daughters three That sing about the golden tree, but rich and ripe and full of flesh, such as Giorgione saw; such as still rain influence from behind dark altars or in Florentine galleries, the work of Titian and Tintoret and Raphael.

in their different ways this quality; a distinction of sentiment the characteristic of which is refinement and an undefined longing. For a special instance I cannot take a better than Botticelli, who is so completely their favourite painter that I may be pardoned for saying a word about him. There is a half-expressed longing But I am rhapsodizing: and I am and fineness of sentiment in Botticelli's called back to a difficulty by two great painting which is unlike anything else names, perhaps the greatest; Leonardo except the poetry of which Dante's Vita da Vinci and Michael Angelo, both great Nuova is the highest example. Giotto, idealists, and great masters of sentiment; Fra Angelico, almost any one else you and that generally a sentiment of melanplease, are straightforward and matter-of- choly. Nothing in Mr. Pater's "Sirenfact in comparison with him. Perhaps songs" is more tuneful than his descripone may say that there is a similar differ- tion of Leonardo's "Belle Joconde." He ence between Raphael and Andrea del understands Leonardo as far as he can Sarto, or between Titian and Bellini. be understood at this distance of time, This refined sentiment, not unknown to and from the fragments of his work Perugino and his pupils, but expressed which exist. But Leonardo is a giant by them in a more happy, sunshiny tem- among giants. His little finger is thicker per, is the quality which our modern than Botticelli's loins; what may be afschool most admires. Mr. Pater, in his fectation in the one is idealism in the book on the Renaissance, says it is other. I would rather restore to art rebellion against dogma and the worship Leonardo's statue of Pope Julius than all of the body that inspires the keen-souled the lost works of the great masters. That Cinquecentists. No! I say; go to Ti- Leonardo in his long and busy life protian and Veronese if you wish to see the duced so little is a reproach to the acregorgeous happy pagan life and the glory painters of Venice, though such great of the worship of the body. In Botti- names are among them. There is no celli we have not the splendid health of affectation in Leonardo as there is perthe Roman and Venetian painters; but a haps in Luini. Leonardo is gloomy, melpale skin, soft blue lines in the throat, ancholy, and tenderly sentimental, but long slender limbs, languid eyes, pouting he is too great to be affected, though inlipsa sad allegory of life, a melancholy tense study sometimes makes his work Virgin; not Raphael's happy Mother; artificial. So, too, Michael Angelo - a not Bellini's holy Annunziata; not Ti- smaller artist working in his spirit might tian's triumphant Assunta. The two become affected; but the sense of power sides of Botticelli's character are typified in him transcends all affectation, as it by two of his pictures, "Mars and does in Shakespeare. Let our moderns Venus," at Berlin; and the "Assump-get the power of Leonardo and Michael tion of the Virgin,” which I saw at Bur-Angelo, or even of Botticelli, and we will lington House last year. The one shows not quarrel with their mannerisms. his tender longing after the Greek life; Meanwhile, let them learn to be simple. the other, his tender Piagnone piety. "Simple," I hear some one say, "why And in both there is something morbid. simplicity is the one thing we love." Not It is not the art which springs from hap-so-this is not a genuine simplicity; it piness and health; it loves decay and is the simplicity of fastidiousness. Simthe sense of the nearness of death. In plicity is the heritage of health, not the Botticelli's pictures this is so constantly acquisition of a taste which dislikes vulpresent that it becomes an affectation. "Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile”. and so Mr. Rossetti (of whom I speak in all reverence as an idealist and as a painter) paints throats which are all but goitres, and impossible rosebud lips; and Mr. Burne Jones lengthens out the limbs of his doleful virgins, and wraps them round with clinging garments of russet hue. Oh, gardens of the Hesperides! not such as these were the

garity. You cannot become simple by pruning and paring, by turning away from this and that, by calling the midday sunshine a glare, and finding fault with grass and flowers for being too bright in colour. Be healthy first of all, whether your powers are small or great. Study nature in her healthy forms, not in her decay. You cannot build a school on the foundations of tender regret and choice sentiment. A living school grows

settle beforehand how its heart shall beat, or count its pulses by the watch. Refinement and sensibility are graces, not virtues, and they may be cultivated till they become sickly. They are essential to the poetic or shaping spirit, but they are not its only essentials; and one of the most important of all is health.

