Yet, with all his sense of the necessity of authority, he was an ardent lover of liberty.

primitive liberty and the deadening artifi- | he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it ciality of Academic rule. Whether our literature and art still pre-work is to be produced.' will never be difficult to guess what kind of serve their ancient constitutional balance; or whether the balance has been unduly depressed in favour of one or other of the two great principles by whose counterpoise it exists; and if so, which that principle is; -these are the questions which we now propose to discuss. And as we have treated the subject by implication, as far as it relates to poetry, in a recent number of this Review,'* we shall not re-open that question, but shall proceed to examine the spirit manifested in our contempory painting, drama, and fiction, as compared with the English tradition of these arts, with a view to discovering what light is thereby thrown upon the present political temper of the nation.

As to painting, we want no better exponent of the English conception of that art than the greatest painter that England has produced, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Nothing can be more constitutional than Sir Joshua's instructions to the students at the Royal Academy. The prevailing note in his admirable Discourses' is an indignant repudiation of the doctrine that genius implies absolute power. The highest genius, he says over and over again, proceeds in obedience to the highest law, and it is only because the majority of mankind are insensible of the limits of law, that they impute the actions of genius to capricious inspiration. The summit of excellence seems to be an assemblage of contrary qualities, but mixed in such proportions that no one part is found to counteract the other.' The nearest approach to this excellence is found in the works of the greatest masters, and Sir Joshua therefore recommends his audience to render to these a rational obedience, and not even to be afraid of being called their

imitators.

contem

'When,' says he, we have had continually before us the great works of art to impregnate our minds with kindred ideas, we are then, and not till then, fit to produce something of the same species. We behold all about us with the eyes of those penetrating observers, whose works we plate and our minds, accustomed to think the thoughts of the noblest and brightest intellects, are prepared for the discovery and selection of all that is great and noble in nature. The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own will be soon reduced from mere barrenness to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what

'A mere copier of nature' (we cannot in these days quote Sir Joshua too often) 'can never produce anything great; can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator. The wish of the genuine painter must be more extensive : instead of endeavouring to amuse mankind with the minute neatness of his imitations, he must endeavour to improve them by the grandeur of his ideas; instead of seeking praise by deceiving the superficial sense of the spectator, he must strive for fame by captivating the imagination."

his hearers the necessity of aiming at the Hence he always kept before the mind of 'great style.'

'This great ideal perfection and beauty are not to be sought in the heavens but upon the earth. They are about us and upon every But the power of discovering side of us. what is deformed in nature, or, in other words, what is particular and uncommon, can be acquired only by experience; and the whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind.'

How far, then, has the tradition established by the first President of the Royal Academy been preserved by the modern representatives of his art? But before we attempt to answer this question, we ought to make certain deductions from his theory that have been rendered necessary by time and circumstance. Painting, he thought, should speak an universal language, and, in so far as it expresses itself by means of form and colour, it is plain that this art has a more extended sphere than poetry, the limits of which are defined by the diversities of human speech. But this common language could only remain intelligible so long as it expressed common thought and sentiment, a truth which Sir Joshua very clearly understood.

'Strictly speaking,' says he, 'no subject. can be of universal, hardly can it be of general, concern; but there are events and characters so popularly known in those countries where our art is in request, that they may be considered as sufficiently general for all our purposes. Such are the great events of Greek and Roman fable 'and history, which early education and the usual course of reading have made familiar and interesting to all Europe, without being degraded by the vulgarism of ordinary life in any country. Such, too, are the capital subjects of Scripture his

tory, which, besides their general notoriety, | tween all the component parts, that they become venerable by their connection with may appear to hang well together, as if the our religion.' whole proceeded from one. mind.'

