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Miscellanies

by Oscar Wilde · English · Gutenberg #14062 · 532,722 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Miscellanies

Author: Oscar Wilde

Contributor: Stuart Mason

Editor: Robert Baldwin Ross


        
Release date: November 16, 2004 [eBook #14062]
                Most recently updated: December 18, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14062

Credits: Transcribed from the 1908 edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISCELLANIES ***





Transcribed from the 1908 edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk






MISCELLANIES BY OSCAR WILDE


DEDICATION: TO WALTER LEDGER


Since these volumes are sure of a place in your marvellous library I
trust that with your unrivalled knowledge of the various editions of
Wilde you may not detect any grievous error whether of taste or type, of
omission or commission.  But should you do so you must blame the editor,
and not those who so patiently assisted him, the proof readers, the
printers, or the publishers.  Some day, however, I look forward to your
bibliography of the author, in which you will be at liberty to criticise
my capacity for anything except regard and friendship for
yourself.--Sincerely yours,

ROBERT ROSS

May 25, 1908.




INTRODUCTION


The concluding volume of any collected edition is unavoidably fragmentary
and desultory.  And if this particular volume is no exception to a
general tendency, it presents points of view in the author's literary
career which may have escaped his greatest admirers and detractors.  The
wide range of his knowledge and interests is more apparent than in some
of his finished work.

What I believed to be only the fragment of an essay on Historical
Criticism was already in the press, when accidentally I came across the
remaining portions, in Wilde's own handwriting; it is now complete though
unhappily divided in this edition. {0a}  Any doubt as to its
authenticity, quite apart from the calligraphy, would vanish on reading
such a characteristic passage as the following:--' . . .  For, it was in
vain that the middle ages strove to guard the buried spirit of progress.
When the dawn of the Greek spirit arose, the sepulchre was empty, the
grave clothes laid aside.  Humanity had risen from the dead.'  It was
only Wilde who could contrive a literary conceit of that description; but
readers will observe with different feelings, according to their
temperament, that he never followed up the particular trend of thought
developed in the essay.  It is indeed more the work of the Berkeley Gold
Medallist at Dublin, or the brilliant young Magdalen Demy than of the
dramatist who was to write Salome.  The composition belongs to his Oxford
days when he was the unsuccessful competitor for the Chancellor's English
Essay Prize.  Perhaps Magdalen, which has never forgiven herself for
nurturing the author of Ravenna, may be felicitated on having escaped the
further intolerable honour that she might have suffered by seeing crowned
again with paltry academic parsley the most highly gifted of all her
children in the last century.  Compared with the crude criticism on The
Grosvenor Gallery (one of the earliest of Wilde's published prose
writings), Historical Criticism is singularly advanced and mature.  Apart
from his mere scholarship Wilde developed his literary and dramatic
talent slowly.  He told me that he was never regarded as a particularly
precocious or clever youth.  Indeed many old family friends and
contemporary journalists maintain sturdily that the talent of his elder
brother William was much more remarkable.  In this opinion they are
fortified, appropriately enough, by the late Clement Scott.  I record
this interesting view because it symbolises the familiar phenomenon that
those nearest the mountain cannot appreciate its height.

The exiguous fragment of La Sainte Courtisane is the next unpublished
work of importance.  At the time of Wilde's trial the nearly completed
drama was entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, who in 1897 went to Paris on
purpose to restore it to the author.  Wilde immediately left the
manuscript in a cab.  A few days later he laughingly informed me of the
loss, and added that a cab was a very proper place for it.  I have
explained elsewhere that he looked on his plays with disdain in his last
years, though he was always full of schemes for writing others.  All my
attempts to recover the lost work failed.  The passages here reprinted
are from some odd leaves of a first draft.  The play is of course not
unlike Salome, though it was written in English.  It expanded Wilde's
favourite theory that when you convert some one to an idea, you lose your
faith in it; the same motive runs through Mr. W. H.  Honorius the hermit,
so far as I recollect the story, falls in love with the courtesan who has
come to tempt him, and he reveals to her the secret of the Love of God.
She immediately becomes a Christian, and is murdered by robbers; Honorius
the hermit goes back to Alexandria to pursue a life of pleasure.  Two
other similar plays Wilde invented in prison, Ahab and Isabel and
Pharaoh; he would never write them down, though often importuned to do
so.  Pharaoh was intensely dramatic and perhaps more original than any of
the group.  None of these works must be confused with the manuscripts
stolen from 16 Tite Street in 1895--namely the enlarged version of Mr. W.
H., the completed form of A Florentine Tragedy, and The Duchess of Padua
(which existing in a prompt copy was of less importance than the others);
nor with The Cardinal of Arragon, the manuscript of which I never saw.  I
scarcely think it ever existed, though Wilde used to recite proposed
passages for it.

In regard to printing the lectures I have felt some diffidence: the
majority of them were delivered from notes, and the same lectures were
repeated in different towns in England and America.  The reports of them
in the papers are never trustworthy; they are often grotesque travesties,
like the reports of after-dinner speeches in the London press of today.  I
have included only those lectures of which I possess or could obtain
manuscript.

The aim of this edition has been completeness; and it is complete so far
as human effort can make it; but besides the lost manuscripts there must
be buried in the contemporary press many anonymous reviews which I have
failed to identify.  The remaining contents of this book do not call for
further comment, other than a reminder that Wilde would hardly have
consented to their republication.  But owing to the number of anonymous
works wrongly attributed to him, chiefly in America, and spurious works
published in his name, I found it necessary to violate the laws of
friendship by rejecting nothing I knew to be authentic.  It will be seen
on reference to the letters on The Ethics of Journalism that Wilde's name
appearing at the end of poems and articles was not always a proof of
authenticity even in his lifetime.

Of the few letters Wilde wrote to the press, those addressed to Whistler
I have included with greater misgiving than anything else in this volume.
They do not seem to me more amusing than those to which they were the
intended rejoinders.  But the dates are significant.  Wilde was at one
time always accused of plagiarising his ideas and his epigrams from
Whistler, especially those with which he decorated his lectures, the
accusation being brought by Whistler himself and his various disciples.
It should be noted that all the works by which Wilde is known throughout
Europe were written _after_ the two friends quarrelled.  That Wilde
derived a great deal from the older man goes without saying, just as he
derived much in a greater degree from Pater, Ruskin, Arnold and Burne-
Jones.  Yet the tedious attempt to recognise in every jest of his some
original by Whistler induces the criticism that it seems a pity the great
painter did not get them off on the public before he was forestalled.
Reluctance from an appeal to publicity was never a weakness in either of
the men.  Some of Wilde's more frequently quoted sayings were made at the
Old Bailey (though their provenance is often forgotten) or on his death-
bed.

As a matter of fact, the genius of the two men was entirely different.
Wilde was a humourist and a humanist before everything; and his wittiest
jests have neither the relentlessness nor the keenness characterising
those of the clever American artist.  Again, Whistler could no more have
obtained the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, nor have written The
Importance of Being Earnest, nor The Soul of Man, than Wilde, even if
equipped as a painter, could ever have evinced that superb restraint
distinguishing the portraits of 'Miss Alexander,' 'Carlyle,' and other
masterpieces.  Wilde, though it is not generally known, was something of
a draughtsman in his youth.  I possess several of his drawings.

A complete bibliography including all the foreign translations and
American piracies would make a book of itself much larger than the
present one.  In order that Wilde collectors (and there are many, I
believe) may know the authorised editions and authentic writings from the
spurious, Mr. Stuart Mason, whose work on this edition I have already
acknowledged, has supplied a list which contains every _genuine_ and
_authorised_ English edition.  This of course does not preclude the
chance that some of the American editions are authorised, and that some
of Wilde's genuine works even are included in the pirated editions.

I am indebted to the Editors and Proprietors of the Queen for leave to
reproduce the article on 'English Poetesses'; to the Editor and
Proprietors of the Sunday Times for the article entitled 'Art at Willis's
Rooms'; and to Mr. William Waldorf Astor for those from the Pall Mall
Gazette.

ROBERT ROSS




THE TOMB OF KEATS


(Irish Monthly, July 1877.)

As one enters Rome from the Via Ostiensis by the Porta San Paolo, the
first object that meets the eye is a marble pyramid which stands close at
hand on the left.

There are many Egyptian obelisks in Rome--tall, snakelike spires of red
sandstone, mottled with strange writings, which remind us of the pillars
of flame which led the children of Israel through the desert away from
the land of the Pharaohs; but more wonderful than these to look upon is
this gaunt, wedge-shaped pyramid standing here in this Italian city,
unshattered amid the ruins and wrecks of time, looking older than the
Eternal City itself, like terrible impassiveness turned to stone.  And so
in the Middle Ages men supposed this to be the sepulchre of Remus, who
was slain by his own brother at the founding of the city, so ancient and
mysterious it appears; but we have now, perhaps unfortunately, more
accurate information about it, and know that it is the tomb of one Caius
Cestius, a Roman gentleman of small note, who died about 30 B.C.

Yet though we cannot care much for the dead man who lies in lonely state
beneath it, and who is only known to the world through his sepulchre,
still this pyramid will be ever dear to the eyes of all English-speaking
people, because at evening its shadows fall on the tomb of one who walks
with Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Byron, and Shelley, and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning in the great procession of the sweet singers of England.

For at its foot there is a green, sunny slope, known as the Old
Protestant Cemetery, and on this a common-looking grave, which bears the
following inscription:

   This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who
   on his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart, desired these words
   to be engraven on his tombstone: HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN
   WATER.  February 24, 1821.

And the name of the young English poet is John Keats.

Lord Houghton calls this cemetery 'one of the most beautiful spots on
which the eye and heart of man can rest,' and Shelley speaks of it as
making one 'in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so
sweet a place'; and indeed when I saw the violets and the daisies and the
poppies that overgrow the tomb, I remembered how the dead poet had once
told his friend that he thought the 'intensest pleasure he had received
in life was in watching the growth of flowers,' and how another time,
after lying a while quite still, he murmured in some strange prescience
of early death, 'I feel the flowers growing over me.'

But this time-worn stone and these wildflowers are but poor memorials {3}
of one so great as Keats; most of all, too, in this city of Rome, which
pays such honour to her dead; where popes, and emperors, and saints, and
cardinals lie hidden in 'porphyry wombs,' or couched in baths of jasper
and chalcedony and malachite, ablaze with precious stones and metals, and
tended with continual service.  For very noble is the site, and worthy of
a noble monument; behind looms the grey pyramid, symbol of the world's
age, and filled with memories of the sphinx, and the lotus leaf, and the
glories of old Nile; in front is the Monte Testaccio, built, it is said,
with the broken fragments of the vessels in which all the nations of the
East and the West brought their tribute to Rome; and a little distance
off, along the slope of the hill under the Aurelian wall, some tall gaunt
cypresses rise, like burnt-out funeral torches, to mark the spot where
Shelley's heart (that 'heart of hearts'!) lies in the earth; and, above
all, the soil on which we tread is very Rome!

As I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as
of a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido's
St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown
boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies
to a tree, and though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine,
impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening heavens.  And
thus my thoughts shaped themselves to rhyme:

   HEU MISERANDE PUER

   Rid of the world's injustice and its pain,
      He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue;
      Taken from life while life and love were new
   The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
   Fair as Sebastian and as foully slain.
      No cypress shades his grave, nor funeral yew,
      But red-lipped daisies, violets drenched with dew,
   And sleepy poppies, catch the evening rain.

   O proudest heart that broke for misery!
      O saddest poet that the world hath seen!
         O sweetest singer of the English land!
         Thy name was writ in water on the sand,
      But our tears shall keep thy memory green,
   And make it flourish like a Basil-tree.

   Borne, 1877.

Note.--A later version of this sonnet, under the title of 'The Grave of
Keats,' is given in the Poems, page 157.




THE GROSVENOR GALLERY, 1877


(Dublin University Magazine, July 1877.)

That 'Art is long and life is short' is a truth which every one feels, or
ought to feel; yet surely those who were in London last May, and had in
one week the opportunities of hearing Rubenstein play the Sonata
Impassionata, of seeing Wagner conduct the Spinning-Wheel Chorus from the
Flying Dutchman, and of studying art at the Grosvenor Gallery, have very
little to complain of as regards human existence and art-pleasures.

Descriptions of music are generally, perhaps, more or less failures, for
music is a matter of individual feeling, and the beauties and lessons
that one draws from hearing lovely sounds are mainly personal, and depend
to a large extent on one's own state of mind and culture.  So leaving
Rubenstein and Wagner to be celebrated by Franz Huffer, or Mr. Haweis, or
any other of our picturesque writers on music, I will describe some of
the pictures now being shown in the Grosvenor Gallery.

The origin of this Gallery is as follows: About a year ago the idea
occurred to Sir Coutts Lindsay of building a public gallery, in which,
untrammelled by the difficulties or meannesses of 'Hanging Committees,'
he could exhibit to the lovers of art the works of certain great living
artists side by side: a gallery in which the student would not have to
struggle through an endless monotony of mediocre works in order to reach
what was worth looking at; one in which the people of England could have
the opportunity of judging of the merits of at least one great master of
painting, whose pictures had been kept from public exhibition by the
jealousy and ignorance of rival artists.  Accordingly, last May, in New
Bond Street, the Grosvenor Gallery was opened to the public.

As far as the Gallery itself is concerned, there are only three rooms, so
there is no fear of our getting that terrible weariness of mind and eye
which comes on after the 'Forced Marches' through ordinary picture
galleries.  The walls are hung with scarlet damask above a dado of dull
green and gold; there are luxurious velvet couches, beautiful flowers and
plants, tables of gilded and inlaid marbles, covered with Japanese china
and the latest 'Minton,' globes of 'rainbow glass' like large
soap-bubbles, and, in fine, everything in decoration that is lovely to
look on, and in harmony with the surrounding works of art.

Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt are probably the greatest masters of colour
that we have ever had in England, with the single exception of Turner,
but their styles differ widely.  To draw a rough distinction, Holman Hunt
studies and reproduces the colours of natural objects, and deals with
historical subjects, or scenes of real life, mostly from the East,
touched occasionally with a certain fancifulness, as in the Shadow of the
Cross.  Burne-Jones, on the contrary, is a dreamer in the land of
mythology, a seer of fairy visions, a symbolical painter.  He is an
imaginative colourist too, knowing that all colour is no mere delightful
quality of natural things, but a 'spirit upon them by which they become
expressive to the spirit,' as Mr. Pater says.  Watts's power, on the
other hand, lies in his great originative and imaginative genius, and he
reminds us of AEschylus or Michael Angelo in the startling vividness of
his conceptions.  Although these three painters differ much in aim and in
result, they yet are one in their faith, and love, and reverence, the
three golden keys to the gate of the House Beautiful.

On entering the West Gallery the first picture that meets the eye is Mr.
Watts's Love and Death, a large painting, representing a marble doorway,
all overgrown with white-starred jasmine and sweet brier-rose.  Death, a
giant form, veiled in grey draperies, is passing in with inevitable and
mysterious power, breaking through all the flowers.  One foot is already
on the threshold, and one relentless hand is extended, while Love, a
beautiful boy with lithe brown limbs and rainbow-coloured wings, all
shrinking like a crumpled leaf, is trying, with vain hands, to bar the
entrance.  A little dove, undisturbed by the agony of the terrible
conflict, waits patiently at the foot of the steps for her playmate; but
will wait in vain, for though the face of Death is hidden from us, yet we
can see from the terror in the boy's eyes and quivering lips, that,
Medusa-like, this grey phantom turns all it looks upon to stone; and the
wings of Love are rent and crushed.  Except on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel in Rome, there are perhaps few paintings to compare with this in
intensity of strength and in marvel of conception.  It is worthy to rank
with Michael Angelo's God Dividing the Light from the Darkness.

Next to it are hung five pictures by Millais.  Three of them are
portraits of the three daughters of the Duke of Westminster, all in white
dresses, with white hats and feathers; the delicacy of the colour being
rather injured by the red damask background.  These pictures do not
possess any particular merit beyond that of being extremely good
likenesses, especially the one of the Marchioness of Ormonde.  Over them
is hung a picture of a seamstress, pale and vacant-looking, with eyes red
from tears and long watchings in the night, hemming a shirt.  It is meant
to illustrate Hood's familiar poem.  As we look on it, a terrible
contrast strikes us between this miserable pauper-seamstress and the
three beautiful daughters of the richest duke in the world, which breaks
through any artistic reveries by its awful vividness.

The fifth picture is a profile head of a young man with delicate aquiline
nose, thoughtful oval face, and artistic, abstracted air, which will be
easily recognised as a portrait of Lord Ronald Gower, who is himself
known as an artist and sculptor.  But no one would discern in these five
pictures the genius that painted the Home at Bethlehem and the portrait
of John Ruskin which is at Oxford.

Then come eight pictures by Alma Tadema, good examples of that accurate
drawing of inanimate objects which makes his pictures so real from an
antiquarian point of view, and of the sweet subtlety of colouring which
gives to them a magic all their own.  One represents some Roman girls
bathing in a marble tank, and the colour of the limbs in the water is
very perfect indeed; a dainty attendant is tripping down a flight of
steps with a bundle of towels, and in the centre a great green sphinx in
bronze throws forth a shower of sparkling water for a very pretty
laughing girl, who stoops gleefully beneath it.  There is a delightful
sense of coolness about the picture, and one can almost imagine that one
hears the splash of water, and the girls' chatter.  It is wonderful what
a world of atmosphere and reality may be condensed into a very small
space, for this picture is only about eleven by two and a half inches.

The most ambitious of these pictures is one of Phidias Showing the Frieze
of the Parthenon to his Friends.  We are supposed to be on a high
scaffolding level with the frieze, and the effect of great height
produced by glimpses of light between the planking of the floor is very
cleverly managed.  But there is a want of individuality among the
connoisseurs clustered round Phidias, and the frieze itself is very
inaccurately coloured.  The Greek boys who are riding and leading the
horses are painted Egyptian red, and the whole design is done in this
red, dark blue, and black.  This sombre colouring is un-Greek; the
figures of these boys were undoubtedly tinted with flesh colour, like the
ordinary Greek statues, and the whole tone of the colouring of the
original frieze was brilliant and light; while one of its chief beauties,
the reins and accoutrements of burnished metal, is quite omitted.  This
painter is more at home in the Greco-Roman art of the Empire and later
Republic than he is in the art of the Periclean age.

The most remarkable of Mr. Richmond's pictures exhibited here is his
Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon--a very magnificent subject, to which,
however, justice is not done.  Electra and her handmaidens are grouped
gracefully around the tomb of the murdered King; but there is a want of
humanity in the scene: there is no trace of that passionate Asiatic
mourning for the dead to which the Greek women were so prone, and which
AEschylus describes with such intensity; nor would Greek women have come
to pour libations to the dead in such bright-coloured dresses as Mr.
Richmond has given them; clearly this artist has not studied AEschylus'
play of the Choephori, in which there is an elaborate and pathetic
account of this scene.  The tall, twisted tree-stems, however, that form
the background are fine and original in effect, and Mr. Richmond has
caught exactly that peculiar opal-blue of the sky which is so remarkable
in Greece; the purple orchids too, and daffodil and narcissi that are in
the foreground are all flowers which I have myself seen at Argos.

Sir Coutts Lindsay sends a life-size portrait of his wife, holding a
violin, which has some good points of colour and position, and four other
pictures, including an exquisitely simple and quaint little picture of
the Dower House at Balcarres, and a Daphne with rather questionable flesh-
painting, and in whom we miss the breathlessness of flight.

   I saw the blush come o'er her like a rose;
   The half-reluctant crimson comes and goes;
   Her glowing limbs make pause, and she is stayed
   Wondering the issue of the words she prayed.

It is a great pity that Holman Hunt is not represented by any of his
really great works, such as the Finding of Christ in the Temple, or
Isabella Mourning over the Pot of Basil, both of which are fair samples
of his powers.  Four pictures of his are shown here: a little Italian
child, painted with great love and sweetness, two street scenes in Cairo
full of rich Oriental colouring, and a wonderful work called the
Afterglow in Egypt.  It represents a tall swarthy Egyptian woman, in a
robe of dark and light blue, carrying a green jar on her shoulder, and a
sheaf of grain on her head; around her comes fluttering a flock of
beautiful doves of all colours, eager to be fed.  Behind is a wide flat
river, and across the river a stretch of ripe corn, through which a gaunt
camel is being driven; the sun has set, and from the west comes a great
wave of red light like wine poured out on the land, yet not crimson, as
we see the Afterglow in Northern Europe, but a rich pink like that of a
rose.  As a study of colour it is superb, but it is difficult to feel a
human interest in this Egyptian peasant.

