Read Ebook: The American Journal of Archaeology 1893-1 by Various

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I had known the house in Grove End Road before it took on the stamp of Tadema's quaint invention and fanciful ingenuity. It had been inhabited by the French painter Tissot during a great part of his residence in England, and I recall a dinner party given by him on an occasion shortly after the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, at which he announced to me his serious and solemn intention of making a radical revolution in the purpose and direction of his art. Up to that time the pictures of this most adroit of craftsmen had been wholly mundane, it might even be said demi-mundane, in character; but he had been profoundly impressed by the recent display of the works of Burne-Jones, to which the public for the first time had accorded a larger welcome; and it immediately struck the shrewd spirit of Tissot that there were commercial possibilities in the region of ideal art of which he was bound as a practical man to take account and advantage. As he himself na?vely expressed it on that evening: "Vraiment, mon ami, je vois qu'il y a quelque chose ? faire"; and he forthwith led the way to his studio, where he had already commenced a group of allegorical subjects, to the infinite amusement of his friend Heilbuth, who at that time, I think, knew him better than he knew himself.

In those days, Tadema and Burne-Jones were scarcely acquainted. Their real friendship came a little later, but when it came it was very genuine and sincere, resting on a certain quality of simplicity which they owned in common and a strong feeling of mutual respect and esteem. Their ways in art lay far asunder, but each knew how to value at their true worth the gifts of the other. From time to time they would both join me in little Bohemian feasts at Previtali's Restaurant in Coventry Street, where we would sit till the closing hours in pleasant converse that was never permitted to be protractedly serious. Tadema generally prefaced the evening with an anecdote which he always believed to be entirely new, and even when its hoary antiquity was not in doubt, Burne-Jones never failed to supply a full measure of the laughing appreciation that was due to novelty. In his more serious moods, however, Tadema's talk was marked by deep conviction and entire sincerity. He never acquired complete mastery over our language, but he could always find the word or phrase that reached the heart of what he wanted to say. In his art, no less than in his views on art and life, he was desperately in earnest, and there was something even in the quality of his voice that aptly mirrored the mind and character of the man. Indeed, to be quite correct, it was not one voice, but two, for sometimes even within the compass of a single sentence the tone would swiftly change from the guttural notes that betrayed his northern origin to those softer cadences that seemed to echo from some southern belfry.

To those who can look below the surface, this central quality of his genius, which he inherited as part of his birthright, will be found reappearing in unbroken continuity throughout the splendid series of his work that lately adorned the walls of Burlington House. Their fertile invention, and the strong and vivid sense of drama that often moves that invention; the patient industry and wide learning which have served to recreate the classic environment wherein his chosen characters live and have their being--these things would count for little in the final impression left by his art, if he had not carried with him in all his wanderings into the past and towards the south, that vitalising principle of light, which, in hands fitly inspired, is able to bestow even upon inanimate things a pulsing and sentient existence. "There is nothing either beautiful or ugly," as Constable once said, "but light and shade makes it so." Alma-Tadema had learnt this secret long ago, when he was little more than a boy, and before he had quitted his native land, and he retained it to the very end of his career.

This is not the occasion to appraise at its full value the worth of Tadema's artistic achievement, nor would even those who are his warmest admirers seek to deny that in many of its aspects it is open to criticism. But at a time when the antics of the charlatan are invading almost every realm of art, his patient and unswerving loyalty to a chosen ideal stands forth as a shining example to all who may come after him. That his powers in the region of design confessed some inherent limitations he himself was entirely conscious. I remember one day when we were discussing the claims of several of his contemporaries, he said to me suddenly, "You know, my dear fellow, there are some painters who are colour-blind, and some painters who are form-blind. Now, Leighton, for instance, is colour-blind, and I--well, I, you know, am form-blind." The criticism was perhaps unduly severe in both directions, but it announced a pregnant truth and proved that he was not unaware of those particular qualities in which his weakness was apt to betray itself.

