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æsthetic perception; the fourth, a handsome Greek face; the fifth (the C minor), a most fascinating head, half dreamy, half martial; the seventh, a noble-looking face half seen through a veil (alluding to the possible meaning of this work, which no one can agree upon); the eighth, a handsome girl with a slightly mischievous expression; the ninth, a beautiful calm head with great masses of dark hair. It is something to go into an exhibition and come across such an original and suggestive thought as this. As it was early in the day and few people about in the sculpture court, I stood before each of them in turn and sang over to her the principal themes from her symphony, to feel how far they accorded with the sculptured ideal.

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as heroic size it looks out of keeping. ner he has shown a great deal of The prehistoric man receives attention from M. Frémiet, who shows him dragging along a young bear by the ears after killing its mother. "Instruction Publique" regards this, too, as a work to secure, on what principle one knows not, but M. Frémiet has always been a favorite in official quarters. Some other works to be had in remembrance out of a number that are more or less good, are M. Hugues's nude figure of a potter "throwing" a vase; M. Cornu's "Spleen," in illustration of a passage from Baudelaire, a beautiful nude female figure kneeling, and as if bowed down, under a rock; M. Peyrol's "Frayeur d'Enfant;" M. Puech's group for the monument to Leconte de Lisle, showing a winged female figure supporting the portrait bust placed on a stele, and with one arm encircling it; M. Icard's "Trop tard," a powerful nude group of the foolish virgins of the parable, somewhat too agitated for sculpture, but nevertheless impressive; and M. Captier's "Désesperance," a nude figure seated and leaning with grief-stricken face towards a broken anchor. All these, it will be observed, are works with a distinct poetic underlying them. At the New Salon sculpture takes a subordinate place, but it contains a large group by M. Dalou, sketched a good many years ago, of the "Triumph of Silenus," a work evidently conceived under the influence of Rubens, and in fact rather like a Rubens picture in the round. It is of course clever, forcible, and so on, but, for sculpture, far too violent in action. M. Bartholomé exhibits a portion of his noble work, "Monument Aux Morts" (one of the grandest achievements of modern sculpture), as executed on a large scale in stone, for its ultimate position at Père la Chaise; the recumbent figures in the tomb, with the angel watching them. M. d'Illzach has done a really charming and original thing, a set of nine life-sized colored busts in "cire polychrome inaltérable," symbolizing the Nine Symphonies of Beethoven. In his expression of the character of some of the symphonies in this man

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The New Salon makes a feature of decorative art and craft, which nearly ignored at the Old Salon; but the result is curious to English eyes. With the exception of some stoneware and some good pewter work in two or three of the cases in the central hall, there is nothing here which would be accepted in England as meeting the demands of decorative art. The textile designs are simply poor and commonplace; the furniture is in almost every case what we should call atrocious in taste. In these matters the French seem quite blind to the superiority and beauty of simplicity of line and of structural character; they must torture everything into odd and unexpected shapes, or they are not satisfied. Some pretty fancies there are to be seen among the silversmiths' work exhibited, but the majority of things seem to be stamped, "article de Paris." Architecture, on the other hand, is nearly unknown at the New Salon, but has a large range of wall at the Old Salon, where the superiority of French drawings of ancient work may be fully appreciated. M. Pontrémoli's series of studies and restorations of the remains at Olympia (part of the work done by him at the French Academy at the Villa Medici) form a monumental set of drawings. In illustrating modern

· buildings the French architects exhibit the announcement of the work before complete plans, sections, elevations, us; and the reader, we hasten at once and often constructional drawings, instead of the little perspective drawings, without even a plan, to be seen at the architectural room at the Royal Academy; but unfortunately most of the buildings are only "châteaux en Espagne"-projets for buildings which will never be carried out. The French method of illustrating architecture at an exhibition is far superior to ours; but the exhibition is not representative of the actual architectural work of the day, it is almost all purely academical. This might surely be amended.

