THE BRITISH ARTISTS AND THE SPECTATOR.

THE appearance of the Spectator in the Law Courts is so rare, its defeat so unprecedented, that we owe some explanation to our readers for the proceedings in the Court of Queen's Bench on Monday last. In the eighteen years that this journal has been established—treating every kind of subject with independent free- dom, and of course, now and then, displeasing both individuals and parties--we have, before Monday, appeared but twice in the Courts of Law. On one occasion it was to answer the complaint of a Peer who took offence at an historical illustration, in which the name of his family was mentioned, though without the smallest intention to give individual offence ; and the Jury affirmed our right so to use the records of Doctors Commons. Next, we denied the right of a person who called himself "the Earl of Stirling" to bear that title, or to dispose of certain colonial lands and privileges : he brought an action, but was defeated ; and everybody knows what became of" the Earl of Stirling." The case with which we entered court on Monday was con- fessedly not so clear ; but neither, we think, was the case against us such as to warrant the verdict. The decision of a law court is commonly assumed to be legal and just ; and lest our readers should suppose either epithet to be appropriate in the present instance, we must lay the case before them.

In our number for the 11th of April last, appeared a notice of

the exhibition of the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street ; and, in part of our impression, at the end of that notice, stood the

subjoined passage— "The last manreuvre of the managers is of a piece with the whole course of their proceedings. A petition for a charter Is presented by them to the Queen, the pretence being that the Society intends to establish a • School of Art' I—and they have 'actually had the audacity to append in the form of signatures to this memorial the names of any distinguished persons who have given donations toward erecting the gallery, or who bought pictures out of its exhibitions When such practices as these are resorted to in order to promote the personal interests of a clique of inferior painters, and give them a factitious preeminence over abler artists, to the Injury of the art itself and of the public as well as of individuals, it behoves those who are aware of the attempt to denounce it."

This passage constituted the basis of the complaint against us. On the Monday in the following week, two persons came to the editor on behalf of the managers of the Society, to represent that the accusation in the above paragraph was libellous and untrue. On such an occasion two courses are open to an editor : one, to refuse all acknowledgment of error, and to deny the construction imputed to the words ; the other, after he has been convinced, to confess and correct the error. In our case, the former might have been the safer course in a legal view : it might not have been impossible to meet the action by an argument, that the phrase "appended in the form of signatures" did not convey a charge of forgery," (a stronger imputation than we ever meant,) but described the aspect of the document publicly exhibited at the Suffolk Street Gallery ; with which, in its printed form, were incorporated, not the signatures of the memorialists, but lists of persons who had purchased pictures or given money to the So-

ciety; these lists, it is to be inferred, comprising names of a more imposing look than the list of signatures, which it was not worth while to publish. But we owed a duty to the character of our journal, and to the trust with which our readers honour us ; and therefore, after proof had been furnished by the delegates from the Society, we did not hesitate to acknowledge that we had erred, and to put the subjoined statement into our next number— "Our attention has been called to a paragraph, containing some severe strictures on the conduct of this Society, that appeared In the first edition of the Spectator last Sa- turday, but was omitted in the second to make room for the afternoon additions to the Postscript. In that paragraph, the Society of British Artists were harshly censured for having • appended, in the form of signatures' to their petition to the Queen for a char- ter, the names of persons who had contributed to the funds for erecting the gallery, or had purchased pictures at the Society's exhibitions. " This was a very incorrect account of the position of the names. A printed copy of the petition or • memorial' to the Queen is now before us : it contains 126 names of noblemen and gentlemen who • have honoured the Society by becoming purchasers of works at the Society's exhibitions' ; then follow 59 names of donors. No signatures follow the prayer of the petition, and the actual signatures we have never seen we are, however, assured that every one of the signatures attached to the original me- morial 'was either written by the party himself, or pursuant to an express authority in the party's own handwriting.'

