MR. POYNTER'S LECTURES ON ART.* mum NoricE.]

Tuts is a fine book, probably one of the books on Art for a good many years, full of clearly and deftly-wrought-out explanations upon subjects of much intricacy. But the lectures are marred, nevertheless, we consider, by an absence of sympathy for certain aims and objects which seem to us to rank very high indeed in the onward march of Art, and which we shall endeavour to exemplify, however partially, in this notice. If, in the endeavour to do this, we appear to overlook the consideration of matters which may be thought of equal moment, the reasons will be found, first, in our disinclination, nay, our inability, to add any additional word to what Mr. Poynter has said ; and secondly, in the liniits of space.

The question with regard to which we profoundly differ from Mr. Poynter is embraced in the estimation of the relative dignity of that species of Art which pours the intellectual stream upon the varied marvels of natune, and treats them with as exclusive a scholarship and depth of feeling as the shapes of the human form. Mr. Poynter maintains throughout his lectures that the great masters of the past deliberately and purposely rejected such subjects as landscape, the quiet poetry of pastoral scenes, * Tens Lectures on Art. By E. 3. Poynter, B.A. London: Chapman and Ball.

flower, fruit, bits of evening sky, as the objects of exclusive de- piction, although they employed them with their fullest value, as he maintains, in the general environment of their paintings of human or divine life. Now, we firmly believe that future ages will look back upon our recording painters, the painters who have searched hill and dale for their glowing, misty charms ; and the sprays, for their floral adornings and fruit, who have transmitted an echo of the gem contrasts which they sought out among the dews, such as the position of wild fruit, or the "plate of peaches," unaccountably distasteful to Mr. Poynter, with every dusty hollow and fruit-stalk quietly and delicately repeated,—as fulfilling a work such as would not have been dis- pleasing to the eye of Michael Angelo himself, had Art not been then in the throes of those greater labours that have always re- mained standards of its greatest possible heights of achieve- ment. Nevertheless, Da Vinci, in many flower-studies, doubt- less at first intended as studies for pictures, but which, as he worked upon them, became elaborated to the finest pitch, had already manifested the delight that the mind takes in a right depiction of the most beautiful natural imagery. It is cer- tainly a striking sign of the separateness of individual, intui- tive faculties, to find that the first glimpse of a new infinity of beauty, such as the vast later work of Turner has given to some minds—minds willing to admit every possible affirmative thesis concerning the creative figure-painters—is counted of so moderate a worth by Mr. Poynter. And so far as the present book is concerned, we are bound to admit that the claims of the iris, and the misty vision of the dazzling morning hills, and the azure vault of heaven, in whose depths the atom-points of humanity may surely see a beauty worthy of recording, a beauty as high as that of the creative intuition, rather need asser- tion on account of a measure of neglect, than from any positive de- preciation of their importance. For instance, in the paper on "Old and New Art," we find this sentence:_" Modern Art, on the other hand,—I mean that part of it which is modern in spirit,— aims at nothing more than recalling the impressions which

all of us, who have a few shreds of poetic sensibility, receive from the more obvious beauties of nature, and in this way makes an appeal to a wide circle of sympathies, though, as 1 have

already noticed, those sympathies may be of the shallowest kind. In rendering what is purely beatiful, it finds its ex- pression in that school of landecape-painting which has reached, perhaps, its highest point in some of Turner's best works ; its lowest, in the mass of still-life flower and fruit-paint- ing, of which I supposed William Hunt is the most refined and skilful exponent." Again, in the same lecture, "It is not diffi- cult, then, to see the reason why landscape painting is neces- sarily put in the second rank of art ; for even if the impressions recorded be of the highest beauty, still it is but a record, an imitation, though still an imitation which may come under the head of Fuseli's second definition as being " directed by judg- ment and taste;" and it is one most difficult of accomplishment, requiring artistic skill of the highest order, on account of the subtle and fleeting effects which it is the delight and glory of the

landscape painter to recall." Now, plastic art must be an imita- tion and adaptation either of the visions of the soul, or of out-

ward nature. If the "impressions recorded be of the highest beauty," the issue is at rest, for music alone transmits the workings of the soul in their original tones. The root of the difficulty seems to be that Mr. Poynter considers that the best modern landscape art rests upon imitation of external things, whereas the best ancient art, even in its landscape, was created so as to tinge the picture with conceptions drawn from a higher world. That is expressed in the words,—" We may call them, if we please, developments of that high school, but the development is from a creative to an imitative art." But those who have had the honour of an intimate acquaintance with the intellectual method of a first-rate modern landscape painter, would have felt, we should have thought, quickly and deeply, when turning over those severely refined and beautiful studies, what an infinite treasure-house of creative tones and hues is opened through him, as he reflects upon the fleeting splendours that have drawn him far among the lonely hills with

their magnetic spell. Shakespeare, an exponent of the allied relations of humanity and nature, says of dawn (Romeo and Juliet) " Tho grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, Checkering the eastern clouds with streaks of light ; And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels

From forth day's pathway, made by Titan's wheels."

Such deep and strange ideal responses, thoughts which are in

their inmost essence allied to those arising from creative work, are raised also by the finest landscape art. In such cases as these, though what we are going to say is travelling into the barren re- gions of the abstractly critical, there is very slight opportunity for imitation, far less than even in the case of the "Venus of Mobs." The distinction between natural emotions of this char- acter, described as mere painter's "impressions," and those en- shrined in the active fire of what is admitted to be creative genius, is, we believe, a verbal one, in essence. They are of equal nobility. Turner's work was breathed on the paper like a Michael Angelo drawing.

