THE ART JOURNAL. MONTHLY, price 2s. 6d. The Art Journal contains each month three large Plates, one an Etching, one an Engraving, and the other either a Reproduction in Facsimile of an Original Drawing or an Engraving of a Statue. Also from thirty-two to thirty-six pages of Illustrated Letterpress, containing Articles by the most eminent authorities. EXTRACTS FROM PROGRAMME FOR 1883. LINE ENGRAVINGS.-The Collection of Works of Art which has been formed by the President and Council of the Royal Academy under the bequest of the late Sir Francis Chantrey, R.A., has now become of considerable importance. Permission to reproduce them has been courteously granted by the Council of the Academy and the respective artists. The following are in course of Engraving:— ETCHINGS.-The Etchings for 1883 will include, one executed specially for the JOURNAL by the President of the Society of Painter-Etchers, Mr. F. SEYMOUR HADEN, entitled 'Cowdray.' The other Etchings in progress are: QUIET PETS, after L. ALMA-TADEMA, R.A., by C. O. MURRAY. WINTER FUEL, by FREDERICK SLOCOMBE. NOTRE-DAME, by A. BRUNET DEBAINES. HOMELESS, after A. MARSH, by C. H. COURTRY. ON the MEDWAY, by R. S. CHATTOCK. WESTMINSTER by MOONLIGHT, by D. Law. BLACKBERRY-GATHERERS, from a Picture by the late G. MASON. From the Paris REPRODUCTIONS OF DRAWINGS.-This year they will be chiefly selected from drawings by Modern Masters, commencing with a drawing of Venice by JOHN RUSKIN, Author of 'Modern Painters.' SCULPTURE.-Engravings from examples of contemporary work will form one of the attractions of the ART JOURNAL. WOOD ENGRAVINGS.-During 1883 the Journal will be embellished by an additional number of Engravings on Wood, by the best artists of the day. The Trustees of the National Gallery have given permission for the whole of the acquisitions of the past year, including those from the Hamilton Palace Collection, to be translated in this manner. 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The Publications of the Society which are in print can be obtained, by Members only, at the prices above mentioned, on application to Messrs. MITCHELL & HUGHES, 140, Wardour-street, W. Entrance Fee: Half-a-Guinea. PROSPECTIVE PUBLICATIONS. The VISITATION of GLOUCESTERSHIRE. in 1623, by CHITTING and PHILLI OT as DEPUTIES to CAMDEN. To be Edited by Sir John Maciean, F.S.A, and W. C. Heane, Esq. The VISITATIONS of BEDFORDSHIRE in 1556, 1586, and 1534. To be Edited by F. A. Blaydes, Esq. The REGISTERS of DURHAM CATHEDRAL. To be Edited by Captain White, F.S.A. The VISITATION of DORSETSHIRE, in 1623, by ST. GEORGE and LENNARD as DEPUTIES to CAMDEN. The VISITATION of STAFFORDSHIRE, in 1583, by GLOVER as DEPUTY to FLOWER, The VISITATION of SHROPSHIRE, in 1584, by LEE as DEPUTY to COOKE. LIST of KNIGHTS with their ARMS, from HENRY VII. to JAMES I To be Edited by Sir John Maclean FS.A. The VISITATION of HERTFORDSHIRE, in 1572, by COOKE. The VISITATIONS of WORCESTERSHIRE in 1569 and 1634. The VISITATIONS of HAMPSHIRE, in 1530, 1552, 1575, and 1622, by BENOLTE, HAWLEY, COOKE, and PHILIPOT as DEPUTY to CAMDEN." The VISITATIONS of SUSSEX, in 1530, by BENOLTE; 1574, by COOKE; and 1633, by PHILIPOT and OWEN as DEPUTIES to ST. GEORGE and BURROUGH. REGISTERS. The REGISTERS of ST. ANTHOLIN, WATLING-STREET, LONDON. The REGISTERS of ST. JOHN the BAPTIST upon WALBROOK, LONDON. The REGISTERS of ST. JAMES, CLERKENWELL, LON DON. . Persons wishing to join the Society should apply to GEORGE J. ARMITAGE, Esq F.S.A., Hon. Sec., Clifton Woodhead, near Brighouse. PAGE 841 842 843 843 845 846-847 THE 847-850 850 851-853 SCIENCE GEOGRAPHICAL NOTES; ASTRONOMICAL MUSIC-WEEK; GOSSIP DRAMA-WEEK; GOSSIP LITERATURE Compared with the earnest benevolence of Nor just Lavinius's just magistrates Myron, 'twas I that - [pauses]; MYR. Not yet Not these passionate tears. My poor Klydone! Dost thou love me so ! What fancy's this f The condition of the slaves in Attica-often the equals in every respect, racial and intellectual, of the dominant race-is strangely 844 pathetic, apart from the fact that the juris845 prudence of the country could only be carried on through the mutilation and torture of their bodies. Not even Asia has anything to show more grievous than this. The idea of a beautiful female slave having to give testimony under torture in order to save the life of one who is at once her lover and her Forgive her, Myron: thou hadst spoiled the girl, master is hardly to be surpassed for pity and for terror, and the story which Mrs. Webster has invented for the purpose of 856 representing this idea is as ingenious as it is beautiful. During the period of the Roman dominance, a wealthy Greek, Myron, having fallen passionately in love with his young slave Klydone, has determined to marry her. With this view he has begun the necessary proceedings for the manumission of Klydone and her father Olymnios. But on the day fixed for the nuptials Myron is seized by the proconsul Lavinius on a charge of complicity in a plot against Rome. The charge is entirely groundless, but Myron's wealth has attracted the cupidity of the proconsul. 