science, learning, and politics, it gains energy from its contact with men who are continually engaged in distant provinces, carrying Russian rule and civilisation to the conquered Eastern tribes. Notwithstanding the great ease and luxury, the fact that so much of the male portion is composed of officers, who wear no other clothes than their uniforms, gives something of a business-like air, and produces a sense of discipline at the entertainments. Individually, the Russians have much sympathy with English ways and habits, and the political antagonism between the two nations does not appear to affect their social intercourse. They are exceedingly courteous, hospitable, and friendly, throwing themselves with much zest into the occupation or amusement of the moment. In these days of rapid communication social life is much the same in every great capital. St. Petersburg is a very gay society, and the great troubles underlying the fabric do not come to the surface in the daily life. There are of course representatives of all the different lines of thought and policy, and because they cannot govern themselves, it must not be supposed that they have not predilections in favour of this or that line of action. The season in St. Petersburg begins on the Russian New Year's Day, which is thirteen days late, for they adhere to what the Western nations now call the Old Style. It lasts till Lent, which the Eastern Church fixes also by a different calculation from the Western, and during that time there are Court balls twice a week and dancing at private houses nearly every other night, Sundays included. Private balls begin, as in London, very late and end very late. The dancing is most vigorous and animated. The specially Russian dance is the Mazurka, of Polish origin, and very pretty and graceful. Like the Scotch reel, it is a series of different figures with numerous and varied steps. The music, too, is special and spirited. The supper, which is always eaten sitting down, is a great feature of the evening, and there is invariably a cotillon afterwards. The pleasantest and most sociable entertainments are the little suppers every evening, where there is no dancing, and where the menu is most recherché and the conversation brilliant. The houses are well adapted for entertainments, and those we saw comfortable and luxurious as far as the owners are concerned. The bedrooms were prettily furnished, and the dressing-rooms attached fitted up with a tiled bath, hot and cold water, and numberless mirrors. The wives of the great Court and State officials, as well as many other ladies, have one afternoon in the week on which they sit at home and receive visitors. There is always tea and Russian bonbons, which are most excellent. What strikes an Englishwoman is the number of men, officers in the army, and others, who attend these 'jours,' as they are called in French. Many of noted activity, such as General Kaulbars, may be seen quietly sipping their tea and talking of the last ball to the young lady of the house. A fête given by Madame

Polovtsoff, wife of the Secrétaire de l'Empire, was wonderfully conducted and organised. It took place at a villa on the Islands, as that part of St. Petersburg which lies between the two principal branches of the Neva is called. It is to villas here that the officials can retire after the season when obliged to remain near the capital. The rooms and large conservatories were lit by electricity. At the further end of the conservatory, buried in palm-trees, were the gipsies chanting and wailing their savage national songs and choruses, while the guests wandered about amongst groves of camellias, and green lawns studded with lilies of the valley and hyacinths; rose bushes in full flower at the corners. When the gipsies were exhausted, dancing began, and later there was an excellent supper in another still more spacious conservatory. The entertainment ended with a cotillon, and for the stranger its originality was only marred by the fact that it had been thawing, and the company could not arrive or depart in 'troikas'-sleighs with three horses which seem to fly along the glistening moonlit snow. A favourite amusement, even in winter, is racing these troikas or sleighs with fast trotters. The races are to be seen from stands, as in England, and are only impeded by falling snow. The pretty little horses are harnessed, for trotting races, singly, to a low sleigh (in summer to a drosky) driven by one man, wearing the colours of the owner. Two of these start at once in opposite directions on a circular or oblong course marked out on a flat expanse of snow and ice, which may be either land or water, as is found most convenient. It is a picturesque sight, and reminds one of the pictures of ancient chariot races on old vases and carved monuments.

The character of a nation can scarcely fail to be affected by the size of the country it inhabits, and a certain indifference to time and distance is produced by this circumstance. There is also a peculiar apathy as regards small annoyances and casualties. Whatever accident befalls the Russian of the lower orders, his habitual remark is Nitchivo' ('It is nothing'). Nevertheless, Northern blood and a Northern climate have mixed a marvellous amount of energy and enterprise with this Oriental characteristic. Take for example the Caspian railway, undertaken by General Annenkoff. This general completes fifteen hundred miles of railway in the incredibly short space of time of a year and a half, and almost before the public is aware of its having been commenced, he is back again in St. Petersburg, dancing at a Court ball in a quadrille opposite the Empress. The railway made by him runs at present from the Caspian Sea to the Amou-Daria river, and will be continued to Bokhara, Samarcand, and Tashkend, in a northerly direction, while on the south it is to enter Persia. Should European complications, by removing the risk of foreign interposition, make it possible for a Russian army to reach the Caspian by way of the Black Sea and

the Caucasus, this railway gives it the desired approach to India. By attacking us in India, which they possibly do not desire to conquer, the Panslavists and Russian enthusiasts believe they would establish their empire at Constantinople, and unite the whole Slav race under the dominion of the Tsar.

