CHAPTER XI

_THE SACRED AND THE COMIC SIDES OF ART_

PART I.--THE SACRED SIDE OF ART

[Illustration: Y]OU have doubtless all seen a photograph of that fine

head of our Saviour by Gabriel Max, illustrative of the legend of St

Veronica. The story tells us that Veronica wiped the face of Christ with

her napkin as He passed along cross-laden, blood-stained, mud-stained,

and sweating to Calvary, and in token of her kindness the Lord left the

impression of that world-wasted face upon the napkin.

It is a beautiful legend, and Gabriel Max has illustrated it as, without

exception, no man before him ever did.

The dimness and uncertainty have aided the painter's conception. It is

not so much a face as the shadow of a face which is presented to us--the

shadow of a lamb-like face, full of infinite meekness and patience,

dirty and wounded, with masses of hair draggled and stuck with the blood

which has trickled down the brow and cheeks to that indefinite beard.

This, to me, constitutes the great charm of this masterly work; that the

painter has left to the spectator the task of embodying this divine

shade.

The trick about the eyes is the weak and common portion of an otherwise

matchless work of subtlety. It may please the people, and make a

multitude of inartistic minds marvel at the cleverness of the illusion,

but it is only a small trick at the best, and unworthy the mind which

could conceive and execute all the rest.

Sacred art, from the specimens I have seen, has not yet fulfilled its

aim or intention. Those Madonnas of Raphael are only pretty women

nursing their babies; that is, if you can tear down the mystery and

veneration which time has thrown about those dead masters and darkened

masterpieces; so perhaps it is as well not to dwell at length upon olden

art, which represented sacred art, but to come to my present purpose,

which is art sacred, or the sacredness of art as a life calling.

I have often wondered whether there are many young men or women showing

pictures in exhibitions who think seriously upon the calling they are

devoting themselves to; do they think upon the duties before them, and

the obligations they are binding themselves to fulfil?

To be a painter means a great deal more than to have learned the

blending of a few harmonies, the proportions of a model, or some years

of outline practice; more than sitting down before an object and

reproducing it faithfully, as far as the outward eye sees. It means the

subduing of self, and the taking up of a daily cross; the following of

an ideal in spite of all obstacles, jeers, laughter, or pity.

It does not mean to be able to sell well to the public or to dealers, as

any clever mechanic can learn to paint to sell: you have only to acquire

the fashion and the trickery of the trade, which, with a little

practice, will make you popular.

Sacred art means patience--not that patience which is composed of

pitiful detail or painstaking, but the patience which will make you

follow out your ideal, regardless of all consequences.

This is where young artists err in taking to the brush. A little

dexterity is acquired, and they imagine that they are done, and able to

criticise all and sundry.

I generally know a novice from an earnest seeker after the truth. The

beginner laughs outright at first sight, and the learned student looks

and probes; the intention being gravely weighed in the balance with the

execution, and the worker getting all the benefit of the doubt.

When an artist first begins to tread his journey (after he has left

school, I mean), it has mostly a very pleasant and sunny appearance. Of

course he can draw and copy casts nearly as well as the master, a great

deal more neatly than most artists who are half-way down the road; all

the maxims are fresh in his memory, with the colour blendings, which he

has learnt by rule.

Hope sits lightly in his heart, because he has one or two commissions,

or perceives the distant promise of a few. So the morning sky above him

arches without a cloud, and the early rays are falling slantingly upon

countless diamonds at his feet.

There is a valley in front of him (but that is far off), a place of

darkness, where high rocks are cleft to meet again overhead so that the

sunlight cannot pierce through the gloom; a place of skulls--the

Golgotha of the painter--where the armour of conceit is broken into

pieces and left amongst the wreckage with which the place is strewn.

Those who come out of this valley of humiliation live on for ever

afterwards grave men, who look more after their own imperfections than

the faults of their neighbours.

Countless hordes rush into the darkness and are never seen again; the

bones of some whiten there, pits on the roadside swallow up others,

while others again get into false tracks and are never able to retrace

their steps.

A number shirk it and go by this side backwards, as happy in their

ignorance and foolish laughter as when they began so hopefully.

And the world is so blind that it consents to honour and pay those

shirkers, oftentimes better than it does those grave survivors of the

black valley.

When the artist first begins his pursuit he ought to begin with the high

sense that his profession is a calling, and that he is the eye-preacher

of beauty as the pastor is the ear-preacher of religion; he must go out

with the intention always to do his very best in his own natural way,

for no other man's habit of walking will do for him.

To be a painter is a great pleasure and a great pain; pleasure in the

summer, when the sun is ripening the pale golden ears of corn, and the

painter walks out amongst the lights and shadows, the fresh air and the

singing of birds, and, fixing upon something beautiful, sits down to

listen to the divine concert and sketch it all in--the _music_ and the

magic changes of Mother Earth; pleasure when he gets up in the

night-time, thralled with his great idea, yet unborn, and labours to

bring it out--those gracious hours of ecstasy when the charcoal smudges

over the paper, and the brain is reeling with the intoxication of the

Creator.

_IMAGINATION_

Gift of God to erring mortal, promise of a life divine,

When the creature is admitted to that awful inner shrine;

There is naught of earth remaining, kings and princes hedged about

With divinity the circle, leaving lesser beings out.

Gifted with the Maker's magic, out of nothing they create

Crowded earths which rise before them, void, until they animate.

They are passed in scorn or pity, beggars in their fellows' eyes.

What are rags and empty purses when to heights like these they rise?

For alas! with this gift comes too often _tactlessness_, a glorious

capacity to build castles in the air, with a most deplorable incapacity

of being able to reduce those splendid edifices to any marketable value.

When the artist has laboured at his idea until it takes a form, not

quite the matchless creation he dreamt, but as nearly approaching to it

as his skill or paints can come, a glow of unearthly passion and

wonderment at his own work comes over him; he has caught something more

than he dreamt about, even although it be not quite so fair; for the

vague indefinite is always more perfect than the embodied reality. He

looks at his work with awe and wonderment.

_SOUL_

Yes! the image is completed, every feature there is caught,

Death is conquered, and immortal we have made it out of naught;

And from that strange spark within us, that strange spark of inner fire,

It is like ourselves, immortal, it can grovel or aspire.

What is that which we have given it? something that we cannot tell,

Something of a life beyond us, for we feel it oft rebel;

Something thrilling, something noble, something leading to a goal,

Ours--and yet beyond explaining, call it Heart or call it Soul.

The artist wonders at himself, and, with the excitement, sees past the

form to the ideal. It is like a draught of nectar to him, that Olympian

wine which made the gods mad in the pleasant court of old Jove.

_ADORATION_

I have made it. Have I made it? It is noble, it is good.

It seems perfect, can I wonder that it is not understood?

There were pangs in its out-coming, efforts of the clouded Will,

But it forced its way to being, all my frame is trembling still.

I have made it. Have I made it? Can the _wish_ engender power?

I am humble, yet adore it; it was in me scarce an hour.

I but yielded up volition, not one effort did it cost,

Only pangs of indecision when I feared the thought was lost.

He is exhausted with the effort and goes to bed, sleeping a dreamless

sleep, while the dormant mind sobers down; and now comes the hour of

reaction and icy pain, when he rises changed and cool to review the

fevered work of yesterday. Reflection sets in, and he tastes of the cup

of doubt and despair.

_REFLECTION_

From the clouds we have descended, time hath cooled our fevered brains,

Reason pounces on her victim, rivets round him iron chains,

Pointing out each imperfection with a finger tipped in ice,

Jeering tells him his creation cannot bear the looking twice,

Sets him up, his harshest critic; now the labour has begun,

Hours of thinking, watching, working, when the spirit part is done,

Timid touches, happy chances, beatings of the fearful heart;

First creation, second motion, then the patient tricks of art.

Last state, repose. When he has done his very utmost, listened to the

opinions of doubtful friends, with friendly and hostile critics; when he

has altered and re-altered as far as _he_ possibly dare go, he lays down

his brush with a defiant gasp, dogged in his resolve to spoil it no

further, deaf to any further suggestions; he is as contented as his

sacred but exacting art will permit him to be.

_REPOSE_

It is finished, all imperfect, but it is our very best,

We can come no nearer Nature, here are all our sins confess'd.

If we spent another hair-stroke something precious would be lost,

Ye that see it but a second cannot reckon up the cost.

'Twas an altar of the passions, burning hopes were offered up,

Prayers and fastings followed after, we drank deep from sorrow's cup.

Through dark hours of cold affliction, from sharp thorns we

pulled the rose;

Marvel you at our assurance, at the pride of our repose?

Unfriendly critics are not much trouble to a true painter; he hears them

talk with the consciousness that he will benefit from their jeers when

they jeer with discretion, and be able to trip them up when they display

their ignorance. The public, not appreciative, does not move him much

either, further than he has the gaunt wolf to keep back, and must study

their wishes so that they may help him to kill this monster. What is his

great grief and tribulation?--the inner voice which tells him every step

of the way that he is so far behind, that he has so much to learn and

so little time to learn it in. Every picture he sees by another artist

seems so much better than his last picture, that his life would be a

constant misery if it were not for those poetic visions and sunny hours

of open-air exercise.

To be able to paint a tree or a street or a face does not fulfil all the

mission of sacred art. It demands more. Nature, which for ever changes,

demands from her votaries constant change of subject and constant change

of treatment, and the hour which finds the painter contented with what

he has learnt, and satisfied to go on reproducing his effects, finds him

a hopeless invalid as far as art-progress is concerned. Like the poet,

he must go on, go upwards for ever; for nothing can remain stationary

either in this or the next world; if we do not climb upwards we are

bound to descend. As Buddha tells us:

'The devils in the under worlds wear out deeds that were wicked in an

age gone by. Nothing endures.'

We must go on, or _go out_, go on searching after purity and elevation

and beauty in its highest sense; not the beauty of an inane face or

fashion-plate figure, not even the ideal beauty of the Greeks, but the

beauty to which we are most adapted in each stage of progression as we

mount toward the infinite.

_BEAUTY_

What is Beauty? the perfection of the type it represents,

And the true fulfilment of the picture that the mind contents.

It is in the babbling streamlet, with its birch and fern-lined strands,

It is in the factory chimney which against the cloud gaunt stands,

In the blasted trunk that fork-like rears its bleached bare arms on high,

Framing sedgy moors and uplands past soft tones that melt in sky.

Nestling in the yellow short-gown, couched in costly wreaths of lace,

In the heart, voice, walk, and gesture, more than in the form or face.

The painter must work out his own redemption in this pursuit of the

beautiful. No imitation of the beauty of another will help him; his

sense must be innate and out-coming; from him the well must spring which

has to quench the thirst of nations--living water and quenchless

fire--to flow on and light on, long after his own creative powers have

ended. As Buddha again tells us:

'Ask not from the silence, for it cannot speak; vex not your mournful

minds with pious pains. Ah! brothers, sisters, seek naught from the

helpless gods by gift or hymn, nor bribe with blood, nor feed with fruit

and cakes. Within yourselves deliverance must be sought. Each man his

prison makes.'

As I have said, the beginning of painting is very easy. A straight line

done fairly well, drawn with the full comprehension of the mind, and a

flowing hand which can pause and run on at will, the knowledge of the

rainbow colours and blendings, are the alphabet of the artist.

Afterwards, as he grows in stature, his wants and wishes grow in

proportion; and the nearer we seem (to the eyes of those behind us) to

be approaching the goal, Perfection, the farther away it is from us.

To the public, for whose instruction and pleasure the artists paint, I

would fain close this by saying just a few words. Beware how you are

satisfied with a picture; misjudge your own eyes when they are gratified

only. Is the painted cornfield exactly like the cornfields you have

seen? Is it a _dead_ or a _living_ portrait of the corn-ears? Has the

painter, in letting go the exact facsimile, not given you something

beyond and better--the motion and soul of that cornfield?

Are those eyes exactly like the eyes of the one you love or mourn for?

They may be the exact shape and size and shade, but are they the eyes

you used to look into and let out your soul after? Or has the painter

been careless about the shape or shade or size, and yet given you a

gleam of the heart-longings that cling to your heart-longings with

unseen angel-claspings?

Weigh it all carefully, whether you want the shape and number of the

houses in the home of your childhood, or the indefinite thrill which

shall wake into the active music of long ago. Do you want the cold clay

that is lying under the senseless stones, or the spirit which is

hovering about you still?

This is the mission of sacred art--to teach us to be better and not to

go back; to bring us from the fierce chasing after the world, and make

us forget the golden links we are striving to forge for the sinking of

our manhood or womanhood; to tell us how the nations long ago lived and

loved and laboured, and now lie dead in spite of all their pomp, as we

shall be in spite of all our hankerings after what is ours no longer

than a day of Time.

To give us gleams of sunshine and green fields and cooling streams, when

we are parched by the dust of the streets.

To give us glimpses into the wisdom of innocence, when we are blinded by

guilt and shame and crusted selfishness.

To give us glowings of chivalry and patriotism, when we are forgetting

all these inspirations in the ignorance of this book philosophy.