Mr. Albert Moore sends some of his usual pictures of women, which as
studies of drapery and colour effects are very charming.  One of them, a
tall maiden, in a robe of light blue clasped at the neck with a glowing
sapphire, and with an orange headdress, is a very good example of the
highest decorative art, and a perfect delight in colour.

Mr. Spencer Stanhope's picture of Eve Tempted is one of the remarkable
pictures of the Gallery.  Eve, a fair woman, of surpassing loveliness, is
leaning against a bank of violets, underneath the apple tree; naked,
except for the rich thick folds of gilded hair which sweep down from her
head like the bright rain in which Zeus came to Danae.  The head is
drooped a little forward as a flower droops when the dew has fallen
heavily, and her eyes are dimmed with the haze that comes in moments of
doubtful thought.  One arm falls idly by her side; the other is raised
high over her head among the branches, her delicate fingers just meeting
round one of the burnished apples that glow amidst the leaves like
'golden lamps in a green night.'  An amethyst-coloured serpent, with a
devilish human head, is twisting round the trunk of the tree and breathes
into the woman's ear a blue flame of evil counsel.  At the feet of Eve
bright flowers are growing, tulips, narcissi, lilies, and anemones, all
painted with a loving patience that reminds us of the older Florentine
masters; after whose example, too, Mr. Stanhope has used gilding for
Eve's hair and for the bright fruits.

Next to it is another picture by the same artist, entitled Love and the
Maiden.  A girl has fallen asleep in a wood of olive trees, through whose
branches and grey leaves we can see the glimmer of sky and sea, with a
little seaport town of white houses shining in the sunlight.  The olive
wood is ever sacred to the Virgin Pallas, the Goddess of Wisdom; and who
would have dreamed of finding Eros hidden there?  But the girl wakes up,
as one wakes from sleep one knows not why, to see the face of the boy
Love, who, with outstretched hands, is leaning towards her from the midst
of a rhododendron's crimson blossoms.  A rose-garland presses the boy's
brown curls, and he is clad in a tunic of oriental colours, and
delicately sensuous are his face and his bared limbs.  His boyish beauty
is of that peculiar type unknown in Northern Europe, but common in the
Greek islands, where boys can still be found as beautiful as the
Charmides of Plato.  Guido's St. Sebastian in the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa
is one of those boys, and Perugino once drew a Greek Ganymede for his
native town, but the painter who most shows the influence of this type is
Correggio, whose lily-bearer in the Cathedral at Parma, and whose wild-
eyed, open-mouthed St. Johns in the 'Incoronata Madonna' of St. Giovanni
Evangelista, are the best examples in art of the bloom and vitality and
radiance of this adolescent beauty.  And so there is extreme loveliness
in this figure of Love by Mr. Stanhope, and the whole picture is full of
grace, though there is, perhaps, too great a luxuriance of colour, and it
would have been a relief had the girl been dressed in pure white.

Mr. Frederick Burton, of whom all Irishmen are so justly proud, is
represented by a fine water-colour portrait of Mrs. George Smith; one
would almost believe it to be in oils, so great is the lustre on this
lady's raven-black hair, and so rich and broad and vigorous is the
painting of a Japanese scarf she is wearing.  Then as we turn to the east
wall of the gallery we see the three great pictures of Burne-Jones, the
Beguiling of Merlin, the Days of Creation, and the Mirror of Venus.  The
version of the legend of Merlin's Beguiling that Mr. Burne-Jones has
followed differs from Mr. Tennyson's and from the account in the Morte
d'Arthur.  It is taken from the Romance of Merlin, which tells the story
in this wise:

   It fell on a day that they went through the forest of Breceliande, and
   found a bush that was fair and high, of white hawthorn, full of
   flowers, and there they sat in the shadow.  And Merlin fell on sleep;
   and when she felt that he was on sleep she arose softly, and began her
   enchantments, such as Merlin had taught her, and made the ring nine
   times, and nine times the enchantments.

   . . . . .

   And then he looked about him, and him seemed he was in the fairest
   tower of the world, and the most strong; neither of iron was it
   fashioned, nor steel, nor timber, nor of stone, but of the air,
   without any other thing; and in sooth so strong it is that it may
   never be undone while the world endureth.

So runs the chronicle; and thus Mr. Burne-Jones, the 'Archimage of the
esoteric unreal,' treats the subject.  Stretched upon a low branch of the
tree, and encircled with the glory of the white hawthorn-blossoms, half
sits, half lies, the great enchanter.  He is not drawn as Mr. Tennyson
has described him, with the 'vast and shaggy mantle of a beard,' which
youth gone out had left in ashes; smooth and clear-cut and very pale is
his face; time has not seared him with wrinkles or the signs of age; one
would hardly know him to be old were it not that he seems very weary of
seeking into the mysteries of the world, and that the great sadness that
is born of wisdom has cast a shadow on him.  But now what availeth him
his wisdom or his arts?  His eyes, that saw once so clear, are dim and
glazed with coming death, and his white and delicate hands that wrought
of old such works of marvel, hang listlessly.  Vivien, a tall, lithe
woman, beautiful and subtle to look on, like a snake, stands in front of
him, reading the fatal spell from the enchanted book; mocking the utter
helplessness of him whom once her lying tongue had called

      Her lord and liege,
   Her seer, her bard, her silver star of eve,
   Her god, her Merlin, the one passionate love
   Of her whole life.

In her brown crisp hair is the gleam of a golden snake, and she is clad
in a silken robe of dark violet that clings tightly to her limbs, more
expressing than hiding them; the colour of this dress is like the colour
of a purple sea-shell, broken here and there with slight gleams of silver
and pink and azure; it has a strange metallic lustre like the iris-neck
of the dove.  Were this Mr. Burne-Jones's only work it would be enough of
itself to make him rank as a great painter.  The picture is full of
magic; and the colour is truly a spirit dwelling on things and making
them expressive to the spirit, for the delicate tones of grey, and green,
and violet seem to convey to us the idea of languid sleep, and even the
hawthorn-blossoms have lost their wonted brightness, and are more like
the pale moonlight to which Shelley compared them, than the sheet of
summer snow we see now in our English fields.

The next picture is divided into six compartments, each representing a
day in the Creation of the World, under the symbol of an angel holding a
crystal globe, within which is shown the work of a day.  In the first
compartment stands the lonely angel of the First Day, and within the
crystal ball Light is being separated from Darkness.  In the fourth
compartment are four angels, and the crystal glows like a heated opal,
for within it the creation of the Sun, Moon, and Stars is passing; the
number of the angels increases, and the colours grow more vivid till we
reach the sixth compartment, which shines afar off like a rainbow.  Within
it are the six angels of the Creation, each holding its crystal ball; and
within the crystal of the sixth angel one can see Adam's strong brown
limbs and hero form, and the pale, beautiful body of Eve.  At the feet
also of these six winged messengers of the Creator is sitting the angel
of the Seventh Day, who on a harp of gold is singing the glories of that
coming day which we have not yet seen.  The faces of the angels are pale
and oval-shaped, in their eyes is the light of Wisdom and Love, and their
lips seem as if they would speak to us; and strength and beauty are in
their wings.  They stand with naked feet, some on shell-strewn sands
whereon tide has never washed nor storm broken, others it seems on pools
of water, others on strange flowers; and their hair is like the bright
glory round a saint's head.

The scene of the third picture is laid on a long green valley by the sea;
eight girls, handmaidens of the Goddess of Love, are collected by the
margin of a long pool of clear water, whose surface no wandering wind or
flapping bird has ruffled; but the large flat leaves of the water-lily
float on it undisturbed, and clustering forget-me-nots rise here and
there like heaps of scattered turquoise.

In this Mirror of Venus each girl is reflected as in a mirror of polished
steel.  Some of them bend over the pool in laughing wonder at their own
beauty, others, weary of shadows, are leaning back, and one girl is
standing straight up; and nothing of her is reflected in the pool but a
glimmer of white feet.  This picture, however, has not the intense pathos
and tragedy of the Beguiling of Merlin, nor the mystical and lovely
symbolism of the Days of the Creation.  Above these three pictures are
hung five allegorical studies of figures by the same artist, all worthy
of his fame.

Mr. Walter Crane, who has illustrated so many fairy tales for children,
sends an ambitious work called the Renaissance of Venus, which in the
dull colour of its 'sunless dawn,' and in its general want of all the
glow and beauty and passion that one associates with this scene reminds
one of Botticelli's picture of the same subject.  After Mr. Swinburne's
superb description of the sea-birth of the goddess in his Hymn to
Proserpine, it is very strange to find a cultured artist of feeling
producing such a vapid Venus as this.  The best thing in it is the
painting of an apple tree: the time of year is spring, and the leaves
have not yet come, but the tree is laden with pink and white blossoms,
which stand out in beautiful relief against the pale blue of the sky, and
are very true to nature.

M. Alphonse Legros sends nine pictures, and there is a natural curiosity
to see the work of a gentleman who holds at Cambridge the same
professorship as Mr. Ruskin does at Oxford.  Four of these are studies of
men's heads, done in two hours each for his pupils at the Slade Schools.
There is a good deal of vigorous, rough execution about them, and they
are marvels of rapid work.  His portrait of Mr. Carlyle is
unsatisfactory; and even in No. 79, a picture of two scarlet-robed
bishops, surrounded by Spanish monks, his colour is very thin and meagre.
A good bit of painting is of some metal pots in a picture called Le
Chaudronnier.

Mr. Leslie, unfortunately, is represented only by one small work, called
Palm-blossom.  It is a picture of a perfectly lovely child that reminds
one of Sir Joshua's cherubs in the National Gallery, with a mouth like
two petals of a rose; the under-lip, as Rossetti says quaintly somewhere,
'sucked in, as if it strove to kiss itself.'

Then we come to the most abused pictures in the whole Exhibition--the
'colour symphonies' of the 'Great Dark Master,' Mr. Whistler, who
deserves the name of '[Greek] as much as Heraclitus ever did.  Their
titles do not convey much information.  No. 4 is called Nocturne in Black
and Gold, No. 6A Nocturne in Blue and Silver, and so on.  The first of
these represents a rocket of golden rain, with green and red fires
bursting in a perfectly black sky, two large black smudges on the picture
standing, I believe, for a tower which is in 'Cremorne Gardens' and for a
crowd of lookers-on.  The other is rather prettier; a rocket is breaking
in a pale blue sky over a large dark blue bridge and a blue and silver
river.  These pictures are certainly worth looking at for about as long
as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter
of a minute.

No. 7 is called Arrangement in Black No. 3, apparently some pseudonym for
our greatest living actor, for out of black smudgy clouds comes looming
the gaunt figure of Mr. Henry Irving, with the yellow hair and pointed
beard, the ruff, short cloak, and tight hose in which he appeared as
Philip II. in Tennyson's play Queen Mary.  One hand is thrust into his
breast, and his legs are stuck wide apart in a queer stiff position that
Mr. Irving often adopts preparatory to one of his long, wolflike strides
across the stage.  The figure is life-size, and, though apparently one-
armed, is so ridiculously like the original that one cannot help almost
laughing when one sees it.  And we may imagine that any one who had the
misfortune to be shut up at night in the Grosvenor Gallery would hear
this Arrangement in Black No. 3 murmuring in the well-known Lyceum
accents:

      By St. James, I do protest,
   Upon the faith and honour of a Spaniard,
   I am vastly grieved to leave your Majesty.
   Simon, is supper ready?

Nos. 8 and 9 are life-size portraits of two young ladies, evidently
caught in a black London fog; they look like sisters, but are not related
probably, as one is a Harmony in Amber and Black, the other only an
Arrangement in Brown.

Mr. Whistler, however, sends one really good picture to this exhibition,
a portrait of Mr. Carlyle, which is hung in the entrance hall; the
expression on the old man's face, the texture and colour of his grey
hair, and the general sympathetic treatment, show Mr. Whistler {19} to be
an artist of very great power when he likes.

There is not so much in the East Gallery that calls for notice.  Mr.
Leighton is unfortunately represented only by two little heads, one of an
Italian girl, the other called A Study.  There is some delicate flesh
painting of red and brown in these works that reminds one of a russet
apple, but of course they are no samples of this artist's great strength.
There are two good portraits--one of Mrs. Burne-Jones, by Mr. Poynter.
This lady has a very delicate, artistic face, reminding us, perhaps, a
little of one of the angels her husband has painted.  She is represented
in a white dress, with a perfectly gigantic old-fashioned watch hung to
her waist, drinking tea from an old blue china cup.  The other is a head
of the Duchess of Westminster by Mr. Forbes-Robertson, who both as an
actor and an artist has shown great cleverness.  He has succeeded very
well in reproducing the calm, beautiful profile and lustrous golden hair,
but the shoulders are ungraceful, and very unlike the original.  The
figure of a girl leaning against a wonderful screen, looking terribly
'misunderstood,' and surrounded by any amount of artistic china and
furniture, by Mrs. Louise Jopling, is worth looking at too.  It is called
It Might Have Been, and the girl is quite fit to be the heroine of any
sentimental novel.

The two largest contributors to this gallery are Mr. Ferdinand Heilbuth
and Mr. James Tissot.  The first of these two artists sends some
delightful pictures from Rome, two of which are particularly pleasing.
One is of an old Cardinal in the Imperial scarlet of the Caesars meeting
a body of young Italian boys in purple soutanes, students evidently in
some religious college, near the Church of St. John Lateran.  One of the
boys is being presented to the Cardinal, and looks very nervous under the
operation; the rest gaze in wonder at the old man in his beautiful dress.
The other picture is a view in the gardens of the Villa Borghese; a
Cardinal has sat down on a marble seat in the shade of the trees, and is
suspending his meditation for a moment to smile at a pretty child to whom
a French bonne is pointing out the gorgeously dressed old gentleman; a
flunkey in attendance on the Cardinal looks superciliously on.

Nearly all of Mr. Tissot's pictures are deficient in feeling and depth;
his young ladies are too fashionably over-dressed to interest the
artistic eye, and he has a hard unscrupulousness in painting
uninteresting objects in an uninteresting way.  There is some good colour
and drawing, however, in his painting of a withered chestnut tree, with
the autumn sun glowing through the yellow leaves, in a picnic scene, No.
23; the remainder of the picture being something in the photographic
style of Frith.

What a gap in art there is between such a picture as the Banquet of the
Civic Guard in Holland, with its beautiful grouping of noble-looking men,
its exquisite Venetian glass aglow with light and wine, and Mr. Tissot's
over-dressed, common-looking people, and ugly, painfully accurate
representation of modern soda-water bottles!

Mr. Tissot's Widower, however, shines in qualities which his other
pictures lack; it is full of depth and suggestiveness; the grasses and
wild, luxuriant growth of the foreground are a revel of natural life.

We must notice besides in this gallery Mr. Watts's two powerful portraits
of Mr. Burne-Jones and Lady Lindsay.

To get to the Water-Colour Room we pass through a small sculpture
gallery, which contains some busts of interest, and a pretty terra-cotta
figure of a young sailor, by Count Gleichen, entitled Cheeky, but it is
not remarkable in any way, and contrasts very unfavourably with the
Exhibition of Sculpture at the Royal Academy, in which are three really
fine works of art--Mr. Leighton's Man Struggling with a Snake, which may
be thought worthy of being looked on side by side with the Laocoon of the
Vatican, and Lord Ronald Gower's two statues, one of a dying French
Guardsman at the Battle of Waterloo, the other of Marie Antoinette being
led to execution with bound hands, Queenlike and noble to the last.

The collection of water-colours is mediocre; there is a good effect of
Mr. Poynter's, the east wind seen from a high cliff sweeping down on the
sea like the black wings of some god; and some charming pictures of Fairy
Land by Mr. Richard Doyle, which would make good illustrations for one of
Mr. Allingham's Fairy-Poems, but the tout-ensemble is poor.

Taking a general view of the works exhibited here, we see that this dull
land of England, with its short summer, its dreary rains and fogs, its
mining districts and factories, and vile deification of machinery, has
yet produced very great masters of art, men with a subtle sense and love
of what is beautiful, original, and noble in imagination.

Nor are the art-treasures of this country at all exhausted by this
Exhibition; there are very many great pictures by living artists hidden
away in different places, which those of us who are yet boys have never
seen, and which our elders must wish to see again.

Holman Hunt has done better work than the Afterglow in Egypt; neither
Millais, Leighton, nor Poynter has sent any of the pictures on which his
fame rests; neither Burne-Jones nor Watts shows us here all the glories
of his art; and the name of that strange genius who wrote the Vision of
Love revealed in Sleep, and the names of Dante Rossetti and of the
Marchioness of Waterford, cannot be found in the catalogue.  And so it is
to be hoped that this is not the only exhibition of paintings that we
shall see in the Grosvenor Gallery; and Sir Coutts Lindsay, in showing us
great works of art, will be most materially aiding that revival of
culture and love of beauty which in great part owes its birth to Mr.
Ruskin, and which Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Pater, and Mr. Symonds, and Mr.
Morris, and many others, are fostering and keeping alive, each in his own
peculiar fashion.




THE GROSVENOR GALLERY 1879


(Saunders' Irish Daily News, May 5, 1879.)

While the yearly exhibition of the Royal Academy may be said to present
us with the general characteristics of ordinary English art at its most
commonplace level, it is at the Grosvenor Gallery that we are enabled to
see the highest development of the modern artistic spirit as well as what
one might call its specially accentuated tendencies.

Foremost among the great works now exhibited at this gallery are Mr.
Burne-Jones's Annunciation and his four pictures illustrating the Greek
legend of Pygmalion--works of the very highest importance in our aesthetic
development as illustrative of some of the more exquisite qualities of
modern culture.  In the first the Virgin Mary, a passionless, pale woman,
with that mysterious sorrow whose meaning she was so soon to learn
mirrored in her wan face, is standing, in grey drapery, by a marble
fountain, in what seems the open courtyard of an empty and silent house,
while through the branches of a tall olive tree, unseen by the Virgin's
tear-dimmed eyes, is descending the angel Gabriel with his joyful and
terrible message, not painted as Angelico loved to do, in the varied
splendour of peacock-like wings and garments of gold and crimson, but
somewhat sombre in colour, set with all the fine grace of nobly-fashioned
drapery and exquisitely ordered design.  In presence of what may be
called the mediaeval spirit may be discerned both the idea and the
technique of the work, and even still more so in the four pictures of the
story of Pygmalion, where the sculptor is represented in dress and in
looks rather as a Christian St. Francis, than as a pure Greek artist in
the first morning tide of art, creating his own ideal, and worshipping
it.  For delicacy and melody of colour these pictures are beyond praise,
nor can anything exceed the idyllic loveliness of Aphrodite waking the
statue into sensuous life: the world above her head like a brittle globe
of glass, her feet resting on a drift of the blue sky, and a choir of
doves fluttering around her like a fall of white snow.  Following in the
same school of ideal and imaginative painting is Miss Evelyn Pickering,
whose picture of St. Catherine, in the Dudley of some years ago,
attracted such great attention.  To the present gallery she has
contributed a large picture of Night and Sleep, twin brothers floating
over the world in indissoluble embrace, the one spreading the cloak of
darkness, while from the other's listless hands the Leathean poppies fall
in a scarlet shower.  Mr. Strudwich sends a picture of Isabella, which
realises in some measure the pathos of Keats's poem, and another of the
lover in the lily garden from the Song of Solomon, both works full of
delicacy of design and refinement of detail, yet essentially weak in
colour, and in comparison with the splendid Giorgione-like work of Mr.
Fairfax Murray, are more like the coloured drawings of the modern German
school than what we properly call a painting.  The last-named artist,
while essentially weak in draughtsmanship, yet possesses the higher
quality of noble colour in the fullest degree.

