New Books on Art

II.

MR. HAMERTON, in comparing the studious perfection of detail in the accessories of Mr. Alma-Tadema’s pictures of Roman life with the poverty which obtained in the backgrounds and surroundings of the classical compositions of the last century, states that the habit of the modern artist in this respect is “ in perfect harmony with the spirit of research which belongs to the present day.” It is this spirit of research which explains the characteristic relations which have been lately established between literature and art,—relations, the effect of which upon art is evident, not only directly in such work as we have referred to, but in a less obvious manner in the fundamental conception of the functions of art. Under this impulse, more or less consciously enforced, art has gained on (lie intellectual side what it has lost on tlie sensuous or emotional. We have seen what heights it is capable of attaining under the latter conditions in the religious art of the fifteenth century; we have yet to see, perhaps, what achievements are possible with such inspirations as are to be furnished by the nineteenth. Mr. Hamerton himself has contributed not a little to the discussions out of which, in great part, the new spirit of art is developing. The purely literary and speculative element in these discussions is not without its uses, but when, united with the literary and theoretical faculties, practical experience in art enters the field, the probability of an ideal no longer misty and doubtful, but definite and symmetrical, arising, like Anadyomene, from the troubled sea of dispute, is greatly enhanced.

Mr. Hamerton’s monthly publication, The Portfolio, ¹ contains the most notable and effective expositions of current English thought on the subject of art, and these, set forth as they are with reproductions, by the best modern masters of engraving, of the best examples in English collections, are the most formidable and business-like demonstrations yet made for English - speaking people against the strongholds of Philistinism. There is plenty of dilettanteism elsewhere, but in these pages the silent spirit of the artist, the long-suffering spirit, which has pursued its way with the brush, the burin, or the modelingtool, undismayed by the clamorous denunciations of absolute amateurs and the exactions of peremptory critics, seems at last to have found a voice. Art is speaking for itself in well-chosen and deliberate words, and it is well for us to listen.

The Portfolio for 1877, which is now before us, fully bears out the promise of its predecessor. Its most conspicuous contents are a series of articles by Mr. Sidney Colvin on Albert Dürer, his Teachers, his Rivals, and his Followers; a series by the editor on tlie Althorp Gallery; a continued series by R. N. Wornum on the National Gallery; and two series by the editor on Turner, and on Mr. Wyld and his sketches in Italy. The pages on Albert Dürer and his school are illustrated by a series of etchings, selected for comparison and contrast, by various masters of that age, when engraving was in its first perfection, and when the greatest men threw into the art their best powers of mind and body. These etchings are perfectly reproduced in these pages by the process of M. Amand-Durand, in which a new copper-plate is produced from a line engraving or etching in such a manner that all the force, delicacy, or brilliancy of the original is preserved in the facsimile. Among these prints the most remarkable reproduction, perhaps, is that of Marcantonio’s masterpiece, the portrait of Pietro Aretino, the infamous bastard of Arezzo, considered the most consummate piece of engraved portraiture in existence. This fac-simile has been made with great skill, by the mechanical process of M. Amand-Durand, from an impression of the first state of the print, of which there are only two known examples. Mr. Colvin’s text is distinguished for a very happy and, when occasion requires, a brilliant literary style, especially when concerned with analysis of methods in the production of artistic effects. The reciprocal influence of the Italian and German masters in the earliest development of the art of engraving during the sixteenth and the latter half of the fifteenth century, as explained in Mr. Colvin’s fourth article, is a good example of the service which literature may render to art; from the nature of the case, the essential characteristics of the spirit of a school or of an artist are often of a kind to elude expression in language; they are called matters of feeling, and the lay reader is obliged to content himself with a mystery when he seeks for a tangible fact. But the words in these papers which are directed to the analysis of the genius of Andrea Mantegna (page 57), for instance, are not used in the merely literary manner, to cover a real absence of appreciation with an affluence of high-sounding phrases, but they convey concrete ideas with elegance and precision; they accomplish the difficult task of making clear to the layman some of the apparently unspeakable qualities of artistic genius, — qualities such as poetry of the highest order sometimes succeeds in suggesting to the imaginative and sympathetic mind, but which seem to defy the resources of prose to set forth in any uninspired, deliberate, or merely scientific manner.

