English painter, and the colour is laid on with a somewhat heavy hand.

This last is a very general defect among the French. Though they possess in M. Meissonier a painter of matchless precision of touch, a great part of whose work has a brightness which is beyond all praise, they seem, both in historical pictures and in landscape and portraiture, to be content with a dull, monotonous style of painting which is the thing the English make most effort to avoid. The reason of this is not far to seek. Owing to their academic training the French can make up their minds exactly what to do and how to do it. Every object in their pictures looks solid and in its proper place. At the first glance the work can be seen to be right. A second look makes us, however, conscious that it wants just that character which gives their charm to works like those of our Scotch landscape painters. It is not, as these are, the expression of delight in Nature. Our students, only half educated as they may seem when judged by foreign standards, respond with genuine enthusiasm to the beauty of the world about them. Their works are like poems; they do them because they cannot help it. The colour, the brightness, the delicacy, the myriad complexities of Nature touch them with true delight and wonder, and in an artless way they set themselves down to copy them. The French student knows that he must keep his picture, as it is said, 'together,' and down go the high lights, which in nature sparkle from point to point and fall often where the artist does not want them. He is anxious to secure solidity, and can do this in brown and white; so he sets no store by colour. He has to cover large spaces of canvas, and has no time to bestow on care in the mere handling of pigment. The result is that a French composition looks often better as an engraving than in its original form; and it is with a sense of disappointment that we come to see French pictures which have been familiar to us in reproductions.

There has been no attempt in the present article to survey the whole field of French and English art, but only to touch upon a few of the strong and weak points in each. There is more intellect, more power to grasp a large subject, more command of the technical side of art in France than in our own country. Our artists possess, on the other hand, natural gifts which have already won for our school a high position in Europe. We may assume that to English painting will always belong those qualities which have here been claimed for it. A great work of art demands, however, something more than these; and it is here, in the conception and working out of subjects, that our art is weak. At the same time this very weakness springs in a way from what is best in it. It results mainly from that loving study of nature which marks our young painters. Their ideal in work is to follow out all the intricate markings, catch all the subtle gradations of hue, in some natural object. Such patient, self-forgetful VOL. VIII.-No. 41. F

labour as they will bestow on bits of foreground is an end in itself, and brings its own reward; those who give themselves up to it are not unnaturally careless of 'ideas' and 'high art,' and the 'traditions of the ancients.' Upon this subject Mr. Poynter makes some most valuable remarks in his recently published Lectures on Art, where he administers a robust rebuke to any sentimental dwelling on leaves and flowers, and insists upon the view, which all experience confirms, that nothing great in art can be achieved without imagination and thought.

We are said, however, to be an unimaginative people. The generation that has seen the enchanted canvasses of Turner in their first freshness, whose patriarchs have stood by the newly-made graves of Shelley and of Keats, and who still listen, in the voice of John Ruskin, to the utterance of one of the most ideal and aspiring spirits that has adorned literature, need not trouble itself much about this imputation. Nor can there be really wanting to English painters that capacity for great work which the men of our nation have shown, and are showing in a hundred different fields. There is imagination enough in the English to rise to the height of any conception, and intellect enough to carry it out with perfect mastery. What is needed is the sort of system that they have in France, and the very want of it, with the consequent weakness of our technique, might well inspire some of our leading painters to become the founders of such a tradition. What modern art requires is an example of work which shall be as strong as that of the French and beautiful with all the poetic feeling and delicate handling of the English school of Naturework too which shall be the expression of delight in what is pure and lovely, and of good report, and shall have about it, in the often quoted words of Plato, 'the effluence from noble deeds, like a breeze that wafteth health from salubrious places.'

GERARD BALDWIN BROWN.

A STRANGER IN AMERICA.

No person could be more completely a stranger than I was in America. After being interested in American history and public affairs from my youth, I saw the country for the first time in August last. Being born in Midland England, I had more English insularity of thought than most of my countrymen; and having a certain wilfulness of opinion, which few shared at home, and probably fewer abroad, I had little to recommend me in the United States. Years ago I knew some publicists there of mark and character, but that was before the great war in which many of them perished. My friend Horace Greeley was dead, Lloyd Garrison was gone, with both of whom I had spent well-remembered days. Theodore Parker, the 'Jupiter of the pulpit,' as Wendell Phillips calls him, paid me a visit in England before he went to Florence to die. To me, therefore, it was contentment enough to walk unknown through some of America's marvellous cities, and into the not less wondrous space which lies beyond them.

For one who has seen but half a great continent, and that but for a short period, to write a book about the country would be certainly absurd. At the same time, to have been in a new world for three months and be unable to give any account whatever of it would be still more absurd. To pretend to know much is presumption—to profess to know nothing is idiocy. A voyager who had seen a strange creature in the Atlantic Ocean as he passed it, might be able to give only a poor account of it; but if he had seen it every day for three months, and even been upon its back, he would be a very stupid person if he could give no idea whatever of it. I saw America and Canada from Ottawa to Kansas City for that length of time, travelling on its lakes and land, and may give some notion, at least to those who never were there, of what I observed-not of its trades or manufactures, or statistics, or politics, or churches, but of the ways, manners, and spirit of the people.