To make us more merciful to the poor and unfortunate, the maimed in mind

as well as body; to make us love all as our brothers and sisters, no

matter what their faults may be.

'Living pure, reverent, patient, pitiful, loving all things that live,

even as themselves, letting unkindness die, and greed and

wrath.'--Buddha.

This is the mission of our sacred art--to educate each soul, painters

and people; to subdue the self that is now dominant, and plant the other

on its throne; to make men and women of us all, in the highest, truest,

grandest sense.

PART II.--THE COMIC SIDE OF ART

Art is many-sided, but with the exception of one, or perhaps two, of the

sides, all the rest are comic.

Viewed from the outside, that is, the standpoint of the buyer and the

critic, the ludicrousness of it is almost appalling. It would be tragic

in the intensity of its farcical characters, even as a very hearty laugh

sometimes will cause sudden death by choking, were it not for the shades

of the pitiful or contemptible which relieve it of the load of laughter,

and change the downward curve of the broad grin into a decided upward

smiling termination.

I dare say you will think my subject should be composed of illustrations

from Cruikshank, Gillray, Leech, and other masters of the comic muse,

and so it ought to be, perhaps, and for that very reason I do not feel

inclined to treat it so. I do not like to see ladies dress all by the

month's fashion-plates, whether it suits them or not, nor men do exactly

the things expected of them. Where would be those delightful throbs of

surprise if it were not for the tangent starts of the unconfined

lunatics who pass for men and women of talent on this very superficial,

thin-crusted globe of ours?

One of the most amusing sides of art is the method people have of

judging a picture.

Say an old gentleman with his wife and two or three daughters come by

mistake into an exhibition with the catalogue of some other exhibition

in their possession. They glance at a picture, and fall into raptures

over it: 'Beautiful, the _feeling_ is delightful. What force of touch,

strength of character! Who is it by? Number So-and-So. Ah! I knew it.'

(The number in the wrong catalogue points to a well-known name.) 'I felt

that I could not be mistaken.' (The old gentleman adjusts his glasses

and looks at the title with triumphant conviction.) 'Odd title, though,

for the subject; eccentricity of genius, I suppose. No matter, it is

splendid. Quite Dutch-like in its subtlety; quite Israely in its

character; delicate, refined, realistic, bold, masterly!'

One of the daughters, blessed with keener vision, has here discovered

another signature on the corner of this masterpiece, a name not in the

fashion, in fact one despised. 'Papa, it isn't by Mr. Smudge, R.A.; it

is by Ernest Tyro.'

'Eh! what? Nonsense! why, the catalogue says Smudge.' The mistake is

discovered, and at once the tune changes. 'Ah! vulgar, coarse,

commonplace. Let us go out before we are contaminated.'

Now, this is the comic part of it, with a dash of the pitiful. What

difference did that signature make in the merit of the picture? If it

was delicate, refined, bold, masterly before, how could it be vulgar,

coarse, or commonplace afterwards?

A man with piles of money to spend and a moderate modicum of brains

gets hauled into the artistic stream, and goes gasping and spluttering

around, spending his money on what he knows nothing about, and never

will while God blesses him with cash, and his tongue can patter cant.

Somebody takes him kindly in hand and educates him, as Buchanan did

James VI.; he raves about the painter he has been taught to consider the

master.

'Look at it! what colour, what masterly brush-marks. Did you ever see

the like of that?'

Never, except in a white-washer with his broad brush, or a scavenger

sweeping a crossing.

In his natural state he may get a picture which he can comprehend,

because the houses are like the houses he sees every day, and the trees

have branches and leaves definitely painted on them; that picture

represented Nature as he saw her, therefore he considered it good. But

under training he is taught to despise this sort of thing, and

obediently despises it; the old love is turned out or with its face to

the wall, and the splashes which have neither form nor finish are doted

upon. Would this man care to have a wife without a nose or with

indefinite features? Would he be charmed with the colour of a mashed-up

bit of flesh? It is all right enough for musicians to rave over the

sweetness of a piece of catgut, but the world wants to hear the whole

tune, and what we as artists know to be good quality is comical

affectation on their part.

Artists are no exception in this curious alteration of opinion. I have

heard artists shouting with contemptuous laughter over a picture,

calling it rubbish, and crying that the man who painted it ought to get

six months for doing such deeds; taking it to pieces, running down the

drawing, the composition, and the colour, until some authority said it

was good, and then they saw as by a miracle beauties in the very

faults. What was bad drawing before this became a splendid piece of

handling; what before had no composition now teemed with poetry, and

from bad it became beautiful colouring; and I have wondered how it all

came to pass, seeing that _they_ ought to know what is good.

There is a story told of Tintoretto, who was kept down and scoffed at

nearly all his life by the school of Titian; for even in those far-off

balmy days fashion ruled the roost, and the great masters acted about as

contemptibly as do the little masters now.

Poor Tintoretto could not paint to please anyone, and when he did sell,

it was only for canvas and stuff, if he got a patron generous enough to

give him so much, brains and labour being flung in by way of apology. It

was the price of a spoilt bit of cloth he generally managed to get from

his patrons.

Sometimes, when the people were surprised out of their habitual doubt

and suspicion by some brilliant flash of fancy, and the wealthy

controllers of men's destinies were inclined to pitch the poor wretch a

sop, it was passed over his head to the hangers-on of the school then in

repute; what the decorated old Titian could not swallow himself he

handed over to some of his satellites, and left Tintoretto outside.

Tintoretto, although an amiable sort of fellow, was not altogether an

angel, and, therefore, naturally resented this sort of starving process,

and kicking out, as some of us still do, got laughed at for his pains,

as I dare say is as much the habit still as it was in those golden days

of old in Italy. Jerusalem is not the only city where donkeys thrive by

braying.

Notwithstanding the constant snubbing to which he was subjected,

Tintoretto was generous enough to be able to see and appreciate the

good qualities of Titian a great deal better than the prosperous painter

could see his beauties in return. If I had to express an opinion on the

two men, I should say, 'Tintoretto was the prince of painters, and the

lucky man was Titian.'

Amongst Tintoretto's few possessions was a picture by his tyrant, and

Tintoretto had the meekness to copy it so carefully that he was pretty

well pleased with it himself; so he hung them up together, with

'original' on the one and 'copy' on the other. The critics came in, as

usual, to laugh or encourage the mighty but stricken heart with words

like this: 'Ah, if you could only paint like Titian!' or, 'Not the least

degree like the original.'

Now, Tintoretto had his own opinion about his abilities, as we all have,

I dare say, about ours, and he thought at nights, when he looked over

his creations, that they were as good as Titian's, and some of them

better, if not nearly so well paid for; and after all these years a

great number of sensible people have come to see and believe the same as

the poor old man did of himself. Of course it wasn't much consolation to

him, this conviction, seeing it didn't change the sour wine and black

bread of his table into the Cyprus and cake of his rivals. No matter;

the old man determined to have his joke, if he could have nothing else

out of the gold-laden quadrupeds; so he wrote on the original 'copy,'

and on the copy 'original,' and waited for the kindly-disposed visitors

to come and comfort him, as usual.

'Ah, a very far way behind, old man! it won't do; you haven't the go of

the master in you. It wants strength and purity; the chiaroscuro is

shallow as a summer stream. Why can't you do it like this, now?'

pointing contemptuously from the original to the copy.

That was the method of judging pictures long ago, as it is now. If a man

paints something that becomes the fashion, then he may do what he likes

with his paper or canvas. A drunken smudge or a meaningless splash of

the brush will be raved over as if the man had wrought a miracle.

And how a man gets into fashion is often as great an astonishment to

himself as it is to the people coming after him.

One artist tried everything, from still life to a vision of the infernal

regions, and still he could neither please the public nor pay for a

respectable suit. One day, in a moment of frolic, he put a priest's robe

upon a brother artist, and painted him in that fashion, sending it into

Paris, as usual, to stand in the windows for an indefinite time. A

distinguished English art patron passed, looked at it, praised it, and

gave the dealer the price asked for it.

Presto! the painter was famous, and found his vocation marked out for

him for ever after; and I suppose now drinks absinthe and smokes

cigarettes during the intervals of priest-making without a single care

for to-morrow.

A man may paint and paint until he is white-headed, or has worn the hair

off his scalp altogether, and all to no purpose. He may rack his brains

until the cords crack to invent a new subject, and propitiate fickle

fortune, and not be able to earn salt for his broth. He may produce

picture after picture, with all the conceptive power of a Michael Angelo

and the colouring of a Titian, and still be no nearer his aim. And, in a

fit of desperation, he may dash off a piece of brainless rubbish, and

for that hasty bit of caprice become the lion of the day.

And when he does succeed, has he not justice on his side if he curses

the goddess Fame, and laughs to derision the senseless crowd of

worshippers who have raised him up on high?

When he thinks on the guineas he is making now, and the coppers he was

not able to earn before; when he thinks upon the pictures which he

created before, and the worthless daubs which he is flinging off now;

when he thinks upon what might have been, or upon the woman he might

have married, or, if married, on the woman who might have been still

alive, if his deserts had been rewarded as his folly is--the woman who

pined and grew haggard with anxiety, and starved to death through the

want of the paltry gold that now curses his present blasted life--this

is the kind of comedy to make men stand up and blaspheme, and to make

women lay down their heads and weep themselves blind. The painter who

_was_ a man, and has become a machine; the man who grew by his

earnestness near to God, and now must work for an earth-idol!

It is a comic sight to see pictures which are the fashion;

colour-blendings, the outcome of craft only; men who have had

aspirations after great things content to lay down a noble purpose

before an order. One trick or one accident did it, and so they must run

the vein threadbare or else starve.

I remember once three young fellows who went gold-hunting; they bought a

digger's claim and dug away for six months without a single sight of

gold-earth colour, and at last caved in.

Two new chums came along and took the claim on chance; the

ex-proprietors had pocketed the transfer-money, and squatted on the

surface to take a final pipe before leaving. The new hands went down and

filled the bucket; it came up bulging with a fifty-six pound nugget of

pure gold in it. The old hands had worked six months without avail, and

the new chums struck at first sight.

Art is like gold-digging, all a blind chance.

It isn't good work that takes, it isn't earnest thought; it is all a

turn of the wheel, and the man may be a genius or a jackass. If his turn

comes up he wins the hour.

Gold! Ah, when will the power of it cease? The first digger who saw the

nugget appear clasped his hands in front of him and took a header down

the pit, dashing his brains out in the paroxysm of his disappointment. I

remember once a man who had made a fortune came on board ship with the

load converted into sovereigns and sewn inside a broad belt round his

waist. He tried to be calm and reasonable, but it was of no use; he went

frantic with his good luck, and one day, after being three weeks out at

sea, he came up on deck in a frenzied condition, took off his valuable

belt, opened it, and pouring the glittering contents overboard, sprang

in after them, and so settled the grand problem. There was one painter

who knew the difficulties of art and the capriciousness of fortune very

exactly. In early life his good pictures could hardly bring him in

30_s._ a week, and latterly, when he could sell all he put his name

upon, he used to say that the British Lion would give fifty pounds for a

dirty piece of paper if it only had his name on the corner.

It is this truckling to gold that makes art comic and common, this

buying and selling custom which takes all the inspiration out of it and

renders the pursuit of it a few degrees below the honest efforts of the

mechanic, just as we know the glory of womanhood loses all its

sacredness when it is made the end of a commercial bargain. If the

beauty is not beyond price it is worthless; so, if the picture is not

too precious to sell, it is nothing greater than the price it brings.

Artists will for ever imitate tradesmen, and want to stand on their

dignity at the same time, which is an impossible combination.

It is a very curious trouble, this disease of Dignity. A man may do a

thousand mean contemptible actions, and yet stand back indignant at the

one over and above. He may sin his soul away, traffic his manliness for

a few paltry shillings, and yet feel fearfully outraged because someone

proposes one other shabby trick to him; as if it mattered much one

shuffle more amongst the others, one more dirty spot amongst the many

defilements with which his soul is smudged over. He may feel no shame,

for instance, in taking away characters, and yet stand out very rigidly

against taking a purse; as if the stealing the paltry contents of the

one were one-tenth part as great a wrong as the other.

A man may feel very much ashamed of a parcel because it isn't done up in

brown paper, or feel very unhappy over a collar half dirty, when he

would think nothing at all about the bit of villainy that is so much

uglier than the half-dirty collar.

You all know those pictures and engravings of Hogarth, who painted like

the moral preacher that he always was. He is of the comic tribe who set

up vice as a warning, and with a laugh give you a lesson to make you

grave. That is the sort of art I should like you to study when you are

too self-satisfied. David Teniers and the other Dutchmen only half did

their work, for they just painted the merry outside of iniquity without

giving us a single glimpse of the soul, which is Ruin. All along, art

has been a mystery and a problem for the wisest to solve, and I do not

know anyone yet who could point out the real good of it.