Hogarth's style is full of the sæva indignatio' of the satirist; every incident and detail conspires to point the general moral; the action of the drama grows naturally out of its original source; the very lines of the various countenances seem to indicate the painter's abhorrence of the vices which he makes them reflect. Hogarth would have done justice to Mr. Frith's subject. There is scarcely a corner of English society that has not been contaminated by the universal passion for gambling. What scope for invention, what revelations of manners, are posible to a painter in an age which has seen the fortunes of historic houses wasted on a race-course, and has listened to the tales of public credulity related by a Benson! But Mr. Frith is no satirist. The moral of his picture was indeed strong enough for a transpontine theatre, but the story in which the moral was conveyed was an ingenuous fable. If we are to believe him, it is customary for commonplace young gentlemen, who play cards at the University, eventually to shoot themselves in a garret from extremity of want; and this, even though they may have been originally possessed of large estates, and presumably of good connections. The public which besieged Mr. Frith's picture must have been perfectly well aware that this is not the road to ruin in our days; they must have perceived, if they had reflected, that the various compartments of the picture had no other connection with the apparent subject, or with each other, than a common frame; but so enchanted were they with the undeniable skill of the painter in reproducing commonplace objects with which they were familiar, that they remained insensible to his deflections from truth and nature.

gives life and balance to the whole composition. The action of the picture, in the one case, starts from the sweep of the fiddler's bow, and the spectator seems to hear the sound, and to understand the various passions which this excites in each particular member of the audience. So, in Blind Man's Buff,' the action is grouped round the cautious, groping figure of the blind man, and nothing can be more beautiful than the balance which the painter has obtained out of the varied attitudes of coquetry and mock-terror which the situation has produced in the rustic groups. Herkomer, on the other hand, had apparently chosen his subject, not so much because he was humanly interested in it, as because it enabled him to make an exhibition of his rare mastery over light and colour.

Mr.

Composition, imagination, and invention, at all events, it may be said, were manifest in the work of Mr. Long; and in the graceful attitudes of the figures, the expressive humour of the faces, and the life-like clinging of the cat-model, the idea of action was more visible in the Making of the Gods,' than in any other picture in the Academy. We had but one ground of quarrel with Mr. Long. Why were not all this grace, humour, and vitality, devoted to the representation of some living interest, instead of being employed in realizing the idea of an obsolete superstition? So, too, a touch of regret mingled with our amusement at the admirably comic Convocation' of Mr. Marks, to think that such dramatic power should not find expression in the representation of human action.

Putting aside, however, a few exceptional pictures of a similar character to those we Mr. Herkomer, another representative have just mentioned, it may be said that painter, is not, like Mr. Frith, a stranger to the prevailing note in the work of the Acadpoetry. In his Evening in the Westmin-emy was Domesticity. Few of the exhibister Workhouse,' it appeared to us there were many fine strokes of imagination, and those who studied that picture will not casily forget the poetical manner in which light and shadow were made to accentuate the characteristics of old age, in the figures obscurely seen cowering in the firelight, or advancing feebly with a staff from the far-end of the room. But how came a painter of such capacity to try and interest the spectator in his group of old women, in the forepart of a long bare room, drinking tea, reading, and cutting out linen? It is not that common subjects are incapable of beautiful treatment; Wilkie's' Blind Fiddler' and 'Blind Man's Buff' are standing instances to the contrary; but in these pictures the painter has commenced his work of a central idea, which

tors let their imagination travel far from home; the majority remained content with the careful imitation of familiar objects. Very different in character is that curious phase of modern art which represents the revolt of a certain section of society from the modes of thought prevalent among the middle classes. Those, who last summer visited the Grosvenor Gallery, found themselves in a region from which the vulgar and the familiar were fastidiously banished. If they had been offended in the Academy with the somewhat slavish imitation of ticulars, they might here solace themselves with pure abstraction; if, in Burlington House, they had breathed with some difficulty the conventional atmosphere of modern society, here at least they might retire

par

into the middle ages; they might listen to the pastoral pipe of the Renaissance, roam among rocks and mountains that appeared to have strayed out of the pictures of Benozzo Gozzoli, or ransack their memories before the faces of knights and angels, whose acquaintance they fancied they had made long ago on some canvas of Giorgione or Sandro Botticelli. Surely here, if anywhere, was to be found that artistic generalization, that imaginative energy, which Sir Joshua Reynolds declared to be the characteristic of the 'great style.' Alas, no!