This is high praise, but it'may he applied also to Mr. Colvin’s description of the Little Masters of Germany and their works. To the careful reader, not versed in the spirit of the earlier etchings and engravings of German, or, as Vasari always called it, of Flemish art, these descriptions and comparisons must prove a revelation, not alone of the quality of the art, which of course is the immediate point in question, but of the manners and customs of the time, the habits of thought which the art all unconsciously illustrates and embodies. Thus interpreted, the three little subjects opposite page 136, etched by Altdorfer, and the four opposite page 152, by the brothers Beham, must assume a new significance; their importunate and often homely and unimaginative detail, their exquisite care and finish, their quaintness of subject, their unaffected and earnest manner, — these qualities are genuine and naive; to consider them intelligently is an exposition of history. The religious art, which places the awful subject of the Annunciation in a Dutch kitchen, with a roller towel hung against the wall behind the announcing angel, with the lily in a clay flower-pot, and a busy street scene outside the homely easement, as shown in one of the illustrative plates, is an art which needs more explanation than is readily attainable; the secret of it lies remote among the springs of human action, and, when discovered, explains far more than the real meaning of a print four inches by seven; it reveals the causes of wars, treaties, and reformations. Hence, such literature as we are now dealing with, in throwing light upon the obscure motives which formed a certain phase of art, is benefiting humanity as well as art. It is not merely a curious study; it is a contribution to essential knowledge.

The art of the Italian masters from 1450 to 1550, although compact of antique learning and traditions, is impassioned and emotional. As Mr. Colvin finely says of Mantegna, “founding his art upon the study of statuary and the antique, and upon the laws of perspective and geometry, he might easily have lost hold of nature and fallen into pedantry. But the art of that age in Italy was as incapable of pedantry as of vulgarity; it can carry any amount of learning without being pedantic; the very fervor of the artist’s studies, the intensity of his devotion to science and the antique, — il grande amore, — somehow pass into the marble or canvas, and prevent the work from seeming cold or labored.” The contemporary art of Dürer and his compatriots, on the other hand, seems to have been evolved out of the necessities of their own natures; it was inspired by the res anguslce domi, and shaped its ideal out of the homely stuff such as may be found in peasant lives; but it was expressed with loving and minute care, with earnestness, delicacy, and force; so that the Italians, stimulated by the knowledge and imagination of the fresh Renaissance, with their minds full of heroes, demigods, the creatures of mythological traditions and their great doings, when they fell upon these German prints, grotesque but strenuous, rugged and commonplace in theme, but pathetic, intense, and rendered with patient skill, found a new inspiration drawn from contemporary life, and immediately adopted into their own art all the qualities out of German art which could improve their methods or humanize their genius. Of course the German ideal in contact with that of Italy was forthwith elevated to a higher plane, but it never lost its rural force and pathos.

The series of plates from the National Gallery is continued in the Portfolio for last year with etchings by Flameng, Mengin, Lhuillier, and other masters, and a new series from the collection of Earl Spencer (the Althorp Gallery) is begun with etchings by Flameng, Richeton, Murray, and Lhuillier. Of these the works of Flameng in especial are remarkable for their happy suggestion of the element of color in the original paintings, without which suggestion, in fact, the raison d'etre of some of these plates might fairly be questioned; but in so far as they do set forth the values of color and the chiaro-scuro, as -well as the qualities of drawing, in the masters whose works they undertake to reproduce, they must take a very high rank in the art. The etchings of Flameng, at least, easily and surely accomplish this result.