because it lives, and does not choose and blue gown hanging up, a girl driving a calf, a horseman astray on a moor. His highest flight of fancy is the lovely dance of girls by the seaside, or the return of the mowers under the moon. He was the Theocritus of English painting; but with such power and such fineness he might have risen above the idyl. What I complain of is that, with higher pretensions than those of other painters, this school stops short of completeness for very fineness and fastidiousness: they have not faith enough to risk a failure by trying what may be too hard for them.

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Let me take (without offence, I hope) three modern instances. First, Mr. Morris's decorative work, which interprets and is interpreted by his poetry for of his painting I cannot speak, not having had enough opportunity of seeing it But I cannot leave these artists with(why won't these artists exhibit? what out paying the tribute of admiration for harm would it do them or their paintings their distinctive excellencies. They see, to be looked at by vulgar people? and it is true, only the grave and pensive vulgar people might learn something side of nature; but that aspect which from them, as I hope they learn from the they represent is perfectly represented pictures in the National Gallery). Mr. and in genuine sympathy with its beanty. Morris, then, like the others of his school, I suppose the same is true of Corot and picks like a chiffonnier here and there the other grey French painters whom whatever is tender and sentimental. He they all admire as suggesting a dreamy began with mediæval asceticism now wistfulness, and not obtruding any pehe has gone on to a strange Greek Goth-dantic or scientific knowledge; but I ic Eastern gorgeousness, of which the cannot forgive these men for banishing first rule is that it should not be com- the sun from the sky and making nature monplace. But excellent as are the de- mourn in sober colours. Nature has her tails, it is all repetition or echo; only bright and gaudy side as well as her there is something of his own in the mists and moonshine, and art has as treatment, and so far he is in harmony much to do with thankfulness as with rewith the old Renaissance. These old gret - nay, much more. But now masters accepted the classical detail, seem to hear them calling to their fellows and to some extent the classical rules. (and the voice is the voice of Mr. Burne But with what a strong grasp did they Jones and the lyre is twanged by the lay hold on them, and make them their skilled fingers and tuned by the delicate own! To return to our lackadaisical ear of Mr. Swinburne), "Give us fruits, artists. The same refining sensibility is but let them be bruised and overripe. shown in their treatment of nature. They Bind garlands for us, but of faded roses. do not work in the spirit of Turner or Sing us songs, but with the lesser third Gainsborough, or even Constable, whom the French have taught them to admire. I do not know where you will find more perfect refinement than in the works of Mr. F. Walker and Mr. Mason, whose loss to art all its lovers must deplore. But are their subjects quite worthy of them? Mr. Walker paints a team of oxen on a Somersetshire hillside, a child and a lamb under an apple-tree, a border of delicately painted flowers, as light and suggestive and perfect as Schumann's "Kinderscenen," or Blake's "Songs of Innocence." Mr. Mason's Arcadia, where is it? not this side of Parthenope. With what exquisite care and labour he worked may be learnt from his repeated studies of the same subject under different skies and in different moods. But the subjects are disappointing—a drying-yard with a

we will have no light but sunset, no hope but of the grave, no love but of that which is gone as we grasp it, no faith but in a frail and brittle beauty."

