on panel, there is a head in the background which consists entirely of the ground colour, just touched here and there as thinly as possible for the lighter parts. It is evident also that the later pictures of John Bellini were painted in the same manner. This is apparent in the three pictures collocated in the Sacristy of the Redentore at Venice, one in his earliest, another in his transitional, and the third in his perfected, manner. The first has been painted without any preparation; the second appears to have received it; in the third a rich, low-toned ground has been used; with what advantage-aided, it is true, by a more finely developed sentiment-he who has seen those sweet eyes which look into the soul of the observer will clearly be able to judge. The same thing is also illustrated in the noble Madonna and six Saints by this painter, in the Accademia.

Although these latter observations are derived from notes made in Venice, a reference to such of the works of the painters mentioned above as are to be found in our National Gallery will illustrate more or less clearly the views here laid down.

It must, however, be distinctly understood that there is no method of painting that should exclude all others; also that the painters whose works are here quoted as illustrating principles might not always and invariably have followed the same system. It is enough if it be proved that therein lay their greatest force and highest speciality, and that they were educationally influenced by such a mode of painting where they did not absolutely or exclusively follow it.

We have thus examined some of the external elements of the power which characterises the painting of these great men: but, of course, their real vital force lay within. This is not a thing of sense and mechanism at all, and any portion of it is only to be attained by profound aesthetic and spiritual training. Weighed in respect of this quality of force, our own Art shows itself lamentably insufficient. The study of the artistic mission-of what should properly constitute its expressional aim-seems to be almost utterly disregarded. Not even is the picture always, perhaps hardly generally, thought out substantially and clearly before its commencement. With all great schools the reverse is always the case, whatever alterations may be subsequently made. The Venetians always began with an exact knowledge of what had to be done, alterations on their canvases being rare, and commonly limited to the direction of a line; seldom or never to a whole figure or group. The simplicity of the means used and the thinness of the painting generally render these altera

tions perceptible where they have been made. With many of our modern painters it is vastly different: a want of certainty of plan, both in regard to manipulation and conception, involving so many changes as to destroy almost all delicacy and tenderness of workmanship. Indeed it is pretty evident that many must depend entirely on their pencil (as a spurious composer of music on his instrument) and the adventitious aid of externals, even for the sentiment and motive of their pictures, as far as they can be said to have sentiment or motive at all. There is clearly no distinct mental image formed to begin with, which makes every step towards its realisation an ordered progress undisturbed by any uncertainty of plan. All genuinely great Art, however imperfect in its means, or deficient in technical skill, must be definite and firm in intention. The thoughtful and laborious workmen who have covered the walls of St. Mark's at Venice with their quaint and fanciful designs have been perfectly regardless of their own shortcomings in the plastic language; but their ideas are not the less clearly set before us on that accountindeed they are perhaps sometimes more impressive from the simplicity and inadequacy of their expressional faculty: they are certainly more touching. Should any one come before us as a spokesman or in a literary capacity, we expect he has something to tell us, and accordingly look for something more than a skilful use and arrangement of words and phrases; but the artist of today has no misgivings in coming forward with no other object than to display a clever use of his material and to exercise his power of picturesque management: that is to say, these are the primary object of his effort, and not secondary, as they ought to be. His work is not an attempt to dress up a noble or worthy idea in the best form, but a struggle to obtain some resemblance to a central motive from the mere shifting of lines and varying shades of colour; so that often enough, when he has completed his picture, he is so vague as to his own meaning or intention in producing it that he does not even know what to call it, or what special significance to impute to it. The most trivial and worthless subjects are made the medium of all the art-dexterity he possesses, and the lay public must be content with his jejune trifles as the best that the noble vehicle of painting has it in its power to convey and express. In place of the coolness and tranquillity of a dignified ease, the true and artistic interpretation of nature, a refined grace of treatment, a sentiment of colour which never forgets either tone or harmony-all softened and soothed by the artistic eye, we have scoriated portraits, mechanically disposed folds of drapery, photographic transcripts of nature, coarse masses of pigment, frequently not

only

only struggling to outdo every other extravagance, but actually so reckless in the utter abandonment of consistency as to make one part of the picture play against the other; introducing all possible keys within the limits of the same canvas; thus crowning disorder with confusion.

