ART.

THE VICTORIAN EXHIBITION.

WE are threatened with a return of the Influenza, and there is a simultaneous relapse into the Jubilee. The sequehe of the latter take this time chiefly the form of the art of her Gracious Majesty's reign during its first fifty years,—the por- trait and ceremonial art. The ravages of an epidemic are notoriously destructive of the sense of modesty.

The late Mr. Matthew Arnold, among other curious and valuable critical machinery, had a familiar whom he called the Zeitgeist, and whom he had trained to a high pitch of serviceableness and docility. In the control of that master, he had a dulcet ironic note and a dexterous band ; but those who have seen him out of livery describe him as an elderly German with spectacles, a peremptory forefinger, and a guttural whisper. Bereft of his subtle prompter, be is become a somewhat rusty automaton ; he harps upon well-worn cate- gories, maunders in a native jargon, and prophesies wrong even after the event. Nevertheless, it might be entertaining to beguile him to the New Gallery, and entreat him obsequiously on what it is that Victorian Art may be supposed to make for. The Earnest Inquirer would address him :—" Here, Sir, the fountain plays softly, the palm-tree springs, the cool marble displays his expensive spots, and the settee invites to cot- templation. Will you now formulate your impressions in a transcendental deduction, or will you first look at the pictures ?"

The Zeitgeist (closing his eyes) :—" I will pause on the threshold, going no further than the umbrella-stand. It is disturbing to systematic thought to put the Phenomenal first in the order of Time."

Earnest inquirer: "In what way, then, will you proceed; by the Comparative Method, or how ?"

The Zeitgeist : "Let us first establish an environment. You will remember how, in a former course, I gave you an account of the tendencies of the time that produced your great Elizabethan dramatist, Shakespeare. There was the Inven- tion of Printing, the Taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the Defeat of the Armada, the Discovery of America by Columbus, and some other circumstance which I am unable for the moment to recall. If we apply the same principle to the Victorian period, it would be easy and interesting to show how Thackeray, Mary Howitt, and the other great writers of the time were the inevitable outcome of modern forces. The Repeal of the Corn Laws, the Introduc- tion of the Ballot, the Invention of the Penny Post, the Return to Nature, the Rise of Sanitary Engineering and Painless Dentistry (I single out but a few of the heads enumerated in the preface to this useful Catalogue),—it is to changes and achievements like these that we must look for the causes of progress in the Arts. And if you ask me what are the new notes that I shall expect to find in the productions more particularly of the graphic arts, I reply at once. They will be stamped with the characters of Democracy and Science." But here he might conveniently be interrupted, and reminded that his ideas were too world-embracing for the occasion; that he was about to view rather the triumphs of a belated Middle Class in its flowering period, and the private collection of its Reigning House, in fact, a selection from the Royal Album. "Then," he would resume, "the formula

is simple ; we shall find a middle-class art snch as might have been prescribed under the terms of the Revolution Settle- ment. That heroic instrument for the neutralising of Monarchy, the avoidance of ideas, and the contrivance of Church and State on a basis of compromise, probably left a loophole in the matter of art (I am not certain, for that is not my period); but the natural good sense of your Royal house has acted, in this too, in accordance with what is expected of a limited Monarchy. Hence a Whig art, in which nothing is daring or

extreme, in which every form is a compromise, and every colour a concession, and the subject always loyaL Just as at such

superb functions as are permissible, with safety to your Con- stitution—I mean Charity Dinners—your Princes must warily pick their words lest they should slip into the expression of an

opinion, so will all their tact be necessary lest among the- practitioners of painting whom they patronise, some artist should intrude, with all the attendant dangers of his kind

You will say that for a Prince of artistic feeling the positions will be a painful one ; but consider, Sir, the multitude of happy homes that would suffer from a single indiscretion : for- remember that for every picture commissioned by royalty, there will be thousands of engravings eagerly bought by eommonalty- Do you think, then, that it will be possible for a ruler to abuse so touching a confidence ? No, he will abide by the Golden, Mean, which in this connection is the same thing as a middling picture at a high price."

