Often, again, what is called conscientiousness elevation to the rank of a duty and a virtue, is is simply the egotism of a willful and intolerant due to those who would monopolize what they nature. We are passionate advocates of our abuse-the name of Christians; and Islamism, wrong opinion because it is ours; we insist upon which commands the extermination of infidels, following our mistaken or mischievous course for only follows our example and betters our instructhe same reason, and because our unchastened tion. It would almost seem as if the habit and temper is impatient of contradiction or control; the principle of persecution had begun with the we make a virtue out of one of the most danger- first dawn of a true faith, had spread with the ous and offensive of our vices. We sail under spread of monotheism, and had culminated with false colors, and go through life a sort of moral what the world has agreed to recognize as its pirates, carrying a lying flag at our masthead. purest and loftiest form. Nay, more, it must be Occasionally the case is even worse, and it is admitted, we fear, that the spirit of religious inpure love of power which uses the plea to throw tolerance has been rampant just in proportion as dust into the eyes of an unpenetrating and in- belief has been enthusiastic and dogmatic, and dulgent world. A position of command-about that the periods of most earnest convictions have the weightiest burden of responsibility which can precisely and invariably been those when persebe laid upon a scrupulous nature-is too con- cution has been most active and most barbarous. stantly exercised merely as the privilege of an imperious volition; and the pressure of obligation which might be in danger of paralyzing action in a truly conscientious man is scarcely even felt by one who only credits himself with being such, and fancies he is discharging his duty when he is, in fact, only obeying his propensities. Probably, however, the most notorious and flagrant instance of conscientious crime is religious persecution. It is also the most widely spread and the most enduring. It has been the curse and the obloquy of mankind for the last eighteen centuries. It did not exactly come in with Christianity, because specimens of it, or what looks like it, are traceable in classic times, and the temper and ideas which are its excuse and inspiration now were partly at least its inspiration among the early Israelites in their treatment of the Canaanitic tribes; but it can scarcely be denied that its prevalence, its systematization, its gation is a wealthy and influential merchant, Mr. Bradshaw-the very distilled essence of a disagreeable Pharisee; ostentatious, patronizing, self-confident, and selfworshiping; rigidly righteous according to his own notion, but in our eyes a heinous and habitual offender; a harsh and oppressive tyrant in his own family, without perceiving it, or rather without admitting that his harsh oppression is other than a grand virtue; yet driving by it one child into rebellion, and another into hypocrisy and crime, and arousing the bad passions of every one with whom he comes into contact; having no notion of what temptation is, either as a thing to be resisted or succumbed to, for the simple reason that all his temptations-those of pride, selfishness, and temper-are yielded to and defended as virtuous impulses; prone to trample, and ignorant of the very meaning of tender ness and mercy. This man, reeking with the sins Christ most abhorred, turns upon the unhappy Ruth (who, after six years, had become governess in his house), as soon as he learns her history, with a brutal violence and a coarse, unfeeling cruelty which we need not scruple to affirm constituted a far greater sin than poor Ruth would have committed if her lapse from chastity had been persistent and deliberate, instead of being half unconscious, transient, and bitterly and nobly atoned for. Now, while unquestionably this form of misguided conscientiousness is of all the most noxious and desolating, it is probably at the same time the most honest and the most logical. While as wrong-headed as any, it has in it less of semi-conscious self - delusion or self-indulgence than most. It has in it more of principle and less of passion. No doubt that impatience of difference of opinion to which we are all so prone, and that domineering temper which is among the least amiable of our faults, lie at the bottom of much religious intolerance, and are mixed up with nearly all; but the doctrine which really dictates and sustains persecution-without which it could scarcely have survived the growth of our intelligence and the increasing tenderness of our nature—is a legitimate inference from the gospel teaching, a false conclusion and conviction common to nearly every Christian Church, professed by nearly every sect of sincere believers, and warranted, it is vain to dispute, by the Scriptures which nearly all accept. The received creed, which we are only slowly beginning to outgrow or to expurgate, pronounces that men's salvation depends not on what they do, but on what they think; not on righteous conduct and a Christian spirit, but on sound dogma and correct