as he is in the next page. But the truth is, as all art-students know, that their skill and moral health or rightness are very closely related. To look on human, i.e. female, beauty with the view of representing it is not like looking on it from any other motive, innocent or guilty. The act of painting affects the moral character of the painter, and the picture. No one ought to be or is allowed to study in a life school till he has learnt the human form, ie. its ideal anatomy, curves, chiaroscuro and colour, in the cast school. He has to bring a good deal of acquired knowledge, ocular, mental, and manual, to bear on this model when he first sees her: and the difficult and delightful manipulations, on which his success depends, leave him no time or thought for anything but themselves, when he comes to work from the life. A good student only thinks of his model on his canvas. There is, in fact, as every workman will tell you, a delicate pleasure in the curves and in the colour which the skilled workman enjoys, and which he desires to enable his critic to share. That is the use of skill: that is what distinguishes a picture from a book, as to idea, or from the natural objects themselves in pure transcript of nature. Skill wins, or ought to win favour by giving a pleasure of its own, To contrast pale crimson and grey in various shades and forms, is most delightful to anybody who can do it; and he can convey a part of that pleasure to anybody who will really look at his work, which Mr. Burgoyne says he won't do.

Again, you do not understand a painting well enough to criticise it in a leading review-still less to criticise the motives of its painter unfavourably, and with disagreeable reiteration of his name unless you know the difficulties involved, and they cannot be appreciated without some experience in manipulations. Try to copy an outline in pencil: if you can do that right, try a form in sepia; if you can do that, try it again on canvas, and feel how the intractable nature of the pig dwells in those uncompromising bristles, which refuse for hours of trouble to do anything you want. In your first attempts at simple things you will hardly be able to see that they are all wrong. Like everything else worth doing, painting is an advance up hills of difficulty, for the sake of fine things to be seen and done on the way or on the top, and the difficulties are great part of the things. Of these difficulties the human form affords the standard, undisputed from the days of Pheidias. He preferred it draped, at least on the female side; so do I, so beyond all question does Mr. Burne Jones, and doubtless so does his critic. In that we are all at one. Nevertheless, that form undraped always has been a central standard of competence in art, and the difficulties of rendering it, light, shade, and colour, have very much to do with any painter's choice of it as his object. He must show himself equal to it, if no more; I think our leading painters take this view of it, and that Millais and Leighton have been influenced by feelings of this kind in their choice of

subject. Any one who has drawn the female form from the cast knows it is the highest reward of the master to succeed with it from: life; all say the same, from the Greeks to the Renaissance (and that begins with Niccolo Pisano) and on from Cellini to Etty. The outsider who knows what he likes can say what he likes, and he always does so, and has the best of it. But he is not in a proper position to talk about the painter's moral standard. He ought not, on the I ground of technical ignorance, to be oracular about motiveā j tendency often observable in the intellectual rough. It is his pleasing: manner to talk of manual skill-just as if it were only manual (which has been considered), then as if it demoralised and committed the student or workman. The Great Briton asserts or implies a notion that > every painter is a person of degraded and sensual mind, from the studies and practice of his profession. I abhor tu quoques, and have a much higher opinion of the morality of the race and clan to which I belong than that expressed in the familiar colloquy. But I do not think, my fellow-countrymen, or any of them, so good or so cold as either. not to see or to receive harm by seeing the beauty of Mr. Jones's works. To wrangle about beauty in the portrait of a woman, or in› the ideal of an angel, which is sure to retain some feminine likeness, is an utter weariness. Before one disputes with one man about the morals of a third, one should know more about both, and confess more about oneself, than ought on any account or anywhere to be made public. It is enough to say that in this matter every painter who does his best, and puts his heart into his work, really carries it on his sleeve for daws to peck at. So they do, and it is all right;: but Mr. Mallock is a tercel-gentle. His beak and single are sharper: and his stoop, to say the least, far more unexpected.⠀

As was said, it is no use talking about colour, form or expression. With many men, it is an offence to know much about or earnestly study them. And men of that form must swing their clubs to their heart's content in talk or newspapers, and so they do. But one thing I should like to say about my friend's feminine ideals... I do not know what restraints young gentlemen now admit in their conversation with ladies, especially when one of the latter is an atheist, and the other of 'imperfect reputation,' whatever that may mean. But if I were in the society of women whom I could only judge by their looks, and who looked like Burne Jones's Angels of Creation,' or his 'Psyche,' or 'Medea,' or 'Creusa,' or anybody he has painted in the Grosvenor Gallery this year, I should be particularly careful not to use any dubious expression whatever. I should not introduce the subject of spades for the sake of calling them by their right name. I should keep guard over my tongue, lest it strayed into anything savouring of 'that flower of modern converse, the innuendo.' I should be careful of my words in such women's hearing, and afterwards, and of my thoughts in their presence, and afterwards.

We all speak of love as we find it; and I have certainly known Englishwomen not unlike those represented in these pictures, who bore great sorrows not unfaithfully as a cross, and were or professed themselves strengthened in such endurance by love of persons dear to them their husbands, for example. The expressions at p. 295, put in the mouth of the aesthetic dummy, appear to me somewhat outrageous accordingly. Knowledge of women of our own race and time is not best acquired by hearing or reading scandal: still less by perusing the extraordinary works which formed part of old Mr. Laurence's library. These, as I trust, his chronicler knows only by name; I never knew their names till I read them in the first edition of his chief work. But the fact that such books were illustrated by Giulio Romano and Sansovino,' and that Popes either winked at their existence, or more often strove against them honestly and vainly, ought to add some charity to expressions used by English Catholics about English women; and if that be all, about English artists as well. It is well to season Ultramontanism with Christianity; and one may hope that a critic who has acquired one may go on to the other. But such an expression as that of 'exhausted animalism' at p. 295, line 21, involves a very ugly and wanton accusation, which no fair student of this painter's works can read without grave indignation.