This was said during the time when Hall? and I were arranging the collected exhibition of his works at the Grosvenor Gallery, and when he had had a full opportunity of passing in review the gathered achievement of many years' labour. Those days we passed together superintending the process of hanging were wholly delightful, and served to bring out many interesting characteristics of Tadema's nature. When the exhibition was first projected Tadema had laid down a rule for our guidance, which he emphatically declared must not be departed from. "The arrangement," he said, "must be strictly chronological"; for the whole interest of such a collection, as he held, lay in the image it presented of an artist's gradual development. We offered no objection at the time, though we knew well by previous experience that adherence to so rigid a principle was inconsistent with decorative effect; and we were, therefore, not unduly surprised when Tadema appeared one morning with the revolutionary announcement that the chronological arrangement must go by the board; insisting, with the air of a man who had hitherto unwillingly yielded to our pedantic tradition, that the only fit way to hang an exhibition was to make the pictures look well upon the walls.

When I called at his house on the day that brought the news of his death, the quaintly covered way that leads to the front door was girt on either side by a wealth of varied blooms that had been made ready by his gardener to greet his expected return from abroad; and then, a few days later, as I stood beside his coffin that had been reverently set down in the great studio, I found it buried beneath an avalanche of flowers, which his countless friends had sent as a last mark of love and affection. And it was, indeed, a fitting tribute to the dead artist; for Tadema, while he lived, had an absolute passion for flowers. As a painter he would linger with untiring devotion over each separate petal of every separate bloom, and yet with such a sustained sense of mastery in the rendering of their beauty that when the result was complete the infinite mass of perfected detail was found to be firmly bound together by the controlling force of a single effect of light and shade. To a young man who stood beside his easel on a day when he was making a careful study of azaleas that formed an integral part of the design upon which he was engaged, Tadema summed up in a single sentence the spirit in which he constantly laboured: "The people of to-day, they will tell you," he said, "that all this minute detail--that is not art!" And then, turning again to his picture, he added in his quaint English: "But it has given me so much pleasure to paint him that I cannot help thinking it will give, at least, some one pleasure to look at him, too." This was the spirit of the older men before the pestilent pursuit of originality came to infect the modest worship of Nature, and it will remain as the dominant quality of all art, whether of to-day or to-morrow, that is destined to outlive the passing fashion of an hour.

WITH ROSSETTI IN CHEYNE WALK

Passing along the Chelsea Embankment a while ago I was reminded by the sight of Rossetti's old house of the number of studios where I was once a constant visitor, which time had long since left untenanted. Millais, Leighton, Whistler, Fred Walker, Cecil Lawson, and Burne-Jones were among the names that crowded upon my recollection; and thinking of these men and of their work, I could not but be reminded of the changed spirit in which art has come to be regarded in these later days of restless experiment and ceaseless research after novelty of form and expression.

And yet those earlier times of which I am speaking were also marked by conflict and controversy; for even in the seventies, when I first became actively engaged in the study of painting, the stirring spirit of English Art still throbbed in response to the message that had been delivered by the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood more than twenty years before. It may be a fancy, but I hardly think the workers or students of a later generation can quite understand the concentrated eagerness and expectation which awaited each new achievement of that small group of men upon whom the hope of the time had been set. We did not, perhaps, then quite realise that the revolution, so far as they were concerned, was already complete, and that what was to come was not destined to signalise any new or important development of what had already been accomplished.

Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti, the three men who stand as the authentic founders of the pre-Raphaelite movement, had all, in the only sense in which their names still stand in linked association, produced the work by which they will be best remembered. During the twenty years that had passed since the movement took birth, the output of these three men, at first bitterly disputed and sometimes keenly resented, was in a sense the best that any or all of them were destined to give to the world--in a sense, I say, because their after-career, whatever new triumphs it proclaimed, exhibited a partial desertion of the aims which had held them in close comradeship during the brief season of their youth. It is probable that no three stronger or more distinct personalities ever laboured in the pursuit of a common purpose; and it was therefore inevitable that as the years passed they should each assert in separate ways the widely divergent tendencies which at the time I am speaking of were held in subjection to a common ideal. But when it is remembered what their combined efforts had already produced, the result must stand, I think, as a record unmatched in the domain of painting by any contemporary achievement in the art of Europe. Millais had painted and exhibited, among many other and less notable works, "The Feast of Lorenzo," "The Carpenter's Shop," the "Ophelia," the "Huguenot," and the "Blind Girl"; Holman Hunt, whose methods as a painter were not calculated to win such ready acceptance, had none the less firmly established his fame by his picture of the "Light of the World," at first roundly denounced by most of the organs of public opinion, but in the end, as much perhaps by reason of its intense religious sentiment as by its qualities of pure art, achieving through the advocacy of Mr. Ruskin a settled place in public esteem; and Rossetti, although during these years little or nothing had been shown to the world, was already accepted by those of the inner circle who were admitted to his confidence as the chief exponent of the spiritual tendencies of the new movement.

