he can also strengthen and intensify his faculty of creation, the power by which he has conjured up that collier-child trudging along the snow, that pair of lovers on the hillside forgetting how the church-bell dies in the air, and the maze of pathetic thoughts which chime sadly through the brain of the dying fisher-there is every likelihood that David Wingate will produce something which shall permanently enrich his mother-tongue. So far as the public is concerned, he has cleared the ground for himself, and given proof of his faculty; but he has yet to claim his rank, and demonstrate what he can do with that undeniable gift. The compass of his notes, and the volume of melody he may yet produce, remain to be settled. Our advice to the poet is, to eschew words and devote himself to men; to be little careful of embodying a pretty thought, or

bearing the burden of a song through all possible varieties of monotone. The 'Deein' Fisher' is a higher effort of art as well as a profounder human study. These pictures linger on the memory when even the words that convey them are forgotten, and become real entities, ineffably independent and superior to the very pencil which produced them, which is an effect of poetry infinitely higher than that trick of recollection which keeps in the reader's mind the rhythm of a verse or the turn of a refrain. This highest result of his art seems in Mr Wingate's power. It is impossible to give higher praise to a new poet who has for the first time broken silence, and proved himself entitled to speak. Next time he appears before us we will know to a fuller extent, and by more perfect experiment, whether what he has to say is worthy the utterance with which he is endowed.

THE Arts this year are disporting themselves over the wide range of international territories, and painters and sculptors, like Royal Commissioners, may learn much that is pleasant and wholesome, and even disagreeable, from critics or jurors of foreign lands. M. About, a name which is itself a terror, and yet a jest, took "un voyage à travers L'Exposition des Beaux Arts," and of course fell in with the English pictures. He paid us the compliment to say that the English is the only school in the world which has not borrowed from the French! He added: In England, painting is for those who purchase the sweetest of luxuries, and for those who paint the utmost of drudgery! He gives us, however, the credit of rewarding our artists handsomely. In Germany, a great artist, when he is discovered, is made member of many academies, knight of many orders, and

Eng

sometimes councillor ! The last finish is "the red eagle of the third class, with a knot "! Α first-rate foreign painter is often far from rich, but he is invariably decorated: he may possibly be in want of clothes, but not of ribbons! It is otherwise in England. lish artists seem not very solicitous for small ribbons of mohair; but, on the other hand, they have a wholesome horror of dying from hunger. And a generous public is willing on these points to meet their views, and so, for "honourable mention," painters are presented with bank-notes, and for medals they receive guineas! "Have you remarked," exclaims M. About, "two little apes occupied in nibbling a pine apple? That is a painting of 50,000 francs!" The animals of Landseer, he continues, have the same defect as Englishmen painted by their fellows. Dress up the dogs in coat and hat, and you have

6

an image of Charivari,' at the time when animals were painted by themselves! Only France and Belgium know how to paint the brute creation! The English possess some cleverness, but no force : when they give us their own 'Cromwell,' we think only of how well are painted his leather boots. They have a certain fantasy and poetry, but all so calmed down that the effect is "d'un 'Punch' à la glace!" English painters, continues M. About, are not without "esprit." But who would venture, he asks, to place the "esprit" of Sterne and the savoir-faire" of Goldsmith side by side with the genius of Shakespeare and Byron? The English school of Art has many Goldsmiths, and possibly one half part of a Sterne it wants nothing, indeed, but genius! "The figure," says M. About, it has never mastered. "Je ne sais pourquoi le nu me paraît toujours choquant dans la peinture Anglaise. Il me semble que ces jeunes misses qui font la révérence in naturalibus vont s'enfuir en criant, For shame! si elles s'aperçoivent que nous les regardons!"

