disappointed in an editor whom they had engaged; and, at their request, I agreed to supply his place for a few weeks, till they could find another. The few weeks stretched into months; and finally to more than a year, during which time I wrote for them, on the average, upwards of a column of editorial matter daily. This I did partly because, after a time, I got interested in editorial skirmishing, and partly to help the young fellows in their undertaking; not charging them, nor receiving from them, a dollar for my pains. I concealed my name, always leaving my articles with a friend, Mr. Samuel Humphreys; and many were the speculations as to who the devil it was that was running the Workies' paper." I wrote as one of the industrial classes; and certainly had a good right so to do,

1 In The Debatable Land between this World and the Next: New York and London, 1873; book

considering my regular twelve hours' daily labor.

It was during the years 1828 and 1829 that I made the acquaintance of that young English lady of whom I have spoken, in one of my works on Spiritualism,1 under the name of Violet. Her early death was a great grief to me. But I have received a communication (as to which the attendant circumstances forbid me to doubt that it was truly from her) to the effect that she has been able to aid and guide me from her home in the other world, more effectually than if she had remained to cheer and help me in this.

The readers of The Atlantic will be better able to judge the cogency of evidence that forces on me belief in such phenomena, when they shall have read my next chapter.

Robert Dale Owen.

iv. chap iii., entitled, A Beautiful Spirit manifesting Herself.

Charlotte F. Bates.

I.

SOUTH KENSINGTON.

If the artistic genius of England were to be judged by its art institutions, its position, already not too high, would become ridiculous; for the occasional individual examples of genuine art-feeling which crop out of the mass of stolid indifference to art seem never by any chance to diffuse their influence into the educational system. In artistic countries we see schools gathered together by the magnetism and genius of individual masters, and the best talent almost invariably more or less devoted to the perpetuation of its traditions; but in England, almost without exception, the men who have real talent put it in the market for what it will bring, without a trace of the generous enthusiasm which one finds in the great Continental ateliers. Artists thrive in England commercially, though art starves, and pictures are sold in quantities and at high prices, and now and then a genuine and remarkable artistic nature does appear; but in general, art as art does not enter into English education, or exercise any influence on it. I must not forget to notice one exception quite worthy of the artistic confrérie of the old times - Ford Madox Brown, the well-known "PreRaphaelite," whose knowledge and time have always been given freely to artstudents.

A popular superstition prevails in England that to have art you need only to have art-schools; whence South Kensington, with numerous tributaries, and yearly competition and prizes: and as the popular mind is tolerably indifferent to the quality of the art, and the legislative mind utterly in the dark as to the measures to be taken to encourage it, the result has been that South Kensington is a huge receptacle into which everything notable in applied art drifts,

and where it lies, the object of indiscriminate and undigesting admiration. I believe that in the course of generations these superb public collections will develop taste, perhaps an art; and if artists arise in England capable of teaching on correct principles, and with a notion of what art really is, there may be created a school; but meanwhile we have South Kensington.

Last September I looked through the annual exhibition of prize drawings for the national competition, and a more hopeless mass of childish, misdirected patience and microscopic enthusiasm I have never seen. The system of study followed, if it deserves to be called system, seems to be analogous to what geography might be as studied by pismires the attempt to crawl over and investigate at near sight every point and detail of the subject, without in the least comprehending the larger relations of it, much less the rhythmical tendencies; in fact, such a mapping of nature as a somewhat intelligent photographic machine would do if left pretty much to itself. Sign of masters or proof of mastery there is none; and of the three general divisions into which the work may be divided drawing from the cast, from the life, and from nature, and decorative design-I was not able to discover a single example which showed the least promise of originality, or betrayed a comprehensive way of looking at things. The drawings from the cast were, in the specimens selected for the chief prizes, mainly distinguished by the carefulness and lithographic quality of the execution, all point-work, and painful from the excessive attention to the most minute markings and little fractures in the plaster of the original, and the laborious way in which a flat background was laid in, stippled, and pointed up like commonplace engravers' or lithographers' work. A plaster cast is a good sitter, and the worst lesson in the