belief; not on being imbued with and governed by "the mind which was in Jesus,” but on having accepted right ideas as to who Jesus was and what he taught. Till this fatal notion is exploded, Christianity can neither bear its destined fruits nor deserve its borrowed name. long as it reigns paramount, religious persecution can neither be denounced as illegitimate nor resented as iniquitous. If my eternal salvation really depends upon the faith I hold, it is impossible to argue that any severity, any barbarism, any oppression which offers the prospect of converting me to the faith that opens the gates of heaven, may not be the most righteous and kindly treatment to pursue toward me-is not, or may So not be, not only a justifiable course, but a sacred and a solemn duty. "The theory of persecution," it has been well said, "would be invulnerable if its major premise were not unsound." To mention other instances in which "conscience" is quite astray, or rather in which what calls itself conscience must be content with the more appropriate name of prejudice or ignorance, we may refer to two which have cropped up not unfrequently of late. The error in each case maintains itself upon a scanty but. undeniable fragment of argument and fact. The "Peculiar People," as they are termed by those they puzzle, are a small sect of Christians of the most uneducated class, who, if their children fall ill, refuse to have recourse to ordinary use of drugs or doctors, but pray over the invalid and leave the issue of the matter in "the Lord's hands." If the child in the course of nature recover, they thank God. If he die, the British magistrates commit the parents for manslaughter, as having neglected to employ the recognized means of cure. Both the law and the offenders have much to say for themselves; and the parents, granting the assumed premises common to both, have undeniably the best of the argument; they are the closer logicians, but the greater fools. They plead: We are ignorant and simple folk, but we must obey our consciences. Our teachers, Christian lawgivers, Christian magistrates, Christian ministers, all agree in telling us that the New Testament is the best guide for people like us, and indeed they say an infallible guide for all. Now, James, an inspired apostle of Christ, speaking in the Holy Scriptures (James v. 14, 15) saith, 'Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the Church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.' We acted as God by the mouth of his prophets ordered us; and 'whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto men more than unto God, judge ye,' as another apostle, Peter, said." Whereupon the magistrate, if he be an honest man, is considerably puzzled; if he be a skeptic, he replies that such is not the law, and that he must obey the law, and that the peculiar person is very ignorant and simple (which is precisely the groundwork of his argument); if he be an ordinary believer, he mutters something about unlearned folk "wresting Scripture to their own destruction," abuses him for want of sense, and assures him that he is mistaken in his interpretation of the Testament. But both alike send the unfortunate defendant away with his sentence of fine or imprisonment added to the loss of his child, quite unconvinced, greatly shaken in his understanding by this conflict between law and Scripture, probably fancying himself a martyr and his condemner a cruel oppressor, and at all events resolved to sin again. But no one regards him as a man who can "afford to keep a conscience" or is entitled to so high a privilege.* Another set of unqualified devotees of conscience are to be found among more educated circles, and have more to say for themselves. Their error is traceable less to want of knowledge than to partial and incomplete knowledge. We refer to those who refuse to have their children vaccinated, as the law requires, on the plea that the (vaccine) lymph used for the operation has, or may have, become vitiated by long transmission through the human constitution, of which it may have contracted, and does occasionally convey, some of the impurities, and even some of the diseases-one, at least, certainly of the most offensive. The fact on which the plea is advanced is admitted—is undoubtedly valid for requiring the amendment and modification of the law; whether it ought to be recognized as warranting violation of the law may assuredly be questioned. The arguments pro and con lie in a nutshell, and the premises on which they are founded are not disputed. Small-pox is about the most loathsome disease to which our race is liable, and was for long the most fatal. It was also the most rapidly and inescapably contagious. Nobody could argue that it concerned himself or his family alone. Every small-pox patient was a risk and a probable agent of death to all with whom he came in contact. Vaccination, when pure and well administered, used to be an almost absolute preservative. It is so still, even as at present administered, in ninety cases out of every hundred. Still, it is admitted that the lymph employed is not as good as it once was, having been "humanized," as we are assured, to the extent of two and a half per cent., and even diseased in quality in very rare cases.