lurking forgotten in country-houses. If, however, there was anything like a school of landscape painters in gouache at this period, it cannot have had much strength or character. Such landscape art as there was probably depended on Flemish example. The decorative landscapes by R. Robinson, published by Mr Tristram in the third Walpole volume, are curious as showing a passing influence from Chinese compositions on 17th-century art. These are panels which once decorated a house in Botolph Lane, and have happily been preserved with the room they adorned. But it is not till the 18th century that landscape art becomes serious achievement. Mr Bell contributes informing notes on some of our early masters in water-colour, bringing one or two hitherto unknown personalities to light, and correcting, from newly discovered material, received accounts. The fully illustrated articles on Turner's sketch-books by Mr A. J. Finberg also form valuable documents. All this is the kind of work which, when the subject was minor Italians of the 15th century, has been pursued by English students with solemn enthusiasm; but why should not the art of their own country receive some of their attention?

Compared with France, or with the Netherlands, England can show no persistent and commanding tradition in the arts. In the Middle Ages England was not behind the countries of the Continent; at certain times, and in certain arts, she led. The Black Death came, a destroying blight; the Hundred Years' War, the War of the Roses, unsettled life, diverted money and wasted blood, treasure, energy at once. Puritanism both obliterated all it could of the once-cherished art of the past, and frowned down beauty in its own experience of life. The Renaissance came late to these islands, too late and tired and weakened to breathe fervour and force into the English arts. Traditions had been too effectually broken. The embers were cold. The imagination of the race flowed into literature. We see a man like Blake, who, born in the later Middle Ages, with a heritage of sound craftsmanship, might have shone for later time with a glory of rare achievement generating masterpieces in his successors-we see him reaching out from the prison of his own age to the halfdiscerned Gothic grandeur, striving to bridge over that

immense and lamentable gap, and to recover the tradition's broken thread. Rossetti and his group, for whom Blake in his turn was a prophet, make another splendid effort to take up the interrupted story and bring back imagination to the arts of their country. But it is always a difficult fight; strife absorbs energy that should flow into creation. For this is the disabling circumstance: the arts have been divorced from the imaginative life. It is not that gift has been lacking. Any one who studies English painting in the 19th century must be struck by the abundance of fine talent-sensitive eye and dexterous hand-put to the service of an almost inconceivable triviality. The imaginative life of the century is scarcely hinted at; it is as if it did not exist We must accuse the patron more than the artist.

Broken, obscured, beset by fatality and all kinds of untimeliness, the English tradition in the arts has been. But the capacity for expression in the arts has never died out. To recall and revive works of beauty made by our countrymen; to make known what fine traditions have been interrupted and neglected; to correct the prevalent ignorance and incredulity; this is the honourable task which the Walpole Society has undertaken. It is relevant also to the art of our own time. For the artist by instinct looks both before and after; he needs the support of previous achievement in working for the future, and he needs the faith of his countrymen in the national genius.

LAURENCE BINYON.

CORRIGENdum.

In the number for October 1920 (No. 465), p. 365, line 4,

for 'Russian' read 'Rumanian.'

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