In 1873, when I first made the acquaintance of Rossetti, I knew more of his verse than of his painting. The first volume of his poems had been before the world for nearly three years, and it was hardly wonderful that the picturesque beauty of his writing, with its occasional direct reference to paintings and designs of his own, should have stirred within me an eager curiosity to make acquaintance with the pictures themselves. It happened about this time that I gained access to the small but choice collection of Mr. Rae of Birkenhead, which contained several of the most beautiful of Rossetti's works; and filled with admiration of what I had seen, I had written, over the signature of Ignotus, an article in one of the daily papers containing an incomplete but enthusiastic appreciation of Rossetti's powers. Searching where I could, I afterwards made myself acquainted with some of his designs in black and white; but still eager for a wider knowledge of a man whose poetic invention had laid so strong a hold upon me, I ventured to address myself directly to the recluse of Cheyne Walk, praying that if he could see his way to grant my request I might be permitted to visit his studio. From that time our acquaintance began. His letter in reply to mine, wherein I had mentioned a project then in my mind of enlarging my brief essay so as to make it more worthy of its subject, already revealed to me some part of that reticent side of his nature which our later friendship helped me the better to understand.

"My youth," he wrote to me, "was spent chiefly in planning and designing, and whether I shall still have time to do anything I cannot tell." And then, in conclusion, he added: "As to what you ask me about views connected with my work, I never had any theories on the subject, or derived, as far as a painter may say so, suggestions of style or tendency from any source save my own natural impulse."

This letter, dated, as I have said, in 1873, shows how little an artist may be aware what part of his life's work is destined to constitute his enduring title to fame. Still eagerly looking forward, he had already produced the work by which he will be best remembered, for although in years a young man--he was not more than forty-five at the time of our first acquaintance--his progress as a painter was not afterwards destined to record any notable development. "Beata Beatrix," "The Loving Cup," "The Beloved," the "Monna Vanna," the "Blue Bower," and the "Lady Lilith" already stood to his credit, besides the series of water-colours, including "Paolo and Francesca," and the beautiful pen-and-ink design of "Cassandra."

The room into which I was shown on the occasion of my first visit to Cheyne Walk came to seem to me as aptly characteristic of the man. It offered few or none of the ordinary features of a studio, and in its array of books around the walls spoke rather of the man of letters than of the painter; and the careless disposition of the simple furniture, though it bore some tokens of the newer fashion introduced by William Morris and Rossetti himself, made no very serious appeal on the score of deliberate decoration. It was obviously the painter's living room as well as his workshop, and as I came to know it afterwards, remains associated in my mind with many long evenings of vivid and fascinating talk, in which Rossetti roamed at will over the fields of literature and art. But the thing that at once took me by surprise on that first visit was the masculine and energetic personality of the man himself.

From what I knew of his persistent seclusion, and in part, also, from what I had gleaned from the subtle and delicate qualities expressed both in his painting and in his poetry, I was prepared to find in their author a man of comparatively frail physique and of subdued and retiring address. Nothing could be less like the reality that confronted me on that May afternoon, as he stood beside his easel at work upon the picture before him. It was not till much later, and then only by indications half-consciously conveyed, that I recaptured the picture of Rossetti as I had first found it reflected in his verse and in his painting. Little by little, as I got to know him better, I realised that my fancied image of him did indeed mirror qualities that lay deeply resident in his character; but at the first encounter it was the dominating strength and vigour of his intellect and the overpowering influence of a personality rich in varied sympathies, that struck itself in vivid outline upon the imagination of the observer.

