completely its supremacy, if not its meaning. Human nature and human progress are placed by modern science in an entirely new light; and the aims and principles which have been hitherto so important will stimulate and guide no longer either the passions of the many or the intellect of the few. We shall look on the human drama with clearer eyes. We shall take our part in it with changed wishes and sympathies, and with new intellectual weapons. We shall see in the struggle before us a variety of unequal forces, which will only be reduced to order when the stronger have subdued the weaker, and when the inequality between them is recognised and acted on as a fundamental social truth. This state of things, instead of being rebuked by the intellect, will be approved by it, and the deliberate aim of all those in power will be, not to lessen such inequality, but to intensify and perpetuate it.

But this is not all. Not only will such an aim commend itself to the rulers: it must also more and more cease to be distasteful to the ruled. With an enlightened oligarchy it would be one of the first cares to provide for the physical wellbeing of the subject classes; for want and privation, as they must well know, give men almost as much power as wealth and plenty. The people being thus disarmed of their two most formidable weapons, democratic hopes and promises, when stated as exact science would state them, would have but small general attraction. Demagogues would no longer be able to appeal to the labouring population, and tell them that they were the equals of their masters, or that they might very readily become so. It would be known that such language was a scientific falsehood. It would be known that the doctrine of equality applied not to men as they are, but to unborn generations as they perhaps might be; nor would it be easy to rouse a contented populace to exertion for the sake of producing a breed of men who, though physically their own descendants, would have less mental kinship with them than even their present masters.

I hope by-and-by to pursue this subject further, and to inquire more particularly into the bearings of scientific atheism on the questions of popular education, on the rights of conscience, and the rights of female virtue; and to show more exactly how singular and how complete is the divorce, at the close of the nineteenth century, between the political and social hopes of the modern world, and its moral and philosophic theories.

W. H. MALLOCK.

MODERN

ENGLISH LANDSCAPE-PAINTING.

THE Fine Arts have now for four years had a section of a congress all to themselves. Their full dignity and value were recognized; grave debates were held even about the propriety of using china plates as ornaments for the walls of our drawing-rooms; and if we remember rightly, at nearly the same time, names of weight in literature were brought to bear against the enormity of the British householder's coal-scuttle. Hardly a word however was said about a branch of art in which we English were onee supposed to take a special interest, and to have attained special excellence, namely, landscape-painting. And yet no branch of art, I believe, has within the last half-century undergone, and is now undergoing, greater changes. My readers will think of pre-Raphaelitism: can landscape-painting have undergone any change which is more than a reflection of that? The change I refer to was of an earlier date, and of a more vital kind. An argument which the opponents of the pre-Raphaelites were fond of using, when the first flush of their triumph was dying away, that the champions of the movement, in proportion to their success, were apt to lose the distinguishing qualities or signs for which they had battled so strongly, however unfair in its immediate and reproachful application, pointed to a truth nevertheless. The signs and watchwords were indeed no longer insisted on, because the war was over: the original impulse was only less clearly traceable, because its strength was modifying whatever lay within its range. The effect of the revolt was great, but the ultimate gain of it was a change in the spirit and temper of our artists, rather than in any widening of the scope, or lasting alteration in the aims and methods, of their art. Certain antique methods and conventions were somewhat roughly put to the test as it were of re-verification. Some of them were seen to have had their value greatly over-estimated; some had lost all worth by mechanical use; with respect to all alike, there had been too great a disposition to seek for subjects to fit them, and to accept obedience to the laws of elegant composition and arrangement, in place of expression, however imperfect, of true feeling and imagina

tive power. But for all that, the finest and quaintest and most. uncompromising pre-Raphaelite picture no more revolutionized the art of figure-painting than the Lyrical Ballads did that of poetry. The world did not like lovely arrangements of forms and colours, if it could get them, in a figure-picture, one whit the less because the romantic and startling stories which artists of the new school invented for themselves to put on canvas were entirely without a certain primness of good composition, characteristic of pictures derived from the Vicar of Wakefield. Every one was delighted with the dramatic intensity, which showed itself, wrought out with abounding technical power, in Millais's pictures, and was thankful for that, even if other great qualities of art were conspicuously wanting. Due honour was given to the strong feeling and noble thought which found expression in the colour, symbolism, and exquisite detail of Holman Hunt's pictures, even if some critics declared them wanting in the dignity which only perfect composition could give; and Rossetti was recognized as a colourist, even though his excellence lay as wide as possible apart from that of great artists whose tone of mind and academical training made it impossible for them to imagine any other models of excellence than Rubens or Sir Joshua. After all, this violent pre-Raphaelite revolution, as at one time it seemed, spent. itself within the old lines of art, and ended in a reconquest of an old domain. The field of human life was more adventurously searched. for subjects. The representation of the most intense emotion was shown to be compatible, if the painter thought fit to have it so, with complete rendering of the details of the surrounding scene. The differences between the aim and methods of dramatic and realistic art on the one side, and decorative and harmonic art on the other, were more clearly felt as they all passed under the quickening influence of a new energy; but with the single exception of an attempt to paint figure-subjects pure and simple in unconventionalized outdoor sunshine, no difficulty was approached which had not been approached before, no rule of art attacked which did not when fairly understood, and not pressed beyond its due limits, quietly re-assert its authority. A noted French critic asserts boldly that all modern art together has only added a few wrinkles to the fair face of that of ancient Greece. It might be said in a similar spirit, and with more truth, of the pre-Raphaelites, that they set themselves to show that very fine art must be content to work with a good deal of ugliness for its subject-matter.

