the whole gallery of old masters there are perhaps not more than a score of different subjects, and all of these obvious to every eye at a glance. Titian and Holbein painted portraits as their sitters were, and did not turn them into ladies and gentlemen dressed up for a fancy ball. Although the subjects are so few, so obvious, so conventional, there no is monotony. All looks noble, solemn, beautiful; for the aim of the painter then was to show how much beauty could be shed over the old ideals of faith, poetry, and manners.

It is quite true that the old ideals in faith, poetry, and manners have proved insufficient. They have failed us; and we must make new ones. No sensible man wishes to recall them; nor does he wish to bind art again in limits so narrow. Three centuries ago modern Europe got rid of its old standards. The faith which inspired Madonnas and Saints, the poetry which was limited to a crude mythology and a few romances, the manners which were essentially based on aristocratic display, indolence, battle, and luxury, were too narrow, too shallow, and too anti-social to be permanent. Art, like modern civilisation, has cast them off. And it is idle to dream that they can ever return.

But it does not follow at all, because the old ideals and sources of art are gone, that painting is to have no ideals, no sources, no guide that every painter is to be a law to himself; and that every hobby, every accident of any painter's life, can equally supply a subject for a picture. What has happened is this. So far as modern art is concerned, religion has almost disappeared; every tradition of great art has been wiped out; and the old subordination of painting to intellect and poetry is put aside. The reign of universal democracy has set in for painting with greater virulence even than in politics and in manners. Painters, apparently by their fondness for the Stuarts, Marie Antoinette, and the Royal Family, ought, one would think, to be Tories and loyalists. But in the practice of their art, they recognise the wildest license of individual judgment, the entire equality of all men to lay down the law in art, and the trenchant abolition of every great and historic tradition.

In all great ages of art the artist's subject was expected to conform to given conditions. It must be simple, familiar, noble, traditional, and beautiful. Nowadays it is too often enigmatical, eccentric, mean, whimsical, or disgusting. Pheidias and the great Greeks represented the gods and heroes of whom Homer sang, the great memories of national history, the beings in whom centred the worship, reverence, and admiration of men, the loveliest women known to the city, the finest champions in the games. Raphael and his fellows painted the great types of religious adoration, the familiar mythologies, great men and great events in history. But in all cases, whether the subject was sacred or secular, old or new, it was always simple, familiar, noble, traditional, and beautiful. Nowadays a painter seems

men.

to consider that his business is to invent something absolutely new, if possible queer, accidental, personal, comic, namby-pamby, or bizarre. He seems to imagine that his duty is to compose a mild original sonnet, a snippety original novel, or a watery anecdote, grave or gay. Now painters are not poets, romancers, nor literary craftsThe result is that, when they try to paint sonnets, stories, or essays, the work is, intellectually, too often on a level with that which goes into the columns of a county newspaper, and is headed' Our Poet's Corner,' and Curious or Entertaining.' How can painters suppose that cultivated men and women care for their japes, their puns, their snippings from stale Elegant Extracts, or for their own poetical and moral maunderings on canvas? A painter who invents a new subject is almost certain to invent something that is either silly or bizarre. Almost all the anecdotes which fill half a page of the Academy catalogues, as subjects of so-called historical pictures, scandal about Queen Elizabeth, the gallantries of some Stuart prince (understanding gallantry in all its various senses), the oddities of Swift, Johnson, or Walter Scott, anecdotes of the Reign of Terror, &c., are either quite unauthentic or utterly trivial; nay, not seldom they are grossly libellous and horribly mean. So long as a subject offers a medium for sheeny stuffs, quaint costume, and WardourStreet bric-a-brac, none seem to be too silly, too scurrilous, or too petty for some painters. It is not the business of painters to become very minor poets and tenth-rate serial novelists. They have, as we say, to paint the simple, the familiar, the noble, the traditional, the beautiful—so as to put new beauty into the old types of our deepest adoration, love, reverence, and delight. Their business is to add glow, intensity, charm, to what is best in the faith, in the memory, in the intellect of their age:-not to puzzle, to startle, much less to sicken us.