It seems we are in the midst of a renaissance. Who shall read us the signs of the times? Why did we not know of this great new birth? why do we still feel half inclined to jest about it? Its professors are in earnest, or mean to be; they speak in esoteric language with all the certainty of a school, and carry out principles unflinchingly. Full of sadness at the smokiness and grime, material and spiritual, of their age, they love to remember the past ages, and — simple souls! they turn away their eyes lest they behold vulgarity, and let the restful influence of the past flow upon them. To see nothing but with cleansed eyes; to

this is how they mean to conduct their renaissance.

choose out what is best and imitate it; | failure by attempting a higher flight. Sir G. G. Scott's idea of taking a fresh departure from Gothic of the thirteenth century is a good and true one, if only it could have come naturally and not by thinking; and if, like Imlac, he and his followers have not flown far, they share with that philosopher the credit of having at least tried to move. What they (like Imlac) want is the power to move their learned wings, and power is not born of learning; though learning is not to be despised, and is of course an essential of renaissance.

Mr. Pater's book on the Renaissance may, I suppose, be taken as an exposition of the principles of the school of art to which he belongs. He speaks, at any rate, as with authority, and his book is didactic as well as historical. But to my mind his view of the Italian Renaissance, though full of insight, and seizing very truly several aspects of that period, mistakes its central principle. Mr. Pater would have us believe that the artists of the fifteenth century were melancholy I sympathize indeed with the weariness sentimentalists and dreamers of sad which comes with the thought of this dreams, as sick of the middle ages as a renaissance or Gothic revival, as it used converted Gothicist, and with no sure to be called. The first revival began hope of anything; only determined to with the Romantic school, Fouqué and rebel against dominant stupidity and Scott and the Eglinton tournament and vulgarity. I believe them, on the con- sham castles, and the Gothic of Blore tray, to have been young and hopeful and Wilkins; then came Pugin and Rusreformers, glorying in their youth, and kin, who had the root of the matter in joyfully accepting the guidance of the them: but the one "could only be exnewly-found models of beauty. The pressed in cathedrals ;" and the other is languid or pedantic archeologist of to- still our teacher, but who shall read him day cannot conceive the joy which was aright? Full of the letter of Ruskin, felt in Rome as one by one the forgotten but with too little of his spirit, came the works of great writers came out from pre-Raphaelites and other makers of ugly their monkish graveclothes, and the things (the Uglicists, may we call them ?), heaped-up soil yielded its treasures, and setting up the symbols of their faith in Lysippus and Praxiteles became a reality patterns of striped brick and stone, partifrom a name. There never was a time coloured pictures, and crooked furniture when buoyant hope had more the ascen- fit neither to look at nor to use. Now dant. The spirit of the age had in it we have, on the one hand, our sentimenmore of Lorenzo the Magnificent than of tal school and a revival of eighteenthLeonardo da Vinci; more of Rabelais century friezes and cornices, mixed with than of Erasmus. It is better symbol-sham mediævalism and sham paganism; ized by the joyful certainty of Raphael and, on the other, Ritualism that than by Michael Angelo's doubting mel- strange unintelligible jumble of modern ancholy. coxcombry and ancient religion misunderstood and travestied. This is what our renaissance has brought us, instead of the glories (blasphemed by Mr. Ruskin) of the fifteenth century. For Hatfield and Hardwicke we have the Houses of Parliament and the Albert Memorial. I think we need not be proud of our nineteenth-century renaissance until it becomes more what do they call it? — naif. I believe it is a German word.

There is a true and a false renaissance; just as every language has a true and a false growth, a natural and a learned period. Each seeks for the spirit of the antique; but the one lives, and the other studies. The one thankfully makes use of former models and methods as a means of new and original creation; the other lays up its talent in a napkin, and sadly despairs, and aims at nothing but imitation. One dares whilst the other doubts. What a splendid growth is Cinquecento architecture; and how unlike Cinquecento architecture is that of the school whose highest aim is to copy accurately a chimney-piece, or adapt a house from one of the date of Queen Anne. By all means copy Queen Anne houses if you can do no better, but don't imagine that it is high art to do so; still less accuse of vulgarity those who risk

