Art. 12.-ENGLISH TRADITIONS IN ART.

The Walpole Society's Publications. Volumes I-VII. Printed for the Walpole Society: Oxford University Press, 1912-1919.

'THE English,' says Coleridge, 'have a morbid habit of petting and praising foreigners of any sort, to the unjust disparagement of their own worthies.' It is a trait which has been noticed by other writers. When Coleridge said 'worthies,' he was using too general a term; he was probably thinking of artists. It cannot truly be said that in the domain of literature we have been in the habit of preferring foreign talent to English; possibly because we are not adepts in foreign languages. But of native music, as of native painting and sculpture, there has certainly been a kind of distrust, not easily overcome. A continental reputation, even the mere bearing of a foreign name, has often brought easy success in England, while native artists, of equal or superior gift, have languished in the cold. Some may maintain that the disparagement has been just, or that there has been due appreciation when our artists had proved their merit. Yet, to recall a signal instance of quite modern times, we had in Alfred Stevens a great sculptor, a great draughtsman, an artist of a completeness of mastery rarely matched since the Italian Renaissance; and how comparatively small a number of Englishmen, even now, know his work or attach a significance to his name! Slowly, very slowly, he is coming into his due of fame; and the recognition of his genius owes much to the enthusiastic admiration of a Frenchman, Alphonse Legros. The belief that we have no sculpture in England is still deeply rooted. Would any other country, we may well ask, so long neglect its greatest sculptor?

Why do we show so much quicker an appreciation of our men of letters? In literature we can boast of a long and magnificent tradition, starred with renowned names; and we take a just pride in it. That, beyond doubt, is the art in which this country has shown by far the greatest genius and the richest powers. It still remains matter for speculation how far the plastic and pictorial

arts have been depressed by neglect and indifference. For these arts demand the whole time and energy of those who practise them; they cannot be pursued in the leisure of a career devoted to more lucrative activities. Most of our poets would have starved, had they attempted to subsist on poetry alone. Is there an undercurrent of Puritanism, with its suspicion of the sensuous and plastic expression of the desire for beauty, that persists in our race, even though it no longer bursts forth in open hatred? Our streets, our buildings, are witnesses to the public indifference to dignity and comeliness in national self-expression. And then, we cling to our habit of leaving everything to private enterprise ; there is no central public authority in matters pertaining to the arts; there is next to no encouragement or support by the State; no effort to express or to guide such public opinion as exists. All is left to accident.

It is not only to living artists that indifference has been shown. We have been very little concerned to do honour to English artists of the past. The great portrait painters of the 18th century, with Turner and a few other masters, have been enthroned, indeed. Auction records have given them just that prestige which impresses the average man. But how large an element of fashion and caprice enters into this! Minute study has been given to the sifting of Italian and Flemish Primitives. But the study of our own masters has remained in the uncritical stage, where every work of merit tends to gravitate to one of a few conspicuous names, and artists of great gift are forgotten. Here surely we may with justice be reproached for a lack of piety which perhaps no other country of Europe has betrayed to such a degree. It was to remedy this lack and to encourage interest in our native art of the past that the Walpole Society came into existence. It was founded in 1911, and has been the means of bringing together the few serious students of the subject. Seven annual volumes have been published. A review of the work which the Society has accomplished during the nine years of its existence will show how extensive and how little laboured the field still is, and how much remains to be done.

The Society names, itself, of course, after Horace

Walpole, whose Anecdotes of Painting in England' remains the classic work on our subject for the period it covers. As is well known, Walpole's work was founded on the notes and documents collected by George Vertue, the antiquary and engraver. What is less well known is the fact that Vertue's notes, still existing in the British Museum, have never yet been published; and the notes contain a great deal of information, sometimes of much interest, which Walpole neglected to use. It would naturally occur to the members of the Walpole Society that here was a task which it was most fitting that they should undertake. But examination of the note-books proved that to publish them in full would be a costly undertaking, beyond the Society's resources. In the third annual volume Mr A. M. Hind gives a list of the note-books in the British Museum, forty-four in number. A few volumes of the original series are not in the Museum, and can no longer be traced. But it will be readily understood that to publish the Museum collection in extenso would absorb an indefinite number of the annual volumes of the Society; and, desirable as the publication is, subscribers would find it indigestible matter for so prolonged a repast.

