'animals, and of insects, and finally to create a powerful ' and vigorous work that shall be wholly ideal.' And in the pictures pastoral sentiment may claim distinctively for its own, he applied his theory with strength and consistency. They remain typically pictures of the idealisation of the actual. There is no hard-and-fast line between what are strictly speaking pastorals and those works which deal with Nature and peasant occupations. The subject matter is by! no manner of means an invariable indication of the sentiment, and sentiment, not sheep, it must be remembered, is the final test. It is a question of emotional association. As dawnlight or sunset determines, with the mutual images evoked, the sentiment of many a landscape scene, appealing to memories of eons of dawns, to anticipations of centuries of sunsets, so the pastoral sentiment appeals to sympathies transcending the narrow compass of individual experience. And it is largely by virtue of such associative appreciation that, where and when in Segantini's works pastoralism becomes a single and self-sufficing motive, it severs itself from the mere portrayals of cattle-tending and agricultural painting. The sentiment is the atmosphere in which human life, animal life, plant life, moves and has its being. And that sentiment is for him the outgrowth, as it becomes the environment, of the life of meadowland and hillside. Human passions, dreams, pleasures and sadnesses, are coloured and shaped by those surroundings, by the monotony of long vacant hours in sunshine or rain, by the breath of the open air, by the breaking of days which call the herdsmen to the pasture, by the closing of days whose close leads to the fold.

What ideals of happiness would arise in lives lived under such influences of space, sky, and companionship? Surely love-in-idleness, between the fellow-guardians of those tranquil charges, whose very footfall on the summer dust of the roadway or the short turf of the cropped slopes speaks peace, whose voices, sometimes content, sometimes querulous, are always subdued. Or if on the mountain-side and in the shadow of steep rocks, with wilder flocks, more of struggle and hardship, less of serenity and quietude, may obtrude itself, yet, even so, set side by side with the struggle of workshop and warehouse, with the sordid hardship of lives spent within street walls and in the penury of crowded cities, it is easy to grasp the differences of mental atmosphere attendant on the differences of occupation and the differences of surroundings. And love-in-idleness idealised is Segantini's subject in that most pastoral fountain scene,

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where the water runlet splashes in the basin, where the boy who kisses is not cumbered with his crook, nor the girl kissed, by her water-pail, where the road winds towards the setting sun, and the sheep loiter a little beyond and apart, in no wise impatient of the lovers' delaying. It is thus Segantini has framed his little love-idyll—and the setting, such is his conscious or unconscious use, suggests itself as the creative cause no less than as the passive background to the human sentiment-a sentiment leisured as the sheep, gentle as the twilight shadows, possibly flitting as the fading daylight. In another idyll, the sense of leisure is absolutely complete. Here it is noon-the flocks are out of sight, if flocks there are. A girl lies full length on the sloping bank of high-grown grasses, her silhouette dark against a sky of thin floating clouds. Her figure sinks deep in the herbage, her head rests against the lad who sits, his back turned to her, his feet hanging over the bank, his face bent, his lips to the pipe he holds in both hands, from which, no doubt, come those thin clear notes tradition has from all time appropriated to the herdsmen of hills and plains. He pipes, she listens; again it is an ideal scene of human comradeship as the effluences of field and flower and open air and sunlight and spring (a flowering leafless bough tells us of spring) might, for a passing hour, fashion it.

Insistently too does Segantini dwell on that other inarticulate comradeship of man and beast. The boy-shepherd asleep by the giant tree-trunk of some shadowed grove, with two of his flock, recumbent but awake, keeping guard beside him (a reversal of office), is full of the lazy summer calm and the perfect trust of familiar companionship. In 'Uno di più,' where the woman shelters the new-born lamb under her unwieldy umbrella while the mother sniffs anxious, but confiding, after her offspring, a touch of humour enhances the charm of realism. Elsewhere similar portrayals approach so closely to pictures of thought, intention, and idea, as to transcend the sphere of true pastorals. When a man has something to say it is usually, though genius admits of no dogmatic prohibition, better for his art that he should not paint it. But Segantini, as years advanced, was not content with maintaining in himself the sensations ' and emotions with which he impregnated his work.' More and more he strove to communicate his reflections and beliefs, and in his favourite theme of Two Mothers-woman and child, cow and calf, ewe and lamb-sentiment is emphasised into a moral, and we feel he is painting, not his models, but what he thinks about them.

From love to comradeship, comradeship human and comradeship with nature, he passes, and then in one most lovely of conceptions he reverts to what religion has retained of the pastoral tradition. It is in the scene where, from midway the flight of circular steps leading upwards from the villag road to the village church, an old priest, with attendant acolytes, blesses the thronging crowds of inattentive herds who wait his benediction patiently browsing the stray grasses amongst the stones. The whole sentiment-fraught with piety as it is-has the simplicity, the homeliness, the calm of a pastoralism as true as the pastoralism of days when the herdsman's instinct sought amongst the gods of men, who were many, one god, if only a semi-god, who should deign to become a god of sheep. Again Segantini steps onwards from religion to symbolism, and even here the note rings clear and with no uncertain sound. In 'Love at the Fountain of Life,' sheep are there none, and shepherd and shepherdess have exchanged their clumsy attire, their rough and heavy footgear, for the drapery and lightly bound feet of nymphs and dryads. Yet in this fantasy of the symbolist an echo of his old spirit abides. The meadow, mountain-bounded, the springing water, the delicate outlines of the seated figure, a transitive vision of love's incarnate form with the soft drooping of wings so great and strong that it is as though an eagle had lent his pinions to a butterfly-comes before us as a dream indeed, but not as the dreams of the city dweller are, not as the dreams of those who dream amid the jostling of men and the jar and fret of activities, but as the vision of the pastoral artist, a vision born of the sleep of shepherds, fashioned out of the shadows of sunset and moonrise and the silent mists of stream-fed meadows, the meadows watered by the River of Life.

