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completions, they are always widely sug-|" Evening Hymn" is liable to a rather gestive and infinitely instructive. Mr. strong objection on this score, fine and Mason was emphatically the artist's noble as is its general sentiment. The painter, the most discerning of whom are always ready to excuse inadequacies of manipulatory power, when the primary and most essential element of all is manifest.

Mr. Mason was a lover of twilight, of the gentle hour which is so touching to all poetic minds, when a dreamy glimmer pervades the still and solemn landscape and stars become visible. So much has he loved these tender moments, that it would almost seem as if he had lived in them in a kind of delicate sympathy. What adds, perhaps, to the impressiveness of his scenes is the reminiscence that they seem to bear of a more southern climate than our own, where the hues of the sky are a tone deeper than ours and the solemn greys of the landscape a thought more rich, as he had seen them in the soft lines, broken with mournful tints of crumbling masonry on the sad Campagna of Rome. Even his figures partake of the same spiritual seriousness that his scenes inspire; the bustle of the day and noise of the busy world are hushed and tranquillized in the calm peace of an idyllic repose.

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singing-girls are far too artificially posed and modelled. The picture is so evidently balanced by the two figures separated from the main group on each side as to materially interfere with its simplicity and naturalness. Another objec tion may be made to the dog in the "Girls Dancing by the Sea," as it regards earnestly the bag suspended from the bough, which, however natural an incident here interferes somewhat with the main calm interest of the picture, and divides the attention with perhaps one of the sweetest bits of English landscape ever put upon canvas.

As Mr. Mason was a deep lover, so was he a close student, of Nature, even a copyist, from a right point of view. We have understood that he was indefatigable in his outdoor studies; and yet these are efforts after the sentiment of nature rather than the portrayal of her facts. He aimed at reproducing her appearances as they affect the poetic mind, rather than her formal representation, which, indeed, he always avoided. Careful and capable draughtsman though he was, there is not a bit of texture, and very little of absolute form pronounced definitely as such, to be found in any of his pictures. They are pictures of aspect or mental impression rather than the actual substance of what he saw, and hold their place more in the mind than in the eye.

His subjects are not very various; but one never grows tired of them. It is now a shepherd seated at the root of an old tree piping to some maidens, whose quiet movements are in perfect harmony with the scene around them, bringing back the old Arcadia and witnessing that the bucolic It is difficult to play the critic on picsweetnesses of Theocritus and Virgil still tures like these; yet to define his true survive among us, and that the genius of place in the history of Art every part of an ancient rural life is not yet destroyed; Mr. Mason's artistic character must be now it may be a sweet-faced country-girl regarded. He is not always uniformly going home with her gleanings, while the happy. There is a hardness and coldness sloping upland, crowned with yellow in some of his works compared with othsheaves, takes the last glow of day now ers. : There is occasionally, too, a tendenit is a group of merry children dragging cy to confusion, and even in his finished along a refractory calf or donkey, or driv- works a want of articulation and definiing a flock of hissing geese; and now tion which interferes a little with their a weary labourer, who returns homewards higher qualities. This arises perhaps with his team leisurely through the twi- from the desire to place before the speclight, or a group of mowers from the corn- tator the painter's full impression encumfield, with long scythes, against the light bered with as little material as possible: of a golden harvest-moon. Here we have and, besides this, there is often in imagalmost all Mr. Mason's material ele- inative minds, feeling acutely in certain ments; and yet they are quite sufficient directions, a want of expressional power, for the expression of a deep and genuine a lack of the consummating faculty; which poetic feeling. With a few exceptional is an excusable defect to those gifted in cases we find that the painter is forgotten the same direction, but an obvious fault in his work as we enter into his magic to those of a less sentimental and more world and make it our own. One or two objectively constructed nature and charof these exceptions we will take the op-acter. It is interesting to see how Mr. portunity of mentioning. We think his Mason felt his way through his sketches

constitutes a very wide section of modern painting, so wide as to include immeasurably the larger proportion of it. We will take, however, the names of two or three as the representatives of its most distinctive features; say Mr. Frith, Mr. Brett, and Mr. Birket Foster.