A man may exercise the brains God has given him, and make a chair or a

table, and no one thinks he has any cause to feel proud; and another may

take a paint-brush, and, with less of the God gift, dabble over a bit of

canvas, and feel qualified thereby to strut along and feel mighty. What

about? Just because he used paints and brushes and the other man used

wood and glue. As if the one wasn't as much to be boasted about as the

other.

Again, an artist paints away and thinks he is doing splendidly, and that

all the other work in the world is rubbish compared to his; or he may be

painting away splendidly, and thinking all the time that he is wasting

good colour, and producing rubbish.

Or you may hear a man who has not a vestige of colour-perception in his

eye or mind pooh-poohing a piece of perfect colouring as being devoid of

the very quality which it possesses, if it possesses any merit at all.

We see something done and we jump to conclusions right away, or we take

offence without rhyme or reason, and never give the offender the benefit

of a single doubt.

What is clean colour to us, through force of habit, looks a singularly

dirty combination to someone else. With a jump the artist sees what he

thinks is an oversight or weak spot without giving his own mind time to

investigate, or the picture time to explain its intention.

A black spot is wanted there, or a white splash, or a spark of red, or

a dash of blue, to make a picture of it. How does he know that the

painter has not tried all these stale old tricks, and, rejecting them,

chosen something better, newer, more subtle, if not quite so apparent?

It isn't jealousy that is troubling the artist when he laughs or

condemns the work of a brother; it is prejudice, that will not let him

look more than one way out, that fastens upon him like a pair of

blinkers, and makes of him an animal under control--drawing him along in

the one direction in spite of his eyes or judgment. The thing is bad; it

looks good, but it must be bad.

This is one of the comic sides to Art. A man has learnt to paint and

draw, and ought to know when the work set before him is good or not, and

yet, like other people, he will look at the name in the corner, and

heroically strangle the knowledge which he must have, in order to chime

in with the clanging bells of Fashion.

Or he will see one unfortunate picture, a poor example, crop up at a

sale or hanging on someone's walls, and straightway judge all that the

man does from that, knowing, as every artist must, that all have sins of

the past to repent of, that there are pictures which they have painted

of which they are themselves ashamed, but which some purchaser has taken

willy-nilly, and necessity has forced them to part with. Knowing this of

themselves, it does seem strange that they never take into consideration

these probabilities when looking at the works of some other man in or

out of the Art upper ten.

A painter cannot paint well when starving, neither will he paint well

when replete; so the time to regard a man at his very best is just that

happy moment when the big elephant Public Opinion kneels down to take

him up. He is elated, but not puffed up; eager to deserve the honours

which he has won, not yet arrogant with success, or content to bestow a

swish of the brush for sovereigns, or think that he is composed of some

finer kind of material than the house-decorator who makes his walls and

woodwork beautiful, without considering the value of hog-hair as he

works.

Be faithful to yourselves and your intentions, and you don't need to

care much whether the people about you consider you an object to be

comic over or not; hold fast to your purpose, and never truckle to a

whim or a caprice, and your art will be true and grand whether you are

painters or plasterers. Yield to be the toy of the hour, and whether you

are making for yourselves guineas or grins, you are only the shadow in a

poor, low comedy; and your art is comic without a single point about it

to raise it from the burlesque, which serves no higher end in creation

than does the bashed hat of Ally Sloper.

[Illustration: ART SUBJECTS]

CHAPTER XII

_ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH ART_

EX LIBRIS

[Illustration: I]T is only when a man settles down in life that he

begins to gather books around him, and to think about the outside as

well as the contents of his favourite volumes. First editions, and rare,

early volumes, as well as _éditions deluxe_, occupy his attention during

his leisure from business cares. The young man is quite content with a

yellow cover and a thrilling or racy inside, while the elder man views

these abominations in the shape of binding and get-up with horror.

Artists as a rule are not great readers of books, and the more modern

and realistic they are, the less they read; their eyes are occupied

solely in watching and studying passing effects, while they can always

depend upon some bookworm friend to give them the particulars if they

want a subject from history. They take their characters from their

models, the bookworm friend provides them with all the other information

about costumes and historical details which they may require; therefore

unless, like Alma Tadema, Walter Crane, or my old friend Sir J. Noel

Paton, his art inclines towards antiquity, decoration, or history, the

true painter is not much of a book authority.

I have found also, from observation, that the man who is fond of his

garden does not care much for his library; indeed, although no man can

reach middle age without having some hobby, he is a very unfortunate man

who has more than one.

My own life has been so arranged by Providence that I have never had

long enough time to get firmly rooted on any special soil, for always

when I have just been settling down I have been transplanted quickly and

ruthlessly, and the tender mosses about my roots have been torn

ruthlessly from their premature clinging and scattered.

At one period I took to collecting delf and china, one of the most

seductive, extravagant, and dangerous of all passions; in this direction

my artistic instinct of colour found vent.

But having inherited a love for books, I indulged in that habit also

when I could afford it--often, alas! sacrificing other interests for

the gratification of these two absorbing passions. Fortunately for my

peace of mind, a clumsy joiner cured me of my hobby for china. He had

lined a room with shelves from ceiling to floor, assuring me that his

work was strong enough to carry the contents of the British Museum; and

foolishly I believed him. At this time I had about four and a half tons

weight of books, and about five hundred pounds worth of china;

therefore, to make my library attractive, I placed the books above and

below the centre shelf, which I devoted to my specimens of china, so as

to bring them, as it were, on the line.

On the second night after I had arranged my treasures I was awoke by a

fearful crash, and on going into my library, I found shelves, books, and

rare china, now a confused blending of fragments on the floor, as

complete a mass of wreckage as mine enemy could have desired to see.

The books were not much damaged, nor the shelves, but the fragile

loveliness which I had doted on with such uxoriousness had taken wings

and left me for ever. No man born of woman dare indulge in two grand

passions with impunity.

That ogre joiner added the last blow to my vanished delusion when he

generously offered to put up my shelves again without extra charge. I

have loved china ever since, but never since that hour with the unholy

desire of possession. I have been content to admire it in the cabinets

of my friends.

The true collector of china does not trouble himself greatly about the

artistic qualities of his wares; it is the rarity which he runs after,

and this is one of the most pitiful of human follies, unless he chances

to be a dealer. What fascinated me in this pursuit was the beauty of

the designs or the richness of the colouring. I delighted to make my

room one complete and harmonious picture, rather than divide it into

different pictures; and in this, while it lasted, I had the most

unalloyed pleasure that mortal man could have. And this is how I should

like to recommend men, who are rich enough to afford the luxury, to

decorate the rooms in which they study or think; for while pictures may

tell their own story, they are apt to become assertive in time, while

the stories grow stale.

But with beautiful works of china, tastefully assorted and harmoniously

arranged in combination with finely bound books of favourite authors, no

matter whether they are first or last editions or contemptibly modern in

the estimation of the china-maniac, you will find yourself constantly

surrounded with old friends who are never prosy, and by an orchestra of

ever-changing songs without words--silent harmonies and poetic

suggestions without limit.

I like my shelves to be open and roomy, so as to hold any size of

volume; made plain and dark coloured, with little ornament, and attached

to the wall.

Yet the beau idéal of a perfect library is to have it made mediæval in

its design, in old and unpolished oak, with Gothic carvings where bare

spaces occur; the ceiling divided into oak panels and rich with design,

the furniture in harmony, so that nothing may distract the eye from the

richness of the binder's art, or the tender flower-like glowing of the

vases, cups, saucers, and plates, stirring up while they at the same

time soothe the jaded imagination of the wearied thinker with their

vague suggestions.

BOOK PLATES

[Illustration: T]HIS is an old art or taste which is being once more

revived with great activity through the timely efforts of the Ex Libris

Society. It is a pursuit which is most educative to the lover of books,

because it is filled with symbols and leads on to the noble art of

heraldry and spiritual intellectualism, in which such men as Albert

Dürer stand so pre-eminent. At first sight it may appear like the

pandering to the vanity of book possessors, but it is not so in any

sense; rather is it the connecting link which binds men of taste and

research to each other, and which leads them on to that higher level of

humanitarianism and faith for which purpose the grand laws of Heraldry

and Masonry were first instituted.

ARTISTIC ASTRONOMY

[Illustration: I] THINK that a man to be a painter, more than any other

student of life-lore, ought to probe a little into every science;

anatomy he must have, geology, botany, and astronomy he ought to know

something about.

I do not mean the very painful and exact knowledge which is begun and

ended in learning the names and probable distances of the planets, or

the exact theories which books teach; that sort of lore is very well in

its place, so that it does not interfere with the gracious if delusive

investments of fancy. But none of us like to hear a discourse upon the

exact sciences from the lips of young love; we would rather have her

more ignorant and responsive to our extravagance--think that her 'eyes

are stars, and would in heaven stream so bright that birds would sing

and think it were not night'--than to be reminded that this Romeo

nonsense is exploded, and be told the scientific composition of those

sapphire or amber orbs, and the cold attractions and revulsions of those

rolling earths.

The painter and the poet, like the lover, should be impassioned and

impulsive, keeping his knowledge only for similes and parts of the

glowing idea. He ought to know all things, but be, besides, 'Dowered

with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love,' able to

see through life and death, through good and ill, and into his own soul.

Regarding the stars, we must indulge in fancy, for science will not

enlighten us much, with all the help its magnificent telescopes can give

us; for, after all is said and done, the wisest of scientists are forced

to admit that the truth is not quite certain, either one way or the

other.

Before the Beginning, we will suppose this earth to have been a molten

globe of fused material, perhaps the fragment of some other vast globe,

one of many sparks flung from the great flame that had spun round for

myriads of centuries with other fires in the black space. To attempt in

words to produce an estimate of the magnitude of this stupendous scene

would be as weak a failure as to attempt by figures to describe

Eternity. The circle is our only sign in the one case; let imagination's

broadest and vaguest conception grasp the other as it best can. The

fearful concussion as two fires met and clashed and became a blazing

shower, the weird effect as the sparks, to us monster planets and

measureless suns, fell whirling into the chaos of that awful night! All

are silent as the stars are in their distance, and we watch at night the

shining and the sparkling, giving them, with our intense narrow egotism,

a place in our emotions and our sentiments, as if they were ministers of

fate for earth, so trifling do they seem to our mite world.

Science blunders on, one generation of savants giving us theories and

blinding themselves to prove them correct, which another generation of

as wise men flatly contradict, and set up fresh theories to be again

knocked down. I pay thirty shillings for a valuable work on astronomy

to-day that next year I find not worth a sixpence. They coolly inform us

that at length the distance to some star is certainly discovered--at

least, with the slight margin of some tens of thousands of millions of

miles, to be afterwards determined as they think best, and that is our

knowledge of the stars. This is science. A man makes himself a mole,

scratching up a mound of earth, boring and thinking and wasting his eyes

and his brains for fifty or sixty or seventy years to try to find out

what he never can while his body consumes bread, and what the most

ignorant clown will discover with a single flap of the wing of Death, if

our belief in a future state is fact.

The poet is the wisest astronomer. He gazes an hour on the stars, with

his eye rapt and his mind fallow, and the spirits or the spirit of

inspiration ploughs it up and fills him with the knowledge

unconsciously, and if the withered old astronomer with his lines and

earth laws is so far astray in his conclusions, seeing the poet cannot

wander much farther, why may he not be the only one correct, in that he

writes what he knows nothing about? We, reading it, call it deep,

mystical, splendid, because we cannot understand it; while the poet,

poor fellow! reading our criticism, and thinking that we understand it

from our subtle explanation, rests perfectly content, feels it is all

right, and that he is a very clever fellow.

To us these stars are serene, as all action is when viewed from

distance. The carnage of the battle-field is but an ant-covered spot of

the landscape to the spectator ten miles away; a little puff of blue

smoke here and there, blotting out the insignificant black and red dots,

is the whole picture of the fierce drunkenness and savage lust of blood

which transform men into devils; those desolate hearths where the curse

of the widow and the wail of the orphan are the most enduring, trophies

of victory.

Myriads of miles away, and all the thunders and rapidity become silver

pin points: yet they joined in that warfare, or watched it as we do

them, saw it cooling down until it died from their range, until the

white glare that it once gave out became a crimson glow, to be swallowed

in the oceans of steam that rolled about it.

And so we are told that the slow stages went on--the fire, the steam,

the waters, the sediment and slime that bred the life, the life that was

rank and low, the preparation for other life, the light which was

forcing its passage through the mists, that came and made the life

robust; the convulsions that overthrew the whole, and the work that

began once more, ever growing higher, as death purified and blotted out

the errors, until the first perfection stood up from the other animals,

and, as man, continued the work of creation.

Sciences so blend together that it is impossible to take up one without

finding tendons of another passing through it. Astronomy teaches the

student that this earth is only one of a cluster; that our sun is not

the sole candle of the universe, nor our moon the only Luna who touches

the brains of men and poisons the flesh of fish; that on each of those

countless needle and pin points, love, war, and work may be going on

while our tiny star is out of the range of their glasses, and

speculation sets to work filling up all the blanks, and tinkering up the

broken links, while imagination gilds the repairs until we can behold

worlds like our own, but larger and fairer; for man ever takes himself

for his model of an angel, and his world for the image of the hereafter.

