The popularity of Georgian art shows no signs of abating; its perfect refinement and good taste still commend it as highly as ever to all those to whom refinement and good taste are sufficing ideals of life. What, however, is strange about this popularity is that it is accompanied by no signs of interest in the human significance of the style. It never seems to be imagined by its votaries that eighteenth century art, coherent and consistent as it is in all its details, stands for a certain definite philosophy of life, the influence of which was as paramount in the living society of its day as it was in the sphere of art and craftsmanship. needs only to bring the style into contact with the history of the period for history and art mutually to illustrate and support each other. deavor in a minute to connection; but in the us examine the character of the art a little more closely in order that we may be able to recognize those circumstances which have affinity with it.

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The eighteenth century saw the rise, development and decline of what we still think of as our representative national school of painting. But that school was certainly not nationally representative in the sense in which the Italian, Dutch and Spanish schools were. Italian, Dutch and Spanish painting seem the effect of national consciousness. Nourished the life of the community, they deal with life as a whole and treat with most success, those themes which are of permanent and universal consequence to mankind. But in England how different is the case! Here all life seems to be surveyed from the point of view of one particular class. However much we may admire Sir Joshua and his group,

is it possible to gauge the scope and character of their work without being struck by the narrowness of the limits within which they moved? Lord This, the Countess of That, the Duchess of So-and-so and her children, the Ladies Mary and Betty Something-else -so runs the catalogue of their canvases. How circumscribed, one cannot help feeling, is the area of life from which this art drew its inspiration. Nor were those narrow limits ever overstepped with impunity. Has eighteenth-century art produced a single great religious composition, or any historical or other event of general interest treated adequately? Not one that I know of. More widely instructed than the rest of his circle in the ideas of the Renaissance, it was Sir Joshua's ambition to deal with those ideas with Italian amplitude, and his experiments are of extraordinary interest as showing that it was exactly in proportion as he approached towards or receded from the strictly aristocratic standpoint that his own art acquired or lost power and vitality. His imaginative characters put on reality as they draw on this common source of inspiration. The intuitions or guesses of classic thought and classic myth, so profoundly and humanly significant, failed to reach him of themselves. But let Lady Mary or Lady Betty be his dryad or Diana, and the subject immediately became thrilled and inspired as it developed the patrician charm which was the prevailing test of beauty.

The same bias shows itself in dealing with the most ordinary occurrences of common life. The villagers and peasantry, the cottage interiors and rustic scenes of George Morland, Old Crome and others are conceived out of no endeavors to realize that life as it existed. These sleek cottagers and

buxom wenches, ignorant but happy, humble in their circumstances, but placid and contented, and, as it were, designed by Nature for their lowly lot, who trudge beside the wagon or dance around the maypole, have no relation to any living English peasantry; least of all to that peasantry in the moment of deepest degradation and misery it has ever sunk to. They are a representation of rustic life not as it was but as aristocratic taste desired it to be, and, perhaps, imagined it to be. And so, too, as regards Nature herself the same rule holds. The meadows and woods and rivulets and hills, the gnarled oaks with bossy limbs and clustering foliage, the dappled sward, the torrent and the rock, have all the same indefinable air of sleekness and docility. They seem to form part of the amenities of some ancestral domain. The trees are of the kind that grow in parks, the wilderness where it exists is carefully studied and arranged, the glades are of the made-up variety known as the picturesque. The very dogs and horses of these pictures are of the same character. They gambol with an obedient playfulness. They arch their necks and prance with a mettlesome spirit which never exceeds the bounds of propriety, and the flash of their saucer eyes is always corrected by the glances of languishing adoration which they cast upon their masters.

It is impossible to turn from the school headed by Sir Joshua and Gainsborough to the schools headed by Rembrandt, or Velasquez, or Titian, or the great Florentines, without perceiving how much the servility of the first school cost it in the reality and truth of its conceptions. Rembrandt and Titian and Velasquez not only give us much more of life than Reynolds and Gainsborough, but they represent things much more truly and as they are. The artists give the impression of having watched life from the sim

ply human standpoint, and each object or person delineated, seen in that clear light, projects its own figure and personality on the canvas; whereas Reynolds and Gainsborough give the impression of having watched it through the mullioned windows of some old Elizabethan mansion, for they see every detail of it in conformity with, and falsified to suit, the prepossessions of a class. The only other art comparable to the English in this respect is the French, and that exceeds it in its own vocation. In France eighteenthcentury art was more entirely under aristocratic control than even in England, and, in consequence, the artificiality of French art, its absorption in the point of view of a class, and the utter futility of its estimate of all that lay outside the sympathy of that class, are more pronounced than is the case with English art.