The draped figures of men and women in his Garland Makers, and Pastoral,
some wrought in that single note of colour which the earlier Florentines
loved, others with all the varied richness and glow of the Venetian
school, show what great results may be brought about by a youth spent in
Italian cities.  And finally I must notice the works contributed to this
Gallery by that most powerful of all our English artists, Mr. G. F.
Watts, the extraordinary width and reach of whose genius were never more
illustrated than by the various pictures bearing his name which are here
exhibited.  His Paolo and Francesca, and his Orpheus and Eurydice, are
creative visions of the very highest order of imaginative painting;
marked as it is with all the splendid vigour of nobly ordered design, the
last-named picture possesses qualities of colour no less great.  The
white body of the dying girl, drooping like a pale lily, and the clinging
arms of her lover, whose strong brown limbs seem filled with all the
sensuous splendour of passionate life, form a melancholy and wonderful
note of colour to which the eye continually returns as indicating the
motive of the conception.  Yet here I would dwell rather on two pictures
which show the splendid simplicity and directness of his strength, the
one a portrait of himself, the other that of a little child called
Dorothy, who has all that sweet gravity and look of candour which we like
to associate with that old-fashioned name: a child with bright rippling
hair, tangled like floss silk, open brown eyes and flower-like mouth;
dressed in faded claret, with little lace about the neck and throat,
toned down to a delicate grey--the hands simply clasped before her.  This
is the picture; as truthful and lovely as any of those Brignoli children
which Vandyke has painted in Genoa.  Nor is his own picture of
himself--styled in the catalogue merely A Portrait--less wonderful,
especially the luminous treatment of the various shades of black as shown
in the hat and cloak.  It would be quite impossible, however, to give any
adequate account or criticism of the work now exhibited in the Grosvenor
Gallery within the limits of a single notice.  Richmond's noble picture
of Sleep and Death Bearing the Slain Body of Sarpedon, and his bronze
statue of the Greek athlete, are works of the very highest order of
artistic excellence, but I will reserve for another occasion the
qualities of his power.  Mr. Whistler, whose wonderful and eccentric
genius is better appreciated in France than in England, sends a very
wonderful picture entitled The Golden Girl, a life-size study in amber,
yellow and browns, of a child dancing with a skipping-rope, full of
birdlike grace and exquisite motion; as well as some delightful specimens
of etching (an art of which he is the consummate master), one of which,
called The Little Forge, entirely done with the dry point, possesses
extraordinary merit; nor have the philippics of the Fors Clavigera
deterred him from exhibiting some more of his 'arrangements in colour,'
one of which, called a Harmony in Green and Gold, I would especially
mention as an extremely good example of what ships lying at anchor on a
summer evening are from the 'Impressionist point of view.'

Mr. Eugene Benson, one of the most cultured of those many Americans who
seem to have found their Mecca in modern Rome, has sent a picture of
Narcissus, a work full of the true Theocritean sympathy for the natural
picturesqueness of shepherd life, and entirely delightful to all who love
the peculiar qualities of Italian scenery.  The shadows of the trees
drifting across the grass, the crowding together of the sheep, and the
sense of summer air and light which fills the picture, are full of the
highest truth and beauty; and Mr. Forbes-Robertson, whose picture of
Phelps as Cardinal Wolsey has just been bought by the Garrick Club, and
who is himself so well known as a young actor of the very highest
promise, is represented by a portrait of Mr. Hermann Vezin which is
extremely clever and certainly very lifelike.  Nor amongst the minor
works must I omit to notice Miss Stuart-Wortley's view on the river
Cherwell, taken from the walks of Magdalen College, Oxford,--a little
picture marked by great sympathy for the shade and coolness of green
places and for the stillness of summer waters; or Mrs. Valentine
Bromley's Misty Day, remarkable for the excellent drawing of a breaking
wave, as well as for a great delicacy of tone.  Besides the Marchioness
of Waterford, whose brilliant treatment of colour is so well known, and
Mr. Richard Doyle, whose water-colour drawings of children and of fairy
scenes are always so fresh and bright, the qualities of the Irish genius
in the field of art find an entirely adequate exponent in Mr. Wills, who
as a dramatist and a painter has won himself such an honourable name.
Three pictures of his are exhibited here: the Spirit of the Shell, which
is perhaps too fanciful and vague in design; the Nymph and Satyr, where
the little goat-footed child has all the sweet mystery and romance of the
woodlands about him; and the Parting of Ophelia and Laertes, a work not
only full of very strong drawing, especially in the modelling of the male
figure, but a very splendid example of the power of subdued and reserved
colour, the perfect harmony of tone being made still more subtle by the
fitful play of reflected light on the polished armour.

I shall reserve for another notice the wonderful landscapes of Mr. Cecil
Lawson, who has caught so much of Turner's imagination and mode of
treatment, as well as a consideration of the works of Herkomer, Tissot
and Legros, and others of the modern realistic school.

Note.--The other notice mentioned above did not appear.




L'ENVOI


An Introduction to Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf by Rennell Rodd, published by
J. M. Stoddart and Co., Philadelphia, 1882.

Amongst the many young men in England who are seeking along with me to
continue and to perfect the English Renaissance--jeunes guerriers du
drapeau romantique, as Gautier would have called us--there is none whose
love of art is more flawless and fervent, whose artistic sense of beauty
is more subtle and more delicate--none, indeed, who is dearer to
myself--than the young poet whose verses I have brought with me to
America; verses full of sweet sadness, and yet full of joy; for the most
joyous poet is not he who sows the desolate highways of this world with
the barren seed of laughter, but he who makes his sorrow most musical,
this indeed being the meaning of joy in art--that incommunicable element
of artistic delight which, in poetry, for instance, comes from what Keats
called the 'sensuous life of verse,' the element of song in the singing,
made so pleasurable to us by that wonder of motion which often has its
origin in mere musical impulse, and in painting is to be sought for, from
the subject never, but from the pictorial charm only--the scheme and
symphony of the colour, the satisfying beauty of the design: so that the
ultimate expression of our artistic movement in painting has been, not in
the spiritual visions of the Pre-Raphaelites, for all their marvel of
Greek legend and their mystery of Italian song, but in the work of such
men as Whistler and Albert Moore, who have raised design and colour to
the ideal level of poetry and music.  For the quality of their exquisite
painting comes from the mere inventive and creative handling of line and
colour, from a certain form and choice of beautiful workmanship, which,
rejecting all literary reminiscence and all metaphysical idea, is in
itself entirely satisfying to the aesthetic sense--is, as the Greeks
would say, an end in itself; the effect of their work being like the
effect given to us by music; for music is the art in which form and
matter are always one--the art whose subject cannot be separated from the
method of its expression; the art which most completely realises for us
the artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are
constantly aspiring.

Now, this increased sense of the absolutely satisfying value of beautiful
workmanship, this recognition of the primary importance of the sensuous
element in art, this love of art for art's sake, is the point in which we
of the younger school have made a departure from the teaching of Mr.
Ruskin,--a departure definite and different and decisive.

Master indeed of the knowledge of all noble living and of the wisdom of
all spiritual things will he be to us ever, seeing that it was he who by
the magic of his presence and the music of his lips taught us at Oxford
that enthusiasm for beauty which is the secret of Hellenism, and that
desire for creation which is the secret of life, and filled some of us,
at least, with the lofty and passionate ambition to go forth into far and
fair lands with some message for the nations and some mission for the
world, and yet in his art criticism, his estimate of the joyous element
of art, his whole method of approaching art, we are no longer with him;
for the keystone to his aesthetic system is ethical always.  He would
judge of a picture by the amount of noble moral ideas it expresses; but
to us the channels by which all noble work in painting can touch, and
does touch, the soul are not those of truths of life or metaphysical
truths.  To him perfection of workmanship seems but the symbol of pride,
and incompleteness of technical resource the image of an imagination too
limitless to find within the limits of form its complete expression, or
of a love too simple not to stammer in its tale.  But to us the rule of
art is not the rule of morals.  In an ethical system, indeed, of any
gentle mercy good intentions will, one is fain to fancy, have their
recognition; but of those that would enter the serene House of Beauty the
question that we ask is not what they had ever meant to do, but what they
have done.  Their pathetic intentions are of no value to us, but their
realised creations only.  Pour moi je prefere les poetes qui font des
vers, les medecins qui sachent guerir, les peintres qui sachent peindre.

Nor, in looking at a work of art, should we be dreaming of what it
symbolises, but rather loving it for what it is.  Indeed, the
transcendental spirit is alien to the spirit of art.  The metaphysical
mind of Asia may create for itself the monstrous and many-breasted idol,
but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual
life which conforms most closely to the perfect facts of physical life
also.  Nor, in its primary aspect, has a painting, for instance, any more
spiritual message or meaning for us than a blue tile from the wall of
Damascus, or a Hitzen vase.  It is a beautifully coloured surface,
nothing more, and affects us by no suggestion stolen from philosophy, no
pathos pilfered from literature, no feeling filched from a poet, but by
its own incommunicable artistic essence--by that selection of truth which
we call style, and that relation of values which is the draughtsmanship
of painting, by the whole quality of the workmanship, the arabesque of
the design, the splendour of the colour, for these things are enough to
stir the most divine and remote of the chords which make music in our
soul, and colour, indeed, is of itself a mystical presence on things, and
tone a kind of sentiment.

This, then--the new departure of our younger school--is the chief
characteristic of Mr. Rennell Rodd's poetry; for, while there is much in
his work that may interest the intellect, much that will excite the
emotions, and many-cadenced chords of sweet and simple sentiment--for to
those who love Art for its own sake all other things are added--yet, the
effect which they pre-eminently seek to produce is purely an artistic
one.  Such a poem as The Sea-King's Grave, with all its majesty of melody
as sonorous and as strong as the sea by whose pine-fringed shores it was
thus nobly conceived and nobly fashioned; or the little poem that follows
it, whose cunning workmanship, wrought with such an artistic sense of
limitation, one might liken to the rare chasing of the mirror that is its
motive; or In a Church, pale flower of one of those exquisite moments
when all things except the moment itself seem so curiously real, and when
the old memories of forgotten days are touched and made tender, and the
familiar place grows fervent and solemn suddenly with a vision of the
undying beauty of the gods that died; or the scene in Chartres Cathedral,
sombre silence brooding on vault and arch, silent people kneeling on the
dust of the desolate pavement as the young priest lifts Lord Christ's
body in a crystal star, and then the sudden beams of scarlet light that
break through the blazoned window and smite on the carven screen, and
sudden organ peals of mighty music rolling and echoing from choir to
canopy, and from spire to shaft, and over all the clear glad voice of a
singing boy, affecting one as a thing over-sweet, and striking just the
right artistic keynote for one's emotions; or At Lanuvium, through the
music of whose lines one seems to hear again the murmur of the Mantuan
bees straying down from their own green valleys and inland streams to
find what honeyed amber the sea-flowers might be hiding; or the poem
written In the Coliseum, which gives one the same artistic joy that one
gets watching a handicraftsman at his work, a goldsmith hammering out his
gold into those thin plates as delicate as the petals of a yellow rose,
or drawing it out into the long wires like tangled sunbeams, so perfect
and precious is the mere handling of it; or the little lyric interludes
that break in here and there like the singing of a thrush, and are as
swift and as sure as the beating of a bird's wing, as light and bright as
the apple-blossoms that flutter fitfully down to the orchard grass after
a spring shower, and look the lovelier for the rain's tears lying on
their dainty veinings of pink and pearl; or the sonnets--for Mr. Rodd is
one of those qui sonnent le sonnet, as the Ronsardists used to say--that
one called On the Border Hills, with its fiery wonder of imagination and
the strange beauty of its eighth line; or the one which tells of the
sorrow of the great king for the little dead child--well, all these poems
aim, as I said, at producing a purely artistic effect, and have the rare
and exquisite quality that belongs to work of that kind; and I feel that
the entire subordination in our aesthetic movement of all merely
emotional and intellectual motives to the vital informing poetic
principle is the surest sign of our strength.

But it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the aesthetic
demands of the age: there should be also about it, if it is to give us
any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality.  Whatever
work we have in the nineteenth century must rest on the two poles of
personality and perfection.  And so in this little volume, by separating
the earlier and more simple work from the work that is later and stronger
and possesses increased technical power and more artistic vision, one
might weave these disconnected poems, these stray and scattered threads,
into one fiery-coloured strand of life, noting first a boy's mere
gladness of being young, with all its simple joy in field and flower, in
sunlight and in song, and then the bitterness of sudden sorrow at the
ending by Death of one of the brief and beautiful friendships of one's
youth, with all those unanswered longings and questionings unsatisfied by
which we vex, so uselessly, the marble face of death; the artistic
contrast between the discontented incompleteness of the spirit and the
complete perfection of the style that expresses it forming the chief
element of the aesthetic charm of these particular poems;--and then the
birth of Love, and all the wonder and the fear and the perilous delight
of one on whose boyish brows the little wings of love have beaten for the
first time; and the love-songs, so dainty and delicate, little swallow-
flights of music, and full of such fragrance and freedom that they might
all be sung in the open air and across moving water; and then autumn,
coming with its choirless woods and odorous decay and ruined loveliness,
Love lying dead; and the sense of the mere pity of it.

One might stop there, for from a young poet one should ask for no deeper
chords of life than those that love and friendship make eternal for us;
and the best poems in the volume belong clearly to a later time, a time
when these real experiences become absorbed and gathered up into a form
which seems from such real experiences to be the most alien and the most
remote; when the simple expression of joy or sorrow suffices no longer,
and lives rather in the stateliness of the cadenced metre, in the music
and colour of the linked words, than in any direct utterance; lives, one
might say, in the perfection of the form more than in the pathos of the
feeling.  And yet, after the broken music of love and the burial of love
in the autumn woods, we can trace that wandering among strange people,
and in lands unknown to us, by which we try so pathetically to heal the
hurts of the life we know, and that pure and passionate devotion to Art
which one gets when the harsh reality of life has too suddenly wounded
one, and is with discontent or sorrow marring one's youth, just as often,
I think, as one gets it from any natural joy of living; and that curious
intensity of vision by which, in moments of overmastering sadness and
despair ungovernable, artistic things will live in one's memory with a
vivid realism caught from the life which they help one to forget--an old
grey tomb in Flanders with a strange legend on it, making one think how,
perhaps, passion does live on after death; a necklace of blue and amber
beads and a broken mirror found in a girl's grave at Rome, a marble image
of a boy habited like Eros, and with the pathetic tradition of a great
king's sorrow lingering about it like a purple shadow,--over all these
the tired spirit broods with that calm and certain joy that one gets when
one has found something that the ages never dull and the world cannot
harm; and with it comes that desire of Greek things which is often an
artistic method of expressing one's desire for perfection; and that
longing for the old dead days which is so modern, so incomplete, so
touching, being, in a way, the inverted torch of Hope, which burns the
hand it should guide; and for many things a little sadness, and for all
things a great love; and lastly, in the pinewood by the sea, once more
the quick and vital pulse of joyous youth leaping and laughing in every
line, the frank and fearless freedom of wave and wind waking into fire
life's burnt-out ashes and into song the silent lips of pain,--how
clearly one seems to see it all, the long colonnade of pines with sea and
sky peeping in here and there like a flitting of silver; the open place
in the green, deep heart of the wood with the little moss-grown altar to
the old Italian god in it; and the flowers all about, cyclamen in the
shadowy places, and the stars of the white narcissus lying like
snow-flakes over the grass, where the quick, bright-eyed lizard starts by
the stone, and the snake lies coiled lazily in the sun on the hot sand,
and overhead the gossamer floats from the branches like thin, tremulous
threads of gold,--the scene is so perfect for its motive, for surely
here, if anywhere, the real gladness of life might be revealed to one's
youth--the gladness that comes, not from the rejection, but from the
absorption, of all passion, and is like that serene calm that dwells in
the faces of the Greek statues, and which despair and sorrow cannot
touch, but intensify only.

In some such way as this we could gather up these strewn and scattered
petals of song into one perfect rose of life, and yet, perhaps, in so
doing, we might be missing the true quality of the poems; one's real life
is so often the life that one does not lead; and beautiful poems, like
threads of beautiful silks, may be woven into many patterns and to suit
many designs, all wonderful and all different: and romantic poetry, too,
is essentially the poetry of impressions, being like that latest school
of painting, the school of Whistler and Albert Moore, in its choice of
situation as opposed to subject; in its dealing with the exceptions
rather than with the types of life; in its brief intensity; in what one
might call its fiery-coloured momentariness, it being indeed the
momentary situations of life, the momentary aspects of nature, which
poetry and painting now seek to render for us.  Sincerity and constancy
will the artist, indeed, have always; but sincerity in art is merely that
plastic perfection of execution without which a poem or a painting,
however noble its sentiment or human its origin, is but wasted and unreal
work, and the constancy of the artist cannot be to any definite rule or
system of living, but to that principle of beauty only through which the
inconstant shadows of his life are in their most fleeting moment arrested
and made permanent.  He will not, for instance, in intellectual matters
acquiesce in that facile orthodoxy of our day which is so reasonable and
so artistically uninteresting, nor yet will he desire that fiery faith of
the antique time which, while it intensified, yet limited the vision;
still less will he allow the calm of his culture to be marred by the
discordant despair of doubt or the sadness of a sterile scepticism; for
the Valley Perilous, where ignorant armies clash by night, is no resting-
place meet for her to whom the gods have assigned the clear upland, the
serene height, and the sunlit air,--rather will he be always curiously
testing new forms of belief, tinging his nature with the sentiment that
still lingers about some beautiful creeds, and searching for experience
itself, and not for the fruits of experience; when he has got its secret,
he will leave without regret much that was once very precious to him.  'I
am always insincere,' says Emerson somewhere, 'as knowing that there are
other moods': 'Les emotions,' wrote Theophile Gautier once in a review of
Arsene Houssaye, 'Les emotions ne se ressemblent pas, mais etre emu--voila
l'important.'

Now, this is the secret of the art of the modern romantic school, and
gives one the right keynote for its apprehension; but the real quality of
all work which, like Mr. Rodd's, aims, as I said, at a purely artistic
effect, cannot be described in terms of intellectual criticism; it is too
intangible for that.  One can perhaps convey it best in terms of the
other arts, and by reference to them; and, indeed, some of these poems
are as iridescent and as exquisite as a lovely fragment of Venetian
glass; others as delicate in perfect workmanship and as single in natural
motive as an etching by Whistler is, or one of those beautiful little
Greek figures which in the olive woods round Tanagra men can still find,
with the faint gilding and the fading crimson not yet fled from hair and
lips and raiment; and many of them seem like one of Corot's twilights
just passing into music; for not merely in visible colour, but in
sentiment also--which is the colour of poetry--may there be a kind of
tone.

But I think that the best likeness to the quality of this young poet's
work I ever saw was in the landscape by the Loire.  We were staying once,
he and I, at Amboise, that little village with its grey slate roofs and
steep streets and gaunt, grim gateway, where the quiet cottages nestle
like white pigeons into the sombre clefts of the great bastioned rock,
and the stately Renaissance houses stand silent and apart--very desolate
now, but with some memory of the old days still lingering about the
delicately-twisted pillars, and the carved doorways, with their grotesque
animals, and laughing masks, and quaint heraldic devices, all reminding
one of a people who could not think life real till they had made it
fantastic.  And above the village, and beyond the bend of the river, we
used to go in the afternoon, and sketch from one of the big barges that
bring the wine in autumn and the wood in winter down to the sea, or lie
in the long grass and make plans pour la gloire, et pour ennuyer les
philistins, or wander along the low, sedgy banks, 'matching our reeds in
sportive rivalry,' as comrades used in the old Sicilian days; and the
land was an ordinary land enough, and bare, too, when one thought of
Italy, and how the oleanders were robing the hillsides by Genoa in
scarlet, and the cyclamen filling with its purple every valley from
Florence to Rome; for there was not much real beauty, perhaps, in it,
only long, white dusty roads and straight rows of formal poplars; but,
now and then, some little breaking gleam of broken light would lend to
the grey field and the silent barn a secret and a mystery that were
hardly their own, would transfigure for one exquisite moment the peasants
passing down through the vineyard, or the shepherd watching on the hill,
would tip the willows with silver and touch the river into gold; and the
wonder of the effect, with the strange simplicity of the material, always
seemed to me to be a little like the quality of these the verses of my
friend.




MRS. LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK


(New York World, November 7, 1882.)

It is only in the best Greek gems, on the silver coins of Syracuse, or
among the marble figures of the Parthenon frieze, that one can find the
ideal representation of the marvellous beauty of that face which laughed
through the leaves last night as Hester Grazebrook.

Pure Greek it is, with the grave low forehead, the exquisitely arched
brow; the noble chiselling of the mouth, shaped as if it were the
mouthpiece of an instrument of music; the supreme and splendid curve of
the cheek; the augustly pillared throat which bears it all: it is Greek,
because the lines which compose it are so definite and so strong, and yet
so exquisitely harmonised that the effect is one of simple loveliness
purely: Greek, because its essence and its quality, as is the quality of
music and of architecture, is that of beauty based on absolutely
mathematical laws.

