the nightingale suggests to a mind filled with the horrors of Philomela's story. Blake seems to be nearer the truth when, in his Spring Song, he makes the 'nightingale in the dale ' and the lark in the sky' merrily welcome in the year.

The strain of melancholy has, nevertheless, come to stay, and it would need great perspicacity to determine to what extent, during the modern period, it is due to tradition or to the genuine impression made by the bird's song. We feel inclined to suggest that, the classic poets having insisted on the melancholy character of the song, the yearning appeal of the long-drawn notes is often given a sad interpretation by modern writers, while the bubbling outburst of the trills which follow is once more rightly translated by them when in more joyful mood.

The sad note prevails among the German Romanticists of the early nineteenth century. Brentano reads in the melody' pain in love and love in pain.' With Eichendorff the plaintive singer becomes the poet's comforter who watches and weeps with him.” Heine speaks of the divinely sad sound' of the 'sobbing, longdrawn tune,' and also finds solace in companionship in woe.

Matthew Arnold's Philomela provides a curious example of reversion to the classic type, with due reference to the fable. The poet asks the bird, singing among the cool trees' by the Thames, whether the old pain will never be quenched. Will the moonshine and the dew afford no balm ?

Dost thou to-night behold

Here, through the moonlight of this English grass,
The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild?

The melancholy mood might be pursued right up to modern times. It again becomes prominent towards the end of the nineteenth century, when pessimism and disillusionment are the keynote of literature, more particularly in France. 'All noises are silenced,' writes Verlaine; ' nothing but the voice, oh so languid, of the bird which was my first love, and which still sings as on the first day!' The melancholy and heavy summer night'

Berce sur l'azur qu'un vent doux effleure
L'arbre qui frissonne et l'oiseau qui pleure.

So, again, Samain :

Cependant qu'aux buissons l'oiseau sentimental,
L'oiseau triste et divin, que les ombres suscitent,
Sur les jardins déserts où les feuilles palpitent
Fait ruisseler son cœur en sanglots de cristal.

Philomela, after doing much harm, has after all fulfilled her purpose. She has awakened the poets' sensibility to a certain aspect of the bird's call ignored in former days. But this aspect, VOL. XCVII-No. 578

R R

instead of making men deaf to the song's essential meaning, only takes second place in their thoughts. The testimony of both English and French Romanticists is overwhelming on this point. Witness Shelley, in The Woodman and the Nightingale, that "happy' bird' whose music is a storm of sound.' Keats' wellknown ode might have been written as a protest against the classic interpretation, in support of Coleridge's contention :

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

The bird has never known the weariness, the fever and the fret' of mankind. It was not born for death,' and appears as a pure spirit endowed with freedom and immortality. How far we are from the pity inspired by Philomela in Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, and even from the comfort which its lament brought to Heine!

When Tennyson, in his Poet's Song, wants to suggest the brightest of all human songs, he tells us that it is brighter even than the nightingale's:

The nightingale thought: 'I have sung many songs,

But never one so gay.'

The French Romanticists, though not so emphatic as the English, dwell rather on the tender character of the melody. 'Que le rossignol chante,' writes Hugo,

oiseau dont la voix tendre

Contient de l'harmonie assez pour en répandre
Sur tout l'amour qui sort des cœurs.

Had Wordsworth been able to read it, the following passage of Lamartine's Jocelyn might have softened his feeling towards the 'creature of a fiery heart.' Love and the anxiety to help its mate, sitting on the nest, alone prompt the nightingale's singing:

Ah! c'est le chant du mâle dans les bois,
Qui, suspendu sur la cîme d'un chêne,
Fait ruisseler les ondes de sa voix !
Oh! l'entends-tu distiller goutte à goutte
Ses longs soupirs après ses vifs transports,
Puis, de son arbre étourdissant la voûte,
Faire écumer des cascades d'accords?

It is not the first time that we meet this comparison, and it will not be the last. The liquid quality of the bird's song has inspired a number of comparisons connecting it with raindrops, streams, waterfalls and bursting bubbles, which are so obvious that they must unavoidably recur.

A poet from Bruges, writing in Flemish in the last years of the

nineteenth century, has succeeded in finding a few more images. To him the nightingale is a weaver before his loom,' singing gaily while he weaves his thread,' or a ' censer full of sweetness, in which angelic hands burn heavenly perfumes,' or a 'peal of golden bells.' The notes which spring from its throat are like bubbles of water running down from a roof,' or like 'pearls fallen from a broken necklace, dancing on marble steps.' Gezelle humbles himself before the miracle, the unattainable and incomprehensible wonder, of the melody. He scarcely dares to interpret it.

Christina Rossetti seems to be dominated by the same emotion:

Hark! That's the nightingale

Telling the self-same tale

Her song told when this ancient earth was young.

We call it love and pain,

The passion of her strain,

And yet we little understand or know:

Why should it not be rather joy that so
Throbs in each throbbing vein ?

