But Turner's red and scarlet drawings vex the public most. Of all the impossible things which a landscape-painter is pledged to try to paint, not to indicate merely, or 'give up' with a frank use of conventional symbols such as the daring black sunbeams of Titian' which Ruskin quotes approvingly, surely the scarlet of a sunset which has chosen for itself a rift of sky crystal-clear, and sends its last shaft through it just at the horizon's edge, is the most impossible. No splendour but that of sunrise can equal it, and we sympathize so much more with the moment when one more day 'sinks in the shadowy gulf of bygone things.' Let us imagine ourselves looking at a cliff or hill-side thickly set with buildings and houses, red-roofed and manygabled, with perhaps some tower or thin-worn ruined abbey whose grey walls have been turned to gold by the blaze of sunset behind us. Let us imagine ourselves trying to copy such a scene, the colour being what has fascinated us as the divine expression of one of Nature's grandest moments. We see that the whole hill or cliff is bathed in scarlet-scarlet which for a moment is startling in its victorious intensity. We see that there is no light which is not scarlet or rosered, except perhaps the flash of the sun caught by a window, or the reflection of the grey eastern sky on some wet ledge of rock or roof perversely set awry. Now if we give the scarlet in its true vehemence of colour in the lights, i.e. in the red roofs and warm-coloured gables and the broad surface of the sandstone cliff (and we shall find that only a very strong tint of vermilion will match that), not only will the scarlet colour so put on look heavy, lightless and opaque in itself, but it will drive us to use very dark colours indeed to make it tell as light at all, in contrast with the shadowed sides of things; and if there is much detail or complexity of surface-markings to be given too, we shall soon find our whole mass of cliff and tower anything but rose-red or scarlet as a whole. But we also find that the shadows themselves in nature are not dark and colourless; they are scarlet sometimes, or pearly grey or lovely purple, anything but brown or dingy grey. The colour of the lights cannot be matched: can the colour of the shadows be matched instead? May we not make the shadows on the deepest coloured portions of our rock surface the bearers of our flamecolours, and leave, as in the foliage quoted above, the white paper for our most highly-lighted portions? In this way we may perhaps approach most nearly to the fulfilment of our desire; we can make the cliff and the rose-red tower look light as a whole-crimson with sunset as a whole, and yet tell our tale of facts about the structure of the cliff, and the drifting smoke-wreaths and huddling roofs of the town below, at the cost no doubt of an apparent, not real, lack of force, of solidity, of earthiness, so to speak, which would deprive our work of all value in the eyes of those who sought for those qualities alone, in a work of art. An example of Turner's method of dealing with an effect of this kind is afforded by a very small drawing-an illustration

of the scene in the Antiquary when Isabella Wardour and her father are caught by the tide at the foot of Ballyburgh Ness. The rock which bars them in to death (if no power intervenes to save them from the white flashing wave which leaps so wildly close at hand) is all scarlet, although from the position of the sun it is plain that the scarlet is due to the reflection on the wet rock of the burning clouds above. The brightness of colour which I have seen wet rocks show in that way is wonderful. Of course, in fact, such rocks would be dark compared with the last glitter of the setting sun, but not the less splendid in their crimson glow. Turner wishes, for poetical purposes, or guided, let us say, by poetical instinct (for I doubt if he reasoned much about these things, but rather got his mind saturated with truths of landscape effect as much as possible, and then let his instinct guide him), to show their cruel splendour. Accordingly, he gives all their modelling, all their groovings, all their treacherous curves which descend into the sea with just enough straightness at their last plunge to make escape by climbing hopeless, in touches of the brightest scarlet, crimson and gold. The whole looks real enough in the engraving, and would no doubt have looked more real in the drawing, if Turner had coloured it in greys and purples with a base of Indian ink and a suggestion of dusky red-or, in other words, had merely tinted his light and shade drawing. He has chosen rather to use the real and true vividness of nature's colour as a means of poetical impressiveness.

There are few of Turner's drawings, after he grew out of the early stage of simple greys and browns, which are not capable of analysis of the kind I have attempted; but it would need something like his own knowledge of nature and of colour-science to perform such a task. They might be fairly described as a series of experiments to discover with what system of colours it is possible to give the greatest amount of colour-truth consistently with truth of light and shade, and will always remain more or less unintelligible to those who do not love landscape-colour passionately, and see in its strength, variety and infinite subtlety, means of representing distinct moods of thought and feeling. The subject has been elaborately worked out by Mr. Ruskin in Modern Painters, but it is strange how little even his eloquence has availed to open the eyes of artists and critics to the few facts of this kind which lie at the base of all knowledge of landscape art. A certain sense of open daylight and of out-of-door colour seems to be wanting: or is it that most people, without owning it, positively dislike the worry of the two enjoyments at once, however skilfully combined, of colour and form in a landscape? Many would enjoy nature just as well if she were dressed in a garb of comfortable sable or well-toned brown, and most certainly prefer to see her so treated in pictures. I do not venture to say that Turner's system is entirely right. I only know that a certain amount of truth (to use

the first line of Mr. Ruskin's defence of him) is given by it which I can imagine given in no other way. It is possible that the form in which landscape-painting will ultimately attain to its highest development will be very different from his; but it is certain that Turner's art will be one of the most important stages in its advance.

