NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART.* To review and expound the artistic tendencies of

the last century, such is the aim of Mr. liacColl's book. Considering that the survey includes not only the art of England, but that of France, and even that of Spain in so far as it concerns Goya, the undertaking is a large one. To make his analysis intelligible, the author has marked out certain divisions and built up pigeon-holes, which he has filled with a selection of painters. Such a procedure cannot, of course, be complete and convincing. There will always be figures who stand outside

groups, and others who seem to belong to more than one. Nevertheless the system is a great help ; indeed, without

some such plan a book of this kind would become little more than a scattered collection of biographies and criticisms. The author's attempt, as he tells us in the preface, has been

to "throw the chief figures of the period into perspective ; to define their imaginative attitude; to indicate how some of them went with the drift of art especial to the century, and others against it." It is this defining of the imaginative att.% tud.e of the painters that makes the book really interesting

and valuable. Mr. MacColl has a faculty of coming to close quarters with his subject, and of laying bare the inner work- ings of the mind. This is not the ordinary writing about art, which consists in little more than chronicling events, but a sympathetic understanding of the complex natures of the artists, French and English. The two main groups into which the painters of the early part of the last century are arranged are called the Olympians and Titans. The Olympian attitude is described as follows :—

" To exhibit this wholesome matter with clarity, serenity, and temperance, it excludes such colour, shadow, and vapour as would render form less complete or distract the eye from its perfection. Violent action and passion are also excluded, because this art aims at affecting the mind, not by any extremity of emotion, but by the more bracing rhythms of beauty and the proud balance of

strength controlled. But there is a constant setting towards a canon of proportions, and when the poetic life of the art ebbs, and fine and intense variation between its narrow limits dies out, dead formula at once emerges, decent in- things of use, if use has not burst the pattern, but intolerable in imagery."

Into this category David and Ingres fall naturally at the beginning of the epoch, and later the tradition was revived by Leighton and Albert Moore. In Ingres the Olympian attitude was carried so far that in order that his serenity might not be ruffled when walking in the streets of Rome, Madame Ingres as they passed a cripple covered her husband's eyes with her shawl and led him past. His disciples also frequently record that "M. Ingres detourna Is tete."

• Nineteenth Century Art. By D. S. MaeCofl. Glasgow : James NaeLehose and Sons. [P5 5s.1

If the world would not look like Raphael, as he desired it should, why then he must avert his glance. The Olympian tries to make a "brave new world," physical rather than spiritual, of which beauty and serenity are chief characteristics. Very different is the work of the Titan, who fights and struggles to express the war that is raging in his imagination. The archetype of this form of artist is Michelangelo, and we can trace his influence upon such restless spirits as Goya, Blake, Gericault, Delacreix, and Daumier. These are the typical instances which Mr. MacColl selects to illustrate his system of grouping. Here we must point out that this system is not forced into a hard-and-fast rule, but merely given as a help to the classification and understanding of tae artists of the nineteenth century. In a later part of the bock a somewhat different grouping is adopted,

and the name heroic is chosen to describe such men as lx1Alet and Puvis de Chavannes, whose inspiration was so much derived from landscape. The art of landscape itself is treated apart in a chapter of great interest. It is quite easy to see how incomplete is this system ; but at the same time we recognise that without some grouping under headings many of the author's most interesting speculations would have been impossible.

We gather that Mr. MacColl in his own mind really divides painters into two classes. On one side he would place those whose inspiration is actual vision, and whose poetry is the

endless beauty and mystery of coloured light and shadow playing on natural objects, whether human beings or land-

scapes. On the other side would be ranked the artists who conceive shapes of beauty in their own mind, and then search for a visible body to make these imaginings live. Thus we expect to find our author more in sympathy with Velasquez than with Michelangelo in the past, with Whistler rather than with Watts in the present. From this statement it must not be inferred that Mr. MaoColl's critical faculty suffers from his own point of view being insisted on ; his judgment is not warped, but merely coloured. Those who wish to understand both views of art, the objective and subjective, will find how useful it is to have " the light that never was on sea or land" compared with the light of—not common, but glorious—day.

For we cannot be too careful in separating the true inner light of the spirit from the will-o'-the-wisp born of the gases of the marsh. As an example of Mr. MacColl's incisive power of

criticism, we quote his refutation of two statements by Mr. Whistler, who says :— " Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without con- founding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works "arrangements" and "harmonies."' This may mean one of two things ; either that a painter should never choose a subject with which emotion is inseparably connected, but only pattern arrangements of form and harmonies of colour or that if he chooses such a subject he must make it no part of his business to express and drive home his emotion; that is to say, in a comic subject there should be no connection between the drawing and the joke, in a tragic no connection between the drawing and the tragedy. If the first of these things is meant we shall evidently have to rule out artists like Rembrandt, if the second we must pronounce him a dealer in clap-trap, because, having taken in hand a scene in which devotion, pity, and other emotions are implicated, he has been so artless as to use all his resources of drawing and tone to reinforce them. In the print of the Crucifixion the black and white would give some pleasure to the sense as a pattern in black and white only : but this pattern becomes ingeniously beautiful only when the black and white are seen to be significant, to be the lights and shadows of things and persons; and it becomes sublimely beautiful, sublime to the spirit as well as beautiful to the sense, when the shadows are seen to be the shadows of tragedy. It is just as true that the idea without the beauty of pattern is not a work of art. But Rembrandt's intention and power is to exalt emotion and sense together, recom- mending the one by the other, the emotion by visible terms. We are therefore not going outside of his intention or of his art when we describe it in terms of emotion : we describe it better so than if we limit ourselves to its pattern. To call such a subject literary' because it can also be expressed in words is, seeing that it has been expressed in visible terms, an elementary confusion. Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy, as an " arrangement in grey and black." Now that is what it is. To me it is if teresting as a picture of my mother ; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait ? ' The public need not be enlightened on that point ; but it will see, because it is presented to its eyes, a great deal more than grey and black, which might have been obtained, uncontaminated by any but the faintest human feeling, from the coal scuttle. It sees reverend age, told in lines of character and enforced by gravity

of disposition, scruple and tenderness of tone. The miraculous blacks and greys become the servants of the person in the image."

The origin of this book, we are told, was the Exhibition at Glasgow of 1901, where the pictures were of singular interest and completeness. From this collection all the illustrations in the volume before us were drawn. This is a matter for regret, for although there are surprisingly few gaps, some of the works are hardly characteristic. The black-and-white reproduction of a painting of fruit is all we have of the art of Courbet, and this painter's works are not easy to see. In this instance, and in others, we regret that a wider field was not used for the illustrations. Another relic of the Glasgow Exhibition is a chapter on mediaeval art objects by Sir T. D. Gibson-Carmichael, which is singularly and ridiculously out of place in this carefully reasoned and balanced review of nineteenth-century art.

It has only been possible to hint at the great wealth of criticisms and speculations to be found in this book. Everywhere we come upon some striking and interesting point of view, and if individual taste may differ from that of the author, it will be freely admitted that Mr. MacColl always founds his view not only on wide general knowledge, but on real insight into the workings of the minds and imaginations of the artist he is considering. Lastly, Mr. MacColl has a real acquaintance with the process by which the painter works, an acquaintance which by itself will not make a critic, but with- out which equipment a critic will be kept at a distance from the work of the artist. It is, indeed, impossible to read this book without discovering that fresh light has been shed on the wonderfully many-sided art of the nineteenth century, from the Olympians to the Impressionists.