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CONTRAST.

PERHAPS there never was a question less creditable to the discernment of the mind which gave it birth than one lately propounded, Which is more essential to beauty, harmony or contrast? It is about as reasonable to ask, Which is longer, a mile or a month? or (to choose a more faithful illustration) to inquire, Which is more worthy of praise, virtue or honesty? Just as virtue exists not without honesty, so harmony implies the presence of contrast, the absence of which means sameness; and just as a character, in so far as it is honest, partakes of virtue, so contrast is indispensable to harmony, which is the essence of beauty.

day: "This suggestive subject was treated in most thoughtful and artistic fashion, shaded with pathos and tenderness, and developed into sentences of great character and brilliancy."

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At what point is this licence of language to stop? As reporting becomes more and more realistic and personal, such piracy of phrase may be indefinitely extended. Thus we may have to read some day that "the right hon. gentleman resumed his seat amid a perfect panorama of applause. the speech, which even political opponents must admit was masterpiece, his well-known vigour of impasto was not permitted to But contrast means more than interfere with sobriety of colour: mere difference, and is generally the fingering in the intricate finsomewhat loosely defined. The ancial obligato was a consummate fine arts being the exponents of piece of dexterity, and almost led beauty, there is a tendency, in dis- the audience to imagine that two cussing its nature, to slide into the human instruments were sounding, use of technical terms in the arts- -an illusion intensified when the a habit which, so far from tending speaker permitted himself an occato elucidate, only serves to confuse sional scumble of local allusion. and conceal sense. This incon- The staccato was well marked, and venience is increased when the ex- led up with incisive effect to the pressions proper to one of the arts stately chiar' oscuro of the peroraare applied to works in another. tion, which closed in a grand crash Thus the calculated eccentricity of of harmony." a certain English painter has accustomed the public to the paradox of "symphonies" (that is, harmony of sound) in such and such colours; we read of pictures executed in a high or low "key" of colour; while, on the other hand, it is common for critics to praise one piece of music as "sparkling" or "brilliant" (that is, shining, reflecting much light), and to depreciate another as being deficient in "colour." Here is a paragraph from musical review in the newspaper nearest at hand, published yester

VOL. CXLIX.-NO. DCCCCVIII.

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The Court journalist will revel in this linguistic elasticity: "Lady Lydia Fetterless wore a charming ballad in French grey, illustrated with delicate vignettes in pale-blue and pink ribbons.

This simple

but pleasing melody is the composition of Madame Mirliton of South Audley Street: and the diamond movement on the bosom and hair was admirably executed by her ladyship's femme de chambre, Mlle. Jane Schoking."

All this, if not mischievous, is unnecessary, for every art has by 3 D

this time a complete terminology of its own; and although it would be pedantic to deny that occasionally a term borrowed from a single art has become indispensable to all, yet it is worth remarking that what is gained for the art which borrows is lost in definite meaning to that which lends. The word "tone," for example, is not only constantly used in painting, but in the compound "monotony " has extended far beyond the arts altogether; and the art of music has now no precise word to express the sound emitted by a stretched string, to define which the word "tone' was originally formed from the Greek TÓVOSTeive, to stretch. In revenge, artists have laid claim to a monopoly in certain words, or exact, as it were, a royalty on their use, as if, which is not the case, such words had been devised by them. Thus musicians have laid violent hands on the excellent words "harmony" and "discord." The filching of the latter word has been made easier by a supposed connection with a chord in music; but in fact the real meaning of concord and discord is a far wider one-namely, the union and jarring of hearts. As for "harmony," it is a Greek word meaning the joining of things fitly together, yet it has long ago become difficult to separate its use from the idea of melody. In the " "Testament of Love Chaucer says

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"There is a melodye in heauen whiche

clerkes clepen armony,"

and one should be slow to grudge the clerks the use of such a wellchosen expression; but the fact that they have chosen well so to "clepe" melody should not be allowed to narrow the scope of the term proper to what is the chief element in all beauty.

These preliminary paragraphs have the object of making clear that contrast, discord, harmony, and such terms are not used here in the limited or technical sense in which they are often found, but in the essence of their own meaning.