But while art remains dumb and immobile in its passionless serenity, with
the beauty of this face it is different: the grey eyes lighten into blue
or deepen into violet as fancy succeeds fancy; the lips become flower-
like in laughter or, tremulous as a bird's wing, mould themselves at last
into the strong and bitter moulds of pain or scorn.  And then motion
comes, and the statue wakes into life.  But the life is not the ordinary
life of common days; it is life with a new value given to it, the value
of art: and the charm to me of Hester Grazebrook's acting in the first
scene of the play {43} last night was that mingling of classic grace with
absolute reality which is the secret of all beautiful art, of the plastic
work of the Greeks and of the pictures of Jean Francois Millet equally.

I do not think that the sovereignty and empire of women's beauty has at
all passed away, though we may no longer go to war for them as the Greeks
did for the daughter of Leda.  The greatest empire still remains for
them--the empire of art.  And, indeed, this wonderful face, seen last
night for the first time in America, has filled and permeated with the
pervading image of its type the whole of our modern art in England.  Last
century it was the romantic type which dominated in art, the type loved
by Reynolds and Gainsborough, of wonderful contrasts of colour, of
exquisite and varying charm of expression, but without that definite
plastic feeling which divides classic from romantic work.  This type
degenerated into mere facile prettiness in the hands of lesser masters,
and, in protest against it, was created by the hands of the
Pre-Raphaelites a new type, with its rare combination of Greek form with
Florentine mysticism.  But this mysticism becomes over-strained and a
burden, rather than an aid to expression, and a desire for the pure
Hellenic joy and serenity came in its place; and in all our modern work,
in the paintings of such men as Albert Moore and Leighton and Whistler,
we can trace the influence of this single face giving fresh life and
inspiration in the form of a new artistic ideal.

As regards Hester Grazebrook's dresses, the first was a dress whose grace
depended entirely on the grace of the person who wore it.  It was merely
the simple dress of a village girl in England.  The second was a lovely
combination of blue and creamy lace.  But the masterpiece was undoubtedly
the last, a symphony in silver-grey and pink, a pure melody of colour
which I feel sure Whistler would call a Scherzo, and take as its visible
motive the moonlight wandering in silver mist through a rose-garden;
unless indeed he saw this dress, in which case he would paint it and
nothing else, for it is a dress such as Velasquez only could paint, and
Whistler very wisely always paints those things which are within reach of
Velasquez only.

The scenery was, of course, prepared in a hurry.  Still, much of it was
very good indeed: the first scene especially, with its graceful trees and
open forge and cottage porch, though the roses were dreadfully out of
tone and, besides their crudity of colour, were curiously badly grouped.
The last scene was exceedingly clever and true to nature as well, being
that combination of lovely scenery and execrable architecture which is so
specially characteristic of a German spa.  As for the drawing-room scene,
I cannot regard it as in any way a success.  The heavy ebony doors are
entirely out of keeping with the satin panels; the silk hangings and
festoons of black and yellow are quite meaningless in their position and
consequently quite ugly; the carpet is out of all colour relation with
the rest of the room, and the table-cover is mauve.  Still, to have
decorated ever so bad a room in six days must, I suppose, be a subject of
respectful wonder, though I should have fancied that Mr. Wallack had many
very much better sets in his own stock.

But I am beginning to quarrel generally with most modern scene-painting.
A scene is primarily a decorative background for the actors, and should
always be kept subordinate, first to the players, their dress, gesture,
and action; and secondly, to the fundamental principle of decorative art,
which is not to imitate but to suggest nature.  If the landscape is given
its full realistic value, the value of the figures to which it serves as
a background is impaired and often lost, and so the painted hangings of
the Elizabethan age were a far more artistic, and so a far more rational
form of scenery than most modern scene-painting is.  From the same master-
hand which designed the curtain of Madison Square Theatre I should like
very much to see a good decorative landscape in scene-painting; for I
have seen no open-air scene in any theatre which did not really mar the
value of the actors.  One must either, like Titian, make the landscape
subordinate to the figures, or, like Claude, the figures subordinate to
the landscape; for if we desire realistic acting we cannot have realistic
scene-painting.

I need not describe, however, how the beauty of Hester Grazebrook
survived the crude roses and the mauve tablecloth triumphantly.  That it
is a beauty that will be appreciated to the full in America I do not
doubt for a moment, for it is only countries which possess great beauty
that can appreciate beauty at all.  It may also influence the art of
America as it has influenced the art of England, for of the rare Greek
type it is the most absolutely perfect example.

The Philistine may, of course, object that to be absolutely perfect is
impossible.  Well, that is so: but then it is only the impossible things
that are worth doing nowadays!




WOMAN'S DRESS


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1884.)

Mr. Oscar Wilde, who asks us to permit him 'that most charming of all
pleasures, the pleasure of answering one's critics,' sends us the
following remarks:--

The 'Girl Graduate' must of course have precedence, not merely for her
sex but for her sanity: her letter is extremely sensible.  She makes two
points: that high heels are a necessity for any lady who wishes to keep
her dress clean from the Stygian mud of our streets, and that without a
tight corset 'the ordinary number of petticoats and etceteras' cannot be
properly or conveniently held up.  Now, it is quite true that as long as
the lower garments are suspended from the hips a corset is an absolute
necessity; the mistake lies in not suspending all apparel from the
shoulders.  In the latter case a corset becomes useless, the body is left
free and unconfined for respiration and motion, there is more health, and
consequently more beauty.  Indeed all the most ungainly and uncomfortable
articles of dress that fashion has ever in her folly prescribed, not the
tight corset merely, but the farthingale, the vertugadin, the hoop, the
crinoline, and that modern monstrosity the so-called 'dress improver'
also, all of them have owed their origin to the same error, the error of
not seeing that it is from the shoulders, and from the shoulders only,
that all garments should be hung.

And as regards high heels, I quite admit that some additional height to
the shoe or boot is necessary if long gowns are to be worn in the street;
but what I object to is that the height should be given to the heel only,
and not to the sole of the foot also.  The modern high-heeled boot is, in
fact, merely the clog of the time of Henry VI., with the front prop left
out, and its inevitable effect is to throw the body forward, to shorten
the steps, and consequently to produce that want of grace which always
follows want of freedom.

Why should clogs be despised?  Much art has been expended on clogs.  They
have been made of lovely woods, and delicately inlaid with ivory, and
with mother-of-pearl.  A clog might be a dream of beauty, and, if not too
high or too heavy, most comfortable also.  But if there be any who do not
like clogs, let them try some adaptation of the trouser of the Turkish
lady, which is loose round the limb and tight at the ankle.

The 'Girl Graduate,' with a pathos to which I am not insensible, entreats
me not to apotheosise 'that awful, befringed, beflounced, and bekilted
divided skirt.'  Well, I will acknowledge that the fringes, the flounces,
and the kilting do certainly defeat the whole object of the dress, which
is that of ease and liberty; but I regard these things as mere wicked
superfluities, tragic proofs that the divided skirt is ashamed of its own
division.  The principle of the dress is good, and, though it is not by
any means perfection, it is a step towards it.

Here I leave the 'Girl Graduate,' with much regret, for Mr. Wentworth
Huyshe.  Mr. Huyshe makes the old criticism that Greek dress is unsuited
to our climate, and, to me the somewhat new assertion, that the men's
dress of a hundred years ago was preferable to that of the second part of
the seventeenth century, which I consider to have been the exquisite
period of English costume.

Now, as regards the first of these two statements, I will say, to begin
with, that the warmth of apparel does not depend really on the number of
garments worn, but on the material of which they are made.  One of the
chief faults of modern dress is that it is composed of far too many
articles of clothing, most of which are of the wrong substance; but over
a substratum of pure wool, such as is supplied by Dr. Jaeger under the
modern German system, some modification of Greek costume is perfectly
applicable to our climate, our country and our century.  This important
fact has already been pointed out by Mr. E. W. Godwin in his excellent,
though too brief, handbook on Dress, contributed to the Health
Exhibition.  I call it an important fact because it makes almost any form
of lovely costume perfectly practicable in our cold climate.  Mr. Godwin,
it is true, points out that the English ladies of the thirteenth century
abandoned after some time the flowing garments of the early Renaissance
in favour of a tighter mode, such as Northern Europe seems to demand.
This I quite admit, and its significance; but what I contend, and what I
am sure Mr. Godwin would agree with me in, is that the principles, the
laws of Greek dress may be perfectly realised, even in a moderately tight
gown with sleeves: I mean the principle of suspending all apparel from
the shoulders, and of relying for beauty of effect not on the stiff ready-
made ornaments of the modern milliner--the bows where there should be no
bows, and the flounces where there should be no flounces--but on the
exquisite play of light and line that one gets from rich and rippling
folds.  I am not proposing any antiquarian revival of an ancient costume,
but trying merely to point out the right laws of dress, laws which are
dictated by art and not by archaeology, by science and not by fashion;
and just as the best work of art in our days is that which combines
classic grace with absolute reality, so from a continuation of the Greek
principles of beauty with the German principles of health will come, I
feel certain, the costume of the future.

And now to the question of men's dress, or rather to Mr. Huyshe's claim
of the superiority, in point of costume, of the last quarter of the
eighteenth century over the second quarter of the seventeenth.  The broad-
brimmed hat of 1640 kept the rain of winter and the glare of summer from
the face; the same cannot be said of the hat of one hundred years ago,
which, with its comparatively narrow brim and high crown, was the
precursor of the modern 'chimney-pot': a wide turned-down collar is a
healthier thing than a strangling stock, and a short cloak much more
comfortable than a sleeved overcoat, even though the latter may have had
'three capes'; a cloak is easier to put on and off, lies lightly on the
shoulder in summer, and wrapped round one in winter keeps one perfectly
warm.  A doublet, again, is simpler than a coat and waistcoat; instead of
two garments one has one; by not being open also it protects the chest
better.

Short loose trousers are in every way to be preferred to the tight knee-
breeches which often impede the proper circulation of the blood; and
finally, the soft leather boots which could be worn above or below the
knee, are more supple, and give consequently more freedom, than the stiff
Hessian which Mr. Huyshe so praises.  I say nothing about the question of
grace and picturesqueness, for I suppose that no one, not even Mr.
Huyshe, would prefer a maccaroni to a cavalier, a Lawrence to a Vandyke,
or the third George to the first Charles; but for ease, warmth and
comfort this seventeenth-century dress is infinitely superior to anything
that came after it, and I do not think it is excelled by any preceding
form of costume.  I sincerely trust that we may soon see in England some
national revival of it.




MORE RADICAL IDEAS UPON DRESS REFORM


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 11, 1884.)

I have been much interested at reading the large amount of correspondence
that has been called forth by my recent lecture on Dress.  It shows me
that the subject of dress reform is one that is occupying many wise and
charming people, who have at heart the principles of health, freedom, and
beauty in costume, and I hope that 'H. B. T.' and 'Materfamilias' will
have all the real influence which their letters--excellent letters both
of them--certainly deserve.

I turn first to Mr. Huyshe's second letter, and the drawing that
accompanies it; but before entering into any examination of the theory
contained in each, I think I should state at once that I have absolutely
no idea whether this gentleman wears his hair longer short, or his cuffs
back or forward, or indeed what he is like at all.  I hope he consults
his own comfort and wishes in everything which has to do with his dress,
and is allowed to enjoy that individualism in apparel which he so
eloquently claims for himself, and so foolishly tries to deny to others;
but I really could not take Mr. Wentworth Huyshe's personal appearance as
any intellectual basis for an investigation of the principles which
should guide the costume of a nation.  I am not denying the force, or
even the popularity, of the ''Eave arf a brick' school of criticism, but
I acknowledge it does not interest me.  The gamin in the gutter may be a
necessity, but the gamin in discussion is a nuisance.  So I will proceed
at once to the real point at issue, the value of the late
eighteenth-century costume over that worn in the second quarter of the
seventeenth: the relative merits, that is, of the principles contained in
each.  Now, as regards the eighteenth-century costume, Mr. Wentworth
Huyshe acknowledges that he has had no practical experience of it at all;
in fact, he makes a pathetic appeal to his friends to corroborate him in
his assertion, which I do not question for a moment, that he has never
been 'guilty of the eccentricity' of wearing himself the dress which he
proposes for general adoption by others.  There is something so naive and
so amusing about this last passage in Mr. Huyshe's letter that I am
really in doubt whether I am not doing him a wrong in regarding him as
having any serious, or sincere, views on the question of a possible
reform in dress; still, as irrespective of any attitude of Mr. Huyshe's
in the matter, the subject is in itself an interesting one, I think it is
worth continuing, particularly as I have myself worn this late eighteenth-
century dress many times, both in public and in private, and so may claim
to have a very positive right to speak on its comfort and suitability.
The particular form of the dress I wore was very similar to that given in
Mr. Godwin's handbook, from a print of Northcote's, and had a certain
elegance and grace about it which was very charming; still, I gave it up
for these reasons:--After a further consideration of the laws of dress I
saw that a doublet is a far simpler and easier garment than a coat and
waistcoat, and, if buttoned from the shoulder, far warmer also, and that
tails have no place in costume, except on some Darwinian theory of
heredity; from absolute experience in the matter I found that the
excessive tightness of knee-breeches is not really comfortable if one
wears them constantly; and, in fact, I satisfied myself that the dress is
not one founded on any real principles.  The broad-brimmed hat and loose
cloak, which, as my object was not, of course, historical accuracy but
modern ease, I had always worn with the costume in question, I have still
retained, and find them most comfortable.

Well, although Mr. Huyshe has no real experience of the dress he
proposes, he gives us a drawing of it, which he labels, somewhat
prematurely, 'An ideal dress.'  An ideal dress of course it is not;
'passably picturesque,' he says I may possibly think it; well, passably
picturesque it may be, but not beautiful, certainly, simply because it is
not founded on right principles, or, indeed, on any principles at all.
Picturesqueness one may get in a variety of ways; ugly things that are
strange, or unfamiliar to us, for instance, may be picturesque, such as a
late sixteenth-century costume, or a Georgian house.  Ruins, again, may
be picturesque, but beautiful they never can be, because their lines are
meaningless.  Beauty, in fact, is to be got only from the perfection of
principles; and in 'the ideal dress' of Mr. Huyshe there are no ideas or
principles at all, much less the perfection of either.  Let us examine
it, and see its faults; they are obvious to any one who desires more than
a 'Fancy-dress ball' basis for costume.  To begin with, the hat and boots
are all wrong.  Whatever one wears on the extremities, such as the feet
and head, should, for the sake of comfort, be made of a soft material,
and for the sake of freedom should take its shape from the way one
chooses to wear it, and not from any stiff, stereotyped design of hat or
boot maker.  In a hat made on right principles one should be able to turn
the brim up or down according as the day is dark or fair, dry or wet; but
the hat brim of Mr. Huyshe's drawing is perfectly stiff, and does not
give much protection to the face, or the possibility of any at all to the
back of the head or the ears, in case of a cold east wind; whereas the
bycocket, a hat made in accordance with the right laws, can be turned
down behind and at the sides, and so give the same warmth as a hood.  The
crown, again, of Mr. Huyshe's hat is far too high; a high crown
diminishes the stature of a small person, and in the case of any one who
is tall is a great inconvenience when one is getting in and out of
hansoms and railway carriages, or passing under a street awning: in no
case is it of any value whatsoever, and being useless it is of course
against the principles of dress.

As regards the boots, they are not quite so ugly or so uncomfortable as
the hat; still they are evidently made of stiff leather, as otherwise
they would fall down to the ankle, whereas the boot should be made of
soft leather always, and if worn high at all must be either laced up the
front or carried well over the knee: in the latter case one combines
perfect freedom for walking together with perfect protection against
rain, neither of which advantages a short stiff boot will ever give one,
and when one is resting in the house the long soft boot can be turned
down as the boot of 1640 was.  Then there is the overcoat: now, what are
the right principles of an overcoat?  To begin with, it should be capable
of being easily put on or off, and worn over any kind of dress;
consequently it should never have narrow sleeves, such as are shown in
Mr. Huyshe's drawing.  If an opening or slit for the arm is required it
should be made quite wide, and may be protected by a flap, as in that
excellent overall the modern Inverness cape; secondly, it should not be
too tight, as otherwise all freedom of walking is impeded.  If the young
gentleman in the drawing buttons his overcoat he may succeed in being
statuesque, though that I doubt very strongly, but he will never succeed
in being swift; his super-totus is made for him on no principle
whatsoever; a super-totus, or overall, should be capable of being worn
long or short, quite loose or moderately tight, just as the wearer
wishes; he should be able to have one arm free and one arm covered, or
both arms free or both arms covered, just as he chooses for his
convenience in riding, walking, or driving; an overall again should never
be heavy, and should always be warm: lastly, it should be capable of
being easily carried if one wants to take it off; in fact, its principles
are those of freedom and comfort, and a cloak realises them all, just as
much as an overcoat of the pattern suggested by Mr. Huyshe violates them.

The knee-breeches are of course far too tight; any one who has worn them
for any length of time--any one, in fact, whose views on the subject are
not purely theoretical--will agree with me there; like everything else in
the dress, they are a great mistake.  The substitution of the jacket for
the coat and waistcoat of the period is a step in the right direction,
which I am glad to see; it is, however, far too tight over the hips for
any possible comfort.  Whenever a jacket or doublet comes below the waist
it should be slit at each side.  In the seventeenth century the skirt of
the jacket was sometimes laced on by points and tags, so that it could be
removed at will, sometimes it was merely left open at the sides: in each
case it exemplified what are always the true principles of dress, I mean
freedom and adaptability to circumstances.

Finally, as regards drawings of this kind, I would point out that there
is absolutely no limit at all to the amount of 'passably picturesque'
costumes which can be either revived or invented for us; but that unless
a costume is founded on principles and exemplified laws, it never can be
of any real value to us in the reform of dress.  This particular drawing
of Mr. Huyshe's, for instance, proves absolutely nothing, except that our
grandfathers did not understand the proper laws of dress.  There is not a
single rule of right costume which is not violated in it, for it gives us
stiffness, tightness and discomfort instead of comfort, freedom and ease.

Now here, on the other hand, is a dress which, being founded on
principles, can serve us as an excellent guide and model; it has been
drawn for me, most kindly, by Mr. Godwin from the Duke of Newcastle's
delightful book on horsemanship, a book which is one of our best
authorities on our best era of costume.  I do not of course propose it
necessarily for absolute imitation; that is not the way in which one
should regard it; it is not, I mean, a revival of a dead costume, but a
realisation of living laws.  I give it as an example of a particular
application of principles which are universally right.  This rationally
dressed young man can turn his hat brim down if it rains, and his loose
trousers and boots down if he is tired--that is, he can adapt his costume
to circumstances; then he enjoys perfect freedom, the arms and legs are
not made awkward or uncomfortable by the excessive tightness of narrow
sleeves and knee-breeches, and the hips are left quite untrammelled,
always an important point; and as regards comfort, his jacket is not too
loose for warmth, nor too close for respiration; his neck is well
protected without being strangled, and even his ostrich feathers, if any
Philistine should object to them, are not merely dandyism, but fan him
very pleasantly, I am sure, in summer, and when the weather is bad they
are no doubt left at home, and his cloak taken out.  _The value of the
dress is simply that every separate article of it expresses a law_.  My
young man is consequently apparelled with ideas, while Mr. Huyshe's young
man is stiffened with facts; the latter teaches one nothing; from the
former one learns everything.  I need hardly say that this dress is good,
not because it is seventeenth century, but because it is constructed on
the true principles of costume, just as a square lintel or a pointed arch
is good, not because one may be Greek and the other Gothic, but because
each of them is the best method of spanning a certain-sized opening, or
resisting a certain weight.  The fact, however, that this dress was
generally worn in England two centuries and a half ago shows at least
this, that the right laws of dress have been understood and realised in
our country, and so in our country may be realised and understood again.
As regards the absolute beauty of this dress and its meaning, I should
like to say a few words more.  Mr. Wentworth Huyshe solemnly announces
that 'he and those who think with him' cannot permit this question of
beauty to be imported into the question of dress; that he and those who
think with him take 'practical views on the subject,' and so on.  Well, I
will not enter here into a discussion as to how far any one who does not
take beauty and the value of beauty into account can claim to be
practical at all.  The word practical is nearly always the last refuge of
the uncivilised.  Of all misused words it is the most evilly treated.  But
what I want to point out is that beauty is essentially organic; that is,
it comes, not from without, but from within, not from any added
prettiness, but from the perfection of its own being; and that
consequently, as the body is beautiful, so all apparel that rightly
clothes it must be beautiful also in its construction and in its lines.

