ART.

DEGAS AND MONTICELLI.

I see the dusk, with dudal art, Prick seven stars in air ; You choose to see the hinder part Of what you call a Bear.

Mr. Arthur L. Collie and La Societel des Beaux-Arts (A. Reid, Directeur), have pleasure in announcing that they are now showing, at Mr. Collie's Rooms, 39b Old Bond Street, a small collection of Pictures by the great French Impressionists. The collection in- cludes seven works by Degas, and several by Monticelli.

To this enter an Arrogant Painter and his Reluctant Friend.

A. P.—Come along and look at Degas, and you shall make yourself disagreeable, as we agreed you should.

B. F.—No, no. I am going to be humble, and you shall explain it all to me. First, here's an old lady with a very dark complexion—no, she's got her back to the light—why, I can't think : it makes her features so indistinct. Then there's a large wall, with a little dribble of ballet-dancers at the far end ; the double-bass is the only human object in it. Then here is a young person trying on a hat. Now, I'm not going to criticise the tones and drawing and colour, and that sort of thing. I know you would say, Look at the quivering, infallible line of that glove, or the rhadamanthine justice of

the tones on that nose, or the caressing flutter of the colour (if the word is still permissible) in the feathers of the hat.

No doubt that is all as it should be, and exactly like nature ; and no doubt that is what gives it its extraordinary ap- pearance. Don't let us discuss it ; I make you a present of

the whole—

A. P.—And think the concession a trifling one. Well, having given away the picture, is there anything in the frame you would like to object to?

B. P.—Stop ; there is everything in the picture still to object to, and I am going to begin. I think you sometimes talk of decoration as well as nature. Well, why can't the man compose P A. P.—I don't know what else to call this but composition, where every bit of colour goes with every other bit, and does its duty to a general effect.

B. F.—I wasn't thinking of that; I allow you the colour and effect. But why does he cut a second woman in two with a cheval-glass ?

A. P.—Perhaps that was his notion of composing. He didn't want, this time, to set up a second drama in her face ; but he did need her, as a mass, to balance the other figure; and there's more story told, if that's what you want, by the half that is left, than most painters could express by the whole.

B. F.—I didn't mean that ; I meant that the cutting her that way was an awkward plan.

A. P.—Say that the pudding you are accustomed to is made

another way.

B. 1.—And that a new way is not necessarily a good one.

But I don't hope to convince you. Let's leave those details and come to the important point.

A. P.—Why, what's left now ?

B. F.—I must say it, however much pain it gives you,—the Subject and the Types. Both are unpleasant. If what you say about this man's eyesight, his sense for form and colour

and arrangement, is true—and partly I can see it is—then the quarrel begins in earnest : for I say that the greater his gift, the greater the demand upon it. If he can see so keenly and so conclusively, why not also be choicer in what he sees Why paint this happy-ninny face, ogling its dowdy person in a mirror ? Line for line, surely a smile is better than a smirk, and the marks channelled by noble character more interesting than the niceties of a grimace!

A. P.—This would be most convincing in vacuo. If we were engaged in making artists, and having got as far as Degas, you suggested, Shall we throw in a little archangel, and con- sult Mr. Ruskin about the sentiments to give the compound ?

I should think twice before refusing. Your bias, no doubt, is for one who can tell sad stories of the death of Kings, but must you, facts being as they are, exalt a mumbler and stammerer in that line of conversation, because to the man who has a gift of speech it comes more natural to talk about the weather ? Here is a man who talks supremely well about the weather, and horses' legs, and other creatures' legs, and so forth, and I think they are worth hearing about when he t dks of them. What right have you to prescribe a subject for him ?

B. F.—I don't ; but I say that the sun shines on the just as well as on the unjust, and that Pegasus had legs as much as the last winner of the Grand Prix. The ballet-dancer has no peculiar attraction for cross-lights and reflections, because she has an ugly head, and Antigone, when she went to her dark bridal bed, had as interesting shadows on her face as Polly when she put her bonnet on.

A. P.—Only the poor painter happened to be present when the bonnet was fitted on, and not when those grand things happened. Polly will pose, Antigone will not, and it is the awkwardness of things that you are butting against. Besides, does Antigone always die in a picture, and is the stage of great deeds always lit and carpentered becomingly ? Rather, the focus of history and that of pictures seldom coincide; not the critical event but the insignificant accident is the painter's opportunity ; his heroes are among the supers of the dramatist, his denouements during the waits and upon the empty stage.

B. F.—Then my painter shall not be the slave of weather or of fact. Your Degas, with his endowment of vision, seems to me like a man who has a passport given him to be a spectator of the Greater Mysteries (and they are enacted to the imagination within the head), but who lingers by the way to look " through keyholes" at lesser mysteries ; he will spend all his time in the corridors, and never arrive ; he is accredited to a Court, and loses his way into the servants' hall.

