painting has for the last ten or twenty years marched or danced to a French air, on which the other nations have only executed variations.

If, then, there has been any continuous movement in the history of painting during, let us say, the last twenty years, we are in a position to seek to understand it now. Many of the pictures that figure in the French portion (the vast majority, in fact), and a considerable number out of those shown by foreigners (especially Americans), have already found their place on the walls of annual exhibitions in Paris -the 'new salon' and the 'old:' not a few have been shown in England; and, of course, most of the English pictures are old friends. Wherefore the effect of numbers is not quite so paralysing as at first it seemed. At the same time, the reunion in one place of the most notable works of many years, the view of them side by side with some masterpieces of an earlier date, and again (in memory) by comparison with other work exhibited elsewhere, compel us almost to try to classify the whole in some intelligible way; to seek at least for some guiding thread through the Dædalian labyrinth.

To seek but shall we find? It were easy and not unpleasant to plunge into the throng-the chaos of painted canvases, recognising old friends and making new. 'Sed revocare gradum?' Shall we emerge thence in sanity? Still more, shall we out of all pluck any principle, understand any impulse of vitality moving the mass? This without doubt is the labour, this is the task. To wield the sceptre of Rhadamanthus, and pronounce a judgement upon all that we hold to be impossible; unless it were done by rough and ready condemnation of the whole mass, in

Holland. The strongest and most original of all the smaller states in painting. Josef Israels is well known. Miss Schwatze's Joubert

was lately exhibited in London.

Ferdinand

Belgium. A. Stevens almost counts as a Frenchman. Khnopff and Lempoels are, on the other hand, quite original painters; and A. Marcelle and A. Bouviers exhibit sea-pieces better than any in the French gallery, and as good as H. Moore's in the English.

Russia. There is some original but not first-rate painting in this section. Weyssenhoff's 'La neige' is very striking. The genius of the country finds expression in the sculpture of Antokolsky. Switzerland: Nothing remarkable.

Sweden. Zorn.

Norway. Thaulow.

Denmark. None of importance.

that it is so chaotic. It is beyond question that in a natural state of things a great show of pictures should be in the sum, and not in the parts only, pleasant to the eye. This is not the case here. But it is easy to understand wherefore. It is the vast and inexpressible mixture of styles that is at fault. Here we have a picture all chalky daylight; beside it, one which has the atmosphere of a coal-cellar. We have a whole school of landscapists who paint in the simplest colours-green and yellow ochre for the most part; we have another school who seem to acknowledge only the colours blue and pink. We have the mosaic school which lays on its paint in contrasted squares of colour; and we have painters such as M. Carrière whose canvases are almost monochrome, and the personages represented on them are buried in a brown mist. We have the pastellist school, of whom M. Henri Martin is the most eminent (unless you choose to call them pointelists), who paint in streaks of varied tints; and we have the mural school of Puvis de Chavannes, who lay their colour on in pale ungraded masses.

And as, when we turn round colours on a wheel or mix too many on a palette, they produce only a grey and dirty tint, so the effect of this sum of painting upon the senses is singularly dull. The same result is produced more or less in most exhibitions. Never before in any picture show have we been so conscious of this impression. There are, however, one or two exceptions from this general sense of colourlessness. Certain painters or schools occupy space enough in themselves to exclude competition. M. Henri Martin is one of these. He has been given the greater part of a small gallery, which contains only second-rate pictures beside his. M. Carrière has almost a wall to himself; so has M. Besnard. The impressionist school-it would be more correct to say what is reckoned the final word of impressionism-the school of Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissaro, Degas, is all placed together in the same room, and, with the possible exception of Degas, its members harmonise moderately well. Such fragmentary spaces-and again in the German and the Spanish sections where the general effect is remarkably uniform-are the only ones in which the eye may find repose.

But for the mind first, and perhaps also for the eye, it is possible to draw pleasure out of this vast confusion by arranging the different elements upon some system; by, as it were, threading these separate fragments into a sort of

190

chain of principle and purpose. We may, if we choose,
resolutely determine to look at each school or sub-school or
It is true that the
group by itself, and to learn to understand in some measure
how one has developed from another.
principle which has guided the whole developement is partly
a principle of revolt, the purpose in part mere reaction
against foregone schools. For all that at the back even of
the reaction and revolt a certain logic remains.