Fairer, because imagination hangs up a gauze veil to soften the general

effect and the blemishes.

We look at the sky; mellow grey at the horizon, going through gentle

gradations towards the deepest ultramarine overhead, and science tells

us that this is formed by miles of atmosphere, and behind the ether belt

spreads the black vacuum. Sometimes we think we can almost trace the

airwaves, one behind the other, until the last thin layer is reached,

and the glance is lured on as through a crystal, and we are soaring

lark-like through the azure fields, the world beneath us lost, as when

the swimmer in mid-ocean turns his face from the ship that represents

land, and floats away on a blue sea under a blue sky, a solemn silence

over all, the heart filled with the trembling delight and awesome

majesty of boundless space.

But to the poet they are angels; to the prisoned wisher they are fairy

barks to wing him away from this earth, which is too small for his

immortal cravings and desires.

We like the science of the child, the lover, and the savage the best,

for we think it as near truth as any other, and ten myriad times more

satisfactory to the feelings. Claud Melnotte is our best guide to

astronomy.

'To sit at nights beneath those arching heavens, and guess what star

shall be our home when love becomes immortal.'

That is the sort of astronomy for the poet, the child, and the quivering

heart.

I would fain bring back the world to its belief in fairies--tear it now

and then from the hard facts which are being now so constantly driven

into aching brains.

Were they not happy times when Jack the Giant-Killer was the veritable

history of a brave boy? Were they not sunny hours when you peered under

toadstools for the little fairy who was to build you up a crystal

palace, where gorgeous cakes were to be served on service of gold?

Is there no cause for regret that the time is past when out of glowing

embers on winter nights sprang forth knights on their war-steeds, or

funny little old men and women with high-crowned hats, who you knew were

all there, because you had _been told about them_?--days when falsehood

was an unknown quality, and 'yes' meant surely 'yes,' and only 'no' was

possible to doubt. Now it has become the large 'no,' with many a 'yes'

much more than doubtful.

What were stars to you then but golden lamps of heaven; shining

ornaments on the foreheads of angels; windows of another beautiful

world; or little sparks put up there all for your own special delight?

And that vast immensity, to contemplate which the horrified brain of the

astronomer reels with madness, and reason is nearly dethroned: what was

it to you then but a cosy curtain of the earth's bed, drawn over it at

nights to keep it warm while it slept, decorated with all those pretty

spangles that people might count them until they fell asleep?

What did those worlds teach you in the hours of your young romance, as

you turned up your flushed face, after parting for the night, and sought

out the brightest one to say your prayers to--young idolaters that you

were? Did they not comfort you more then than now when you know what

they really are, as you watched them grow moist with their great

sympathy? It was a flick of vapour crossing them, or a tender tear

creeping up to your eye in reality, but to you it was a star watching

over you both, and carrying the wishes of the one to the other.

Science tells us that those fantastic shapes flying above us are caused

by the vapours absorbed from the ocean, condensed up there, and sent

down again in the form of those grateful showers upon which the sun

paints the prismatic rainbow, the sign of grace and hope, the index of

the painter.

We see the sun rising out of the vapour in the morning, a pale disk,

surrounded by wreaths of the softest grey, here of the pearly ash, there

of the citron bloom, broken by the salmon and the amber, while over them

gleam the golden spokes and white bars of the wheels of glory,

surrounded again by the curtains of grey to the chastened fringes of

azure and silver, the golden car into which the king of the morning

leaps, guiding his winged horses out into the day with a lustre

overpowering, flinging his glittering shafts down the mountain sides,

into the streams and torrents, into the mists of the valleys, breaking

up the solid masses, tearing ragged edges from them, and scattering them

until they fly away round the rocks, amongst the furze, in a panic of

confusion, and the marble wall of an hour ago has become but a little

smoke amongst the heather.

We see the mid-day lights and shades, the clouds that trail slowly along

like a flock of tired sheep with languid motion and drooping head, now

like chubby infants flinging about their dimpled limbs, and casting fat

depths of purple over the ivory shoulders of the children underneath;

white-skinned cherubs whose antics have diverted us during a sleepy

afternoon sermon, as they rolled past the diamond panes and cast their

gigantic grey shadows on the whitewashed church walls opposite; or the

drift of dapple and scumbly white overhead, like snow-flakes melting on

a deep river, stippled all over with the ripples between.

Then comes the night, and we know that the earth is turning round, and

that it will soon be dawn with our friends in Australia, but to us it is

the sun which is sinking behind the waves. It was a white flame on a

blue field before, then the blue passes through changes of grey to gold,

and the gold deepens to orange, and the orange glows to crimson, and the

sun has become a blood-red eye glaring out of a purple mask, while

overhead gather armies clad in regimentals of every shade. The red coats

are struggling with the black and green, and the yellow and white

facings are savagely torn off and sent flying after the tattered banners

stained with the clotted gore of the slain, and the castles they were

swarming about are crumbling to pieces.

Then the battle is over and the stillness of death settles down, the

purple grows grey, the amber afterglow is cooling behind it, and those

wonderful little spark worlds are coming out to watch. On the earth long

lines of silver vapour lie like stretches of water with fen-lands

between; the tree trunks are submerged in the deluge, and only the tops

of brown ranges float above. A sigh comes over the land, that enters

into our spirits and finds an echo there, as we turn to the east to

watch the mellow moon rise out of its umber grey background, giving us

thoughts of rest after the day's work is over, bringing out young

lovers, imparting to rosy cheeks the spiritual pallor of tender

sympathy, throwing into dark eyes, that might flash mischievously in the

sunlight, the melancholy languor that rivets the pensive chains, and a

host of vague forms to the dreamy student, as he leans back, while the

thin wreaths created by his meerschaum pipe circle heavenward from his

meditative lips.

ARTISTIC BOTANY

[Illustration: I]

It is astonishing how insensibly we are drawn on to moralise when in the

mood. A stone in our path, over which we stumble, may become the text

for a long sermon; a little piece of crumpled, torn newspaper may lead

us along a train that seems endless--the power of the critic and the

abuse of that power, the art of printing, and how people got on without

the use of type to spread their gossip, the machinery used for it, and

the boon steam will be to the poor horses who may yet become our friends

instead of our slaves; the garment that scrap of paper once was, and the

romance of the wearer, the loom where it was spun, and the weavers, the

vessel that bore the little balls of cotton from the western fields

where the lash of the overseer once cursed the land--and we have taken

up the science of botany all in a single thought, and fly backward by

flashes until we come to the period when earth was like a fair garden

waiting upon its owner when the work was all but finished, and the

nameless lion and lamb together grazed by the Tree of Knowledge. The

great hush of fifty centuries hangs over it all, flinging before it the

haze of a far distance. The date-palm waves like feathers in the silver

space, the cocoanut hangs from the roof of its fan-like branches. The

banana is green, or ripens without the decay of a leaf; the many

bright-winged songsters are sparkling with their hundred warm tints, and

the fresh first spring, for they have suddenly burst into joyous

animation to hail the new life. We mingle with the morning mists, the

white forms of the angels who watched that great work, and the diamond

drops of dew which are lying in the mouth of the lilies get between us

and the starry diadems which crown their glowing heads, until we cannot

separate the flowers from the deathless host.

Shall we break it all up with our relentless science, get out our

trowels and our tin cases, and scatter the angels until we classify some

of the unknown specimens?

This purple flower with its drooping bells, to the half-open mouth of

which the black-and-amber coated bee hangs sucking, is our own foxglove,

a useful foreground ornament for the painter. Adam has yet to christen

it, so I may be homely in my title and leave the Latin to the

professors. An orange and scarlet toadstool rests against its grey green

leaves, while the greyer boulder against which they grow absorbs the

grey from the green until the leaf seems as bright as the fern-tree

overhead, for after this manner ring out the chimes of colour in Nature,

the high note only high until we strike the next.

Yes, it is amazing upon how slight a foundation a very plausible and

fine theory may be built up. I had almost fancied, while I was watching

the rich crimson juice oozing like blood from the cracks of that

dragon-tree, that the finale had come, and that it was our forefather

Adam who clung in that most undignified fashion between me and the sky

to that high branch of the upas, until I perceived the long hair upon

his arms as he reached to the cocoanut alongside of him, while his

graceful tail like a black snake twined round the white stem; then I

recognised with feelings of relief that it was only our familiar

caricature the monkey.

How familiar it all seems as we ponder! This gnarled tree trunk is the

oak of England, while yonder faint mountain-top, that we can just see

between its twisted limbs, looks like the cobbler at work on the lofty

Ben Lomond, giving us almost the right to claim our little island as the

original site of Paradise, did not those many pillars which are shooting

up and drooping down from the archways of this mighty banyan stop our

ideas from going farther in that direction.

Let us pause for a moment to regard the vegetation around with the

draughtsman's glance. The oak rising like a pyramid, with its rugged

horizontal masses, light, raw siennaish-green leaves clustering round

the spreading knotty branches at right angles to its corrugated trunk.

The elm, lime, and chestnut, not unlike in general outline, yet with

distinctive shapes that separate them all. The rough trunks of the elm,

pine, and fir may be distinguished at once from the smooth bark of the

plane, chestnut, beech, birch, bamboo, and upas. The branches of the fir

and beech are straight; the weeping willow and birch droop under their

light load to kiss the river. Then there are the serpentine ash, and

the irregular elm, cedar, and poplar, the long tapering leaves of the

ash and willow, the round flakes of the beech and cedar, the fan-like

masses of the chestnut, the little needle points of the fir. All these

stand out stamped with their type marks, and proclaim what they are by

their form and by their colour. We see, too, the dark olive duskiness of

the fir crown, with its flesh-like arms flung outwards, and the warm

glow of the upper limbs dying out of its body as it nears the brown

earth, reddened like the bed of the larch with the dropping spray of

cast-off shreds; the fir and the larch, that never change their entire

garments winter or summer, but only cast away the worn bits they have

done with; the willow, that grows paler as the summer advances and the

other trees flush, until she stands out white amongst the orange and the

russet, and the intense purple fumes of the passing year; the fairy

birch, lady of the lee, with her indefinite toned festoons, her delicate

madder-brown branches, and her silver crackle bracelets, reflecting all

the colours in our paint boxes.

Under foot we trample a perfect world in miniature--the velvet moss and

grey lichen, the vivid sparks of green amongst the bronze, the rose and

golden hairs that shake brown balls at us, and lure us into grottoes

where nymphs and lady-birds slumber together.

The ferns are making themselves studies in foreshortening as they spread

over the broad-leaved docken, under which the eye may penetrate the damp

shadows to find that the range is endless; furry rosaries swing on green

strings, little leaved tendrils that half smother blue and pink stars

with white centres, brambles and ivy shooting over knotty roots upon

which cling verdigris, tinted cactuses, and perfect gardens of flowers

and grasses, trailing like auburn tresses, all in the space of a square

inch, and veiled with the close meshes of that great spider web on which

the dewdrops swing by thousands.

That wonderful dew, flashing like the purest diamonds under foot,

glowing like rare opals a little way off, glittering like powdered snow

farther off still, floating over the roses like the gauze webs away in

mid-distance, bringing us back again to the scene we left to burrow in

details! Let us bundle up our specimens, and try not to feel any smaller

than we can help while we put our trowels and tin cases out of sight,

and crouch down with the hot-eyed monster cat panther within his leafy

shelter, and in company with the cunning cobra watch the work that is

being done out there in the broad sunlight.

Is it the heat fumes which are growing denser as the day advances? Can

the sunlight filtering down between those green fringes make those

shapes upon the grass and on the trunks of the trees?--trailing robes of

filmy white, dove-like wings of faintest pink that sweep across the

glade and crowd in circles round. The lioness does not think this

strange, for she squats and blinks lazily in the light like an over-fed

yellow mastiff. There is a rustling like birds rising. The locust chirps

in the grass; the bee is busy, so does not hum; the red-coated soldier

ants defile along in rigid order, and are allowed to pass by the active

little black-coats. Those that have work to do, do it, and all the rest

sleep. We have surely been dozing also, for the picture is finished, the

dewdrops are almost dry, the mists are sweeping away, and the red man

lies in his death-like slumber, while bending over him, with the staring

eyes of a newly-awoke baby, stands that white wonder of creation,

woman.

THE SPIRIT OF BEAUTY

[Illustration: T]

There is nothing more interesting in all the sights which bountiful

nature provides for the entertainment of man than the shapes, colours,

frolics, and labours of the insect world; and nothing more dastardly and

contemptible than the way man has of enjoying those pleasures, trapping

the spirit of liberty, mutilating the exquisite bodies, ruthlessly

cutting short their transient lives and merry pranks, brushing away the

subtle delicacy of that matchless colouring, leaving only stiff,

tattered corpses, that may appear fair in comparison with the clumsy

work of their destroyers, but bear no resemblance to the sportive specks

of splendour they were before: melancholy specimens stuck upon a card or

in a glass case in order to gratify a latent lust of cruelty or

acquisition, which is rechristened 'the curiosity of science,' or worse

still, when it is to minister to the vilest of all vain passions, the

empty desire to be thought oracles.