A. P.—Yes, if the light leads him there ; and with its presence and the painter's I shall think the company good enough. We seem to be infected, as Bacon would say, with the manner of the poets ; and if I am to keep up the image, I should say that I prefer the dialogue of the lackeys as reported by a Shakespeare, to that of the angels as distorted by a lackey ; and that is what you will get if you cling to your subject-criterion.

B. F.—Neither would Shakespeare stop with the lackeys, nor need the reporter of the angels be one. And, report for report, I prefer a half-realised illustration of my ideas to the most complete rendering of what would displease me if I saw it. It is to coerce my imagination to make it behold so par- ticularly what my eyes would avoid.

A. P.—It is to teach you how to see, and what you refuse to your vision is an expansion and a refuge. You are like a man with no appetite who should object to a dinner that it was a revolting exhibition of dead flesh, when one might have been admiring the moon. He who has the sense for food does not think of the joint as a carcass ; he who has the sense for painting need not think of other connections of the subject than the visible. Its grosser ties become irrelevant. And by this sense you may learn to see nothing common or unclean, but beauty everywhere.

B. F.—Yet the vegetarian, though hungry, might object to your banquet; then why not the moralist to your picture ? It is very fine to represent your painter as a discoverer of unsus- pected beauties, as who should say : I will show you wonderful sights if you will please to hold your nose the while. I cannot slip my associations to get pleasure on these terms. And what is more, I believe he does choose his subjects as subjects of association, and choose them perversely,—I call it a kind of bravado ; he chooses what the bourgeois will dislike, and therefore he is dictated to by the bourgeois. If not, he has no feeling for personal distinction, and no imagination ; to him Polly is as Antigone, and a thing is to him a thing, and not a thought and a memory and a desire.

A. P.—It is at least an image and a glory ; and Polly he sees, which I am sure you don't. But we are talking about different things. I have a sense that you do not possess ; and to make things equal, I don't mind saying that you have ideas that I don't share. Let us look at the Monticellis.

[They examine the " Souvenir d'teosse."

B. then, Monticelli Italian for a smudge-board?

A. P.—Yes, if you like, to begin with. Did you never admire the accidental mess of colours on a smudge-board, and wish you had thought of anything so good ? He did.

B. F.—Perhaps; but I don't call that a picture; I expect drawing, definition, design in a picture.

A. P.—How much drawing do you insist on P Do you require a certificate in bumps and shadows for the presence of all the bones and muscles your text-book tells you of, and an assurance in outline of all that air and light so mercifully steal, or will you deign to be satisfied with drawing that gives all the grace, the dazzle, the colour of a form, without the scaffolding of its anatomy? Are your fellow-creatures to you always illustrations to a work on physiology, and did they never yield up the oppression of their humanity to become prismatic changelings, colour-phantoms, pleasures?

B. F.—All very well; but who has been preaching realism and Degas A. P.—Not I ; his realism is a very fine pretext for a picture, but I hope a jewel is a reality too. Here is a painter so constituted as to see one in everything. It was about him the story of the jewel in the toad's head was told : he takes the jewel and leaves the toad. Nothing of the fountain there but the diamonds, nothing of the woman but the opal ; Nature reduced to terms of gems.

B. F.—What is he talking about now ? Do you know, I have been looking closer, and it is wonderful how much you can make out. It is not unlike a Watteau, with its mas- querading Arcadian figures.

A. P.—Having noticed the pic-nic, could you not go a step on the other line, and make your smudge-board a palette ? Suppose you put in Diaz between Monticelli and Watteau, and then carry back through Rabens to Venice,—Tintoretto himself, if you like ?

B. F.—Something might be made of that ; Tintoretto's hasty, coruscating angels that leave a phosphorescent track, and Giorgione's sumptuous people that glow to music, turning into Rubens's blowsy wives, and then again waking up as chill French Arcadians.

A. P.—Gently. They were only disguised as Apostlest=or Frans or Chloes ; they were really called Rose and Blue11:id Mother-of-Pearl ; and this is a happy family gathering,.. be- cause it is sometimes long between their meetings. I believe the Mother is baptising two little twin-pearls at that fountain.

B. F.—I deny that that was all; if Rose spoke to Blue, so did Pierrot to Columbine ; they brought north from Arcady that whisper-gesture of their head, and dance-trembling of their feet. Think ! it is a silver moment between two rains on a Scotch hillside ; the flimsy rout is flitting up through the broken gateway of a Highland keep, and before the glistering train is in, the cloud will shut down, those people of the prism and the pastoral will be gone, and Rose de Venise but half wed in gossamer to Robinet.

A. P.—I see. Give you a title, and you will admire even a