With Segantini pastoralism of theme and sentiment would seem to have said, for modern art, its last inventive word. It travelled far from the sheepfolds of Bethlehem, through the romance-Arcadias of Renaissance fiction, to reach the regions of pure artificiality. Again it cast aside the cold levities of late eighteenth-century affectations, to retrieve its soul in Blake and its heart in Segantini. And fitly enough the circle whose starting-point in the history of postclassic art was the Incarnation of the Divine may end with the painter who achieved the Idealisation of the Earth; fitly enough, the sentiment which found a place at the nativity of a new faith should find a last expression in the reverence of an old worship-the worship of the serenity, the repose, and the elemental spirituality of Nature.

ART. IV.-TIBET.

1. Lhasa: An Account of the Country and People of Central Tibet and of the Progress of the Mission sent there by the English Government in the year 1903-4. By PERCEVAL LANDON. 2 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1905. 2. Tibet and Nepal. Painted and described by A. HENRY SAVAGE LANDOR. London: A. & C. Black, 1905.

3. The Unveiling of Lhasa. By EDMUND CANDLER. London: Edward Arnold, 1905.

4. A Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet. By SARAT CHANDRA DAS, C.I.E. Edited by the Hon. W. W. ROCKHILL. Second Edition, revised. London: Royal Geographical Society; John Murray, 1902.

5. To Lhasa at Last. By POWELL MILLINGTON. Smith, Elder & Co., 1905.

I.

London:

WITHIN the last year has been enacted a drama profoundly interesting in the annals of this world. One of the last of the earth's hidden places has been revealed; and up among the snows of the Himalayan Mountains the curtain that veils an obscure and fascinating community has been plucked back, held open for a few months during which the curious eyes of Western civilisation have peered upon the mysteries which it concealed, and has fallen and veiled them again from our vision. Yet it is not distance and obscurity alone that have lent to Tibet its deep and unique interest. As time goes on, the world becomes in a sense smaller; countries and peoples are drawn together by threads of commerce, of enlightenment, by possibilities of travel and communication before unknown; and as the surface of the globe thus seems to contract, the primitive wonder and amazement of men, the childish sense of physical discovery and adventure, fades in the light of knowledge. One by one the obscure places of the earth are visited, their hidden secrets revealed, and something of the commonplace infused into them by the flooding stream of civilisation. We were interested in them because they presented a picture of human life which was perhaps incredible and alien to us; because in them we might discover an existence going on in which, although it was lived by men and women made in the same image as ourselves, we could recognise hardly any

conditions common with our own except the great primitive facts of life, birth and death. One by one, as we say, these mysterious regions have been visited, explored, revealed; one by one they have become absorbed in the common life of this planet, which, however painfully, however slowly, does nevertheless gradually but surely grow towards cohesion and conformity. The last of these strongholds of silence and secrecy to fall are those which Nature herself has most completely isolated, and which offer no great temptation to the cupidity of men or of nations; and among them the country of Tibet, poor and unenlightened, girdled by dangers, perched amid forbidding mountain peaks and the huddle of rocks and glaciers that are the roof of the world, has remained the last upon which the light of modern knowledge and curiosity has been turned. But not only, we repeat, because of its isolation is Tibet an intensely interesting country: an almost greater claim than this lies in its sanctity as the home of one of the most mystical and obscure schools of the Buddhist faith. Across all the dangers and difficulties of the road, beyond the mountains and glaciers, the dangerous and rocky track ends four hundred miles from Siliguri, in Mr. Landon's words, 'in a loop ensnaring the golden roofs of the Potala and of the 'Cathedral, and round that loop the sad-eyed Lamas, muttering their unchanging prayer, creep solemnly all day.' Here is the centre and shrine of a religious system which remains without parallel in the world for its power, its completeness, its harshness. We say 'harshness' with regret; for truly one of the most disappointing things which the exploration of Tibet has revealed to us is that the religion of lamaism is not the mild and gentle influence that seems to beam from the eyes of Buddha, but a dark and rigorous intolerance, a harsh priestly rule, a system peopled with all the bogies and terrors of a childish hell, and appealing to crude and simple fears such as only cruelty can impose and ignorance support. But however disappointing and painful this fact may be, it is true that this rumour of sanctity gave the sharpest edge to our wonder as to the isolated land of Tibet and the holy and forbidden city of Lhasa. A profound, a painful curiosity dominated the minds of men when they thought of that distant place with its thousands and thousands of monks, its myriads of holy men, its stream of thought and intention turned for ever upon the contemplation of holy things. What were the people like who thus passed the days and years of their lives in the