Doubtless one reason why form and external phenomena are now so exclusively dwelt upon is, that painters, having so little of their own to say, are fain to take refuge among the verities they see around them, and allow themselves to be made the mirror of the mere appearances of things. It is an abuse very difficult to rectify, seeing that the appearances of objects must inevitably form the substantial basis of everything done in plastic Art. It is impossible, therefore, to define exactly from the outside how much of the literality of nature must enter into any given form of Art. The true workman, however, will have no difficulty in practically solving the question: for he will use precisely so much of nature as may be required for his own expression. He will be just so literal as to obtain a clear and precise language for his utterance, and so ideal as to keep himself free from anything approaching to an enslaving materialism. He will avoid scholasticism and pedantry in externals in order to gain force for his central meaning. Towards this end the art-workman will acquire more from his observation than from his pencil, with whatever persistency this may be used. Form and pictorial circumstance will have for him the importance of a scientific study. With a mind well stored with observation and reflection, he will be enabled to produce the forms of nature with a wider meaning, ensouling them with so much of his own spirit as will impress them with a new force and aspect on the minds of others. This will not be found an easy mode of study: in fact it will prove far more difficult than that of the pencil; but it will have upon the workman all the power of a moral training, and will develop and bestow the better and the nobler elements and gifts of Art; it will need an uniting devotion, calling forth the most refined and subtle perception, together with a constant exercise of the reflective powers to ennoble and glorify the drudgery of imitation by the vivifying light of Law. The artist of this elevated type will not look at Nature with the eye of a casual observer, but he will commune with her in all her aspects as an intimate and inseparable friend, admitted, as it were, into her arcana and secret workshop. She will teach him her principles, she will show him her resources, informing him of her width and vastness; so that he will become a sort of ambassador or delegate of her powers, an interpreter of her laws and her expressions, not merely an imitator of her appearances

and

and accidents. In his early training he may give himself frankly to a thoughtful reproduction of her forms and conditions with this higher sentiment behind his labour; just as the literary man or the orator practises himself upon various models in the use of his language; but he will never mistake the repetition of the symbol for the ultimate object of his art, nor lose the essence in the substance, the spirit in the letter.

It does not lie within the compass of these observations to enter into any wide consideration of what ought to constitute the proper mission of Art, beyond what has been embodied in the course of our enquiry. It is enough here to say that it is but the function of something infinitely more noble than all Art: that however much it says, it must always leave immeasurably more unspoken: that the right artist must be greater than anything he does or can do, having that within him to which the outward can only offer a more or less inadequate means of expression; feeling that something better still lies behind his best, and being able to say with all true and worthy ministers of the ideal,

'Howsoe'er the figures do excel,

The gods themselves with us do dwell.'*

ART. II. Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life. By George Eliot. 4 vols. Edinburgh and London. 1872.

WHEN the history of literature during the times in which

we live comes to be written, it will perhaps contain a chapter on the English Positivists. It is not necessary to suppose that such a chapter will be a very long one or have more to do than to describe the passing attitude of a small number of persons of talent. But it is sufficiently probable that English Positivism will require literary notice; and, in our opinion, it will even be found to have possessed a rhetorical grace and a brilliant air, which are lacking in French Positivism, from which it is, after all, an offshoot. The figures in this movement are a little academic band of men. The leader, in youth a master at Rugby in the best days of the famous school, then, as a college tutor, collected about him a few disciples to a new creed from the very centres of Oxford Evangelicalism; finally he turned to London and its suburbs, on week-days labouring as a physician among the poor, on the

Andrew Marvell,

seventh

seventh day addressing a tiny congregation, at which it was noticed by a chance visitor that (sad augury for the permanence of the work) among the audience but one child was to be seen. Round this leader have to be grouped some fifteen or twenty personal friends, chiefly University men, many of them of the same University generation, London barristers, London professors, London doctors, sharply and fiercely criticizing English political and religious life from the point of view of a narrow Continental philosophical sect, founded by Auguste Comte, a strangely isolated Parisian student, who, after the collapse of the French Revolution and the First Empire, strove once again to contrive a complete system of human faith, morals, government, and discipline. The most remarkable characteristics of these writers- -so free from prejudice, from scruple, from embarrassment, as, at first glance, they appear to think and write— are, on closer examination, seen to be their intensely and exclusively French sentiment, the thoroughness with which they have acclimatised and assimilated a French doctrine and a French style, their corresponding ignorance of and contempt for Teutonic literature and German ideas, and their desire to discard the historical traditions and to overthrow the existing framework of English society.

But the writer, for whose sake the little circle will hereafter arrest attention, will, it may without hazard be predicted, be the novelist and poetess known under the name of George Eliot. It might, we hold, be questioned, whether with any sweeping meaning, and especially in regard to final social and religious maxims, George Eliot should be numbered with the followers of Comte in this country, and yet the signs are everywhere and unmistakable in her method and tone of a very close intellectual relationship to them. There are, however, two particulars, in which certainly she stands in strong contrast to their school. So far as width of training, of sympathy, of insight, is concerned, George Eliot has none of its faults; she has a full and broad knowledge, not merely of modern French, but of general European culture, and she is entirely English in spirit and speech. One has, indeed, only to consider her in relation to the great contemporary French novelist, whose example may have suggested to her the adoption in literature of a masculine title, one has only to compare George Eliot with Georges Sand, in order to appreciate the distance which still extends between French and English rules and results in thought and composition.

The continued theoretical revolt, the profound political despair of French society, tinges, through and through, the language and the scenery of French imaginative literature. And these features Vol. 134.-No. 268.

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