To the sensitive mind the spectacle of a show case of these poor little

insect samples, pierced through with thin pins and having their Latin

titles attached to each, is almost as excruciating a sight as a vision

of Calvary would be, with the mockery of that Greek, Latin, and Hebrew

superscription suspended from the freighted Cross; and the utility of

these crucifixions is about as great to the private collector and his

narrow circle of admirers as the deliberate vivisection of a fly is to

the idle mind of the vicious boy, who dismembers a being of more

exquisite formation and greater usefulness than he may ever become, with

those instincts, in order to see how it can wriggle along after the

power of walking and flying has been torn piecemeal from its quivering

sides.

What can all this wanton waste of the spirit of life teach them that

they may not read in the works of others, or see in any museum where the

sacrifice has already been made, that they must trample like savage

senseless cattle through fields already carefully gone over by men who

have devoted their lives to this branch of science?

We all know that science must at times be unsparing and merciless in its

hunt after knowledge, but the discovery once with certainty gained,

cruelty ought to cease for ever, and the mind rest satisfied; or if

unsatisfied with the dead example, seek to learn the grace and beauty of

the life, the motion that must be preserved alone by memory, for the

corpse can tell us nothing of life, and it is life we are most

interested in knowing. We can learn from death only decay, and any

hour's walk will show us that without our paltry aid towards its

manifestation.

When education costs the student labour or even agony and self-loss,

consider no exertion lost time, for experience must ever be better than

theory; but if it is at the cost of a single life, or even a thrill of

agony to another life, then let him pause, for no life is trivial that

the spirit animates, and where the mechanism is so perfect; and the

lowest form of life may be of greater value in the universal scheme than

the life that destroys it.

Let him pause, for the experience is too costly, the sacrifices already

made should satisfy; for what is the life of a man, except that the

shell is larger and coarser and clumsier, more than the life of the tiny

midge that sings about our ears in the sundown, or the silent insect

that, all unconscious of its danger, crawls under our feet? I speak

here with all due reverence for science, when it is science that demands

the sacrifice, and not the ostentatious vanity of superficial ignorance;

also with reserve, for we know how men's lives have been the price of

many trivial discoveries, and while we may lament, we must yield to the

relentless force of circumstances.

THE BUTTERFLY SYMBOL OF ART

[Illustration: T]

The butterfly is the symbol of the painter and the poet, and so I choose

it as my present symbol.

As it must first be a caterpillar, and devour greedily leaf, fibre, and

all that can be devoured by caterpillars, so the student must settle

down and devour all the knowledge that he can find, and crawl slowly

along unheeded, or be looked at perhaps with contempt.

As it changes its skin many times while growing, so must he change the

style of his admiration.

As it carries within it the wings and the colours in the egg state, so

the light wings of fancy and the pure instinct of colour must be born in

the painter, or it cannot be altogether trained: a perception which,

like the perception of music, will cause his nerves to quiver at a

discordancy, although he never handled a brush. 'Full many a poet never

penned a line,' and so with the painters who have lived and died with

their dreams unchronicled, the perception being too fine for the

material contact of earth, which must pollute, even while it embodies; a

perception ever running before the knowledge, ever torturing the

possessor with the innate consciousness of his errors before he has

learnt enough to perceive them.

Form is the grammar of art--a thing of measurements, which can be

tested, corrected, and satisfied by the exact laws which govern it; but

colour is too fitful a possession to be tested or controlled by rule or

education beyond a certain stage. We have it when we least expect it,

and find it slipping from our grasp, after a life-long experience

renders us confident of its control. It is a quality far too subtle to

be described by words; a sensitive gift which will torture the gifted,

as George Paul Chalmers, the Scottish Rembrandt, was tortured until his

spirit became unnerved with the galling longing, and his brush blundered

and would not finish. It is not the wings of the butterfly but the

golden dust which covers them, and which is so easy to rub away; not the

genius of the painter, but the precious garment of his genius, to which

genius is as much indebted as her mortal sisters are to the costumes of

a more terrestrial texture; too fine a fabric for earth looms to spin,

too delicate to be measured or shaped by fashion; and even as the

caterpillar must suffer the throes and self-efforts of Nature, and lie

under the wearied languor of spent exertion, so must the student painter

torture and weary his heart out with his many struggles to do that which

his instinct tells him must be.

Many caterpillars perish from their own efforts, many are destroyed by

enemies, many are killed by their own kind; and how like is all this

experience to that of the student painter!

And the critics, who fawn upon the rich and powerful, while they sneer

in their meaningless fashion at the student who adds poverty to the

crimes of daring and young impotency; who, besides being devoured by

the gnawing consciousness of failure, has the gall and wormwood of

witnessing greater ignorance, because talentless ignorance, in the

favoured, praised up as virtues; the bitterness to see them airing all

the paltry tricks which their money has brought them from the studios,

while his poor attempts have to be sent forth bare and ragged, because

he has had to find out all that they have had held up before them, for

what is given eagerly to the rich is charged double rate to the poor!

His dreams are as great as theirs, but theirs are nursed and dressed

while his are sent beggars to the icy atmosphere. The world says, What

right has he to attempt art, a clown, an apprentice, an ignorant

ragamuffin, while the pets have been to college and Paris life schools?

and it is very well for him to read up in his garret that men have risen

from his level, that Murillo was a half-naked peasant boy, Homer a poor

blind beggar, Claude a cook, Angelo a mason's apprentice, Mahomet a

camel-driver, and long lists of illustrious characters, originally

nothings like himself--if, when he appears and presumes on these great

precedents, the cold iron wedge of derision is driven into his heart. If

a man, his sense of purpose will support him through it all, but

precedent will not much console him.

And yet, what does it matter in the end what we have to do in order to

keep up the life, if the life is devoted to the thought? What though we

hold horses like Shakespeare, or blacken boots, or sweep chimneys, sell

cloth or make it up, prime doors and panels for others to decorate or

decorate them ourselves? If a painter he is a painter, whether he splits

up or imitates rails, cuts down or copies trees, whitewashes ceilings or

paints skies; it is all right and proper if he is keeping himself

devoted to the end. The dexterous workman is not the artist, tricks are

not talents, craft is not art, any more than the dress is the woman,

although men do buy tricks and pass by talents, as men often court and

marry dresses. In both cases they are all the better for the tricks and

the dressing: but keep the facts separate if you can.

It is the innate impulse and power that makes the painter in spite of

his own efforts otherwise, or the advice of his friends--the impulse

that forces him on in the face of all omens. As an artist he requires no

peculiar cut of hair or livery to mark him so. Art is above, therefore

quite careless of, keeping up her dignity. She is quite as ready to sit

and hob-nob with the beggar as with the baronet.

Again, if he succeeds in a very slight degree, for no man jumps at

success or perfection, he is like the little caterpillar crawling out of

his shelter and shadow to be pounced upon by the large caterpillars,

torn in pieces and gobbled up; for although most of us have generosity

enough to pity, and perhaps help, misfortune, how few are there with

sufficient philanthropy to crown success!

He will suffer all the pangs of conception to hear his infant called an

abortion, he must endure all the suggestions of puffed up, purse-proud

ignorance, which imagines it can comprehend, with a glance through its

gold glasses, what has taken months to plan. He must make the

alterations the patron may desire, although his whole being shudders at

the sight of a spoilt idea, or else starve; while the favoured

caterpillar can laugh them to scorn in his plenty, condemn the treason

of the poor, and deride the weakness of his necessity. If he remains

firm to himself he will be a martyr without the small consolation of the

martyr's niche; he will see his original failures ignored for pretty

imitations, and so he may struggle on to the bitter end, to be

forgotten, a dead chrysalis to be blown about by the world's winds, or

drifted under the wheels and crushed.

But what of all that? Whether he lives despised, or dies unknown, this

would be a grief to the glory worshipper, but not to the true painter,

because the consolation of the painter rests in a higher pleasure than

the trickster's craving after renown. The painter labours to satisfy his

ideal: he knows that fame is not the reward of merit, that it has

nothing to do with merit, although merit is sometimes crowned by

mistake. If he gains the laurel he knows that it is the accident of

chance, or the degradation of influence, and he wears it with the

indifference which it deserves, or blushes at the shame of it; for if by

influence it has been bought at too great a price, the cost of

self-respect, he must wear it with deceit, while he struggles for ever

after, not to please his own consciousness, but to prove to unbiassed

posterity that it was his by right of worth.

This is the image of fame to the true painter, a pillar whereon he is

set by blind admirers, who crowd about its base and shout at the image

they cannot see, while the strangers who look on at a distance behold

its imperfections bare and ghastly in the sunshine.

But still, for all the frost and the evil influences brought to bear

against the chrysalis, if it is to be, its time comes, and we see the

butterfly breaking from its gloomy death, and fluttering away gaily

through the summer air, happy, careless, beautiful, every hour an

effortless success, its sole mission pleasure, working good

unconsciously, rocking in the breast of the rose, rising to light up

some shady nook like a fleck of sunshine, hovering over the

lemon-coloured grain fields like animated scarlet poppy flowers,

settling down like winged pansies in our gardens, hovering overhead like

the spirit of the lovely things it sports with a golden gleam upon the

violet, a sapphire on the buttercup, a velvet page amongst the lilies, a

giddy flirt with all, blending, harmonising, contrasting wherever it

lights upon to kiss and beautify; thus it passes on, doing the duty of

its creation, aspiration, and fitful fancy. And so with the painter. He

may take up the traces of custom, chain himself with laws and methods,

go out with his buckler of tinsel, and his bindings of green withes, to

watch the sun setting, to reckon up its strength and classify its dyes,

gauge all the glories with his measuring tapes, and bring his weak

knowledge to the mighty test, when, even as he seeks for precedents, he

is caught up by the spirit, as Philip was of old, and borne, not to the

chariot of a great eunuch, but unto a chariot all his own, made of pure

beaten gold, lined with purple and crimson, and studded over with the

richest of gems, and thus rolled like a conqueror through the glowing

gateways of the eternal space, his frame quivering with the intoxicating

joy of that fleeting hour, his tinsel buckler and green withes

shrivelled up and cast behind, and his unshackled mind sent bounding

through the endless vistas of dreamland.

[Illustration: A GARDEN SCENE]

CHAPTER XIII

NATURE WORSHIP

[Illustration: L]ABOUR being done, we naturally look for reward, which

is the legitimate termination of work. This reward may be rest, or

wealth, or fame; it is the spur of our exertion, the caviare of our

ambition; upon it we exist through the famishings and the anxieties, the

hard roads and long miles; it is the destination which fills our

imagination from the very first step of our journey, else would we have

fainted twenty times over. It is the day's wage or week's wages which

supports the toiler or the workman through all the hours between him and

the hour of pay.

And this is not wrong. Buddha bids us seek truth and morality without

hope. The sentimentalist would say, 'Work for the love of labour;' but

we hold that this is not inducement enough. Walk hard, because fatigue

ought to be a pleasure? No! walk to produce the fatigue, that you may be

able to know to the full extent the delightful flavour of rest. Work, be

it at painting or writing, that you may see the idea embodied and

perpetuated; if it be at bricklaying, that you may see the wall rise up,

layer by layer; help the needy and afflicted, that you may comfort them;

raise the fallen, that you may see them rise.

Be pure and charitable and as sinless as you can with the help of God,

that you may stand holy in that holy Light. Use your influence to make

those purer around you, that you may have only the incense of purity

surrounding you now and hereafter. Thus, to be virtuous after the creed

of Gautama is work such as Hercules worked at the stables of Augeas; to

be virtuous, as Jesus Christ taught, is to be inspired with the presence

of God all through earth's life and stand unsubdued at its close.

When Hannibal, and after him Napoleon, crossed the Alps, Italy lay to

their hand; the certain prospect of Italy, fertile and rich, aided them

in the removal of fearsome barriers, imparted to them the daring to

brave toppling crags, slipping ice-ridged streams, appalling heights,

quivering avalanches, swaying to and fro as they passed, swinging over

in their rear with that muffled soul-sickening thud which they knew

meant a snowy grave to those behind. Italy, the grape-hung, the

sun-laved, was before them on the other side, with its wealth and

power--nay, it was with them, in their hunger and bitter cold, as the

presence of God is with the devout every hour of his earth-life.

But when Bonaparte came within sight of Moscow, the vision of which had

supported him and his famished army all through those awful icy leagues,

and beheld in the light of those blazing domes the destruction of his

hopes, then, and only then, the full bitterness of that winter march

began.

So with the warrior prince-leader of Israel, when he stood up face to

face with God and cried out in the passionate strength of his

man-thirst, 'Let me go over and see the good land'--the land he had

worked and walked so long to see, for which he had given up all the pomp

of the Egyptian court, and, still greater sacrifice, the erudite society

of the sumptuous priesthood, to consort with a nation of spiritless,

ignorant, and discontented slaves.

