"THE PAGEANT," AND TWO OTHER MIS CE LLANIES.*

The Pageant is a rightly conceived mixture of literature and graphic art. Instead of illustrations furnished by some

indifferent hack to story or essay, and wordy description written round pictures, we have here drawings, verses, prose,

appealing each on their own merits. The exceptions are of the kind that justify themselves. Verlaine's reverie upon Rossetti's Monna Rosa is called forth by a real personal

sympathy, and the same attraction to a kindred spirit in another art is evinced by Mr. Ricketts's illustrative work, as it was by Rossetti in his drawings for Tennyson.

We may take the graphic art first, for the newer contribu- tors on this side are stronger than the writers. It is needless

to speak of the admirable work by acknowledged masters, Rossetti, Watts, Whistler, Millais, Burne-Jones. The newer men do no discredit to this company. The leading spirits are Messrs. Ricketts and Shannon. The Oedipus of the first displays the remarkable blending in its author of classical

taste and knowledge with a delight in romantic intricacy and

suggestion. In the Psyche the balance has turned perhaps a little too far in the direction of pattern lines, instead of

expressive lines ; but it is the work of the only possible pre- tender in the younger generation to the heritage of the Rossetti of 1857. Of Mr. Shannon's two drawings, one suffers in reproduction ; but both prove, like all his work, a spirit of real imaginative delicacy. The same is true of Mr. Charles Conder's "Blue Bird" of good luck, flitting above a company of gallants and ladies in a garden. Mr. Reginald Savage and Mr. Laurence Housman, if we cannot at present put them on so high a level, have a distinct talent; the former expresses himself something in the fashion of Madox Brown, the latter has a turn for grotesque design and amazing minuteness of execution. Mr. Rothenstein's lithograph of Mr. Swinburne is strongly characterised in the head.

The literature includes a lovely variant by Maeterlinck on one of Ophelia's songs, beginning :–

"‘• Et all revenait un jour Quo faut-ii lni dire ?'

Dites-lui qu'on l'attendit Jusqu'il e'en mourir."

The dramatic piece, Tintagiles, reveals too much of the author's machinery of images for thrills. It is not to be reckoned with L'Intrus. A like overemphasis of the

machinery of phrase hurts Mr. Swinburne's sunset picture of Theleme." A tender lyric by Mr. Henley, and two poems by Mr. Robert Bridges, are the only other remarkable verses.

Of less-known writers, the most interesting is Mr. John Gray. A criticism by Mr. York Powell, in which something, for a wonder, is said on the author of Sidania, and a glimpse into the imaginative history of the Moors, by Mr. Cunning- hame Graham, appeal to us most among the remaining pieces.

• (1.) The Pageant. Edited by C. Hazelwood Shannon and J. W. Gleeson White. London : Henry and CO. 1896.—(8.) A London Garland. Selected from rive Centuries of English Verse, by W. E. Henley. With Pictures by Members of the Society of Illustrators. London : Macmillan and Co. 1895.—(1) The Eesrpresn : a Northern Seasonal. The Book of Spring—The Book of Autumn. Edinburgh : Patrick Geddes and Co. 1895.

It is a pleasure to find a book pat together with so much taste in the choice of its contents, the arrangement of its type, and the design of its cover. A miscellany like this at six shillings is cheap indeed.

A London Garland is a collection of illustrations by members of the Illustrators' Society, upon occasion furnished by Mr. Henley's selection of poems dealing with London. The Society of Illustrators is a body formed with the excellent idea of guarding the commercial interests of the members against the rapacity of publishers and editors of the bailer sort, or their own ignorance and carelessness. In fact, it is intended to do for the illustrator what the Authors' Society has taken in hand for the writer. Such a body is not of course formed on an artistic but on a professional basis, and must include men of all degrees of merit. It is therefore ill. framed to carry out consistently an artistic project, and a miscellany of contributions from its members must exhibit too great an inequality, as well as too great a variety of styles, to make it possible to admire the book as a whole. The work, in fact, ranges down to some striking examples of inaptness and wash-drawing of the common type. But on the other hand, besides pictures or drawings of repute not executed expressly for the book, there are several good numbers among the illustrations; we may name, in parti- cular, the drawings of Messrs. Abbey, W. W. Russell, Edgar Wilson, A. S. Hartrick, H. Tonks, Raven Hill, W. Hatherell, Paul Renouard, Aubrey Beardsley, and the Fog of Mr. Pennell. The book, indeed, is a fair epitome of the run of illustration of the day,—good, middling, and bad.

Mr. Henley has made the best of a difficult business in selecting the poems, for to take " London " as the peg for an anthology is to proceed on a very accidental principle. Mr. Henley's own poems are among the few centrally inspired by the idea of London. Wordsworth'e sonnet is another case; Mr. Whistler's Nocturne a third. It is with an uncomfortable jerk that we attempt to bring London to the front in reading many of these poems. The prose of Charles Lamb, De Quincey, and others strikes the more conscious attitude required. Bat we need not take Mr. Henley's part in the project more gravely than he does himself. The main idea, after all, was to furnish pretexts for illustrations, and for some superstitious reason the makers of books are still loath to say to their draughtsman, Go and make London drawings without troubling to find a warrant in a poem.' A word must be said for the well-designed end-papers by Mr. Gleeson White.

For the good intentions and some of the ideas of the pro- ducers of The Evergreen we have sympathy ; but they appear to us to confuse the ardent desire for the presence of art with the power to produce it. The essence of their movement for a "Scots Renascence" would appear to be a kind of social settle- ment including University teachers and students, and they are anxious to add culture and an artistic creation to their study of science and aspiration after social good-fellowship. But these things do not come only by wishing and taking thought and trying. Talent too is necessary, and is not to be had to order. These two numbers of the "Seasonal" are marked by an anxious self-consciousness, an effort to have style that defeats itself. The type has so much of this style that it is ugly and unreadable. Style stands like a grille before the articles, and hits one in the eye from the drawings. We find, however, some feeling and talent in the writing of Miss Fiona MacLeod, and in Mr. Charles Mackie's Hide and Seek.