It is not a question of subject only. The evil goes deep into the very nature of the art itself. Of what kind is the change of mind we are conscious of in passing from the gracious and lovely canvases of the Reynolds group to those grave and exalted compositions— annunciations, visitations, crucifixions, and the like which, changing little, and passing with slight emendation from hand to hand, move like solemn thoughts through the development of the Italian Renaissance? There is the change of sentiment, of course, inseparable from the change of subject; but that is not all. There is a change also in the quality of the painting. The great spiritual subjects have uttered themselves in compositions of a grandeur and dignity quite outside the conception of Georgian art. The types of face and head, the single figures and the groups, are endowed with a monumental simplicity and significance which have very little in common with the fluent gracefulness of Gainsborough or Romney. This the

theme itself insures.

We seem to be in some danger nowadays of forgetting the simple truth that the greater the theme, the more purely æsthetic is its influence. An idea seems to exist that the desired unity of effect can be obtained by merely studying the disposition of masses; but really all those æsthetic principles which have unity for their object are put into operation by a motive great enough to dominate all lesser conflicting motives. It is the action and influence of the master motive which we recognize when we speak of the harmony of a composition and the subordination of its parts to the whole. Composition is governed by ideas, and takes its own quality from the quality of the ideas it handles. Lofty and selfless motives, as they are general in their appeal, so they ennoble and unify design; while sordid or trivial impulses, which are merely personal in their appeal, tend to disintegrate design by the introduction of selfish and unrelated action. Lift up a crucifix, and you strike a keynote of composition. Fling down a handful of lucre into the crowd, and instantly your composition is shattered into discordant atoms. The Greeks calculated the construction of their temples in relation to a fixed point high above them. The phalanx of columns were all slanted inwards in such a manner, so slightly and imperceptibly that if they were prolonged they would meet in an apex a mile above the temple itself. The effect of the arrangement on the building is to endow it with a spirit of conscious unity. It is one in aspiration, and therefore one in structural design. But the secret lies in that invisible point of attraction in mid-heaven, which like the raised crucifix, draws all the members of the temple together in a single act of recognition. Such is the esthetic value of an adequate inspiration. Georgian painting, lacking the high

spiritual seriousness of Renaissance art at its greatest, lacks also the noble sense of composition which that seriousness engendered.

But painting, after all, is but one branch of art. What is remarkable about the Georgian creative epoch is that every one of its manifestations bears the same aspect. The furniture, the porcelain, the silver, the decorative details of ceilings and mantelpieces, the pottery, the sculpture, the architecture of the period, since they all very obviously act in obedience to the same motive, must be open to the same interpretation. If we have rightly caught the spirit of eighteenth century painting, we shall find that all the other arts and crafts guarantee and reiterate our inference. There is no difficulty in divining their character. The whole of eighteenth century art, it is very evident, is pervaded by an extraordinary and unusual refinement. There is nothing in it exuberant, redundant, or over-emphatic. It is severely restrained, in a high degree cultured, exceedingly well-bred. Not a trace does it exhibit of the superabundant vitality and warmth of popular art, but rather inclines to a certain coldness and arrogance of expression, its very perfection of taste lending it an air of exclusiveness, as of a thing aloof from common appreciation, and of too delicate an order to be understood by the vulgar. In short, in all respects, it is intensely aristocratic, and it is its aristocratic purpose, or tendency, to deal with its subject matter entirely from the aristocratic standpoint, which constitutes its note as a style.

This becomes clearer if we compare it for a moment with the only other period in British art which can take rank as a great creative epoch. Gothic art, like Georgian, has the stylistic note. Its inspiration, however, is not aristocratic but democratic. Lacking the

attraction which we associate with good taste and refinement, it is replete with the energy and vitality which art only acquires when it is used to express national emotions and aspirations. In every respect there is an entire divergence of view between the two epochs; but the clue to all differences consists in the different relations which in each case are assumed to prevail between the workman and his work.

The Gothic conception of art and craftsmanship is that they are processes belonging to and emanating from the national labor. Man is condemned to a life of toil, but this solace and recompense is awarded him, that he is permitted to ennoble toil itself by using it as a means of self-expression. Through this medium he may utter his faith and longing, or tell the story of his life. Thus defined, art shares with language in being one of the two chief modes of expression of humanity. It is as much the speech of the hands as words are of the lips. How many are there who have used that mute utterance who otherwise would have had no outlet for the thoughts that were in them! This, after all, is the greatest, the only adequate reward of labor.