After all I had read or heard, it seemed to me that there were great features of social life there unregarded or misregarded. New York itself is a miracle which a large book would not be sufficient to explain. When I stepped ashore there, I thought I was in a larger

Rotterdam; when I found my way to the Broadway, it seemed to me as though I was in Paris, and that Paris had taken to business. There were quaintness, grace and gaiety, brightness and grimness, all about. The Broadway I thought a Longway, for my first invitation in it was to No. 1455. My first days in the city were spent at No. 1 Broadway, in the Washington Hotel, allured thither by its English military and diplomatic associations, going back to the days when an Indian war-whoop was possible in the Broadway. At that end, you are dazed by a forest of tall telegraphic poles, and a clatter by night and day that no pathway of Pandemonium could rival. Car-bells, omnibus-bells, drayhorse-bells, railway-bells and locomotives in the air, were resounding night and day. An engineer turns off his steam at your bedroom window. When I got up to see what was the matter, I found engine No. 99 almost within reach of my arm, and the other ninety-eight had been there that morning before I awoke. When one day at a railway junction I heard nine train-bells being rung by machinery, it sounded as though Disestablishment had occurred, and all the parish churches of England were being imported.

Of all the cities of America, Washington is the most superb in its brilliant flashes of space. The drowsy Potomac flows in sight of splendid buildings. Washington is the only city I have ever seen which no wanton architect or builder can spoil. Erect what they will, they cannot obliterate its glory of space. If a man makes a bad speech, the audience can retreat; if he buys a dull book, he need not read it—while if a dreary house be erected, three generations living near it may spend their melancholy lives in sight of it. If an architect in each city could be hanged now and then, with discrimination, what a mercy it would be to mankind! Washington at least One Sunday morning I went to the church, which is attended by the President and Mrs. Hayes, to hear the kind of sermon preached in their presence. But the walk through the city was itself a sermon. I never knew all the glory of sunlight in this world until then. The clear, calm sky seemed hundreds of miles high. Over dome and mansion, river and park, streets and squares, the sunlight shed what appeared to my European eyes an unearthly beauty. I lingered in it until I was late at church. The platform occupied by preachers in America more resembles an altar than our pulpit, and the freedom of action and grace in speaking I thought greater than among us. The sermon before the President was addressed to young men, and was remarkably wise, practical, definite, and inspiring; but the transition of tone was, at times, more abrupt and less artistic than in other eminent American preachers whom I had the pleasure to hear.

Niagara Falls I saw by sunlight, electric light, and by moonlight, without thinking much of them-until walking on the American

side I came upon the Niagara River, which I had never heard of. Of course water must come from somewhere to feed the Falls-I knew that; but I had never learned from guide-books that its coming was anything remarkable. When, however, I saw a mighty mountain of turbulent water as wide as the eye could reach, a thousand torrents rushing as it were from the clouds, splashing and roaring down to the great Falls, I thought the idea of the Deluge must have begun there. No aspect of nature ever gave me such a sense of power and terror. I feared to remain where I stood. The frightful waters seemed alive. When I went back to the Canadian side I thought as much of Niagara as anyone-had I seen the Duke of Argyll's recent published Impressions' of them (he also discovered the Niagara Rapids) before I went there, I should have approached Niagara Falls with feelings very different from those with which I first saw them.

6

In the Guildhall, London, I have seen City orators point their merchant audience to the statues of great men there, and appeal to the historic glories of the country. Such an audience would respond as though they had some interest in the appeal-feeling, however, that these things more concerned the great families' who held the country, whom they make rich by their industry, who looked down upon them as buttermen or tallow-chandlers. No orator addressing the common people employs these historic appeals to them. The working class who are enlisted in the army, flogged and sent out to be shot, that their fathers may find their way to the poorhouse, under their hereditary rulers, are not so sensible of the glory of the country. The working men, as a rule, have no substantial interest in the national glory: I mean those of them whose lot it is to supplicate for work, and who have to establish trades' unions to obtain adequate payment for it. Yet I well know that England has things to be proud of which America cannot rival. At the same time we have, as Lord Beaconsfield discerned, 'Two Nations' living side by side in this land. What is wanted is that they shall be one in equity of means, knowledge, and pride. Nothing surprised me more than to see the parks of New York, abutting Broadway, without a fence around the greensward. A million unresting feet passed by them, and none trampled on the delicate grass-while, in England, Board Schools put up a prison wall around them, so that poor children cannot see a flower girl go by in the streets; and the back windows of the houses of mechanics in Lambeth remain blocked up, whereby no inmate can look on a green tree in the Palace grounds. In Florence, in Northampton, where the Holyoke mountain looks on the ever

1 Americans are not lacking in generous admissions herein, as any one may see in William Winter's Trip to England. The reader must go far to find more graceful pages of appreciation of the historic, civic, and scenic beauties of this country.

2 In an historic churchyard at the bottom of the mountain is the grave of Mary