The one preponderating impression produced by a short visit to Russia is an almost bewildering sense of its vastness, with an equally bewildering feeling of astonishment at the centralisation of all government in the hands of the Emperor. This impression is perhaps increased by the nature of the town of St. Petersburg. Long broad streets, lit at night by the electric light, huge buildings, public and private, large and almost deserted places or squares, all tend to produce the reflection that the Russian nation is emerging from the long ages of Cimmerian darkness into which the repeated invasions of Asiatic hordes had plunged it, and that it is full of the energy and aspirations belonging to a people conscious of a great future in the history of mankind. Is it too sanguine to hope that, as this development proceeds, the Russian Government may learn to perceive that a real and enduring peace with England would give the commercial wealth and prosperity so much coveted? A firm, decided, and unflinching policy on England's part, with a determination to protect her interests at whatever cost, may perhaps bring Russia to consider the advantages of this aspect of the question.

M. A. A. GALLOWAY

585

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SCHOOL'

IN ART.

THE present fashion of pitting one century against another may be followed at least as fairly in art as in literature. From the early struggles into freedom of the Florentines and the Sienese down to the confident facility of our own time, each century has had its characteristic movement. Of this the centre has been now in Italy, now in the Low Countries, now mainly in France and England. And its importance has varied with its site. For us the interest of painting in the childish fourteenth century is mainly historical; so it is in the adolescent fifteenth; in the early sixteenth, in Italy, it was completed as a vehicle for ideas; in the seventeenth, in Holland, it developed its power as a record of human life and habits; in the eighteenth, under the guidance mainly of France, it was for the most part content to echo the past; in our own nineteenth century it has fallen into a line with science, and set itself to grasp and vulgarise, in the good sense, the elements of natural beauty. This generalisation is, of course, rough. In every age there have been men who, by idiosyncrasy or power, belonged to a generation that was not their own. But it holds good in the main, and particularly does it, I think, apply to the three great ages for the more essentially modern art of painting. The ideality of the early Italians and the humanity of the Dutchmen require no advocate; but as yet few have ventured to put the curiosity of the nineteenth century in France and England on the same level. But there I believe it will surely be in the mi: ds of the men of a hundred years hence.

As we look back over art in the past, we can trace its course without difficulty. We see that its main stream, at least, has always flowed in one bed with other mental activities; that in its widest sense it has been at once the purest and most personal expression of the characteristic thoughts of its time. But all this we find it hard to grasp in the art immediately about us. Like one who wanders among water meadows, we have many doubts before we decide which is the chief among the various channels by which the ground is cut up. Looking down, however, from our eminence of

eighty years, it is clear that in the first lustrum of the present century a new aim appeared in art. Until then all painting had been more or less architectonic. From the Madonnas of Duccio and Cimabue down to the landscapes of Claude and his English and French disciples, a balance based on symmetry had never been absent for long. Even in the freest of the Dutchmen, this decorative note, this regard for something outside the picture frame with which what was inside had to harmonise, is always present. In landscape especially the informing spirit is contented, manipulative, and declaratory, rather than enthusiastic and curious. Ruysdael, Hobbema, Van de Velde, Backhuizen, did not 'libel the sea,' or the land. Their aim was not to search out truth and record it, but to take facts in their breadth, and with this to create a whole which should have the unity of a Doric column. They had no belief, and none who had lived up to their time had much, in the unity given by truth. In their view, tints, forms, natural arrangements, had to be profoundly modified before they could be fit for art. In many cases this was done with such consummate skill that it requires both insight and practice to make sure it was done at all. To a careless eye Hobbema's Avenue' may seem to embody the same notions as Constable's 'Hay-wain.' The Dutchman's sky is painted in three tints, the landscape is reduced to a camaïeu of warm brown and neutral green, the reds are greys and the figures modelled from the earth on which they stand. But all this is done with such tact and knowledge that it gives an impression of actuality scarcely less vivid than that of the English picture. But in attitude to truth a distinction must be made not only between Hobbema and the other Dutch landscape-men, but even between this particular work and others by the same hand. In the 'Avenue' Hobbema has set himself to delude the spectator, to make him feel exactly as if he were looking out of a window. But in the rest of his work it is balance, and not illusion, that he seeks. And still more is it so with Ruysdael, the only other Dutchman, Cuyp excepted, who painted pure landscape with distinction.

6

Of all landscape-painters Jacob Ruysdael was, no doubt, the purest artist. Without the human sympathies which have made Hobbema, Cuyp and Claude so popular in England, he had a finer instinct than either for those effects of nature which could be welded into unity. In his best pictures we find, too—and it is very rare—an active knowledge of what paint can not do. His conceptions are based on the more obvious features of his own world. There is little in them that can be called research. But they are thoroughly organised-nothing can be taken from or added to them with impunity-and they are most simply carried out. No painter has contrived more thoroughly to say what he wished than Ruysdael. If we must find a fault in him, it can only be for not wishing to say