I like to embody this great leader of Israel, not as his countrymen knew

him when he led them out of the land of bondage, the snowy-bearded grave

statesman and law-giver, but as the Prince Rameses, the mighty Egyptian

Lord of Lords, the favoured son of the Queen Amense, always the

companion of philosophers and sages, hearing the petitions of his people

in the outer courts, driving his gold-embossed chariot between long

avenues of sphinxes, reviewing his countless hosts in the open plain

outside the great royal city of On, crowned victor as he swept home from

battle, over garlands of roses and lilies, with armies of white-vestured

priests of Ptah, dancing girls, singing maidens, and the sacred women of

Bast (the lady of Auchta), all surrounding with fumes of incense and

hymns of praise Egypt's pride Rameses the Mighty.

[Illustration: THE ANCIENT NILE]

I think of him in the palace of his adopted mother; on the terrace,

decorated with chaste designs of lapis lazuli, malachite, and precious

stones; sitting upon ebony-carved byssus-draped couches, Rameses, with

the royal lady, gazing over their good land. Away in the distance the

red-tinged hills lifted above the tawny sands; between the palace and

the Libyan hills are hordes of slaves brickmaking and temple-raising,

with a white-grey sky above them and choking dust all round; slaves

toiling on foot, mostly female; strong young women whom labour will not

tame; dark-skinned matrons who find a joy in that they have once more

sons to suckle, even in that hour of quenchless thirst; wrinkled-skinned

old women who have grown passive to rebuke, and deadened to the lash;

old men sweating and dropping dead or afaint, some digging trenches for

the fancy lakes, some dragging the stones that have come down the Nile.

The girls and boys are the brickmakers, and the strong men are the

drivers, copper-tinted Egyptians who sit on chairs which the strong

women bear, while others hold up the great sun-shades, or fan with

ostrich fans the heat which the lashing exercise brings upon them. It is

a good land. Nile spreads along in sight of all, prince and slave, with

its sweet treasures and its clouds of bird-life, and by its banks rise

those columned buildings. Colour is over all, rich tints in yellow,

blue, red, and black, grounded with white, symbolic in design, each tint

a law unchanging. Over red and white walls the fruit trees hang, and the

spreading Nile bears upon its breast the echoings of fertile gardens,

and the barges ever passing from the city of the dead to the city of the

living, pleasure boats with golden-wigged ladies and jewelled men, and

the sounds of instruments joining and jarring upon the groans of the

afflicted.

I think more of Moses as Rameses, discussing with his queen-mother that

vexing conundrum of the day, increasing Israel, than of Moses solving

the question later on. I seem to see his aged father and unknown mother

amongst that seething mass, hiding their secret between their hearts,

shouting with the crowd, Hosanna to the king of kings, their God-like

son. And then my vision shifts, and I see him taking leave of his

people, none there now who knew him in his royal pomp and splendid

manhood.

What a life of abnegation! Bred for a king, laying down his crown, happy

in his desert freedom, giving up his rest, daring in his faith, becoming

the chief of a horde of ignorant serfs and advocating their rights in

the throne-room--once his own--leading them out from the tyrant power,

yielding but a little when sorely tried, creating reason in brains all

reasonless, wandering through a land of doom, with his God ever beside

him, helping that mighty work. Think on the task of raising the serfs of

Russia to reason out their own condition and so help themselves!

Hundreds of earnest souls have been hard at the work for hundreds of

years, and yet they are still hundreds of years from the promised land.

Imagine a lower state, viler than any race you can bring up as an

example on earth's face, more hopelessly sunk in the satisfaction of

apathy and degradation, and you have not reached the moral level of

Israel when Rameses put forth his hand to lift them out of their slough:

slaves of centuries to be educated in forty years; slaves with all the

whip-checked vices of slavery let loose by an acquired power. The first

instinct of liberty was the beast instinct of destruction running and

tingling like mixed wines through every vein. Moses and Aaron, with the

Lord about and before them, led out of Egypt a congregation of

mind-crusted, unreasoning serfs.

But now his task is done and he can go to his well-earned repose; the

slaves and slave-binders are dead who came out of Egypt, and are buried

by the way; the rest are free men now, and under control. They have

their laws and obligations, which makes them a people; they have their

leaders appointed, which makes them a state. Pharaoh is a thing of the

past, Egypt a myth-land, Canaan the good country towards which their

wishes tend. Already have their souls crossed the Jordan; and though

they wear sack-cloth for thirty days on the plains of Moab for the old

man who has gone from them up the hill of Nebo, though their tears flow

apace, yet the strong men are grinding their steel, with their hearts

soaked in triumph and conquest.

Up the mountain the great old seer passed. I think Joshua supported him

up so far, to the foot of Pisgah, and then they parted. A thin mist was

creeping from the brow of the hill, and even as the warrior gazed it

caught the statesman, and drew him from the sight of all.

No man saw within that veil of mist, for God was there. Yes, once it

parted, when he reached the top. That mist was made of angels' wings.

They drew aside, and for a time permitted him to view the promised land,

and the Lord was with him, pointing it all out.

A voice from the mist of the angels' wings told him of the presence of

God, so he stood up, clutching to the rock beyond which he gazed, the

shadow of the mountain over the plains of Moab and the last fiery ray of

evening laving the land in front.

He saw all Gilead unto Dan, to the utmost sea, where the line of

unbroken amethyst crossed the scarlet clouds; Naphtali, Ephraim,

Manasseh, the valley of Jericho, and the city of palm-trees.

His back was to the sun, and for a moment it fell upon him, casting his

shadow over the hill-edge, a statuesque, white-clad, unbent figure, with

rolling tresses of grey and streaming beard, looking out.

Then the legions closed upon him and the sun went down.

To the poet the death of Moses is filled with glorious imagery. Nature

is here absorbing a grand portion of her own spirit to give it out again

to other souls. God is the mighty mover of all, but He is indefinite--in

the wind bearing melancholy sounds and bodes, in the waters lapping the

shingle or rushing over the great rocks, in the vague dreams which

possess him as he gazes out upon the countless planets, in the wild

yearning to be solved by that overpowering impregnation of silence.

To the painter it all comes in a vision of colour; it is a blending of

spirit harmonies, rainbow shades, a sense of the eye that embodies the

spirit into a definite pleasure. By faith he sees revelations, the

golden streets and crystal rivers, and, above all, the great prismatic

light.

To the utilitarian Nature represents a scheme of economy and utility. We

are one of a countless cluster of planets. The sun which shines over us

is but one of a vast chain of reflections and magnetic communications,

the moon is but one of many discs; the world swims in chaos; all partake

of the bountiful provision of an unchangeable law; not one world is to

be considered more than another, not one accident to be deplored, from

the combustion of a globe to the crushing of a worm, while it only

affects its _own destiny_. It was good that the Son of Man should die

for men, good for the minority to suffer, if by their pangs the harmony

of the majority is secured. Virtue is only according to circumstances;

morality is a thing of adjustment; there are no fixed laws of conduct.

If vice conduce to the happiness of men, then it has become a virtue; if

the removal of a man lead to the restoration of peace, then to kill him

is not murder. The end justifies the means: a Jesuitical policy, which

has been flung in their teeth as a sign of distrust; the policy of

England's Commonwealth, when Oliver Cromwell, with the other members of

Parliament, signed away the life of their king. To the utilitarian the

earth is a garden for the use of mankind; it is the religion, since men

began to herd together; it recognises only the Gods or God of the day.

It is the keynote to the sacred bond of Freemasonry. Love is good for

the community; set up love and friendship, and rear an altar to them.

Unity is well for man, so lay down all private likes and dislikes,

annihilate all personal speculations which may breed discord; for the

spirit of Truth as she hovers in mid-heaven has the hues of the

chameleon, and changes in shape to each eye. What I see, you cannot.

Therefore the fact must be carried by vote if you would be perfectly

utilitarian in your aims. The reformer is a disturber of concord always.

Cassandra disturbed Troy, Jesus Christ disturbed Jew and Gentile; so for

the sake of utilitarian peace Pilate washed his hands, and the

crucifiers had it all their own way.

Henry George is a utilitarian in principle, but as he speaks as yet in

the minority, albeit advocating the welfare of the majority, until men

are convinced as to his line of argument he is a disturber of the peace

of present society. Whether his scheme for the regulation of mankind

would be successful is as yet doubtful in the extreme, seeing that he

ignores all other means except his pet theory. As we find man at

present, poverty is in many cases a protection rather than a curse. With

passions paramount by ages of contamination, and habits confirmed,

opportunity would only sink them deeper in the mire. Drink reformers,

food reformers, crime reformers, have before them superhuman labour ere

the Henry George jubilee will be of utility to the lower strata.

Sanitation, knowledge, morality must be universally taught first, and

what is good will follow as a consequence. To us it seems that poverty

is of greater utility for the redemption of mankind than wealth. We

would see all men poor and sacrificing. It is better for the rich to

become poor than for the poor to become rich.

To the utilitarian Nature has a spirit, but it is a spirit of

convenience. Floods rush, not to destroy houses, but to water districts.

Hurricanes come, not to strew strands with wrecks and wasted lives, but

to carry off infections, clear the poisons from the atmosphere. Nature

is a great manufactory, where benefits are created for the use of man;

and the Spirit is the worker who is busily coining good for the greater

number. Trees are admired, not for the waving of the foliage, not for

the serpentine curvature of the branches, the half tones about the

boles, or glad tints on the leaves, but for the uses of that tree when

it is cut down. A true utilitarian is the direct antithesis of the poet

or painter.

To the agnostic Nature is a solemn image set up before the eye; the

veiled Isis, soulless, or endowed with a spirit unseen and therefore

unknown.

'Before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of

darkness.'--Job x. 21.

The agnostic does not deny God or the possibility of eternity; Genesis

is not a legend to be laughed at; soul is not to be disputed. Agnostics

only stand upon the platform of their senses; they know by geological

research that earth was not created in six days; they know by

astronomical observation that the sun and moon could not stand still,

that if the earth paused one second of time in its velocity it would be

destroyed--blotted out utterly from the clusters of stars; by

naturalistic knowledge they have proved that the fauna of the earth

could not be gathered together or carried inside the Ark; souls have not

returned to them from that dark land beyond the grave; if there be

secrets, death has locked them up, and they cannot get past it and

return to tell their tale.

They doubt not, because they know not, neither do they believe. Faith is

a sentiment, as love is, or fear, only built up on a more slender

foundation; what they can see and touch they testify to, all beyond that

is beyond them.

Some say that agnostic means atheist; it does not. There are no

atheists, nor could any human mind capable of reason be atheistic,

because to be one it must be convinced beyond dispute and declared

definitely that there is no futurity and no God, and the most that

incredulous science can assert is that there is no evidence palpable of

the existence of a God. The atheist would be a fool unredeemed and

unredeemable, like to the man who, shutting his eyes, shouts out

insanely that it is dark to everyone, whether it is or not. The agnostic

by research has proved that he knows nothing, and there he stops; there

may or may not be. If bold he takes his risk of that 'to be'; from the

evidences of the beneficent order of Nature, he trusts his case in the

unknown hands: if it is Providence, that Providence is too all-wise to

revenge ignorance; if it is chance, he counts upon the hour.

Youth and strength and beauty and health are the aims of life to strive

after, the golden hours of summer, when sunshine lights up the heart of

all creation, and man, with the plants, feels the divine instinct of

life surging in him. He pauses irresolute at the first stratum of

earth's crust; beneath that metal plate seethes the fire; that

represents to him the beginning. Yet he knows that it was not. The world

revolves the portion of a circle; yet why that circle of a sun-centre,

or that wider circle within which both suns and earths revolve, or what

the centre which controls the entire system of immensity may be, he

dares not affirm. Our lives are miracles, yet we are habituated to them,

and name them chance. That the earth revolves is no greater wonder than

that it should stop and roll again; yet that it revolves constantly and

only stopped once, is the point that they will not approve. They learn

that era after era the earth was destroyed, and species created without

connecting links. Theorists as mad in their dogmatism and desire to

prove evolution, as they consider the devotionalist to be in his

supernatural credences, try to hang facts upon threads and dovetail

corner-pieces and centres, but science gives no encouragement to theory.

The agnostic, to be consistent, must hold aloof from Darwinism as he

holds back from faith doctrines; he must be content to use his eyes,

ears, nostrils, fingers, and mouth. Instinct or surmise with him cannot

be sense.

It is a fair day and a blue sky. The mountains are piles of softest

velvet, grey, mauve, olive green, and bistre; a soft air that inebriates

the brain and shakes the petals of the flush-rose; a day amongst fine

days to be hereafter long remembered, for the woman of his choice has

listened to his words Eros-shafted, and yielded up her will to his

discretion; is she not a type of more than earth-life as she stands

before him in the clear lustre of her maidenhood love-glorified? It is

not flesh-worship which sways him now, for her beauty has about it to

him the sanctity of the religion he cannot receive; in the humbleness of

his awe-freighted triumph he could forget his naturalism and cry out,

'Be thou my God!'

