quite a thing of itself, entirely unlike the Swiss, French, or Italian), still lingers, and may it long do so, in the valleys of the Ahr, the Lahn, the Nahe, and even the Moselle. But the modernising process goes on fearfully fast everywhere within reach of railroads. The whole effect of the Taunus ridge is destroyed by a few square drab-coloured boxes, which dwarf its height, break its curves, and draw the eye without mercy. The still beautiful town of Kreuznach is sadly defaced in the same way. It comes of railroads and transport of new cheap building materials. I believe we did see one house being rebuilt in the beautiful old brick or stone-and-timber construction, which has entirely departed from the Rhine, as from Shropshire and the pleasant West of England. Till lately a Frenchman out of Paris, or a German who did not live in the new parts of Frankfort or Vienna, breathed the picturesque like ozone and oxygen; and it now seems if that had ended in unconsciousness or insensibility, and they cared no more about it than the British lower orders. Germans are more speculative than English people, but hardly more sentimental, now that there is money to be made; and with money increases population, and with that men's attention is necessarily transferred, as we said, from beauty to drainage.

as

The worst of it is that there seems to be a regular anarchy of taste, founded on ignorance of styles and their historical and natural principles, which delivers civilised society entirely over to mere fashions and vogues. Nobody can hold by local, or national, or characteristic methods of building, dress, or custom. I have lamented over kittels and pipes, but there is yet a partial comfort in the recollection of the Mainz market-place, under the shadow of the great cathedral, whose transitional architecture marks the passage of races, Roman and Teuton. Its Romanesque domes and arcades pass into fair thirteenth century Gothic, and are an instance of historical change, as distinguished from more ephemeral shifts of human habit. So it is at Aachen; before the old Stadthaus some relics of national costume appear naturally day by day, and scenes like Prout's well-remembered drawings the old white caps and blue skirts, the vast and variegated umbrellas, with all green fresh things below them-soon to be concealed by corrugated iron sheds and paltry girders. Then it must be observed that a national dress is national, and cannot be made the fashion, or kept up by subscription, or worn piecemeal, after the pravity of modern self-disguise. The green, grey, or brown-checked kilt may be worn on Highland hills, even by a Saxon, with tolerable effect; because it is in fact the best dress which can be worn to shoot grouse in early in the season; but it will not do except on its native heath. I once went to a costume ball, and I observed that a few really national dresses, which had been worn in their own land in actual every-day life (as Arab, abbas, and kefiyehs), looked very much better than fancy dresses of the theatrical sort. But of course a

national dress worn out of its own air becomes theatrical, and this, I think, is worthy of notice, that a national dress is almost always a working dress; calculated for the life and the employments of a locality or a climate. And it never will do to adopt it piecemeal. For instance, it has of late pleased many young ladies to go about in Kilmarnock caps suited to the late Mr. David Deans. They would most of them have looked well in anything, but they looked very odd in that headgear, and it was a mistake. Some of us may remember a capital woodcut of Du Maurier's, scene laid at Deauville; an Englishwoman admiring the chic dress of a little French lady, and threatening to adopt it; to which her husband answers that if she dresses like the lady he will get himself up like the gentleman with her, as a Neapolitan sailor, with enormous red cap and extensive trousers. Such a disguise may be chic, but it fails of the picturesque from incongruity, because it awakens associations with which the wearer has evidently nothing to do. Only compare the pretty fancies of a French wateringplace with the true picturesque of the Mainz market; the everchanging, restless novelties of the milliner with the old caps and skirts that alter not. A worn working dress almost always retains the true picturesque, and that for a moral reason-because it involves honourable associations. Here the irrepressible railroad meets us again, and perhaps it is difficult to make much of the corduroys of its tightly-clad satellites, though one sees very fine forms in them. But an honour certainly dwells about the old smock-frocks that are nearly gone, about sou-westers, and oilskins, and pea-jackets. Butchers are better than nothing, and there is still good in grooms, when not too smart. Everybody has read Sartor Resartus on the symbolisms of dress, and it may well be an important feature in art from its power over life. What a difference it may make. I do not think there is a more weighty or pathetic saying in all Charles Dickens than the remark about the new-born Oliver Twist; that considered as a baby he might have been anybody, but the workhouse flannels, once indued, made him a workhouse child. It is now and then forced upon our minds that our dress is a kind of prison garment here, raiment not of honour, and that another robe is promised us; there is, in fact, when one comes to consider dress as a matter of art (and so it ought to be considered) a haunting remembrance about it. It does remind us strangely of the Fall of Man, and of that inextricable confusion between shame and beauty which has clung about the human body ever since. Of late it has been rather the fashion to glory in our shame as if it was a necessary part of our beauty; but there is some comfort to the Christian artist in hoping to get rid of the former some day. But without dwelling on so sad a subject as unavoidable degradation by dress, one may say that characteristic working dresses are generally within the limits of the picturesque. I believe Mr. Watts has gone into this subject in the Nineteenth Century, and I well remember a