It is the honour of our older Academicians steadily to uphold the great traditions of the noble style, as to the subjects proper for painting. First and foremost in this matter comes the President himself. And in nothing does his culture, taste, and training in the great schools tell more than in the example he sets his contemporaries as to the field, limits, and aim of their art. Never was this shown more finely than in the subject of the first picture with which he came upon the world, "The Procession at Florence' to escort Cimabue's Madonna' to Santa Maria Novella. Here was an almost perfect subject for a modern painter. It was simple, obvious, noble, and beautiful. Though the idea was new, it presented a touching and dignified incident in the history of art, in a form familiar and interesting to all cultivated people. It was like a chapter out of Modern Painters in colour and form. I confine myself strictly to the subject, to the painter's motif, and do not touch upon any point in the execution. As a subject it was perfect. For nearly forty years

the President has continued to present a series of subjects, almost equally happy-Greek, mythological, or historical-but all simple, familiar, noble, traditional, and beautiful. To understand such pictures as the 'Daphnephoria,'' Phryne,' ' Cymon,' or the 'Hemicycle' at Kensington, it is not necessary to read a page out of some historian, or to consult Dictionaries of Antiquities. Every cultivated man at once recognises the subject, and sees at a glance that it is simple, impressive, beautiful. So, too, the Andromache' of this year is equally happy in its subject. Every cultivated man, without the lines from the Iliad, can recognize the incident; can see its beauty, its pathos, its tragic and lyric dignity; and so he is drawn on to study in detail the Hellenicism, the refinement of knowledge and taste, the subtle convolutions of grace, with which the painter illustrates the poet. We are dealing now solely with the subject of a painting. And here surely is the painter's art seeking to express the grandest poetry, in high and pure traditional types.

So, too, Mr. Watts has maintained a noble choice of subject in the grand and true vein of the old schools. In his 'Dawn,' 'Death,' 'Love,' 'Hope,' 'Faith,' and like symbolical fancies, he is usually within the limits of the simple and the intelligible. At times he, too, wanders off into the abstruse and the fantastic-never into that of the trivial or the repulsive. A poet may be mystical, obscure, even wild for a space: but a painter cannot be so without infinite risk. The definiteness, the fixity, the simplicity of his instrument bind him. No man less than Michael Angelo can venture to be Apocalyptic: nor can painter born of woman be mystical without ceasing to be intelligible; and an unintelligible picture is a rebus.

These sound traditions as to subject for the most part are sufficiently preserved by such men as Mr. Poynter, Mr. Armitage, Mr. Long, Mr. Richmond-to mention no others. For the most part the subjects they paint are simple, familiar, dignified, and beautiful. So far as Mr. Long shows a tendency to plunge into learned antiquities, and oddities of archæology, needing, to explain them, long passages from Diodorus Siculus-apparently his favourite author-so far he is leaving the ground of familiar and simple art. Of Mr. Alma Tadema and Sir John Millais a few words must be said. Sir John is only on rare occasions a painter of historical and imaginative incidents; and his greatest admirers will hardly think that he best displays in them his wonderful gifts as a painter. A man who tries to write the chapter of a novel on a canvas three feet by two is on perilous ground. The 'Huguenot,' the Order for Release' achieved that feat. It may be doubted if the 'Fireman' and some others did not overstep the line. The business of a painter is not to tell a thrilling story, or to paint spasms-we cannot bear thrilling moments eternally prolonged in one strain. His business is to present a subject which is simple, familiar, noble, and beautiful.

