witnessed an amazing spectacle, Waterloo Bridge toppling over, arch after arch, like a pack of cards and vanishing beneath the waters of the Thames. A sufficiently alarming catastrophe! And then what would have been the result? For the granite blocks would have come apart and buried themselves in the mud. The girders of a steel bridge might have been caught up and picked out. This mass of broken stone would have set up a dam right across the Thames, probably barring all navigation; while the Embankment, the old Underground, perhaps the Terrace of the Houses of Parliament and a great section of South London, would have been under water until the obstruction was moved. For how long? I wonder if all the Waterloo Bridge lovers-and most of us rank ourselves as suchrealise all this, the immense responsibility-for there are six piers standing in the stream, all similar in construction, a crushing weight of stone resting on wooden piles driven down into the river-bed. One pier is giving way. Can we take risks about the others?

Then, what was the next step? Our engineer, speaking with the fullest knowledge of all the facts, said that this pier must come down. Another engineer, while admitting that he was not in full possession of the facts, opined that such drastic treatment was unnecessary, arguing that it could be underpinned. The Committee called in two men at the head of the engineering profession, the only two living men who had built bridges in the tidal waters of the Thames. They agreed on the necessity of demolition. Others, we are told, supported the proposal to underpin. How could the Committee decide between experts? It appealed to the Council of the Institute of Civil Engineers, and after most careful consideration the reply came that the London County Council'would be well advised to act upon the considered individual opinion of' the men they had consulted. Can any one suggest a higher or more trustworthy tribunal? It would be difficult to find one, and that afternoon in February the Council, after debate but without a division, passed the following recommendation, that

'Subject to the provision of a subway underneath the Strand for the accommodation of the general vehicular traffic

using the bridge, Waterloo Bridge should be reconstructed with not more than five arches over the river, and of a width sufficient to take six lines of vehicular traffic.'

But remember this. In the Committee room that morning, when receiving the deputations which had come, some of them a second or third time, to plead for the preservation of the bridge, and again in the Council Chamber that afternoon, the Chairman of the Committee put his case with crushing logic. In situations such as this, whatever their personal predilections might be-and I believe that most of its members started in with the desire to save the bridge-what must a responsible Committee do? They were not engineering experts, but they had the highest engineering opinion that one pier must certainly come down at once, and that probably most of the others would have to come down as well, now or in the future. A granite bridge sounds indestructible, but in places poor stone had been used, and it was crumbling. If the whole bridge had to be taken down-to its very deepest foundations, remember should it be re-erected? As an artistic monument it has been acclaimed all over the world. From the traffic point of view, as a 20th-century bridging of a tidal river which carries heavy traffic, and would like to carry still heavier, it is now out of date, the span of its arches, the width of its roadway, being both too narrow. Its gallant defenders say nothing need be taken down. Well, somehow or other, they must manage to prove this. They have the incentive and they have the time. For no action can be taken in any case until the temporary bridge is completed, and that will not be before July. At present the dangerous arches are shored up, and safe.

GEORGE S. C. SWINTON.

Art. 10.-CLASSICAL

GALLERY.

MYTHS IN THE NATIONAL

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THE pictures in the National Gallery whose subjects are taken from classical mythology are among the most popular in the collection; some of that popularity is undoubtedly due to the relief given by such pictures from the continual repetition of religious themes in the Italian schools. In these 'profane' pictures the artist can be appreciated as artist or illustrator according to the inclination of the spectator without the intrusion of any religious or anti-religious sentiment. Some popularity is also aroused by recalling memories or providing illustrations in happier days of legends once familiar but unwelcome at school or college. To many the profound charm of those ancient legends, obscured in boyhood by the difficult triviality of Ovid's utterance, has been finally revealed by such a masterpiece as Titian's 'Bacchus and Ariadne.' Yet though these pictures may serve as illustrations, they are utterly free from the pedantic precision of archæological detail which makes illustrated editions of classical texts so futile and modern paintings of such subjects so sickly and valueless. If the spectator happens to be a classical scholar and has any feeling for art, he knows that archæological and artistic values must not be confused, and the general public, who are never quite sure if painting is anything more than the illustration of a subject, are of necessity quite indifferent, once they have established a general identity between title and treatment, to requirements of scholarship. And a similar indifference, springing, however, from a different cause, is characteristic of the Italian artists, even after editions of the classics and classical remains had become common in Italy. Antiquarianism was never allowed to cramp creative power, whereas in painters of inferior calibre it becomes the dominating influence in their work. Mantegna is the only great Italian artist to whom archæological truth was an obsession, and fortunately his genius was, in general, strong enough to mould his science into impressive artistic form.