This questioning answer is the best we have been able to find to the problem raised by Coleridge. We cannot help feeling that the latter's challenge came at the right time and was to a certain extent justified, but his conclusion is far too sweeping when he declares that

In nature there is nothing melancholy.

What did he think of the cry of other night birds, of the whistling of the wind in pine trees, and of the breaking of waves on the shore during a stormy night? Neither can it be contended, as is often done, that natural objects are nothing in themselves and are only what we make them. The wonder which stops the pen of Gezelle and of Christina Rossetti and turns their mind to God is not merely the sheer delight of a song or a sight, but the mysterious way in which these things answer to our own moods. Whether we decide that the nightingale's song is glad or sad, or contains a certain blending of joy and melancholy, we only mean by that that it awakens such feelings in ourselves. It is not necessary that the bird should share them. The love-call of the owl is as lugubrious as its danger signal, and blind chaffinches in small cages sing as well as, if not better than, their companions hopping freely in the neighbouring trees. The light of a star, the colour of a flower, the song of a bird, are great revelations, whether we recognise our soul in theirs or whether the mysterious affinity which binds us together reflects the spirit of our common Maker.

EMILE CAMMAERTS.

ART AND BEAUTY

'IN the morning of life the Truthful wooed the Beautiful, and their offspring was Love.' This is the opening sentence of Thackeray's delightful parody of Bulwer Lytton.

To me it is not quite as absurd as it looks; there is something, at any rate, in the conjunction of truth and beauty which appeals to me. It is curious that in modern art the flouting of truth to Nature' which has become quite a hobby with many artists and art critics is combined with a remarkable cult of ugliness, especially manifest in the portrayal of human beings.

In the old days all the leading authorities on art used to lay stress on the necessity of a close study of Nature with a view to its truthful representation. The great Leonardo is very strong on this point, and indeed generally the artist used to take a somewhat humble view of his relation to Nature; 'Il se faisait tout petit devant la Nature,' as Zola says of his artist hero in L'Euvre: and this is an attitude that used to be universally commended by art critics. Ruskin wrote five large volumes to demonstrate Turner's wonderful fidelity to Nature and to confute those carping critics who complained that Turner's pictures were lacking in reality. Ruskin pleaded at great length and with extraordinary eloquence and research that Turner was one of the closest observers of Nature that had ever lived; and, paradoxical though it may seem, he more or less proved his case. Turner was always making notes of natural phenomena; the cellars of the National Gallery are full of them. He never relied on his imagination unless it were fortified by facts most laboriously acquired.

That this is the right method for even the most imaginative artists I have no doubt whatever, but the point of view of modern writers upon art is mostly quite opposed to this. In the jargon of modern art critics the one thing to be avoided is ' representation,' by which is meant the faithful rendering of Nature. The function of painting is so to distort Nature that the picture shall represent the personality of the painter much more than the scene that he depicts. This doctrine is a very comfortable one for the artist and is naturally popular. The representation of Nature is a task of extreme difficulty, and demands much labour and

the greatest qualities of eye and hand. No untrained eye or hand can come near to it. But the representation of the artist himself is very easy, if it were worth doing. He has only to give up the struggle with Nature and avoid correcting his imperfections of vision and execution, and the trick is done. Personally I prefer to be one of the strugglers.

All training in art used to be directed to fitting the artist for this struggle. In my young days our laborious student work from the plaster cast and from the living model was devoted to gaining the power of accurate representation and to the elimination of errors due to imperfect observation. The task of the teacher was to point out in what way the drawing or painting differed from the model. It was not of much use for the student to say, ' But I see it like that.' Such a plea was given short shrift. It was pointed out very forcibly that he did not see it like that; he only represented it like that, owing to carelessness and want of observation, But in the modern theory all this elaborate training is worse than useless. It was directed to the minimising of the personal error. But it is precisely this personal divergence from truth to Nature which is now applauded in a work of art. It is that which saves it from the cardinal sin of representation. It is that which reveals the artist, chiefly, I may say, by revealing his shortcomings. Any training which tends to cure him of his shortcomings obviously brings him closer to representation, which is the great thing to be avoided. Logically all training should be scrapped.

Fortunately the modern theorists are not logical-anything but that. At one well-known school of art and possibly at others a sort of compromise is arrived at. The individuality of the student is so sacred that work considered bad by the teacher is often condoned, in the desperate hope that it may lead to something remarkable in the future.

I am an impenitent Representationist; and I hold firmly to the ancient theory epitomised by a well-known teacher who, when asked by a student what he should do to his drawing, said, 'Get it like.' 'And after that?' said the student. Get it more like.' It will probably be objected that this kind of training would ruin the initiative of the pupil and prevent his developing his originality. I am confident it would do nothing of the kind. The great obstacle to the development of originality is imperfect technique. The power of representation is essential to the development of even the most poetic imaginings.

I do not think I need refer to Cubist and Futurist nonsense. Having hardly any relation to the world about us and having no imaginative quality, these movements have died of dulness; their only appeal was that of novelty, and when this wore off there was nothing left. Modern art, even the most advanced, bears some