ance to be immortal. The only chance a critic has of
being right in his judgments is to measure contemporary
literature by standards and canons upon which rests
the fame of the great poets and writers of the past, and,
tried by which, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,
and Byron have been assigned their enduring rank in
the poetic hierarchy. 'Blessings be with them,' says
Wordsworth (Sonnet xxv):

'Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler lives and nobler cares,
The Poets who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.'

It is only the great poets, the poets in whom we can recognise the essentials of greatness, who can do that for us. They are not rebels, as are too many lyrical poets, but reconcilers; and they offer to external things and current ideas both receptivity and resistance, being not merely of an age, but for all time. It is their thoughts and the verse in which their thoughts are embodied that are enduringly memorable. For great poetry, as Wordsworth teaches us in a single line, is not mere emotion, not mere subtle or sensuous singing, but

'Reason in her most exalted mood.'

A still greater authority than Wordsworth, no other than Milton, has immortalised in verse the principles for which I have ventured to contend in prose. In Paradise Regained' (iv, 255-266) he says:

"There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power

Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit

By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,
Eolian charms and Dorian lyrick odes,

And his who gave them breath but higher sung,
Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called,
Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own;
Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught
In Chorus or Iambick, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delight receiv'd,
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life,
High actions and high passions best describing.'
ALFRED AUSTIN,

1

Art. 6.-THE REMAINS OF ANCIENT PAINTING.

1. Denkmäler der Malerei des Altertums.

Edited by Pau Herrmann. Munich: Bruckmann. (In progress.) 2. Le Nozze Aldobrandine, i paesaggi con scene dell' Odissea e le altre pitture murali antiche conservate nella Biblioteca Vaticana e nei Musei Pontifici. With an introduction by Dr Bartolommeo Nogara. Milan: Hoepli, 1907. 3. Le Pitture delle Catacombe romane. Illustrated by Giuseppe Wilpert. Rome: Spithoever, 1903.

4. Untersuchungen über die campanische Wandmalerei. By Wolfgang Helbig. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1873.

And other works.

THAT the spade of the excavator, which has restored to us the Hermes of Praxiteles and other priceless relics of ancient sculpture, will yet bring to light the authentic masterpieces of Zeuxis or Apelles, we are forbidden to hope. The perishable materials of which they were formed have long since been consumed by the envious tooth of time. The north-western half of the Propylæa on the Acropolis of Athens, once adorned with frescoes by Polygnotus and other masters of fifth century painting, is now only a gutted chamber of bare marble; the porticoes and temples of Imperial Rome, for whose enrichment the Hellenic world was despoiled of its treasures, have perished in the wreck of ancient civilisation. Even the copies of classical chefs-d'œuvre, whether executed for public galleries, such as that formed by the Pergamene kings, or for wealthy Roman connoisseurs, have met with a harder fate than the marble works by whose reflected light we are able to discern something of the glories of Hellenic sculpture. We cannot therefore look forward to the time when the great painters of antiquity, upon whom their admirers lavished a meed of praise no less generous than that accorded to Phidias or Praxiteles, will once more stand before our eyes in their artistic individuality.

Nevertheless, ancient painting has not wholly perished. The buried cities of Campania have yielded up many hundreds of frescoes which, however we may solve the problem of their relation to higher forms of art, at least

unlock the key to many secrets of ancient technique; and the' encaustic' process, so long counted amongst the lost arts, may now be studied in original examples, thanks to the discoveries made in the cemeteries of the Fayum. It is now thirty-six years since Helbig, in the work mentioned at the head of this article, endeavoured to appraise the true significance of the Campanian wall-paintings in the development of ancient art; and his book, though of inestimable value to the student of Hellenistic civilisation, which has never since been portrayed in such vivid colours, no longer claims for its main thesis the unquestioning adherence of scholars. The time is approaching when & fresh synthesis of our knowledge with regard to the painting of the ancients must be attempted; and we therefore extend a cordial welcome to those publications which, even for the most travelled archæologist, must supplement personal observation, while they make it possible for a host of students, who are debarred from examining the originals, to contribute in their measure to the progress of archæological science.