By no wages

is labor dignified. Pay it a pound a minute and what then? You make it worth a man's while to do it, but you do not change the nature of what he does. If the work itself be mean and mechanical, mean and mechanical it will remain, and mean and mechanical it will make the doer of it, however highly paid it may be. But set labor free to propose its own solutions and voice its own ideas of what is meet and becoming, and the act of toil is itself transformed. The hands are become instruments of the mind. Imagination and mental activity prompt the tools and feel, in their turn, the stimulus of creation. The toil of a country, culminating to this outlet, matches

some great orchestral symphony with all its varied instruments-the tapping of a million hammers and notes of plane and saw and chisel-uniting in its harmony. This is what ennobles toil.

This theory-the theory that art is a perquisite of the people, emanating from and uttering the national life-was the root of the whole Gothic creative movement. Its importance and the part it seemed to that age to play in the economy of life may be gauged when we remember that it forms an inseparable portion of the ideal of liberty which may be said to be the contribution of the Gothic race to the sum of human experience. The two were indissolubly united in their origin and growth. The great mediæval guilds were not founded exclusively, nor even primarily to guard the rights and privileges of craftsmanship, but to guard the rights and privileges of citizenship. The originating motives of these pow erful associations had their roots in the social circumstances of Europe during the Dark Ages, and their purpose was the vindication of popular liberty. They are the answer to the feudal system of individual tyranny, and it is in them that we first catch sight of that idea of popular freedom which was to form the basis of European civilization. The oath of the guild man to his brother was an oath to stand by him against the oppressor, to make good his rights, and to redress his wrongs. In a word, these organizations were as much political as industrial, and recognized no difference between the right of a citizen to govern his labor and his right to govern his other actions. Such was the Gothic ideal of citizenship. In the domain of art we know it best by, and recognize its effect most clearly in, the sphere of architecture. Apart altogether from their æsthetic value, what gives significance to the great Gothic cathedrals is that they

stand for the original and characteristic theory of the Gothic people that the ideals of art and craftsmanship were not matters of individual culture and research, nor to be introduced from any extra-national sources, but were ends to be achieved by labor itself through the united action of the working people of the country. Nothing of Gothic origin will be understood if this is not understood. Gothic labor is essentially free labor-labor free to express its own ideas in its own language. Daring and difficult as are the structural forms employed in our national architecture, no expert knowledge was found necessary to their creation. Architects they knew none save the guild masons and carpenters. They were built by working men, and represent what working men felt to be appropriate and becoming. Above all the works of our race, they plead in vindication of the Gothic theory of the democratic nature of art and craftsmanship.

An idea like the Gothic idea, once it has got good hold of life must needs die hard and slowly. Its influence was felt through the sixteenth, and even well on into the seventeenth century. The determined effort of English-born builders in the Tudor age to evolve what may be called an insular Renaissance-that is, to construct a style of horizontal proportions out of the earlier vertical forms of Gothicis one of the most interesting, as it is the most neglected, of the episodes in architectural history. Tudor architecture, a horizontal style of Gothic origin, is pure Northern Renaissance, and, so far as I know, its sole manifestation. It is a fine example of the tenacity with which the tradition of free labor maintained itself in a country instinctively attached to the cause of liberty. Not easily did it occur to the sturdy English craftsmen, bred in the Gothic tradition, that life could

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make demands upon art which it was beyond their skill to satisfy. Nor was it English life that ever, as a fact, made such demands. The natural ripening and expanding of the national character could and would have found utterance in terms of national art. What could not so find utterance was the Italian culture which made of the Renaissance a foreign accomplishment and the perquisite of an instructed minority. The idea of the superiority of foreign culture implied the superiority of the foreign art in which that culture was embodied. In vain the British workman entrenched himself behind the national architecture. mischief lay deeper than he could reach. If the forms of medieval art appeared contemptible to the taste of the "Augustan age," it was because the national and democratic spirit which had animated those forms had itself come to seem contemptible. In building, this separation of the architect from the rest of the workers (which signified the division between art and national feeling and sentiment) does not seem to have occurred till the seventeenth century was some years spent. Down to that time, "the designs of buildings," as Mr. Blomfield tells us in his History of Renaissance Architecture, "seem to have been supplied indifferently by carpenters, masons, or bricklayers." By degrees, however, the influence of the cultured classes bore its natural fruit in the sphere of production. Slowly the British craftsman, persuaded of his own nothingness, relinquished the thought of a national craftsmanship expressing the national life, and resigned himself, with a patience that was partly apathy and partly despair, to reproduce the pomps of Versailles, or the classical formalities of Roman baths and temples.

What then we find on surveying the general course of art from the rise of English nationality down to the eight