† But vaccine lymph procured direct from the animal has been introduced in Belgium (and now, we understand, in St. Petersburg) with the most complete and *We must observe, however, that the most decisive argument of the magistrate in favor of enforcing obedience to the common law is that the father is dealing with the case of his children; he is playing, as is believed, with the lives of others, not with his own. He is charged with manslaughter, not with suicide. Now, no man is entitled to be whimsical in dealing with the lives of others. Justice as well as law (as far as may be) requires that these shall be governed and determined by the common sense of the world at large. You may not choose to take physic yourself; but you are not entitled to deny it, any more than food, to those whom you are bound to support. + See Sir Thomas Watson, "Nineteenth Century," June, 1878. unexceptional success, and without the slightest liability to the objection which has to some slight extent given countenance to the aversion which has arisen here. With this amendment of the system once introduced, it becomes obvious that the law of "compulsory vaccination" is a righteous one, and that the dislike and opposition of any individual to a beneficent arrangement determined by the sense, and appointed for the safety, of ninety-nine of every hundred in the community qualified to form a judgment, ought to be sternly overridden. Conscience is a far more unendurable plea for disobedience in this case than in the last. There disobedience threatened only the life of the offender's child; here it threatens the lives, health, and comeliness of thousands of his fellow citizens. The practical conclusion to be drawn from all these considerations, stated nakedly and broadly, would strike most persons as somewhat startling. It is this: that conscientiousness in its absolute form-that is, being a slave to your conscience, always doing what it tells you to do is commendable or defensible only on the preliminary assumption that you have taken every available pains to enlighten and correct it. You can be safe and justified in obeying it implicitly only when you have ascertained, or done all in your power to ascertain, first, that it is qualified to command; and, secondly, that what you take for conscience is not in reality egotism, ignorance, incapacity, intolerance, or conceit under a thin disguise. Το make sure of this is no easy business. It requires not only good sense (a much rarer gift than we fancy), but great intelligence, a cultívated mind, modest as well as earnest searching after truth, to entitle a man to give himself over to his conscience. Never must he be allowed to plead it as an excuse for mistake or wrong. In fine, and in plain truth, it is not every manperhaps we might say it is but few men-that can afford to keep a conscience-a conscience of this absolute and imperious sort at least. To direct floundering or blinded souls, just as much as to cure diseased bodies, needs a license and a diploma from some college competent to confer such. In the navy, and I believe in the merchant service as well, it is the practice as soon as a ship is ready for sea, or ordered on an expedition, to pass her through a preliminary ceremony, known technically as 'being swung." It is absolutely indispensable; she is not held to be fit for duty till it has been performed. It consists in verifying her compasses-ascertaining by actual and minute comparison with compasses on shore that those instruments by which she is to direct her course throughout her voyage are perfect and accurate, point aright, are impeded in their operation by no fault of construction, and liable to no deviation from the influence of disturbing attractions. As a matter of fact the magnetic compasses of few ships are found to be thoroughly exact, or to point truly and precisely to the north-sometimes swerving from that direction as much as ten degrees, and owing this variation most commonly to the position and amount of iron of which the ship is partially constructed. Before the ship is suffered to sail, this variation must be either rectified or, as is more commonly the practice, registered and allowed for. It is obvious that, unless this were done, not only would the vessel not know for certain whither she was steering, nor arrive except by accident at her intended port; but that ship, cargo, and the lives of the crew might every day be wrecked on any hidden rock or headland—in fact, that her course and fate would be at the mercy of chance. In the case of ships setting forth upon voyages across the Atlantic Ocean all this anxious caution is observed lest the guiding instrument to which they trust should be imperfect or misleading. Yet men habitually set out upon the voyage of life-far longer in duration, beset with perils from rocks and hurricanes immeasurably greater, and fraught with issues incontestably more serious-with a compass as their guide which they trust as blindly and obey as implicitly as any mariner who ever sailed the seas, yet which in countless instances they have never been at the pains to test before installing it in a position of command, and which they seldom if ever pause to question, verify, or adjust. W. R. GREG, in the Nineteenth Century. VOL. VI.