853-855 857 In a Day: a Drama. By Augusta Webster. Indeed, a slave's testimony seems to have been considered the purest of any, because it could only be given under torture; and if the calculations of Böckh are correct, showing the vast preponderance of slaves over freemen, the country of Eschylus and Praxiteles must have been a land of bloodshed, cruelty, and pain. Such an aspect of the tragi-comedy of human life, even in its most polished condition, was likely to strike a poet of deep human sympathies like Mrs. Webster. From her first volume to the one before us she has rarely used her gifts save from a distinctly humanizing and benevolent impulse. Impulse, however, must not be confounded with self-conscious intent. She has not strangled poetic art with a didactic purpose, and yet without a benevolent impulse she seems scarcely able to produce her best poetry. This criticism would be extraordinary praise if we were speaking of a man; it does not seem so, however, when the writer under discussion belongs to the same sex as Mrs. Browning and George Eliot. For one of the striking features of the nineteenth century is that, in the matter of humanitarianism, the women are in a very unaccountable degree in advance of the men. The evidence against Myron is so flimsy that it has virtually broken down when the idea occurs to one of his enemies (who is aware of his passion for Klydone) to demand for the clearance of the accused the testimony of the household slaves. Myron, knowing that Klydone and her father can only give testimony under torture, refuses to hand them over for this purpose. The proconsul, whose end is simply to get at Myron's wealth, suffers him to return to his house till the adjourned trial. The father and daughter on learning this determine secretly to save Myron by yielding themselves up for examination, and while he is quietly taking his siesta they leave the house and surrender themselves to the tribunal. Olymnios bears the torture in silence and without incriminating Myron, but Klydone, in spite of her high resolutions, is driven by the pain to utter all kinds of frantic and imaginary charges against Myron, and, as a result, he is convicted and condemned to die. He elects to die by hemlock. Klydone and her father determine to take hemlock too, and perish at the same And, being quickly mad with pangs Has answered all their promptings as they would Joined on imaginings of her startled brain, Signed thy direct accusal; signed it twice. For first, her scattered senses coming back, Snatching the murderous paper while he read, She answered staunchly, let them place her, then Hate me not. MYR. I love thee. Love was but half love till now. poor child. * KLYD. So brief a pain! So little harmless pain ▾ "Ware with her, butcher, see thou mar her not." And yet 'tis true they went not past their need: In spite of the painfulness of the story, Not to the utmost pangs. MYRON. It was her step. Klydone! MYR. Sweet my true brave Klydone, there's a tale, The volume can hardly fail to increase Mrs. Webster's reputation as a dramatist. The dialogue is throughout both intellectual and subtle. Indeed, it is just here where lie such faults as can be charged against the play. Dialogue may be much too intellectual and subtle for pure representative art. Concise and trenchant suggestiveness and intellectual pregnancy of line are required in drama, no doubt, but these must not be sought for at the expense of verbal music, and especially they must not be sought for at the expense of dramatic truth. Ever since Shakspeare's time the quest of striking lines of the aphoristic kind has spoilt drama. And no one will deny that even Shakspeare himself in this matter sometimes sins. In no time and in no country would a girl trimming a vase of flowers talk in this fashion to her lover, and yet as literature the dialogue is exceedingly good: KLYD. To cut away parched leaves, spent blooms. Thy vases must