I have no more desire to define ugliness than I have daring to define
beauty; but still I would like to remind those who mock at beauty as
being an unpractical thing of this fact, that an ugly thing is merely a
thing that is badly made, or a thing that does not serve its purpose;
that ugliness is want of fitness; that ugliness is failure; that ugliness
is uselessness, such as ornament in the wrong place, while beauty, as
some one finely said, is the purgation of all superfluities.  There is a
divine economy about beauty; it gives us just what is needful and no
more, whereas ugliness is always extravagant; ugliness is a spendthrift
and wastes its material; in fine, ugliness--and I would commend this
remark to Mr. Wentworth Huyshe--ugliness, as much in costume as in
anything else, is always the sign that somebody has been unpractical.  So
the costume of the future in England, if it is founded on the true laws
of freedom, comfort, and adaptability to circumstances, cannot fail to be
most beautiful also, because beauty is the sign always of the rightness
of principles, the mystical seal that is set upon what is perfect, and
upon what is perfect only.

As for your other correspondent, the first principle of dress that all
garments should be hung from the shoulders and not from the waist seems
to me to be generally approved of, although an 'Old Sailor' declares that
no sailors or athletes ever suspend their clothes from the shoulders, but
always from the hips.  My own recollection of the river and running
ground at Oxford--those two homes of Hellenism in our little Gothic
town--is that the best runners and rowers (and my own college turned out
many) wore always a tight jersey, with short drawers attached to it, the
whole costume being woven in one piece.  As for sailors it is true, I
admit, and the bad custom seems to involve that constant 'hitching up' of
the lower garments which, however popular in transpontine dramas, cannot,
I think, but be considered an extremely awkward habit; and as all
awkwardness comes from discomfort of some kind, I trust that this point
in our sailor's dress will be looked to in the coming reform of our navy,
for, in spite of all protests, I hope we are about to reform everything,
from torpedoes to top-hats, and from crinolettes to cruises.

Then as regards clogs, my suggestion of them seems to have aroused a
great deal of terror.  Fashion in her high-heeled boots has screamed, and
the dreadful word 'anachronism' has been used.  Now, whatever is useful
cannot be an anachronism.  Such a word is applicable only to the revival
of some folly; and, besides, in the England of our own day clogs are
still worn in many of our manufacturing towns, such as Oldham.  I fear
that in Oldham they may not be dreams of beauty; in Oldham the art of
inlaying them with ivory and with pearl may possibly be unknown; yet in
Oldham they serve their purpose.  Nor is it so long since they were worn
by the upper classes of this country generally.  Only a few days ago I
had the pleasure of talking to a lady who remembered with affectionate
regret the clogs of her girlhood; they were, according to her, not too
high nor too heavy, and were provided, besides, with some kind of spring
in the sole so as to make them the more supple for the foot in walking.
Personally, I object to all additional height being given to a boot or
shoe; it is really against the proper principles of dress, although, if
any such height is to be given it should be by means of two props, not
one; but what I should prefer to see is some adaptation of the divided
skirt or long and moderately loose knickerbockers.  If, however, the
divided skirt is to be of any positive value, it must give up all idea of
'being identical in appearance with an ordinary skirt'; it must diminish
the moderate width of each of its divisions, and sacrifice its foolish
frills and flounces; the moment it imitates a dress it is lost; but let
it visibly announce itself as what it actually is, and it will go far
towards solving a real difficulty.  I feel sure that there will be found
many graceful and charming girls ready to adopt a costume founded on
these principles, in spite of Mr. Wentworth Huyshe's terrible threat that
he will not propose to them as long as they wear it, for all charges of a
want of womanly character in these forms of dress are really meaningless;
every right article of apparel belongs equally to both sexes, and there
is absolutely no such thing as a definitely feminine garment.  One word
of warning I should like to be allowed to give: The over-tunic should be
made full and moderately loose; it may, if desired, be shaped more or
less to the figure, but in no case should it be confined at the waist by
any straight band or belt; on the contrary, it should fall from the
shoulder to the knee, or below it, in fine curves and vertical lines,
giving more freedom and consequently more grace.  Few garments are so
absolutely unbecoming as a belted tunic that reaches to the knees, a fact
which I wish some of our Rosalinds would consider when they don doublet
and hose; indeed, to the disregard of this artistic principle is due the
ugliness, the want of proportion, in the Bloomer costume, a costume which
in other respects is sensible.




MR. WHISTLER'S TEN O'CLOCK


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 21, 1885.)

Last night, at Prince's Hall, Mr. Whistler made his first public
appearance as a lecturer on art, and spoke for more than an hour with
really marvellous eloquence on the absolute uselessness of all lectures
of the kind.  Mr. Whistler began his lecture with a very pretty aria on
prehistoric history, describing how in earlier times hunter and warrior
would go forth to chase and foray, while the artist sat at home making
cup and bowl for their service.  Rude imitations of nature they were
first, like the gourd bottle, till the sense of beauty and form developed
and, in all its exquisite proportions, the first vase was fashioned.  Then
came a higher civilisation of architecture and armchairs, and with
exquisite design, and dainty diaper, the useful things of life were made
lovely; and the hunter and the warrior lay on the couch when they were
tired, and, when they were thirsty, drank from the bowl, and never cared
to lose the exquisite proportion of the one, or the delightful ornament
of the other; and this attitude of the primitive anthropophagous
Philistine formed the text of the lecture and was the attitude which Mr.
Whistler entreated his audience to adopt towards art.  Remembering, no
doubt, many charming invitations to wonderful private views, this
fashionable assemblage seemed somewhat aghast, and not a little amused,
at being told that the slightest appearance among a civilised people of
any joy in beautiful things is a grave impertinence to all painters; but
Mr. Whistler was relentless, and, with charming ease and much grace of
manner, explained to the public that the only thing they should cultivate
was ugliness, and that on their permanent stupidity rested all the hopes
of art in the future.

The scene was in every way delightful; he stood there, a miniature
Mephistopheles, mocking the majority!  He was like a brilliant surgeon
lecturing to a class composed of subjects destined ultimately for
dissection, and solemnly assuring them how valuable to science their
maladies were, and how absolutely uninteresting the slightest symptoms of
health on their part would be.  In fairness to the audience, however, I
must say that they seemed extremely gratified at being rid of the
dreadful responsibility of admiring anything, and nothing could have
exceeded their enthusiasm when they were told by Mr. Whistler that no
matter how vulgar their dresses were, or how hideous their surroundings
at home, still it was possible that a great painter, if there was such a
thing, could, by contemplating them in the twilight and half closing his
eyes, see them under really picturesque conditions, and produce a picture
which they were not to attempt to understand, much less dare to enjoy.
Then there were some arrows, barbed and brilliant, shot off, with all the
speed and splendour of fireworks, and the archaeologists, who spend their
lives in verifying the birthplaces of nobodies, and estimate the value of
a work of art by its date or its decay; at the art critics who always
treat a picture as if it were a novel, and try and find out the plot; at
dilettanti in general and amateurs in particular; and (O mea culpa!) at
dress reformers most of all.  'Did not Velasquez paint crinolines?  What
more do you want?'

Having thus made a holocaust of humanity, Mr. Whistler turned to nature,
and in a few moments convicted her of the Crystal Palace, Bank holidays,
and a general overcrowding of detail, both in omnibuses and in
landscapes, and then, in a passage of singular beauty, not unlike one
that occurs in Corot's letters, spoke of the artistic value of dim dawns
and dusks, when the mean facts of life are lost in exquisite and
evanescent effects, when common things are touched with mystery and
transfigured with beauty, when the warehouses become as palaces and the
tall chimneys of the factory seem like campaniles in the silver air.

Finally, after making a strong protest against anybody but a painter
judging of painting, and a pathetic appeal to the audience not to be
lured by the aesthetic movement into having beautiful things about them,
Mr. Whistler concluded his lecture with a pretty passage about Fusiyama
on a fan, and made his bow to an audience which he had succeeded in
completely fascinating by his wit, his brilliant paradoxes, and, at
times, his real eloquence.  Of course, with regard to the value of
beautiful surroundings I differ entirely from Mr. Whistler.  An artist is
not an isolated fact; he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a
certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of
any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom
from a thistle.  That an artist will find beauty in ugliness, le beau
dans l'horrible, is now a commonplace of the schools, the argot of the
atelier, but I strongly deny that charming people should be condemned to
live with magenta ottomans and Albert-blue curtains in their rooms in
order that some painter may observe the side-lights on the one and the
values of the other.  Nor do I accept the dictum that only a painter is a
judge of painting.  I say that only an artist is a judge of art; there is
a wide difference.  As long as a painter is a painter merely, he should
not be allowed to talk of anything but mediums and megilp, and on those
subjects should be compelled to hold his tongue; it is only when he
becomes an artist that the secret laws of artistic creation are revealed
to him.  For there are not many arts, but one art merely--poem, picture
and Parthenon, sonnet and statue--all are in their essence the same, and
he who knows one knows all.  But the poet is the supreme artist, for he
is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and
is lord over all life and all arts; and so to the poet beyond all others
are these mysteries known; to Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire, not to
Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche.  However, I should not enjoy anybody
else's lectures unless in a few points I disagreed with them, and Mr.
Whistler's lecture last night was, like everything that he does, a
masterpiece.  Not merely for its clever satire and amusing jests will it
be remembered, but for the pure and perfect beauty of many of its
passages--passages delivered with an earnestness which seemed to amaze
those who had looked on Mr. Whistler as a master of persiflage merely,
and had not known him as we do, as a master of painting also.  For that
he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting is my opinion.
And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.




THE RELATION OF DRESS TO ART: A NOTE IN BLACK AND WHITE ON MR. WHISTLER'S
LECTURE


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 28, 1885.)

'How can you possibly paint these ugly three-cornered hats?' asked a
reckless art critic once of Sir Joshua Reynolds.  'I see light and shade
in them,' answered the artist.  'Les grands coloristes,' says Baudelaire,
in a charming article on the artistic value of frock coats, 'les grands
coloristes savent faire de la couleur avec un habit noir, une cravate
blanche, et un fond gris.'

'Art seeks and finds the beautiful in all times, as did her high priest
Rembrandt, when he saw the picturesque grandeur of the Jews' quarter of
Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks,' were
the fine and simple words used by Mr. Whistler in one of the most
valuable passages of his lecture.  The most valuable, that is, to the
painter: for there is nothing of which the ordinary English painter needs
more to be reminded than that the true artist does not wait for life to
be made picturesque for him, but sees life under picturesque conditions
always--under conditions, that is to say, which are at once new and
delightful.  But between the attitude of the painter towards the public
and the attitude of a people towards art, there is a wide difference.
That, under certain conditions of light and shade, what is ugly in fact
may in its effect become beautiful, is true; and this, indeed, is the
real modernite of art: but these conditions are exactly what we cannot be
always sure of, as we stroll down Piccadilly in the glaring vulgarity of
the noonday, or lounge in the park with a foolish sunset as a background.
Were we able to carry our chiaroscuro about with us, as we do our
umbrellas, all would be well; but this being impossible, I hardly think
that pretty and delightful people will continue to wear a style of dress
as ugly as it is useless and as meaningless as it is monstrous, even on
the chance of such a master as Mr. Whistler spiritualising them into a
symphony or refining them into a mist.  For the arts are made for life,
and not life for the arts.

Nor do I feel quite sure that Mr. Whistler has been himself always true
to the dogma he seems to lay down, that a painter should paint only the
dress of his age and of his actual surroundings: far be it from me to
burden a butterfly with the heavy responsibility of its past: I have
always been of opinion that consistency is the last refuge of the
unimaginative: but have we not all seen, and most of us admired, a
picture from his hand of exquisite English girls strolling by an opal sea
in the fantastic dresses of Japan?  Has not Tite Street been thrilled
with the tidings that the models of Chelsea were posing to the master, in
peplums, for pastels?

Whatever comes from Mr Whistler's brush is far too perfect in its
loveliness to stand or fall by any intellectual dogmas on art, even by
his own: for Beauty is justified of all her children, and cares nothing
for explanations: but it is impossible to look through any collection of
modern pictures in London, from Burlington House to the Grosvenor
Gallery, without feeling that the professional model is ruining painting
and reducing it to a condition of mere pose and pastiche.

Are we not all weary of him, that venerable impostor fresh from the steps
of the Piazza di Spagna, who, in the leisure moments that he can spare
from his customary organ, makes the round of the studios and is waited
for in Holland Park?  Do we not all recognise him, when, with the gay
insouciance of his nation, he reappears on the walls of our summer
exhibitions as everything that he is not, and as nothing that he is,
glaring at us here as a patriarch of Canaan, here beaming as a brigand
from the Abruzzi?  Popular is he, this poor peripatetic professor of
posing, with those whose joy it is to paint the posthumous portrait of
the last philanthropist who in his lifetime had neglected to be
photographed,--yet he is the sign of the decadence, the symbol of decay.

For all costumes are caricatures.  The basis of Art is not the Fancy
Ball.  Where there is loveliness of dress, there is no dressing up.  And
so, were our national attire delightful in colour, and in construction
simple and sincere; were dress the expression of the loveliness that it
shields and of the swiftness and motion that it does not impede; did its
lines break from the shoulder instead of bulging from the waist; did the
inverted wineglass cease to be the ideal of form; were these things
brought about, as brought about they will be, then would painting be no
longer an artificial reaction against the ugliness of life, but become,
as it should be, the natural expression of life's beauty.  Nor would
painting merely, but all the other arts also, be the gainers by a change
such as that which I propose; the gainers, I mean, through the increased
atmosphere of Beauty by which the artists would be surrounded and in
which they would grow up.  For Art is not to be taught in Academies.  It
is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist.  The
real schools should be the streets.  There is not, for instance, a single
delicate line, or delightful proportion, in the dress of the Greeks,
which is not echoed exquisitely in their architecture.  A nation arrayed
in stove-pipe hats and dress-improvers might have built the Pantechnichon
possibly, but the Parthenon never.  And finally, there is this to be
said: Art, it is true, can never have any other claim but her own
perfection, and it may be that the artist, desiring merely to contemplate
and to create, is wise in not busying himself about change in others: yet
wisdom is not always the best; there are times when she sinks to the
level of common-sense; and from the passionate folly of those--and there
are many--who desire that Beauty shall be confined no longer to the bric-
a-brac of the collector and the dust of the museum, but shall be, as it
should be, the natural and national inheritance of all,--from this noble
unwisdom, I say, who knows what new loveliness shall be given to life,
and, under these more exquisite conditions, what perfect artist born?  Le
milieu se renouvelant, l'art se renouvelle.

Speaking, however, from his own passionless pedestal, Mr. Whistler, in
pointing out that the power of the painter is to be found in his power of
vision, not in his cleverness of hand, has expressed a truth which needed
expression, and which, coming from the lord of form and colour, cannot
fail to have its influence.  His lecture, the Apocrypha though it be for
the people, yet remains from this time as the Bible for the painter, the
masterpiece of masterpieces, the song of songs.  It is true he has
pronounced the panegyric of the Philistine, but I fancy Ariel praising
Caliban for a jest: and, in that he has read the Commination Service over
the critics, let all men thank him, the critics themselves, indeed, most
of all, for he has now relieved them from the necessity of a tedious
existence.  Considered, again, merely as an orator, Mr. Whistler seems to
me to stand almost alone.  Indeed, among all our public speakers I know
but few who can combine so felicitously as he does the mirth and malice
of Puck with the style of the minor prophets.




KEATS'S SONNET ON BLUE


(Century Guild Hobby Horse, July 1886.)

During my tour in America I happened one evening to find myself in
Louisville, Kentucky.  The subject I had selected to speak on was the
Mission of Art in the Nineteenth Century, and in the course of my lecture
I had occasion to quote Keats's Sonnet on Blue as an example of the
poet's delicate sense of colour-harmonies.  When my lecture was concluded
there came round to see me a lady of middle age, with a sweet gentle
manner and a most musical voice.  She introduced herself to me as Mrs.
Speed, the daughter of George Keats, and invited me to come and examine
the Keats manuscripts in her possession.  I spent most of the next day
with her, reading the letters of Keats to her father, some of which were
at that time unpublished, poring over torn yellow leaves and faded scraps
of paper, and wondering at the little Dante in which Keats had written
those marvellous notes on Milton.  Some months afterwards, when I was in
California, I received a letter from Mrs. Speed asking my acceptance of
the original manuscript of the sonnet which I had quoted in my lecture.
This manuscript I have had reproduced here, as it seems to me to possess
much psychological interest.  It shows us the conditions that preceded
the perfected form, the gradual growth, not of the conception but of the
expression, and the workings of that spirit of selection which is the
secret of style.  In the case of poetry, as in the case of the other
arts, what may appear to be simply technicalities of method are in their
essence spiritual, not mechanical, and although, in all lovely work, what
concerns us is the ultimate form, not the conditions that necessitate
that form, yet the preference that precedes perfection, the evolution of
the beauty, and the mere making of the music, have, if not their artistic
value, at least their value to the artist.

It will be remembered that this sonnet was first published in 1848 by
Lord Houghton in his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats.
Lord Houghton does not definitely state where he found it, but it was
probably among the Keats manuscripts belonging to Mr. Charles Brown.  It
is evidently taken from a version later than that in my possession, as it
accepts all the corrections, and makes three variations.  As in my
manuscript the first line is torn away, I give the sonnet here as it
appears in Lord Houghton's edition.

   ANSWER TO A SONNET ENDING THUS:

      Dark eyes are dearer far
   Than those that make the hyacinthine bell. {74}

      By J. H. REYNOLDS.

   Blue!  'Tis the life of heaven,--the domain
      Of Cynthia,--the wide palace of the sun,--
   The tent of Hesperus and all his train,--
      The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey and dun.
   Blue!  'Tis the life of waters--ocean
      And all its vassal streams: pools numberless
   May rage, and foam, and fret, but never can
      Subside if not to dark-blue nativeness.
   Blue! gentle cousin of the forest green,
      Married to green in all the sweetest flowers,
   Forget-me-not,--the blue-bell,--and, that queen
      Of secrecy, the violet: what strange powers
   Hast thou, as a mere shadow!  But how great,
      When in an Eye thou art alive with fate!

   Feb. 1818.

In the Athenaeum of the 3rd of June 1876, appeared a letter from Mr. A.
J. Horwood, stating that he had in his possession a copy of The Garden of
Florence in which this sonnet was transcribed.  Mr. Horwood, who was
unaware that the sonnet had been already published by Lord Houghton,
gives the transcript at length.  His version reads hue for life in the
first line, and bright for wide in the second, and gives the sixth line
thus:

   With all his tributary streams, pools numberless,

a foot too long: it also reads to for of in the ninth line.  Mr. Buxton
Forman is of opinion that these variations are decidedly genuine, but
indicative of an earlier state of the poem than that adopted in Lord
Houghton's edition.  However, now that we have before us Keats's first
draft of his sonnet, it is difficult to believe that the sixth line in
Mr. Horwood's version is really a genuine variation.  Keats may have
written,

         Ocean
   His tributary streams, pools numberless,

and the transcript may have been carelessly made, but having got his line
right in his first draft, Keats probably did not spoil it in his second.
The Athenaeum version inserts a comma after art in the last line, which
seems to me a decided improvement, and eminently characteristic of
Keats's method.  I am glad to see that Mr. Buxton Forman has adopted it.

As for the corrections that Lord Houghton's version shows Keats to have
made in the eighth and ninth lines of this sonnet, it is evident that
they sprang from Keats's reluctance to repeat the same word in
consecutive lines, except in cases where a word's music or meaning was to
be emphasised.  The substitution of 'its' for 'his' in the sixth line is
more difficult of explanation.  It was due probably to a desire on
Keats's part not to mar by any echo the fine personification of Hesperus.

It may be noticed that Keats's own eyes were brown, and not blue, as
stated by Mrs. Proctor to Lord Houghton.  Mrs. Speed showed me a note to
that effect written by Mrs. George Keats on the margin of the page in
Lord Houghton's Life (p. 100, vol. i.), where Mrs. Proctor's description
is given.  Cowden Clarke made a similar correction in his Recollections,
and in some of the later editions of Lord Houghton's book the word 'blue'
is struck out.  In Severn's portraits of Keats also the eyes are given as
brown.

The exquisite sense of colour expressed in the ninth and tenth lines may
be paralleled by

   The Ocean with its vastness, its blue green,

of the sonnet to George Keats.