So far the anticipation ; but accidents will happen, and even into the Victorian Exhibition a few pictures have strayed. The most notable, it is true, has been promptly concealed at a great height by the directors, and the decent uniformity is little injured. One might almost imagine that the period' had been untainted by art. Yet the wind bloweth where it listeth, and in spite of the Middle Class, with all its tendencies. and "all its engines," the artist obstinately reappears, and as often as not completely out of date. He will be born in the nineteenth century with the decorative ideas of a Caveman or- a Greek, or a Mediaeval or a dead Dutchman, and take his

fling accordingly. There is the Carlyle, and the vision is. Spanish of three centuries back ; another would fain be Vene- tian of earlier date ; while those other painters "in touch with" current important events, have no other touch worth considering.

One other surprising piece of art, a sketch of Pellegrini, the Vanity Fair draughtsman, by Degas, suggests how much.

more vivid an exhibition of portraits might have been formed from that admirable gallery. Or, if we begin to dally with what might have been, how still more vivid to have arranged tableaux to illustrate the life of the period. It would have been like those instructive groups of black and yellow peoples, that used in old times to figure at the Crystal Palace, each in its little patch of proper jungle. How would exact Anthro- pology have been the gainer ! Imagine, on the social side, a series of Parties in a Parlour (for Parlour read Boudoir,

Arbour, Smoking-Room, as the date may be) with careful wise-en-seine, and performances in character. Take three at random.

(1.) Decoration : sprigged wall-paper, twigged carpet, curly steel stove and fender, centre-table with gift-books, whatnots, antimacassars, young man with redundant side-hair and whiskers, answering to the name of 'Gus. Persons: fresh young ladies in sloping shoulders and crinolines, hair Plain or Ringlets. Their fair lips are parted on the syllable "La!"

(2.) Clear faces in a frame of dusky hair on a background of, little leaves ; voluminous skirts freaked with flowers. Furni- ture: an embroidery-frame, a parting-cup, a prie-dieu. A damoiseau, with a haggard smile and Gothic hands, touches the citole at prime and nones.

(3.) A great deal of atmosphere, compounded in equal parts of cigarette-smoke, the dust of words in distress, and difficult esoteric emotion. Several young women with impressionistic

features, fin-de-siecle attitudes, and garments in the fashion of last week. Accessories : old, unhappy, far-off things of

every description, tame johnnies and a kangaroo, and a shaven, pontifical-looking person, who may be anything from a Mahatma to a Music-hall Artist. Analysis of the Soul at 3 and 8 precisely.

But the Exhibition as it is incites to a suggestion and a question before we leave it. The suggestion is, that the official picture of ceremony, as we see it here, is the result of needless pains and labour. Since its only laws are that there

must be a back view of nobody concerned, nor perspective to dim the recognition of any distant Royal cousin or Chamber- lain dtfunct, a much more simple and efficient way of pro- ducing it would be to cut out the heads of the performers from ordinary cartes-de-v;site and attach them with paste to tailors' diagrams of the suitable dresses. Thus might a Wilkie occasionally be spared for better work.

The question is, whether after all there is any insuperable law against our Royal Houte leing well painted. It might be urged that so venerable a Throne, the symbol of so vast a sway and empire, did a poor turn to the commonwealth by neglecting the imaginative appeals of Art. The distinction of a Court, the dignity of a Monarch, have in other times em- ployed and inspired great painters, and the place is vacant for an interpreter of the pomps and solemn extravagances of kingship. The ceremonial sense, perhaps, is no longer a common one ; the confused noise of the Warrior from Germany and the mechanic bonhomie of the President in France, might be difficult to transfigure. not to consider too curiously our own estate. But former English Kings have not disdained the aid of an art that can ennoble and render memorable even what is not in itself majestic; and our Tudor and Stuart lines are inextricably woven up with the painter dynasties of Holbein and of Vandyck. It is a loss that their successors should go down as conceived by a Von Angeli, a

Karl Sohn, a Boehm, a Tussaud. D. S. M.