not a fragment remains. On Lord Beaconsfield's return he was smothered with flowers. The Queen bestowed on her favourite Minister the Order of the Garter. She offered him a Dukedom. No adulatory phrase was spared him. Society, as he once had said, kissed his feet. Did his ironical spirit travel for a moment into that wide field between obvious seriousness and downright sarcasm, as Leslie Stephen called it, where the readers of Disraeli's novels may interpret his meaning as they please? He must have remembered the struggles of his long life against the animosities and ridicule of all these fine people. What,' Coningsby had asked, 'is an individual against a vast public opinion?' 'Divine,' Sidonia had replied; and Lord Beaconsfield could, after the experience of more than thirty years, have found no simpler answer. Mr Buckle's final volumes contain the portrait, at the summit of his fame, of the most picturesque figure among British Prime Ministers. They are full of this man's mystical prophesies and sagacious reflexions. There are many lessons to be learned from them. The lesson he learnt at Berlin, so he said, was that neither the Crimean war, nor this horrible devastating war which has just terminated, would have taken place if England had spoken with the necessary firmness.' How vain are the lessons of history and the reflexions of statesmen! Mr Buckle may be accused of eulogy. It is the fashion to decry the statesmen of the Victorian era, and to depreciate its philosophy, literature, and art. The Elizabethans in their turn suffered at the hands of the Stuart poetasters. Mr Buckle has borne in mind Newman's dictum that a just indignation is felt against a writer who brings forward wantonly the weaknesses of a great man, though the world knows that they existed. These volumes show Lord Beaconsfield, the Dizzy of the 19th century, to have been great in literature and statecraft. It may justly be claimed for him that his fancy influenced the policy of England. ESHER. Art. 2.-GREEK PORTRAITS IN THE BRITISH 1. Inlustrium virorum ut extant in urbe expressi vultus. [By Achilles Statius.] Rome, 1569; Formis Ant. Lafrerii. 2. Imagines et elogia virorum illustrium et eruditorum ex antiquis lapidibus et numismatibus expressa cum annotationibus ex biblioteca Fulvi Ursini. Rome, 1570; Ant Lafrerii Formis. 3. A Catalogue of Sculpture in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum. By A. H. Smith. Three vols. London, 1892-1904. 4. Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures in the Municipal Collections of Rome. Vol. I. Ed. H. Stuart Jones. Oxford, 1912. 5. Etudes Comparatives sur le Portrait. By Vladimir de Grueneisen. Rome: Modes, 1911. 6. Antike Porträts. By R. Delbrück. 1912. Bonn: Marcus, 7. Greek and Roman Portraits. By A. Hekler. Heinemann, 1912. 8. Griechische Porträtstatuen. By G. Lippold. Munich: Bruckmann, 1912. And other works. DURING the past twelve months the collections of the British Museum, which, during five years of war had been all but inaccessible, have affected us in a new way, making upon us the double claim of strangeness and familiarity. As one department after another was once more thrown open to the public, we found ourselves revisiting them, partly with the delight of recognition, but also with a new feeling of discovery, much as we visit galleries abroad or even our own after a prolonged absence in a foreign land. In such a mood not only are we struck with the interest or beauty of particular objects, but we perceive more acutely perhaps than ever before what a wealth of comparatively unknown material is still hidden away in certain sections of the Museum. In the Greek and Roman galleries, for instance, where the civilisation of Greece and Rome is represented well-nigh continuously in the most magnificent of its artistic products, a certain number of objects seem to have escaped attention, from the simple accident of unfavourable exhibition or because they are shown in a manner confusing to the mind. The Greek portraits are a case in point. The Kingpriests from Branchidæ, the Mausolus-that supreme conception of an Eastern despot-the bronze head of an African found at Cyrene, have long, it is true, been famous and accredited masterpieces, while a certain number of portraits, ranging in date from the fourth to the second century B.C., have recently been rescued from oblivion and are now exhibited in the Ephesus Room in connexion with works of art of the same period and style. But, before the collection of Greek portraits, which though small is scarcely equalled elsewhere for quality, can be brought into the prominence that it deserves, it would seem necessary to break definitely with certain obsolete principles of arrangement too long prevalent at the Museum, such as the assigning of conspicuous places only to pieces of historic interest, while considering the rest, whatever their æsthetic quality, as of subordinate importance. Portraits difficult to identify are still used as mere furniture to fill awkward spaces, or else are banished to the uncomfortable gangway known as the 'Hall of Inscriptions,' where fine pieces remain perched almost out of sight on high wall-brackets. Hence it happens that many portraits of the first order are singularly little known outside the official catalogues, a bare half-dozen figuring in a standard work like Hekler's 'Greek and Roman