"We are bound to believe this statement, which leaves no room for doubt ; and, as the assumption on which our censure was founded proves to have been erroneous, we willingly retract the offensive comments, and express our sincere regret at having, through misapprehension, imputed blame which was undeserved.

"Our mistaken impression was derived from a hasty glance at the document, In which the names figured conspicuously, though, we now know, not as signatures, as It hung up in the lobby of the exhibition-room on the day of the private view: we had not seen the printed copy. "As the Spectator never knowingly resorts to misrepresentation of any kind, It Is due to the character of this journal, no less limn to the parties aggrieved, to make this reparation for an unintentional misstatement. And the writer cannot let the occasion pass without disavowing in the most unreserved manner, the existence of any hostile feeling on his part towards the Society of British Artists as a body, or to any individual members. Whatever animadvendons he may have offered on proceedings of the So- ciety have been dictated solely by a desire to raise the standard and promote the in- terests of art. And no one would more heartily rejoice to find the Society of British Artists holding the high position that it ought to attain by proper management, in- suring the confidence of artists generally, and those of superior talent In particular : for without the codperation of men of first-rate talent, an exhibition loses its hold on public attention, and the exhibiters Insensibly deteriorate instead of improving."

Had the Society been simply desirous of setting itself right with our readers, the matter would have stopped here ; but having, in communications of an amicable character, extracted from us an available admission of the technical error, the mana- gers of the Society, without even awaiting the publication of the correction to which we cheerfully pledged ourselves, proceeded against us at law, on a cumulative charge of general malignancy. Through the ingenuity of their counsel and the lax law of the Bench, the case assumed such a shape in court, that, while we were restricted to the defence on a specific point, the at- tention of the Jury was suffered to extend to other matters on which we were precluded from offering any justification. The specific basis of the action for libel was the incorrect statement about signatures; the ex parte statements consisted of references to past attacks" in the Spectator on the administration of the Suffolk Street Society, which were advanced in proof of a malicious animus. Now the reader must not be suffered, as the Jury were, to assume that there ever were in the Spec- tator any "attacks" to warrant such an inference; and in order to prevent such an assumption, we must remind our readers that the ' past attacks" consisted of divers criticisms on the ex- hibitions and management of the Society—" the whole course of proceedings" alluded to in the paragraph. Those criticisms in- volved no charge of moral delinquency. When we objected that the Society frustrated the very object of its institution, by out- rivalling the favouritism of the Royal Academy in the hanging of pictures ; when we noted the result of mismanagement in the defection of good artists from the Society ; when we objected to this claim of a charter, as unduly arrogating to the Society a national character ; in every remark of this nature, we did nothing but exercise the right of criticism on public acts, by a standard which the Society itself supplied—in its own pro- fessions. That right of criticism the plaintiff's counsel, Sir Frede- rick Thesiger, recognized in the most distinct and unqualified manner : his own declaration on the right of criticism ought to have cut him off from using these critiques to swell the charge derived from a single passage of a different kind. And our counsel showed that in their public management the plaintiff and

his colleagues came as lawfully under criticism as the exhibited works of an individual artist, or the performance of an actor, or the administration of a theatre. Without this explanation, the reader might have supposed that Sir Frederick Thesiger had ex- humed some old papers filled with real libels. It was insinuated that the writer of the misstatement in ques- tion was actuated by some unworthy motive of private interest or enmity. Such an insinuation was wholly groundless. The writer is a person of cultivated taste, of invich information on matters of art, but not in the profession, wholly devoid of any professional interest, and personally esteemed by all who' know him for his sincerity and honour.

