have also indulged their lust for painting. Sport with us is a kind of cult. Every kind of hunting has a poetic phase, and the pastime should, and does, in many persons lead to the growth of a love of Nature, yet in sporting pictures it is astounding how rarely there was at first anything but the baldest record of some details about the shape of a horse or other animal when stretched in a position like a butterfly, in a naturalist's case, pinned out to show his points. Landseer appealed to this love of the chase more capably with Art; he had a strong, if a sinister, poetic strain in him, which at times reached great heights, but the productions of his most in favor were of scenes dwelling upon the butcher-like side of the pursuit. Hounds tearing poor deer to their death, and terriers digging their teeth into rabbits or hares, or stags standing in such a way as to be " a good shot" for a sportsman for a whole generation these were regarded by the rich as the noblest productions of the English school, and I think they did much to lower the conception of the purpose of painting and design; perhaps, too, they led to the very sudden rush of prejudice for Continental Art as found in Rosa Bonheur, who had not any spark of the English painter's poetry, who could not draw form so well, but who never descended to the vulgarity which frequently marred our animal painters' conceptions.

The tide, once having set in, flows on with a constantly increasing rush, so that now I am not exaggerating in saying that Englishinen are being driven from the possibility of continuing this profession. If the judgment is right which says that foreigners are our superiors, then our race must bear a stigma of incompetence in one point, which is a great reversal of the judgment on its first efforts.

What is this French Art with which in the matter of design Europe is now to be Cæsarized? I have no lack of interest and admiration for it on its own ground in its highest examples. It is an expression, as all Art should be, of the nature of the race. We see the same spirit in its literature and on the stage. The situation is the object of aspiration. Figure-painting is used as the means of representing a dramatic situation; every point is made the most of for the case. A fact in history is chosen, it may be by a master mind; the

spectator sees the whole scene vividly as any historic penetration could present it. Every detail is accurate, costume, accessories, and architecture; every figure is in its right place and costume. I delight in conning such a tableau over, and am grateful to the painter for a most useful piece of illustrative information, yet I look in vain for the divine breath which animates the living world. When the fact is of no historic or dramatic interest, with men doing what amounts to nothing, or otherwise the intention is to excite the latent brute in man, it is ingenious and curious, but not edifying, either as Ait or as information. When no play is going on the figures are only dead pawns off the board.

Constable is thought by many French painters to have been a compatriot; so entirely, since he was honored by their predecessors in 1820, have they followed him, not in spirit, but in manner. He had not a mind of the greatest range; his was an instrument with no high notes, but it was in direct resonance to Nature's lightest touch. His French followers, as all followers do, find their admirers waiting. They accept given patterns to copy more proudly than our painters of name do. A theme once found acceptable is repeated like a lesson. A moonlight under clouds, with the herding of sheep or cattle, was first etched divinely in two or three forms by our own Palmer. Then it was too new to be understood. Now it is welcomed as is a thrice-told tale by the dull. I have often read that among French landscape painters there are charms in the realism of this painter, or in the sentiment of another; but I find the first too self-asserting. There are none of Nature's surprises. She has been tained and trained to serve the school; and the second bears reminiscence of previous favorite effects. Troyon is a manufacturer of metallically ever-colored foliage to give effect to some white patched cows. Israels is a man with one good undertaker's stock in trade, without any eye for the world but what is funereal. In any case, there is no painting in the sense that the work of Titian, Rembrandt, De Hoogh, Reynolds, and Turner is painting; there is no joy of thankfulness in spirit, and no subtilty and profundity of variety in the handling and the treatment of ocular impressions. There is not an example of what truly constitutes the artis tic stamp, the presence of human expres