Any notice of this collection, however, would be incomplete without especial reference to the masterly etchings of Legros, in the portraits of Poynter, the English painter, and of Jules Dalou, the French sculptor. These two works are in the severe early Italian style of etching with lines running in one direction, without the usual cross-hatching which was invented by the Germans. Under this exceptionally difficult condition of handling, the modeling of these two heads is a triumph of technical skill. We have seldom met with such fine examples of portrait design in serious modern art.

Mr. Hamerton himself continues his temperate but appreciative papers on Turner. They are such papers as an artist should write of an artist; they get behind the apparent face of Turner’s genius, and disclose the primary formations beneath the surface out of which, by the series of great revolutions and upheavals to which the sensitive mind is subject, finally emerged the perfected artistic nature of the man. It is a very workmanlike and thorough piece of analysis, which can enable the mind untrained in the technique of the painter’s craft to “ make sense ” out of the shapeless iridescence and wanton aberrations by which, in the experimental stages of its career, this singular and fortunate imagination gave expression to its conflict with nature. It is to this task, however, that the artist critic successfully addresses himself in these pages. We have space to quote but one general observation as an example, but this, in view of the manner in which it is customary to talk of the greatest Turneresque effects, is worth remembering.

Mr. Hamerton, in speaking of Turner’s distant effects, by which he made his first claim to be regarded as a master of landscape art, says: “ Such painting requires not only much good-will in the spectator, but also great knowledge, freedom from vulgar prejudices, and some degree of faith in the painter himself. When people see a noble effect in nature, there is one stock observation which they almost invariably make: they always say, or nearly always, ‘ Now, if we were to see that effect in a picture we should not believe it to be possible.’ One would think that, after such a reflection on their own tendency to unbelief in art and to astonishment in the presence of nature, people would be forewarned against their own injustice; but it is not so. They will make that observation every time they see a fine sunset or a remarkable cloud in the natural world, and remain as unjust as ever to the art which represents phenomena of the same order. Turner had to contend against this disposition to deny the truth of everything that is not commonplace.” This, in short, is the sort of literary work which, not stooping to amuse by mere prettiness, opens to common apprehensions the profound and serious mission of art in these modern days, and encourages the artist to approach the higher standards of culture. The Portfolio is by no means the least among the agencies at work to bring about this result. We commend it as a part of the machinery of the new civilization. Dr. Wilhelm Lübke, professor of art at Stuttgart, and author of a number of works, all of which, like the present,² have been issued in repeated editions, seems to hold for his own country a position somewhat like that of Taine and Viollet-le-Duc in France and Ruskin in England. The analogy is not very close, since there is nothing in him of the doc~ trinaire, nothing of the warm enthusiasm of the latter two for the original views they propound with a corresponding impatience of contradiction. Nor is he, like Taine, purely a philosopher. He appears in the more patient and laborious rôle of a compiler. Instead of surveying the field of art with a keen, fresh glance, to divine in it a meaning hitherto undiscovered, his preoccupation appears to be rather to weigh judicially former systems in the various branches, to select the positions he deems the best supported, and to throw them together in a reliable whole for the use of those who desire a text-book in a moderate compass. He is reported by some of those who have listened to his lectures at Stuttgart, which are no doubt better at first than at second hand, to be a person of general appreciation and sympathies. Apart from a strong patriotic German bias, he certainly shows no especial predilection or favoritism for one form of art over another.