As our intercourse and our friendship advanced, it was easy enough to comprehend the source of that potent spell which he wielded over all who came within the sphere of his influence. Without any reservation, I may say of him that he was beyond comparison the most inspiring talker with whom I have ever been brought into contact: certainly the most inspiring to a youth, for his conversation, although it sought no set phrase of eloquence, flowed in a stream that was irresistible; and yet so quick was his appreciation and so keen his sympathy that the youngest man of the company could always draw from him encouragement to speak without fear upon any theme that sincerely engaged him. I have heard him sometimes "gore and toss" without mercy any one who ventured to enter the debate with an empty ambition of display. Of insincerity of view, of any mere flimsy preciousness or prettiness of phrase, he was always impatiently intolerant; but he was equally quick to recognise and to welcome a thought truly held and modestly stated. At such times his ready power of evoking a full and fearless statement of what even the most insignificant of his visitors had to say was scarcely less inspiring than the rich and rounded tones of his own voice, as it glowed in enthusiastic appreciation of some worshipped hero in the field of art or letters. And though his work owns to a concentration and intensity of purpose that would seem sometimes to imply a corresponding narrowness of vision, it was in his work only that such a limited outlook could be said to be characteristic of the man.

That he dwelt by preference on the imaginative side of life, and chiefly chose for eulogy achievements in which the imagination was the dominating factor, is unquestionably true; but his taste within the wide limits of the region he had explored was catholic and comprehensive to a degree that I have not known equalled by any of his contemporaries. And lest this should seem an exaggerated estimate of the man as I knew him then, I may here quote the testimony of others who stood nearer to him than I did. Burne-Jones, his pupil and disciple, wrote long afterwards: "Towards other men's ideas he was decidedly the most generous man I ever knew. No one so threw himself into the ideas of the other men; but it was part of his enormous imagination. The praises he had first lavished upon me, had I not had any inborn grains of modesty, would have been enough to turn my head altogether." And at another time he wrote: "What I chiefly gained from him was not to be afraid of myself, and to do the thing I liked most; but in those first years I only wanted to think as he did, and all he did and said fitted me through and through. He never harangued or persuaded; he had a gift of saying things authoritatively, such as I have never heard in any man."

But there is, indeed, no surer testimony to the magic of his personality than is betrayed in the restive spirit with which his two comrades of those earlier days endeavoured afterwards to assert their independence of his influence. Both Sir John Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt, in their later life, went out of their way to try to prove to the world that the pre-Raphaelite movement would have been in no way changed in its direction if Rossetti had not been one of the original group. I often talked with Millais on this subject, and it was easy to perceive that he harboured something almost of resentment at the bare suggestion that the direction of his art was in any sense due to the example or teaching of Rossetti; and of the Millais of later years, who had partly discarded the poetic impulses of his youth, it may be readily conceded that he owed nothing to the man whose art, whether in its splendour or in its decay, was governed always by the spirit of imaginative design.

And equally of Holman Hunt who, in his two long volumes, has so laboriously and so needlessly laboured to vindicate his own independence, it may be admitted without reservation that his kinship with the spirit in which Rossetti worked was transient and almost accidental. But it remains, nevertheless, unquestionably true that during that brief season of close comradeship, the supremacy of Rossetti's genius is very clearly reflected in the work of both. The aftergrowth of talents as great as--and in some respects greater than--his, led each of these men into ways of Art that owned, it may be freely confessed, no obligation to Rossetti; and of the rich gifts of Millais as a painter, extraordinary in their precocity and developed in increasing power almost to the end of his career, no one could exhibit keener or truer appreciation than Rossetti himself. I recall on one of those nights in Cheyne Walk with what power and fulness of expression he paid willing homage to Millais' genius. "Since painting began," he said, "I do not believe there has ever been a man more greatly endowed." And then he went on to speak with genuine humility of his own many shortcomings in technical accomplishment, wherein he admitted that Millais stood as the unchallenged master of his time.

