LORD ROSEBERY AT THE ACADEMY DINNER. T HE Academy dinner this
year was unusually dull. Sir J. Millais, great artist as he is, has not Sir Frederic Leighton's gift of fascinating, though over- ornate, eloquence, and in his final speech exhibited a certain want of the valuable quality of self-suppression. The Prince of Wales, though always judicious, is too hampered by his position in the State ever to become an orator, and the Duke of Cambridge would have done better to feel more hampered by his, and to have chosen another occasion for what was at once accepted as a speech in self-defence. To tell an assemblage such as gathered there, "reforms, when they are necessary, are desirable, when they are not necessary, are dangerous," was — well, let us say, though the sentence naturally produced some laughter, not very entertaining. There was no toast in honour of literature, which is, after all, the first glory of English art ; Mr. Pinero, who answered for the drama, would not have made either his fortune or his reputation if his plays had been as prolix as his speech ; while Sir A. Mac- kenzie, who replied for music, though he said many true things, must have been as tedious as the defender of c)nservatism, whether in art or politics, too often allows himself to be. The Academy had no doubt a great gun to fire off, which on many occasions has made up for every other deficiency. No one living can make such an after- dinner speech as Lord Rosebery,—nor are there many who can illumine such speeches with flashes of brighter thought. On this occasion, however, though the Premier has, we are most happy to hear, partly recovered his health, the trace of protracted insomnia lingered in his utter- ance,—his best joke, that "he doubted in his seclusion whether he had resigned or was dead," had too much unpleasing truth in it for after-dinner humour, and the substance of his speech was a little too pessimist, as well as at the close a little disappointing to those whom he intended to encourage. Lord Rosebery wishes the State to be the supreme patron of art, but admits that it can only be a generous one in times of prosperity, "when commerce begins to smile and agriculture has ceased to frown;" and when, consequently, the intervention of the supreme patron is least required by the artistic world. Is it, however, quite true that painting languishes in England because the Government only buys pictures of the dead ; that sculpture needs Government orders, that our architecture creates, "in any citizen of the United Kingdom," a feeling of despair ? We are not an artistic nation, or at least we say so ; and in one depart- ment, sculpture, no doubt a conspicuous failure must be admitted. The average Briton dislikes nudity, he has less appreciation than the Southerner of pure form, and except as portraiture—" keeping a record," he terms it— does not at heart either admire or care for the sculptor's art. But is it not true that the Continent is just waking up to the percEpt:on that English painting deserves a place, and a high one, amongst the schools of the world ? Lord Rosebery depreciates our architecture ; but is there a country so filled with "stately homes," as Mrs. Hemans said ; or is there a Berliner, a Viennese, or a Parisian artist who, standing on London Bridge, could con- scientiously declare that his own capital was fuller of beautiful erections ? If London had but a Southern climate or even the cloudless sky which sometimes sheds a pale brightness on cities like Stockholm, Copenhagen, or Edinburgh, London would be acknowledged to be the most picturesque and among the most beautiful capitals in the world. It lies usually, though not this week, under a cloudy sky in dank grey air ; but those are drawbacks which, even if the Chancellor of the Exchequer drew heavily upon his bottomless purse, he could never by any lavishness of patronage hope to remove or modify. For our own part, we doubt whether State patronage could do so much for art in England, as Lord Rasebery, when, as he says, he wanders into Utopia, seems to fancy. It might by possibility create a dead-alive school of sculpture, inspired, not by genuine feeling for form, but by a wish for commissions and official honour ; but could it do anything more ? We will repudiate the idea that the State would always jab, and assent with a shrug to the assertion that a body like the House of Commons can choose the right picture, but would still ask whether anybody knows of the grand English picture which nobody will buy, or what there is in. Government patronage to make an architect great. The Government is rich, no doubt, and wealth is essential in our modern day to the production of great buildings ; but will wealth of itself produce the men who are to build them? Surely Lord Rosebery, in another mood, would pronounce that a very vulgar conception. For ourselves, we shall venture for once to annoy all artists of all the three divisions, and doubt whether the hunger to make fortunes has not im- peded and debased art, whether great artists, like great writers, have not done their best work in comparative poverty, whether, in fact, the impulse of true art is not the