Now the change which is taking place in our landscape-painting is, I think, of a much more vital kind, although from the comparatively small interest which is taken in that branch of art it has been much less noticed. Over and above the effect of the modern tendency in favour of realistic treatment-of that wish to look closely and keenly at nature in the fields as well as in the laboratory or

herbarium, which has wrought confusion and change in practice and criticism and everything connected with landscape-painting-I believe that, as a further consequence, the art has been brought face to face with the difficulties of a new development-that its students in seeking a wider range of subjects, or in aiming at greater accuracy or fulness of representation in the old one, are striking out paths in which traditional principles will serve them little or nothing.

I believe also that these difficult problems are worth the labour which they must cost to solve, inasmuch as they lie directly in the way of all landscape work which sets itself to give imaginative pleasure, together with the close attention to fact, which is a condition of giving pleasure to the age at all.

Of course I speak of art which endeavours to be true, and that best part of our age which endeavours to recognize truth of any kind. Various aspects and qualities of nature which were uninteresting pictorially to a former generation have become interesting to this; a careful count of what our fathers would have called minor details is demanded, and certain conventionalities or art-moulds in pictures by which they obtained unity of effect, are entirely unsuited for that purpose now. To ask our landscape-painters to invent for us ways and means of marshalling these troops of details-new, inconvenient and complicated as they are-into well-ordered wholes, is only, it would seem, to ask them for new exertion on their part of their proper faculty of design; but if these details insist, as they certainly will do with any artist who feels the pressure of his time, upon being given with their manifest light and their fascinating, nay bewildering colour, that light and colour blended in divinest splendour will be found to constitute a world of art which only one man has hitherto attempted to enter.

If we could imagine the change which would appear in our exhibitions to anyone who had been familiar with exhibitions, or with art which was connected with literature, or bound up in books and keepsakes not so many years ago, we should easily recognize what these new tasks are, and to what extent they are different in kind, not in degree only, of difficulty from all which with one exception have been undertaken hitherto. It is to be feared that such an observer, unless he were of a singularly hopeful temperament, would see little in the work of to-day to set against the glories of the past. We have no Turner: but an age or period may have good work to show without having such exceptional genius as his to be proud of. A whole band of picturesque designers, of whom Stanfield and Harding may be taken as the type, have hardly their equals now. The long line of water-colourists, from Varley downwards-rich in such names as Cox, Havell, Robson, Prout, to take only some of the most famous-stands, some critics would say, to reproach their successors, although all would admit that in Duncan, G. Fripp, and Dodgson,

we have still amongst us artists well worthy to be ranked with the best of an earlier school. Annual Tours,'' Keepsakes,' this age knows them not. Our illustrators, clever as they are, have other things to do than to trace the course of famous rivers, like the Seine or the Loire, from their source to the sea, and bring back for us picturesque views of grand old towns decaying in peace, with their gateways unspoiled, and their cathedrals still unfinished. The battle-field with its horrors keeps their pencils busy now. The ends of the earth are

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not half so difficult to get to to-day, as Nubia was in Roberts's time; but no sacred places, no temples, even though they saw the dawn of a faith which has overspread the world, tempt our best artists away from the nooks and corners of our own little island. Even in Europe there are still left large veins of scenery in which natural beauty is combined with historic associations and romantic architecture, but they are left unworked, as if (to anticipate our reasoning from these facts) our artists felt that they could not make transcripts or compositions either from material with which they had not been familiar all their lives, or which would oppose too great an amount of physical difficulty, if they wished to study it in the full and literal fashion of the present day. No, the admirer of the old style would say that for him at least the roll of mighty poets' in landscape-painting was made up ;' that the enthusiasm of natural beauty which was once shared by poet and painter alike, when Turner rejoiced in painting Childe Harold's' Italy, and Byron recognized in Turner's vignette illustrations of another Italy' a poet's prose and a painter's poetry,'— that ardour of sympathy with nature's life, he would maintain, had died away, and a certain uninspired fidelity to the letter, not to the spirit, was all that remained to make our artists' work worthy of the least regard. We have put the case strongly against ourselves; but we may as well confess frankly that the subjects, the virtues, and the devices of the art which such a retrospect brings before us have something in them which is utterly alien to the art of to-day. Cold and artificial!' 'Manifestly borrowed!''Wanting in freshness!' would be the terms of criticism which a work executed with such models in view could not hope to escape, There were ways then of putting things within the four corners of a frame which were as fixed as the frame itself: we hold such ways still in high respect, but do not venture to use them. The famous 'brown tree' has long since been put in its proper place, although the conventionality of which it was the note is not, and never will be, extinct. But who does not feel a lingering liking for that most useful and, in reality, lovely arrangement which Turner took naturally from Claude, and in one way or another made to do duty in all lands and in all sweet bowery places which he ever painted—namely, the group of trees, or sometimes a single tree, planted just one third of the picture's length from the side, with temple or tower, or perhaps some humbler building, set between it