highest expression of itself. With poetry the immediate appeal is the smallest of all; and although it is held that poetry is the marriage of sound and sense, sense is so far the predominating partner that we only care to read poetry in an unknown tongue for a very short time-many people, for instance, cannot tolerate more than two verses of Burns's "Poor Mailie." With sculpture and painting the two properties merge more intricately into one another, for in the one operation of the eye both things claim equal attention. A picture appeals to us by its design and color before we have considered what it represents. That immediate effect, however, has an organic relation to the content of the picture. It is conceived by the artist, consciously or unconsciously, as the symbol of his subject, and is the last thing to disappear. So we find in old and faded works by good masters wonderful ghosts of form and color after features, dress, and action have almost disappeared. In every real work of art this quality that is not representation exists, and apart from all veracity of statement, or beauty of the subject-matter, or illustration of life, it is what makes the painting a work of art. Primitive art has this first-hand expressiveness; and although we may argue that it was the result of incapacity to represent objects, that as soon as the primitive could draw his images better he did so, and that this is what we understand by the progress of art, it does not follow that this lost expressiveness is not worth much of what we have gained, or rather, that something of its spirit cannot be recovered and developed in another way than that of the Greeks and the Renaissance. Even the stoutest of us, as he has stood by the eternal-looking figures in the Assyrian and Egyptian rooms in the British Museum, must have had his moments of doubt whether all the victories won by Greek art have not cost us more than a defeat. Mr. George Moore in one of his early essays raised this interesting speculation: what would have happened to Japanese art if a cargo of the Elgin marbles had been wrecked on the coast of Japan? A speculation that is more to the taste of our day is: what might have happened here if, before the Renaissance, a cargo of Egyptian and Assyrian figures had found its way ashore on both sides of the Channel? Each year, however, sees more and more examples of the ancient art of the East assembling in European museums, and the impact of this penetrating expressiveness upon the more sensitive minds of our generation is probably one of the causes of the dissatisfaction with the whole trend of art that is now becoming manifest all over Europe. But the more potent influence has been the new knowledge of Chinese art which has moved Western artists to the greatest heart-searchings. The whole art of the Orient is at last receiving respectful study-its significance as well as its form-and the artists are beginning to follow the students, and their studies are carrying them far in directions that seem like madness to their older contemporaries. For instance, the Indian many-limbed figures, which a generation ago were dismissed as barbaric and debased forms of art, are now thought no more strange than the centaurs and fauns of the Greeks, and it has become the focus of discussion whether they do not represent further possibilities of making sculpture more symphonic or precessional, the many limbs, it is argued, having power to suggest infinity. In a word, the question is raised whether the drift of art was really Westward. The new learning of Oriental art bulks more and more formidably every day, and the forces are gathering in all parts of Europe. The solid foundations (especially in the Grafton Gallery) are beginning to tremble underfoot, and men are asking one another whether there is any law (or by-law). on earth why there should not be more than one Renaissance. In Italian art before the Renaissance the masters exercised a plastic freedom over their designs and a power to intensify and exaggerate expressiveness that gives them often a curious kinship with Eastern art, this power fading in the fifteenth century and in the seventeenth dying away (shall we say?) in the enigmatic smile-faintly Chineseof the Mona Lisa. It may be that some day, when Oriental learning has wrought a complete change, people will say of her (for, of course, she will be rediscovered by then) that she was smiling at the wrong Renaissance. Since the powerful influence of that Renaissance, art has gone fast and far along the road to complete imitation of nature. But as the artist's power of representation has enlarged, the problems of this function have in an increasing measure occupied his mind, and the objects upon which he has exercised it have slackened their demand upon his power to invent and magnify. There were, of course, a host of other factors, such as the modern concern with light, which became the "hero of the picture," but the decline in the importance of the subjectmatter and a lessening capacity for pregnant design are indisputable. The question that fails to be considered is whether the synthesists (to group together the French Post-Impressionists and the Augustus John group in England under one ugly but convenient title) do not really go far to remedy the two disabilities into which modern art has fallen. The one group, which includes most of the living Frenchmen who exhibited at the Grafton Gallery this year, have accepted and carried yet further the negation of the subjectmatter, but they seek to make the composition monumental in its own right by the value of the pigment, the strength and intensity of color, and the simplification of form to shapes that convey this sense of permanence. The other group, which includes John, Lamb, and Grant, in