Rossetti was the kindest, but most careless, of hosts, and the many little dinners at which I was permitted to be a guest always had about them something of the air of improvisation. Of the actual details of the feast, from a culinary point of view, he seemed to take little heed, and there was something quaint and humorous in the way in which, at the head of his table, he would attack the fowl or joint that happened to be set before him, lunging at it with the carving knife and fork almost as if it were an armoured foe who had challenged him to mortal combat. I remember on one of those occasions an incident occurred that showed in striking fashion the quick warmth of his heart at the sudden call of friendship. We were in the midst of cheeriest converse. Fred Leyland, one of his staunchest and earliest patrons, was of the company, when the news came by special messenger that young Oliver Madox Brown was stricken with serious illness. It chanced that we had been talking of the young man's youthful essays, both in art and in literature, and Rossetti had spoken in almost exaggerated praise of the promise they displayed, when the letter was handed to him. He remained silent for a moment, though it was easy to see by the working of his face that he was deeply distressed. "Brown is my oldest friend," he said. "His boy is ill, and I must go to him; but that need not break the evening for you." And then, without any added word of farewell, he left us where we sat, and in a moment we heard the street door close, and we knew that he had gone. For a time we lingered over the table, but Cheyne Walk was no longer itself without the presence of its host. We passed into the studio, where Rossetti was wont to coil himself up on the sofa in preparation for long hours of talk, and we felt as by common consent that the evening was at an end.

The circumstance was slight enough in itself, but I remember feeling afresh how magical and inspiring was the spell he exercised over us all, and I little realised then that this friendship with Rossetti, which had proved so powerful a factor in moulding the intellectual tendencies of my own life, was not destined much longer to endure. For a time, indeed, the old welcome always awaited me, but after a time I thought I detected a certain reserve and restraint in our intercourse which I was unable to explain. A little later those longed-for invitations to dine at Cheyne Walk ceased altogether, and once or twice when I called the studio door, always open to me heretofore, was closed, on the excuse that the painter was too busily engaged. It was not, indeed, until after his death, that I learnt from his truest and most trusted friend the cause of our alienation.

Rossetti, although he never exposed his own pictures to public criticism, was, like every artist who has ever lived, eager for the praise of those whose praise he valued; and his nature, already grown morbid under the stress of influences that were undermining his health, was not without an element of jealousy that seemed strangely inconsistent with the tribute he could on many an occasion offer to the work of others. He saw but little of Burne-Jones in those days, but he knew that I saw him often. He knew, also, from my published criticism, that I was strongly attracted to his genius, and although I have heard Rossetti himself speak of his pupil and follower in terms of laudation that could not be surpassed, the thought, as I learnt later, had already begun to poison his mind that my allegiance to himself had suffered diminution; and he frankly confessed to the friend from whom little in his life was hidden that my presence in Cheyne Walk became to him, for this reason, a source of irritation, which, in the condition of his health, he was unable to endure.

Such flaws in a nature so splendidly endowed count for nothing in remembrance of the picture of him that remains to me as I first knew him in the plenitude of his intellectual powers. For a time it seemed as if the great movement at the head of which his name must enduringly remain was likely to suffer eclipse. The taste of later years had taken an entirely different direction, and the ideals which the small band he led had striven so manfully to recapture from a renewed study of nature and a finer understanding of the artistic achievements of the past appeared to have sunk into oblivion. It was therefore a delight to find in Rome in the spring of two years ago how enthusiastic was the welcome accorded to a man who, while he ranks so high among English painters, owned in his veins the blood of Italy and from whose painters, at that bewitching season when the spirit of the Renaissance was in its youth, he had drawn the inspiration which was destined to kindle his own genius.

EDWARD BURNE-JONES

"I think Morris's friendship began everything for me; everything that I afterwards cared for; we were freshmen together at Exeter. When I left Oxford I got to know Rossetti, whose friendship I sought and obtained. He is, you know, the most generous of men to the young. I couldn't bear with a young man's dreadful sensitiveness and conceit as he bore with mine. He taught me practically all I ever learnt; afterwards I made a method for myself to suit my nature. He gave me courage to commit myself to imagination without shame--a thing both bad and good for me. It was Watts, much later, who compelled me to try and draw better.

"I quarrel now with Morris about Art. He journeys to Iceland, and I to Italy--which is a symbol--and I quarrel, too, with Rossetti. If I could travel backwards I think my heart's desire would take me to Florence in the time of Botticelli."