་

Foremost amongst these stands the great series of reproductions which the firm of Bruckmann have been encouraged to issue by the success of their Monuments of Greek and Roman Sculpture.' We are promised as many as six hundred plates, the subjects of which will not be confined to painting alone, but will include the finest examples of the sister-art of mosaic. A few, but only a few, of these will be executed in colour; for the remainder various photographic processes will be used. So far as can be judged from the specimens which have hitherto appeared, this work will furnish an adequate basis for the criticism of the originals, so far as style is concerned. Some technical details of no small importance, such as the clearly marked brushwork which distinguishes ancient from modern fresco-painting, have been robbed of their due emphasis by a process of toning-down. Again, the small but priceless collection of ancient paintings preserved in the Vatican Library, which includes the 'Aldobrandini Marriage,' the Odyssey landscapes of the Esquiline, and the Heroines of Tor Marancia,' has been reproduced in a fine series of plates issued by Messrs Hoepli, with a valuable account of all that can be known as to the history of the originals from the pen of Dr Nogara. The

three-colour plates are indeed not wholly successful, since, in some cases, the primary colour-prints have not been accurately superposed; but they are supplemented by adequate photographic reproductions. For early Christian painting we have the admirably illustrated and monumental work of Mgr Wilpert; and it is no secret that he will in due time give us the results of his researches into the later development, both of painting and mosaic, in the centuries which bridge the transition from the ancient to the medieval world. Mgr Wilpert is content with nothing short of the best that science can devise in the matter of reproduction. The water-colour drawings upon which Messrs Richter and Taylor's illustrations of the mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore were based seem to him to leave too much scope for the intrusion of the draughtsman's personality; and we are to have a series of plates in which colour is applied on a photographic foundation.

To trace, even in its outlines, the history of GrecoRoman painting is a task too great to be attempted within the limits of this article; yet some brief account must be given of its earlier phases, in order that an answer may be made to the question of the relation which the paintings of Rome and Pompeii bear to its highest development. It is unnecessary to dwell on the fact that the Greeks, although their artistic sense was pre-eminently plastic, were no parties to that divorce between form and colour which the practice of modern sculptors has established. Architecture, decorative relief, and statuary were alike richly coloured; and, if the monstrous figures of the sixth century pediments found on the Athenian Acropolis betray an almost childish delight in gaudy hues, the delicate tints of the Sidonian sarcophagi at Constantinople reveal a subtle colour-sense in the harmony of their general scheme and the nice calculation of their local contrasts. But, if it be true that the Greek sculptors never aimed at the representation of abstract form, it is not to be denied that the rendering of form through pure colour, in which the art of painting consists, was so far foreign to their native bent that the solution of its principal problems was deferred until those of sculpture had been triumphantly mastered.

In the first place, the scale of colours applied to the enhancement of architectural or sculptural effects was of necessity conventional and limited; exact local colour, as the Greeks instinctively recognised, would be out of place here, and the subtler distinctions of 'value' unmeaning. The painter, therefore, had nothing to learn from the sculptor, but was forced to pursue his own path of discovery. Moreover, in the orderly growth of the Greek genius to full and perfect maturity, the technique of linear drawing was mastered before the infinite possi bilities of colouring were divined. It is here that the study of Attic vase-painting helps us to trace the earlier stages of progress in Greek painting, or, to speak more accurately, of Greek draughtsmanship. Exquisite feeling for beauty of outline, and a firmness and security of touch which has never been surpassed, are the qualities which place the masters of the red-figured style in the highest rank attainable by industrial art; and we may be sure that just these same excellences, in a still higher degree, were possessed by Polygnotus, Mikon, Panænus, and the other painters of the fifth century.

Prof. Carl Robert has ingeniously restored the famous frescoes of the Fall of Troy and the Lower World by Polygnotus, seen and described by Pausanias at Delphi, by the use of motives drawn from fifth-century vasepainting;* and there is good reason for thinking that the colour-scheme employed by the painters of this school was of the simplest. Pliny the Elder tells us that 'four colours only-white, yellow, red, and black-were used by Apelles, Aëtion, Melanthius, and Nicomachus in their immortal works.' The saying seems a hard one, since Apelles, if we may trust our ancient authorities, was lacking in none of the resources which painting employs in order to produce naturalistic illusion; and many modern critics have accepted the suggestion of Julius Lange, that Pliny refers to flesh tints only. But the difficulty disappears when we compare with Pliny's statement a passage in the Brutus' of Cicero. The orator seeks to illustrate the contrast between the severer style of Cato and the polished diction of his own time by

* Robert's restorations are reproduced in Dr Frazer's 'Pausanias,' vol. v, facing pp. 360, 372.