 
 
 Hunt, William . 
 
 15; 
 
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 Hunter, Colin, A.R.A 
 
 
 • 334 
 
 K 
 
 
 
 Knight, Joseph 
 
 
 74 
 
 L 
 
 Landseer, Charles 
 
 
 . 310 
 
 Landseer, Sir Edwin 
 
 
 30, 310 
 
 Lanherne, Vale of 
 
 . 
 
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 • 397 
 
 Lavery, John 
 
 
 • 391 
 
 Lawson, Cecil . 
 
 
 126, 307 
 
 Leader, B. W., A.R.A 
 
 
 .164, 340 
 
 Lefebvre . 
 
 
 87, 206 
 
 Legros, Alphonse 
 
 . 
 
 28, 316 
 
 Leighton, E. Blair 
 
 . 
 
 334, 372 
 
 Leighton, Sir Fredericl 
 
 :, P.R.A. 
 
 207,311, 
 
 320, 329, 334, 
 
 344, 352, 
 
 356, 368 
 
 Lemon, Arthur . 
 
 
 396 
 
 Le Roux . 
 
 
 293 
 
 Leslie, G. D., R.A. . 
 
 •30, 
 
 158, 3" 
 
 Levy, Amy 
 
 . 
 
 135-149 
 
 Lewis, John 
 
 155, 
 
 163, 306 
 
 Leys, Baron 
 
 
 13 
 
 Linnell 
 
 
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 Linton, Sir James 
 
 
 78, 341 
 
 Lockhart . 
 
 
 • 335 
 
 Logsdail, W. 
 
 
 348, 374 
 
 Long, Edwin 
 
 318, 329, 
 
 335. 340 
 
 M 
 
 
 
 Mabuse . 
 
 
 96 
 
 Macallum, Hamilton 
 
 
 326 
 
 Macbeth, R. W., A.R. 
 
 A. . 
 
 316, 324 
 
 M'Cracken 
 
 • 42, 55. 68 
 
 MacWhirter, J., A.R.iS 
 
 L. 
 
 37. 324 
 
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 Marks, H. S., R.A. 
 
 310. 
 
 313, 317 
 
 Marshall, John . 
 
 
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 402 
 
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 125. 304 
 
 Rae, George 
 
 
 16 
 
 Meissonier 
 
 14 
 
 Raphael 
 
 
 
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 Rapin 
 
 
 
 293 
 
 Mentz, Paul 
 
 . 288 
 
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 3x0 
 
 Meredith, George 
 
 74 
 
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 334 
 
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 Rembrandt 
 
 
 
 13 
 
 Millais, Sir John, R. A. i - 1 o . 
 
 5/«j«w, 159, 
 
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 26 
 
 312. 315. 347. 370. 379 
 
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 43 
 
 Millet, F. D. . 
 
 364 
 
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 177-189, 291 
 
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 78, 336, 361, 393 
 
 Minnewater 
 
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 Rossetti, Christina 
 
 
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 63 
 
 Moore, Albert . 310, 1 
 
 ;i2, 380, 381 
 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 
 
 I-IO 
 
 5 passim 
 
 Moore, Henry,A.R.A. 185, 
 
 187.338.353 
 
 Rossetti, William Michel . 
 
 41 
 
 . 57, 60 
 
 Morris, P. R., A.R.A. i 
 
 60, 322, 393 
 
 Rubens . . . . 
 
 
 ■?!, 200 
 
 Morris, William 
 
 • 75. 91 
 
 Ruskin, John . .1-10 
 
 5 passim, 2q8 
 
 Munro, Alexander 
 
 75 
 
 Rye 
 
 
 194 
 
 Murillo 
 
 30 
 
 
 
 
 Murray, Fairfax 
 
 • 19. 78 
 
 S 
 Samboume, Linley 
 
 
 79^ 
 
 N 
 
 
 Sandys, Frederick 
 
 
 
 73 
 
 
 Sant, James, R.A. 
 
 
 358, 362 
 
 Nasmyth . 
 
 • 155 
 
 Sargent, John 
 
 
 355,358,398 
 
 Nicol, J. E. 
 