be cured of yesterday. MYR. A fretful task, to gather perished sweets, Task little fit for thee. Nay, put it by; Let others take the blighted and the sere, Cull thou new perfect flowers. KLYD. That's a man's share. We women, even they that are not slaves, Have never leave of life to take but best: The best sweet flowers, and costing never a care, Are for the butterflies and choiceful bees And men like thee. It is the universal opinion among the booksellers that there is with readers a positive antipathy to the dramatic form of poetry, whether the poetry be good or bad. And the reason seems to be the public dislike of difficulty in its reading. Now the dramatic form is essentially difficult as compared with narrative, and this difficulty is much increased by the straining after lines which shall be striking apart from their dramatic value. After all, it is the imaginative work done that decides the value of any drama. Howsoever striking may be any line, if it in the smallest degree diverts the reader's imagination by the difficulty of its metrical movement or by the intellectual suggestion it involves, it is, in the true critical sense, a blemish in a play, though the intellectual texture of the work may gain by it. James Burn, the "Beggar Boy": an Autobiography. (Hodder & Stoughton.) GENERALLY the life of a working man who is sufficiently to the fore to have an excuse for writing his own story is the history of a rise, more or less rapid, out of the workshop and its surroundings into middle or upper class life, so that half that half way through the book the rough actualities of working class existence are left behind, and we find ourselves following the conventional fortunes of a prosperous man of business or member of one of the genteel professions. Mr. James Burn, however, remains a working man to the end of his book. More than once in the course of his narrative he speaks of the times when he was doing regular work as a journeyman hatter as not only the happiest periods of a life of many miseries, but as times quite happy enough to need no enhancement from comparison. The disappointing thing is that these periods are of very short duration. Once out of the seven years' apprenticeship which it cost him an heroic struggle to accomplish, eight or nine at the very utmost eighteen-months mark the limits of Mr. Burn's capacity for keeping to one occupation or remaining with one employer. And the cause of this was not, as in many cases, intemperance, or laziness, or insubordination, but simply a want of fixity of purpose resulting from a mental activity and quickness of social sympathy dangerously in excess of the solid forces of his character. The influences of a vagrant childhood acting upon a remarkably amiable and affectionate disposition are answerable for this fault. From infancy he has been acquainted with a variety of squalid and disreputable phases of life, and, being preserved by naturally good instincts good instincts from sharing the moral degradation of his associates, has gone through life without so much as understanding why other men of more corruptible morality think it desirable to escape as quickly as possible from the temptations of hand-to-mouth subsistence by keeping resolutely to their work, even at the cost of sacrificing some of the more precious and lovable attributes of human nature. A preface says that this book has been written for the purpose of encouraging others in the struggle of life by showing how energy of character may overcome difficulties. But unless these common expressions are to be taken in an uncommon sense, heart, and a the aim will hardly be realized. The true lesson of the book is the much rarer one that virtue is its own reward; and this not in the cynical sense of having to go unrewarded, but with the straightforward meaning that a good conscience, a kind sweet temper preserved through eighty years of bad luck, will enable a man to look back upon his life with thankfulness to Providence and sincere good will towards his fellow men in all ranks. Even in speaking of himself Mr. Burn keeps clear of bitterness. No man ever admitted more candidly (or, it must be said, with better reason) that his misfortunes were of his own making; but he does so without any morbid excess of self-condemnation, and he has the courage to claim his merits as well as his defects. It this combination of candour and moderation that makes his book valuable as a study of character. The literary merit of the work is very unequal. The