6 'Flowing to the River,' The Fringe of the Moor,' The Deserted Garden,' Over the Hills and Far Away,' and 'Blow, Blow, thou Winter Wind!' In 'Scotch Firs' Nature herself has provided a subject of monumental grandeur, and the painter has seen its bigness and allowed it to speak for itself. It is when Millais's pulses are stirred, when his subject speaks to him of home and all that he most dearly loves on this fair earth, that in landscape he attains to that spiritual beauty without which it has no true place in art. Such subjects are the winter sunset scene Christmas Eve' (1887); the serenely beautiful 'Murthly Water' (1888), a little hard, it may be, in its pellucid clearness; the tender twilight study, The Moon is up, and yet it is not Night' (1889); above all The Old Garden' (1888). This last is surely the artist's masterpiece in this branch of his practice. Not only are the rich and beautiful motives, so difficult in their very richness to combine into an harmonious whole, handled with consummate skill; not only is the point of view chosen with a rare and admirable intuition, but the scene in its simple homely beauty is bathed in an atmosphere of peace and love, indefinably yet none the less surely enveloping and spiritualising that which is presented with a charm so unaffected and yet so penetrating. It is, however, as the painter of men, and especially of men still vigorous in late maturity or old age, that Millais shows himself supreme, and it is on this ground alone, in his middle time, that he can be called great. He loves to depict the intellectually and physically strong, who, battling hard with the world and showing its scars in the furrows on brow and cheek, have arisen victorious from the fight, and hold it firmly in their grasp. Here no painter of the century can be said to have surpassed him. And this statement is deliberately made remembering Sir Thomas Lawrence, David and Ingres, our own Watts, Franz von Lenbach, Elie-Delaunay, Emile Wauters, Bonnat, Carolus-Duran. If Mr. Watts sums up the intellectual, the emotional personality, as no other painter of the time save perhaps Lenbach has done, Millais gives us the whole man, with mind and body in perfect balance, with breath in his nostrils as well as speculation in his eyes. The 'Portrait of George Grote' is, in its subdued golden glow, veracious and pathetic as a Rembrandt, a true presentment of serene and dignified old age. The great 'Mr. Gladstone' of 1879 is so masterly a piece of painting in its concentrated force and simplicity that the supreme fineness of the technique may at first sight escape the casual observer. Perfect as a portrait, the picture is, moreover, the very personification of elastic force, of watchful untiring vigour not less physical than intellectual. The Alfred, first Lord Tennyson' is surely, in its rugged realism, the greatest portrait ever painted of the late Laureate. There is, quite naturally and without pose or pretence, a Michelangelesque grandeur about the figure that stands facing the spectator wrapped in its long loose cloak of black. It VOL. XLIII-No. 253 D D calls up the musings, the doubts and wrestlings of the philosopherpoet rather than the love-poems, the rustic idylls, the sunlight and shadow of the Arthurian romance. This is the Tennyson for whom it was possible to feel reverence and awe-nay, almost fear-as well as love. The well-known Portrait of J. C. Hook, Esq., R.A.,' is a performance of monumental power, for all the unpretentious simplicity of the rendering; British manliness and the beauty of hale, lovable old age could not be more finely conveyed. In the same category of noble works may be placed, though somewhat lower down in the scale, the John Bright,' the 'Sir James Paget,' the Ornithologist,' the Earl of Shaftesbury,' the 'Luther Holden,' and, one of the very last portraits, the 'Sir Richard Quain.' A portrait-study, too, and a most moving representation of green old age, upheld by firm resolve, is The Yeoman of the Guard.' It is at the same time a magnificent study, a trumpet-toned harmony in flaming scarlet, deep purple, and gold. 6 It is as a painter of women that it is least possible to consider Millais as the legitimate successor of our greatest British masters. He had too little sympathy with the physical graces of woman, with natural elegance and distinction, with the ultra-refinements of civilisation; moreover, he was not in the highest sense a painter of flesh, that is, of youthful supple flesh, with its semi-transparencies, through which the flush of the blood is seen. Stolid, and as uninteresting to us as they must have been to the painter, are all too many of these so-called 'fashionable' portraits; and these are the things, if any, which might, without serious diminution of completeness in the exhibition as a whole, have been excluded. Among the best paintings of this class should be cited the charming 'No!' (portrait of Miss Dorothy Tennant, now Mrs. Stanley), the Miss Eveleen Tennant' (Mrs. F. H. Myers), the Portraits of the twin daughters of T. R. Hoare, Esq.,' the Mrs. Stibbard,' the Mrs. Jopling,' the 'Mrs. Perugini.' Millais has been as popular as a painter of children as of women, and far more deservedly so. He brought to this portion of his task -without doubt a labour of love-many qualities: breadth of execution, brilliancy of colour, variety, a never-failing sympathy; all but fancy and that freakish charm, that happy audacity, which belong to Sir Joshua Reynolds when he is on this his chosen ground. Space is lacking to describe the most remarkable of these canvases, and it is only possible to name A Souvenir of Velazquez,' 'Sisters,'' Portraits of the Children of Octavius Moulton Barrett, Esq.,' 'Lilacs,' 'In Perfect Bliss,' 'Lady Peggy Primrose,' and 'Little Speedwell's Darling Blue.' In the last two sad years of suffering and foreboding a startling change is to be observed. It is as if the doomed master had at this supreme crisis sought solace in his own genius, communing with it again without intermediary, seeking for consolation and appeasement in its youth renewed, throwing off those bonds in which he had been held by a public too faithful to certain manifestations of his art, and those the least significant, the most superficial. Whatever view we may, from the purely technical standpoint, take of 'Speak! Speak!' 