 310 
 
 Scott, W, Bell . 
 Shannon . 
 
 
 
 32 
 362 
 
 
 
 
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 362 
 
 Orcagna . 
 Orchard, John . 
 Orchardson, W. Q., R.A. ] 
 
 Ouless, W., R.A. 
 
 31 
 
 • 63 
 
 [60, 322, 324, 
 
 337. 351. 365 
 309 
 
 Shaw, Walter 
 Siddal, Eleanor . 
 Solomon, Solomon J. 
 Stanhope, Spencer 
 Starr, Louisa . 
 Stephens, F. G. . 
 
 
 10, 2 
 
 341 
 
 55 
 82,361 
 
 75. 78 
 
 321 
 
 63 
 
 P 
 
 
 Stevens, Alfred . 
 
 
 
 304 
 
 
 Stobhall . 
 
 
 
 22 
 
 Palmer, Samuel 
 
 15s. 326 
 
 Stock, Arthur . 
 
 
 
 • 341 
 
 Parsons, Alfred . 
 
 302, 334 
 
 Stone, Marcus, R.A. 
 
 
 I 
 
 60, 320 
 
 Parton, Ernest . 
 
 • 334 
 
 Strudwick, J. M. 
 
 
 
 78 
 
 Pater, Walter . 
 
 
 69 
 
 Swan, John 
 
 
 
 386 
 
 Pelouse . 
 
 
 293 
 
 Swinburne, A. C. 
 
 
 
 • 69, 74 
 
 Perugini, C. E. . 
 
 
 333 
 
 T 
 
 
 
 Pettie, John, R.A. 
 
 
 365 
 
 
 
 
 Philippoteau 
 Pickering, Eveleen 
 
 
 317 
 
 Thompson, Miss 
 
 3 
 
 14. 319 
 
 
 78 
 
 Thornycroft, Hamo, R.A. 
 
 350, 356 
 
 Pickersgill 
 
 
 310 
 
 Tinworth, George 
 
 
 347 
 
 Pinwell, George 
 
 79. 125, 306 
 
 Titian 
 
 
 31. 299 
 63 
 
 Poole, P. Falconer, R.A. . 
 
 160, 310 
 
 Tupper, J. L. . 
 
 
 Poynter, E. J., R.A. 2 
 
 06, 208, 322, 
 !37. 344. 390 
 
 Turner . . . ] 
 V 
 
 t55. 2 
 
 42, 245 
 
 Prinsep, Val, A.R.A. . 
 
 75. 320, 322 
 
 Van Beers, Jan . 
 
 
 • 9. 343 
 
 Prout, Samuel 
 
 . 155 
 
 Van Eyck 
 
 
 30. I 
 
 67. 169 
 
 
 
 Van Haanen 
 
 
 I 
 
 60, 337 
 
 Q 
 
 
 Varley, John . 
 
 
 
 155 
 
 Quentin Matsys 
 
 
 31 
 
 Veronese . 
 
 
 
 299 
 
 403 
 
w 
 
 Walker, Fred, A.R.A. 79, 125, 179, 304 
 
 Waller, S. E. . 
 Wappers, Baron 
 Waterhouse, J. W., A.R.A 
 
 • 334 
 
 13 
 
 • 359 
 
 Waterlow, Ernest, A.R.A. 
 
 334. 392 
 
 Watts, G. F., R.A. . 31, 
 
 128, 201-225 
 
 Whistler, J. M'Neil . 
 
 Wilkie 
 
 Wilkinson 
 
 310. 353 
 
 31.299 
 
 14 
 
 Wimperis . 
 Windus . 
 
 187, 302 
 72 
 
 Woods, Henry, A.R.A. 
 Woodville, Caton 
 Woolner, Thomas, R.A. 
 Wyllie, W. L., A.R.A. 
 
 Yates, Edmund 
 
 337. 395 
 
 • 341 
 
 3i 38. 62 
 
 346 
 
 14 
 
 Zwiller, M. 
 
 282 
 
 THE END 
 
 404 
 
*