THE AMERICAN INVASION


(Court and Society Review, March 23, 1887.)

A terrible danger is hanging over the Americans in London.  Their future
and their reputation this season depend entirely on the success of
Buffalo Bill and Mrs. Brown-Potter.  The former is certain to draw; for
English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they
are in American civilisation.  When they sight Sandy Hook they look to
their rifles and ammunition; and, after dining once at Delmonico's, start
off for Colorado or California, for Montana or the Yellow Stone Park.
Rocky Mountains charm them more than riotous millionaires; they have been
known to prefer buffaloes to Boston.  Why should they not?  The cities of
America are inexpressibly tedious.  The Bostonians take their learning
too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an
atmosphere; their 'Hub,' as they call it, is the paradise of prigs.
Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustle and bores.  Political
life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.  Baltimore
is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and
though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.  Better the
Far West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cow-boys, its free open-
air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its
boundless mendacity!  This is what Buffalo Bill is going to bring to
London; and we have no doubt that London will fully appreciate his show.

With regard to Mrs. Brown-Potter, as acting is no longer considered
absolutely essential for success on the English stage, there is really no
reason why the pretty bright-eyed lady who charmed us all last June by
her merry laugh and her nonchalant ways, should not--to borrow an
expression from her native language--make a big boom and paint the town
red.  We sincerely hope she will; for, on the whole, the American
invasion has done English society a great deal of good.  American women
are bright, clever, and wonderfully cosmopolitan.  Their patriotic
feelings are limited to an admiration for Niagara and a regret for the
Elevated Railway; and, unlike the men, they never bore us with Bunkers
Hill.  They take their dresses from Paris and their manners from
Piccadilly, and wear both charmingly.  They have a quaint pertness, a
delightful conceit, a native self-assertion.  They insist on being paid
compliments and have almost succeeded in making Englishmen eloquent.  For
our aristocracy they have an ardent admiration; they adore titles and are
a permanent blow to Republican principles.  In the art of amusing men
they are adepts, both by nature and education, and can actually tell a
story without forgetting the point--an accomplishment that is extremely
rare among the women of other countries.  It is true that they lack
repose and that their voices are somewhat harsh and strident when they
land first at Liverpool; but after a time one gets to love these pretty
whirlwinds in petticoats that sweep so recklessly through society and are
so agitating to all duchesses who have daughters.  There is something
fascinating in their funny, exaggerated gestures and their petulant way
of tossing the head.  Their eyes have no magic nor mystery in them, but
they challenge us for combat; and when we engage we are always worsted.
Their lips seem made for laughter and yet they never grimace.  As for
their voices, they soon get them into tune.  Some of them have been known
to acquire a fashionable drawl in two seasons; and after they have been
presented to Royalty they all roll their R's as vigorously as a young
equerry or an old lady-in-waiting.  Still, they never really lose their
accent; it keeps peeping out here and there, and when they chatter
together they are like a bevy of peacocks.  Nothing is more amusing than
to watch two American girls greeting each other in a drawing-room or in
the Row.  They are like children with their shrill staccato cries of
wonder, their odd little exclamations.  Their conversation sounds like a
series of exploding crackers; they are exquisitely incoherent and use a
sort of primitive, emotional language.  After five minutes they are left
beautifully breathless and look at each other half in amusement and half
in affection.  If a stolid young Englishman is fortunate enough to be
introduced to them he is amazed at their extraordinary vivacity, their
electric quickness of repartee, their inexhaustible store of curious
catchwords.  He never really understands them, for their thoughts flutter
about with the sweet irresponsibility of butterflies; but he is pleased
and amused and feels as if he were in an aviary.  On the whole, American
girls have a wonderful charm and, perhaps, the chief secret of their
charm is that they never talk seriously except about amusements.  They
have, however, one grave fault--their mothers.  Dreary as were those old
Pilgrim Fathers who left our shores more than two centuries ago to found
a New England beyond seas, the Pilgrim Mothers who have returned to us in
the nineteenth century are drearier still.

Here and there, of course, there are exceptions, but as a class they are
either dull, dowdy or dyspeptic.  It is only fair to the rising
generation of America to state that they are not to blame for this.
Indeed, they spare no pains at all to bring up their parents properly and
to give them a suitable, if somewhat late, education.  From its earliest
years every American child spends most of its time in correcting the
faults of its father and mother; and no one who has had the opportunity
of watching an American family on the deck of an Atlantic steamer, or in
the refined seclusion of a New York boarding-house, can fail to have been
struck by this characteristic of their civilisation.  In America the
young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the
full benefits of their inexperience.  A boy of only eleven or twelve
years of age will firmly but kindly point out to his father his defects
of manner or temper; will never weary of warning him against
extravagance, idleness, late hours, unpunctuality, and the other
temptations to which the aged are so particularly exposed; and sometimes,
should he fancy that he is monopolising too much of the conversation at
dinner, will remind him, across the table, of the new child's adage,
'Parents should be seen, not heard.'  Nor does any mistaken idea of
kindness prevent the little American girl from censuring her mother
whenever it is necessary.  Often, indeed, feeling that a rebuke conveyed
in the presence of others is more truly efficacious than one merely
whispered in the quiet of the nursery, she will call the attention of
perfect strangers to her mother's general untidiness, her want of
intellectual Boston conversation, immoderate love of iced water and green
corn, stinginess in the matter of candy, ignorance of the usages of the
best Baltimore society, bodily ailments and the like.  In fact, it may be
truly said that no American child is ever blind to the deficiencies of
its parents, no matter how much it may love them.

Yet, somehow, this educational system has not been so successful as it
deserved.  In many cases, no doubt, the material with which the children
had to deal was crude and incapable of real development; but the fact
remains that the American mother is a tedious person.  The American
father is better, for he is never seen in London.  He passes his life
entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by
means of a telegram in cipher.  The mother, however, is always with us,
and, lacking the quick imitative faculty of the younger generation,
remains uninteresting and provincial to the last.  In spite of her,
however, the American girl is always welcome.  She brightens our dull
dinner parties for us and makes life go pleasantly by for a season.  In
the race for coronets she often carries off the prize; but, once she has
gained the victory, she is generous and forgives her English rivals
everything, even their beauty.

Warned by the example of her mother that American women do not grow old
gracefully, she tries not to grow old at all and often succeeds.  She has
exquisite feet and hands, is always bien chaussee et bien gantee and can
talk brilliantly upon any subject, provided that she knows nothing about
it.

Her sense of humour keeps her from the tragedy of a grande passion, and,
as there is neither romance nor humility in her love, she makes an
excellent wife.  What her ultimate influence on English life will be it
is difficult to estimate at present; but there can be no doubt that, of
all the factors that have contributed to the social revolution of London,
there are few more important, and none more delightful, than the American
Invasion.




SERMONS IN STONES AT BLOOMSBURY: THE NEW SCULPTURE ROOM AT THE BRITISH
MUSEUM


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 15, 1887.)

Through the exertions of Sir Charles Newton, to whom every student of
classic art should be grateful, some of the wonderful treasures so long
immured in the grimy vaults of the British Museum have at last been
brought to light, and the new Sculpture Room now opened to the public
will amply repay the trouble of a visit, even from those to whom art is a
stumbling-block and a rock of offence.  For setting aside the mere beauty
of form, outline and mass, the grace and loveliness of design and the
delicacy of technical treatment, here we have shown to us what the Greeks
and Romans thought about death; and the philosopher, the preacher, the
practical man of the world, and even the Philistine himself, cannot fail
to be touched by these 'sermons in stones,' with their deep significance,
their fertile suggestion, their plain humanity.  Common tombstones they
are, most of them, the work not of famous artists but of simple
handicraftsmen, only they were wrought in days when every handicraft was
an art.  The finest specimens, from the purely artistic point of view,
are undoubtedly the two stelai found at Athens.  They are both the
tombstones of young Greek athletes.  In one the athlete is represented
handing his strigil to his slave, in the other the athlete stands alone,
strigil in hand.  They do not belong to the greatest period of Greek art,
they have not the grand style of the Phidian age, but they are beautiful
for all that, and it is impossible not to be fascinated by their
exquisite grace and by the treatment which is so simple in its means, so
subtle in its effect.  All the tombstones, however, are full of interest.
Here is one of two ladies of Smyrna who were so remarkable in their day
that the city voted them honorary crowns; here is a Greek doctor
examining a little boy who is suffering from indigestion; here is the
memorial of Xanthippus who, probably, was a martyr to gout, as he is
holding in his hand the model of a foot, intended, no doubt, as a votive
offering to some god.  A lovely stele from Rhodes gives us a family
group.  The husband is on horseback and is bidding farewell to his wife,
who seems as if she would follow him but is being held back by a little
child.  The pathos of parting from those we love is the central motive of
Greek funeral art.  It is repeated in every possible form, and each mute
marble stone seems to murmur [Greek].  Roman art is different.  It
introduces vigorous and realistic portraiture and deals with pure family
life far more frequently than Greek art does.  They are very ugly, those
stern-looking Roman men and women whose portraits are exhibited on their
tombs, but they seem to have been loved and respected by their children
and their servants.  Here is the monument of Aphrodisius and Atilia, a
Roman gentleman and his wife, who died in Britain many centuries ago, and
whose tombstone was found in the Thames; and close by it stands a stele
from Rome with the busts of an old married couple who are certainly
marvellously ill-favoured.  The contrast between the abstract Greek
treatment of the idea of death and the Roman concrete realisation of the
individuals who have died is extremely curious.

Besides the tombstones, the new Sculpture Room contains some most
fascinating examples of Roman decorative art under the Emperors.  The
most wonderful of all, and this alone is worth a trip to Bloomsbury, is a
bas-relief representing a marriage scene.  Juno Pronuba is joining the
hands of a handsome young noble and a very stately lady.  There is all
the grace of Perugino in this marble, all the grace of Raphael even.  The
date of it is uncertain, but the particular cut of the bridegroom's beard
seems to point to the time of the Emperor Hadrian.  It is clearly the
work of Greek artists and is one of the most beautiful bas-reliefs in the
whole Museum.  There is something in it which reminds one of the music
and the sweetness of Propertian verse.  Then we have delightful friezes
of children.  One representing children playing on musical instruments
might have suggested much of the plastic art of Florence.  Indeed, as we
view these marbles it is not difficult to see whence the Renaissance
sprang and to what we owe the various forms of Renaissance art.  The
frieze of the Muses, each of whom wears in her hair a feather plucked
from the wings of the vanquished sirens, is extremely fine; there is a
lovely little bas-relief of two cupids racing in chariots; and the frieze
of recumbent Amazons has some splendid qualities of design.  A frieze of
children playing with the armour of the god Mars should also be
mentioned.  It is full of fancy and delicate humour.

On the whole, Sir Charles Newton and Mr. Murray are warmly to be
congratulated on the success of the new room.  We hope, however, that
some more of the hidden treasures will shortly be catalogued and shown.
In the vaults at present there is a very remarkable bas-relief of the
marriage of Cupid and Psyche, and another representing the professional
mourners weeping over the body of the dead.  The fine cast of the Lion of
Chaeronea should also be brought up, and so should the stele with the
marvellous portrait of the Roman slave.  Economy is an excellent public
virtue, but the parsimony that allows valuable works of art to remain in
the grime and gloom of a damp cellar is little short of a detestable
public vice.




THE UNITY OF THE ARTS: A LECTURE AND A FIVE O'CLOCK


(Pall Mall Gazette, December 12, 1887.)

Last Saturday afternoon, at Willis's Rooms, Mr. Selwyn Image delivered
the first of a series of four lectures on Modern Art before a select and
distinguished audience.  The chief point on which he dwelt was the
absolute unity of all the arts and, in order to convey this idea, he
framed a definition wide enough to include Shakespeare's King Lear and
Michael Angelo's Creation, Paul Veronese's picture of Alexander and
Darius, and Gibbon's description of the entry of Heliogabalus into Rome.
All these he regarded as so many expressions of man's thoughts and
emotions on fine things, conveyed through visible or audible modes; and
starting from this point he approached the question of the true relation
of literature to painting, always keeping in view the central motive of
his creed, Credo in unam artem multipartitam, indivisibilem, and dwelling
on resemblances rather than differences.  The result at which he
ultimately arrived was this: the Impressionists, with their frank
artistic acceptance of form and colour as things absolutely satisfying in
themselves, have produced very beautiful work, but painting has something
more to give us than the mere visible aspect of things.  The lofty
spiritual visions of William Blake, and the marvellous romance of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, can find their perfect expression in painting; every
mood has its colour and every dream has its form.  The chief quality of
Mr. Image's lecture was its absolute fairness, but this was, to a certain
portion of the audience, its chief defect.  'Sweet reasonableness,' said
one, 'is always admirable in a spectator, but from a leader we want
something more.'  'It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools
of art,' said another; while a third sighed over what he called 'the
fatal sterility of the judicial mind,' and expressed a perfectly
groundless fear that the Century Guild was becoming rational.  For, with
a courtesy and a generosity that we strongly recommend to other
lecturers, Mr. Image provided refreshments for his audience after his
address was over, and it was extremely interesting to listen to the
various opinions expressed by the great Five-o'clock-tea School of
Criticism which was largely represented.  For our own part, we found Mr.
Image's lecture extremely suggestive.  It was sometimes difficult to
understand in what exact sense he was using the word 'literary,' and we
do not think that a course of drawing from the plaster cast of the Dying
Gaul would in the slightest degree improve the ordinary art critic.  The
true unity of the arts is to be found, not in any resemblance of one art
to another, but in the fact that to the really artistic nature all the
arts have the same message and speak the same language though with
different tongues.  No amount of daubing on a cellar wall will make a man
understand the mystery of Michael Angelo's Sybils, nor is it necessary to
write a blank verse drama before one can appreciate the beauty of Hamlet.
It is essential that an art critic should have a nature receptive of
beautiful impressions, and sufficient intuition to recognise style when
he meets with it, and truth when it is shown to him; but, if he does not
possess these qualities, a reckless career of water-colour painting will
not give them to him, for, if from the incompetent critic all things be
hidden, to the bad painter nothing shall be revealed.




ART AT WILLIS'S ROOMS


(Sunday Times, December 25, 1887.)

Accepting a suggestion made by a friendly critic last week, Mr. Selwyn
Image began his second lecture by explaining more fully what he meant by
literary art, and pointed out the difference between an ordinary
illustration to a book and such creative and original works as Michael
Angelo's fresco of The Expulsion from Eden and Rossetti's Beata Beatrix.
In the latter case the artist treats literature as if it were life
itself, and gives a new and delightful form to what seer or singer has
shown us; in the former we have merely a translation which misses the
music and adds no marvel.  As for subject, Mr. Image protested against
the studio-slang that no subject is necessary, defining subject as the
thought, emotion or impression which a man desires to embody in form and
colour, and admitting Mr. Whistler's fireworks as readily as Giotto's
angels, and Van Huysum's roses no less than Mantegna's gods.  Here, we
think that Mr. Image might have pointed out more clearly the contrast
between the purely pictorial subject and the subject that includes among
its elements such things as historical associations or poetic memories;
the contrast, in fact, between impressive art and the art that is
expressive also.  However, the topics he had to deal with were so varied
that it was, no doubt, difficult for him to do more than suggest.  From
subject he passed to style, which he described as 'that masterful but
restrained individuality of manner by which one artist is differentiated
from another.'  The true qualities of style he found in restraint which
is submission to law; simplicity which is unity of vision; and severity,
for le beau est toujours severe.

The realist he defined as one who aims at reproducing the external
phenomena of nature, while the idealist is the man who 'imagines things
of fine interest.'  Yet, while he defined them he would not separate
them.  The true artist is a realist, for he recognises an external world
of truth; an idealist, for he has selection, abstraction and the power of
individualisation.  To stand apart from the world of nature is fatal, but
it is no less fatal merely to reproduce facts.

Art, in a word, must not content itself simply with holding the mirror up
to nature, for it is a re-creation more than a reflection, and not a
repetition but rather a new song.  As for finish, it must not be confused
with elaboration.  A picture, said Mr. Image, is finished when the means
of form and colour employed by the artist are adequate to convey the
artist's intention; and, with this definition and a peroration suitable
to the season, he concluded his interesting and intellectual lecture.

Light refreshments were then served to the audience, and the five-o'clock-
tea school of criticism came very much to the front.  Mr. Image's entire
freedom from dogmatism and self-assertion was in some quarters rather
severely commented on, and one young gentleman declared that such
virtuous modesty as the lecturer's might easily become a most vicious
mannerism.  Everybody, however, was extremely pleased to learn that it is
no longer the duty of art to hold the mirror up to nature, and the few
Philistines who dissented from this view received that most terrible of
all punishments--the contempt of the highly cultured.

Mr. Image's third lecture will be delivered on January 21 and will, no
doubt, be largely attended, as the subjects advertised are full of
interest, and though 'sweet reasonableness' may not convert, it always
charms.




MR. MORRIS ON TAPESTRY


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 2, 1888.)

Yesterday evening Mr. William Morris delivered a most interesting and
fascinating lecture on Carpet and Tapestry Weaving at the Arts and Crafts
Exhibition now held at the New Gallery.  Mr. Morris had small practical
models of the two looms used, the carpet loom where the weaver sits in
front of his work; the more elaborate tapestry loom where the weaver sits
behind, at the back of the stuff, has his design outlined on the upright
threads and sees in a mirror the shadow of the pattern and picture as it
grows gradually to perfection.  He spoke at much length on the question
of dyes--praising madder and kermes for reds, precipitate of iron or
ochre for yellows, and for blue either indigo or woad.  At the back of
the platform hung a lovely Flemish tapestry of the fourteenth century,
and a superb Persian carpet about two hundred and fifty years old.  Mr.
Morris pointed out the loveliness of the carpet--its delicate suggestion
of hawthorn blossom, iris and rose, its rejection of imitation and
shading; and showed how it combined the great quality of decorative
design--being at once clear and well defined in form: each outline
exquisitely traced, each line deliberate in its intention and its beauty,
and the whole effect being one of unity, of harmony, almost of mystery,
the colours being so perfectly harmonised together and the little bright
notes of colour being so cunningly placed either for tone or brilliancy.

Tapestries, he said, were to the North of Europe what fresco was to the
South--our climate, amongst other reasons, guiding us in our choice of
material for wall-covering.  England, France, and Flanders were the three
great tapestry countries--Flanders with its great wool trade being the
first in splendid colours and superb Gothic design.  The keynote of
tapestry, the secret of its loveliness, was, he told the audience, the
complete filling up of every corner and square inch of surface with
lovely and fanciful and suggestive design.  Hence the wonder of those
great Gothic tapestries where the forest trees rise in different places,
one over the other, each leaf perfect in its shape and colour and
decorative value, while in simple raiment of beautiful design knights and
ladies wandered in rich flower gardens, and rode with hawk on wrist
through long green arcades, and sat listening to lute and viol in blossom-
starred bowers or by cool gracious water springs.  Upon the other hand,
when the Gothic feeling died away, and Boucher and others began to
design, they gave us wide expanses of waste sky, elaborate perspective,
posing nymphs and shallow artificial treatment.  Indeed, Boucher met with
scant mercy at Mr. Morris's vigorous hands and was roundly abused, and
modern Gobelins, with M. Bougereau's cartoons, fared no better.

Mr. Morris told some delightful stories about old tapestry work from the
days when in the Egyptian tombs the dead were laid wrapped in picture
cloths, some of which are now in the South Kensington Museum, to the time
of the great Turk Bajazet who, having captured some Christian knights,
would accept nothing for their ransom but the 'storied tapestries of
France' and gerfalcons.  As regards the use of tapestry in modern days,
he pointed out that we were richer than the middle ages, and so should be
better able to afford this form of lovely wall-covering, which for
artistic tone is absolutely without rival.  He said that the very
limitation of material and form forced the imaginative designer into
giving us something really beautiful and decorative.  'What is the use of
setting an artist in a twelve-acre field and telling him to design a
house?  Give him a limited space and he is forced by its limitation to
concentrate, and to fill with pure loveliness the narrow surface at his
disposal.'  The worker also gives to the original design a very perfect
richness of detail, and the threads with their varying colours and
delicate reflections convey into the work a new source of delight.  Here,
he said, we found perfect unity between the imaginative artist and the
handicraftsman.  The one was not too free, the other was not a slave.  The
eye of the artist saw, his brain conceived, his imagination created, but
the hand of the weaver had also its opportunity for wonderful work, and
did not copy what was already made, but re-created and put into a new and
delightful form a design that for its perfection needed the loom to aid,
and had to pass into a fresh and marvellous material before its beauty
came to its real flower and blossom of absolutely right expression and
artistic effect.  But, said Mr. Morris in conclusion, to have great work
we must be worthy of it.  Commercialism, with its vile god cheapness, its
callous indifference to the worker, its innate vulgarity of temper, is
our enemy.  To gain anything good we must sacrifice something of our
luxury--must think more of others, more of the State, the commonweal: 'We
cannot have riches and wealth both,' he said; we must choose between
them.