'St. Stephen,' and 'A Forerunner,' we cannot fail to recognise the exquisite pathos, almost childlike in unquestioning naïveté, which gives to these works a unique character, a strange power to move. The old strenuousness, the youthful passion are no longer there, but they are replaced by an infinite tenderness and a perfect trust. In Speak! Speak!' there are passages of the artist's very finest work— as, for instance, the figure of the awakened sleeper, who, starting from his couch, beholds, gazing at him with a yearning love, the apparition of a lost consort, jewel-crowned and clothed in diaphanous garments of white. Even here, however, true to his idiosyncrasy to the very end, he shows himself a realist. In the very upheaval of his imaginative passion renewed, he is better able to depict the thing still of earth than to conceive that which must be evoked with the vision of the poet-painter looking within rather than without. In the course of these remarks it has been sought to point outit is hoped with all possible reverence and sympathy-where Millais more greatly and where less excelled. And yet, take it as a whole, and see how great, how true in its absolute candour and simplicity, how solid and enduring his life-work is! How strong in artistic individuality, how various, how wide in accomplishment, is the man who can thus, in youth, found a school not merely archaistic and imitative but absolutely new in modern times; then excel in genre, in romantic art, in sacred history and legend, in all branches of portraiture, in landscape, in illustration. Only monumental and purely decorative art would appear to have been beyond his powers. And it would not be safe even to assume as much as this, having before us here the important and truly inspired 'Design for a Gothic Window,' which belongs to the great days of early manhood. 'He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.' We may yet have painters more imaginative, more subtle, more daring, as various in aim and accomplishment. We cannot well in these days, when national landmarks and local characteristics are so fast disappearing, have one as thoroughly English, as truly characteristic, in the higher sense, of the time and the country in which he occupied so commanding a place. In another quarter of a century, we shall no doubt have a host of flexible and accomplished artists; but shall we have, in the truer meaning of the word, an English school of art? A vast wave starting from France as a centre is now more or less rapidly spreading itself over the whole expanse of the civilised globe, enveloping even us, who have with a wise obstinacy most strenuously interposed our barriers of race and position as a defence. If it continue to advance, steady and resistless as heretofore, will there not, before the next century has spent half its course, be practically but one art? Will this not be an art corresponding in its sub-variations to the races and nationalities who practise it, but yet one in its general aspect as in its general principles ? Is it to be and remain permanently victorious over the national schools which have been developed in each land upon a normal basis of national temperament and national idiosyncrasies? Our English school has far more to lose than to gain by such a surrender, whether complete or partial. But it may well be that the conditions of modern existence, the effacing influences of unrestrained intercourse between the nations, may render it unavailable, even to those who have fought the valiant fight. If this be so, it will be the worse for art-for English art above all. CLAUDE PHILLIPS. THE METHODS OF THE INQUISITION Of late years a great deal of attention has been directed to the subject of the Inquisition. This, no doubt, is due in some degree to the appearance of Dr. Lea's learned but desultory and ill-arranged work, which has been very widely read, and not, upon the whole, perhaps, very judiciously criticised. But Dr. Lea deals with the medieval Inquisition only. The modern Inquisition seems to me of more interest and importance, for several reasons. I will mention here merely two. One is that it is so much nearer to us. Until towards the close of the last century, it was in good working order throughout Southern Europe. Nay, even in our own century, after the Congress of Vienna, it was re-established, though with attenuated attributes, in Spain, Portugal, Bavaria, and the' Papal States. Its new career in the first three mentioned countries was, indeed, brief. But in Rome it lingered as a spiritual tribunal, with power to inflict temporal penalties, until the downfall of the Pope's Civil Princedom in 1870. Another reason why the modern Inquisition-which we may date from the issue in 1542 of Paul the Third's Bull Licet ab initio— deserves more attention than the medieval, is because its practice was more regular, more settled, more, if I may use the word, scientific. And perhaps Italy is the country in which its working may be best studied. In Spain, it was to a great extent a political engine, and to this fact many writers impute its unscrupulous savagery for which no one, so far as I know, except De Maistre, has in these latter days attempted to apologise. The same may be said of it as organised in Portugal. But in Italy, where it was a purely ecclesiastical court, it was certainly less sanguinary. And there can be no doubt of its popularity in that country during the seventeenth century and, at all events, the early part of the eighteenth; a popularity due not only to its congruousness with the religious sentiment of the population, who regarded heresy as the worst crime any man could commit, but also to the high character of its officials. Now, what I propose to do in the present paper is to give some 1 1 During the reign of Philip the Fifth (1700-1745); 1,500 persons are stated to have been burnt by it. |