An important feature of the late awakening of interest in these matters is its extension amongst the middle classes. They cannot afford many or expensive books. They would like a work, ornamental and attractive in itself, to present the subject fully and lie upon the drawing-room table for reference. It need not go into all the minor sinuosities, but it ought to contain, without omitting any, those broader, leading aspects which may be mastered without neglecting the ordinary avocations of life. Bearing in mind thoroughness and painstaking as traditional German traits, looking over the very full illustrations,—there are five hundred and fifty in all, — and snatching here and there some passages of graphic and picturesque description, one is inclined at first to believe that he has found something quite meeting the requirement. It has, for the moment, much of the effect of examples of the new Munich school of painting, in which the mechanism is still as perfect as of old, while the traditional German hardness and coldness are replaced by freedom ami warmth. The pleasant impression lasts especially through the distinct characterizations of the earlier epochs of art. So great is the accumulation of matters at the present time that it is particularly desirable — and this above all in a popular treatise — that each branch of human development should be displayed by its most distinctive side, in order that it may keep its place amid the pressure of a thousand new demands. The author is apparently aware of this, and aims to gratifv it by tracing each successive phenomenon to a definite, physical cause. We are delighted with these lucid concepts, and astonished to find that so vast and apparently obscure a field has been so thoroughly sifted and reduced to rule. It is not until we begin to compare these neat summaries among themselves that the impression is disturbed. Then we are inclined to find that perhaps “ he doth protest too much.” His general theory is of an intimate correlation between civilization and topography. So unqualifiedly does he carry out its application that we may even have thought that, with the causes of every varied phase of development accurately spread before us, it might be possible to rise to the gift of prophecy. It seems that the indication of the localities of the next flowerings of art and their character need be nothing any longer but a matter of an atlas and some tables of mean temperatures. But arriving at the end of the first volume, if we please to go back and note bow the detailed explanations support the general scheme, we shall find some strange discrepancies.

The general distribution of the matter is into four divisions: the ancient art of the East, classic art, mediaeval art, and modern art. Each has its natural subdivisions, as classic into Greek, Etruscan, and Roman, and each, again, its appropriate periods. Each variety is discussed under the three heads of architecture, sculpture, and painting. They are considered historically and critically at the same time, and for the most part preceded by general remarks upon the kind and its origin. It is in following these preliminary remarks consecutively that we come upon an apparent carelessness; the author seems to have paid little heed to a theory of a special state of things when once it has served the purpose in hand, and to have confided in a similar happy forgetfulness on the part of the public. Though each explanation of causes stands fairly complete in itself, there is no thought taken to reconcile the conflict of the rise of quite similar art developments from most dissimilar circumstances, or to explain why it is, on the other hand, that from circumstances entirely analogous to those depicted at certain points no arts at all have arisen at other points. Such a line of treatment as the following is so common throughout the first sections as almost to serve as a formula: “ The question suggests itself why it was that this particular branch which we know under the name of the Greek should have so far surpassed all other nations of similar origin. In order to understand this it will be necessary to study carefully the nature of the country.” Its hills and valleys are then examined, and the author continues: “Bearing all these influences in mind, we shall comprehend how a people dwelling for centuries in such a region must gradually develop such a character as we find in the Greeks.” A kind of argument in a circle recurs continually. Without adding any new premise to what was already known, it is concluded from an examination of surfaces, as if a priori, that results of a certain kind must follow. Turning, then, to the actual situation, what do we find ? The wonderful coincidence of the exact results predicted. It is not easy to credit such a want of reflection, if it be that, or such an appearance of talking for the sake of talk, to a work of such grave and reverend character, from an author of such apparent repute. It is unfortunately, however, a matter of demonstration. We need only set side by side a number of the assigned causes from which we are given to understand that civilization and art took their origin. It appears that art arose in —

(1.) Egypt, from a great river flowing without tributaries through a narrow fertile belt. The spirit of the free development of the individual was lacking; hence its art development “must have been ” chiefly in the direction of architecture.

(2.) Assyria, from a surface consisting of scattered fertile districts separated by inhospitable wastes. Man in these circumstances (as explained by Taine in Holland, where it was doubtless the case), compelled to active exertion to subdue external nature, developed in the process a general force, which he went on to apply in other directions.

