the same ideas have played their part before, and failed. Your acquaintance, too, with the religious experiments of other times will deliver you from crotchets, from enthusiastic confidence in any particular panacea, from expecting to rectify all that we lament by some pet organization, or by the iteration of some extreme and isolated truth. You will not seek, in short, to realize by a detached fragment of the divine Verity those benign results which history shows us have never followed save from the fair announcement of its main substance.

Him who sends us not
May your lives be full
May you never cease

And now, my brethren, I commit you to on this great warfare at our own charges. of usefulness, and therefore full of happiness. to look unto the Strong for strength, and as your day is so that strength shall be. May the great Head of the Church unceasingly sustain, endow, and prosper you; and may you hear him say, when the sun of life's labouring day shall have set, 'Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things!'

ART AND HISTORY.*

BOTANISTS tell us of certain plants which always spring up where certain races have occupied the soil. Some of these grow wherever the Red Man has trodden, others follow as constantly the appearance of the White. As it is with man, so is it in great measure with man's thoughts. Certain forms of art are found to spring up in the train of certain prevalent ideas, modes of thought, or national characteristics. Any one who studies history in its relation to art, and art in its relation to history, will soon be made aware that his pathway is lined by a series

* From Fraser's Magazine for October, 1857.

of such correspondences on either hand.

The connexion is close

between a revolution in society and a revolution in æsthetics. A style of art has been frequently determined by a form of government: the disputes of the schools have not been without their influence on the practice of the studio. If it were possible for some accident to destroy the materials of history, the loss might be to a large extent repaired from the monuments of art. As the soil of a remote district might be deduced from specimens of its flora, so might the leading features of a national history be re-constructed from an acquaintance with its poems, its pictures, or its buildings. An age or nation, with its works of art, may be compared to some curious clock that sends out a different group of figures with each hour it strikes. At an early morning hour comes forth a Peter with his warning bird; at high noon Sol, with a golden hammer; at eventide a Nun in white and grey, ringing a silver bell. If a veil were hung over the dial-plate, or the hands had been broken off, or the striking mechanism long since rusted and useless, we should know how the index would have pointed, and what strokes would have been struck, so long as we could still see the figures coming out in their time and order on the little platform above, and going in at their folding-doors. So, whatever Time may have concealed or consumed, we might infer the dawning, the noontide, or the declining hours of a people's day by the personages it puts forward on the stage of Art-by the heroes of its drama, the favourites of its song, or the saints of its calendar.

Even a cursory survey of the connecting links between art and history will suggest many inquiries of interest, and bring out some startling examples both of agreement and of contrast. We shall sometimes see greatness in history and greatness in art associated. At other times they diverge. If we could indicate by lines on the map of Europe the successive shiftings of the centres of power and the centres of taste, we should find them sometimes coincident, sometimes far apart,-like the isothermal lines and the parallels of latitude on a chart of physical geography. A political alliance, a

VOL. II.

T

commercial relationship, a foreign conquest, communicate their influence speedily to art, and elevate or depress it. Compacts have been signed between citizens and sovereigns (of interest apparently only to the Dryasdusts) which we now see to have been fertile in galleries and pictures. Seeds have been sown in certain social and ecclesiastical conflicts, whence were to arise whole forests of columns and of spires. Civic faction at home, and bloody fields abroad, have more than once cleared a space with the sword where the glasspainter might build his oven, and the sculptor his studio. Such struggles may now be seldom brought to mind, but they live in their unforeseen results. They have found their emblazonment in wondrous windows, their monuments in living stone. If painter's brush and knightly lance, sculptor's chisel and diplomatic pen, could hold a colloquy, we might hear some strange stories of their fellowship.