Piero di Cosimo's 'Death of Procris'* is a good

* N. G. 698.

TO

f

NAT

instance of the free handling by an artist of a familiar classical subject. Moore has turned the story into some pretty verses, and Ovid has told it at length in the Art abje of Love as well as in the Metamorphoses. Procris, the jealous of her husband, follows him on a hunting our expedition, betrays her presence by a movement in the

thicket where she has concealed herself, and her husband, nest thinking the noise was caused by a wild beast, drew his the bow at a venture and killed her. Piero was born about ord 1462, and the editio princeps of Ovid appeared in Rome r in 1471, so that it is quite likely that he may have read me the story for himself or heard an accurate version of it. ro And yet the picture is in no way a direct illustration of for Ovid's verses, and those who do not know the classical they story are not hindered in their enjoyment of the picture.

It is antiquarian and illustrative in a peculiar manner. te The dramatic moment of her death and discovery did Ti not attract Piero. Procris is seen lying dead by the shore of an estuary in a wide, peaceful landscape where flowers and birds and dogs are shown with tender delicacy; the actual cause of her death is suggested or recalled to those who know by the presence in the foreground of the hunting dog and the satyr, a being in whom the life of the wilds is personified. The artist's emotions have been stirred not so much by the story as by the thought of the world in which the incident took place, by the freedom of that ancient life which he realises so convincingly in the landscape and in the e figure of the satyr, while Procris remains a rather heavily conceived and executed form, just as clumsy as the nymphs in the same painter's picture of 'The Rape of Hylas.'* Piero had no power to present the beauty of the human form, but he conveys the tragic moment of death by the impressive form of the dog, gazing in dumb TE sorrow at Procris and by the exquisite delicacy of the half-human satyr laying his hands so gently, so humanly upon the dead woman. The solemn stillness of the whole scene is only broken by a few birds quietly gliding down to the water in the background.

i

In his essay on Sandro Botticelli, Walter Pater has touched on that painter's peculiar treatmentof the antique.

*In the collection of Mr Robert Benson.

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'You will find,' he says, referring to The Birth of Venus' in the Uffizi,' that quaint design of Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of the Greeks themselves of the finest period.' Botticelli, about whom Pater wrote so hesitatingly in 1870, almost apologising at the end of the essay for delaying so long upon a secondary painter, is now established as one of the greatest among Italian artists. Mr Berenson calls him the 'greatest artist of lineal design that Europe has ever had,' at the same time drawing attention to Botticelli's general indifference to mere subject and representation': the secret is this, that in European painting there has never been an artist so indifferent to representation.' And it is consistent with this view of his genius that none of Botticelli's pictures are direct illustrations of a literary subject. The so-called 'Mars and Venus' in the National Gallery, The Birth of Venus' and 'The Spring' at Florence, are not based on any classical legends, but are a free combination of certain pictorial conceptions from the ancient world. In what way, then, is he so excellent an inlet into the Greek temper'? It is simply through his gift of design or orderly coherence. Design brings with it clearness of individual form, and subordination of the parts, not to a possible subject, but to the total effect. And that is the peculiar achievement of Greek art in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.; vases, reliefs on tombs, pediments of temples, all bear witness even in their ruin to a feeling for design, which must have been much more obvious in the undamaged brightness of marble and paint and metal. In the single statue it was on the effect of the whole that the artist concentrated, not on facial expression or graceful attitude; in the pedimental the groups he took the solid figure and repeated it to form an adequate design just as Botticelli throws together his figures in 'Spring' or 'The Birth of Venus.' The Greek artist never allowed the power of the figures employed in the design to be diminished by charm of background or atmosphere, and they were always to be seen in the all-revealing light of Greece. The facial expression of Botticelli's figures is no more significant than the 'smile' in early Greek sculpture; his real interest is in the completed design, and in the interest of that he has

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