-12 SOME MODERN ARTISTS. FORTUNY. thing that existed previously. That the man, despite his genius, was all wrong with himself and his art, I do not think any one would doubt for a FORTUNY was world has ever known, cessors and a school, I can not do it. The effect ORTUNY was probably as original a genius moment; but as to referring his work to prede and no less so in the shortcomings than in the successes of his work. With a power of drawing detail as marvelous in its way as that of Meissonier― nay, really more marvelous, because attained seemingly without effort - he would nevertheless habitually leave at least half of his work hardly begun. With a power and ease of composition which I have never seen equaled among modern painters, he habitually disdained to compose at all, and threw his figures together with an insolence of neglect that can hardly be expressed in words. There would be-as, for instance, in the picture of the Alhambra, in this gallery—a little bit glowing like a jewel in the middle of the picture, finished with the most delicate minuteness, and all round it a bare plastered wall and paved floor, destitute alike of interest and beauty. He would paint, as in a little picture here, a woman's figure with such delicacy of contour and light and shade as hardly to be surpassable, and he would surround it with a mass of coarsely daubed, dull-green paint, representative of absolutely nothing. There was a little picture here of a Bedouin Arab on a horse, against a white wall, man and horse certainly not more than four inches high, in which every detail of horse and man was rendered with a fidelity, and yet a breadth, which, as I have said above, could only be compared to a Meissonier, without the labor. That was the great attractiveness of the man's work, it looked so easy. It was hard to persuade one's self that any one could not produce similar results. Another very peculiar characteristic of it was its almost perfect use of bright color. Sense of the real beauty of color (in gradation of tint) Fortuny, I believe, had little or none, but it seems to have been positively impossible for him to use wrong color in combination. He puts the brightest of all bright tints together-azure against emerald, and gold against rose; he heaps them one upon the other in a reckless prodigality of strength; and yet, as far as I have seen, he is invariably justified by the result. To me, these pictures of his (and I happen to have had the opportunity of living in the same house with one for several years, during which time I studied it thoroughly) are stupefying, in their contradiction to all my preconceived notions of art, and I can compare them with no of this work on the mind of the Italian and Spanish artists seems to have been almost immediate-probably followed directly on its recognition in Paris, where the artist's paintings sprang at once into popularity. Always ready for the contradictory and the bizarre, the style of Fortuny was the very one to captivate the French mind, and to this day his reputation is greatest in Paris. But the Italian and Spanish artists saw simply the facility and the beauty of the work, saw the perfect mastery over bright color, attained apparently without effort and with little labor; saw that if color could be so manipulated, the subject matter of the picture was of little importance, and that if they could once master the secret of the work, they might go on producing ad infinitum, without the exercise of thought; and so, missing in their narrow interpretation what was undoubtedly the fact, that Fortuny's genius was great, and his pictures wonderful, not because of his method, but in spite of it, they set themselves deliberately to work to copy his eccentricities, in the hopes of sharing his fame. Such is an exceedingly weak and imperfect, but, I believe, in the main, correct view of the rise of the Fortuny school in painting, that school which at present includes nearly all the artists of Italy and Spain. I do not know how to bring the style of the pictures vividly home to my readers. Try to imagine a world where there is no sunlight or shade, but over everything a ghastly glare (such as the gas companies tell us is the effect of the electric light), and then try to imagine crowds of people, in dresses of the most varied hues, moving rapidly about, intent upon nothing. Banish from their faces every trace of emotion, nobility, and thought; fill in the background with emerald trees, azure sky, and clouds of dust; and then you will have a typical picture of this school. It is the old story of Croesus, after all; the artists have gained their wish, the only thing wanting to complete their triumph was the one essential that they never thought of acquiring. They have produced Fortunys by the dozen, by the thousand, but they are Fortunys only in their errors. The method and the trick have been learned more or less successfully, but the light of genius which redeemed them both is for ever wanting. MILLAIS. WITH regard to Millais, I am