complaining is to be called reasoning—
is surely indicative of a very small grasp
of mind. What if art be not the thing of
the day? What if it have to enter into
competition with science, commerce,
mechanics, and a hundred other interests?
This is a day, not of one thing, but of
many things; and art is one of the many.
Religion is not the thing of the day, as
it is supposed to have been in what are
called the "ages of faith." Yet it is
much to be questioned whether the
influence of real, practical, vital religion were
ever greater than at this moment. War,
again, is not the thing of the day, as it was
once; yet whenever it happens that fighting
becomes necessary, there seems no reason
to complain of our not knowing how to do
it. Just so it is with art. The art which
was devoted to what are called devotional
subjects may have seen its best days; but
are there not, per contra, some developments
of modern art which are quite peculiar to it,
and which have belonged to no previous
period of art-existence? The painting of
pictures, rendered intensely interesting by the
dramatic nature of the scenes they represent,
and by the expression of various passions and
emotions in the faces of the actors in such
scenes, is a comparatively modern development
of art, and dates almost entirely from
the time of Hogarth. Is this a small thing
for the art of the new time to have achieved?
What picture by any of the old masters is
dramatically interesting? They charm by
their rare technical excellences, by their
beauty of form, colour, and chiar'oscuro,
and often by a delicious sentiment which
pervades them, and which is produced we
know not altogether how. But they
certainly do not appeal to our imaginative
faculties by reason of any special interest
attaching to the scenes they represent,
or to the persons by whom those scenes
are enacted. With the old painter the
manner of representing was everything;
with the new, the thing represented is the
more important. Let the due amount of
credit be given to each, for what each has
done. It is, to say the least, an open
question whether any result achieved by
Titian, or even Raphael, is of really higher
artistic value than the figure of the dying
husband in Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode,
or that of the Catholic girl in Millais's
Saint Bartholomew's Day. These are
great doings; so were the doings of the
older artists; and to disparage either
because it is not the other, is to be both
unfair and illogical.

That this introduction of the dramatic
element into art may fairly be claimed for
the modern school is easily demonstrable;
for though in a very few cases, as in that
of Raphael's Death of Ananias, and some
other instances, the telling of a story and
the exhibition of human, emotion was one
of the tasks which the painter of the old
time set himself to execute, it must still be
admitted that such attempts were
exceptional, and by no means to be regarded
as essential features of the art of the time.
For the most part, Religious and Devotional
Subjects, Representations of Holy Families,
Incidents in the Lives of the Patriarchs of
the Old Testament or the Saints of the
New, were the themes chosen for illustration
by the old painters. These were
varied, occasionally, by pictures illustrative
of History, or the Heathen Mythology, not
more likely to interest the spectator than
the others. These pictures move us not
by causing us to be absorbed in the fortunes
of the men and women represented in them,
but simply by their intrinsic beauty as works
of art. That other achievement of interesting
us in the lives of human creatures having
no existence but in the imagination of the
artist, was reserved for such despised
moderns as Hogarth, Wilkie, and others, who
invented their own stories, and told them
on canvas with such power of realisation
as makes us almost forget the excellence of
their pictures as works of art, in our
admiration of the wonderful imaginative
intuition which can so awaken our interest
in their dramatis personæ.

In the first fervour of the pursuit of what
was dramatic in art, the cultivation of the
exclusively picturesque may have been
somewhat lost sight of; but of late there
has been a revival in this respect also, and
a revival, moreover, of such vigour that it
is not too much to assert that there are
living men, both in England and in France,
whose works, making allowance for their
necessary deficiency in the harmonising
influences of time, might compete, in all
artistic qualities of colour, form, light and
shade, delicacy and truth of execution, with
any of the master-pieces of the old painters
of Italy, Spain, or the Low Countries.

It would not be possible, within the
limits of an article such as this, to
maintain all that might be maintained in
defence of the right of modern art to be
regarded as one of the important features
of the age we live in. Enough to show
that it is a living reality, not a dead
thing galvanised into a mimicry of life;