picture of his, of Draymen and their Horses, which seemed to me to be a work of great value and true dignity. Mr. Madox Brown's Navvies will be remembered as a chief feature of one of the great pictures of our day; and really a railway porter in the act of upheaving a big trunk shows his manhood through his fustian in a way which some realist painter ought to represent. Realism is excellent in itself; it means business, not baseness, and has its place in art accordingly.

scene.

Good working clothes may in fact partly make up for the sad loss of national or class costume, and something may be made of any purpose-like dress which suggests fitness for labour or exercise. It is hard to say much against hunting things, for example. Most men look better in them than in ordinary attire, and pinks are brilliant in a winter But there is generally an elaboration and shininess about them which militates against the picturesque, by confounding it with the spruce, the spicy, the well-got-up, and other qualities which suggest over-minute attention to lower details of appearance. The servants of the renowned Heythrop hunt wear a kind of green velvet, which is exceptionally good and highly picturesque; as that colour bears out in brilliant contrast, not only with the scarlets, but with all horse and hound tints-chestnut, bay and grey, brown, black, white, and the intermediates. Hunting pictures are getting much more numerous now. Some appear conventional or vulgar, or are mere repetitions of Alken's sketches; but (setting aside the excellent woodcuts in Punch) several oil-painters manage to convey the idea that they have really been out, liked it, and noticed the scene and country as well as men and horses. The picturesque of dress leads us again to the picturesque of association, or of thought, sentiment, or passion. The latter, as has been hinted, is symbolic, the object stands to this or that individual for much more than is actually or demonstrably in it. These terms just used all run into each other. A rose may in itself be like its little sister by the river's brim, a flower, and nothing more. But since the red and white rose were gathered in the Temple Gardens the flower has had historical memories which most people acknowledge; and when

'The red rose cries, She is here, she is here,
And the white rose weeps, She is late-

they enter into the domain of passion also, and are good subjects for picture as well as poem. There is, in fact, a broad distinction between the technical picturesque, all that will do well in a picture, and the associative picturesque of thoughts or ideas. The latter of course vary in dignity or intensity: a hat well driven in has more of the quality than a new hat, but less than a cloven helmet or dinted shield; because it only suggests the sylvan war, and the imitative though real dangers of the chase. Still, modern clothes are most intractable, and their changes extremely subtle. Our friend the Neapolitan sailor or lazzarone may be beautiful in a state of nature,

picturesque in ragged shirt and trousers, red scarf and cap; hideous if he wins in the lottery, and appears in a suit of black, worked shirt front and shiny boots. It may be contended that the dress of the chase, or some other time-honoured pursuit connected with the nature and earliest history of man, fairly comes within our lines. But the various disguises adopted for polo, lawn-tennis, or cricket are too bizarre, and merely conventional; while the dress for boatracing is undress. It is a last faint remnant of the Isthmus and Olympia.