Our sentimental school abjure this bastard renaissance, but they are of it notwithstanding, for they have for ideas of their own an echo of past ideas. Learning, as I said, is an essential of a renaissance; but as the note of a true renaissance is faith and of a false renaissance criticism—or, shall I say, hope of the one, and regret of the other? there is more life in honest effort which looks forward at the risk of vulgarity,

than in sentiment which analyzes the present and tries to reproduce the past. Like all modern artists, they do not realize that what made the art of the great centuries was its spirit not its form, the growth of new thought which clothed itself in the forms of the past. Till that thought arises again I am content to believe that the houses and churches built by the one school are better than those built by the other, and heartily to admire for all its strangeness the wall-papers and chintzes and tiles designed by Messrs. Morris and their fellows; but I cannot consent to take them as the only artists who are to save us from the Philistines, or their principles as having the hope of the future in them.

generations which thought finely; and from those pick out all that is most quaint and furthest from commonplace. Lovers of art must have a taste for olives and caviare. And in looking at nature never forget that the smell of death is in all her sweetness, and that the grey decay of her softer moods more truly expresses her to the feeling mind than the garish gold of summer.

I think that I have said enough to indicate the tendency of this school. These artists have taught me so much, and I owe them so much thanks for what they have taught me, that I am almost converted to believe that they have the key of the future; and certainly no other school can do more than fumble at the door. But they want faith and hopeand so with all their sense of beauty and all their technical skill, they fail in power of creation. Hopeless is thankless; and thankless art has no future. They remain fruitless because faithless; Atyspriests of beauty, impotent to add to the life of art: because they believe in death rather than in life. And when I feel this, their pretensions to infallibility rather gall me. The last time I saw my Oxford friend was in Bond Street - he had been looking at exhibitions black and white, and blue and green, and was full of the "sweetness" of his own friends and the worthlessness of everything else. I listened for a while to his jargoning, and then left him and turned into the National Gallery; and there sat down before a Titian and a Turner, and clean forgot all about him and his friends and their principles.

After all, I have not made out yet what these principles are. But as far as I can understand this school, it is based on fineness of sentiment rather than on knowledge, and the keynote of this sentiment is a longing "regret for the absents "as Theocritus says, whether it be regret for a past life, or yearning for a distant ideal, or the less spiritual pains which consume Sicilian and Florentine lovers. This longing takes nowadays the form of regret, forced upon it by the vulgarity of the nineteenth century for, seeing how vulgar the present is, it has no hope in the future. Regretfulness and disgust of modern commonplace has a double result. In the first place it leads to the state of mind which says, "The world is full of trouble and there is no certainty of anything else to come. It is better to enjoy what we have, or at least to give up preaching and divorce morality from art; to live the most perfect life in the moment, which is all that we can grasp;" then comes in the sensuousness and body-worship which to some extent is characteristic of the school; something of the spirit of the later Anthology; a Sehnsucht to which I HAVE Some doubts about the psychoall objects are lawful; such a spirit as logical bearings of fear. In old English, inspires Mr. Pater's book and is put perplexity" was often used as its equivinto more articulate form by Mr. Swin-alent, and it seems a pity that this usage burne; the spirit which says alternately, has been dropped. We want a word for "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow fear that would express a kind of mental we die," and "Let us fall in love with syllabub. Dr. Johnson, following Locke, death, for to-morrow we die." In the defines fear as "a painful apprehension second place it leads to the rejection of future danger." Now I confess that I of whole periods and phases of art do not like the word "apprehension,” and nature the nineteenth century to which means a laying hold, because I begin with- and then all prosperous cannot help concluding that fear is altomaterial periods and countries. Noth-gether a letting go. If logicians would ing can be given to art by ancient Ro- let me, I would define fear per metaphoman, by Flemish, barbarian, American ram, and call it "resentment at being life. Study, they say, those nations and kicked out of one's rut." The most philo

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From Temple Bar.