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The inevitable conclusion from brief review of the two salons is that, while sculpture is in a healthy condition, the French are both painting and exhibiting too many pictures; quantity rules more than quality. I read the other day a proposal in a French paper that the exhibitions should be closed for two or three years, to give the painters time to consider what they are about and what they are really aiming at. It would really not be a bad idea, and the occasion is just opportune for it. Both Salons will be unavoidably deprived of their old galleries after this season, and there has been much controversy as to where they are to be housed till after the 1900 exhibition. Suppose they were to cut the knot by doing without exhibitions till then? It might be a very wholesome thing for French art. And when the new buildings are free for them, let us hope the wall space for future exhibitions will be somewhat more restricted, so as to afford less temptation and opportunity for commonplaces on a great scale.

H. HEATHCOTE STATHAM.

From Macmillan's Magazine. LANDSCAPE IN POETRY.1 "What a charming title" will be the exclamation of every one who reads 1 Landscape in Poetry; by Francis T. Palgrave, late Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. London, 1897.

to say, will find the book to possess all the captivating qualities which its title promises. He will find all poetic literature, from Homer to Tennyson, laid under contribution by a scholar of proved and acknowledged taste and judgment. He will have an anthology of hundreds, possibly thousands, of passages selected as illustrating the attitude of successive ages towards the external world, and full of beauty and delight, quite apart from the question whether they really illustrate that attitude or not. We hope we shall not be called ungrateful to Mr. Palgrave, or unappreciative of the boon which he has conferred on us, if we say at once that many of the passages cited seem to us to have very little bearing on the question, "How did this or that nation or epoch regard nature and the external world?" We are not, indeed, ungrateful; on the contrary, we feel that we owe him hearty thanks for a beautiful anthology. But we think that a different method should have been adopted, if his aim had been rather to show how landscape has acted on poetry than to illustrate how poets have dealt with landscape; and we hold that the former would have been, in the language of Bacon, the more light-bearing (luciferous) inquiry.

Mr. Palgrave has approached the question historically, and culled from the poets innumerable elevated, or merely pretty, passages in which poets have dealt with landscape either in describing the scene of an incident narrated, or allusively and figuratively to enhance the vigor or effectiveness of a sentiment or reflection. It seems to us that none of such passages have any bearing on the question, how nature has influenced poetry. If a poet says that the arrows fell like snowflakes, he no more shows a sympathy with nature in her wintry moods than he betrays an interest in astronomy or archery if he describes something as shaped like a half-moon or like a bow. When Homer compares Penelope's tears to the streams that flow down the mountain

side when the snow is melted, he is no more under the influence of nature than Tennyson was when he wrote:

I would have said, "Thou canst not know,"

But my full heart, that work'd below,
Rain'd thro' my sight its overflow.

The only difference is that Homer, after the usage of his age and his own manner, goes into fuller detail, just as when he compares the jarring of a heavy and rusty bolt to the roaring of a bull, which he then goes on to de scribe as roaming through the flowery meads. Again, direct narration is out of court. When Virgil says of Dido, in the passage so exquisitely rendered by Tennyson, that she

Ever fail'd to draw
The quiet night into her blood,

he is far more under the influence of nature than when he paints those pretty landscapes, many of which are quoted by Mr. Palgrave; because in the one case we see that the spirit of the night has been felt by him, and that it has unconsciously influenced his diction; while in the other case we find only the conscious artist engaged in the necessary task of unfolding or embellishing his narrative.

