DISCOVERY 



195 



Asiatic shore just north of the Strait by drift-ice last 

 November. But he intends to try his luck again this 

 autumn and expects to be away for a period of five 

 years. 



***** 



In this number we pubhsh an article on John Clare, 

 the peasant poet of Northamptonshire, whose work 

 made a great sensation in literary and fashionable 

 circles early in the nineteenth century. His comet- 

 like fame blazed suddenly and died away almost as 

 quickly. Perhaps this is not surprising since he wrote 

 in an age bestarred by a multitude of great poets, 

 including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and 

 Keats — an age commonly known as the Romantic 

 Revival, whose zenith lasted from 1798 (the date of the 

 publication of the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and 

 Coleridge) till the first appearance of Tennyson in 

 1830. But Clare, with his delicately expressed and 

 minutely observant nature poetry, and with his restless 

 verses produced by an early unfulfilled love, made a 

 definite contribution to literature. It is not to be won- 

 dered at that revived interest is being taken in his work 

 during a period such as ours, when both poetry and 

 fiction are confining themselves to accurate observa- 

 tion of nature and humanity, and to the technique 

 of literary expression rather than to the higher flights 

 of imagination. 



***** 



The writer of the article, Mr. Edmund Blunden, is 

 himself a young nature poet, whose volume. The 

 Waggoner and Other Poems (Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 

 1920), has attracted a great amount of attention. I 

 quote the concluding lines of his poem, " Clare's 

 Ghost," written in a smithy in 1917 : 



" And a stranger stands with me here in the glow 

 Chinked through the door, and marks 



The sparks 

 Perish in whirlpool wind, and if I go 

 To the delta of cypress, where the glebe gate cries, 

 I see him there, with his streaming hair, 



.\nd his eyes 

 Piercing beyond our human firmament. 

 Lit with a burning deathless discontent." 



***** 

 A few words about some of our contemporaries. In 

 the July number of the Scientific American Monthly, 

 Professor Eisenhart lucidly explains Einstein's theory 

 of the universe as " unbounded but of finite volume," 

 while Mr. Snowden Sinclair emphasises the hazardous- 

 ness of the Mount Everest Expedition. On this latter 

 subject The Geographical Journal for July gives som.e 

 interesting notes. The Nation and the Athenceum, in 

 its issues of July 9 and 16, considers British soldiers' 

 prose accounts of the war. The time has arrived for 

 a critical estimate. We intend to' give one in an early 

 subsequent number. 



(a) Old Paintings and 

 Polarised Light 



How Ancient Paintings, Dark with .\ge and 

 Patina, can be viewed in all their Pristine Fresh- 

 ness, without Restoration — \ Parisian Scientist's 

 Discovery 



By George Frederic Lees 



Time is sometimes credited among connoisseurs with 

 having added to the beauty of oil paintings by the 

 Great Masters. The pigments and mediums, with which 

 they were painted, darken in the course of centuries, 

 largely owing to the action of light and atmospheric 

 conditions upon them. Some of these works of art take 

 on a patina, which is often said to enhance their beauty 

 and value. But are we quite certain that this is so ? 

 Which would you prefer : a painting by, say, Raphael 

 just as it is to-day, or the same work exactly as it was 

 when the Master put the finishing touches to it, when 

 it appeared in all its pristine freshness ? The majority 

 of people would, I bsheve, vote in favour of the master- 

 piece as it appeared to the eyes of the painter and his 

 contemporaries, and would regret that it is no longer 

 possible to see the work as it was in its original state. 



Are we quite certain, however, that it is impossible to 

 do this ? Cannot science help us to see through the 

 dust and incrustations with which ancient pictures are 

 covered, and to behold the colours as they left the 

 artist's brush ? . . . These were questions which a 

 Parisian scientist, M. Pierre Lambert, asked himself in 

 the course of experiments at the Sorbonne ; and whilst 

 seeking for one discovery he unexpectedly made an- 

 other which has permitted him to answer those ques- 

 tions in the affirmative. The members of the Academy 

 of Science, headed by M. Lippmann, have just witnessed 

 these experiments in M. Lambert's laboratory, and one 

 and all were very much impressed. 



A picture may be regarded as made up of two parts. 

 There is the paint forming the picture itself, and there 

 is the varnish covering the brushwork. Now the light 

 reflected by the picture is reflected not only from the 

 painting itself, but also from the varnish. If the latter 

 be perfectly fiat and polished, and if the observer place 

 himself in a good position he may see the picture 

 properly. But the surface of an old picture is generally 

 irregular, full of little hills and dales, and even under the 

 most favourable conditions of lighting the light reflected 

 by the surface usually interferes in a remarkable 

 manner with the reflection from the painting itself. It is 

 therefore impossible to place oneself completely out of 

 the reach of the reflections from this irregular surface 

 which interfere so greatly with the effect expressed by 



