serious obstacles in the conditions of modern society-obstacles, moreover, which seem ever growing-to the spreading of the noblest artfeeling even among the educated, and that just complaints may be made against the art, and still more against the criticism of art of the present day, taken as a whole.

There is a quantity of work turned out as fine art in which there is no pretence or shadow of an aim at high intention, and, though recognised by all who have a fine taste as worse than useless, choking up the better work and overcrowding the market with pictures which degrade art, it has a bad influence on the public, even if only by counteracting the right effect of good work. But besides this spurious art, there is some wrong condition in our social life which makes the right influence Art has had on highly civilised societies in which she has flourished, very difficult to produce on the masses nowadays; and it is useless to think of a great school of art if we ignore the fact that it is out of the essence of a people, not from a crust-like, superadded culture, such great schools arise. Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh,' and it is out of the emotions, out of the sensibilities, but mostly out of the religion of a people, its art springs.

Undoubtedly we have two or three great men among our artists, poet-painters whose work would hold its own in all times and in all schools, also many earnest workers who imitate nature faithfully, and a few singularly gifted decorators; still all those who have studied Art as she flourished in artistic nations must agree that this is not an artistic age. The gratification of the sense of the beautiful is not essential to our well-being or our happiness; ugliness does not offend us seriously. It is true great struggles are being made through a desire for general culture and wide liberal sympathies to seek and find the beautiful, but that instinct which makes things sightly without a struggle has left us. The poet Morris and a few other decorators and architects have landed some of the richer class beyond the horrors of aniline dyes and the depressing architecture of London streets: still aniline dyes remain a success, and Belgravia and South Kensington, hideously dull in their monotony, and vulgar in ostentatious and useless size, are fashionable, are daily deadening the sense of the beautiful in the rising generation brought up in their streets and squares. Here and there an artistic house appears, a spot to be measured by the foot, compared with the miles of dismal houses built by contract for as small a sum of money and as costly an appearance as are compatible. Utility and convenience are often used as pleas for ugliness; but if ugliness inspired the mental discomfort which it does in artistic nations, ugliness would not succeed even if found to be useful and convenient. It would not succeed if the opposing dislike was strong enough to be a force. If ugliness produced the jar on the ordinary educated English mind which dirt, untidiness, or an absence in surroundings of the respectable" element produces, modern

external life would not be ugly, for the practical reason that a jar on the mind or eye unhinges the thoughts and spoils the temper, and therefore interferes with the work of life. No; what might be called artless art has left us, and we have done our best in India and other countries with which we have come in contact to destroy that instinct for beauty.

About four years ago, it was said, there were only two shawls in the whole of Cashmere to be bought which were free of the violence of aniline dyes, and two years ago some English went to an Indian gaol where carpets are made, and found the natives not only imitating English patterns and colours, but copying English imitations of Persian carpets! We have but to go to the Baker Street bazaar or the Oriental Warehouse to see that half the modern Japanese work is being spoilt by arsenic greens, and that element of haste and hurry in the work so utterly destructive of all beauty.

What is it in the modern European life which has extinguished the natural wholesome love of beauty? Can we trace it solely to the eager, greedy way in which we pursue the passion for making money? Mr. Ruskin's writings suggest this to be the case, but surely, this being the unlovely squalid though exciting passion it is, it can hardly have the strength to carry out a work as completely as the eradication of beauty in the external life of the masses has been carried out in the last century. In England we can, perhaps, trace much to the influence of the Puritans, who, with their wicked destroying of all that attracted the senses, possessed undoubtedly the beauty of moral strength; and, though possessing it in some pride and ostentation, moral beauty was and is felt to be so necessary to the perfecting of life, that the Puritans' influence still remains a power. But much of the wholesomeness seems to have ebbed out of it.

