But the Census Sunday' was not an ordinary Sunday, nor was that attendance an ordinary attendance; for we know that in many instances men were then called to muster, not to prayer, and that in others the most vague calculations were substituted for an actual enumeration of heads.

In the Exercises on the Religious Statistics of Wales,' while the author finds in the tables to which we have alluded, 'fair ground for concluding that the Nonconformists are in the proportion not of nine, but of three to one,' he proves by the 'reductio ad impossibile' the inaccuracy of Dissenting returns on the Census Sunday, from some of which we are permitted to draw the pleasing though perplexing conclusion, that the actual attendance exceeded the possible attendance by a very considerable amount,' and are brought to the very awkward position of having a number of aliquot parts beyond that which normally makes up an integer' from others, to the belief that 'on a large scale, and in districts widely varying in physical and social conditions,' each house, from the squire's mansion in the valley to the shepherd's hut on the distant hill-side, must on that day have sent forth the proper quota of worshippers,' and left not a straggler behind them. Well may the author of these 'Exercises' say, 'O, si sic semper et ubique.'

But to turn from these idyllic and visionary scenes to the hard realities of life-to what we have known after an ordinary mundane fashion,' do not inquiries such as those of Sir Thomas Phillips, and returns such as those which have been methodised by Mr. Horace Mann, suggest deeper reflections and graver questions than a mere contrast or comparison between the number of Dissenters and the number of Churchmen in Wales? They surely lead us to think of the residuum,' the thousands who, take what estimate we may, belong neither to one nor the other, but stand altogether aloof from Christian teaching, and from religious influences of any kind, and for whom all the appliances of voluntaryism, and all the resources of the Establishment have

strenuously for disestablishment, makes this fair and candid admission, 'all that Dr. Ollivant claims for the Church in Wales we frankly concede, we admit that in this diocese especially, during the last twenty years it has made great progress, and in that progress we rejoice as sincerely as the most thorough Churchman can. We acknowledge with pleasure and gratitude that its revenues have been wisely expended, that its wealthy members have contributed nobly of their abundance, and that the funds so raised have been invested with a single eye to the promotion of religion and the improvement of the moral and social condition of the people;' and adds, with reference to the vexed question of numbers according to the most reliable data that can be obtained the Dissenting bodies in Wales are to the Established Church in Wales as four to one;' an estimate, which we are not prepared to admit, but which furnishes another illustration of the incurable inaccuracy of Mr. Bowstead's statements.

hitherto

hitherto been found but too scanty and too narrow still. With this sight before us, and when the Church, fully awakened to her duty, is seeking from the vantage ground of her territorial divisions, and by the extension of her parochial economy, to reach these waifs and strays,' whom neither Churchmen nor Dissenters have as yet enrolled within their pale, is it, let us ask, a time to destroy and to uproot-a time to cramp her energies, a time to paralyze her exertions, a time to cripple her machinery? The prudent statesman, no less than the earnest Christian, will shrink from such a course, and will dread its effect on the social and political, as well as on the moral and religious condition of the people, and he may, perhaps, chance to recollect that neither the children of Rebecca' nor the ranks of the Chartists were recruited from those who belong to her communion, or who have been wont to worship within her walls.

ART. IV. Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts. Second Series. By Sir C. L. Eastlake, late President of the Royal Academy and Director of the National Gallery: With a Memoir compiled by Lady Eastlake. London, 1870.

WE

E English are a curious people. Whilst, on the one hand, few races have gone beyond us in popular self-belief, and the glorification of our noble selves' after a peculiarly intense and complacent fashion; on the other, no European nation has hitherto equalled us in the cheerful readiness with which we confess our own defects, make faces at ourselves in the glass, and grumble at the very points on which we are rather better than our neighbours. With equal alacrity, and almost at the same moment, we are soaring with the breezy confidence of Lord Palmerston, or lowering ourselves to the chronic querulousness of Mr. Carlyle. The Janus-head of John Bull alternately presents to the world a face of massive defiance and of penitential humiliation. Now, we claim the initiative in all modern improvements, 'consider other countries a mistake,' or speak of them as our most humble followers. Anon 'the vision changes;' we are being passed at every turn by our contemporaries, whose village schools turn out scientific men in crowds, whilst their cab-horses are almost equal to the Derby winner; we cannot sustain the 'too vast orb of our fate;' we magnify, not our offices, but our defects, and ignore our legitimate claims to distinction. In short, England is a standing enigma to Englishmen ; and we have no right to wonder or be enraged if foreigners take us too literally at our word, and pronounce changeable Albion'

Albion' at once causelessly proud, and self-abased with very good

reason.

If this be the law of our nature, and we must accept one extreme, let us look out for that one which, as Aristotle taught long ago, is likely to be the least remote from the central mean of philosophy and sane judgment. In this case, there can be no doubt as to our choice. However it may fare with the individual, national self-humiliation is accompanied rather by want of manly courage and ability to mend matters, than by virtuous resolve and penitential profit. It is anything but wisdom and disinterestedness which is at the bottom of an unequalled power of discovering grievances, and magnifying them when discovered.' The lugubrious temper of the professing prophets of evil is much more nearly allied to unwholesome egotism than the vanity of the over-boastful itself. Better a complete incredulity about earthquakes than to be always shouting to prepare for a grave crisis.' Better to hold our country the 'navel of the universe,' and salt of the whole earth, than to scream at every pinch of the national shoe, how much we are outdone by foreigners:-foreigners, who at the same time are too often pointing idly to England, in turn, as their exemplar. And better to air ourselves on the platform of robust Philistinism, than to sit down and croak in the dismal swamp' of Mr. Carlyle, and his chorus of too devoted followers. For, bad as may be the superstition of John Bullism, its effects prove it a less injurious creed than what we have heard only too justly styled the Worship of the Windbag.'