So Burne-Jones wrote of himself more than forty years ago. It chanced I had just then written a series of papers on living English painters; and, with the thought of their re-publication, had asked him for some particulars of his earlier career. The scheme, I remember, was never carried into effect; but his answer to my inquiry, from which I have drawn this interesting fragment of autobiography, served as the beginning of a long friendship that was interrupted only by death.

In those boyish essays of mine there was, as I now see, not a little of that quality of youthful conceit that could never, I think, have entered very largely into his composition; and if I recall them now with any sort of gratification, it is mainly because they included an enthusiastic appreciation of so much as was then known to me of the work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Of Rossetti's art I have already spoken, and perhaps the time has not yet arrived to record a final verdict upon the worth of his achievement as a painter. I have also sought to indicate how irresistible in my own case was the influence of his strongly marked personality, an influence which enabled me the more readily to understand how deep may have been the debt that is here so generously acknowledged. In this matter the witness of his contemporaries is irrefutable. Even though posterity should not accord to him the unstinted praise bestowed upon his art by those who then accepted him as a master, no later judgment can dispute or disturb the authority he exercised over those who came within the sphere of his personal fascination.

Little wonder then that to the dream-fed soul of the younger painter, whose art as yet lacked the means to fix in form and colour the thronging visions that must have already crowded his brain, the friendship of such a man must have seemed a priceless possession; and although, with the patient and gradual assertion of Burne-Jones's individuality, their ways in the world of Art divided, yet even in that later day each knew well how to measure the worth of the other. Of what was highest and noblest in the art of Rossetti, no praise ever outran the praise offered by Burne-Jones to the man he had sought and owned as his master; and I can recall an evening in Cheyne Walk more than forty years ago, when there fell from the lips of Rossetti the most generous tribute I have ever heard to the genius of the painter who was still his disciple. "If, as I hold," he said, in those round and ringing tones that seemed at once to invite and to defy contradiction, "the noblest picture is a painted poem, then I say that in the whole history of Art there has never been a painter more greatly gifted than Burne-Jones with the highest qualities of poetical invention." Here we have praise indeed; but there is at least one painter, he whose long life still kept the stainless record of unswerving loyalty to a noble ideal, to whom also Burne-Jones has here owned his indebtedness, who would, I believe, have accepted and endorsed even such a judgment as this. And if an artist's fame lives most sweetly, most securely, in the regard of his fellows, who could ask aught higher of the living or the dead of our times, than that the award of Rossetti should be confirmed and enforced by the painter of "Love and Death"?

"A picture is a painted poem." Upon that Rossetti never tired of insisting. "Those who deny it," he used to add in his vehement way, "are simply men who have no poetry in their composition." We know there are many who deny it,--many, indeed, who think it savours of the rankest heresy; for herein, as they would warn us, lurks the insidious poison of "the literary idea." Nor can such warning ever be without its uses. The literary idea, it must be owned, has often played sad havoc in the domain of art. Much, both in painting and sculpture that the world has rightly forgotten or would fain forget, found the source of its failure in misguided loyalty to a literary ideal; much even that survives still claims a spurious dignity from its fortuitous attachment to an imaginative conception that had never been rightly subdued to the service of Art.

But though the warning be timely, the definition which it confronts is not on that account to be lightly dismissed. It is true, as Rossetti stoutly maintained, and must ever remain true, of all men who have poetry in their nature. It was true, from the beginning of his career to its close, of the art of Burne-Jones. From "The Merciful Knight" to the unfinished "Avalon," wherein, as it would seem, he had designed to give us all that was most winning in the brightly-coloured dreams of youth, combined with all that was richest in the gathered resources of maturity, his every picture was a painted poem. Nay, more, every drawing from his hand, every fragment of design, each patient study of leaf or flower or drapery, has in it something of that imaginative impulse which controls and informs the completed work. I have lately been turning over the leaves of some of those countless books of studies he has left behind him, studies which prove with what untiring and absorbing industry he approached every task he had set himself to accomplish. And yet, amongst them all, of mere studies there are none. Again and again he went back to nature, but ever under the compelling impulse of an idea, always taking with him an integral part of what he came to capture. That unprejudiced inspection of the facts of nature which, in the preliminary stages of their work, may content those who are moved by a keener and colder spirit of scientific research, he had not the will, he had not the power to make. For every force carries with it its own limitation; nor would it ever have been his boast that nature owned no more than she was fain to yield to him. If, then, with unwearied application he was constantly re-seeking the support of nature, it was with a purpose so frankly confessed, that even in the presence of the model the sense of mere portraiture is already seen to be passing under the dominion of the idea. At their first encounter the artist's invention asserts its authority over his subject; and not all the allurements of individual face or form which to men of a different temperament are often all-sufficing, could find or leave him unmindful of the single purpose that filled his mind and guided all the work of his hand.

