A FAMILIAR COLLOQUY.

MRS. ROLAND's house in Bruton Street was a very pleasant one; and daily, at two o'clock, five or six pleasant people were sure to be assembled there. To-day, as the party were coming downstairs to the dining-room, Violet Staunton suddenly made her appearance-the beautiful Violet Staunton, with the perfect face and the imperfect reputation.

'Quite right, my dear,' said Mrs. Roland, who never dropped her friends; 'we are always in at luncheon. I think you know Lady Lilith Wardour-(isn't she looking quite lovely this season ?)-and these are my two cousins, Ralph Burgoyne and Gage Stanley. Come, sit here between me and Ralph, won't you? And now tell me what you have been doing lately. Were you at Lady Surbiton's ball last night?'

'Not I, my dear,' said Miss Staunton. My dancing days are quite over-at least my doctor says they must be; and a party where you mustn't stand up to dance, and where you can't sit down to supper, is, to me, of all life's trials the most unbearable. Besides,' she said softly, and with a faint smile, 'I'm not so welcome a guest now as I once was. No-what I did was to go with my old aunt to see Measure for Measure, and naturally, like all July play-goers, I

came home with a headache.'

'I quite agree with Miss Staunton about balls,' said Lady Lilith. 'I, last evening, was very far away from the gay world. I was at Hampstead with some artistic friends of mine, and we had some delightful talk upon æsthetic and intellectual subjects.' Mrs. Roland inquired who the friends were. 'Oh!' said Lady Lilith, 'not people that you would be likely to know; but they are really charming so quaint and so refreshing. They are called Addison. Their real name, I believe, was Biggs; but they didn't like that, and so they changed it. They never use any furniture, or any English, that is of a later date than Queen Anne's time; and therefore they couldn't talk fashionable scandal, even if they knew any, because they would have no language to express it in.'

'Well,' said Mrs. Roland, what artistic people we all of us are to-day! Here are Ralph and Gage, who have just been spending their whole morning in the Grosvenor Gallery.'

'Tell me, Mr. Burgoyne,' said Miss Staunton, what did of the pictures there?'

'Don't ask him, Miss Staunton,' said Gage Stanley, for he never looked at one of them. He simply sat still on his chair and watched the people.'

Ralph Burgoyne: I see Miss Staunton is shocked at my bad taste, but to my mind the part I chose was the better one. I did for a few moments glance round at the pictures, but that glance was enough for me; so I left Gage poring over the 'Laus Veneris,' and sat down quietly to take stock of the people. I thought them a far more instructive study. I saw four or five lovely faces, and above fifty lovely frocks. I watched three flirtations, and I detected any amount of rouge. Now there we have realities; there we have the genuine facts of life —the things, and the only things, which are of any great concern

to us.

Violet Staunton: Well, I'm afraid it would hardly become me to blame you; for last night, at the play, I acted much as you did. I thought very little about the stage. All my attention was given to the gallery. I see you look surprised, but the conduct of the gallery was really very singular. I have no doubt that the men who composed it were Claudios or Lucios, most of them, if the truth were known, and yet would you believe it?—their whole applause was given to Isabella. Now there was a bit of human nature, if you like; but I expect you saw nothing like that at the Grosvenor Gallery. Besides, you see, I was only turning away from moderate acting; you from perfect painting. Not that I mean to call all the pictures perfect, or to pretend that I am equal to appreciating a great many of them. As for Whistler's Nocturnes' and 'Harmonies,' for instance, I positively could make nothing of them; and certainly, if your object was to look at paint, you would see a deal more on one girl's face than on the whole of his canvases. But Burne Jones and Alma Tadema― surely their pictures are worth study.

Ralph Burgoyne: I looked at all their pictures-remember, please, I only speak as an outsider-and as specimens of painting they were, I have no doubt, wonderful. I saw marble that looked like marble; mosaic pavements that looked like mosaic pavements; flowers that looked like flowers; dresses that looked like dresses; and a quantity of bare skin that looked like skin. I was conscious also of many medleys of colour, that gave my eyes a languid sense of pleasure. But really this was all. The pictures said nothing to me; they neither amused, soothed, instructed, or suggested a single thought to me.

Gage Stanley: I on the contrary think that they are all full of instruction. Add Tissot to Burne Jones and Alma Tadema, and I think that the works of these three artists are the most significant sights in London.

Ralph Burgoyne: It may be my dulness and denseness, but I

don't see how they can be. As I say, as tours de force with a brush and a paint-pot, they may be as wonderful as you please. But I confess I am no judge of such technical merits. A gin-palace may be a specimen of perfect bricklaying, but none the more do I care to look at it. Painting is a sort of language. To talk this language gracefully may be a charming accomplishment; but still if the talker says nothing, I shall soon get tired of hearing him. And to me these modern painters are nothing but accomplished babblers. It is true they seem to be saying something, but for the life of me I cannot tell what it is, and they themselves seem quite indifferent. Their meaning is but a lay figure on which to hang the clothes of their language. All that I can tell of the meaning is that it has nothing to do with me or with mine, or with them, or with any living thing. They seem They seem as frightened of realities as people are frightened of ghosts. I am perfectly out of patience with them. For God's sake, I feel inclined to say to them, do try to paint something that will concern the only life that is of any concern to us-the life of the present day. We are surrounded with hopes, pains, passions, and perplexities, all tinged with the special colour our own age gives them. Try to catch this colour. It is the only colour you will ever really know. But no-it is of no avail. With my mind's ear, I hear them start back sighing; and they call me fool and Philistine in Pompeian Latin or in mediæval French; or else they misquote a text at me from a Bible they have ceased to believe in. Think for a moment of Burne Jones's 'Six Days of Creation.'