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world; but at least a draughtsman ought, with time and patience, to be able to rival the photograph in exactitude. Not one of these drawings of antique statues, however, showed more than a superficial apprehension of the original. The clear quality of the lines was gone; the muscle markings were all there; the pose and action no one could miss: but the subordination of detail to the action, and to the larger masses, was lost entirely; the outlines were hesitating and undulating, without expression, weak, and flabby. Through all the spiritless manipulation one felt that the object was seen by its details more than by its ensemble; that the feeling which lay at the root of the work was, Get the details right and the masses must be right- a superficial maxim, and one that is invariably falsified by practice; for no one ever does get the details absolutely right, and the sum of the errors is worse than any possible error in the larger way of working. The French system, the only correct one in use nowadays, is to get your ensemble at once and without reference to detail; your "motive" fixed, you may go on and add detail as long as you like; but the artist's work must be like the creation, first divided by the broadest demarkation. Any system of drawing not based on this principle will be wasteful certainly, weak probably, and invariably inaccurate. And it is not at all in the practice of working with the point of the crayon that the error exists, any more than inaccurate grammar lies in a bad pen. A good draughtsman, whether he begin his work with chalk, with a stump, as in most French schools, or with a huge hog tool, will invariably work largely, while the South Kensingtonian will but blunder without his point because he has learned to see nothing but detail, and the stump or the brush is too large for his facts.

But if the system of building up by detail be unfortunate in statuary even, what will it be with the mobile and easily-tired living model? Here Rousseau's precept, "If your picture is not made in the first five strokes, it never

will be," is absolutely true. If the motive of the drawing, the character of the figure, is not caught in the first few strokes and the first few minutes of the pose, it will never come right; and so all depends on the rough cast, the blocking out, of it. And the South Kensington system betrays it votaries from the beginning, for it does not lead them to look mainly at this larger truth, without which all addition of facts is decoration without meaning, and finish without structure. There were no figures in full from the life, but a collection of studies of heads was just what we might have anticipated from the errors of system followed in the antique; not one was there which would not disgrace a French student three months in the atelier. It is not that there was no genius (if there were, it would not find its way through these sophistications), but there was an utter want of style and breadth in the drawing all the petty points of feature elaborated and likeness hunted out with the eyes of a ferret, while the solid and plastic qualities, the roundness and large contours, were utterly lost sight of; detail protruded everywhere - hard, liney, and anatomical.

The studies from nature similarly had the character of botanical studies. There was no limit, except that of eyesight, to their faithfulness, but there was no artistic relation in them. If training is wanted for scientific draughtsmen in botany and inanimate nature, here it is; but one need not have South Kensington for that; it wants neither method nor masters nor public competition to bring it out-the true pismire habit is perhaps the best for it.

There remains only the decorative design to be considered. Here I failed to find anything beyond ingenious adaptation of the styles of ornamentation so well known, Persian, Italian, Morris & Co. nothing equal as decoration to Japanese either in form or color, the best in color being some that were very like Morris & Co.'s designs for papers. There were conventional styles of decoration in which the daisies are a little more realistic and the climbers and

creepers more botanical, but this is, except for a naturalist's eye, rather an objection than an excellence. The essence of all good ornament is that it should be felt as ornament merely, not as natural history. There must be a certain conventionalism of type in the forms if the forms are borrowed from nature; but the noblest schools of decoration have always based their work on abstract or geometrical forms, and only unartistic people, or those with whom art has gone to decay, adopt naturalistic types with realistic treatment. A strongly realistic tendency is the worst possible symptom in a rising school, and in the whole history of the world there is no example of a noble school of art growing out of imitation of nature. A certain affectionate representation, far off and fantastic, with a strong subordination to the first motives of the work, have always attended the introduction of nature into the great schools. It is only in the English school that we have even the ornamental arts made intentionally realistic, and the ensemble sacrificed to the parts.

There were designs for fans in which the French of Louis XIV., or the salon style, was most appropriate and equally good with any. But in all, the principles of art were not so much as recognized. Now, the larger question at once arises, if, when art is to be cultivated, even for ornamental purposes, it is not better to lay the basis in the practice of the better style of design; and whether, if the commercial demand for ornamental designs alone were to be consulted, it is not wiser to aim at making artists (so far as training can accomplish that end) even for our house-papers, than to adopt a system which may make clever draughtsmen, but never will help make a true designer? Vulgar and uneducated tastes are caught by the recognition of the little facts of nature, and delight in being deceived by that artifice which they mistake for art. The study of nature is not necessarily art, but it is made artistic by a proper method, as we shall see in examination of the Belgian schools.

VOL. XXXIV.NO. 201.

6

II.

THE SCHOOL OF ANTWERP.