Essentially and primarily this revolt is against the domination of literature over painting. It must be remembered that in the beginning painting was what it can never be to-day, both literature and a plastic art; its object was both to give information and to impress the eye. It had to produce an effect; but it had also to tell a story. And for this reason, next after religious art, historical painting has held the highest place, been reckoned par excellence high art;' and it is this form of 'high art' which stares at us still from the walls of the French rooms at the Louvre, in some portions of the exhibition, in the vast and hideous pictures of David, Gros, Prudhon, Vernet, and the rest, at which we need only look and pass.' Delacroix, though he was far above the level of these, acknowledged, as his predecessors did, the literary standpoint, and it would be impossible better to realise the transition from the old to the new than by comparing, as we are able to do, the inspiration which, in painting, Delacroix derives from a great poet, such as Dante, with the fashion in which a contemporary painter of the foremost rank is inspired by the same poet. We have in the Louvre a picture of Delacroix taken from the Divina Commedia' (Dante and Virgil crossing over to the city of Dis); and we have in Room 13 of the present exhibition a wall-ful of pictures by M. Henri Martin, most of which are inspired by Dante and his poems. But M. Martin's pictures are in no sense illustrations. He has inspired himself from Dante in the sense that, in every part, his canvas, his three or four large canvases one should say, are designed, by the method of workmanship, by the colours chosen, by the forms presented, to translate into the medium of the painter's art what he has received from the other. We may quarrel with M. Martin's methods (we do quarrel with this stippling pastel style of his); we may consider his pictures too aerial, or the attitudes affected. But what we cannot deny is that they have about them a certain principle of unity; that they translate for us an idea in the mind of the artist, not a piece of information which he has got

from his author. And in some of these canvases (in 'Sérénité,' for example, in the figure of the young man lying and supporting his head upon his hands) we have work of exquisite grace and beauty, absolutely in the spirit, not perhaps so much of the Comedy,' as of the softer love-poetry of that age, the love-poetry of Dante and his cycle, and of their predecessors, the troubadours.

*

It

And, to carry the illustration a step further, let us compare with these Dante pictures another by the same artist, which shows in another fashion how apart from purely literary influences may be those which inspire an imagination. The Dante pictures of M. Henri Martin are not the best among the very important work which he exhibits; the best is the picture Vers l'abîme.' "Vers l'abîme' was exhibited a year or two ago in the Continental Gallery, but in so small a room that it could not be seen; it had figured in the 'salon' the summer previous. The mere subject is commonplace enough, with something of vulgarity in it-a vulgarity which in the painting reveals itself in the transparent black robe and mittens of the woman who, in strong evening sunlight, is leading a crowd through a sterile valley towards the abyss. As a motive it would have done well enough for Steinlen and Gil Blas.' is the treatment, the arrangement only of form and colour, which raises this painting to a high, if not to the highest, rank. The poetry of the picture lies where the poetry of the plastic arts should before all things lie, not in the literary idea evoked in the mind of the spectator, but in the figures and faces of the picture, and in the harmony of tones set before his eye. The figures are, many of them, very pathetic-one old man upon his knees, one woman with fair hair trying to hold back her husband. And they are immensely affecting, in a second degree, by a certain cleanness and yet unobtrusiveness of drawing, and for the delicacy of their tones and their admirable contrast: the old man with the roses in his hair, the green robe of the fair-haired woman; and then again the pink of the sterile rocks, the blue of the sky, the blue-black ravens hovering over the crowd. The picture is absolutely full of colour, yet it never seems garish or offensive.

We in England have in Mr. Watts a painter of very much the same calibre as M. Henri Martin, and of a more manly method of painting. Sometimes Mr. Watts is quite free

* No. 1322.

But, alas! a much inferior draughtsman.

He is so, for

from the influence of the literary method. example, in Chaos.' You feel in that picture that, whatever its merits-technically it is not among Mr. Watts's best work—the imagination of the artist has gone straight to the visual effect. In 'Hope' you feel the contrary. The pictorial beauty of the picture is considerable; it lies in the colouring, in the attitude of Hope with her bowed head. But there is much besides. The broken string of the lyre, the awkward position of Hope astride of a globe, have no pictorial merit; they are designed to appeal, and do appeal, in a tolerably commonplace way, to the literary instincts of

the crowd.

These instances have been first chosen precisely because M. Henri Martin's art-perhaps of all the art shown in the present exhibition-most nearly approaches the domain of literature and poetry, in that it is highly imaginative, anything but an art of mere outward impression. And it is a fact that, throughout all its multitudinous developement, we see in modern painting, more than aught else, the tokens of this revolt against literary domination, and thereby a determination to express only what (in the view of the painter) can properly be expressed by his form of plastic art. Or we may speak more liberally, and say that which, in the view of the painter, he could express most properly through his form of plastic art: this is his primal motive. It is just because this modern art is non-literary that it is so hard to describe it in words: harder yet to claim for it the sympathy of those who think in words. It has, for the most part, gone on the way of its developement silently; and the critics have continued to be the expounders of an earlier tradition.

There are naturally transition stages not always easy to define. The time of transition lies somewhere about the epoch of the Barbizon school-that is to say, in the sixties. Those who form what is called the Barbizon school are, in a certain sense, literary painters. Millet illustrates (in a fashion) the life of the peasant, from his cradle to his grave; just as Rousseau illustrates, in a fashion, the various forms of tree-growth in Fontainebleau Forest, and, par excellence, one might say, the life of an oak, from its cradle to its grave.

* J. F. Millet is represented in this exhibition by half-a-dozen paintings, whereof the best are the well-known 'Homme à la houe ' and 'Le retour des champs,' and by twenty interesting drawings. He is too original and single a painter to be discussed here.