Around them wafts the odour of gardens and fields, the spirit of the

flowers is floating around, the soul of the sunbeam is kissing them

both, the union of outer beauty and inner life wraps them in the

all-pervading, everlasting folds; for who dare say that the soul of a

perfume can fade? His spirit clasps with her spirit, and both soar away,

with the multitudinous souls of things gone by, and things drifting on,

up those ladders of light into the presence of God. In this moment the

agnostic is an agnostic no longer, for he has seen heaven, whether he

believes it hereafter or not.

So love has opened to him the vision of St. John. It is woman who has

become the typified divinity, love which embraces faith and hope,

casting out self, yet surrounded by barricades of fears; it is an

instinct of humanity, as pity, grief, or that innate combination which

modern philosophy terms superstition, an elevated instinct of humanity,

for it is not the woman-flesh which inspires him with this rapturous

awe; it is the magnetic influence of the woman-soul over the man-soul,

and this the agnostic feels, in spite of all his former scientific rant

about body and brain.

At the present hour we stand on the threshold of mysteries, with the

rusted key in our hands which will open the closed door. Four thousand

years ago man halted here, with the key in his hand, only it was new and

glittering then, and used to that easily turned lock. Behind that door

waited legions of souls, upon the opening by man, when they would come

and tell him all that lay beyond the good land, his by right of gift,

theirs by right of heritage, and they brought with their knowledge great

power. That was the hour when myriads of agencies--each agency strong

enough to stop a planet--waited on the voice of the man who held the key

of the portals between their worlds and his; that was the hour when

Abraham and Lot spake with angels, when Pharaoh bent his scientific neck

before the miracles of calamity; that was the hour when the pillar of

fire passed through the sea, and unseen forces swept back the water till

they reared up great protecting walls--wondrous walls of sea-shells and

conglomerate, like some rare kind of polished marble, the specimens

alive but struck death-still with amazement, the roaring hushed as they

passed under the arching crests, a gleam of starry space far above, and

a glare along the watersides from that crimson pillar in front.

That was the hour when familiarity made remonstrance possible, and man

gauged the strength of his science against Almighty prescience, as he

does still, only then prescience replied directly to reason, and power

refuted by immediate evidence of cause and effect, for then reason did

not wilfully close its eyes upon possibility, and man owned the

superiority of his Creator.

It was a good land when the angels of God visited man upon the plains,

when the voice of God was heard within the mountains, when Enoch, by

preparation, body and soul, became spiritual enough to dispense with the

services of death; when Moses went up, with clear eye and upright head,

to make the last peace-offering--himself, on Mount Nebo: Moses who by

philosophy had rendered his mind fit to consort with the inner circle

around the throne, who by abnegation had rendered his body fit to offer

up the last great sacrifice for his people in the land of darkness, with

soul ready to be redeemed.

Ah! what an audience waited upon that solemn change, upon the dimming of

that eagle eye, the relaxing of that upright figure! No man can find his

grave--no man knows his end; yet we may conjecture that as he looked and

longed, with his body chained to Mount Nebo and his spirit flying over

the land, held to the mortal portion but by a thread, as the falcon is

held to wrist, an elastic cord that elongated as he flew, waxing thinner

as it farther stretched, until it was almost unseen; then death came

from that white-draped crowd, draped in the red robe of man's passionate

desire, flitting over, like a gleam of sunset, from the midst of

cherubim and seraphim, angel and archangel, flitting over his 'abeiyeh'

with gleaming fingers, lighting up his 'kefiyeh' as it sought for the

source of that unseen cord--the shears of death--red, golden shears have

clipped the link, and Moses is in Canaan, the heaven of his present

desires, and the supine clay is being attended to.

Nearly two thousand years ago the climax came to all that mystic

intercourse: from the supernatural unseen Teacher, God became the

natural sure friend and teacher of man, and so He has continued ever

since--amongst men when they like to have Him, imparting the knowledge

of the supernatural to those who choose to learn, holding out a key all

unrusted, in exchange for the key which we have ourselves left to lie

and become thickly clotted with rust.

There are angels passing still, for men have used that key; when the

lives are pure and the habits simple, when charity extends to wider

circles than humanity, and mercy embraces all creation; at times and in

obscure places, where God can speak, the Son of God instruct, and the

angels work miracles, as they did of old, where faith is paramount and

science can only gibber and scoff outside.

It is a good land to all; even to the agnostic, as he waits for

darkness, or annihilation, the sun shines hope, the west wind breathes

peace, the dew speaks promise when he walks abroad. Science is like the

mole, it must bore; it has no affinity with moving creation, it has no

interest with life or hope, it lives and battens with the ghouls amongst

the dead; yet the deepest borer in philosophy is but a man, and the man

part of him must enjoy light as long as science keeps from blinding him

entirely.

But to the devotionalist, the Christian, the God-worshipper, what a land

of bounty it is! I do not mean those narrow souls who dwell in a vale of

tears, those dyspeptic souls who can no more enjoy this world than they

will the next, but the man who honours God sufficiently to know that all

He created must be perfect--this world for man, the other worlds for

those who inhabit them, heaven only fair to the spirit to whom this

earth is good. Are not the summer clouds as they float through the

atmospheric belt the emblems of the angel forms which are ever passing

to and fro in the state beyond--the hills, and rivers, and valleys, the

ever-changing landscapes and aerial effects, all created for the

pleasure of man by the good Father, all symbolic and typical of the

pleasures of the future? It matters little what are the individual or

sect ideals of that Creator or futurity toward which they are wending,

whether they sit down in ecstatic contemplation, in the midst of

Nature's splendour, with the moment of final merging into the great

light before them, or look forward to that future when individuality is

retained and time alone is merged into eternity. To the man who believes

in immortality this earth smiles her sweetest, because there are no

melancholy surmises mingling with the present enjoyments. Virtue appeals

alike to believers and unbelievers as the wisest guide to follow, the

consequences of departure from her laws being immediate and independent

of the fear of future punishment. It is not hell which appals the

intellectual sinner and deters him from crime, but earth; manhood, not

morality; the pride of honour rather than the hope of everlasting

reward. But to the hopeless, or spirits who cannot rest upon a hope,

what are the pleasures of time but days spent in a condemned cell to the

doomed? Every sunset which glorifies the world is a day stolen from

precious existence. They glance backwards upon the past with yearning

pathos, to the hour when boyhood bounded along the track of life, and

religion was the pabulum of custom and Sunday-school the turning point

of the week. How foolish it all appears in their intellectual advance,

yet how joyous; with what hopeless envy they hear of the ambition of

young men and women, who rest their fame upon a class-prize or the

applause attending a choir-concert! Ah! those were days when the Son of

Man came near enough almost to be seen with the earthly eyes, and the

divine messages were palpable.

To the Christian poet and painter nature appears animated by the spirit

of a deathless Creator; the body dies, the seasons fade, but another

body as real comes forth, and nature spiritualised is revived as the

spring drapes the limbs of winter.

To the poet and painter to whom this earth means all, to whom the spirit

of nature is but the Greek soul that goes out with the change, never

more to be revived unless in the soul left behind, it is all beautiful,

but filled with woe; a soul of spring dying before the breath of summer,

summer shrinking before the chill of autumn, autumn crouching under the

iron heel of winter; death over all--death and despair; and this is the

creed of the agnostic.

But to believers, what is it but a continuation of everlasting joy? In

pain they see the blessed surcease; in sorrow the golden alleviation; in

death, the balmy sleep, and afterwards the glorious waking up; earth,

the garden of the Lord, where æsthetic tastes are gratified, where love

is generated and friendships are formed to be continued and cemented in

eternity, where soul-philosophy, and not pitiful brain-logic, is begun

to be followed out without an end, where problems are given to be

hereafter solved.

Is it not a good land to poet, painter, utilitarian, agnostic, and

devotionalist? When the sun rears from the ocean-bed and rides over the

fleecy clouds of morning, while all the ground is teeming with the

silver evaporation of pearly night dews; to the poet and painter as they

watch the tender colour-shafts, the subtle play of light and delicate

blue-grey shadows on the meadows where the cattle graze, over the

furrows that the plough is turning up, amongst the dancing ripples

adown the waste of heaving waters.

A good land, despite the evils which erring man has brought upon it--the

drink-devil who riots in palace and den and wanders even to the verge of

pellucid springs, the demon who is sapping the manhood from the human

race, who is making bare and bleak the fairest spots, the most

consecrated things on earth, whose lank talons spread beyond the grave

and rob Paradise of its rarest flowers; despite the smoke-fiend who is

aiding and abetting his brother drink to enervate the brain of workers;

the devils called luxury and indulgence in all their thousand disguises,

whether it be in eating, or drinking, or dressing; despite the vampire

called poverty, who squats hand in hand with crime, attended by despair

and utter misery.

A good land, where we can cast aside the trammels of cities and get out

to see it; where we can forget our brothers in iniquity, our brothers in

sorrow and starvation, depths which charity cannot cure, or

investigation eradicate, which rise up like black waves against our

stemming and threaten in the future to engulf us all.

A good land, where we can abnegate desire, learn to be poor as Christ

was poor in order to correct poverty; where we can conquer ourselves,

lay down the most clinging habit, for the sake of mankind, and by

example teach others at the lower level to be content with God's air,

and God's light, and go out to get them; where we can live with less

comfort, fewer tastes, and greater simplicity.

A good land, where the great social problem is solved and self-abolished

for cause, and men, proud of being poor, as now they grow arrogant in

wealth, join hands as little children, forgetting that bat-ghoul

philosophy, taking the gifts which God has given to them as the

foretaste of better things in store.

A good land here; but what is there to come, where Art begins?

INDEX

Abbey, 157

A B C of art, 115

Aberdonian clipper, 146

Academies, 96

Actions of nature, 28

Adoration in art, 255

Age of romance, 281

Agnosticism, 306-9

Aikenhead (Major), 97

Aissouas, the, 107

'Ally Sloper's Half Holiday,' 166, 167

Alma-Tadema, his work, 80, 193, 194, 273

Almanack, Comic, 166

Anatomy, 95

Ancient Egypt, style of, 299-301

'Ansidei Madonna,' its value, 231

Apocalypse, Albert Dürer's, 156

Ark, dimensions of, 135

Art, realism in, 34;

fashion in, 90;

instinct of, 98;

lessons in, 102;

savage, 102, 214-16;

Eastern, 105;

false, 107;

true aim of, 108, 252;

A B C of, 115;

uses of, 117-18;

practical, 157;

individualism in, 160;

influence of Turner on illustrative, 163;

sacred, 250;

sacrifices of, 252;

imagination in, 254;

adoration in, 255;

soul in, 255;

comic, 260;

Dutch, 268;

dignity in, 268, 293;

symbol of, 291

Art course, time of, 116

Artist and butterfly, 291

Artists as readers, 273

Assyria, styles of, 60

Astronomy, artistic, 276

Atheism, 307

Australian experience, 108-12

Backgrounds, old style, 7

Barnard (F.), 157

Bayeux Tapestry, the, 139

Beauty, 209, 257;

spirit of, 289

Bell, his 'Mary Queen of Scots,' 45

Bellini (Giovanni), 238

Bewick, 159, 160, 173

Black and gold marble, 189

'Black and White,' 165

Blake (William), 35, 89

Blemishes in marbles, 195

Blunders of science, 278

Boats, Egyptian, 136

Body colour, 92

Bolton, 171

Book, an illustrated, 152, 172-5

---- plates, 276

Books on painting, 83

Boots and feet, 200, 201, 203

Botany, artistic, 284

Botticelli (Sandro F.), 240

Bough (Sam), 82

Breydenbach's Travels, 155

Bronzino (Angelo), 240

Brushes, 69

Buddha, 298

Burnett on painting, 127, 129

Burns (Robert), 211

Byron (Lord), 89

Cameron (Hugh), 47, 48

Canvas, preparing a, 179

Carlyle (Thomas), 20, 87, 101

Cassell & Co., 155, 169

Centre line, the, 225

Chalmers (George Paul), 82, 239, 246, 292

Champs and champing, 183, 184

Chatto (W. A.), 150, 152

Chatto & Windus, 166

Chemistry of colour, 92

Chevreul, his book, 115

China collecting, 273

Classification of light, 129

Coleridge, 89, 217

Colour, body, 92;

chemistry of, 92

---- perception, 269

Colours, blending of, 59;

the primaries, 58

Combing, 181, 182

Comfort in ornament, 224

Comic Almanack, 166

---- art, 260

Consistency in ornament, 225

Constable (John), 86, 160

Contrast of ships, 142-5

Contrivance for lighting, 18

Copying, benefit of, 35;

its use and abuse, 81

Correggio (Allegri, A. da), 85, 240, 247

Cox (David), 91

Crane (Walter), his work, 155, 173, 273

Creswick (Thomas), 161

Critics, 80

Cromwell, 305

Cross-bars, 184

Cross-hatching, 155

Cruelty of science, 290

Cruikshank (George), 157, 160, 166, 167, 260

'Daily Graphic,' 170

'Death of Procris,' 246

Decoration, 208

Designing, 114

Details, 77;

of foregrounds, 268

Dignity in art, 268, 293

Distortion of vision, 33

Dobson (Austin), 150

Doré (Gustave), 82, 89, 95, 160, 168-171, 248

Dove marble, 191, 192

Dow (Gerard), 243

Drawing, 114;

on the wood, 157

Dress, 99, 196;

modesty in, 201;

fashion in, 203-7

Drummond (William), 195

Dumas (A.), fils, 220

Dürer (Albert), 34-9, 44, 52, 155-7, 242, 274

Dutch Art, 268

Eastern Art, 105

Economy in Ornament, 224

'Editions de Luxe,' 175

Egypt, style of, 60

---- ancient, style of, 299-301

Egyptian boats, 136

'Eight Bells,' 113

Eliot (George), 220

'English Illustrated Magazine,' 165

Etching and Etchers, 41

Ex Libris, 272, 276

Ex Libris Society, 173

Exhibitions, 96, 261

Expression, 23

Eyck (Jan van), 243, 247

Faed (Thomas), 47, 82

Failures, the benefit of, 112

Faith, 312

False art, 107

Fashion in art, 90;

in dress, 203-7

Feeling, 28

Fildes (Luke), 82

Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, 247

First coating, 178

Foreground flowers, 285

Foster (Birket), 173

---- (John), 53

Francesca (Piero della), 238

Frith, his 'Derby Day,' 87

Fuligno (Niccolo di), 247

Furniss (Harry), 167

Gainsborough (Thomas), 94

Galleys, Greek, 137

Garvagh 'Madonna,' the, 232, 234

George (Henry), 305

Gillray, 260

Glazing, 81

Goethe, 89

Goodwin Sands, 148

Gradation of shadows, 124

Graining, 86, 176, 178

Grammar of Art, the, 292

Grandi (Ercole de Giulio), 247

Granite, 192

'Graphic' (Daily), 170;