These papers are to be about the study of natural beauty, and the various lessons, great and small, which are to be obtained from it. We have got thus far, that the word picturesque applies to ordinary degrees of beauty, and beautiful aspects of things, and that there is a picturesque of association, which invests an object, comely or not in itself, with beauty of idea and association. Now it is to be observed further that objects without beauty may be dignified or ennobled by some unaccountable power of the human mind, which goes by many names in the world, but which amounts in its results to spiritual power of some kind. Michael Angelo certainly made that old person famous, who sat to him for Atropos; and so of countless other models. It does not seem as if the spiritual power of the painter created the beauty, and he laid it on, like his impasto ; it seems as if he was able to see some desired charm in faces and persons which do not show it to ordinary eyes. He finds what he wants in an everyday face. And on that which he wants the greatness of his work will probably depend: if he wants nobleness of form, feature or colour, he will find it, and unquestionably vice versa. Some call it wanting, some call it loving, but the words practically mean the same thing; and all art leans on love of beauty, which varies according to choice of beauty; which varies according to morals, health, and education. But the soul of man is able, under certain influences and teachings, to invest things with awe, beauty, and grandeur not their own, and not evidently its own either. These qualities seem to us to be real, to be something and not nothing; and to have their source in some spiritual fountain of Honouron, to which the painter has occasional access, or from which it is given him in some sense to drink. A subject then may be raised into dignity by the spiritual, or in great degree by the technical gift, or power of the painter. It may have a dignity of its own. Even in landscape or domestic still-life, or with things inanimate, a kind of odour hangs about the places where good, or brilliant, or tender, or daring deeds were done. I apprehend one might feel less selfish than usual in Sister Dora's room at Walsall, and that one would not be specially timid on the deck of Nelson's old Victory.

Then, further, whether we are painters or not, it is a duty, or it is good, to beautify our own world after our fashion, and not deface it.

This may not apply strongly to all; but if a person has any tastes or æsthetic preference or conviction at all, that is natural taste. It was not given for nothing, and he does well, to say the least, in acting up to it, and in trying to make things look better to the eyes of others. One pretty thing in a street is a little dole of pleasure to nine-tenths of the passengers. I never go by Mr. Morris's house, close to Blackfriars Bridge, on the St. Paul's side, without feeling that he has done and is doing me a pleasure by having built it, and I see better or worse imitations near it which convince me that others feel the same. We are always being told that we live in Icaria, and that the world in general lives in Don'tcaria; only the world does care every now and then, and in its own way. That is often a wrong (i.e. simply erroneous) one. But it is, at all events, morally wrong to enforce indifference, and labour for dulness. That does not want active support; it is strong enough already. The gods fight hard against it, said Schiller, and don't always get the best of it. In this and other matters, it seems best to be on the side of the gods; and indeed I have somehow observed, in the course of the last forty years or so, that one's reasons for choosing any course, or making exertion or sacrifice for anything, run much into the question whether one is on the side of the gods

or not.

We are not polytheists-no more was Schiller-and we may drop the plural. It is the argument of the following pages that God made a certain large part of His creation (chiefly natural phenomena and the outsides of things) to be for delight, pleasure, happy contemplative employment of life. Further, that as He made it the duty and delight of His people to seek after Him continually, after their fashion and opportunities, so He gives beauty as a way or means of finding Him, and by finding Him I mean experiencing such consciousness of His presence and action as He gives to men to have here. It is my belief that as at this present time science is wrongfully forced towards denial of His existence, art is called on to assert it on the other hand, to which assertion I wish to contribute in a small way. It is well to show one's colours; I have often been attacked for preaching about art; and all I have to say is, woe is me if I do not do so, worse or better, and where and how I can; having seen too much art, and worked far too hard at it, to think it worth pursuing unless it leads to something better than itself. A great many scientific men, advertising themselves as science personified, tell us that is nonsense, and there is no thoroughfare. Be happy and virtuous, and anything else you please, but do not set up for a soul above molecules. Atoms you are-all you call your soul, genius, hope, love, prayer-and unto atoms you shall return. Well, all we call culture of the soul, and art more particularly, seems to me and to others to teach emphatically the other way; that there is something in and beyond atoms, which makes them capable of beauty and of enjoying