Mr. Burne Jones's name is coupled with M. Alma Tadema's and M. Tissot's, as if the painters had anything in common except perfect manual skill. This is harmless crudity; and the two last-named painters are well able to take care of themselves. But most men will admit the difference between ideal expression, antiquarian realism, and modern realism; as motives of art, supplying subjects for pictures, I do not like the third, and I respect the second, but the first appears to be in fact identical with the motives of the highest written poetry. Mr. Mallock partly sees this, and goes on very sensibly from his pictorial studies to some parental lamentations over Mr. Swinburne's misled genius, which I hope that gentleman will lay to heart; and if he should reply to them, it will not be bad reading. But I do not know what an attack on Mr. Aubrey de Vere's new book has to do with a familiar colloquy on art, though it may be highly palatable to the extreme section of the Roman Catholic Church in this country.

R. S. TYRWHITT.

1 See Crowe and Cavalcaselle's Life of Titian.

* It is perhaps right to state that Mr. Mallock does not belong to the Roman Catholic Church, as the author appears to suppose.-ED.

THE CHINESE AS COLONISTS.

THE Chinese are, by common consent of all Western nations, pronounced to be an eccentric and impracticable race. And not without reason; for, in nearly every characteristic which marks a people, they seem to be hopelessly antagonistic to nations occupying the western hemisphere, and usually included in the conventional term 'civilised.' Oil and water would seem to be scarcely less reconcilable to each other than is the Chinaman to the European or American; and the greater the opportunities of intercommunication the less they appear likely to harmonise. Yet the Chinese do not, like most dark-skinned races, flinch or degenerate in the contact. On the contrary; homogeneous, sturdy, clannish, and enterprising, they not only hold their own, hand to hand and foot to foot, with more favoured races, but compete with them successfully upon Chinese soil, and bid fair to wrest from them the prizes of art, labour, and commerce even in their own territories. As a natural result, Chinese immigration has become a red rag to Australians and Americans alike, and the question of putting a decided stop to it, or so dealing with it as to keep it within manageable bounds, forces itself with daily increasing weight upon the attention of the several administrations concerned.

Summarise the charges brought against Chinese immigrants by those most nearly interested, namely, British colonists and United States citizens, and these may be stated as follows:-They are pronounced to be the scum of the population of the worst districts of China; they migrate without their families, and the few women they import are shipped under a system of slavery for the vilest purposes; they introduce their own bizarre habits and ideas, and studiously eschew all sociability with colonists of other races; they outrage public opinion by hideous immoralities; they ignore or defy judicial and municipal institutions; they form secret and treasonable associations amongst themselves; they manage to afford, by their low miserable style of living, to undersell and underwork white men as mechanics, labourers, and servants; they fail to take root in the soil, making it their aim always to carry home their gains to the old country, and even to have their bones conveyed back thither for interment; in a word, so far from seeking to become colonists or citizens in the true

sense of the terms, and striving to enrich or benefit the country of their temporary adoption, they are mere vagrants and adventurers, and that of a kind positively hurtful to the general welfare and progress.

Some of these accusations are serious enough, and the remainder of the traits ascribed derive an importance which they would not otherwise possess from mere association with a race which has unfortunately rendered itself obnoxious. The object of this paper is to inquire how far the generally received opinion is to be accepted as correct, and whether any, and, if so, what, steps can be taken to remove or modify any difficulties which may actually lie in the way of acclimatising (so to speak) the Chinese upon a foreign soil with advantage to themselves and to those amongst whom they settle. It will be presumed, as a matter of course, that the Chinaman has as much right to emigrate, and claim for his motto the maxim Live and let live,' as any other denizen of this earth's surface. Any one thinking otherwise must seek elsewhere than in this paper for a refutation of his dog-in-the-manger doctrine.

In dealing with the charges brought against the Chinese immigrant it would seem only necessary to give attention to the more material ones of vagrancy, immorality, and insubordination. As regards those other traits which derive their importance from association rather than from any inherently objectionable features, it will suffice if their influence be not lost sight of when the question of remedial measures comes to be considered. If clannishness, patriotism, persistence in the habits and ideas to which one has been brought up, frugality, the desire to acquire money in order to lay it out at home, and a settled determination to lay one's bones on native soil, can be characterised as crimes or objectionable traits, then many are the Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, and Americans, who cannot afford to throw stones at the heathen Chinee.'

First, as regards the character of vagrancy ascribed to the Chinese immigrants as a class. This is to a certain extent merited, and it is a difficulty which, for some time to come at any rate, must beset the question more or less, seeing that it is of necessity chiefly the poor and wretched, who, finding existence at home impossible or intolerable, seek to better themselves by going abroad. But it is by no means the fact that it is solely the scum of the Chinese population who emigrate. It depends much upon the part of the country from which they may hail. The chief, indeed the only, provinces whose populations have thus far shown a tendency to overflow seaward, are those of Canton, Fukien, and Chekeang, and the principal points of embarkation are (commencing from the west and going northward and eastward) Haenan, Canton and Macao, Swatow and Chaochow, Amoy, Chinchew, and, to a limited extent, Wenchow and Ningpo. The Haenan people make their way principally to the Straits of