In the masque of The Tempest, the conversation of the goddesses turns principally upon the qualities of the finest land- scape. The following quotation coincides, as students of Turner have doubtless long ago found out, idea for idea with the leading effects of the finer late creations in water-colour of that strange and noble artist, Turner :—

"[Soft music. A Masque. Enter Iris.]

Iris.—Cores, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and pease, Thy turfy mountain, where live nibbling sheep, And flat meads, thatched with stover, them to keep ; Thy banks with peonied and lilied brims, Which spongy April at thy 'hest barium, To make cold nymphs chaste crowns ; and thy broom groves, Whose shadow the dismissed batehelor loves, Being lass-lorn; thy pole-clift vineyard, And thy sea-merge, steril and rocky-hard, Whore thou thyself dost air : The queen o' the sky, Whose watery arch and messenger am I, Bids thee leave these ; and with her sovereign grace, Here on this grass-plot, in this very place, To come and sport ; her peacocks fly amain ; Approach, rich Ceres, her to entertain.

[Enter Ceres.] Ceres.—Hail! many-coloured messenger, that no'er Dolt disobey the wife of Jupiter, Who with thy saffron wings, upon my flowers, Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers ; And with each end of thy blue bow (lost crown My bosky acres, and my unshrubbed down,

Rich scarf to my proud earth."

So perfectly does this express in language the sentiment of much of Turner's best work, that only the most careful word- ing could indicate their deep relations ; for example, Turner nearly always places "an unshrubbed down" near his rainbows, greatly to the consternation of customers who wished "a view of the spot." Then, again, in much of the work of Beethoven the same enchanted world of landscape imagery appears, this time through the medium of "soft music" alone. Of the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony, Beethoven wrote that the occasion was given by "Awaking of cheer- ful feelings, on arriving in the country." In this the imagina- tion is filled with the conception of a mild blue distance, varying perspectives, and the warm wind, and humming insects, besides a countless variety that every one would decide upon for himself. The next movement, "Scene by the Brook," suggests, with the imagery of flowery banks and.

diverse-flowing ripplings, the gradually increasing width of the stream, and the actual notes of birds, the quail, cuckoo, nightingale, and yellow-hammer. Then how often has the "merry gathering of the country people" been rendered by Shakespeare and Turner, and also by various other fine landscapists ! Then " Gewitter-Sturm," grandest of the grand, has often been matched, as far as plastic art can be, by Turner. And last, we may mention the herdsman's song, "Blithe and thankful feelings after the tempest,"—almost un- approachable in painting. In glancing briefly at a few of the stages in the history of landscape-painting, we find that Giorgione devoted some of his best strength exclusively to it ; and it is not true to regard Titian as the actual founder of the art. Mr. Poynter's remark on this subject seems to be but partially true :—" indeed, has left us pictures of almost pure landscape, but they are rather in the nature of a diversion from his other and more serious work, being painted but occasionally, out of the fullness of his delight in the beauty of his native mountain scenery." Rembrandt also, whose place Mr. Poynter ranks among the very highest, devoted himself con amore to the de- piction of landscape, both in painting and etching. The same is

true of Albert Diirer also. Cuyp and Claude bestowed that care,

on the atmospheric infinity, as Mr. Poynter points out, that laid down the road along which Turner toiled, with his wealth of

intuitional resource. But Mr. Poynter maintains that "for one man who has the al othetie faculty of being pleasurably- affected by the beautiful forms and proportions of the Venus of Mobs' or Michael Angelo's Slave,'—that is, by the subtle distinctioas of line which in Nature go to make the difference between a form of high beauty and one that is of a mean or vulgar kind—there are a hundred who can feel the glory of a sunset, or the exquisite tints of an anemone." How unfair this passage sounds to us, not only in coupling together these two final things ! The appari- tion of the motionless evening sky, an infinite of blending hue and form, strikes any beholder, it is true, from its very magnitude. But comparatively few stop to look at it, and very few indeed, surely—certainly the present writer does not pretend to be one of them—can trace the sublime forms of the perspective, by countless atmospheric planes, mirrored there in flawless harmony, imbued with all the standard hues, and some unearthly onea—with dazzling gold; the softest rose, shading yet deeper into violet, and "the white evening star." Just as Plato studied the forms of the clouds, in all probability the sculptor of the "Venus of Melos " modelled her form with many a note of the universality of curve-beauty, wherever seen in its highest instances:, We should almost be inclined to believe that the beauty of the human form is more generally understood, than that of the great en- closing landscape. Certainly, even among artists, the qualities of some of the later works of Turner are as much ignored as were once the late works of Beethoven. The meaning of human life, and its poetry and history, are surely fittingly shadowed forth, when a true cognisance has been taken of the deep impressiveness of nature and her manifold aspects. True, the world is as rich in landscape form as in the moulding of human life.. But we are inclined to think that in this outward nature of ours may be far more often seen great outward realisations of the acme of intuitional beauty, in the mountain valleys, or the lovely woods, than in the tamed of imam

This would in a sort explain, on the one hand, how the great creative painter, Turner, never wearied of Ids laborious study of Nature, and how the loftiest figure conceptions, such as those of Mr. Watts in our day, are even more entirely dependent upon the world "forlorn of light" that lies in the mind's eye. But the appreciation of the qualities of the finest land- scape art depends greatly upon tones of mind, such tones as would be carefully fostered for a right apprehension of Wordsworth, Shelley, or Shakespeare, and are not easily ver- bally transferred to deseribablemsthetie or plastic qualities.

In another paper we shall endeavour to trace some of the ex- cellences which this book displays, in all questions upon which an intellectual and energetic painter's experiences%have led Mr. Poynter to pronounce.