Somehow it has become strangely mixed up and twisted into the utilitarian notions of our middle class, giving a moral force to feelings which are selfish and stupid. It is probable that one of the chief reasons why the monstrous tameness and ugliness of modern buildings are not tempered by any accident of prettiness is because the ghost of the Puritan still hovers near his descendant the utilitarian, and preserves his work from any hint of remote beauty, on the ground that sin and beauty are almost synonymous.

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There is a story that Mr. Tennyson protested with a builder at Freshwater against the ruthless cutting down of trees. Why do you cut down the trees?' said Mr. Tennyson. Build your houses a few yards back, and you could save them. Trees are beautiful things.' 'Trees is ornaments,' replied the builder. What we wants is utility.'

The strength and stubbornness of such ideas lie in the conviction -though of course not reasoned out or defined in the minds of the builders, or rather of their customers-that usefulness is moral and beauty immoral. As with the masses the art-instinct has departed,

and with it the necessity for beauty, now the power of understanding any reason for entertaining serious thought about this instinct is wanting. One thing is certain the Puritans and other causes have done their work so well, leaving us such mighty agents for ugliness in the persons of the utilitarians,' that the great worth of the feeling for beauty requires preaching most emphatically, strange though it may seem to have to insist on what Nature, if left to herself, preaches so eloquently through all hours and all seasons. The bluntness in seizing, for practical use, and for practical education, the truth that beauty is divine, is a difficulty by no means confined to the middleclass stamp of mind. Many leading intellects are wanting in that harmony, that completing of their whole nature which the culture of the beautiful in life, as well as in art, goes so far to produce. It is an element in the mind like the presence often of a child in a house. Its influence rounds off the whole, and, by connecting seemingly discordant elements, tunes the mind to a sense of completeness, and tends to impress on our minds those wider harmonies in nature which are links between our restricted human powers and the infinite.

How is this value of beauty to be preached? How are those devoid of the instinct and sense of it to be converted? It may be argued that if we remain still an unartistic nation it is not for want of artists, decorators, exhibitions, and writing on art, all of which abound in such profusion. Modern life among the rich seems to have gone mad about art. Perhaps it is this very fussiness which proves how superficial the interest is. It is when the reality of a taste goes that dilettantism creeps in.

Setting aside the class which, if it likes, can pass its life in play, can it be said truly that our present art has any real place in the serious interests of society? has it a respectable raison d'être in the world? We fear not; we fear society may be said at present to flirt only with Art, not to marry her, not to knit her into the earnest real life of every-day duties; consequently society neither expects from Art an elevating help in education, nor looks to her for anything more than for a passing amusement. A jar is felt by those who really love Art by the attitude society takes with regard to her. There is a want of true sensitiveness as to the high position she is capable of taking. Society is not strung with the finest fibres with regard to her. It is strange there should be this coarseness of fibre and want of earnest study of the things we learn through the eye when there is so much delicacy and subtlety in the study of thought. It is a suggestive fact that we, as a nation, have our minds educated, but not our eyes. We can think, but we cannot see. Nations who can hardly think at all can see much better than we do, and produce without effort beautiful things in art which, with all our labour and training and academical knowledge, we cannot rival, always excepting the work of our few great men.2