THE course of instruction in the Academy of Antwerp is substantially in preparation for the higher branches of art-production, although the plan of organization extends over all the occupations in which design is applicable: painting, historical and genre, ornamental design, landscape, and animals; sculpture; architecture; ship-building; and engraving. The course is divided into elementary (comprising linear drawing of ornaments, heads, and figures, and geometrical drawing; ornaments, heads, and figures in light and shade, and orders of architecture), from which the pupils pass into the middle classes (enseignement moyen) by a competition in which they must satisfactorily acquit themselves in the execution of a drawing or model in the branches for which they compete, without assistance or direction, to show that they have thoroughly mastered their material, their subject being a print or cast. In the middle class the modeling or drawing is from an antique statue, from nature, with studies of expression, etc., in the classes of painting and sculpture; in architecture, of the principles of construction; and in engraving, of the different styles of copper and steel plate engraving and wood cutting with modeling in wax for medals, etc.

The competition for passing into the upper class is in the execution of a figure from an antique statue; in architecture, of a design for a dwelling-house, etc. There are, beside, competitions in costume and knowledge of antiquities, anatomy, proportion of the human body, perspective linear and picturesque, expression and geometry considered as accessory, and in the different branches of application of art to industry.

The plan of organization is very large and comprehensive; to carry it out in all its branches effectively would demand resources greater than any government has yet seen fit to devote to

such an object; but beside being the central institution of forty-six academies and schools of design in the different cities of Belgium, it has in its own schools given instruction in the last ten years to nearly sixteen thousand pupils, of whom forty-seven were from the United States, and of them one, Mr. Millett of Boston, is recorded in the last report (1873) as having taken seven first prizes out of eleven given in the department of painting and drawing of the highest classes. The staff consists of the director, De Keyser, and twenty professors. The primary classes were not in train when I visited the school, but of the evening classes, to which the artisans and apprentices of Antwerp come in great numbers, all instruction being free, that of architecture was by far the most striking, from the number of operatives of different occupations who come to receive an education which they may carry as far as their talents permit them.

Of the total of the students in the academy last year (1872-73) one hundred and sixty-two were decorative painters, three hundred and eight carpenters and cabinet makers, seventyseven stone-cutters, sixty-three plasterers and masons, twenty goldsmiths, and thirty-two other metal workers, beside representatives of nearly every trade in use in the city, about five hundred and sixty being undetermined yet as to their future careers.

The system of drawing is similar to that so long established in France, and in principle the antithesis of that employed in England. The pupil is taught to look mainly, in the antique school, for the individual character of the statue employed as model, and to render this in the drawing, beginning with the largest relation and carrying the elaboration on in all parts more or less pari passu, so far at least that no part shall be finished in advance of the whole. In the life school not only is this throughout insisted on, but the more difficult feat of catching the motive of the pose, and expressing it in the fewest and largest lines, is kept constantly before the pupil, for the double

reason that the model soon loses the pose from weariness, and the draughtsman himself, if he does not catch the pose at once, is less likely to get it with each successive alteration; and the larger and simpler the cast of the outline, the more likely it is to give the essential character of the action. The pupil is taught, in other words, that the less his eye is diverted to details, the easier and truer his generalization is likely to be, and that no amount of detail will compensate for the loss of the general fidelity.

Some drawings which are hung in the class-room are admirable examples of the results of the system-outlines pure and clean, anatomy well developed, and the larger qualities of form underlying the expression of all the surface markings. There was not as much recognition as I have been accustomed to see in some of the French ateliers, of the distinctions of local color in terms of black and white, but it is a moot point amongst even good draughtsmen how far this should be carried, some preferring to render the forms as if they were monochromatic as in the plaster cast, others noting local color in equivalent of tint in the monochrome, much as the photograph renders it. The latter seems to me the true system, and certainly the most expressive and effective drawings are obtained in this way.

The drawings for the competition, such as those I saw in the class-room, are done without any assistance or advice from the professors, and so represent truly the attainment of the pupil. There are, beside drawings from life, anatomical studies in which the student can have no assistance even from dia

grams. The professor makes a number of small sketches of figures in certain attitudes, and draws from them by lot those which must be the basis of the anatomical study, for which the pupil has no other guide than this sketch. He is shut into the drawing-room and must in twelve hours make a study showing all the anatomical developments in a figure taking that attitude one drawing for the muscles and another