To sum up the points of my sketch. I have endeavoured to show the change which has taken place in the style and in the subjects of our landscapists' work-the breaking away from traditional methods of arrangement, the effort to make a little less abstraction and generalization do for us, and to deal with a few more complexities of beautiful fact, until we have arrived at the notion that we can almost give all the truth of any given scene. Of the many reasons why this is impossible I have dwelt upon one alone: the impossibility of reproducing in art, the union which subsists in nature between colour and light. I have pointed out that this impossibility shows itself at once when an artist seeks not so much for subjects which will bear witness to his dexterity in evading it, as for those which will express his sympathy with nature at the cost of technical imperfection, or rather of evident defeat: that such an artist's sympathy will lead him to invent for himself forms of artistic expression-such expression by means of design answering in his work to the story or incident in the figure-painter's; but differing, so far as it demands the re-casting in harmonised form of the whole subject. I have maintained that our landscapists are feeling their way through unflinching study to the expression of new truths; and that as nature is a brightly and richlycoloured thing, their wider study has forced them to wrestle with more and more difficult truths. That there should be defeat, confusion, and apparent retrocession is inevitable. It is only recently that a glimpse of the full scope of landscape art which was gained by the genius of one man, has become the common property of all. We hardly yet perceive how great an equipment of gifts is required to enable any one to follow in his footsteps, and possess himself of any portion of the fair land which his eyes discerned. The gifts which would enable their fortunate possessor to make a name, and that no mean one, as a painter of the human form, and the Spirit which dwells therein, must in a landscape-painter be combined with a temper which will make Nature, and the Spirit which dwells in Nature, the love, and the imaging of her beauty, the labour, of his life.

A. W. HUNT.

PENAL SERVITUDE.

THE report which lately emanated from the Royal Commission on Penal Servitude invites some reconsideration of our present system of secondary punishment. Reconsideration, indeed, is due from time to time to any system of public administration which consigns many thousands of the people to official custody out of our sight. Executive bodies are prone to ruthless routine, bound to forms, sequent on precedent, enamoured of their own work, and naturally blind to its defects or possible improvement. The Legislature, also, is prone to take the readiest relief from perplexing problems, which, in the treatment of criminals, means riddance of them for the longest time out of the way.

There are, at this moment, in Great Britain and Ireland, 25,000 criminals in local prisons, and 10,000 more undergoing as convicts penal servitude. If to these numbers we add the multitude of wives and children coincidently thrown into workhouses as paupers, it would be no over-estimate to conclude that our present penal system throws 50,000 of the population always on public charge.

Putting aside, for a moment, considerations of moral responsibility, this is a very serious calculation of public cost and loss. Maintaining so many thousands of able-bodied people, during the best part of their lives, at a dead loss of their keep and earnings, and in artificial treatment which, in spite of the best intentions, must more or less physically and morally incapacitate for independent industry, is an enormous national sacrifice for the insurance of order, and safety of life and property. National defence requires a large deduction from industrial power. The permanent maintenance of so many offenders as well as defenders, as a non-productive mass of the community out of all proportion to the productive remainder, is an unnatural drag on our prosperity which we may reasonably hope to find capable of some alleviation. There is something Irish in the idea of punishing plunderers by making them plunder us, to such an enormous extent, still more. Compare the value of property stolen in this country with the cost of feeding, -lodging, clothing, and a prolonged education of the thieves, main

taining their families, and foregoing all the profit that might be made of them; and the remedy seems worse than the injury.

Mr. Cross has, on several late occasions, expressed for himself what is a very general feeling, that we have too many in prison. The late Summary Jurisdiction Act had for its chief object to reduce the number.

It would be the height of folly to rush towards this end by simply diminishing punishments. The question is, how far their length and number designate their strength-whether a more effectual system would not concur with fewer and shorter imprisonments. One tells a workman out of health not to potter with a long course of palliatives, but that his best economy is to get well; so with the diseases of the commonwealth, our best economy is not to nurse them, but effectually to grapple with their motive springs.

In the first place penal servitude would seem condemned as a scheme of punishment by its very origin and its first idea. Its lengthened process would render it, taken on its own merits, very questionable as an effective correction for any specific offence-its triple stages of separate confinement, public works, and gradual liberation under surveillance of police, would seem over-refined. If abstractedly proposed as on original device for a penal code it would be condemned as wanting the most requisite qualities of punishment. One has to seek back to its origin for any defence; and certainly in its origin we find no defence at all. It was a senseless imitation of transportation, when, the colonial outlet failing, we could only think of punishing our criminals similarly at home. So much,' wrote Colonel Du Cane in a pamphlet, 1872, is our present system the result of, and founded on, the transportation system, that those who wish to acquire a full acquaintance with it must not fail to study the history and phases of that system.' He also described, in the last November number of this Review, the present system as 'deriving its character immediately from the transportation system on which it was founded, and which may almost be said to have been brought to perfection at the time it became necessary to abandon it.' In his evidence before the Commissioners he sketched the series of experiments, shifts, and devices through which transportation arrived at this perfection.' Some things, in moral as well as natural life, fall ripe in a perfection of rottenness. Transportation began in the simple form of banishment from the kingdom, as Germany still attempts it. Criminals were afterwards sent to distant specified settlements; where settlers contracted for their service as slaves, at so much head. Some wholly penal settlements were established in the Southern Hemisphere, which became scenes of the most horrible immorality, disease, hunger, and mortality. Costly systems of assignment to emigrant employers followed, which soon lost all character of regular penal treatment whatever, and held out, by way of punish