pleasure of creation rather than the enjoyment of com- fort. That the State can gather together from the whole world beautiful examples, and so breed in the people a perception of art which may become at last instinctive; that it can support great schools in which the nacanique of art may be thoroughly learned ; that it can recognise great artists by honours, and so stimulate the desire of fame which is one of the artists' motives as it is one of the poets', all these things may be true ; but it is none of these that Lord Rosebery proposes. lie wants the State to be Medicean, to become the supreme patron, and we cannot believe that in this he is well advised. We should rather expect, if his wish were realised, to see a generation of artists struggling not to realise their own conceptions, but those of ruling politicians, bowing, as French sculptors did to Napoleon when he suggested, as the highest embodiment of statuesque grandeur, an elephant in marble or bronze, pouring water from its extended trunk, the strangest proof we know of the vein of vulgar grandiosity which shot and impaired the brilliant intellect of the Italian conqueror. The difficulty of securing adequate insight in the supreme patron, great in all States, is greatest here, for here the function would never be left to an individual, or if the House of Com- mons passed a self-denying ordinance, the function would be exercised under a bewildering and dismaying shower of criticism. The private patron has at least this advantage,—that he need consult no one except the artist and himself, and that consequently there is at least a chance that the work may be the product of one brain, and not stripped of all spontaneity and originality. Think for a moment of what a national exhibition would be like with every painting and statue in it bearing evidence that the artist was thinking first of all of the impression his work would make on a national committee whose tastes were at once fixed and known. Within a few years all spontaneity would be gone, and there would remain nothing but "a school" which might be great, but might also be feeble, whose work in any given year could almost be described before it had been seen. These projects of State-patronage should be left to the day, now, in the opinion of many dreamers, so fast approaching, when all private property having ceased, and all men having become stipendiaries of the com- munity, the State, if art is to exist at all, must become sole patron, and as all men must have equal incomes, a patron granting nothing beyond the wages on which it is possible to subsist. There is one exception to the view which we have endeavoured to defend. We heartily agree with Lord Rosebery that the State should order and pay for por- traits of its great living personages, statesmen, soldiers, Admirals, poets, authors, and men of science, and only hope that he will see his way to creating a fund for that purpose. But then we support this project in the interest not of art, but of history. It is most important that future generations should know exactly how the great men of the past appeared ; so important, that we would not only have portraits painted of them, but medallions struck, as we proposed in these columns twenty years ago, which will survive the portraits by at least two thousand years. One reason, at least, why we realise the Roman Emperors so much better than our own early Sovereigns, is that we know what they were like, can separate one from another, and yet can realise that there was a type — the "Roman Emperor" type — towards which they all, or nearly all, in some degree converged. But then we seek not brilliant pictures, but admirable likenesses. If we can have both, so much the better ; but the intention is not to teach men portraiture, or even to honour the living great, but to preserve a record without which history must always want something of true life. It is, for example, a real impediment to under- standing the true character of Mary of Scots, that we do not know certainly what her face was like, the many portraits of her in existence differing from each other as if they were portraits of different women, and all of them lacking that subtle charm which up to her latest day drove grave men half-wild with love and sympathy. No one, again, will quite understand Lord Rosebery if the record of his face is lost, and there are men who have deeply affected the Victorian era, of whom already the physical look has almost disappeared from men's memories. We would gladly see a liberal annual vote even in times of "depression" for such a purpose as this, but then we shall judge its expenditure, not by its encouragement to portrait-painters or its effect on art, but by the merit of the selection and of the likenesses which are to preserve for posterity a true record of our time. We could hardly exaggerate the value in A.D. 2500, or even in A.D. 2000, of accurate portraits of all the Premiers, leaders of Opposition, great poets, and great Churchmen of the Victorian era, and the State, we entirely agree with Lord Rosebery, could, if it pleased, preserve them.
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