Constant Troyon is generally classed among the animal-painters, but like Cuyp, he showed his genius rather in enveloppe, in his cows plus landscapes than in his cows by themselves. Like Dupré, he was apt to become false in colour, but the signs of nature-watching are never absent from his work. Millet, Corot and Daubigny are divided from these men by their greater subjectivity. They have none of the variety of Rousseau, and little of the simplicity of Constable, Dupré, or Troyon. With Corot and Millet, of course, landscape is more of a means to an end than with the rest, and in that they are less entirely in the movement of their time. But so far as they go their pictures are painted entirely on the modern principle. The facts are gathered under the blue sky, and the decorative idea is never allowed to do harm. With Daubigny, the last and least of the constellation, appear the first sure signs of a new mannerism, a mannerism which is fast reducing landscape in France to a condition not much above that from which Constable and his heirs freed it. The men I have named were of course surrounded by a crowd of more or less successful imitators, some of whose work posterity may rate higher than we. They were followed, too, by the impressionists, who in anything like a complete history of the movement would occupy the unenviable place which belongs to those who kill an idea by stretching it beyond its capacity. It is curious how little foothold they have won on this side of the Channel.

It has been said that so far as England was concerned the movement started by Constable came to an end with himself. This is only very partially true. The right way to put it would be to say that here Constable found no immediate followers in his own medium. Even when he came to die, his name was by no means a household word in his native country, and it was only at small prices that his works were sold. Turner and the Claudists held the field. English patrons did not, indeed, leave Constable to starve, as the French left Millet, but they did little enough to encourage others to set out on the same road, and when Constable's career came to such a sudden end in 1837, there was but one man in his native country who applied his principles with sincerity and success; and that was David Cox.

It is the fashion to belaud the 'great English School of Water Colour,' and its productions are often, in fact, so exquisite, that it is hard not to join in the chorus. For the rendering of certain effects of light and qualities of colour, it is unapproached and perhaps unapproachable; but as a whole its inferiority to oil is beyond dispute. In range, richness and force, in directness and pliability, no comparison between the two methods is possible, while there is in oil the great, though more accidental, advantage that its solidity enables it to hold its own in galleries, among great architectural features, and across ample spaces. Before such masters of the lighter art as Cox, and Turner, and George Barrett, it is difficult to feel anything but

delight in what they did. Regrets that they did it at all, and not something else, seem impertinent. But, nevertheless, the conviction forces itself upon us that their choice did much to deprive England of a galaxy of painters which would have outshone even the great Frenchmen of Barbizon and Ville d'Avray.

But

Another preventing cause was the influence of Turner. Ideas vary and may yet vary for years as to the rank of Turner's own work, but there can be no two opinions as to the harmfulness of the example he set. Under his hand paint became dénaturé. It was taken into a sphere for which it was so unfitted that it could only be kept alive there at all by his personal genius. All the men, and they were a good deal more numerous than is sometimes thought, who tried to follow the same road came to grief on the way. perhaps the illest turn done to English Art by Turner was when he gave a text for Modern Painters. In that book, so great from every point of view but the critics', the false ideal which Turner followed was set forth in language that burnt it into every brain. The boundaries of art were trampled down. The true aims of landscape especially were obscured, so that men who might otherwise have been content to go about it in the natural but reserved fashion of Constable, exhausted themselves in the attempt to do impossibilities. Three things combined, then, to neutralise Constable--(1) The fidelity of our upper classes to Claude and the Dutchmen, which deprived our English painter of substantial success in his own lifetime; (2) The preference for water-colour of the best artists living at Constable's death; (3) The influence of Turner. To these causes may be traced what is, in fact, a very curious phenomenon in art history. I doubt whether another instance could be given of a prolific example set in one country and followed only in another.

I say followed only,' but it would be more accurate to say 'mainly. For the full scope of the revolution effected by Constable is only to be seen when we turn to other arts than his own. The most interesting development of the last few years has been the revival of etching. Ever since the time of Rembrandt, of course, artists have etched. That is to say, they have attacked copper with point and acid. But it is only within the last thirty years that the etched line has been used, as it was two centuries ago, with a comprehension of its peculiar powers. The immediate honour of the revival belongs, no doubt, to men like Seymour Haden, Méryon, and Whistler. But their work, and especially that of the first named, would have been impossible but for the new standards set up by Constable. In days when the last word in landscape was believed to have been said by Claude there could be no public for such brilliant but partial studies as 'Penton Hook' or 'Erith Marshes; it was only when truth fresh from the fields came to take the rank it now holds that their chance arrived.

VOL. XXI.-No. 122.