sion and tenderness, which makes the spectator forget everything but a thrill of divine love passing through him in tacitly acknowledging a new appeal to his heart. When you have looked your best at Gerôme's gladiators, do you feel that you have singled out one of the victims to wonder about, as Byron did of the Dying Gladiator, as to his distant home and loved ones? The merit of French work commends itself greatly to the literary mind, and so all our Press praise it to the skies. The detail of Meissonier's work they can peer into and estimate; it is too perfect for human eyes. You need a magnifying glass to see its fullest beauty, but the strongest lens will bring you no nearer to the true artist's limitations. In other cases the French advocates take palpable dabs, all of one shape and size, with undisguised paint as a sign of masterliness in the school that indulges in dash. As well might the meaningless scribbling of children, done in imitation of the hasty writing of parents, be regarded as a sign of accomplishment. I know that in writing. thus broadly there is some injustice done to many modest masters of France. One painting by Jules Breton of "Les MoisSoDeurs" is really great, poetically and artistically. I pass by some others that deserve commendation, but then how many I avoid to cite that could only be mentioned with execration. Yes! honest eyes, indeed, there are in France who look with perfect bewilderment upon the rage among young men of England to turn from the individualism of their predecessors and the exquisite taste for human beauty in English work, to acquire instead the trade of painting as it is taught in Paris. But the common critics, playing into the hands of French and Frenchified picture-dealers, are responsible, who have so cried up the Croûtes as to take away the fair chance of any English painter getting a living with the competition from abroad, unless he in some way will adopt the style. For this is a fact that is too much ignored, there is not demand enough in England for Art for her own sons; not now even to keep the disappointed among foreigners from taxing the funds of the Benevolent Society; and many most capable English artists are driven from the opportunity of continuing their profession by the inroad of foreigners, among whom Americans would not be classed did they not first go

to Paris and lose all the character of the common race by their training in denationalizing mannerism. The Chinese soldier, after the storming of the Tekoa forts by the English, gave as his reason for the hasty flight of the defenders, "No two people stand in one place; you come, we go." However righteous and valiant an army may be, there is no resistance possible after betrayal.

The ideals of Art are best shown by example. Men write about the matter too much without showing what they really mean, and so they darken counsel with words, like the celebrated critic Ruskin refers to, who, praising a landscape with quadrupeds in it, to justify their particular shape said they were not exactly sheep, nor cows, nor horses, but animals, as they should be. I have ventured to refer to the Duke of Marlborough's article because it so frankly and typically states his case that there could be no hesitation in the conclusion that he would be glad to have it as freely examined.

The true ideal of Art is the outcome of a spirit of love and reverence for Nature. It must be inexhaustible in its illustration of the variety and perfection of life and the world. Walt Whitman somewhat amusingly speaks of the true poet as being part of everything of vital force he meets with in his walks. He is just, for the poet must sympathize with all the earth, not like the passer-by, but as being part of himself, and he must give what his surroundings have taught him, as his own eyes show them, and as they affect the nature which with his fellows he inherits from his ancestors. Every great Art so far has been strictly national. It is by honest emulation among different races that progress and culture is obtained, and the fact forms a great reason against Cæsarism in thought and invention. Every race is diverse in its nature, and each can only truly express its own. There are outside of this line large principles common to the aim of all nations. These are to be studied by the serious as of universal value, and the want of them must be condemned because no great Art has been destitute of them. If Art deals with the misfortunes and wickednesses of the human race, it must do so to illustrate the irrepressibleness of the soul of good fighting against evil, not as though it gloated over the vice. It may be humorous

and jocular in turns to any extent. It is not forbidden by any means to represent the human figure of either sex, for these are the highest developments of creation, but this must not be done without the stamp of unquestionable purity of mind. Art may be connected with religion or morality, but this is not a necessity. Yet in "the making for righteousness" of destiny

it must never work for the retarding of the onward action-for the taking us back to brutedom-under penalty of being a witness against itself when the judgment comes, showing that it never had clain to indulgence as an ennobling influence in its day. So far I would dogmatize, and no further.-New Review.

I.

THAT the literary epoch now drawing to a close has been pre-eminently rich in the production of English poetry-far richer indeed than any previous epoch, save that which is illumed by the sunlight of Shakespeare's name is an article of faith with all who nowadays love poetry, and especially with all those who write it themselves. But although the critics have not attempted to disturb that faith, yet the sourest of them try to make bitter the poet's cup of pleasure by putting forth certain uncomfortable queries "Will the twentieth century," they ask, "sustain and carry on the poetic glories of the nineteenth? Will not the everincreasing and ever widening channels through which the intellectual energies of the country are now being hurried lead off into other and alien directions those forces which have hitherto expressed themselves through poetic forms! A literature of power as distinguished from a literature of knowledge there will always be (say they), but will it in the epoch before you continue to take a metrical form?"