Perhaps the work which approaches in charm nearest to what we have called

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Another curious fact about Art is the separateness of her position in England, the way she seems to be only really alive in a clique— this, considering with what labour art is followed by the few whose vocation, and the many whose trade she is. To most of the public, who 'do' the Academy and the Grosvenor,' the operation, though a little less painful, is as separate from their real interests as a visit to the dentist would be. On the same principle that so much of the world keeps its religion for Sundays and has done with it when Sunday is over, most of the crowd in the galleries' does' its art there and nowhere else, the same relief being felt when church and art are disposed of, the difference being a greater courage in expressing dislike of pictures than dislike of church. Still, here are an everincreasing number of men spending a most laborious life in the production of pictures and statues-men who are generally admitted to be up to the average in intellect and far above the average in sensibility; and here is the public thinking it a duty to crowd to see the fruits of all this labour, and paying large prices to possess pictures. Undoubtedly art takes a serious position in the lives of a large number; not so earnest or so fervent as in the days when it represented the religious feeling of nations, still far more engrossing than is warranted by the aimlessness of most of the results of this labour, a labour far more difficult than is supposed by the outsiders who know nothing and care less about it. The producing of even third-rate pictures and statues is so laborious an occupation that, though it may be thought dull by many artists themselves to consider the influence of art as a moral question, serious the world ought to be, or common sense says art ought not to engross so large a piece of the world; the production of it ought not to exist as the earnest occupation of any superior nature. Now whether or not it should be made more generally a serious interest or less so, depends on the possibility of uniting the art-feeling, that sensitive vibration of certain natures to beauty and power of creating a form for that beauty which is the true artist feeling, with the educating leading thought of the day. Unfortunately there seems a strange absence of sympathy between the rare but distinctly fine and subtle art-instinct possessed by our few great painters and the intellectual thought of our time. They do not seem sufficiently in sympathy to be able in any way to educate one another. Artists go back to the past for their favourite literature, writers go back to the past for their theories on art-theories, for literary men, as a rule, have little else but theories on art. Many have a keen feeling for nature and a genuine delight in her landscape portraits, but that does not mean a sympathy with art as art, does not mean an understanding of the artist's creations, a sympathy with the genius that has created a form. the artless art is found in Mr. Walter Crane's genius, and shown most distinctly in his children's picture-books, which every nursery and school-room ought to possess. VOL. V.-No. 26.

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To any mind educated, even elementarily, in the best art-instinct of our day, it is surprising to see how extremely wide of the mark are the criticisms of the general literary world on work which is the result of this creative faculty. Anything funnier than the various criticisms on the Grosvenor collection of last year can hardly be imagined. The very little thought or aim at understanding given to the criticism of works by great artists, the labour of months, even years, is surprising. Critics apparently think themselves qualified to dispose of the merits of any kind of picture at a glance, or should they be of a discursive turn will prefer to discourse on a theory of their own suggested by the picture rather than on any intention of the painter's. Mr. Watts' Time and Death' was curiously handled in this way, though the subject was treated in such an obvious and simple manner. The art critic of the Saturday Review mistook 'Time' for 'Death,' and thought it such a happy idea representing 'Death' as young. The critic of the Athenæum said Mr. Watts did not mean the picture to represent what he said it did, 'Time and Death,' but Saturn and Rhea,' and, finding some detail which did not carry out the 'right' meaning, blamed Mr. Watts for not grasping his idea with more completeness.

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There is something particularly exasperating in these days, when art of the highest character is so rare, to find even the brightest exceptions have, when exhibited in these public exhibitions, to endure being drawn through the mud of flippant criticism. With very few exceptions, the art criticisms have not that ring which indicates any original instinct by which sympathy with the painter is awakened. Even the best writing on art has usually the stamp of special cliques and art-friends about it, the flavour of mutual admiration societies, which ought to prevent such writing influencing any wide community. A literary man's judgment of a picture, if quite honest and original, must be tempered with extreme modesty, the moment he passes from the literary aspect of art to the more strictly artistic and technical qualities; for no judgment but that of a first-class artist himself could be taken as thoroughly satisfactory in these matters. Conscious of this, perhaps, many an intelligent critic gets himself coached up in this part of his business by the artist, often by no means first-rate, for whom he has a bias, or one mere chance throws in among his acquaintances. The result is, we get the not disinterested opinion of one or two artists on their own and other men's work in these criticisms, not spontaneous intellectual efforts suggested by the work judged. To any one behind the scenes who has watched how these art criticisms are concocted and how the littérateur's opinion is formed, it is clear that both artists and the public should think little or nothing of the ordinary newspaper writing on art, for the very good reason that the writers very rarely discover anything for themselves. Unfortunately, the sensitive tem