the use of
telling artists that they should try and paint Nature as she really is?
What Nature really is, is a question for metaphysics not for art. Art
deals with appearances, and the eye of the man who looks at Nature, the
vision, in fact, of the artist, is far more important to us than what he
looks at. There is more truth in Corot's aphorism that a landscape is
simply 'the mood of a man's mind' than there is in all Mr. Bayliss's
laborious disquisitions on naturalism. Again, why does Mr. Bayliss waste
a whole chapter in pointing out real or supposed resemblances between a
book of his published twelve years ago and an article by Mr. Palgrave
which appeared recently in the Nineteenth Century? Neither the book nor
the article contains anything of real interest, and as for the hundred or
more parallel passages which Mr. Wyke Bayliss solemnly prints side by
side, most of them are like parallel lines and never meet. The only
original proposal that Mr. Bayliss has to offer us is that the House of
Commons should, every year, select some important event from national and
contemporary history and hand it over to the artists who are to choose
from among themselves a man to make a picture of it. In this way Mr.
Bayliss believes that we could have the historic art, and suggests as
examples of what he means a picture of Florence Nightingale in the
hospital at Scutari, a picture of the opening of the first London Board-
school, and a picture of the Senate House at Cambridge with the girl
graduate receiving a degree 'that shall acknowledge her to be as wise as
Merlin himself and leave her still as beautiful as Vivien.' This
proposal is, of course, very well meant, but, to say nothing of the
danger of leaving historic art at the mercy of a majority in the House of
Commons, who would naturally vote for its own view of things, Mr. Bayliss
does not seem to realise that a great event is not necessarily a
pictorial event. 'The decisive events of the world,' as has been well
said, 'take place in the intellect,' and as for Board-schools, academic
ceremonies, hospital wards and the like, they may well be left to the
artists of the illustrated papers, who do them admirably and quite as
well as they need be done. Indeed, the pictures of contemporary events,
Royal marriages, naval reviews and things of this kind that appear in the
Academy every year, are always extremely bad; while the very same
subjects treated in black and white in the