A NIGHT TERROR IN AFRICA.

sophical remark of Falstaff's was that he tale intelligibly, I may be allowed to give was a "coward upon instinct." When some short description of the place. all our instincts, which are but sublimated The city is named from one Pieter Mahabits, are turned topsy-turvy, then we ritz, whose sacred bard I have never met know what fear is. Though your partic- with, and the memory of whose deeds, ular rut must lead to the cannon's mouth, therefore - - of the pounds of Boer toyou are cheerful and impavid in it as a bacco he smoked in a green-stone pipe, man just and firm of purpose should be; of the hollands he drank, of the wide but when you are kicked into a neigh- trousers he wore, and of the Dutch oaths bouring rut which may lead to the Hes- he swore — must forever, as far as I am perides, the blood freezes in your veins. concerned, be 'whelmed in long night. Luckily a perfect terror, an utter annihi- Maritzburg (as the name is commonly lation of all ruts whatsoever, an overhead abbreviated) is the seat of government plunge into the unknown, comes but and the headquarters of the garrison. once or twice in any man's life. The All the other towns in Natal Durban occasion may be trivial. A belated jack-especially which consider themselves ass, the love-plaint of a feline Sappho, not to be sneezed at, are sneezed at by a brawl of rodents behind the wainscot, Maritzburg. We are slightly aristocratic a pendant night-shirt whose fluttering in Maritzburg; we have been known to tails are visited by playful moonbeamsany of these things is sufficient. Or the occasion may be great; a convulsion of nature, or the approach of death in a strange garb. It matters not. The supreme moment of terror, when the scalp lifts like the lining of a hat, when a man is clothed from head to foot in a raiment of "goose-skin," when the knees refuse to bend, and are yet too weak to keep straight, and when the heart feels like the kernel of a rotten nut-that moment is never to be forgotten. Then the man feels the natural and the supernatural, the real and the ideal, the subject and the object, the ego and the non ego, the present and the remote, all jumbled together in a mad dance through his bewildered consciousness. Then Pope's line is reversed and sense leans for aid on metaphysic. Then the man discerns how infinitely little he is when reduced within his own circumference; how dependent he has been on a tiny world, outside which he is "quenched in a boggy Syrtis." Then he discovers how necessary to his happiness are the ordinary conditions of thought, and that, if he only knew it, the most awful, the most intensely horrible thing the imagination can conceive of, is a syllogism with an alien conclusion. Then, for an instant, he learns what it is to be dead.

The qualifications of a perfect terror are three. It must be unexpected; it must be absolutely incomprehensible; and it must culminate like a nightmare. Once I had a terror which so perfectly fulfilled these requirements that no man may hope to have a better.

This thing happened to me in the city of Pieter-Maritzburg, in the colony of Natal; and in order that I may tell my

wear gloves; we have caught a little of the hoity-toitiness that lingers round the purlieus of bureaucracy. In this respect Maritzburg is not remarkable; but in another respect, namely, brilliancy of colouring, Maritzburg is one of the most remarkable towns I ever saw. It lies on a shoulder of table-land, surrounded on three sides by an amphitheatre of hills, which to a European eye are singularly brown and barren of aspect. In the midst of this great ugly basin Maritzburg absolutely blossoms. All its roofs are of red tile, all its hedges are rose-hedges, and nearly all its trees are peach-trees; and thus, when peaches and roses are in bloom there is red and pink enough to make the town look like a gigantic nosegay. Another peculiarity of the town is very pleasant; one, two, or even three streams of bright, clear, swiftly-flowing water run down each street. A large head of water comes downwards on the town from the top of the shoulder on which it is built, and this water-supply is subdivided as it enters the town into a multitude of small rivulets or sluyts, as the Dutch call them. Thus, a street in Maritzburg is formed in the following way: each house stands well back from the road in its erf or plot of ground, then comes a thick and lofty hedge of roses, then a sluyt, then a raised footpath or causeway, then another sluyt, then the roadway. Now these sluyts, however much they may add to the cleanliness of the place, are exceedingly awkward to the pedestrian. Every sluyt is about a yard below the footpath, and being bridged over by innumerable slabs of stone and logs of wood, forms in fact a series of traps and pitfalls. If I have drawn my picture rightly, the reader will