Contrast is sometimes understood to imply suddenness or violence of opposition, but such is no essential part of its nature. Contrast consists in the balance of qualities, those which are absent in one part of a group, organism, scene, or work of art, being present in another part. In respect of suddenness, contrast possesses every variety of degree for instance, it is as much present when the full chord is struck as when the notes of it are sounded arpeggio or consecutively; as much in the grey dawn stealing slowly over the dark sky as in the blinding flash of lightning at mirk midnight. Each is part of that harmony, or fitting together, which carries out the scheme of beauty. Human beings, perhaps from impatience for sensation, seem unconsciously to prefer those passages in nature where the contact of extremes simplifies the contrast and makes it more vivid. The operation of this instinct is sometimes the cause of what seems merely fickle fashion, which is owing, however, less to a revolution in taste than to altered conditions. A curious instance of this is recorded in connection with a certain beautiful park on the Firth of Clyde, which was laid out by "Capability Brown," the great landscape-gardener. There is a steep hill in full view of the house, clothed with wood, save where a precipitous grey crag shows its impracticable front through the foliage. This shred of savage nature in the midst of peaceful greenery is a charming feature in

the landscape; but it was not so regarded by Mr Brown, who, it is said, considered it a blemish, and urged that it should be painted green, so as to look like a grassy slope! Now, in Mr Brown's day, the surrounding country being all heather and rock, the artist's object in designing the park was to create a green oasis in the brown wilderness; hence his proposal, though in dubious taste even then, might be more plausibly defended than now, when all the land for miles around is under cultivation, and the eye turns gratefully for relief to the hoary precipice.

The great charm of water in scenery consists in the wonderful contrast it affords to the solid earth. Your child strays from you in the grounds; if there is a brook or a pond in the demesne, it is there you will turn to look for him, and it is by the margin that he will assuredly be found. The same impulse prevails with grown people. The Londoner's idea of a holiday is to get to the seaside, where lands and waters meet. It would seem, indeed, as if absolute and sudden contrast were necessary to the highest beauty in landscape. The place where perfect scenery may most surely be looked for is where mountains rise from the plain. Artists know this well. It is not among the restless outlines and unquiet foregrounds of an Alpine valley that great subjects offer themselves. Studies there are in plenty, such as the deep-browed chalet with luscious warm hues among the timber joints and exquisite greys on the shingle roof; the copious crystal of the mill-stream dashing over the wheel, and hurrying away among the mossy boulders below. The grass is nowhere of so clear a green, nor set with flowers of such pure hues,

as where the steep mountain lawn loses itself among the crowded pines. All this lavish colour and vibrating growth, this play of falling waters and comfort of securely built homestead, is enhanced by the motionless, colourless, inhospitable snow-field above. But to imbibe the magic which transfers to a piece of canvas measured by inches that sense of space which is the true charm of landscape art, the painter must descend to a plain, such as that, for example, lying round the city of Turin. Here the level land, deeply farmed and set with ordered rows of trees garlanded with vines, spreads for miles to where, afar and widely on the north, rises sudden surge of many-crested Alps. Here is not merely the opposition of level plain to jagged horizon, of shadow of flying cloud to sunlit peaks, but something that rouses the fancy as well as excites the eye. Insensibly the mind compares the rich, busy, easily traversed plain with the impassable barren solitude of the heights. So long as paint and canvas endure, generations after the hand that united them has mouldered into dust, so long will one beholding such a picture be thrilled by the eternal harmony of such a scene.

Every one deplores the lack of beauty and interest in contemporary portrait-painting, but allowance is not always made for the enormous difficulty to be encountered by our painters, in that far more than half the portraits executed in each year are those of men; and never in the history of the world was the dress of the civilised male so hideous as it is among ourselves. The Chancellor of the Exchequer expressed this well in his speech at the Royal Academy banquet last month, when, in apologising to the

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artists for the humdrum and commonplace subjects supplied for representation by nineteenth-century civilisation, he said that the impression left on his mind by the portraits in the Exhibition was that of "a blameless record of duties comfortably performed and of taxes punctually paid." It is doubtful if Adam and Eve, when, still acalypt, the necessity for some covering first dawned on their perplexed senses, can have endured such poignancy of shame as must overtake an educated man when he reflects that it is his example that has caused the Japanese to fling aside their delicately tinted silks and exquisite embroidery, and to don the odious envelope of a nineteenth-century European. The bombardment of the Parthenon was not a vulgar outrage upon the beautiful. One is reminded of a burlesque called "The Happy Land," which was put on the stage some twenty years ago, and the whole town crowded to see. It was a bitter piece of satire on the administration of the day, and included such wicked caricatures of three of the principal Ministers, made up to the life, that the Lord Chamberlain interfered to prohibit the performance. One of the characters thus held up to ridicule was the late Mr Ayrton, then First Commissioner of Works. The Ministers were represented as transported into Paradise; the scene was aglow with lovely colour, which proving intolerable to the official mind of the First Commissioner, he promptly ordered everything to be painted "Government grey.' It is perhaps not generally known that a monument of this policy remains to this day. The inner lobby of the House of Commons, which, whatever may be held to be the merits of the style, is at all events.