Still less can it be the business of a painter elaborately, lovingly, and learnedly to paint a childish practical joke. From the point of view of subject and motif, Mr. Alma Tadema's 'Heliogabalus,' in spite of its pictorial skill, is itself a bad joke. The subject has every vice that a subject can have. It is at once silly, bizarre, incomprehensible, whimsical, and mean. It is bad enough to commemorate at all one of the most pitiful animals whom accident ever thrust into a throne; but to choose a childish anecdote out of some chronique scandaleuse, one which it is physically impossible to paint, is really to sin against art and sense. This is all the more to be regretted because Mr. Alma Tadema's astonishing powers as a painter have been long united with real learning, singular instinct for antique life, and a delightful zest for the aroma of classical ages. Mr. Alma Tadema is one of the few living men who can don the chiton and the toga with the air of a true ancient. But he has too often shown a dangerous turn for archæological eccentricities, for trivial bypaths and alleys of the antique world; when, with all his mastery of hand and stores of knowledge, his business is to show us its temples, palaces, life, and thought, its power, its splendour, its beauty—it may be its vices and its weakness, but not its tricks and tomfooleries.. No painter in any age has ever shown more loyal regard for noble traditions in selecting his subjects than has Mr. Burne-Jones. A certain field of romantic mythology he has made all his own—the old tales of Hellas conceived in the spirit of a Renaissance mystic. Burne-Jones' studio, full of a long mythological series, looks as if Sir Thomas Malory had made us a volume of myths, reduced in to Englysshe out of the Greke booke.' These fugues on the theme of "Penseroso' are simple, noble, traditional, and beautiful. It is a question if they are familiar, if they do not verge on the mystical, if they are not at times occult and cryptogrammic. A man who dwells so much alone in a dreamland of his own is necessarily appealing to a select audience. And it has been Burne-Jones' noble aim through life to pray ever for 'audience fit, though few.' As to Rossetti, he withdrew into a dreamland infinitely less accessible to the public, a dreamland almost confined to one great poet and to one set of types. It required a special study in itself to know what Rossetti was dreaming about at all. No painter ever took such pains to dream for himself, by himself, and within himself alone. To the poet-and Rossetti was certainly a poet-the claim is legitimate enough. But a painter, as he leaves the simple and the familiar, is making for the enigmatical and the artificial. And in any case he is deliberately restricting the power of his work to a special circle of cognoscenti and illuminati.

It is of course in the Salon at Paris that conspicuous examples are seen of the modern craving for new and startling subjects. Not that there is any real French school,' as some persons fancy. For the Salon contains examples of fifty schools, the works of painters

from almost every civilised nation, representing a score of very different ideals of art. But in the Salon, with the audacity, license, versatility, and power it collects, are seen examples of the best and worst types of modern aim in art. Humanity, pathos, imagination, tenderness, bestiality, lust, ferocity, impudence, and tomfoolery jostle each other in the fierce struggle to attract the notice of the public. All is wild democratic license. Filth, disease, death, carnage, torture, prurient prying into things which decency and self-respect keep covered, the secrets of the dissecting-room, of the consulting-room, of the studio, of the dressing-room, of the slums and the sewers, form the inspiration of pictures equally with devotion, poetry, sympathy, and dignity. Every man fights for his own hand, paints in his own method, chooses his own subject, and tells his own story. And the result is an unimaginable pot-pourri. Huge canvasses seem designed solely on the principle so well understood by the vendors of 'Pears' soap.' They are not pictures, but gigantic posters, to let the world know that there is such a painter as M. Tel much at your service. No human being could buy, much less live beside, these enormities. And the greater the enormity, the more is the public forced to stare.

Of all infamies on canvas, the worst is 'The Maniac,' No. 1564, by Lefebvre (G., be it said, not J.). Here, in a bare room, with every sign of a recent struggle, the furniture smashed to fragments, stove, mirror, chairs, door, and crockery in bits, on the edge of a deal table, sits, in his shirt, a wretched maniac, grinning in ghastly triumph. At his feet lies extended, in a pool of blood, with clothes torn to shreds, the dead body of a woman, common, coarse, and prosaic. Even had the picture power and terror, which it has not, it would be loathsome. But the cold, hard, dry, photographic presentment of a vulgar madman committing a brutal murder is as foul a subject as ever painter imagined. Zolaism is indeed rampant in art when this is possible. But in literature even a ghastly murder does not stand out in such visible crude brutality. And no one is obliged to read Zola unless he deliberately choose. To expose on a life-size canvas to the public gaze Zolaism in its crudest shape is an offence against civilisation, which every decent man and woman ought to treat as an unpardonable outrage.

Or what shall we say to a 'Rape in the Stone Age,' No. 1355, by Jamin? Here a sort of naked Polyphemus has seized and is carrying off a nude, very white studio model, who is posed as the female of the Stone Age. In her fury this elegant nymph has rammed her thumb into Polyphemus' right eye, which she is just gouging out. Polyphemus, howling with pain, clutches the graceful girl in his huge fist, and is just crushing in her ribs, she yelling in agony. To them comes Polyphemus No. 2, a sort of Porte St. Martin torturer; who, seizing his rival behind, is garotting him by strang