Nothing is more invidious than to complain that a writer has not done what he never attempted to do, especially when he has done what he has attempted excellently well. Probably, indeed, Mr. Palgrave's book is really far more interesting than it would have been if he had sought to find out the true relation of the external world

to different epochs and to different individuals. A pharmacopoeia would be, perhaps, better reading if it passed over many healing herbs to linger rather among the lovely "flowers that the dædal earth puts forth." Yet an attempt to deal more directly with the question of the influence of landscape on poetry would have its own interest. It would be a difficult feat; but few are better equipped to essay it than Mr. Palgrave. It would have to be treated not inductively but deductively, and by

analysis rather than synthesis. It would be requisite to discard the historic method, and to devise certain categories or principles, to serve as a framework for a discussion which would tend to be vague and hard to keep within compass. Perhaps among them might stand the questions,-How far is nature felt, not merely described? How far is she appealed to in love and sympathy, and not merely in the interests of clearness or of ornament? How far is she analyzed with a poet's minute keenness of observation, as contrasted with the obvious reflections of an ordinary observer, however beautified by style and diction? Again, does nature sympathize with grief or mock at it? Is mental suffering more grievous amid beautiful or sordid surroundings? We fancy that the answer to most of these questions would go far to show that until quite modern times the influence of the external world on the mind of the poet was insignificant, or did not exist at all. We cannot fancy an ancient poet saying anything like Tennyson's

On the bald street breaks the blank day; or Burns's

Ye banks and braes o' bonny Doon,

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair! How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae weary, fu' o' care;

or Lord Lytton's (Owen Meredith's,

The day comes up above the roofs All sallow from a night of rain. Readers of Mr. Palgrave's excellent chapter on the "Later Roman Epic"

and the "Elocutio Novella" will see that at that epoch Latin poetry was making a closer approach to the modern spirit than was ever made by classical Latin poetry or by Greek or Mediæval. But, unless we are mistaken, be

tween the ancient and the modern spirit there is a great gulf fixed. An anthologist, it is true,-Meleager, of the Syrian Gadara (about 100 B.C.)-asks the meadows why they laugh in vain,-—

Λειμώνες τί μάταια κόμαις ἐπι φαιδρὰ γελᾶτε;

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Considerations like these have sometimes suggested themselves to Mr. Palgrave; but the analyst is overborne by the anthologist. He is so charmed by beauty in literature that he sometimes gives us passages which are merely beautiful and have, as he owns, no bearing on his subject. He notices more than once the difference in the sentiments with which the ancient and the modern worlds have regarded nature, but he does not seem to realize fully that it was a difference in kind and not merely in degree; and principles now and then appear, but only to be soon ignored when he proceeds to illustration. For instance, though we read of that "union with human feeling which, whether by way of sympathy or contrast, art itself and the human soul always imperatively call for," we look in vain for that union in quotations from Greek, Latin, and Hebrew poetry at all events, to say nothing now of the rest. "More distinctly modern," he writes, "is the attempt to penetrate the soul of the landscape itself;" but it has not occurred to him that this attempt may be held to be wholly and solely modern, and quite uncharacteristic of the ancient or mediæval world. Is there a sign of even conscious sensibility to Nature, not to speak of an attempt to penetrate the soul of the landscape in Greek poetry before Theocritus? In Latin poetry, as Professor Sellar pointed out, there is a

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good deal of conscious sensibility to nature, but something quite like the modern, the Wordsworthian and Tennysonian, attitude. Lucretius makes a shrewd and interesting remark: "How splendid would be, if seen for the first time, the clear blue color of the open sky, the wandering stars, and the moon and dazzling sun, to which now man scarce deigns to raise his sated eyes." The feeling for nature, we would say, in Latin poetry is to that of modern poetry as this passage from Lucretius is to Wordsworth's,