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Violet Staunton: I often do think of it; and I think of it as one of the loveliest things I ever recollect to have looked at. Ralph Burgoyne: Perhaps you have powers of vision that are denied to me. But, as far as I can tell, it meant actually nothing. If we really thought that God in six days had produced this fair order of things out of chaos, the matter would be very different-so too probably would have been the artist's way of treating it. I thought old Lady Ealing's painted face, whom I saw last year looking at the picture, a far more suggestive study than the picture was itself.

Violet Staunton: Well, there at any rate you have a modern miracle if you don't believe in the ancient one; for she, any day and in only six hours, creates a far fairer order out of a far more formless chaos.

Ralph Burgoyne: Very well then; if that is so, let us paint the modern miracle. Let us have something out of the life around us.

Violet Staunton: All the great Italian painters painted scenes remote from their own present. They took their subjects from the past of the Gospel history.

Ralph Burgoyne: They took their subjects from the Gospel

history, it is true; but the Gospel history was not a past to them. It was an eternal present. A painter may nominally paint past events, if he pleases; but a great painter will only do so nominally. He will not do so in the spirit of an antiquary, but of a contemporary and a familiar; and this, not because his present is withdrawn into the past, but because the past is conjured up and made to breathe in the present. Thus, no great scriptural or historical picture was ever painted, that was not full of anachronisms. The absence of anachronisms always means the absence of genius. In Burne Jones and Alma Tadema I dare say there are no anachronisms. I have no doubt the baths, the pavements, the chairs, and the musical instruments are historically entirely accurate.

Violet Staunton: To me there is something quite delightful in this accuracy. You feel that the painter actually lived in the past, and that he takes us with him.

Ralph Burgoyne: Yes, that is just my accusation against them. If a man deserts his own generation, his own generation will take no heed of him. He is a useless idler. If he allures others to desert their own generation likewise, he is a mischievous idler.

Violet Staunton (softly): I suppose it is not everybody who knows what a relief it is, sometimes, to escape from the present. Some of these pictures are to me like a wet towel round one's head when it is aching. They do take one very far away. Myself, I like that. I feel like a man who has been caught cheating at cards, and who has at last got safely out of his own country. So this very unreality you complain of, for me has something real in it. Some of the pictures that I believe it is the right thing to admire, I won't say a word for. You can't think them more unreal than I do. They are like nothing in the heaven above or in the earth beneath. Artists, people say, are proverbially immoral. I don't know anything about Mr. Whistler personally; but if he had broken every other commandment, I'm sure he has faithfully kept the second.

Gage Stanley: You know Ruskin, on the contrary, says that all great artists must be moral.

Violet Staunton: I know he says that; but I'm afraid their biographies would hardly bear him out.

Lady Lilith Wardour: According to my theory, every one is moral who does his own special work in the best way possible.

Gage Stanley: I think you may give a painter's morals a wider field than that, and yet find Ruskin right. I entirely agree with him; but then I think that is because I understand him, and I think other people don't. When we talk of moral goodness we may mean two things-corporate goodness and individual goodness, one of which we have because we belong to ourselves, the other of which we have because we belong to our epoch. I can explain this to Miss Staunton out of her own experience. You were surprised, as you

said just now, at the gallery applauding Isabella. The men who made all that clapping were, no doubt, as you charitably suppose, Lucios in their own conduct; but they were Lucios not because they had no higher self, but because the higher self had been gagged and tied down by the lower. But at moments like these the better self gets free. No temptation is there to fetter it. Looking at the stage, they are placed, as it were, above the world, and they can judge of vice and virtue unwarped by any personal feeling. Another cause, also, helps to bring the better self uppermost. The moral judgment we are speaking of is given in public; and even should each have some secret wish in his heart to applaud vice, shame chokes the wish, and he does not dare to do so. Each man is not only passing judgment himself, but his sentence is being judged by others. Well, here you have a body of rough, dissolute individuals, any one of which one might be afraid of meeting alone, who yet show themselves possessed, under certain circumstances, of a spirit of virtue and of chivalry -possessed of what I call a corporate moral goodness. Now this is the sort of goodness that is necessary for a great painter to have part in. Though his own life may be selfish, he must reverence self-sacrifice; though his own life be impure, he must reverence purity. And if, during the age he lives in, purity and self-sacrifice are held surely and generally to be holy and adorable things, he may give them a willing and public tribute on his canvas, though he may unwillingly deny them in his secret life. But he can do this only, when his age is of such a character. Thus, in a great age, a dissolute painter may paint pure and noble pictures; and in a degraded age, a most respectable painter may paint degrading and degraded pictures. And now perhaps you will see what I meant when I said just now that I thought some of these pictures we have been talking of were the most significant sights in London. The painters who painted them may no doubt personally be most excellent people, but their pictures, so far as their meaning goes, are utterly condemnable and debased. A bad painter, in a great age, is like the Dead Sea, which, though it hides Gomorrah in its heart, yet reflects the heaven on its surface. A good painter, in a bad age, is sure to reflect Gomorrah, though his heart, in its own depths, may be as pure as Jordan.

Ralph Burgoyne: I, my dear Gage, should be thankful if our modern art had even an immoral meaning. To me it seems positively to have none.

Gage Stanley: And so it has none in one sense. It is true there is this want in it—and that is what you are struck by-there is no discrimination in it between good and evil. I quite agree with you, that if it were immoral, there would be much to be thankful for. This would show that our artists knew the good even if they did not choose it. But to me it seems that they do not so much as know it. That idea of the good, which, in Plato's exquisite meta