The critics know very well how uncomfortable are such questions as these to all those to whom the enjoyment of metre, and especially of rhyme, is deeper than any other delight-men who, if they dared to confess it, could "travel from Dan to Beersheba," and, unless the journey were enlivened by a few songs, would say "it is all barren.'

If the time is really approaching when the best music to be heard along the highways of life will be the hum of the manufacturer's mill, varied occasionally by the whistle of the steam-engine, those high

WATTS.

ways will be to some of us as arid as the sands of Sahara.

It is, however, fortunate for the poet vexed by these queries that, as far as the poetry of England is concerned, they can only be answered by guesses. To guess with Dr. Hake that a great new school of poetry, based on that new cosmogony which has revolutionized the world, lies in the womb of time, waiting to give voice to the twentieth century, is as easy as to guess with Carlyle, that the Englishman of the future will be compelled to "say" in prose everything that the Englishman of the past would in verse have " sung.

But concerning this unknown epoch whose brow is just about to appear above the horizon, there is a second question which, to the English poet and lover of poetry, is of an interest only less intense than that I have alluded to. Supposing that English poetry will be able to resist and survive the colossal attacks of science and the literature of knowledge, what will be the relation of England to her colonies as a producer of the literature of power, and especially of poetry, at a time when perhaps the material leadership of the English speaking race will be challenged, if not seized, by the foremost of her daughters? Is it likely that the twentieth century will succeed, where the nineteenth century has failed, in giving the United States of America a body of poetry that can properly be called American?

Those transatlantic poets who have visited England in my time have as individuals exercised so great a charm over their brother and sister singers that what they the American poets, wish in this m we also might wish. At the ment when the American po”

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passed what they call (and not without humor) the International Copyright Act two prominent American writers come forward--Mr. Moncure Conway and Mr. Walt Whitman-the one asking whether the long-expected English Variant in America" has at last been evolved, and the other putting forth what he calls "the terrible query-Is there, or can there ever be, distinctively any such thing as an American national literature?"

According to the author of Leaves of Grass, the Variant," though at present expressing his individuality through the medium of "petroleum and pork," is in the future to express that individuality in poetic art, and to express it so fully as to put to shame all the poetry of the past; which poetry of the past-whether chanted by Homer, or written by Eschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, or any other -is, it seems, characterized by an "almost total lack of first-class power and simple natural health." It will be seen from the following extract that he does not tell us in so many words that the new poetry is to be built on the metrical system of Leaves of Grass, but allows us to enjoy our own happy inferences on this head.

"Ensemble is the tap-root of national literature. America is becoming already a huge world of peoples, rounded and orbic climates, idiocrasies and geographies -forty-four nations curiously and irresistibly blent and aggregated in ONE NATION, with one imperial language, and one unitary set of social and legal standards over all, and (I predict) a yet-to-be National Literature. (In my mind this last, if it ever comes, is to prove grander and more important for the commonwealth than its politics and material wealth and trade, vast and indispensable as these are.)

"The great current points are perhaps simple, after all: first, that the highest developments of the New World and Democracy, and probably the best society of the civilized world all over, are to be only reached and spinally nourished (in my notion) by a new evolutionary sense and treatment; and, secondly, that the evolution principle, which is the greatest law through nature, and of course in these States, has now reached us markedly for and in our literature. Modern verse generally lacks quite altogether the modern,

and is oftener possessed in spirit with the past and feudal, dressed may be in late fashions.

"Certainly, anyhow, the United States. do not so far utter poetry, first-rate literature, or any of the so-called arts, to any lofty admiration or advantage-are not dominated or penetrated from actual inherence or plain bent to the said poetry and arts. Other work, other needs, current inventions, productions, have occupied and to-day mainly occupy them. They are very 'cute and imitative and proudcan't bear being left too glaringly away far behind the other high-class nationsand so we set up some home 'poets,' artists,' painters, musicians, literati, and so forth, all our own (thus claimed). The whole matter has gone on, and exists to day, probably as it should have been, and should be; as for the present it must be. To all which we conclude and repeat the terrible query: American national literature is there distinctively any such thing, or can there ever be ?"

