Leading Articles in the Reviews. 



683 



A PAINTER OF SNOW SCENES. 



The An Monographs published by Messrs. 

 Virtue have now reached No. 37, and the subject 

 of the present issue is Mr. Joseph Farquharson 

 and his work. 



Archdeacon Sinclair, the writer of the letter- 

 press, begins by pointing out that there is not 

 one of Mr. Farquharson's pastoral landscapes 

 which is not treated from the contemplative point 

 of view. His work therefore belongs to two of 

 the forms of landscape-painting mentioned by 

 Ruskin — the pastoral and the contemplative. To 

 many people Mr, Farquharson is best known as 

 a painter of the snow — " the poetry of snow 

 either in its suggestion of desolation, or of the 

 endurance of peasantry life, or the exquisite 

 beauty of rare tints of sun or moon on deep 

 snow surfaces and seen through leafless trees." 

 He inherited from his father his devotion to art, 

 and on holidays worked in his father's studio. 

 When he had reached the mature age of twelve 

 he was presented with a paint-box of his own, 

 and, spurred on by the acquisition, he painted a 

 picture the next year and sent it to the Scottish 

 Academy. The picture was accepted and hung. 

 Some of the excellent technique of this early 

 success was due to the instruction of Mr. Peter 

 Graham. For twelve years the boy continued to 

 exhibit regularly at the Scottish Academy, the 

 pictures being scenes drawn mainly from his 

 Highland home. The snow scenes, it should be 

 remembered, often include flocks of sheep, 

 admirably grouped. In 1885 Mr. Farquharson 

 paid his. first visit to Egypt, and the result was a 

 series of pictures of life in that country. He nas 

 also painted several portraits. The monograph, 

 which contains some fifty illustrations of Mr. 

 Farquharson's work, is a very interesting 

 number. 



PICTURED MUSIC. 



The Christmas issue of the Woman's Maga- 

 zine contains a series of coloured reproductions 

 from the paintings of Hayward Young. They 

 are the painter's interpretation of his emotions 

 on listening to Rachmaninoff's " Prelude," 

 Mendelssohn's " Spring Song," Bach's " Fugue 

 in G Minor," and Beethoven's " Moonlight 

 Sonata." The painter explains them thus : — 



For years and years I have had a theory and belief 

 that the emotions aroused by waves of sound could be 

 registered by an artist who had the craftsmanship at his 

 finger ends combined with an imaginative temperament. 

 Being first and foremost an outdoor painter and lover 

 of Nature, I find that all good instrumental music has a 

 wonderful and immediate stimulative effect on my 

 imagination ; and according to the form of music I am 

 listening to, so do I see either beautiful sunlit woods 

 and dales, lowering skies and wind-swept seas, moon- 

 light and lapping waves, or rolling clouds and melan- 

 choly moorlands, suggested perhaps by some melody in 

 a minor key. 



PHILOSOPHIC MUSIC. 



In an article on the Relationship between 

 Music and Life which Mr. Gerald Cumberland 

 has contributed to the Contemporary Review 

 for November it is claimed that music has been 

 brought into " the closest relationship with Ufe 

 — a relationship that has its origin and hopes 

 for permanence in the soul of man." 



INSPIRATION FROM THE POETS. 



In Mendelssohn, Liszt, Berlioz, Chopin, Schu- 

 mann, and Wagner we have a number of 

 musicians of enormous culture, and it was as a 

 result of the activities of these men that pro- 

 gramme music became self-conscious. Litera- 

 ture and music became closely allied. Liszt 

 went for inspiration to Goethe, Lamartine, 

 Byron, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, and other 

 poets. Mendelssohn was affected by the con- 

 templation of scenery more keenly than by 

 literature, but, like Berhoz and Schumann, he 

 also derived inspiration from Shakespeare and 

 Goethe. Berlioz was attracted by the relation of 

 heroic deeds, and Virgil and Byron originated 

 several of his works. Schumann was inspired 

 by Hoffmann, Riickert, and Schiller ; and 

 Wagner by Goethe and by the deeds of men of 

 heroic mould. In the orchestral work of these 

 composers a secondary place only is allotted to 

 love, and it was left to the operatic stage to 

 continue to make love the theme of inspiration. 



"thus spake zarathustra. " 



Putting aside both " absolute " and " pro- 

 grammatic " music, the writer goes on to dis- 

 cuss a new species of composition as represented 

 by Richard Strauss's " Also sprach Zara- 

 thustra." Composed in 1896, it belongs to 

 Strauss's second period, when he had freed him- 

 self from the classic tradition. He was, indeed, 

 the first musician to go to a book of philosophy 

 for inspiration, and of all writers who have 

 influenced his outlook Nietzsche stands alone as 

 working a kind of revolution in the composer's 

 mind. In order to understand such " philo- 

 sophic " music as the " Zarathustra " of 

 Strauss it is necessary to understand the philo- 

 sophy, as with programme music one must know 

 the scheme. Thus music, which had first been 

 fertilised by poetry, has now been fertilised by 

 abstract thought, and in the future it will be an 

 exposition of the soul of man. 



W. D. HowELLS, described by Theodore Roose- 

 velt as the greatest novelist of our day, is, in 

 the Westminster Review, declared to be the 

 portrayer of Italian trivialities and American 

 commonplaces. 