It is this which gives to the drawings of Burne-Jones their extraordinary charm and fascination. He who possesses one of these pencil studies has something more than a leaf torn from an artist's sketch-book. He has in the slightest of them a fragment that images the man: that is compact of all the qualities of his art; and that reveals his ideal as surely as it interprets the facts upon which he was immediately engaged. And yet we see in them how strenuously, how resolutely, he set himself to wring from nature the vindication of his own design. There is no realist of them all who looked more persistently at life, who spared himself so little where patient labour might serve to perfect what he had in his mind to do; and if the treasure he bore away still left a rich store for others, it is because the house of beauty holds many mansions, and no man can hope to inhabit them all.

"A picture is a painted poem." Like all definitions that pass the limits of barren negation it contains only half a truth. Like most definitions forged by men of genius it is chiefly valuable as a confession of faith. There is a long line of artists to whom, save in a forced and figurative sense, it has no kind of relevancy. And they boast a mighty company. Flanders and Spain serve under their banner. Rubens and Velasquez, Vandyck and Franz Hals, aye, and at no unworthy distance, our own Reynolds and Gainsborough are to be counted among the leaders of their host. And long before the first of these men had arisen, the tradition they acknowledged had been firmly established. It was Venice that gave it birth. Venice, where not even the commanding influence of Mantegna could hold back the flowing tide of naturalism that rose under the spell of Titian's genius. Out of his art, which contained them both, came those twin currents of portraiture and landscape that were destined to supply all that was vital in the after development of painting in Europe. All that was vital; for though Religion and Allegory, History and Symbol, still played their formal part in many a grandiose and rhetorical design, these things were no longer of the essence of the achievement. To the painters who employed them, nature itself was already all-absorbing. The true poetry of their work, whatever other claims it may seem to advance, resides in the mastery of the craftsman; it cannot be detached from the markings of the brush that give it life and being. To wring from nature its countless harmonies of tone and colour, to seize and interpret the endless subtleties of individual form and character--these are the ideals that have inspired and have satisfied many of the greatest painters the world has produced. Who then shall say that Art has need of any other, any wider ambition?

And yet, as I have said, the house of beauty has so many mansions that no single ideal can furnish them all. Nature is prodigal to those who worship her; there is fire for every altar truly raised in her service. And so it happened that while Venice was perfecting a tradition destined for many a generation to sway the schools of Northern Europe, there had risen and fallen at Florence a race of artists, such as the world had not seen before and may haply not see again, who had asked of Nature a different gift, and had won another reward. That imperishable series of "painted poems" which had been first lisped in the limpid accents of Giotto, had found their final utterance in the perfected dialect of Michael Angelo. In the years that intervened many hands had tilled the field; many a harvest had been gathered in: but so rich had been the yield that the land perforce lay fallow at the last; and when Michael Angelo died, Florence had nothing to bequeath that the temper of the time was fit to inherit.

From that day almost to our own the ideal of the Florentine painters has slept the sleep of Arthur in Avalon. Those who from time to time have sought to recapture their secret have gone in their quest, not to the source, but to the sea. They have tried to begin where Lionardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo left off; to repeat in poorer phrase what had been said once and for all in language that needed no enlargement, that would suffer no translation. They made the mistake of thinking that the forms and modes of art are separable things, independent of its essence; that the coinage moulded by the might of individual genius could be imported and adopted as common currency; and so even the most gifted of them carried away only the last faltering message of a style already waning and outworn. To look only to the painters of our own land, we know well what disaster waited upon men like Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon in their hapless endeavours to recover the graces of the grand style; a

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