It is a useless and a presumptuous thing for a mere Englishman to attempt to extract a meaning from the utterances of any one of those Bunsby-Apollos in whom the transatlantic Delphi has always been so rich. It is only the native-born Captain Cuttle that is expected to expound them. This is fortunate for me. The word "nation," for instance, as used here, may very likely have a Delphic meaning which is as much above mere human etymology as the verbiage surrounding it is above mere human grammar. Still I will not deny that the growing complexities of society may render it almost imperative that some words should grow into a significance both wider and looser than their

Of

etymologies warrant. But is it convenient to allow the word nation to slip away from its etymological anchorage? course the word is connected, not with populus but with natus, and in the old world of Europe it is, or used to be, held that no people can properly be called a nation in whose descent there is not something at least of homogeneity. This is why, as even the school books of the Old World affirm, or used to affirm, the Romans are not called the Roman nation but the Roman people. Compared with a population built up of representatives of

แ

forty-four nations," as the above ex

tracts declare the Americans to be, the Romans themselves were about as homogeneous as the Greeks.

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Hence to use the word "nation" as descriptive of such a community is to give it a meaning which is new and as unscholarly as new. Etymologically the people of Australasia and especially the people of New Zealand are, if Mr. Walt Whitman's data as to American heterogeneity are to be accepted, far more like a nation than the Americans can ever be. Even in South Australia such blood as is not Anglo-Saxon is, after all, mainly Teutonic, though of course here as throughout the entire Australian continent there is the inevitable leaven of Celtism. In a word, the "facts" embodied in the above extract, if they are to be accepted, would form an admirable refutation of the argument in favor of the possibility of the American people ever developing into a nation. But writers whose quest is not the truth but the striking must never be taken too seriously. To talk about a nation composed of forty-four nations" seemed both striking and fine, and the poet here had neither the knowledge nor the sagacity to see how these striking and fine generalizations of his told against his argument. It is interesting to observe with what very different eyes another writer -the writer of some thoughtful sentences upon the Italian Mafiaites in New Orleans -reads the meaning of American heterogeneity. The "query" he puts is not, "Will there ever be an American nation?" but "Will the United States even continue to form an integral portion of the English-speaking world at all?" Arriving at the conclusion that even so much homogeneity as the preservation of a common language would imply is becoming not less but more problematical, he act ually suggests, as the only means of saving the people of the United States from degenerating into a mere polyglot-amalgam of all the races of Europe, the passing of a law prohibiting the permanent settlement of Europeans in America save under the condition of their undergoing a successful examination in the English language during their first two years of residence on American soil. In support of his the ory that the very existence of the American people as a branch of the Englishspeaking race is in peril-in growing peril -he quotes some words from a Texan

journalist, who, after affirming that Galveston in Texas with a population of fifty thousand "cannot muster a corporal's squad of merchants of English-speaking origin," declares exultingly that "the day of the English-speaking people in the great Southern cities is gone and will never return." If this is really so, I wonder what becomes of Mr. Walt Whitman's "Ensemble," and "the tap-root of National Literature," and what will become of Mr. Moncure Conway's "English Variant" ?

As a matter of fact, however, notwithstanding the vast immigration from European countries, it is easy to exaggerate, if not the heterogeneity of the American people, the potentiality for mischief involved in that heterogeneity. Making every allowance for even the Irish element, the non-Teutonic and non-Scandinavian blood in America will not in the long run be able to disturb the racial symmetry unless the Anglo-Saxon race should, from some climatic influence as yet undisclosed, lose that "prepotency of transmission" which has been its chief characteristic, not only from the time of the Norman Conquest, but from the semimythical days of Hengist and Horsa.

The motive power of modern life is commerce, and commerce between Europeans in the same country will bring miscegenation, and then the indomitable prepotency of transmission which characterizes our race will, as in the past, trample down every obstacle, unless, indeed, Humboldt should be right as to the deteriorating effect of the climate of the United States upon the Anglo-Saxon type. The failure of commerce to produce miscegenation in British America is the result not of natural laws of race, but of the artificial disturbance of natural laws of race. In order to balance one Canada against the other (for entirely mistaken political ends) William Pitt did everything possible to prevent miscegenation. Had that miscegenation taken place, no one can doubt what would have been the effect of Anglo-Saxon prepotency of transmission, for the climate of North America above the St. Lawrence on the east, and above the 49th parallel on the west, does not exhibit those attenuating qualities which attracted Humboldt's attention. In the United States, however, government influence, so far from working