in doubt whether I can make my readers clearly understand, in a few words, the extraordinary merits and defects of his work. Every one knows what his early work was; every one remembers the "Ophelia" and "The Huguenots," and perhaps some have even seen the "Apple Blossoms," the most typical works of this painter in his younger days. Many of my readers are probably also readers of Anthony Trollope's works, and if they will take the trouble to turn to " Framley Parsonage" or "The Small House at Allington," or, best of all, "Orley Farm," they will be in a position to judge of what Millais might have done, as well as what he has done. In those early pre-Raphaelite days (Millais was one of the three original "Brethren ") there were three things that Millais did better than they had ever been done before. The first, and the greatest, was the expression of emotion; the second was the power of investing the most simple incidents with a grace and beauty which have only been equaled by one man (Fred Walker), whose work I will speak of directly; the third was the reproduction of animal and inanimate nature faithfully, and yet in perfect combination and subordination to his chief subject. Had he continued as he began, had he lent to the pre-Raphaelite school the influence of his keen sense of beauty, both of emotion and nature, it is impossible to say what the English school might not have been at the present time. I do not judge of any man's motives, and I will not raise the question here, but, from one cause or another, Millais forsook his old ways, gradually turned his attention to portrait and landscape painting, became fashionable, and threw his influence mainly against the school he had once belonged to. When I think of the “Ophelia" and "The Huguenots," and then of the series of pictures called "Yes," "No," and "Yes or No," the change seems to me almost pathetic-that a painter should begin his work with the noblest deeds of self-sacrifice and heroism he can find for subjects, and end by painting a "brown ulster" and a beef-eater's uniform, for those are practically the chief subjects of the two last large figure paintings of this artist! The realism is still there, my readers will perhaps say. Yes; that is just the whole point of the question. That is what I want to lead my readers to see clearly, if I may, in this article-that realism is not noble in itself, if it have no higher object. Realizing an inkstand or an ulster will not give you a picture; what you want to realize is the beauty which dwells in nature, and also the relative degree in which various natural objects possess it; and you can not stop even there—that will give you beauty, but only that of death. The next step is the all-important one, the one which can only be taken by one man in a thousand, and which he must take, unless he is false to his art and himself. This is simply the connection of material beauty with immaterial thought. I wish I had space to dwell longer upon this. I should like to try and show how all nature really depends for its chief interest on humanity; how dead and cold it becomes the instant all trace of man's thought, interest, and emotion is removed from it. I once tried to show this (in an article devoted to the purpose) to the readers of the Spectator," and straightway a lot of wiseacres thought I wanted a man in the foreground of every picture, and set to and abused me for so doing. So it is with fear and trembling that I let this sentence stand-that the simple copying of nature, no matter how minute or skillful, will never make a great picture, or a great artist. An artist must not only see more clearly than other people-he must also see more; he must, if he is to be an artist in anything but name, see those hidden significances in commonplace things, that poetry of the ordinary which, in another form, is revealed to us by the poet. Like him, too, his work must be .... bravely furnished all abroad to fling The winged shafts of truth; To throng with stately blooms the breathing spring Of Hope and Youth. THE GREEK ARTISTS OF ENGLAND. a mother By Greek artists I mean those who follow, either in subject or theory, Greek art. They are five in number-Watts, Leighton, Poynter, AlmaTadema,* and Albert Moore. Now, of these, the first and perhaps the last are Greek in spirit; the other three only in form. For instance, let us take Leighton's "Music-Lesson " teaching her child to play some stringed instrument. I am not going to say a word against the beauty of this picture; as a specimen of skillful painting, and as a piece of delicate color, it is a perfect feast for the eye; that the delicacy of the skin and its transparency of tint are too great to be natural is, I conceive, exactly what the artist intended-his reading of the fact that what the Greeks sought in art was beauty. But is this the right interpretation of what the Greeks meant by "beauty"? Do these soft robes of palest seagreen and blue, with their golden embroideries, harmonize with what we know or imagine of the stern simplicity of Greek art? This waxen rose * So long domiciled in England and so well known, that I mention him here, though I believe he is French by birth. |