(Weekly), 165

Greek ideals, 199

---- ships and galleys, 137

Grey, the quality of, 18

---- paper, the value of, 130

Ground for black and gold marble, 189

---- for maplewood, 187

---- for oak, 180

Gum tree, the, 110-2

Hag, the, 46

Half-tones, 19

Hals (Frans), 243

Hamerton, 41

Hannibal, 296

Harmony, 128

'Harper's Monthly,' 165

Harvey (Sir George), 82

Hatching work, 92

Hatherell (William R. I.), 165

Hayden (Dr. G.), 41

'Henri Grâce à Dieu,' 140

Henry the Eighth, 241

Heraldry, 276

Herdman, 82

Herkomer, 41

Hobbema, his work, 248

Hogarth (William), 157, 159, 160, 268

Holbein (Hans), his work, 241, 244

Homer, 218-220, 293

Hunt (Holman), 63

---- (William), 15, 36, 54

Huxley, 214

Illusive Effects, 123

Illustrative art, Turner's influence on, 163

Image, the, 29

---- of Fame, the, 295

Imagination in art, 254

Imitation of nature, 28

Impressionists, school of, 53

Impressions of pictures, 230

Individualism in art, 160

Insects, 289

Instantaneous effects of nature, 126

---- photography, 29, 164

Instinct of art, 98

Irving (Henry), 222

Israels (Jozef), 64

Italian marbles, 192

---- school of painters, 128

Jackson, 152

Job, 102

Judgment in painting, 270

'Julius II. (Pope),' 234

Kingsley (Charles), 216

Knotting, 177

Knowles (Davidson), 145

Knox (Dr.), his work, 115

Landscape Photography, 42

Lastman (Peter), 35

Lawrence (Sir Thomas), 19

Leech (John), 260

Leighton (Sir F.), 80

Lessons in art, 102

Libraries, arrangement of, 275

Lichens, mosses, &c., 287

Life and nature studies, 116

Light, classification of, 129

---- and shadow, proportions of, 17;

the effect of, 127

Lighting, 16;

contrivances for, 18

phenomenal laws of, 120

Lippi (Fra Filippo), 240, 247

Lockhart, 82

Lorenzo da San Severino, 247

'Lorna Doone' (Blackmore's), 164

Lorraine, Claude, 248, 249, 293

Loutherbourg (P. J. de), 146

Love the revealer, 309

Low-toned School, the, 64

Macdonald, 82

Madonna, Ansidei, its value, 231

'Magazine of Art,' 165

Mahogany, to grain, 188, 189

Mahomet, 293

Mannerism, 160

Mantegna (Cav. Andrea), 247

Maple wood, to grain, 187, 188

Marble, black and gold, 189;

blemishes in, 195;

method of working black and gold, 189-191

Marbles, Italian, 192

Masonry, 276

Matsys (Quintin), 243

Max (Gabriel), 250, 251

Mechanical workers, 126

Memory, 226

Michael Angelo (Buonarroti), 15, 80, 246, 247, 293

Millais (Sir John), 52, 80, 89

Millet (J. F.), 54

Milton, 101

Modern painters, 66

Modesty in dress, 201

Modjeska (Madame), her art, 208

Mora, his photographic work, 27

Moroni, his work, 234, 237, 238, 240

Moses, as Prince Rameses, 299-304;

death of (word picture), 311

Murillo (Bartolomeo Esteban), 179, 189, 240, 242, 293

Napoleon, 298, 299

National Gallery, 229

Nature, imitation of, 28;

sketching from, 31;

how to approach, 73-5;

instantaneous effects of, 126;

the guide to taste, 189;

different methods of seeing, 313, 314

Nature worship, 297, 304

Nimmo (John C.), 236

Notes, shorthand, 83;

how to take, 103, 104

Oak graining, the art of, 180;

tools required for, 181

Oil painting, 115

Operators, photographic, 6, 7

Orchardson, 47, 48, 49, 50, 80

Original ideas, 101

Ornament, 211-3;

comfort in, 224;

economy in, 225;

consistency in, 225

Outline work, 154

Over-graining, 184

Overwork, danger of, 71

Painters, modern, 66;

Italian School of, 128

Painting, books on, 83;

water-colour, 92;

oil, 115;

judgment in, 270

Paper, a scrap of, 284

Parsons (Alfred), 157, 163

Paton (Sir J. Noel), 82, 273

---- (Waller), 82

P. and O. Liners, 144

Perspective, 94

Perugino (P. V.), 36

Pettie (John), 47, 80

Phoenicia, 219

Photographic operators, 6, 7

Photography, instantaneous, 29, 164;

landscape, 42

Picture, what to seek in a, 258

Pictures, the buying of, 91;

impressions of, 230

Pilkington, 34

Piombo (S. del), 247

Poliphili, the, 155

'Pope Julius II.,' 234

Popularity, 245

'Portrait of a Tailor,' 234

Posing, 12

Poussin (G.), 248

Practical art, 157

Pre-Raphaelitism, 63;

mistaken efforts of, 126

Primaries, the, 58

Priming, 177

'Procris, Death of,' 246

Proportions of light and shadow, 17

'Proserpina,' 72

Public opinion, 271

'Punch,' 166

Rameses, Prince (Moses), 299-304

Raphael, 36, 91, 231-5, 251

Rat-tails, 182, 183

Reade (Charles), 176, 177

Realism in art, 34

Reflection, 255, 256

Relief, 128

Rembrandt, 20, 23, 35, 39-42, 45-50, 65, 86,

129, 157, 159, 234, 239, 240, 243-5

Reni (Guido), 238, 239

Repose, 256

Retouching, 20

Reuwich (Erhard), 155

Reynolds (Sir J.), 15, 19, 83, 236

Riggers, 185

'Rivers of France' series, 162

Road, effect of light upon, 127

Roman ships, 137

Romance, age of, 281

Rosa (Salvator), 78, 85, 248

Rubens (Sir Peter Paul), 15, 19, 80, 85, 238, 240, 243

Rules, 79

Ruskin (John), 32, 53, 56-8, 65, 66, 70-2,

83-7, 91, 101, 179, 186, 193, 239, 244, 249

Sacred Art, 250

Sacrifice of art, 252

Sandals, 204

Sarony, his photographs, 27

Sarto (Andrea del), 239, 240

Savage art, 102, 214-7

Science, blunders of, 278; cruelty of, 290

Scott (David), 89

'Scribner's Monthly,' 54

Scumbling, 81;

for oak, 181

Seavey, his backgrounds, 27

Second coating, 178

Shadows, gradation of, 129

Shakespeare, 70, 101, 104, 160

Shelley, 73, 89

Ships, 133, 134, 140, 161;

Greek, 137;

Roman, 137;

contrast of, 142-5

Signorelli (Luca), 247

Sketching from nature, 31

Sky pictures, 280, 282-4

Small (William), 157, 165

Social problems, 314-5

Soul in art, 255

Spagnoletto, 242

Spirit of beauty, 289

Stages of painting, 67;

of the globe, 279, 280

Stanfield (W. C.), 146

Stanley (H. M.), 29

Stars, 277

Stippling, 92

Stirling-Maxwell (Sir W.), 236

'Stones of Venice,' 71

Studio visiting, 88

Style, 82

Styles, 184

Subject, confidence in, 221

Subtlety, 217

Swinburne, 217

Symbol of art, 291

Teniers (David), 35, 47-9, 243, 268

Third coating, 178

Thomson (D. C.), 150

Thomson (Joseph), 29

Tiepolo, 246

Time for art course, 116

Tintoretto, 80, 85, 247, 263, 264

Titian, 15, 85, 91, 247, 263, 264

Tone, 81

Tones, half, 19

Tools required for oak graining, 181

Torchlight, effect of, 121

Trees, 286, 287

True aims of art, 108, 252

Tunny, 53

Turner (J. M. W.), 32, 65, 70, 86, 157, 161, 173, 244, 248, 249;

his influence on illustrative art, 163

Tyndall, 214

Uses of Art, 117, 118

Utilitarianism, 305, 306

Vandyke (Sir A.), 36, 80, 243, 244

Velasquez, 236, 240, 241, 247

Viking craft, 138, 139

Vinci (Leonardo da), 115, 246

Vision, distortion of, 33

Walnut, how to grain, 188, 189

Water-colour painting, 92

Weyden, 243

Whistler (J. McNeill), 20, 86, 91, 236, 245

Whitman (Walt), 44, 45, 217

Wilkie (Sir David), 50, 243

Wohlgemuth (Michael), 35

Wood, drawing on the, 157

Word-painting, 303, 304, 311

Wordsworth, 89

Worth, 99, 100

Wyllie (C. W.), 165

Youth and Age, 313

Zola, 43, 44, 221

Zurbaran (Francisco), 242

Zwanenburg, 35

THE END

PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE

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[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Only, not to the encouragement of lazy habits; at times (for the

sake of practice) a painter ought to draw the most minute point-detail

with the pencil, as a singer practises his scales; otherwise, for the

object, the photo is most to be relied upon for truth in all, _except

in perspective_.

[2] For an example of what I mean, see the effects in 'Choice Blends'

in 'The Idler'.

[3] See 'Specimen Days and Collects,' by Walt Whitman, page 306 of

Collects. Want of room prevents me giving the specimen in full, and I

dare not mutilate such a literary masterpiece.

[4] See 'Mary Queen of Scots,' by Bell--last scene.

[5] The snow scenes are exquisite, and one exhibited, of a camp fire

with figures, a perfect triumph of misty refinement; the faces seen

through the smoke particularly to be observed. I would also call the

reader's attention to his cattle studies, and the printing done on

rough hand-made paper--flat and like sepia and Indian-ink work, only

far more refined than hand-work could be.

[6] Some days before the death of Millet, a stag was chased by hunters

and dogs into a neighbour's garden and butchered before the dying

man's gaze. 'I take it as an omen,' he said mournfully, and prepared

for the earth-end.

[7] Esther i. 6.

[8] I have seen this picture since writing these remarks, but without

changing my opinion concerning it.

[9] As a worker of broad effects, I lay myself open to be charged with

bigotry when I condemn the pre-Raphaelites, and accept the risk.

[10] See _Life and Nature Studies_.

[11] I called attention to the marvellous medicinal virtues of this

Eucalyptus-tree long before it was generally accepted by the Faculty.

See 'Picturesque Australasia' and 'A Colonial Tramp,' &c.

[12] _See_ 'A New Guinea Village,' p. 125.

[13] _See_ Frontispiece: 'A New Zealand Fern Gully.'

[14] See also _A Treatise on Wood Engraving_, by Chatto & Jackson, p.

46.

[15] The same excuse applies to this present work.

[16] The numbers in this chapter are those of February 1892.

[17] George Paul Chalmers, an Edinburgh artist, is the only colourist

who really followed Rembrandt in his method. He used sometimes to take

sixty sittings to one portrait, and hardly ever finished any of his

works, so fastidious was he; yet as far as he perfected he was very

perfect as a colourist.

* * * * *

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

thum-bhole=> thumb-hole {pg 68}

thes ame=> the same {pg 191}

Niccolo of Fuligno;=> by Niccolo of Fuligno; {pg 247}

No. 35, Titian; 'Mercury=> No. 35, by Titian; 'Mercury {pg 247}

Savage art, 102, 214-1=> Savage art, 102, 214-7 {pg index}