66

6

Were a German philosopher, instead of a French wit, let loose in our Royal Academy, we should, in lieu of satire, doubtless be treated to profound reflections on art, the outward symbol of invisible thought, the plastic embodiment of a human soul struggling for the unconditioned and the infinite! Schlegel, in his essay On the Limits of the Beautiful,' writes: "One art strays into the province of another, one peculiar branch becomes intermingled with the family of another. Representation is confounded with perception-imagination with contemplation; while symbolism and reality, time and space, all change their relative position!" This sublime German strain recalls Bon Gaultier's English lines:

"And when the King of Terrors breathes

While from their ashes, burnt with pomp of kings,

'Mid incense floating to the evanished skies,

Nonentity, on circumambient wings,
An everlasting Phoenix shall arise."

66

It is really a pity that in this year of confluent and international genius, no modern Schiller has yet written on our London Exhibitions, to show our native artists what mistakes are daily committed from ignorance of the true and eternal relations known to bind "subjectivity" and "objectivity" into one essential brotherhood. "The universe," Mr Emerson teaches us, "is the externisation of the soul;" and "Art and Science," says Von Schelling, "can only revolve on their own axes." Effective science is, in nature and art, the bond between conception and form, between body and soul." "Sculpture," he adds, "can only attain its highest excellence in natures whose idea it brings with it-natures in which everything that they are in the idea, or soul, can at the same time be likewise in actuality: consequently, in godlike natures!" "At this height sensuous grace becomes merely veil and body to a still higher life." In conclusion, let us add one more aphorism, also taken from Von Schelling's 'Philosophy of the Plastic Arts and Nature." "The artist should indeed, above all things, imitate that spirit of nature which, working in the core of things, speaks by form and shape, as if by symbols; and only in so far as he seizes this spirit, and vitally imitates it, has he himself created anything of truth." The arts this season being intrusted to the paternal government of "Royal Commissioners," who have considerately provided for the temporal comforts of students and the general public, even to mundane wants, as ham - sandwiches, and strawberry ices, bitter beer, and sherry-cobbler, may we not reasonably entertain the hope that the more transcendental cravings of our higher humanity will yet receive their enlightened and disinterested

attention? If these Royal Commissioners, who have hitherto given to the world incontestable proof of their justly - assumed omniscience, could lay hold of a genuine hazy yet sublime Kantean philosopher, to do a "handbook on the scale of "the infinite," they would still further add to the benefits they have already conferred upon the literature of the arts. The German Gallery contains a picture of St Cecilia,' by Von Scheffer, contributed by the Emperor of Austria. Why should the Royal Commissioners not honour themselves and our illustrious ally by some such criticism as the following, written by Frederick von Schlegel on the 'St Cecilia' of another German artist, Ludwig Schnorr? "As the seven eternal harmonic tones," says Schlegel, "which form the fundamental harmony of music, in life as well as in science, are symbolised by the hues of that manytinted bow, formed of the broken rays of original light, or rather of tears, drops shed by created nature in the ocean of infinity, and broken and divided in the play of the sunbeam; so the artist has represent ed the symbolic organ in the foreground of the picture, glimmering through the reflection of the rainbow: thus striving, by the adoption of every artistic intimation in his power, to clothe the impalpable idea with reality, and, in working out his conception, to carry the tangible representation to the extremest verge of idealism"!!

This sublime passage of the cloudy incomprehensible, we should, in a plain blunt way, have ventured to pronounce mere bosh, philosophic twaddle, morbid self-consciousness, the rhapsodyof a weak intellect grow ing hysterical, had not the Royal Commissioners stamped with official authority a Handbook to the Fine Art Collections in the International Exhibition,' written in the same style and spirit. This red pamphlet was ere long thrust from the building, into which, indeed, it ought never to have entered; and

thus we are absolved from further comment on the author.