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem

Apparel'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

But it is when we come to Horace that we are most puzzled to realize what it is that in Mr. Palgrave's opinion constitutes in a poet a real love of nature and susceptibility to her influence. Apparently the mere mention of a river, a mountain, a valley, is enough. What conceivable proof or sign of a feeling for nature can be

found in the lines

Cur valle permutem Sabina
Divitias operosiores?1

Yet it is with reference to this very couplet that Mr. Palgrave indignantly observes, "Those who cannot find the great poet in Horace should lay aside poetry." Now it seems to us, that for even erroneous views on this subject, renewed study under intelligent direction would be a better treatment than the complete laying aside of poetry; but we cannot regard as erroneous the view which sees in Horace a great poet absolutely uninfluenced by nature, to which, indeed, he often refers with characteristic prettiness, but only to point some shrewd comment on life, its transitoriness and so forth. Surely it does not go for nothing that by far the most elaborate of his eulogies on country life is ironical, a very clever piece of 1 Why lose my Sabine dell to gain

The cares that swell the rich man's traine.

banter directed against practical men who think it graceful to go into ecstasies about the country,-indeed, the most decided protest in poetry against the main feeling which underlies what some now call the Lake School of English poetry. So far as we can gather Mr. Palgrave's meaning on page fiftytwo, we are to account for Horace's limited allusions to landscape by his limited opportunities of living in the country. But is it not strange that when he does dwell, sincerely and not in mockery, on the delights of a country life, it is on the noctes cænæque deûm, his dinner parties and country society, that he enlarges; not on the joys which the country offers, but on those which can be imported thither from the town? Yet Mr. Palgrave twice (pages 238 and 248) actually compares Horace and Wordsworth as lovers of the country.

In characterizing landscape poetry to the close of the eighteenth century, he gives us some excellent criticism which with the necessary modifications might well be applied to Horace: "Man and his works were the chief subject of Dryden's powerful Muse, and, although he looked back to Chaucer, his tales were so modernized by Dryden that the old poet became almost unree ognizable. The wonderful genius of Pope, who saw what his readers quired, largely took for the object of his strenuous labor court life and the artificialities of society. Country life as such was to him intolerable dulness."

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Though only too generous in his appreciation of the poets, and too ready to find, even in casual allusions, heart attuned to the spirit of the country, Mr. Palgrave puts one poet alone outside the pale. This is that tunefulest of singers, Ovid. The late Doctor Henry thought the first book of the "Metamorphoses" better than any part of his favorite Virgil's works. With out going so far as this, we would venture to say that the scene in which Proserpina with her girl friends plucks flowers in Enna, though depreciated as "nothing but a gardener's catalogue,"

compares favorably as landscapepainting with any of Horace's vignettes inspired by a flask of Cæcuban under a tree, and is not inferior to most of the illustrations cited from the subsequent poets (except Shakespeare and Milton), until we come to genuine feeling for nature in recent poetry.

Quintilian, in an oft-quoted passage, pointed out that the Latin poets admired nature only for her amenity; bold and wild scenery, mountain pass and frowning scaur, were to them fædi and tetri visu (shocking and hideous to behold). Tennyson's "Palace of Art," among its lovely pictures of peace, has its "iron coast and angry waves," its "foreground black with stones and slags," and its

Ragged rims of thunder brooding low
With shadow-streaks of rain.

All these would have been repulsive to an ancient Roman whether in art or poetry.

A very similar criticism may be made on landscape in Hebrew poetry. Biblical poetry treats landscape mainly in relation to man. The beautiful scene is the field which the Lord has blessed, which will yield a good harvest. Even the 104th Psalm is hardly landscape poetry so much as a series of reflections on the relation of nature and nature's God to living things, and espe cially to mankind. The one phrase in Hebrew literature which seems to show a real sympathy with nature in the modern sense is the allusion to the lilies of the field in the Sermon on the Mount, a passage which has always seemed to us as curiously unique as it is simply beautiful.

We have said that Mr. Palgrave here and there enunciates a principle which might have had a regulative influence on his quotations, but that his mind, so attuned to beauty in poetry, cannot resist the Muse when she lays herself out to please; and it has already been pointed out how the condition of "union with human feeling," or even the "sense of the Unity in Nature," is often neglected in the choice of illustrations. Though he quotes Beetho

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