The lecture was listened to with great attention by a very large and
distinguished audience, and Mr. Morris was loudly applauded.

The next lecture will be on Sculpture by Mr. George Simonds, and if it is
half so good as Mr. Morris it will well repay a visit to the
lecture-room.  Mr. Crane deserves great credit for his exertions in
making this exhibition what it should be, and there is no doubt but that
it will exercise an important and a good influence on all the handicrafts
of our country.




SCULPTURE AT THE ARTS AND CRAFTS


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 9, 1888.)

The most satisfactory thing in Mr. Simonds' lecture last night was the
peroration, in which he told the audience that 'an artist cannot be
made.'  But for this well-timed warning some deluded people might have
gone away under the impression that sculpture was a sort of mechanical
process within the reach of the meanest capabilities.  For it must be
confessed that Mr. Simonds' lecture was at once too elementary and too
elaborately technical.  The ordinary art student, even the ordinary
studio-loafer, could not have learned anything from it, while the
'cultured person,' of whom there were many specimens present, could not
but have felt a little bored at the careful and painfully clear
descriptions given by the lecturer of very well-known and uninteresting
methods of work.  However, Mr. Simonds did his best.  He described
modelling in clay and wax; casting in plaster and in metal; how to
enlarge and how to diminish to scale; bas-reliefs and working in the
round; the various kinds of marble, their qualities and characteristics;
how to reproduce in marble the plaster or clay bust; how to use the
point, the drill, the wire and the chisel; and the various difficulties
attending each process.  He exhibited a clay bust of Mr. Walter Crane on
which he did some elementary work; a bust of Mr. Parsons; a small
statuette; several moulds, and an interesting diagram of the furnace used
by Balthasar Keller for casting a great equestrian statue of Louis XIV.
in 1697-8.

What his lecture lacked were ideas.  Of the artistic value of each
material; of the correspondence between material or method and the
imaginative faculty seeking to find expression; of the capacities for
realism and idealism that reside in each material; of the historical and
human side of the art--he said nothing.  He showed the various
instruments and how they are used, but he treated them entirely as
instruments for the hand.  He never once brought his subject into any
relation either with art or with life.  He explained forms of labour and
forms of saving labour.  He showed the various methods as they might be
used by an artisan.  Mr. Morris, last week, while explaining the
technical processes of weaving, never forgot that he was lecturing on an
art.  He not merely taught his audience, but he charmed them.  However,
the audience gathered together last night at the Arts and Crafts
Exhibition seemed very much interested; at least, they were very
attentive; and Mr. Walter Crane made a short speech at the conclusion, in
which he expressed his satisfaction that in spite of modern machinery
sculpture had hardly altered one of its tools.  For our own part we
cannot help regretting the extremely commonplace character of the
lecture.  If a man lectures on poets he should not confine his remarks
purely to grammar.

Next week Mr. Emery Walker lectures on Printing.  We hope--indeed we are
sure, that he will not forget that it is an art, or rather it was an art
once, and can be made so again.




PRINTING AND PRINTERS


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 16, 1888.)

Nothing could have been better than Mr. Emery Walker's lecture on
Letterpress Printing and Illustration, delivered last night at the Arts
and Crafts.  A series of most interesting specimens of old printed books
and manuscripts was displayed on the screen by means of the
magic-lantern, and Mr. Walker's explanations were as clear and simple as
his suggestions were admirable.  He began by explaining the different
kinds of type and how they are made, and showed specimens of the old
block-printing which preceded the movable type and is still used in
China.  He pointed out the intimate connection between printing and
handwriting--as long as the latter was good the printers had a living
model to go by, but when it decayed printing decayed also.  He showed on
the screen a page from Gutenberg's Bible (the first printed book, date
about 1450-5) and a manuscript of Columella; a printed Livy of 1469, with
the abbreviations of handwriting, and a manuscript of the History of
Pompeius by Justin of 1451.  The latter he regarded as an example of the
beginning of the Roman type.  The resemblance between the manuscripts and
the printed books was most curious and suggestive.  He then showed a page
out of John of Spier's edition of Cicero's Letters, the first book
printed at Venice, an edition of the same book by Nicholas Jansen in
1470, and a wonderful manuscript Petrarch of the sixteenth century.  He
told the audience about Aldus, who was the first publisher to start cheap
books, who dropped abbreviations and had his type cut by Francia pictor
et aurifex, who was said to have taken it from Petrarch's handwriting.  He
exhibited a page of the copy-book of Vicentino, the great Venetian
writing-master, which was greeted with a spontaneous round of applause,
and made some excellent suggestions about improving modern copy-books and
avoiding slanting writing.

A superb Plautus printed at Florence in 1514 for Lorenzo di Medici,
Polydore Virgil's History with the fine Holbein designs, printed at Basle
in 1556, and other interesting books, were also exhibited on the screen,
the size, of course, being very much enlarged.  He spoke of Elzevir in
the seventeenth century when handwriting began to fall off, and of the
English printer Caslon, and of Baskerville whose type was possibly
designed by Hogarth, but is not very good.  Latin, he remarked, was a
better language to print than English, as the tails of the letters did
not so often fall below the line.  The wide spacing between lines,
occasioned by the use of a lead, he pointed out, left the page in stripes
and made the blanks as important as the lines.  Margins should, of
course, be wide except the inner margins, and the headlines often robbed
the page of its beauty of design.  The type used by the Pall Mall was, we
are glad to say, rightly approved of.

With regard to illustration, the essential thing, Mr. Walker said, is to
have harmony between the type and the decoration.  He pleaded for true
book ornament as opposed to the silly habit of putting pictures where
they are not wanted, and pointed out that mechanical harmony and artistic
harmony went hand in hand.  No ornament or illustration should be used in
a book which cannot be printed in the same way as the type.  For his
warnings he produced Rogers's Italy with a steel-plate engraving, and a
page from an American magazine which being florid, pictorial and bad, was
greeted with some laughter.  For examples we had a lovely Boccaccio
printed at Ulm, and a page out of La Mer des Histoires printed in 1488.
Blake and Bewick were also shown, and a page of music designed by Mr.
Horne.

The lecture was listened to with great attention by a large audience, and
was certainly most attractive.  Mr. Walker has the keen artistic instinct
that comes out of actually working in the art of which he spoke.  His
remarks about the pictorial character of modern illustration were well
timed, and we hope that some of the publishers in the audience will take
them to heart.

Next Thursday Mr. Cobden-Sanderson lectures on Bookbinding, a subject on
which few men in England have higher qualifications for speaking.  We are
glad to see these lectures are so well attended.




THE BEAUTIES OF BOOKBINDING


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 23, 1888.)

'The beginning of art,' said Mr. Cobden-Sanderson last night in his
charming lecture on Bookbinding, 'is man thinking about the universe.'  He
desires to give expression to the joy and wonder that he feels at the
marvels that surround him, and invents a form of beauty through which he
utters the thought or feeling that is in him.  And bookbinding ranks
amongst the arts: 'through it a man expresses himself.'

This elegant and pleasantly exaggerated exordium preceded some very
practical demonstrations.  'The apron is the banner of the future!'
exclaimed the lecturer, and he took his coat off and put his apron on.  He
spoke a little about old bindings for the papyrus roll, about the ivory
or cedar cylinders round which old manuscripts were wound, about the
stained covers and the elaborate strings, till binding in the modern
sense began with literature in a folded form, with literature in pages.  A
binding, he pointed out, consists of two boards, originally of wood, now
of mill-board, covered with leather, silk or velvet.  The use of these
boards is to protect the 'world's written wealth.'  The best material is
leather, decorated with gold.  The old binders used to be given forests
that they might always have a supply of the skins of wild animals; the
modern binder has to content himself with importing morocco, which is far
the best leather there is, and is very much to be preferred to calf.

Mr. Sanderson mentioned by name a few of the great binders such as Le
Gascon, and some of the patrons of bookbinding like the Medicis, Grolier,
and the wonderful women who so loved books that they lent them some of
the perfume and grace of their own strange lives.  However, the
historical part of the lecture was very inadequate, possibly necessarily
so through the limitations of time.  The really elaborate part of the
lecture was the practical exposition.  Mr. Sanderson described and
illustrated the various processes of smoothing, pressing, cutting,
paring, and the like.  He divided bindings into two classes, the useful
and the beautiful.  Among the former he reckoned paper covers such as the
French use, paper boards and cloth boards, and half leather or calf
bindings.  Cloth he disliked as a poor material, the gold on which soon
fades away.  As for beautiful bindings, in them 'decoration rises into
enthusiasm.'  A beautiful binding is 'a homage to genius.'  It has its
ethical value, its spiritual effect.  'By doing good work we raise life
to a higher plane,' said the lecturer, and he dwelt with loving sympathy
on the fact that a book is 'sensitive by nature,' that it is made by a
human being for a human being, that the design must 'come from the man
himself, and express the moods of his imagination, the joy of his soul.'
There must, consequently, be no division of labour.  'I make my own paste
and enjoy doing it,' said Mr. Sanderson as he spoke of the necessity for
the artist doing the whole work with his own hands.  But before we have
really good bookbinding we must have a social revolution.  As things are
now, the worker diminished to a machine is the slave of the employer, and
the employer bloated into a millionaire is the slave of the public, and
the public is the slave of its pet god, cheapness.  The bookbinder of the
future is to be an educated man who appreciates literature and has
freedom for his fancy and leisure for his thought.

All this is very good and sound.  But in treating bookbinding as an
imaginative, expressive human art we must confess that we think that Mr.
Sanderson made something of an error.  Bookbinding is essentially
decorative, and good decoration is far more often suggested by material
and mode of work than by any desire on the part of the designer to tell
us of his joy in the world.  Hence it comes that good decoration is
always traditional.  Where it is the expression of the individual it is
usually either false or capricious.  These handicrafts are not primarily
expressive arts; they are impressive arts.  If a man has any message for
the world he will not deliver it in a material that always suggests and
always conditions its own decoration.  The beauty of bookbinding is
abstract decorative beauty.  It is not, in the first instance, a mode of
expression for a man's soul.  Indeed, the danger of all these lofty
claims for handicraft is simply that they show a desire to give crafts
the province and motive of arts such as poetry, painting and sculpture.
Such province and such motive they have not got.  Their aim is different.
Between the arts that aim at annihilating their material and the arts
that aim at glorifying it there is a wide gulf.

However, it was quite right of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson to extol his own art,
and though he seemed often to confuse expressive and impressive modes of
beauty, he always spoke with great sincerity.

Next week Mr. Crane delivers the final lecture of this admirable 'Arts
and Crafts' series and, no doubt, he will have much to say on a subject
to which he has devoted the whole of his fine artistic life.  For
ourselves, we cannot help feeling that in bookbinding art expresses
primarily not the feeling of the worker but simply itself, its own
beauty, its own wonder.




THE CLOSE OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 30, 1888.)

Mr. Walter Crane, the President of the Society of Arts and Crafts, was
greeted last night by such an enormous audience that at one time the
honorary secretary became alarmed for the safety of the cartoons, and
many people were unable to gain admission at all.  However, order was
soon established, and Mr. Cobden-Sanderson stepped up on to the platform
and in a few pleasantly sententious phrases introduced Mr. Crane as one
who had always been 'the advocate of great and unpopular causes,' and the
aim of whose art was 'joy in widest commonalty spread.'  Mr. Crane began
his lecture by pointing out that Art had two fields, aspect and
adaptation, and that it was primarily with the latter that the designer
was concerned, his object being not literal fact but ideal beauty.  With
the unstudied and accidental effects of Nature the designer had nothing
to do.  He sought for principles and proceeded by geometric plan and
abstract line and colour.  Pictorial art is isolated and unrelated, and
the frame is the last relic of the old connection between painting and
architecture.  But the designer does not desire primarily to produce a
picture.  He aims at making a pattern and proceeds by selection; he
rejects the 'hole in the wall' idea, and will have nothing to do with the
'false windows of a picture.'

Three things differentiate designs.  First, the spirit of the artist,
that mode and manner by which Durer is separated from Flaxman, by which
we recognise the soul of a man expressing itself in the form proper to
it.  Next comes the constructive idea, the filling of spaces with lovely
work.  Last is the material which, be it leather or clay, ivory or wood,
often suggests and always controls the pattern.  As for naturalism, we
must remember that we see not with our eyes alone but with our whole
faculties.  Feeling and thought are part of sight.  Mr. Crane then drew
on a blackboard the naturalistic oak-tree of the landscape painter and
the decorative oak-tree of the designer.  He showed that each artist is
looking for different things, and that the designer always makes
appearance subordinate to decorative motive.  He showed also the field
daisy as it is in Nature and the same flower treated for panel
decoration.  The designer systematises and emphasises, chooses and
rejects, and decorative work bears the same relation to naturalistic
presentation that the imaginative language of the poetic drama bears to
the language of real life.  The decorative capabilities of the square and
the circle were then shown on the board, and much was said about
symmetry, alternation and radiation, which last principle Mr. Crane
described as 'the Home Rule of design, the perfection of local
self-government,' and which, he pointed out, was essentially organic,
manifesting itself in the bird's wing as well as in the Tudor vaulting of
Gothic architecture.  Mr. Crane then passed to the human figure, 'that
expressive unit of design,' which contains all the principles of
decoration, and exhibited a design of a nude figure with an axe couched
in an architectural spandrel, a figure which he was careful to explain
was, in spite of the axe, not that of Mr. Gladstone.  The designer then
leaving chiaroscuro, shading and other 'superficial facts of life' to
take care of themselves, and keeping the idea of space limitation always
before him, then proceeds to emphasise the beauty of his material, be it
metal with its 'agreeable bossiness,' as Ruskin calls it, or leaded glass
with its fine dark lines, or mosaic with its jewelled tesserae, or the
loom with its crossed threads, or wood with its pleasant crispness.  Much
bad art comes from one art trying to borrow from another.  We have
sculptors who try to be pictorial, painters who aim at stage effects,
weavers who seek for pictorial motives, carvers who make Life and not Art
their aim, cotton printers 'who tie up bunches of artificial flowers with
streamers of artificial ribbons' and fling them on the unfortunate
textile.

Then came the little bit of Socialism, very sensible and very quietly
put.  'How can we have fine art when the worker is condemned to
monotonous and mechanical labour in the midst of dull or hideous
surroundings, when cities and nature are sacrificed to commercial greed,
when cheapness is the god of Life?' In old days the craftsman was a
designer; he had his 'prentice days of quiet study; and even the painter
began by grinding colours.  Some little old ornament still lingers, here
and there, on the brass rosettes of cart-horses, in the common milk-cans
of Antwerp, in the water-vessels of Italy.  But even this is
disappearing.  'The tourist passes by' and creates a demand that commerce
satisfies in an unsatisfactory manner.  We have not yet arrived at a
healthy state of things.  There is still the Tottenham Court Road and a
threatened revival of Louis Seize furniture, and the 'popular pictorial
print struggles through the meshes of the antimacassar.'  Art depends on
Life.  We cannot get it from machines.  And yet machines are bad only
when they are our masters.  The printing press is a machine that Art
values because it obeys her.  True art must have the vital energy of life
itself, must take its colours from life's good or evil, must follow
angels of light or angels of darkness.  The art of the past is not to be
copied in a servile spirit.  For a new age we require a new form.

Mr. Crane's lecture was most interesting and instructive.  On one point
only we would differ from him.  Like Mr. Morris he quite underrates the
art of Japan, and looks on the Japanese as naturalists and not as
decorative artists.  It is true that they are often pictorial, but by the
exquisite finesse of their touch, the brilliancy and beauty of their
colour, their perfect knowledge of how to make a space decorative without
decorating it (a point on which Mr. Crane said nothing, though it is one
of the most important things in decoration), and by their keen instinct
of where to place a thing, the Japanese are decorative artists of a high
order.  Next year somebody must lecture the Arts and Crafts on Japanese
art.  In the meantime, we congratulate Mr. Crane and Mr. Cobden-Sanderson
on the admirable series of lectures that has been delivered at this
exhibition.  Their influence for good can hardly be over-estimated.  The
exhibition, we are glad to hear, has been a financial success.  It closes
tomorrow, but is to be only the first of many to come.




ENGLISH POETESSES


(Queen, December 8, 1888.)

England has given to the world one great poetess, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning.  By her side Mr. Swinburne would place Miss Christina Rossetti,
whose New Year hymn he describes as so much the noblest of sacred poems
in our language, that there is none which comes near it enough to stand
second.  'It is a hymn,' he tells us, 'touched as with the fire, and
bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of
refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the
serene and sonorous tides of heaven.'  Much as I admire Miss Rossetti's
work, her subtle choice of words, her rich imagery, her artistic naivete,
wherein curious notes of strangeness and simplicity are fantastically
blended together, I cannot but think that Mr. Swinburne has, with noble
and natural loyalty, placed her on too lofty a pedestal.  To me, she is
simply a very delightful artist in poetry.  This is indeed something so
rare that when we meet it we cannot fail to love it, but it is not
everything.  Beyond it and above it are higher and more sunlit heights of
song, a larger vision, and an ampler air, a music at once more passionate
and more profound, a creative energy that is born of the spirit, a winged
rapture that is born of the soul, a force and fervour of mere utterance
that has all the wonder of the prophet, and not a little of the
consecration of the priest.

Mrs. Browning is unapproachable by any woman who has ever touched lyre or
blown through reed since the days of the great AEolian poetess.  But
Sappho, who, to the antique world was a pillar of flame, is to us but a
pillar of shadow.  Of her poems, burnt with other most precious work by
Byzantine Emperor and by Roman Pope, only a few fragments remain.
Possibly they lie mouldering in the scented darkness of an Egyptian tomb,
clasped in the withered hands of some long-dead lover.  Some Greek monk
at Athos may even now be poring over an ancient manuscript, whose crabbed
characters conceal lyric or ode by her whom the Greeks spoke of as 'the
Poetess' just as they termed Homer 'the Poet,' who was to them the tenth
Muse, the flower of the Graces, the child of Eros, and the pride of
Hellas--Sappho, with the sweet voice, the bright, beautiful eyes, the
dark hyacinth-coloured hair.  But, practically, the work of the
marvellous singer of Lesbos is entirely lost to us.

We have a few rose-leaves out of her garden, that is all.  Literature
nowadays survives marble and bronze, but in old days, in spite of the
Roman poet's noble boast, it was not so.  The fragile clay vases of the
Greeks still keep for us pictures of Sappho, delicately painted in black
and red and white; but of her song we have only the echo of an echo.

Of all the women of history, Mrs. Browning is the only one that we could
name in any possible or remote conjunction with Sappho.

Sappho was undoubtedly a far more flawless and perfect artist.  She
stirred the whole antique world more than Mrs. Browning ever stirred our
modern age.  Never had Love such a singer.  Even in the few lines that
remain to us the passion seems to scorch and burn.  But, as unjust Time,
who has crowned her with the barren laurels of fame, has twined with them
the dull poppies of oblivion, let us turn from the mere memory of a
poetess to one whose song still remains to us as an imperishable glory to
our literature; to her who heard the cry of the children from dark mine
and crowded factory, and made England weep over its little ones; who, in
the feigned sonnets from the Portuguese, sang of the spiritual mystery of
Love, and of the intellectual gifts that Love brings to the soul; who had
faith in all that is worthy, and enthusiasm for all that is great, and
pity for all that suffers; who wrote the Vision of Poets and Casa Guidi
Windows and Aurora Leigh.

As one, to whom I owe my love of poetry no less than my love of country,
has said of her:

         Still on our ears
   The clear 'Excelsior' from a woman's lip
   Rings out across the Apennines, although
   The woman's brow lies pale and cold in death
   With all the mighty marble dead in Florence.
   For while great songs can stir the hearts of men,
   Spreading their full vibrations through the world
   In ever-widening circles till they reach
   The Throne of God, and song becomes a prayer,
   And prayer brings down the liberating strength
   That kindles nations to heroic deeds,
   She lives--the great-souled poetess who saw
   From Casa Guidi windows Freedom dawn
   On Italy, and gave the glory back
   In sunrise hymns to all Humanity!

