that would make frontier wars impossible in the future must surely in the end be the most economical.

There is no doubt whatever that, although the tribes may at first resent control and may be suspicious of our purposes, in course of time they will learn that we mean them no harm, and that we have no wish to interfere with their internal affairs. Once assured of this, they will throw in their lot with us.

British influence and authority, exercised however strictly through local means, would then be conterminous with the frontier that is recognised by our neighbours as ours, and for which, in their view at any rate, we are responsible.

NAPIER OF MAGDALA.

MILLAIS'S WORKS

AT BURLINGTON HOUSE

6

THE exhibition of John Everett Millais's life-work, which commenced with the New Year at the Royal Academy, and is still open there, has produced everywhere a profound, an indelible impression. Not, indeed, that the chorus has been one of absolute harmony in praise throughout, or that criticism has in every case been synonymous with laudatory comment and sympathetic appreciation. There have been plenty of discords and unpleasing sharps' to season the praise, and it is well perhaps that this should be. Millais's art is robust enough-robustness is indeed the dominant characteristic of its maturity-to stand such treatment, and to emerge from it purified and the stronger. The de mortuis nil nisi bonum is not for artists. of his calibre, but for the smaller men, whom, dismissing with a word of indulgent praise and brotherly sympathy, we put away and forget. We honour Millais more by judging him according to Voltaire's dictum: On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.' The best of the English master's art is for all time. Why, then, should we not have and seize the opportunity of passing it through the sieve, which shall leave to us enough and to spare that is precious, suffering to sink into their proper place the too numerous specimens of accomplished mediocrity which characterise, though by no means exclusively, his period of maturity and of too great vogue with the less artistic section of the general public? It has been said, and said with much truth, that Millais's fame would stand even higher than it does at the present moment-both with his critics and with that larger class of admirers who care not so much to reason as to the precise quality of what they enjoy-had this. sifting been done by the Royal Academy before the present exhibition was definitively constituted. On the other hand, it is well to bear in mind that we have here unrolled before our eyes not only what is practically the life-work of the great English painter, but, for those who know how to read, the very man himself.

We see how naturally, and in some respects how unfortunately, the developments of his art followed the developments of his career; how his unexampled popularity imposed upon him certain formulas,

and those not the most significant or the most representative that might be extracted from his works, but rather the cheaper and the more obvious. We should be able to perceive, however, at the same time, that his genius, though it inevitably suffered transformation and gave forth less light and heat than in those radiant early days, was not dead, but only dormant. Let the shock be but strong enough, and it shone forth again, served by a more masterly and decisive power of execution than had ever been at its command before. And it will be felt, too, that in the last sad period of physical suffering and decay it took a new colour, a new beauty, bursting through the upper crust formed by the commonplace and the prosaically literal, and standing forth again, fresh and undimmed, with an added touch of almost childlike pathos.

Fashion, not only to-day but in past times, has had much to answer for. By which, of course, is meant not the just fame accorded to and worn by commanding genius, but that persistent and unwise engouement for one particular artist, and one particular style of that artist, which forces him to repeat, with or without variation, that which has won applause, and repeating to turn what was once invention into facile repetition of mere formula. Raphael himself suffered terribly from fashion-from the fashion of his own day, which was the lavish favour of potentates and cities competing for his works. His fame would have stood far higher still than it actually does, had his own brush, instead of that of pupils, realised those supreme creations of his latest period, which we now see dimmed even less by time than by the harsh, unsubtle technique of his interpreters. Titian, too, in the zenith of his powers, in the full splendour of his worldly success, had his moment when the flame of genius burnt low, and the highest mastery of technique that the world had yet seen did not make full amends for a marked diminution of the true artistic passion.

Van Dyck, who had passed not unscathed through the ordeal of the artist's life in Genoa and Rome, and of increased popularity after his return to Antwerp, succumbed to the tremendous demands made upon him by the fashionable world of England, following the lead of Charles and his court. The splendid and charming Fleming was not only, beyond any possibility of rivalry or even of competition, the first painter in England; he would be, nay, he was to the life, the country gentleman, the magnificent and generous courtier, the artist-prince, like his master and friend Rubens. Had it been otherwise, he might have been spared to art another score years or more; the museums and palaces of Europe might have been even better filled than they are now with the masterpieces of aristocratic portraiture.

For how many 'pot boilers,' for how many weak and washy productions in the life-work of even such masters as Sir Joshua Reynolds

and Gainsborough, is not the insistent clamour of fashion answerable? For how much that is pompous, frigid, and conventional in that of Sir Thomas Lawrence?