Let us turn to Exhibitions, Great and Small, which this year are legion. The world of history has its cycles, its periods of revolution and return; and so the little world of art, in like manner, seems permitted to have its millenniums of rest, its jubilees of rejoicing, its seedtime and its harvest, its years of plenty, when barns are filled to overflowing. Not that we now live in the age of Pericles, of Augustus, of Leo, of Francis, or of Louis; yet, what is perhaps next best in the absence of Phidias, Apelles, Raphael and Michael Angelo, we inhabit a land given to Exhibitions! Ours, it is true, is not an age wherein one small block, hewn from Hymettus, can be carved into a single but immortal work which for all time shall be an exhibition of itself. But, on the other hand, we have in this day power of accumulation, combination, and co-operation truly gigantic and astounding. If our hills are not built of the stone of Pentilica and Carrara, our valleys are rich in alluvial clay. And thus it is our blessing to live in an epoch of brick, and our towns are like Rome herself ere the Emperor made her palaces of marble. we have not the essential unit of genius to start with, we have at all events an infinitude of littleness, which, as in the International Building itself, at length accumulates by mere aggregation of parts into the monstrous and the grand. And thus, in like manner, the other exhibitions of the year are put togegether-little of marble, little of refined gold-little, in short, of that genius which creates, as it were, out of nothing a grand epoch of its own. In the Royal Academy we find 1142 works; in the Suffolk Street Gallery we presume are at least 1000 more. The Old Water Colour Society enters 329 drawings in its catalogue, the New Society 333; the French Gallery hangs about 200 works; and, lastly, the Internatianal Exhibition comprises an aggregate

If

of rather more than 7000 pictures, sculptures, drawings, and engravings, British and Foreign. The grand total makes somewhat above 10,000 works; bricks, to repeat the metaphor, which will fitly build into the great pyramid of this annus mirabalis.

The accumulated result, however, even in its component atoms, is not to be despised. Eternity is made out of moments, many of which are far from thrilling; and infinite space is, after all, but the aggregation of square inches, many of which are sufficiently flat and commonplace. And thus the 10,000 bricks composing the great pyramid of 1862, although each wondrously like the other, and bearing close similitude to the thousand and one bricks it has been our privilege to see before, still, as a shepherd is said to distinguish a separate and peculiar character in each face of his numerous flock, so every lineament in the herd of 10,000 works is doubtless the expression of individual thought, the very gist of personal genius. But how, in this somewhat voluminous incarnation of talent, to reach the pith and the marrow-how to do justice to each separate idea which evidently struggles for immortality, -this were a gigantic and, indeed, a hopeless endeavour.

In the present year of international competition, it might be desirable and fitting, if possible, to rise into the sphere of international criticism; it might be well to enter our galleries and scrutinise our pictures with the eye of a disinterested stranger, anxious to discriminate the distinctive characteristics of our national school-to mark the tendency and weigh the pressure of the times, and see in the face of living art the reflection of a people's mind. Suppose that we put ourselves, for example, in the attitude of an enlightened Frenchman, acquainted with the gallery of the Luxembourg, and knowing by heart 'The Shipwreck' of Gericault, the grand compositions of Brun, David, Jouvenet, Prud'hon, Gros, and Guérin,

in the Louvre. Or let us imagine ourselves in the London Royal Academy, arm-in-arm companion of the stranger. We will read to this Frenchman, imbued with the "high art" of his country, the following imaginary yet characteristic criticism:- "Mr Millais, in 'The Ransom,' is at his best; Mr Philip, in his 'Water-Drinkers,' was never seen in greater force or richer colour; Mr Elmore, in his ingenious subject, 'The Invention of the Combing-Machine,' for the moment forsakes the history of nations for the incident of an invention; Sir Watson Gordon, in his portrait of the Prince of Wales, is, as usual, vigorous, quiet, and truthful; Mr Mulready, in his 'Toy-Seller,' magnifies his well-known miniatures into life size; Mr Poole once more, in his Trial of a Sorceress,' indulges in that weird mystery wherewith he knows so well how to work on the imagination by a spell; Mr Webster, in Roast Pig,' and Mr Hardy, in 'The Sweep,' treat us to a couple of genuine English subjects; Mr Herbert's "Labore est Orare' is, as might be expected, suggestive,' yet weak, washy, and scattered. This great artist will do well to look to his laurels."