(3.) India, from a vast peninsula of tropical luxuriance, watered by a network of rivers. “ It could not have been otherwise ” than that this should have filled the mind with brilliant picturcs, and also should have imparted a strong mystical and religious bias. Development was exclusively limited to religious matters. Buddhism is said to have been necessary, however, to the production of genuine artistic creations, in contrast to the before prevalent Brahminism, “which had corrupted to the utmost the national mind of the Hindoo people.” Inasmuch as there are no earlier records than its own, it is hard to see what it had corrupted it from. Besides that, it presently appears, “ Brahminism has produced a multitude of no less magnificent detached buildings;” and further, in China, where Buddhism had and has entire sway, a monumental and serious religious style has never arisen.

(4.) Greece, from a territory cut up by mountains into numerous independent valleys opening to the sea. “ This infinitely rich individualizing of the surface at once suggests that here, if anywhere, scope was afforded for an analogous development of human existence.” Unlike the slavish Orientals, the Greeks afford us the picture of personal inner development, severely subordinated, however, to the interests of the state. Hence, in the temple alone the art of architecture found a field for development. (But compare the statement of the exclusively religious development of India above and what is said of the result of the Romanesque condition below.)

(5.) Arabia, from a rocky, barren plateau, without rivers or maritime facilities.

The topographical argument does not extend much farther. It is not carried into modern times or among the modern nations as we know them; but other good and sufficient, always very definite reasons are sought for each successive occasion, and they contradict each other, as above, with great ease. In the division of Early Christian Art it is said, “ So wonderful and profound are the laws of the inner life of humanity that only by this road (the adopting of antique models) the possibility of an immeasurably rich, new development could be attained.” In the division of Romanesque Art architecture must have been the highest form of activity, because it was a period of transition and youthful fermentation. Compare the respectively dissimilar states of mind of Greece, Egypt, and the whole Orient, in which — the latter two especially— architecture also “must have been ” and was the leading activity.

Much of this reasoning is valid and well founded by the agreement of archaeologists, hut it is only a partial and very far from a complete solution of the conditions for which it purports to account. When it is used as all sufficient, we cannot resist the desire to be told why it. was that civilizations and arts did not arise by other rivers, and among other hills and valleys and plateaux, of identical character; and why, if it was only the exaltation of individualism here and the repression of it there to which phenomena were due, the phenomena were not uniform and constant, and the most marked where the respective conditions prevailed in the extremest degree.

If an ultimate principle to which everything is to be referred be a desideratum in a work of this kind, the race theory, so strongly insisted on by Michelet and prefaced by Ferguson to his voluminous history of architecture, seems much better adapted to the purpose. The four great original elements, unchanged and unchangeable in their essence — the Turanian, idolatrous, abject, without feeling for symmetry, but impressible to color; the Semitic, monotheistic, poetic, rather literary and cold than artistic; the Celtic, unstable in government, but sharply logical, and open to all glowing impressions; the Aryan, political, excelling in the useful, and without spontaneity in art — are not susceptible of demonstration; yet the plan can be supported by a mass of evidence, and it has the merit at least of comprehensiveness and of going to the bottom.

The same sort of forgetfulness is discoverable in minor matters in Dr. Lübke’s work, to an extent which much confuses the general reader and leaves him without a final impression. What is denied in one paragraph is quite likely to be affirmed in the next: as, to take an example at random, that Mohammedan art never succeeded in developing any universal and definite model for its houses of worship, and immediately after that it is possible to reduce the forms of mosques to two types. It is a puzzling line of conduct inasmuch as the ideas are apparently there, and we do not feel altogether prepared to say that they are not rightly understood and intended. We are at first inclined to lay it to the translator, but a comparison of the texts shows that, aside from a few harmless departures in the way of giving to sentences a more sonorous finish, the original is faithfully adhered to. There is a strange thickness and roundaboutness of statement,— a neglect of the smaller qualifications and of a close observation of their bearings, which is not only necessary to knit the argument into a perfectly logical whole, but without which, as we have seen, It is in parts elusive and unintelligible.