to the peculiar qualities he desired. Some are wholly of a tentative nature, the merest blurs of colour, a species of artistic short-hand, yet intelligible to the initiated as containing a compendium or synopsis of the completed picture. Pursuing the function of censors, we may notice also that Mr. Mason's skies are occa- With Mr. Frith it is very hard to deal, sionally somewhat muddy in quality, and as he holds a place so remote from the are only partially cleared at some expense genuine function of right Art, and so to the landscape. It may be said, with closely bordering on that of the mere every respect for what he has left us, that illustrator, that it is difficult to say if his his works, on the whole, show rather what works come under the category of Art at the mind yearns to accomplish than what all. There is, it is true, a degree of interthe hand is able to perform; the refined est in looking at his pictures of the "Seaand elegant instinct of the able and imag- side," the " Railway Station," and the inative amateur, rather than the command-" Derby Day," with their various realistic ing utterances of the representative of a groups and circumstances, but it is the school of a broadly diffused and healthily interest of an illustration or pictorial repdeveloping artistic sentiment. resentation without any shade of the artistic sentiment or any foundation of true Art whatever. Indeed, we suppose that Mr. Frith does not intend to make any broader appeal than that of being the mere transcriber or photographer of the promiscuous crowds of men and women which he may see anywhere around him. His pictures have no moral and no meaning in them. A comparison of his works with those of Hogarth, who was quite as accurate a painter of the men and women of his time, will show exactly what we mean. With the latter we have everything set before us subordinate to an artistic purpose, the purpose of the whole picture. Setting aside the qualities of painting which they exhibit (which are now too much overlooked), they possess the highest characteristics of the social epic. We have a hundred lessons taught us, a hundred suggestions made to us, by the subtle art of the painter. These are all put before the mind in so delicate and insensible a manner that we think the painter's generalizations our own, and the compendium of human nature with which he supplies us, its follies, its vanities, and sins, presented to us with the consummate art of one of the most philosophic students of life and character, seem like the results of our own observations and reflection. Again, if we compare Mr. Frith's pictures with those of Wilkie, how lamentable is There is still another group of works, the difference! In place of a centralized in all respects antithetical to the one we motive we get confusion and perplexity; have just examined, and which, in spite in place of the nice perception of the vaof its general popularity, must be called rious shades of character given with a the debased school, since the elements sweet artistic refinement, we have the of the artistic principle are utterly ig- coarseness of the excursion-train and the nored, misunderstood or otherwise alto- breeding of the tavern-bar; instead of gether perverted in its hard literalisms the subtle poetry which Art ought to be and unimaginative transcriptions. This able to find in all grades of life and to inLIVING AGE. VOL. II. 98

It is hard to say whether the influence of a painter so delicately constituted is likely to be advantageous or otherwise: indeed, this wholly depends on the character and idiosyncrasy of his pupils or followers. The action of special genius or power on a robust mind is to cause it to develop its own capacities and gifts without attempting any close or external imitation of what it sees and admires, excepting incidentally as one of the elements of its own education. This sound method teaches the mind to measure and assert its individual capabilities and powers, and does not lead it to ignore them or to submit to any foreign influence, however great or noble that may be. In such an instance as the present no material imitation would be of the least service to appropriate or "convey" the tender influence diffused from these contemplative and subjective works, which suggest qualities so rare and impalpable that the artist himself was not always able to grasp or retain them. Such paintings can only be regarded as intimations or indications in the abstract of the rich results of thoughtful and conscientious labour, and as a testimony that good Art has not yet lost all her resources, but that there are new aspects and ideals still for disinterested and devoted, persevering and imaginative, workmen.

fuse into all her works, we get an uncon- he has ornamented our drawing-room genial prose that reflects its most discordant elements and introduces its most disagreeable associations.

If we look in Mr. Frith's work for the high qualities which distinguish the works of the painters we have just referred to, we do not find any of them or any trace of them, but a jumble of heterogeneous figures and circumstances, unselected, unassorted, and absolutely commonplace. There is no indication of a governing or ruling principle or purpose; and after the first gaze they fatigue the mind and pall upon the eye from their wearisome vacuity, their slender trivialities, and their utter denial of every kind of inward appeal which constitutes the soul of Art and makes the better part of every noble picture.

Neither is Mr. Frith's workmanship happy. He ignores atmosphere in the glare of a vulgar realism, and outrages colour in the absence of any prevailing sentiment of eclectic distribution: he sets tone aside as useless in the distraction of a hundred different keys. His faces have a hardness of quality with nothing beneath them; while the dresses and costumes of his undignified men and women, borrow no character from those by whom they are worn, and only remind one of the "set up" of a Bond Street tailor, or, conversely, of the rags of a

theatrical wardrobe.

tables, necessity compels us to protest against the field of Art, or rather the mode of expressing himself, which he has chosen; particularly in his watercolour drawings, whose exhaustive manipulation and conventional textures prevent the mind at once from going a step beyond them. If Mr. Foster merely aims at reaching the admiration of unreffective observers or non-observers of those to whom "a primrose by a river's brim " is but a primrose and is "nothing more," bringing no glow into the soul, and having no associative connection with the world that lies within - he may succeed; but to those who see beyond the substance, to whom substance is but the symbol of the interior essence, who are ever ready to seize an indication, whose souls only need the significant letter set before them in order to read its deeper meaning, all Mr. Foster's laborious "finish" will but obscure the inward vision and exclude those exquisite glimpses and "warm excursions of the mind" which are the most indispensable complement and the noblest addition to the true artist's labour, without whose help, indeed, his toil will be in vain.