But we are wandering into side paths and away from our main subject-Millais at the present exhibition of the Royal Academy. Note has been taken of the depth and reality of the impression made on all unprejudiced observers by this extraordinarily varied and powerful display. Some are completely subjugated by the candid simplicity and the intense sincerity of the standpoint, by the patient truthfulness first, and then the breadth, vigour, and accomplishment of the technique, the typically and nobly British aspect of the whole; others are half recalcitrant still, and yearn for a grace, for a musical rhythm and flow that are not, save exceptionally, there; for a more captivating truth in the presentment of the essentially feminine element in female portraiture; for certain happy audacities, certain refreshing and consoling harmonies of line and colour to which the modern schools, radiating from France, have now accustomed us.

Still those who approach our master without parti pris-putting aside the spirit of the arch-scoffer, who to all things said Nay -must own him the most essentially English figure, the greatest English painter on the whole, that the latter half of the century has seen. We must not expect from him, after the first happy time when youthful ardour went hand in hand with an accomplishment extraordinary already of its kind, the romantic passion, the transmuting power that marked even the most imperfect productions of Rossetti. Mr. Watts soars easily, even in his less happy efforts, into regions where Millais but seldom attempted to gain a footing, and in his interpretative portraiture sums up with the higher truth the noblest qualities of mankind. Frederick Walker, with that tremulous tenderness of his, finds his way straighter to our hearts; George Mason within the comparative narrow limits of his art, as we know it in its late and exquisite maturity, is perhaps the most completely satisfying of our modern British painters. Of two other English-speaking artists whose names naturally suggest themselves when the front line of contemporaries is being discussed—we refer to Mr. Whistler and Mr. J. S. Sargentnothing need be said in this connection. Neither the exquisite subtleties of the one, nor the stimulating audacities of the other, have about them anything that is characteristically English. Here America has been the mother, France, however, the foster mother, to whom the greater debt is owing. Yet, though it is quite conceivable that one should find oneself drawn by bonds of a warmer and more loving sympathy towards all or any of the masters just now enumerated-seeing that they on occasion rise higher, lift the veil from more secret beauties, or penetrate deeper into the very heart of things-it would be much less conceivable that the attempt should seriously be

made to give to any one among them artistic precedence of Millais. He, as we see him here in the series of masterly achievements which stand forth solid and enduring, amidst other performances less noble and less enduring, on the walls of the Royal Academy, has brought forth more that is complete and satisfying of its kind, and excelled more variously than any one of his contemporaries. He has been more useful, in the highest sense of the word, to his generation; he has more comprehensively, if less profoundly, and with a less delicate intuition, expressed certain essential aspects of his own time and his own country.

Passing over the boyish productions, of which the Etty-like 'Cymon and Iphigenia' is the most important, we may come at once to the famous 'Lorenzo and Isabella,' painted when Millais was but a boy of twenty, and as such unique in the history of English art. There is about this piece a grotesqueness so obvious as to need no discussion; but it is a grotesqueness so sincere that we need no more resent it than we do that of the great Netherlanders of the fifteenth century, whose legitimate successor the young Millais here, without imitation, shows himself. Still, the penetrating truth of the delineation, the capacity for the individual statement of fact, is already extraordinary. Moreover, there is a sly unction, a kind of Shakespearian mingling of grave and gay in the conception, which is not easily discoverable in any production of the later time. In the Ferdinand lured by Ariel' of the same year, Millais, preserving this rare quality, soars yet for once into those realms of the imagination, the threshold of which his spirit has so rarely crossed.

In these works, and far more strongly still in the Christ in the House of His Parents' ('The Carpenter's Shop') of 1850, and the 'Ophelia' of 1852, he shows already an independence, a capacity for the most complete self-expression in a style adopted with conviction and deliberately worked out, such as in the youth and earliest manhood of the creative artist are so rare as to be almost unique. He was barely twenty-three when the last of these famous canvases was painted, and save for the encouragement that he derived from the stimulating contact with the other members of the Brotherhood, he could not be said to show descent from or community with any predecessor or elder contemporary. This peculiarity may in part be traced to the system which obtained, and still obtains, in England, of teaching by precept rather than by personal example; it must also in a great measure be accounted for by the strength of the painter's personality and by his incapacity for submitting to or assimilating outside influences. At this age of twenty-three we find even the greatest masters dominated by their teachers. Raphael at twentyfour produced the beautiful Sposalizio' of the Brera, one of the masterpieces of the Umbrian school; yet in it he clearly marked his descent from Timoteo Viti, Perugino, and Pinturicchio. Van Dyck,