Considering the book apart from its philosophy of causes, which, though valuable, if consistent and authoritative, is by no means an indispensable adjunct of such a work, and taking it in its purely historical and critical aspects, it is possible to yield again to a more favorable impression, particularly in the earlier divisions and in the portions relating to plastic art as distinguished from architecture. If it does not present too acceptably the reasons of their being, it at least shows clearly, in the main, the appearances of things. The mysterious impassiveness of the Egyptian type, the crude, realistic tendency of the Assyrian, the wild fancifulness and luxurious softness, by turns, of the Indian, are strongly grasped, and the picture of Greek art will hardly be found anywhere more satisfactorily presented in so small a compass. This is indeed largely a matter of the illustrations. The true progress of the long, charming story is read only in turning the interminable series of these; the words but expand and define the impression already vividly received. Here is an Egyptian hero in the pictured chronicles of their walls, towering above men and cities, rushing along in his battle

chariot, and slaughtering a myriad of insignificant enemies; here, again, Cyrus, with double wings, and mighty horns of dominion rising from his forehead, naively proclaiming, in a cuneiform inscription, “ I am Cyrus, the king, the Achæmenide.” Here are in turn the progress of Greek art, from the chrysalis of the Pelasgic bas-reliefs to the perfect, melting grace of the ago of Pericles; the majesty of the Roman portrait statues; the conceits of the troubled early Christians in their catacombs, their symbols, and the archaic good shepherd carrying the lamb on his shoulders; the Byzantine mosaics, with their elegant embroidered patterns and stiff types forever fixed by rigid conventions; the unsympathetic tangle of Saracenic arabesques; the pure and noble draped statues of the cathedral porches; the lovely, symmetrical altarpieccs of Andrea del Sarto and Fra Bartolommeo, and the wild, ecstatic ones of the great epic masters; the sensuous nudities of the revived classicists; their theatrical exaggerations later; the confined lights and rich shadows of the Flemings; the rise of genre, and the arrival at modern times with its wide acquaintance with all the perfections that were in their times developed each in its remote corner and under its special conditions, and its balancing uneasily upon the verge of great conceptions, which it seeks but does not find, for the display of its universal knowledge. Of all this and the scores of intermediate gradations there are representative views enough to be of great value, apart from a letter - press which is not marshaled with the clearness and directness of a Lecky, but is far from being without entertaining qualities in its more successful portions. The more successful departments, it must be unhesitatingly said, are those of the fine arts proper. In architecture the author seems to be much loss at home. This appears in a failure to seize the essential meaning of forms as deduced from their constructive causes, which is the more singular since, as we have seen, this is the very point with which he has the air of being the most preoccupied. His descriptions are often in the reverse of the real order of importance. Appearances are treated of as they might impress the uninitiated observer rather than one who knew the structural reason for their existence. Thus, in explaining the Romanesque (and Gothic) door-ways, it is said: “ The central point of the facade was the main entrance, whose walls spread on either hand from the inside to the outside, and were often cut rectangularly, so that hollows are formed in which tiny, separate, slender columns are arranged.” How much more clearly is this conception fixed in the head by the statement that the sides are thus spread or “ splayed ” simply to take off the disagreeable effect of sharp corners, and that the splaying is more marked and the angle shafts, with which the baldness of the arrangement is further mitigated, more numerous iu proportion to the increasing thickness of the wall. Nor is the weight of evidence to the effect that the stainedglass windows were simply a decorative feature, devised to fill up the wall spaces left useless by the adoption of groined vaulting and the buttress system, but rather that this system was perfected to the utmost to give the greatest possible room for the brilliant new decoration and the elaborate traceries in which it was set, which made of the once sombre interiors vast jewel-boxes. There is, besides, an unusual and awkward technical nomenclature, as the “ body ” and the “ giant ” for certain parts of a buttress, — what parts we are not informed, — old and young “servants” for the primary and secondary fillets of clustered shafts, and “lisenes” for simple pilaster strips. On the whole, Very little satisfaction will be got from Dr. Lübke’s architecture. The reader will do infinitely better in this branch to turn from the German book to another, the straightforward treatise of Rosengarten, published by the Appletons in 1876. It must be of very nearly the same extent, comprising all of Lübke’s scattered divisions in one, and there can be no comparison in point of clearness and completeness.