It is useless to pursue our subject as a special criticism any farther. We have already passed under review some of the most important features of our present Mr. Brett has imported the same vicious school of painting, and have said quite mode of treatment into landscape Art. enough to make our stand-point clearly His metallic seas, woolly clouds, grass appreciable. As to some of the older without softness, and trees without any elements which have overlived their time touch of the verdurous plasticity of na- and are now dying out, they may be left ture, only oppress the mind with a sense in peace. They will do no more harm, as of bondage which shuts out every con- they are doing no good; and we may genial and sympathetic influence that we safely leave them to the end they merit. are accustomed to receive from Nature. We do not, however, pretend to have exIn Mr. Brett's pictures Nature has ceased hausted our subject. There are many to express herself, her generous inspira- notable names and works which, perhaps, tions are destroyed, her fine ministra- might be advantageously criticized in one tions overlooked or disregarded. The way or another; but as our object here freezing wand of the enchanter has is rather to elucidate a thesis — to make passed over her palpitating vitalities, and clear the actual and relative position of they are reduced to the condition of con- the English school of painting-than to gealed and inexpressive petrifactions. His unsuggestive workmanship rather hinders and obscures our own interpretation of Nature than assists us to any fresh significance and character that he may have found in it.

Our ungracious task only gives us one example more of this mistaken school of painters. Grateful as we must feel to Mr. Birket Foster for the number of pretty landscape vignettes with which

give a comprehensive or detailed account of it in all its various manifestations, which within our limits would be impos sible, we must leave them unnoticed. The works, for example, of Sir Edwin Landseer, whose intelligent interpretation of animal life has made for him a field entirely his own, since none of his numerous imitators have been able to follow him with any considerable degree of success, might perhaps have found a

place in our inquiries; but as they would not be specially or additionally illustrative of the large question we have in view, and as our position is a defined one, it is not necessary to discuss them.

they would be intolerable; but in their present position they are not inharmonious with what surrounds them; for they are monumental in subject, as they are in some respects as paintings. At least we may say this of them, that no Our inquiry, however, into the present one else could have given them to us in condition of the English school of paint- their great grasp and high-spirited and ing would hardly be complete unless we vigorous portrayal of facts. They are were to make some observations on the very superior to the excessively overpaintings which ought to best interpret praised Munich frescoes. Their chief its highest skill and embody its loftiest interest, however, is not an artistic but powers. We allude to those works in merely a human one. One cannot help the Houses of Parliament, upon which so being impressed with the scenic probamuch time, money, and deliberation have bility of many of the most touching epibeen spent, with most unsatisfactory re- sodes, as the dying men, who with a last sults. Without entering into the question effort, raise their swords in the presence of how they have been done, and what it of the Duke; the stern peacefulness on might have been better or best to do, we the countenance of the dead trumpeter, will at once advance to the examination whose head is pillowed on the broken of their qualities as the representatives wheel of a piece of artillery; the gentle of the national Art-standard. expression on the face of the youthful

buried in the carnage, whose last thought has been of home and the dear ones left behind. There is something, too, of genuine artistic power expressed in the face of the Duke of Wellington, whose stern and grimy features are filled with a mingled expression of fatigue, triumph, and suppressed excitement, the central figure in this scene of confusion, bloodshed, and death.

It

On our entrance into the Royal Gal-officer, "young gallant Howard," borne lery we are confronted with the two vast by two pitying soldiers; the monk who works of Maclise, the "Meeting of Wel- holds the cruifix before the closed eyes lington and Blücher after the Battle of of the apparently-departed Hanoverian; Waterloo" and the "Death of Nelson." or the grey, middle-aged warriors, halfThey are painted, as is well known, in simple water-colour, with the superimposition of water-glass or silicate of potassium, which, in another form, is the basis of the manufactured glass of common use. But it is in vain we try to imitate the subtle chemistry of nature. However accurately balanced our compounds may be, the diamond is unattainable. In this case, owing either to disintegration or precipitation, or to the The picture of the "Death of Nelson " numerous external influences at work upon is not nearly so notable as the other. it, the indestructible medium has already has less incident and variety, and the given way, and some portion of the earli- story is less powerfully told. The face est painted of these pictures is partially of the mortally-wounded hero is overdestroyed. To speak of the pictures themselves: the labour and devotion bestowed upon them inspire respect. They are not by any means artists' pictures, yet they have large claims in their own way and from their own centre. If they were upon canvas they would be amenable to another kind of criticism in regard to quality of workmanship; their hard lines, which never lose themselves, their sturdy Of Mr. Herbert's large, and in some and unwavering realism, their rigid and respects more pretentious picture of uncompromising treatment, their unre- "Moses Descending from the Mount" lieved inflexibility and metallic colouring, in the Peers' Robing Room, we cannot would at once exclude them from a cate- say so much: for though executed from gory of the greatest works; but, on the a presumably higher point of view than other hand, their dramatic multitudi- the pictures just described, and though nousness and energy, their robust pow-more agreeable in some qualities of maer, their conscientious thoroughness from nipulation, it appears to have been done their own point of view, demand a con- rather with the cautious calculation of the siderate notice. In some situations academic than with the enthusiasm of a