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a consummate example of our native Tudor architecture, has fretted walls of stonework and a wooden roof. Some difficulty was found in keeping this stonework clean, owing to the smoke from numerous gas-burners. Mr Ayrton settled the matter by ordering the whole of the walls to be painted stonecolour, and the roof yellowish brown, so that the effect now is exactly the same as if the whole affair was stucco and pasteboard!

Well, to return to portraitpainting. Broadcloth seems to have spread the same blight upon our canvas that coal-smoke has brought upon our scenery. Black garments did not prevail, it is true, to numb the consummate hand of such a master as Franz Hals; but in his day, at least, there was still some beauty in tailors' designs; even he might have felt daunted if, instead of trunk-hose, his subjects had concealed their lower limbs in shapeless tubes of cloth, and had crowned their persons, not with the broad-leaved beaver, but with the chimney-pot hat, or grande nefas et morte piandum the billycock.

There seems only one device (if one unskilled may speak and live) by which portraits of eminent males in this age may be conceived so as to earn such reverent contemplation from posterity as we freely bestow on the works of dead painters; only one plan suggests itself to cause our grandchildren to recall us as creatures more worshipful than smug railway directors or tobacco-consuming mole-catchers. Of these two ideals, the former is preferable; for when the reaction against broadcloth brings about, as it sometimes does, a resort to homespun and suits of dittos, it is a sight to make the angels weep. It is nothing less than a broad

cast insult- -a posthumous affront -that a man should dare to transmit his portrait to generations to come, unless dressed in the best of his wardrobe. It is a profanation of the art of Tintoretto and Velasquez of all the masters who rightly revelled in costly textures and glowing dyes-to employ it on coarse and common fabrics. Ugly as our "Sunday best" may be (and the gods know that nothing more unsightly could be devised!), let a protest be lodged in the name of all that is decorous against that ignoble horror of these latter days, the portrait of a country squire in shooting clothes. The doom is harsh indeed which deprives our eyes of the sight of well-turned legs now swaddled by fashion's decree in shapeless trousers; but more vicious than trousers is the knickerbocker, which wrongs proportion, distorts shape, and, in virtue of the material being, as a rule, ostentatiously common, carries an air of hilarious vulgarity, which in portraiture is wholly unendurable. No: the day may yet be distant when our tailors find themselves "filled with wisdom of heart to work all manner of work of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, and in scarlet and fine linen;" but nothing is more likely to hasten the much-needed æsthetic revolution in men's attire than insisting that every one sitting to a painter shall wear the best clothes he has. Artists should be resolute in this matter; let them patiently continue to depict the smugness of black frock-coats and sticking - plaster boots, for we shall never be converted if they fly for relief to rough fabrics and neutral tints.

What, then, is the device (consideration of which has been postponed to a spasm of honest indignation) by which the spirit of

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beauty is to be infused into portraits of the disfigured men of this day? Some means must be found to invest the "portrait of a gentleman with effects more subtle than those yielded by a black waistcoat and a white shirt-front. Recourse must he had to the commonest, yet the noblest, of natural contrasts that of the sexes: that balanced harmony of which the lion's mane, the pheasant's glittering neck-nay, humbler still, the perianth of the wayside weed—are as much a part as a man's beard or a woman's bosom. Thus, if the merit of two isolated portraits of husband and wife be represented by any value you choose to put on them, the merit of a picture in which these two portraits form a single composition is infinitely more than double that of either of them singly.

A remarkable instance of the delightful result of this use of contrast was to be seen in the last winter exhibition in Burlington House. It was a picture by the Spaniard, Francisco di Ribalta, representing the artist and his young wife, life size. Francisco, who is fair, with light-brown hair, stands in a black dress, embroidered with the red cross of Santiago, showing a painting to his wife, who is seated, wearing a rich robe with gold embroidery and white sleeves. She is exceedingly beautiful, very dark, with heavily fringed eyes and massive coils of hair, which russet gleams redeem from absolute blackness. Through these coils has been elaborately plaited a

white satin ribbon. Hardly could two individuals of similar age present a more striking contrast with each other-in attitude, in dress, in expression. The composition is a masterly example of the well-known device in heraldry call "counter-chang

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