England, and Maurice Denis, and a number of Frenchmen, seeks to revive the importance of subject-matter, and to concentrate upon the emotional significance that arises from the subject. Whether we agree or not that they have found the remedies, we must admit that both sections are serious about serious things, and that their search for monumental form and style is all for the good. It is significant that many of the most learned and most thoughtful of our critics here and in France have given their general support to the movement; that it has attracted back to contemporary painting the more serious section of our connoisseurs who want art to be anything but a solace for tired minds; and that it has stabbed through the indifference to art into which the general public had fallen since the PreRaphaelites. How far the movement is leading us, and how changed the criteria of criticism are becoming, may be gauged from an excerpt from a Post-Impressionist article in the "Burlington Magazine" by Mr. Clive Bell, a leading apologist of the school, who puts the case for perfect freedom in this way: "Either all works of art have something in common, or when we speak of 'works of art' we gibber. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all works that stir our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to St. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes, the masterpieces of Poussin, of Cézanne, and of Henri Matisse? Only one answer seems possible significant form. In each, forms and relations of forms stir our aesthetic emotions. Form is the one quality common to all works of visual art." The claim is distinctly staked out that the plastic arts are not representative but presentative like music. The purest form of art by this theory would be art purged of its content, and reduced to cubes and patterns, for then there would be nothing but form and the relations of form. Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin had this in common, that they sought to reclaim the ancient prerogative of the artist to deal with his subject after his own law. Their transfigurations were expressed in terms of abstract form. They were synthesists above everything else. A few of their French followers seek, like John and Lamb, to transfigure their subjects in terms of significant form, but the majority are content with the aim of form without concern for the subject. England therefore, at a time when she has not made up her mind whether pictorial art can be severed from literary associations, finds herself facing the spectacle of pictorial art trying to sever itself from all associations. Can pictorial art live apart from its association content like music, or will it become gibberish, as poetry does when the poet seeks to use words for their rhythmic value apart from their meaning? Can it give up ethics and cease to have the responsibility of poetry without lowering its whole value to the human race? The answer surely is that it cannot; that although works of art have in common the language of significant form, a work of art to be great must also have a moral value that can be expressed in that form, as form in poetry rises to its heights when it is expressing its most ecstatic thoughts. That any movement can alter a prin ciple so deeply rooted in the human race, is, at the least, unlikely, but that such an attempt is valuable as a corrective of the ills of modern artthe otiose condition of our classicalists, the indigestion of our Impressionistsis surely undeniable. Nevertheless, England, at least, need have little fear of Post-Impressionism or any other form of imported art. England only imports what can be dealt with by her national temperament, and that she speedily transforms into a home product on which the original exporter cannot find his trade marks. How different is the wayward, dainty Impressionism of Steer, Clausen, McTaggart (who got Impressionism by wireless, for he never saw a Monet till he was over sixty), of the Glasgow School, of Brabazon, Holmes and Houston, from Impressionism that seized and possessed Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, to whom their art was a new religion! The prevailing instinct of English art is the desire for beauty, and we pay the penalty in the national cult of prettiness, which is as far into her territory as most of us can enter. Our boast might be that we make two pretty things grow where one idea grew before. However the mandarins may rage against them, even our pioneers are never ahead of beauty. But the French can forget her in their search for truths, and it is they who must take their consolation from Whitman's lines: The Great Masters No characteristic of the Englishman is more clearly expressed in his art than his love of an harmonious life within the walls of that much-vaunted castle of his, which is inviolate, because the authorities know perfectly well that nothing dangerous is con no equivalent. It is this spirit that England needs most, for in our island art loses her divine fierceness and challenge, and we forget that beauty should be more than sweetness, that art at her noblest can be "terrible as an army with banners." Therefore let us not shut our gates to all that comes with the smoky flares of the Post-Impressionists. cealed within. (Whoever heard of a of artist-explorers to whom we have really dangerous English anarchist?) We have an incurable gift (called "Spirit of Campromise") for taking an ideal, domesticating it, and making it something with which we can live harmoniously. Life must be pleasant and seemly. The French have a gift for making life fit an ideal or be damned. It was they who had the Revolution and the Commune. There is a shy, wild-flower quality in our English art that makes it perhaps seem fragile and accidental