Portraits '-not the only book of its kind to overlook excellent examples belonging to the Museum in favour of inferior replicas abroad. It would, however, be both ungracious and unjust to offer just now any definite criticism of existing arrangements at the Museum, for in the comparatively short time that has elapsed since the treasures of antique art were brought back from the hiding-places where they were stowed during the war, neither Trustees nor Keepers can have had time in which to elaborate any new scheme of exhibition. Since many of the busts recently put back still lack their old labels, it seems probable that the present reversion to the old state of things is intended in most instances to be only temporary. If the Greek portraits remain dispersed, without much regard to date or style, they have at least escaped the arrangement in serried rows common to many foreign museums and adopted in our own gallery of Roman Imperial busts. Here the historical principle has been pushed to its logical conclusion, but the attempt to secure an unbroken chronological sequence often issues in insufferable monotony. In point of fact, portraits, Roman as well as Greek, suffer from faulty exhibition in practically every collection of long standing, simply because the æsthetic aspect of portraiture had not been properly realised when these collections first came into existence. Just as museums neglect to treat ancient portraits as works of art to be placed among other objects of the same style and period, so our handbooks and histories of archæology fail to regard them as serious factors in the development of the Antique. Greek art has probably suffered in this respect more than Roman, since, in a large number of instances, Roman Imperial busts could at least be satisfactorily identified by the help of coins and medals, while, owing to the scarcity of such adventitious aids for the Greek periods, the naming of a Greek portrait has remained a perilous archæological adventure, and one which our scientific age tends to regard with increasing distrust. A distorted vision of the development of portrait art within the Græco-Roman cycle has arisen from the mistaken notion that it was principally, if not exclusively, the appanage of Rome. It is not often that one chiefly concerned with Roman archæology has to complain that Greek achievement is misrepresented in favour of Roman, yet in this instance the complaint would seem justified; and for the sake of the general history of the Antique, as well as of the more special history of portraiture itself, the balance between the Greek and the Roman contributions to the subject must be readjusted. No one, of course, can pretend to ignore the fascination that attaches to a great portrait of which the subject, be it Pericles or Cicero, Alexander or Augustus, is definitely known, or to minimise the importance of identified pieces as providing the land-marks necessary for the dating of the rest. But to focus interest upon this aspect of the subject alone, as though we had not advanced beyond the point of view of the humanists of · the Renaissance and of the Recueils' of Achilles Statius or of Fulvius Ursinus, is to overlook the fact that portraiture is among the great progressive forces of art. It was, indeed, the channel, narrow and difficult at first, through which realism forced its way into the stream of convention, and helped to liberate the representation of the human form from the traditions of archaic art. It is usual to connect the beginnings of Greek portraiture with the times after the Persian invasion, when definite attempts at facial likeness may be detected in the portraits of the strategoi who won the war for Athens. But, even were we to admit, with Dr Hekler, that portraiture is not a primitive art, it should yet be obvious that the first efforts in this direction are much earlier than the fifth century, and have only escaped us because of the habit, fostered by too exclusive a study of Roman portrait-busts, of attributing significance to the head alone. Hence the belief that expression and character must be concentrated in the countenance, and the failure to remember that, to the Greek, portraiture resided as much in the pose and movement of the whole figure as in facial expression-a point well made by Dr Lippold in a short monograph which draws attention to the importance of the portrait statue as opposed to those busts and heads which too long represented the measure of antique skill in portraiture. 6 The fragmentary nature of the material is largely responsible for the exaggerated emphasis laid on the head. Time and vandalism have so often severed heads from bodies that it is difficult to realise, in presence of the interminable rows of heads in most large museums, that the majority of these have only been made into busts either by the ancient copyist or by the modern restorer. But in Greek portraiture-coins and gems apart-the rendering of the bust alone would, down to the time of Alexander, have been regarded as a meaningless mutilation of nature. It was the perception on the part of the The herm or pillar-like shaft ending in a head might seem an exception, but it appears to represent a survival of that early stage of sculpture in which the figure had not yet been anthropomorphised. The survival of this form is due to its value as an architectural feature. |