The history of a nation is determined in great measure by its geographical position. Art receives its complexion from the same cause. Venice furnishes a good example. Why was her art so exclusively legendary and religious? How was it that her painters resisted so steadily the classic influences of the Renaissance, overflowing the rest of Italy, from Rome on the one side, and Florence on the other? Savonarola, the great Puritan divine of Florence, could exorcise only for a brief hour the newly-risen spirit of Paganism. Venice preserved herself without an effort, as by the mere instinct of her people. Not one Olympian deity could survive the air of the lagunes. A glance at the position of Venice explains this immunity. The Queen of the Adriatic was intensely religious, because she had been called, like Poland and like Spain, to defend one of the great outposts of the Cross against the Crescent. From the days when sightless, white-haired Dandolo led her galleys against Constantinople, her most glorious wars had been holy wars-her struggle for life, a championship of the faith. Legends made her only literature. Rome was scarcely more rich than Venice in the most sacred kind of treasure-in relics, brought with silks and spices in her home-bound argosies from every region of the East.

So, from the most potent member of her secret council, to the meanest workman in her dockyards, Venice was devoted to that Church she had so heroically served. The painter breathed the common atmosphere. Does he paint the portrait of a doge, arrayed in his robes of state? He places him on his knees, with bowed head, at the feet of the Virgin.

The Venetian school excelled in colour, as did the Tuscan in design. The love of colour was not peculiar to her artists-did not originate with them. Shut up between the vault of the sky and the level of the sea, the Venetian eye could not feast itself with variety of form. Many of the beauties of natural colour were also denied: the hues of the mountain side, changing with the hours of the day-the hues of the woodland, changing with the seasons of the year. So Venice indemnified herself by artificial colour. We see this in her Bellinis, Giorgiones, and Titians; we see it in the variegated dyes of her architecture, in the gaudy fashion of her old parti-coloured costume.

Look at Holland, again, so prosaic and realistic in its art. The very ground on which the Dutch painter stood was created and maintained by watchful labour-was the spoil of nature, not her gift. Men love much what has cost them much. The Hollander rejoiced to see truthfully depicted the vehicle of his industry, the fruit of his enterprise, the comfort he had plucked from the very teeth of the sea. Pleasant to his eyes that picture of well-fed kine, ruminating on one of those grassy banks that fortressed him and his household from the rage of waters. When rains or fog obscured the outward landscape, the picture of a trim and bright interior heightened his sense of snugness. As the knight hung his sword in the hall, so the Dutch skipper would suspend a painting of his ship in the back parlour. Amidst the sunshine and the fruitfulness of Italy, man may work little and dream much. But what Hollander can doze away upon the grass long summer hours of reverie? Full soon would the first pangs of rheumatism and lumbago break up his dreams of the ideal. Evelyn was astonished

at the immense number of pictures he saw in the Dutch fairs. He attributes the briskness of the trade in paintings to the necessary limitations of the country. The farmer or the citizen of sea-locked Holland, unable to lay out his gains on tracts of land, found a medium for speculation or investment in these works of art.

In Russia, there can be no doubt that the heavy snows necessitated the substitution of steep roofs and spires for the turbanshaped cupolas of the Greeks.

Compare Gothic and Grecian art in their representations of Death. To the Pagan, Death was terrible; but he made its emblem lovely. To the Christian, Death brought less of fear; but he made its emblem hideous. In Greek art, Death appears as a beautiful youth ; in Gothic art, he grins and threatens-a ghastly skeleton. The Greek would fain hide away every painful thought under wreaths of flowers, graceful forms, and pleasant words; calling the snake-haired Furies Eumenides, and the sepulchre a sleeping-place. The Goth, familiar with savage nature, has first braved horror, and then revels in it. His imagination, and so his art, have been thus grimly fashioned from of old by barbaric hardship-by the gloom of Germanic forests-by perils of the floating ice and the iron coastby long and eerie nights of winter among the pines, the glaciers, and the wolves. With regard to this particular instance the representation of Death-another fact has to be taken into consideration. To the German of the Middle Age, Death was not his enemy only, but that of Christ. Death and the Devil were the vanquished foes of his deliverer. They had done, and were doing, their baffled worst against God and man; but they must tremble at the cross. So the Gothic artist signalized at once his Lord's triumph and his own hope by making both antagonists ugly and abominable. He vented his abhorrence and his scorn in the fleshless anatomy of the one, and the bestial appendages of the other.

Great calamities, and the superstitious fears they stimulate, leave an impress upon art not to be mistaken. The troubled interval between the ninth and twelfth centuries exemplifies this connexion.