when seen beside the art of contemporary schools of the Continent, with their strong intensive culture. But England's spontaneous charm never altogether fails, and is ever springing up under the most unlikely hedgerows and in queer company to carry us through seasons when professional crops on the Continent have perished in the drought. But the continuous, laborious, seriousness so characteristic of the French mind is as alien to us as is its gaiety. French genius takes pains in the real sense of the word. Millet, Degas, Monet, and Cézanne belong to a line The Edinburgh Review. What the future may hold for English art is more than ever an enigma; but of one thing we may be sure: I'ost-Impressionism, either as a poison or a medicine, will never be taken here in its purity. You never get in England the empty vessel. Artist, musician, writer, politician-their capacity is always nearly full: only a little can go on top and the body of the liquor remains much the same. None of our national bogeys are really dangerous. No anarchists, Jesuits, or Post-Impressionists can ever have their will of us. South Kensington and Hammersmith can sleep safe o' nights, well guarded by the Spirit of Compromise, formidable to Art as to Anarchy. James Bone. THE ASCENDANCY OF WORDSWORTH. In 1884, James Russell Lowell, in the course of his presidential address to the Wordsworth Society, said of Wordsworth, "Popular, let us admit, he can never be"; and certainly the slight recognition given to the poetry of Wordsworth at that period justified the American Ambassador's somewhat pessimistic outlook. Yet to-day, despite the fact that this is considered an unpoetical age, one may say with assurance that the popularity of Wordsworth's poetry, unlike that of his contemporaries, is in the ascendant with public opinion, and that presently he will take the full honors due to one whose genius places him next to Milton. This tardiness of recognition by the public is due partly to Wordsworth's own attitude, and partly to the unfortunate period in which he lived. One can scarcely wonder that he was laughed to scorn because of his simplicity cult. Revolting from the tawdry glitter of Moore and Byron, he resolved to produce a new and pure kind of poetry that should be based upon truth and simplicity of diction. To a certain extent he was justified in his demand for simplicity, but through an entire lack of humor the cult was carried to as ridiculous an excess as that which characterized the very school of poetry to which he was so opposed. It is not to be wondered at that a public brought up on the poetry of Moore and Byron should find nothing attractive in the somewhat barren work of Wordsworth, for the latter deliberately precluded himself from using every artifice, legitimate or otherwise, that had been used by what one might term the Italian School of poetry, of which Byron was the brilliant figurehead.. Time has demonstrated to us that Wordsworth was most earnest in this idiosyncrasy of his; he put forward vehement claims to recognition on the strength of poetry of the Idiot Boy type, which now moves one, not to laughter, but to pity at the spectacle of a man endowed with the highest poetical gifts wasting them on the production of work that, by reason of the crippling restrictions which in his excess of zeal he imposed upon himself, could not possibly demonstrate his true ability. Genius breaks the bonds of theories, and Wordsworth unconsciously found himself in a style that neither conformed to the school he opposed nor to the rules he had himself laid down. We now read his poetry, not because his muse found expression in the diction of an ordinary man, but because in following his self-imposed cult of simplicity he expressed himself in language as far removed from that of the ordinary man as was that of the poets to whom he took exception. His was a grandeur that outshone the scintillating archaicisms of the most romantic of poets. The simplicity which he insisted on was one not so much of diction as of thought. His philosophy never got beyond Nature; why should it when "The meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"? And though in one of his letters he declares: "I have not written down to the level of superficial observers or unthinking minds," the result of his work was to make men both observe and think. His rugged honesty would not permit him to conceal the inner music of the heart, and hence his poetry touches some corresponding chord in the soul of his reader. There can be no doubt that Wordsworth derived inspiration and strength from his solitude, and he might as truthfully have referred to his inspiring thoughts, as to the daffodils, when he wrote: "For oft, when on my couch I lie, In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude." Some men find inspiration amid the throng of humanity, some find it on the silent mountain tops; it was in the latter place that Wordsworth found the deep, imperishable truths which he proclaimed in immortal verse. Hazlitt, a man endowed with the highest critical faculties, was not slow to recognize the true merit of Wordsworth; indeed, the warmth of his praise contrasts greatly with the apathetic attitude of the poet's contemporaries. "Mr. Wordsworth is the most original poet now living . . his poems open a finer and deeper vein of thought and feeling than any poet in modern times has done or attempted. He has produced a deeper impression and on a smaller circle than any of his contemporaries. His powers have been mistaken by the age," was Hazlitt's tribute, and it required much courage and great insight for a critic to make such a statement at a time when Byron and Scott were at the zenith of their popularity. We are given, then, the remarkable spectacle of a man who never mis |