The national bias we have mentioned manifests itself by very frequent referenees to “the German mind,” the attribution to this influence of effects which the writers with whom we have been most familiar heretofore have by no means so accurately traced to it. and the illustration of principles as far as possible bv German examples. It is a partisanship, however, that seems rather creditably patriotic. It is exerted very little to the detriment of other nationalities, and this by the indirect method of neglect instead of the ill-natured fashion we recently had occasion to note in the travels of the French architect, M. Narjoux. But, just as it may be to bring into a clearer daylight, now that the German empire has advanced so prominently to the front, matters perhaps too long suppressed by unfriendly framers of opinion, this new distribution of merits adds to the difficulty of comprehension, at least for those who had already made some small advances towards the subject from the points of view which we had almost considered established.

The ostensible fairness of the author is manifested in such paragraphs as that in which he opens a survey of Dürer: “ Dürer is rightfully the darling and pride of the German people, but we should not allow ourselves to forget that, being the highest expression of our excellences and virtues, he is at the same time the representative of our weaknesses and deficiencies. Blind idolatry is never seemly, least of all in connection with so genuinely true, so severe a master. We are not permitted to hurry over the austere, rugged externalities of his style either with indifference or pretended rapture.”

Including the Netherlawlers among Germanic peoples, the German influence in painting must be readily admitted, especially in the modern features of genre and landscape, to which attention was turned for new subjects after the upheavals of the great religious wars, in which in the North the old ideals were destroyed. Farther back, too, than this, the quaint Dombild of Master Stephen of Cologne takes rank as perhaps the highest development of the art in the distinctively Gothic period, and Holbein and Dürer yield to none, in their respective styles, for the boldest originality. We are tempted to wish — but this is a condition perhaps inseparable from a work which has so much ground to cover — that less of the narrative wore a mere cataloguing of names, and that more of it were given to such full typical expositions as those of Holbein and Dürer.

In a final chapter, on the art of the nineteenth century, Dr. L&@x00FC;bke makes the claim — which seems so preposterous even to the editor that he avails himself of a foot-note to refute it — that in this period Germany takes the lead, and that “ it is to her we owe the truly thoughtful and promising regeneration of art.” Mr. Cook, on the contrary, decidedly holds that we owe the revival of art in our own time to France and England. He is not far from right, we think, in estimating that nearly everything that Germany has done in the last hundred years must survive, if it survive at all, as a warning example. We trust he does not mean to include in this, however, the Munich school of the latest date, which has done and is doing some work showing very admirable artistic qualities. The preface to this concluding chapter, aiming to generalize the peculiar conditions and spirit of the time, is an epitome of the elusiveness, in a mass of fair-seeming, philosophic verbiage, of which we have complained, and of which we had tried to believe, in escaping it for a time in some of the more satisfactory later sections, we had derived an unjust impression. In four pages it says nothing that can be definitely grasped as a solution. Of the United States, in the review of national conditions in this period, it is only said that it shows an evident leaning towards the German schools, under the leadership of Leutze. The names of Winslow Homer and Wordsworth Thompson, —certainly drawn out of a hat by lot, —it is said, may be added, “and among the numerous landscape painters, Bierstadt, Whittredge, Colman, and Gifford.” That is all, and its absurdity as a concept of our art, without reference to its length, is one of the reduplicated circumstances that put it out of one’s power —with the readiest disposition to do so, as a recognition of the handsome form in which the hook is presented by the publishers and the very full and useful notes of the painstaking editor — to commend it as a valuable work for the purpose intended. We are not so far off as ancient Assyria, for instance, and if it be thus difficult to fix the status of the United States, the skeptical person can hardly help being troubled with misgivings about Korsabad and Kujjunjik.