style is that of a selfeducated man, whose acquaintance with books has come a little too late to counteract the effects of an early training as far removed as possible from cultivated influences, and who at no time of his life has been in habitual contact with a scholarly world. It is easy and pleasant when the matter is well within the author's personal experience, but becomes prosy and tiresome when subjects of a wider range are attempted. The first half of the book is incomparably the better, partly on account of the more picturesque character of its incidents, and partly also because the author's defect of critical power and sense of proportion is less felt when he is dealing with the period of life when to want these things is not an individual peculiarity. Through life he has had plenty of imagination of the simpler kind that sees all things beautifully, affectionately, and with idealizing exaggeration; and this faculty serves him in good stead so long as he is engaged in painting the world of his childhood, of which his own consciousness is the centre and his emotions determine the perspective. The chapters in which he describes his wanderings with a vagabond stepfather have all the charm of a romance. This man, MacNamee by name, was a discharged Irish soldier whom the boy's mother had married after being deserted in wretched circumstances by the father of her child. Mr. Burn draws his portrait with characteristic leniency, but it is evident that the man was idle, drunken, and dishonest, and that in following the profession of a vagrant beggar he was doing about the only thing he was fit for. The man and the boy together tramped through the whole south country of Scotland and much of the English north country, and once made a journey to London and back. The result is that Mr. Burn has a great many anecdotes to tell in illustration of the manners of beggars in the old time, and of their shifts and impostures as well as of their real hardships and sufferings. Interspersed among a number of grim anecdotes and unsavoury details come not a few pleasant recollections of the kindly hospitality of the farmers on whose charity beggardom mainly throve: "Almost every house on the border at that time was a welcome home for the wayfarer; the beggar was treated kindly and bountifully supplied with food; he had his bed for the night comfortably made up in the barn or the byre; and in many farmhouses bedclothing was specially kept for this class of wanderers." In the case of one class of beggars, technically described as "handbarrow mendicants," the host had not only to provide food and a night's shelter, but to take the trouble of conveying the guest to the next post on his road : : "These miserable creatures were a source of infinite trouble to the people in the wild, sequestered parts of the country. They were either seated upon their barrows or they reclined on bundles of rags, and when one of them was set down at a farmer's door it required two ablebodied people to remove the living lumber to the next house." MacNamee and his stepson often enjoyed another sort of hospitality than that of the kindly border farmers:— "Within the short space of two years I had been an inmate of every jail in the south of Scotland. My poor stepfather's love of drink and his religious dogmatism continually embroiled him in scrapes, and, being his squire, of course I came in for a share of his treatment." From a story that follows about a theft of a halter, it is pretty clear that MacNamee had dispositions tending more directly towards gaol-lodgings than religious dogmatism or even drunkenness. The man appears, however, to have had some kindly impulses, and the child was sincerely attached to him in spite of much torture of body and mind to which he subjected his stepson. Accounts of brutal beatings alternate with descriptions of terrible nights in which the boy suffers by sympathy all the horrors of delirium tremens, believing religiously in the presence of the thousand devils conjured up by the drunkard's imagination. At the age of fifteen the boy was transferred to the keeping of his own father, whom he cordially hated, and with whom he was ten times more miserable than with MacNamee. He soon ran away, and after six years of independent vagabondage apprenticed himself to a hatter at Hexham. This was the turning-point of his career, and ought to have been the beginning of settled fortunes. But, as has been said already, Mr. Burn never settled down to business. All his trade |