To Mr Hind's list, Mr Lionel Cust adds some 'proposals' for the publication. He contends that to print a careful transcript would not suffice; it would be difficult to make clear what were Vertue's own actual corrections and additions to the original notes; and he suggests that the best solution would be to publish the notes in photolithography and that a special fund should be raised in the name of the Walpole Society for this purpose. The war has prevented, but we hope only postponed, any such further steps being taken. If this project be realised, it will at last be possible for us to estimate at their due value both the prodigious labour and insatiable research of Vertue and the lucid art of Walpole. The pith of Walpole's book consists of Vertue's collected material. But the writing of the Anecdotes, the translation of this mass of scattered notes into that easy, graceful narrative, is a feat that excites the greater wonder the more one reflects on the difficulties of the task and the rapidity with which it was done. As an instance of Walpole's omissions we may take the

practically unknown Gawen Hamilton (not to be confounded with the later Gavin Hamilton) about whom Mrs Finberg writes in the sixth of the volumes before us. Vertue left many notes upon this artist, but Walpole barely mentions him.

Let us briefly glance over the whole field, and see what the Walpole Society's publications have done to supplement existing knowledge.

The average educated Englishman is persuaded that there was no English school of painting before Hogarth; and, as to sculpture, it is a received opinion that there never was an English school. Yet all the evidence proves that England in the Middle Ages had her schools of the arts and the crafts, as flourishing and active as in any country of the Continent. Arts like the illumination of manuscripts and the embroidery of vestments and hangings have happily survived in numerous and splendid examples, because such work could be hidden from the ransacking rage of iconoclasts. But the destruction of all the sculpture except the effigies on tombs in the interiors of churches, and the whitewashing of the frescoes on their walls, have left a palpable bareness which seems to accuse our Middle Ages of a poverty of imagination which is far from the reality. Some of the remains of the Westminster School of painting, still existing, and reproduced by the Walpole Society from Mr Tristram's water-colour copies, arouse poignant feelings of regret and loss. Mr Lethaby, than whom no one speaks with more authority, tells us that

'the most brilliant period of English art was the second half of the 13th century, and its chief centre was Westminster, where, under the patronage of Henry III, a great concourse of artists gathered from all parts of Europe to assist in the works which that king was always undertaking at Westminster and at his other palaces.'

Walpole says of that monarch

'Henry's reign is one of the most ignominious in our annals; that of Edward the First of the most triumphant. Yet I would ask by which of the two did the nation suffer most? By sums lavished on favourites and buildings, or by sums and blood wasted in unjust wars?... Who will own that

he had not rather employ Master William and Edward of Westminster to paint the gestes of the Kings of Antioch, than imitate the son in his barbarities in Wales, and usurpations in Scotland?'

William of Westminster was a monk and the King's beloved painter.' Mr Lethaby suggests that he may be the author of 'the noble wall-painting in St Faith's Chapel in the Abbey;' and to Master Walter of Durham he would tentatively ascribe another wonderful work also painted about 1270, namely, the retable now preserved in the Jerusalem Chamber. The Walpole Society has reproduced in colour (Vol. 1), Mr Tristram's fine copy from one of the panels of the retable, and also his copy from the head of Edward the Confessor, painted on the back of one of the sedilia in the choir of the church. The exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum of a series of the water-colour copies on which Mr Tristram has spent so much skill and patience must have opened the eyes of many. many. With that severe yet ardent figure of St Faith before them they must have felt that English art in the time of Cimabue was no negligible thing.

Mr Lethaby's researches disclose the names of many English mediæval painters (though there are few works to which we can attach the names) and yield a number of interesting particulars about the London Guild of Painters. Would that we could discover the painter of the magnificent portrait of Richard II in Westminster Abbey! There are, of course, critics who maintain that this, and the exquisite diptych at Wilton, representing the same king with saints, are foreign work; but there is no evidence that disproves their English origin. These two pictures stand out with a peculiar splendour from the English pictorial traditions of the Middle Ages. For, as Mr Strange says in his article on the Rood Screen at Cawston in Norfolk-again illustrated in colour from copies by Mr Tristram-English medieval art for the most part, abundant and flourishing as it was, exhibits 'a high level of craftsmanship, but little individuality.'

The history of early sculpture in this country is fairly parallel with that of the early painting. In both cases, clues and links in the history are lacking, through