The representative painters of the Grosvenor Gallery had even less conception of action than the painters of the Academy. For if the latter restricted themselves to imitation, at least they imitated actual life, but the former merely imitated certain peculiarities in the style of the old masters. Mr. Burne Jones is the chief master of this school. His picture entitled' Laus Veneris' represented a number of ladies sitting in the foreground gorgeously attired, and in the background some knights in white armour, looking in at a window as they rode by. The women in the chief group were doing -nothing. They had even stopped singing the praises of Venus, which it appears was their sole resource for passing the time. They had all one type of face, one morbid kind of complexion, one monotonous expression, which culminated in the figure of the Queen, who, with her seat thrust back from the rest, her crown on her knees, and her feet far extended in front of her, seemed to have resigned herself to the dominion of Ennui. A similar somnolent languor pervaded Mr. Jones's Chant d'Amour; indeed so potent was its influence that a Cupid, who had been apparently borrowed from Botticelli for the purpose of blowing the bellows of an organ-which for some reason the female musician has chosen to play on the top of a wall-had actually fallen asleep at his work. In like manner the abstractions of Day and Night and the Four Seasons indicated not the action of light and darkness, nor the variety of generation and production, but the perpetual presence in the painter's mind of thoughts on revolution and decay.

The tendencies which we have noticed in our painting are equally observable in our drama. Had Mr. Gladstone lived in the reign of Elizabeth, he would no doubt have swelled the outcry of the critics against Marlowe's Tamburlane the Great.' And if he had wanted a text from which to inveigh against the materialistic spirit which inspired the voyages of Raleigh, he might have found it in the dying speech of the

great Scythian shepherd, where he bids his
son follow his conquests on the map :-
Look here, my boys; see, what a world of
ground

Lies westward from the midst of Cancer's line
Unto the rising of this earthly globe,
Whereas the sun declining from our sight
Begins the day with our antipodes !
And shall I die with this unconquered?
Lo, here, my sons, are all the golden mines,
Inestimable drugs, and precious stones,
More worth than Asia and the world beside;
And from the antarctic pole eastward behold
As much more land which never was descried.
Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright
As all the lamps that beautify the sky-
And shall I die and this unconquered?
Here, lovely boys; what death forbids my life,
That let your lives command in spite of death ?'

But Mr. Gladstone may take comfort if he turns to the Victorian stage, and reflects that the public, of whose aggressive spirit he is so much afraid, have for thirteen hundred successive nights been following with rapt attention the fortunes of two young men, whom true love has induced to throw up all the advantages of wealth, and to work for their living in a garret. From Tamburlane' to 'Our Boys' is a long journey, but the artistic stages on the way are as clearly marked as those of our political constitution. The spirit of the drama under Elizabeth was at once monarchical and national, for the cause of the throne was completely identified with that of the people. During the civil wars dramatic representation was naturally suspended. After the Restoration it took from the Court a tone that was entirely opposed to the national character. When taste had been purified and regulated by the great critics of the early part of the eighteenth century, the stage reflected for a long period the more temperate manners of the aristocracy. The Reform Bill again initiated a fresh epoch; the aristocracy after that date gradually ceased to visit the theatre; and the course of the drama has, up to the present day, been almost completely controlled by the taste of the middle classes.

At each of these stages we may observe a restriction of the national idea of action. Founded as the Elizabethan drama was on purely national principles, it was natural that its poetical tradition should have been lost during the period when the nation was divided against itself. The spirit of the old tragedians never really reappears after the Restoration. But comedy survived, and as every comedy turns more or less upon a love-plot-flourished in a society which still retained traces of chivalrous gallantry and an aristocratic freedom of manners. ners. Again, however, the genius of the