The apology, it is said, was insufficient. With this com- plaint it is not so easy to deal, because, we fear' there is no coin-

mon measure by which to test the sufficiency. We intended it to be ample. But we necessarily made the new statement include a distinction between what was actually shown to us and what we were only told : of the former we spoke absolutely—of the latter, that we were " bound to believe " it. Having been once in error, we deemed that the best mode of rectifying it would be an expo- sition of the facts exactly as they stood, and to that end we stated exactly what were our data. Our statement comprised a declara- tion of the error, correction, retractation, and expression of sincere regret. If lawyers hold that a heaping of words or epithets would have increased the force of that apology, we can only say that our experience induces us to differ from them as to the elements of force in literary style.

A sinister use was made of the fact that the paragraph in liti- gation was removed in our second edition. Sir Frederick Thesi-

ger twisted that into a consciousness of error, and then asked why the correction was not made simultaneously with the omission? The answer was given in one of the letters read at the trial- " because no knowledge of any inaccuracy in the statement ex- isted at the time." It was proved on oath, too, that the paragraph was removed solely to make room for some later news in the same

page.* Yet, in his reply., Sir Frederick Thesiger reassumed the

bad construction just as if the evidence had been unknown. We do not complain of Sir Frederick : according to the licence per- mitted by the morals of the bar, he was free to go as far in making out the worst case against us as the Judge would permit; and we have to acknowledge the emphatic manner in which,

when it served iZpurposeihe recognized the pains bestowed on

the general co tt and construction of the Spectator: but we do, with all needful deference, conceive that the Judge ought not to have suffered this perversion to go to the Jury without explicit and emphatic correction.

One point of." judge-made law," enacted. pro re natd, we hold to be very questionable. At least it aims a heavy blow at the

freedom of the press. It is, that in an action for libel the plain- tiff may advance extraneous matter of which the defendant is not apprized until the moment of trial. According to this position, a public writer may attack some abuse in terms of severity, great, but so merited as to forbid an action for libel; yet the same wetter may be altd mente repostum, and at the end of six years (and if of six, why not of twenty or thirty ?) it may be brought forward to swell the materials for a cumulative charge of libel. A com- plaint resting upon some paltry point of technical detail may be swelled by volumes of just censure previously sanctioned by the sufferance of law. Under the Scotch law, a marriage legitimates a large family of prenuptial children : the Westminster law is a strange converse—it holds that one libel incriminates any amount of lawful strictures in the past. Where is this to end ? The severity of a critic and the severity of a judge who uses inculpating lan- guage in passing a sentence stand upon the same justification in

law. Now, suppose a ‘judge' in passing sentence of imprison- ment upon a violent and brutal man for an assault upon a defence- less girl, should give utterance' as most judges do, to expressions

of natural and laudable indignation • suppose that six years after- wards such judge published a libel upon the prisoner, in some review, and were sued for it : (Lord Denman knows that judges do sometimes write in reviews :) would the plaintiff have the right to give a character to that imputed libel by advancing in evidence a short-hand-writer's report of the old sentence passed upon him in court ? According to Lord Denman's law, he would. Penal law teaches by example ; and the moral to be drawn from this trial is multiform. 1. A good character is a disadvan- tage to a journal : if you are always libellous, you are passed by

with the impunity of contempt; but the general character of the Spectator for propriety and fairness was used to aggravate the

effect of the special exception. 2. If you ever do make a mistake —and infallibility is beyond human attainment—do not confess it, but stick to your error : confession may commit you, or be used against you in court—reserve is a masked battery which may deter a foe from assault; in legal phraseology, never make an admission. B. If you assail an abuse, do it only ouce : continuance of the abuse is a sound reason for suffering it to be unnoticed ; for if you are so much in earnest as to continue your strictures, in the hope of reform, you lay yourselves open to a cumulative charge of malignity. 4. Never suppose that a trial at law is sim- ply an appeal to the known law—it is also an appeal to construc- tive law promulgated on the spot ; also an appeal to all the chances of confusion, misapprehension, and inattention—the speeches of counsel perhaps sharing favours with the paper of the morning.

* Chiefly, we may here explain, the latest news of the Money-market; which is never inserted in the morning edition.