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spread with a ghastly spasm, whose painful contortions are horrible to look upon. One would much rather have seen him portrayed with the soft expression associated with the last "Kiss me, Hardy," on his lips, even if it had been at the sacrifice of the literal truthfulness of the circumstance considered at the precise moment chosen by the painter.

master great with his idea. A measure | possible is nothing but a probability) than of realism may not only be admitted, but this lack-life system of composition and is perhaps desirable, in the representa- arrangement, which comes from. the head tion of an historical event of comparative- and hand, but never from the heart; ly recent occurrence; but in a didactic which kindles no answering enthusiasm work which appeals, or ought to ap- within us and awakens no thought bepeal, purely and entirely to the moral na- yond that, at most, of the skill of the artture, in which the fact does not depend ist and the possibilities of his material. in the least degree upon any special set Infinitely worse than the picture itself is of circumstances for its impressiveness, the fatal tendency and principle involved and is, indeed, already removed out of in it. Mr. Herbert has thought of nothtime and place by the infinitely more im- ing but a cold realization of the circumportant contingency of its having been stances of his subject, and never for a raised to the quality of a religious ab- moment of giving us its inner meaning straction, addressing itself wholly to the and central power. It is a mere statemind, and not at all to the eye, in its es- ment of facts with which we are all fasential object and design-a purely miliar and to which the pictorial reprerealistic treatment is not only misplaced, sentation adds nothing. but is likely to act as a barrier to the In other respects also we think this special influence of the occasion. Mr. work a mistake. Mr. Herbert has laid Herbert's picture may rather be said to his ground in white, consequently it be a huge study made in the alphabet of stands in far too high a key to be impresArt than the embodiment of a masterly sive from any serious or picturesque conception in the mind of the painter. point of view. The effect is that of a Its claims are those of an illustration solemn piece of music played in a key more than of an artistic representation. eight or ten tones higher than that for The posed models which personate the which it has been composed, or upon a figures have evidently been drawn with light and airy instrument instead of a the closest fidelity to the life, the draper- grave and sober one. All solemnity of ies have all been disposed with the nicest effect is destroyed, and all rightness and care, the attitudes have been adjusted fitness of decoration ignored. The glarwith the strictest regard to propriety, the ing sky, the garish background, the inharvarious expressions have been inserted monious and commonplace figures fill the into the faces in the most correct manner, room with an insistatory impertinence and yet the result is wholly unsatisfacto- which quite outsteps the end and purpose ry. One can never believe that the tall of such a work. Perhaps it would be figure with the two stone slabs in his profitless to point Mr. Herbert to the hands is really like the majestic Moses works of those who have always and evwho ruled the Israelites, whose "anger erywhere been considered the first mashad waxed hot" when he had broken the ters in this kind of decoration, to refer first tables and ground the golden calf to him to the walls and ceiling of the Sistine powder-whom Michel Angelo has giv- Chapel, the Stanze of the Vatican or the en to us in marble with so much dignity halls of the Ducal Palace, where the noand power. Even were the dramatic in- ble breadth, grand proportions, and subterest preserved in the figures, it would dued appeal of these great masters reach have been quite ruined by the back- and impress the mind without wearying ground. Mr. Herbert, with so noble and the eye. They do not thrust themselves lofty a story to tell, should not distract unduly on our notice, or offend the taste the thoughts of the spectators from its with an unseasonable persistence that intrinsic impressiveness to the details of will not be forgotten nor for a single ina background worked up with photo- stant overlooked. In this respect a lesgraphic care. That he will not allow the son might have been taken from Mr. eye to pause or rest for a moment in any Watts's less obtrusive, but at the same unmanipulated place, shows that he is time quite as powerful, fresco at Lincoln's not deeply moved by the grandeur of his Inn. idea, and that he chooses to display the Of the works of Mr. Cope in the Peers' shell and outer covering of his subject Corridor, nothing more favourable can be rather than to develop and surround us reported. Under every disadvantage of with its inner sentiment. Better a thou- situation and ill-lighting, they are still sand mistakes in the technicalities of Art more unfortunate in their inartistic maor the probabilities of circumstance (for,nipulation, unimaginative treatment, and indeed, the best and most exact imitation utter want of the least perception of the

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