She lives indeed, and not alone in the heart of Shakespeare's England,
but in the heart of Dante's Italy also.  To Greek literature she owed her
scholarly culture, but modern Italy created her human passion for
Liberty.  When she crossed the Alps she became filled with a new ardour,
and from that fine, eloquent mouth, that we can still see in her
portraits, broke forth such a noble and majestic outburst of lyrical song
as had not been heard from woman's lips for more than two thousand years.
It is pleasant to think that an English poetess was to a certain extent a
real factor in bringing about that unity of Italy that was Dante's dream,
and if Florence drove her great singer into exile, she at least welcomed
within her walls the later singer that England had sent to her.

If one were asked the chief qualities of Mrs. Browning's work, one would
say, as Mr. Swinburne said of Byron's, its sincerity and its strength.
Faults it, of course, possesses.  'She would rhyme moon to table,' used
to be said of her in jest; and certainly no more monstrous rhymes are to
be found in all literature than some of those we come across in Mrs.
Browning's poems.  But her ruggedness was never the result of
carelessness.  It was deliberate, as her letters to Mr. Horne show very
clearly.  She refused to sandpaper her muse.  She disliked facile
smoothness and artificial polish.  In her very rejection of art she was
an artist.  She intended to produce a certain effect by certain means,
and she succeeded; and her indifference to complete assonance in rhyme
often gives a splendid richness to her verse, and brings into it a
pleasurable element of surprise.

In philosophy she was a Platonist, in politics an Opportunist.  She
attached herself to no particular party.  She loved the people when they
were king-like, and kings when they showed themselves to be men.  Of the
real value and motive of poetry she had a most exalted idea.  'Poetry,'
she says, in the preface of one of her volumes, 'has been as serious a
thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing.  There
has been no playing at skittles for me in either.  I never mistook
pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the
poet.  I have done my work so far, not as mere hand and head work apart
from the personal being, but as the completest expression of that being
to which I could attain.'

It certainly is her completest expression, and through it she realises
her fullest perfection.  'The poet,' she says elsewhere, 'is at once
richer and poorer than he used to be; he wears better broadcloth, but
speaks no more oracles.'  These words give us the keynote to her view of
the poet's mission.  He was to utter Divine oracles, to be at once
inspired prophet and holy priest; and as such we may, I think, without
exaggeration, conceive her.  She was a Sibyl delivering a message to the
world, sometimes through stammering lips, and once at least with blinded
eyes, yet always with the true fire and fervour of lofty and unshaken
faith, always with the great raptures of a spiritual nature, the high
ardours of an impassioned soul.  As we read her best poems we feel that,
though Apollo's shrine be empty and the bronze tripod overthrown, and the
vale of Delphi desolate, still the Pythia is not dead.  In our own age
she has sung for us, and this land gave her new birth.  Indeed, Mrs.
Browning is the wisest of the Sibyls, wiser even than that mighty figure
whom Michael Angelo has painted on the roof of the Sistine Chapel at
Rome, poring over the scroll of mystery, and trying to decipher the
secrets of Fate; for she realised that, while knowledge is power,
suffering is part of knowledge.

To her influence, almost as much as to the higher education of women, I
would be inclined to attribute the really remarkable awakening of woman's
song that characterises the latter half of our century in England.  No
country has ever had so many poetesses at once.  Indeed, when one
remembers that the Greeks had only nine muses, one is sometimes apt to
fancy that we have too many.  And yet the work done by women in the
sphere of poetry is really of a very high standard of excellence.  In
England we have always been prone to underrate the value of tradition in
literature.  In our eagerness to find a new voice and a fresh mode of
music, we have forgotten how beautiful Echo may be.  We look first for
individuality and personality, and these are, indeed, the chief
characteristics of the masterpieces of our literature, either in prose or
verse; but deliberate culture and a study of the best models, if united
to an artistic temperament and a nature susceptible of exquisite
impressions, may produce much that is admirable, much that is worthy of
praise.  It would be quite impossible to give a complete catalogue of all
the women who since Mrs. Browning's day have tried lute and lyre.  Mrs.
Pfeiffer, Mrs. Hamilton King, Mrs. Augusta Webster, Graham Tomson, Miss
Mary Robinson, Jean Ingelow, Miss May Kendall, Miss Nesbit, Miss May
Probyn, Mrs. Craik, Mrs. Meynell, Miss Chapman, and many others have done
really good work in poetry, either in the grave Dorian mode of thoughtful
and intellectual verse, or in the light and graceful forms of old French
song, or in the romantic manner of antique ballad, or in that 'moment's
monument,' as Rossetti called it, the intense and concentrated sonnet.
Occasionally one is tempted to wish that the quick, artistic faculty that
women undoubtedly possess developed itself somewhat more in prose and
somewhat less in verse.  Poetry is for our highest moods, when we wish to
be with the gods, and in our poetry nothing but the very best should
satisfy us; but prose is for our daily bread, and the lack of good prose
is one of the chief blots on our culture.  French prose, even in the
hands of the most ordinary writers, is always readable, but English prose
is detestable.  We have a few, a very few, masters, such as they are.  We
have Carlyle, who should not be imitated; and Mr. Pater, who, through the
subtle perfection of his form, is inimitable absolutely; and Mr. Froude,
who is useful; and Matthew Arnold, who is a model; and Mr. George
Meredith, who is a warning; and Mr. Lang, who is the divine amateur; and
Mr. Stevenson, who is the humane artist; and Mr. Ruskin, whose rhythm and
colour and fine rhetoric and marvellous music of words are entirely
unattainable.  But the general prose that one reads in magazines and in
newspapers is terribly dull and cumbrous, heavy in movement and uncouth
or exaggerated in expression.  Possibly some day our women of letters
will apply themselves more definitely to prose.

Their light touch, and exquisite ear, and delicate sense of balance and
proportion would be of no small service to us.  I can fancy women
bringing a new manner into our literature.

However, we have to deal here with women as poetesses, and it is
interesting to note that, though Mrs. Browning's influence undoubtedly
contributed very largely to the development of this new song-movement, if
I may so term it, still there seems to have been never a time during the
last three hundred years when the women of this kingdom did not
cultivate, if not the art, at least the habit, of writing poetry.

Who the first English poetess was I cannot say.  I believe it was the
Abbess Juliana Berners, who lived in the fifteenth century; but I have no
doubt that Mr. Freeman would be able at a moment's notice to produce some
wonderful Saxon or Norman poetess, whose works cannot be read without a
glossary, and even with its aid are completely unintelligible.  For my
own part, I am content with the Abbess Juliana, who wrote
enthusiastically about hawking; and after her I would mention Anne Askew,
who in prison and on the eve of her fiery martyrdom wrote a ballad that
has, at any rate, a pathetic and historical interest.  Queen Elizabeth's
'most sweet and sententious ditty' on Mary Stuart is highly praised by
Puttenham, a contemporary critic, as an example of 'Exargasia, or the
Gorgeous in Literature,' which somehow seems a very suitable epithet for
such a great Queen's poems.  The term she applies to the unfortunate
Queen of Scots, 'the daughter of debate,' has, of course, long since
passed into literature.  The Countess of Pembroke, Sir Philip Sidney's
sister, was much admired as a poetess in her day.

In 1613 the 'learned, virtuous, and truly noble ladie,' Elizabeth Carew,
published a Tragedie of Marian, the Faire Queene of Jewry, and a few
years later the 'noble ladie Diana Primrose' wrote A Chain of Pearl,
which is a panegyric on the 'peerless graces' of Gloriana.  Mary Morpeth,
the friend and admirer of Drummond of Hawthornden; Lady Mary Wroth, to
whom Ben Jonson dedicated The Alchemist; and the Princess Elizabeth, the
sister of Charles I., should also be mentioned.

After the Restoration women applied themselves with still greater ardour
to the study of literature and the practice of poetry.  Margaret, Duchess
of Newcastle, was a true woman of letters, and some of her verses are
extremely pretty and graceful.  Mrs. Aphra Behn was the first
Englishwoman who adopted literature as a regular profession.  Mrs.
Katharine Philips, according to Mr. Gosse, invented sentimentality.  As
she was praised by Dryden, and mourned by Cowley, let us hope she may be
forgiven.  Keats came across her poems at Oxford when he was writing
Endymion, and found in one of them 'a most delicate fancy of the Fletcher
kind'; but I fear nobody reads the Matchless Orinda now.  Of Lady
Winchelsea's Nocturnal Reverie Wordsworth said that, with the exception
of Pope's Windsor Forest, it was the only poem of the period intervening
between Paradise Lost and Thomson's Seasons that contained a single new
image of external nature.  Lady Rachel Russell, who may be said to have
inaugurated the letter-writing literature of England; Eliza Haywood, who
is immortalised by the badness of her work, and has a niche in The
Dunciad; and the Marchioness of Wharton, whose poems Waller said he
admired, are very remarkable types, the finest of them being, of course,
the first named, who was a woman of heroic mould and of a most noble
dignity of nature.

Indeed, though the English poetesses up to the time of Mrs. Browning
cannot be said to have produced any work of absolute genius, they are
certainly interesting figures, fascinating subjects for study.  Amongst
them we find Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who had all the caprice of
Cleopatra, and whose letters are delightful reading; Mrs. Centlivre, who
wrote one brilliant comedy; Lady Anne Barnard, whose Auld Robin Gray was
described by Sir Walter Scott as 'worth all the dialogues Corydon and
Phillis have together spoken from the days of Theocritus downwards,' and
is certainly a very beautiful and touching poem; Esther Vanhomrigh and
Hester Johnson, the Vanessa and the Stella of Dean Swift's life; Mrs.
Thrale, the friend of the great lexicographer; the worthy Mrs. Barbauld;
the excellent Mrs. Hannah More; the industrious Joanna Baillie; the
admirable Mrs. Chapone, whose Ode to Solitude always fills me with the
wildest passion for society, and who will at least be remembered as the
patroness of the establishment at which Becky Sharp was educated; Miss
Anna Seward, who was called 'The Swan of Lichfield'; poor L. E. L., whom
Disraeli described in one of his clever letters to his sister as 'the
personification of Brompton--pink satin dress, white satin shoes, red
cheeks, snub nose, and her hair a la Sappho'; Mrs. Ratcliffe, who
introduced the romantic novel, and has consequently much to answer for;
the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, of whom Gibbon said that she was
'made for something better than a Duchess'; the two wonderful sisters,
Lady Dufferin and Mrs. Norton; Mrs. Tighe, whose Psyche Keats read with
pleasure; Constantia Grierson, a marvellous blue-stocking in her time;
Mrs. Hemans; pretty, charming 'Perdita,' who flirted alternately with
poetry and the Prince Regent, played divinely in the Winter's Tale, was
brutally attacked by Gifford, and has left us a pathetic little poem on
the Snowdrop; and Emily Bronte, whose poems are instinct with tragic
power, and seem often on the verge of being great.

Old fashions in literature are not so pleasant as old fashions in dress.
I like the costume of the age of powder better than the poetry of the age
of Pope.  But if one adopts the historical standpoint--and this is,
indeed, the only standpoint from which we can ever form a fair estimate
of work that is not absolutely of the highest order--we cannot fail to
see that many of the English poetesses who preceded Mrs. Browning were
women of no ordinary talent, and that if the majority of them looked upon
poetry simply as a department of belles lettres, so in most cases did
their contemporaries.  Since Mrs. Browning's day our woods have become
full of singing birds, and if I venture to ask them to apply themselves
more to prose and less to song, it is not that I like poetical prose, but
that I love the prose of poets.




LONDON MODELS


(English Illustrated Magazine, January 1889.)

Professional models are a purely modern invention.  To the Greeks, for
instance, they were quite unknown.  Mr. Mahaffy, it is true, tells us
that Pericles used to present peacocks to the great ladies of Athenian
society in order to induce them to sit to his friend Phidias, and we know
that Polygnotus introduced into his picture of the Trojan women the face
of Elpinice, the celebrated sister of the great Conservative leader of
the day, but these grandes dames clearly do not come under our category.
As for the old masters, they undoubtedly made constant studies from their
pupils and apprentices, and even their religious pictures are full of the
portraits of their friends and relations, but they do not seem to have
had the inestimable advantage of the existence of a class of people whose
sole profession is to pose.  In fact the model, in our sense of the word,
is the direct creation of Academic Schools.

Every country now has its own models, except America.  In New York, and
even in Boston, a good model is so great a rarity that most of the
artists are reduced to painting Niagara and millionaires.  In Europe,
however, it is different.  Here we have plenty of models, and of every
nationality.  The Italian models are the best.  The natural grace of
their attitudes, as well as the wonderful picturesqueness of their
colouring, makes them facile--often too facile--subjects for the
painter's brush.  The French models, though not so beautiful as the
Italian, possess a quickness of intellectual sympathy, a capacity, in
fact, of understanding the artist, which is quite remarkable.  They have
also a great command over the varieties of facial expression, are
peculiarly dramatic, and can chatter the argot of the atelier as cleverly
as the critic of the Gil Bias.  The English models form a class entirely
by themselves.  They are not so picturesque as the Italian, nor so clever
as the French, and they have absolutely no tradition, so to speak, of
their order.  Now and then some old veteran knocks at a studio door, and
proposes to sit as Ajax defying the lightning, or as King Lear upon the
blasted heath.  One of them some time ago called on a popular painter
who, happening at the moment to require his services, engaged him, and
told him to begin by kneeling down in the attitude of prayer.  'Shall I
be Biblical or Shakespearean, sir?' asked the veteran.
'Well--Shakespearean,' answered the artist, wondering by what subtle
nuance of expression the model would convey the difference.  'All right,
sir,' said the professor of posing, and he solemnly knelt down and began
to wink with his left eye!  This class, however, is dying out.  As a rule
the model, nowadays, is a pretty girl, from about twelve to twenty-five
years of age, who knows nothing about art, cares less, and is merely
anxious to earn seven or eight shillings a day without much trouble.
English models rarely look at a picture, and never venture on any
aesthetic theories.  In fact, they realise very completely Mr. Whistler's
idea of the function of an art critic, for they pass no criticisms at
all.  They accept all schools of art with the grand catholicity of the
auctioneer, and sit to a fantastic young impressionist as readily as to a
learned and laborious academician.  They are neither for the Whistlerites
nor against them; the quarrel between the school of facts and the school
of effects touches them not; idealistic and naturalistic are words that
convey no meaning to their ears; they merely desire that the studio shall
be warm, and the lunch hot, for all charming artists give their models
lunch.

As to what they are asked to do they are equally indifferent.  On Monday
they will don the rags of a beggar-girl for Mr. Pumper, whose pathetic
pictures of modern life draw such tears from the public, and on Tuesday
they will pose in a peplum for Mr. Phoebus, who thinks that all really
artistic subjects are necessarily B.C.  They career gaily through all
centuries and through all costumes, and, like actors, are interesting
only when they are not themselves.  They are extremely good-natured, and
very accommodating.  'What do you sit for?' said a young artist to a
model who had sent him in her card (all models, by the way, have cards
and a small black bag).  'Oh, for anything you like, sir,' said the girl,
'landscape if necessary!'

Intellectually, it must be acknowledged, they are Philistines, but
physically they are perfect--at least some are.  Though none of them can
talk Greek, many can look Greek, which to a nineteenth-century painter is
naturally of great importance.  If they are allowed, they chatter a great
deal, but they never say anything.  Their observations are the only
banalites heard in Bohemia.  However, though they cannot appreciate the
artist as artist, they are quite ready to appreciate the artist as a man.
They are very sensitive to kindness, respect and generosity.  A beautiful
model who had sat for two years to one of our most distinguished English
painters, got engaged to a street vendor of penny ices.  On her marriage
the painter sent her a pretty wedding present, and received in return a
nice letter of thanks with the following remarkable postscript: 'Never
eat the green ices!'

When they are tired a wise artist gives them a rest.  Then they sit in a
chair and read penny dreadfuls, till they are roused from the tragedy of
literature to take their place again in the tragedy of art.  A few of
them smoke cigarettes.  This, however, is regarded by the other models as
showing a want of seriousness, and is not generally approved of.  They
are engaged by the day and by the half-day.  The tariff is a shilling an
hour, to which great artists usually add an omnibus fare.  The two best
things about them are their extraordinary prettiness, and their extreme
respectability.  As a class they are very well behaved, particularly
those who sit for the figure, a fact which is curious or natural
according to the view one takes of human nature.  They usually marry
well, and sometimes they marry the artist.  For an artist to marry his
model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no
sittings, and the other gets no dinners.

On the whole the English female models are very naive, very natural, and
very good-humoured.  The virtues which the artist values most in them are
prettiness and punctuality.  Every sensible model consequently keeps a
diary of her engagements, and dresses neatly.  The bad season is, of
course, the summer, when the artists are out of town.  However, of late
years some artists have engaged their models to follow them, and the wife
of one of our most charming painters has often had three or four models
under her charge in the country, so that the work of her husband and his
friends should not be interrupted.  In France the models migrate en masse
to the little seaport villages or forest hamlets where the painters
congregate.  The English models, however, wait patiently in London, as a
rule, till the artists come back.  Nearly all of them live with their
parents, and help to support the house.  They have every qualification
for being immortalised in art except that of beautiful hands.  The hands
of the English model are nearly always coarse and red.

As for the male models, there is the veteran whom we have mentioned
above.  He has all the traditions of the grand style, and is rapidly
disappearing with the school he represents.  An old man who talks about
Fuseli is, of course, unendurable, and, besides, patriarchs have ceased
to be fashionable subjects.  Then there is the true Academy model.  He is
usually a man of thirty, rarely good-looking, but a perfect miracle of
muscles.  In fact he is the apotheosis of anatomy, and is so conscious of
his own splendour that he tells you of his tibia and his thorax, as if no
one else had anything of the kind.  Then come the Oriental models.  The
supply of these is limited, but there are always about a dozen in London.
They are very much sought after as they can remain immobile for hours,
and generally possess lovely costumes.  However, they have a very poor
opinion of English art, which they regard as something between a vulgar
personality and a commonplace photograph.  Next we have the Italian youth
who has come over specially to be a model, or takes to it when his organ
is out of repair.  He is often quite charming with his large melancholy
eyes, his crisp hair, and his slim brown figure.  It is true he eats
garlic, but then he can stand like a faun and couch like a leopard, so he
is forgiven.  He is always full of pretty compliments, and has been known
to have kind words of encouragement for even our greatest artists.  As
for the English lad of the same age, he never sits at all.  Apparently he
does not regard the career of a model as a serious profession.  In any
case he is rarely, if ever, to be got hold of.  English boys, too, are
difficult to find.  Sometimes an ex-model who has a son will curl his
hair, and wash his face, and bring him the round of the studios, all soap
and shininess.  The young school don't like him, but the older school do,
and when he appears on the walls of the Royal Academy he is called The
Infant Samuel.  Occasionally also an artist catches a couple of gamins in
the gutter and asks them to come to his studio.  The first time they
always appear, but after that they don't keep their appointments.  They
dislike sitting still, and have a strong and perhaps natural objection to
looking pathetic.  Besides, they are always under the impression that the
artist is laughing at them.  It is a sad fact, but there is no doubt that
the poor are completely unconscious of their own picturesqueness.  Those
of them who can be induced to sit do so with the idea that the artist is
merely a benevolent philanthropist who has chosen an eccentric method of
distributing alms to the undeserving.  Perhaps the School Board will
teach the London gamin his own artistic value, and then they will be
better models than they are now.  One remarkable privilege belongs to the
Academy model, that of extorting a sovereign from any newly elected
Associate or R.A.  They wait at Burlington House till the announcement is
made, and then race to the hapless artist's house.  The one who arrives
first receives the money.  They have of late been much troubled at the
long distances they have had to run, and they look with disfavour on the
election of artists who live at Hampstead or at Bedford Park, for it is
considered a point of honour not to employ the underground railway,
omnibuses, or any artificial means of locomotion.  The race is to the
swift.

Besides the professional posers of the studio there are posers of the
Row, the posers at afternoon teas, the posers in politics and the circus
posers.  All four classes are delightful, but only the last class is ever
really decorative.  Acrobats and gymnasts can give the young painter
infinite suggestions, for they bring into their art an element of
swiftness of motion and of constant change that the studio model
necessary lacks.  What is interesting in these 'slaves of the ring' is
that with them Beauty is

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