Our French stranger of the "Academie Française," we need scarcely say, looked confounded and aghast. A leading journalist then took him round the smaller rooms. "You will see," observed the Editor, "that the young Danbys are following in the footsteps of their revered father; that the Linnells, a family party, make a nice thing of it; that Mr O'Neil, having for several seasons painted from the same models, clambering up and down the same ship-side, has this year, in Mary Stuart's Farewell,' changed his dramatis personæ, and taken to a handsome quarterdeck; that Mr Goodall, having in a former season encamped certain Eastern models and sketches upon the shores of the Dead Sea, now effects a pleasing

variety in his 'Pilgrim's Return from Mecca,' by a change of venue to the streets of Cairo; that Mr Roberts, having long haunted every canal in Venice, this year sails his bark upon Father Thames, and notwithstanding the sad sanitary condition of the water, manages to give us plenty of sunshine; that Mr Cooke having of late done well in sunsets Mr Cooper having struck on a good idea, sheep in a snow-drift-Mr Lee having studied with success the rock of Gibraltar -Mr Creswick being long known by meadows, trees, and running brooks-and Mr Hook growing famous for fisher boys, christened 'Sea Urchins,'-one and all of these great painters resolved that it was impossible to hit upon anything more lucky or profitable than their old and time-hallowed subjects, and therefore have again repeated the pictures of former years in disguise." We have thus imagined our foreign novice listening patiently to the foregoing strictures,-a contrast to French and German criticisms already quoted.

The supposed Editor then extemporises on his own account a few spontaneous remarks:-" You will observe," says he, "a total absence of Mr Ruskin's 'apple-blossoms,' which in former seasons bloomed so profusely-the Academy in consequence this year loses much of its gay spring-like profusion. You will mark, too, that, Mr Ruskin having discontinued his annual 'Notes,' artists cease to paint up to the tone of his criticisms, and consequently our English school-especially the Pre-Raphaelite branch of it, now in danger of sinking into mere common-sense sobriety-has lost much that is precious' and 'tender,' 'Dead Stone-breakers,' and the like. Our English art, sir, allow me to add, we consider in a remarkably healthful and hopeful condition; it is now in its hundredth year, and has still all the promise and loveliness of opening youth upon its brow. In the noble branch of portraiture, sir, we are

VOL. XCII.-NO. DLXI.

without rival; from the time of Reynolds to the present moment, the walls of our Academy have never ceased to be crowded with the heads of the first ladies and gentlemen in the land."

Our native critic having ended, the Frenchman took the word. "Pray, Monsieur, permit me to inquire where is your salon of 'tableaux historiques '-where are the great national deeds which your country naturally expects your artists to record?" The illustrious

foreigner is taken in front of Mr Elmore's picture, The Invention of the Combing-Machine,' which, placed by the hangers in the chief point of honour, would seem sufficient answer to our visitor's anxious inquiry. "I should wish to see the works," continues the Frenchman," sent by your students and pensioners from the English Academy in Rome." The cicerone, in a moment of perplexity, explained that the great works executed under the direction of the English Professor of Painting at the British Academy in Rome had been delayed, and unfortunately had reached London too late. A kind friend hereupon took the speaker aside, and in sotto voce reminded him that England, unlike France, Russia, and most other nations, has no Academy in Rome; that leading authorities, including Mr Ruskin, being of opinion that Continental art had for three centuries been going to the bad, and that Raphael in the Vatican had written "upon the walls the Mene, Tekel, Upharsin of the arts of Christianity," the English Government had not deemed it advisable, especially considering that the Bishop of Rome was Antichrist of the Revelation, to send our students to "the Eternal City!" The Ministry, moreover, consider it essential that Englishmen, including painters, shall be Englishmen, and they hold it imperative that our native art shall continue home born and bred, and thus be kept wholly independent of foreign intervention! The subject was

E