RR

At the present moment the ideas of which I have endeavoured to suggest the source seem to be winning ascendency here just as they promise to lose it in France. On the other side of the Channel devotion to one particular technical quality threatens to set up a standard hardly less artificial than that of a century ago. But here the stimulus which missed the painters of the dry land has struck the sea-painters with its full force. True to their day, these are by no means encyclopædic. Each practically confines himself to some favourite aspect of the sea. Mr. Hook paints the breezes and the broken water, Mr. Henry Moore the heavier movements of the waves; Mr. Colin Hunter paints the ocean as a liquid jewel, Mr. Macallum the play of sunlight through the mists which lie upon it; and so on with some half a dozen more. We have not a single painter of landscape proper whom we can put side by side with these men, unless, indeed, it be Millais.

The same spirit is to be recognised in the best modern portraits. A hundred years ago good portraits were above all things decorative. Painters like Reynolds and Gainsborough were content to catch a likeness and to finish a head on a system, leaving much of their canvas to be covered by journeymen and pupils. A few sittings of an hour apiece were all they asked. It was inevitable that works produced in such a way should have little individuality. And in fact nothing impresses one so strongly in a gathering of portraits from the eighteenth century as the want of variety among the sitters. If we go back further this becomes still more strongly marked. Kneller, Lely, even Vandyck, seem to have been content with likeness in the head alone. It was not so with the Dutch. The portraits of Van der Helst, Frans Hals, and Rembrandt are more comparable to modern work in essentials than any landscape of their school, and the best of our living portrait-painters are more closely allied to them than to those Venetians on whom they prefer to fix their eyes. It is only in our own time that the practice of Rembrandt and Hals has been revived, and that the character of a sitter has been allowed to decide the whole treatment of his portrait. It is only within the last seventy or eighty years. that we find a head modelled, so to speak, inside and out, and every touch on the rest of the canvas governed by the desire to enhance its expression. The first man of our modern schools to work consciously on this principle was Lawrence, who, whatever his faults, could at least model a fine head when he had one before him. But to see it thoroughly grasped we must turn to living men like Millais, Holl, or Bonnat, and to see its results in perfection to portraits like those of Mr. Hook, of Mr. Chamberlain, and of M. Thiers.

If I have succeeded in making myself understood, it will be seen that I wish to point to one particular phase of modern art as characteristic of the nineteenth century, and upon Constable as its author.

The phase is that based upon curiosity, the new substitute for faith. Men no longer dogmatise upon nature. They go to her and find out what she is, and they bring back what they can. In one of his smaller plates Hogarth foreshadowed the new motive with Rabelaisian candour. His prescience has in part been proved by such developments as the Zolaistic novel, but his fears for his own calling are not yet in train to be fiulfilled. For the new trust in nature has given an art of its own to the nineteenth century-an art which is likely in time to be placed with those of the sixteenth and seventeenth.

WALTER ARMSTRONG.

ON WELL-MEANT NONSENSE ABOUT

EMIGRATION.

ARE these islands over-populated? In other words, is it possible by any conceivable process to maintain at home in reasonable comfort and decency not only the thirty-seven million human beings whom the United Kingdom is estimated to contain, but the three or four millions who, at the present rate of increase, will be added to them in the course of a single decade? The question has been asked ever since the days of Malthus, and as it closely touches the happiness of the present and coming generation, I propose to say a few words upon it.

1

It is difficult to believe that there can be room for two opinions on such a subject. The once popular adage that the Providence which sends the mouths will send the meat,' if it still regulates the practice no longer constitutes the creed of the least provident classes; while few thinking men can bring themselves to share Mr. George's belief in a coming millennium when 'a greater number of people will collectively be better provided for than a smaller,' and when the natural increase of population will constantly tend to make every individual richer instead of poorer.'2 At the same time, it may be admitted that Mr. J. S. Mill's gloomy predictions have not yet been verified. Mr. Gladstone, it is true, has had no difficulty in showing, in the pages of this Review, that the England of to-day supports its 28,000,000 with greater ease and in greater comfort than the England of Lord Tennyson's youth supported its 14,000,000, and Mr. Giffen's remarkable statistics are scarcely needed to prove that our working classes are better paid, better fed, better clothed, and

1 In a paper contributed to the September number of the Statistical Society, Dr. G. B. Longstaff, a well-known authority on the subject, estimates the population of the United Kingdom on the 3rd of April, 1886, at 36,776,064, and its quinquennial increase at 1,891,206. If Ireland, where the population is actually decreasing, be omitted from the calculation this increase would exceed 2,000,000. Possibly, as Dr. Longstaff subsequently points out, some slight deduction may have to be made from these figures.

2 Henry George's Progress and Poverty, p. 126.