English art, to turn to the subject immediately before us, we have long thought, has suffered under one of those excesses of national humility noticed above. We do not mean that our popular habit has not been to rate highly, often to overrate, the conspicuous masters of our school. Of course we have not been

so faithless to the self-laudatory elements in the national character. But we have admired an Hogarth, a Reynolds, a Turner, with what we have almost confessed was an insular admiration; not attempting to give them or the English school its place in the whole art of Europe, and resting acquiescent in the ignorance of what our artists have done which has pretty generally existed on the continent. The tradition of the old masters,' and of Italian taste, against which Hogarth had to fight his way a hundred years ago, has been one unduly depressing element in our estimate of ourselves as compared with others: we have not ventured to claim our own against so many and such noble competitors in the earlier world: whilst, on the other hand, recent exhibitions, and the growing intercommunity of countries, have made us latterly aware that our insularity of practice is excessive, and

that

that some essential elements in art have been neglected among us. Yet, whatever shortcomings may be correctly charged against the English school, it may justly claim a very proud position.

Our countrymen were the first to perceive the full extent of the province of painting, and to dare to enter upon it. They were the first to put into it the movement of contemporary life, to render it the direct vehicle of poetical sentiment, to make it the interpreter of Nature for her own sake. They are the founders of modern art.

The peculiarity of this position is not so fully recognised as to render it an otiose task if we give here a brief sketch of the series of historical facts which led to the results just specified. And it will be found also to have a close bearing upon our estimate of Sir Charles Eastlake's own place in the English school.

The art of modern Europe at the beginning was a direct offshoot from Greek art, as modified by the influences of the 'lower' or Byzantine Empire :-influences, we may note by the way, to which Western civilisation was infinitely more indebted, in every direction, than Western pride has commonly allowed. Without entering upon the question of antique art, we may safely aver that, owing to the peculiar direction of the Byzantine mind, painting had been gradually elevated and narrowed to the expression of religious facts or feelings, whilst sculpture disappeared almost entirely under the prevalence of the iconoclastic' sentiment. The technical methods, however, of painting, and the general idea of treating a subject, were still those which had been handed down by tradition from the days of free Hellas. Art, thus conceived and practised, held by but a slender thread to its proper and natural sphere. As the means of conveying a certain class of pleasure, by the representation of all pictorially representable things, it had almost no existence. We call it art; yet it was only another mode in which theology reproduced itself.

Under these conditions, painting migrated to Italy towards the beginning of the twelfth century-that great European revolutionary epoch in which the main principles of the Renaissance were really, though often unconsciously, developed. Immediately, therefore, a remarkable change began to pass over the art which had made its way from the East. There, we repeat, it had not only restricted its functions to performing the part of a handmaid and interpreter of theology, but, in so doing, all effort on the part of the artist, with all wish to distinguish himself individually, had well-nigh vanished. The whole design of every subject, down to its smallest details, had been long elaborated,

and

and could not be deserted without danger of heterodoxy. One painter was, consequently, as good as another for the task required from art:-and this peculiar stationary position has, as is well known, been prolonged in the East and in Russia (the barbarian caricaturist of Byzantium) to the present day. In the West, art at once felt the stirring atmosphere of what we may roughly characterise as Teutonic free thought. It was vivified; but the vitality infused carried with it the seeds of its own decay :-the decadence of the sixteenth century was implicitly contained in the dawn of the thirteenth. At first, however, this decay was invisible and unthought of. Painting, now reinforced by sculpture, retained its original impulse. Its office was, not to represent all things that are representable, not to give pleasure by such representation, but to aid religion and morality; to inspire the meditations of the cloister; to re-echo the lessons of the preacher; to colour this life with images of another. For a certain time in Italy, for a certain time in Swabia and the valley of the Rhine (the word Germany would imply far too large an area), these ends were carried out with a completeness and a variety which the Byzantine parent of the European schools never reached. So far as we know, the 'religious idea' was at no time, not even in early Hellas, expressed with the energetic naïveté of Giotto, the exquisite intensity of Angelico, the spiritual insight of Buonarotti. But these splendid names, marking the progress of individual genius in the art, mark also the signs of the inevitable decline of art under its original impulse. Painting cannot at once be the handmaid of theology and the expression of the idiosyncrasies of the painter. When what is thought of is the progress of a school, the style of an individual artist, there will soon be an end of religious interpretation, of devotional incitement. The Virgin of Saint Sixtus may invite and receive the worship of the connoisseur; but the long gaze of ecstasy, the sigh of passion, are reserved for the dingy Madonna, huddled in brocade, and garlanded with tinsel.

Parallel to this development of early art as the record of individual effort, ran, of course, all that other series of developments which we collectively speak of as the Renaissance:-Printing, city life, organised trade, national consciousness, Plato and Ovid, and how much else!--ending in the classical revival (say) of 1500, the theological struggles of 1530, the scientific outburst of 1580. Not only did these things tend in many ways to render the religious function of art less important, but they began gradually to change the direction of art itself. Very slowly and very unconsciously it was found that other subjects than those derived from Scripture and from legend might be handled; that painting might be Vol. 128.-No. 256.

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looked