FREDERICK WALKER.* IN this biography Mr. Marks has made no

attempt at a critical life of his brother-in-law, but has given us a great mass of material, interesting and the reverse, chiefly in the form of Frederick Walker's letters. The industry of the biographer has been great, but had it been applied to sifting the material we should have been more grateful than we are for this Life. One feature of the book, how- ever, deserves nothing but praise ; we refer to the illustra- tions, which in a work dealing with a painter are all- important. The quantity and the quality are both excellent, and by the photogravures of some of the most important pictures we are able to correct the false impression produced by the popular etchings of them.

After reading this bulky biography we are confronted with a problem. It is true that it is not for the first time that we have met it, for other lives of painters and musicians have raised the same question. Roughly stated, the problem amounts to this, How could the intellect here revealed to us have produced the splendid things that it did ? Walker's mind was not an enlarged one; he seems to have had as little knowledge of, as he had interest in, art outside his own. On the occasion of his first visit to Venice he wrote home long and detailed accounts of the hiring of gondolas and at what hour was the sable d'hote. Only once does he mention the pictures, and then it is to say he has not gone to see them because his friends, the Birket Fosters, have not arrived, and he thinks their courier will take him to the galleries with less waste of time than if he went alone. At the same time he says he is rowed about the lagoon reading Pickwick and drinking seltzer-water. For such a voluminous and constant letter-writer as Walker, it is disappointing to find how seldom any passage of interest occurs in his correspondence. The merest trivialities and details he wrote at wearisome

• Life end Lenore of Frederick Walker, 4.R.A. By John George Mark& ;Auden: Macmillan and Co.

length. Indeed when he was in Scotland catching fish and making exquisite water-colours, it is the fish we hear about, and to such a tiresome extent that we exclaim "Hush, hush," with Carlyle, and skip hastily. At the same time we cannot deny that these letters do reveal a personality, but it is not an interesting one. To his mother, Walker owed a great deal, not only in the early years of poverty—when his difficulties in following a life of art were great—but throughout the whole of his life her constant care and sympathy were of the utmost value to him. Nor was he unappreciative. One of the best traits in his character was his constant affection. He sent the cheque he had received for his first Academy picture, "The Lost Path," to his mother, with these words,—" and the reason I send it to you, dear, is that you should break into it as soon as you like." These feelings remained unchanged.

From the book before us—and we have no other knowledge —we gather that Frederick Walker was a nervously sensitive man, easily agitated by small aggravations. He seems to have had great belief and confidence in himself and his art, not from conscious acts of reasoning, but from innate feeling.

He lived neither in the great world nor in solitude, but among a small society of friends who ominously styled themselves "the Clique." The influence of this society no doubt accounted for the peculiarities noticed by Miss Jekyll, and described by her in that part of this memoir dealing with Walker's visit to Algiers, when his health was breaking down. She says :—

"He gave me the impression of a man who had lived very much in one set of people; his surprise seemed unbounded that every- body did not know all about him ; not, as it appeared to us, from any sort of undue vanity, but from simply never having occasion to realise that there was any world but just the one in which he had lived. We may have been in error, but this was the idea it gave. As time went on, his bodily and nervous condition became evidently worse, and he seemed to think he should not get home alive. In addition to serious bodily discomfort, he was desperately homesick. Over and over he repeated, in a way that was very piteous, 'I shall never see a hansom cab again.'"

No doubt this description refers to Walker when sickness was bringing his life to a close. Nevertheless, it is charac- teristic of him generally.

Turning from the man to his art, what a difference do we see. Having summed up the characteristics of Walker the man, let us now sum up the characteristics of Walker the artist. Dominating his whole work is the most absolute sense of beauty, whether it be of form, colour, detail, or composition. Together with this he possessed in a very high degree the sense of style. Generally this quality is supposed to come from an analytical turn of mind, and a scholarly appreciation of the traditions of art.

In Walker's case it came from pure intuitive genius. Hence with him style is not an added academic grace, but a living force, inspiring his art from its foundation. The great thing accomplished by Walker in English art was that he gave us ideal beauty in everyday life, without sacrificing truth, or creating an Arcadia. The boy running beside the horses in the "Plough" is a miracle of rhythmic beauty, but he is none the less a real ploughboy. The prosaic person no doubt contends that this beauty could not be found in actual life, and was added by the artist. The truth is that Walker was endowed with an extraordinary power of realising movement, and seized that moment when the action of the figure had brought the limbs into rhythmic accord. This same selection of a moment has given the figure shipping his oars at the " Ferry " the grace we are accustomed to associate with ideal art. The great merit of Walker was that he showed rhythmical beauty of the joyous kind that inspired Rafael existing in modern life, as Millet had shown that the grandeur of Michelangelo still has its place in the world.

Artists seem generally to fall into two divisions,—those who, like Michelangelo and Beethoven, reach by profound speculation the lofty summits of art, and, again, those who, like Rafael and Mozart, achieve their ends by an instinctive power of creation. To this latter class Walker belongs ; like Rafael and Mozart, he had the power of turning what he touched into pure beauty. He could, like-

" The sovereign alchemist that in a trice

Life's leaden metal into gold transmute."

The workman taking his pipe out of his mouth as he walks along the road before the "Old Gate," the inmates of the "Harbour of Refuge" in the glowing spring sunset, and the

little girl picking primroses in the copse,—all have their peculiar beauties revealed. For this great painter's powers were so penetrating that he could seize the passing beauty of movement and make it live on the canvas. Walker was endowed with the capacity for collecting together various elements and fusing them into a whole, never letting his passion for details mar the main intention. Take, for instance, the " Plough " ; before we get close enough to really the parts of the work, we clearly feel the pictorial intention. The dark plough lands lying under the hill crowned with the quarry and cumulus clouds, glorified with sunset glow, show themselves as the foundations of the work before the subtler beauties of men and horses are observed. This directness of pictorial in- tention no doubt assisted Walker in gaining early recognition for his work. We have heard from one who was present, that when the " Plough " was brought before the committee of selection at the Academy, all the members of that committee with one accord burst into applause and hailed a masterpiece.

Walker attempted to paint a tragic picture, "At the Bar." It is the figure of a woman in the dock turning round to face the jury as they enter the Court to give their verdict. The subject was not a pictorial one ; emotion of this kind requires words. And to the consciousness of this we must attribute the fact that, when the picture returned to him at the close of the exhibition where it bad been hung, he scraped out the face and never repainted it. We must mention the picture called "Wayfarers" as another instance of failure. Here again the sentiment was literary, and in trying to enforce it the figures have been made to pose in such extremely pathetic attitudes that they have become ridiculous. But these lapses were few, and they do not detract from the value of the artist's successful works. Walker had in him a vein of idyllic poetry of very great richness. He possessed a feeling for form which in England has been rare. It was not so much that he had mastery over the complications of the structure of the human body, as that he knew how to give to his figures that harmony which, for want of more definite expressions, we call rhythmic and lyrical. As a colourist he has few rivals. He could be gorgeous in the " Plough " or the "Harbour of Refuge," delicate in the "Rainy Day," or restrained as in the "Old Gate." While in such a picture as "The Bathers" —perhaps his masterpiece—he could make colour, form, light and shade, and composition all unite to produce a whole of radiant vivacity. At the age of thirty-five his life was cut short. With such genius who knows what he might not have achieved had he lived ? Although constantly imitated, on his own ground he has never been rivalled,—for true genius is inimitable.