A MERE VISITOR ON THE ACADEMY.
A VISITOR to the Royal Academy this year, if interested in Art but ignorant of its technicalities, will, I think, agree very heartily with the artist who drew down Sir Francis Grant's rebuke at the annual dinner by pronouncing it " a poor year." Doubtless there are many good pictures, many triumphs of manipulation, many containing good " bits," which artists study with interest or admiration. But to the spectator who does not quite realize what a critic in the Pall Mall Gazette, writing of the " Actma," calls the " sublime arrangement of the lines of the head and body in relation to the sea," there seems a deficiency of thought in the collection. There are plenty of interiors nicely painted, and little incidents quite intelligible to the meanest capacity, and children's faces which the mothers worship ; but of genuine ideas, ideas which stir the mind and can be remembered for years, there are very few. To myself, moving ignorantly, though studiously, about, it seems as if there were but five or six pictures which next year one without seeing them again would be able to recall. Nobody, for example, who has looked steadily at Herod in Mr. Armitage's " Birthday Feast" is at all likely to forget him, or to quit the picture without feeling that his mind is, be it only by some hair- breadth or span, wider than it was. I do not like the whole picture, beautifully as it seems to be drawn. Why should Jews be as dark as Hindoos, or Herodias look so sulky when she wants
to conciliate Herod, or Salome be so very unenticing? But Herod is wonderful ; a great Jew noble, with the " haggard eyes " Matthew Arnold ascribes to the sated Roman, and an expression which, though not cruel at the moment, has in it that capacity for cruelty which could order the massacre in Bethlehem or give an apostle's head to a dancing girl ; has in it, too, though flushed with wine, and pride, and lust, something of genius, of the power of brain which must have belonged to the son of the Jewish Theodore who built Masada, and whom Rome always suspected. It teaches one, that face, to recollect that there was once a civilization in which individual wills were unbridled, in which volition was a force, and in which, there- fore, faces were not always of the type one usually sees in collars. Then there is Mr. Mason's " Evening Hymn." I do not recollect Mr. Mason's name, yet what a wealth of power, of hard thought, and hard industry there is in this work of his ! Uglier girls in uglier costumes advancing under less pleasing light I hope I may never see, the light in particular, for it suggests that one's own sight is growing dim. But in each of those ungainly girls there is a separate devoutness, a special absorption, a peculiar entrain which grows and grows as you look till you can hear the " Keep me, oh, keep me, King of kings !" and know as if you knew them that those girls are Wesleyans, ignorant people whose one idea above their sordid surroundings is their faith, whose one sweet practice is their worship. Then turn to an utterly different subject,. Mr. Leighton's " Acme and Septimius," the girl turning in intensest fondness to kiss her lover on the eyes. Was the better spirit of Catullus,—he had two, let Lord Byron say what he likes,—ever so rendered before ? People say the picture is sensual, at least one critic does. Sensuous it is, and intended to be, but I cannot see the sensuality. If earthly passion, the love at once of the heart and of the senses, is ever to be treated by modern painters at all, surely it would be hard to treat it with greater purity, with a more perfect combination of earthiness and poetry. Better leave the earthiness out ? So be it, but I am talking of the picture as the artist meant it, not as somebody else thinks it ought to have been meant. And then there is at least one noble portrait, if not more than one, a portrait which is more than a painted photograph, a portrait which is alive, and unless I am utterly mistaken--an easy possibility—will be alive many a century hence, the portrait of Lady A. G. Lennox, by Mr. H. Graves, the son, as the catalogue compilers take care to inform us, of a peer, but apparently artist by profession as well as taste. It is difficult to ex- plain why the portrait seems so fine without an impertinently minute criticism not on the painting, but on the face of the original ; but this much it is allowable to say : the face itself cannot be more alive, more full of definite expression, of traceable qualities, of visible faculties than is this representation of it. The crowd as it stands about seldom misses this portrait, being British, and inclined to titles ; but instead of criticizing Mr. Graves, it criticizes his sitter, just as it would do if the painter were unknown, and the picture a hundred years old.
One more recollection I carried away from the Exhibi- tion, or shall I say two from the sculpture vault? One is that Mr. Theed's " Group of Her Majesty and the Prince Consort in early Saxon costume " is the stagiest specimen of portrait sculpture I ever remember to have seen, and the other is that Mr. Bell has, in " The Octoroon," succeeded in carv- ing something which is not merely "a stone woman without clothes," as the American with unconscious justice once described a statue before him, but an octoroon, in whose veins, as you can see, there is a tinge of the blood of the South, whose limbs are rounder, whose flesh is pulpier, whose thoughts are fewer, and whose passions are fiercer than those of any child of the North. Only did not Mr. Bell in his long study discover that no octoroon ever had hair like that, hair which belongs to blue eyes, and was never yet seen in East or West on the head of any one with a trace of the darker races in her blood?
A MERE VISITOR.
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