yau 13, 1887] 



NA TURE 



251 



mician. At the request of the Fine Art Society he has 

 this winter allowed a series of about fifty sketches painted 

 by him on the west coast of Scotland last summer to be 

 exhibited in the New Bond Street rooms. These sketches 

 show that he has recently spent a long holiday among 

 some of the most delightful scenery in the British Isles. 

 As a man who has evidently got on in the world, 

 looking back upon a distinguished past and forward 

 to perhaps a still more distinguished future, he might 

 reasonably be expected to smile pleasantly on the 

 world that has used him so well. If the keen eyes 

 that stand him in such good stead in landscape-paint- 

 ing reveal to him the weaknesses and frailties of his 

 fellow-men, one might at least anticipate that they would 

 wink hard at these shortcomings and rather turn to the 

 good side of men and of things. But apparently Mr. 

 Brett sees only too vividly what he conceives to be the 

 impostures and ignorances around him, and his soul is 

 stirred within him at the sight. The exhibition of his 

 last year's sketches has furnished him with the occasion 

 for discharging the vials of a wrath which, like that of 

 Tarn o' Shanter's wife, he must have been nursing for 

 a long while to keep it so warm. 



The Exhibition (now closed) was illustrated by a 

 pamphlet, which on the title-page is described as " An 

 Explanatory Essay," and on the first page is more 

 emphatically designated as "The Commentaries." Mr. 

 Brett, apparently with some presentiment that this liter- 

 ary effort of his might not meet with the same kind 

 reception that attends his pictorial labours, stipulated 

 expressly, as he tells us in a " Prefatory Note," that his 

 paper should be published exactly as it left his hands. 

 We cannot therefore plead for him that his essay was 

 hurriedly thrown off in a fit of ill-temper. He ostenta- 

 tiously goes out of his way to accept the responsibility of 

 its matter and its style. A description of each picture, 

 from the artist's point of view, with a running comment- 

 ary on his method of working, the difficulties in Nature 

 to be overcom:, and his way of grappling with them, 

 would have been interesting to the general public and 

 valuable to artists and students of art. He seems to 

 have started with the idea of writing some such com- 

 mentary. But by the time he gets to the second page he 

 catches sight of the red rags of imposture and ignorance, 

 and without more ado rushes madly at them. The first 

 victims of his fury are press critics of art. Nothing is 

 too contemptuous to be said of them. Mr. Brett looks 

 on them as a set of ignorant charlatans, too idle to work, 

 too proud to beg, but who are glad to earn the slender 

 pay allowed to them by careless editors. Some wretched 

 scribbler had pronounced his work to be " laborious," 

 which we would have thought rather a complimentary 

 epithet ; but Mr. Brett cannot forgive it. The writer 

 who used it he stigmatises as a " bell-wether," and those 

 who blindly followed his lead are described as "enlight- 

 ened tom-tom players, who have gone on sounding the 

 same note for a quarter of a century or more." 



After this onslaught the painter tries to find his way 

 back to where he was, and for a little while the reader 

 begins seriously to entertain the hope that the promised 

 commentary is coming. But the author gets upon the 

 subject of clouds, and instantly a bigger bunch of red 

 rags looms in front of him. Down goes the head, and 

 with one triumphant howl of derision the infuriated 

 writer rushes at scientific men in general, and the Royal 

 Society in particular. After this second outburst he 

 hardly calms down again till the end of the performance. 

 No sooner does he turn from the treatment of the clouds 

 to the ground beneath us than geological theories in all 

 their hideous deformity and crass ignorance stare him in 

 the face. The text is not roomy enough to contain all 

 that he has to say about the misdoings of the geologists, 

 so that he has to overflow into a footnote. Next comes 

 the tarn of those misguided astronomers who have 



led mankind wrong about the moon and the planet 

 Mars. 



One is tempted to ask what is the meaning of all this 

 sound and fury. What relation has it to the pictures it 

 is meant to preface ? What object can the writer have 

 had in indulging in it ? Men of science are, no doubt, 

 often wrong. But at least they take the trouble to try 

 to be right. Their greatest aim is to get at the truth, and 

 they welcome whatever will lead them nearer to that 

 goal. They will even willingly learn from Mr. Brett if he 

 has anything to teach them, though he laughs them to 

 scorr, and derides them as " scientific Johnnies," "lovers 

 of jargon," makers of " real gibberish," by whom various 

 "forms of silliness are palmed off as science disguised in 

 Greek or Latin." If the meteorologist turns for sugges- 

 tions to Mr. Brett's essay, he there learns that " the 

 fundamental phenomena of evaporation have always been 

 misrepresented," and that he and his gaping fellow- 

 students of Nature will learn more about clouds from the 

 pictures of a well-known landscape-painter " than from all 

 the Transactions of the Royal Society put together." If 

 the geologist inquires what Mr. Brett has to say for his 

 consideration regarding the " laws of the rocks," he is 

 told that water is a " recent formation," that upheaval is 

 a " childish conception," and that geologists " ignore the 

 moon." If the astronomer in turn asks what the author 

 of " The ComiTientaries " has to say in his department of 

 knowledge, he is informed that Mr. Brett defies him " to 

 point out a single instance of a volcano or a volcanic 

 crater in the whole disc" of the moon. The "jargon" 

 and " real gibberish " of modern science not only afflict 

 the artist's own -soul, but they disturb the peace of his 

 family. " One professor the other day," he indignantly 

 e.xclaims, " learnedly instructed my boy that aqueous 

 vapour was formed by evaporation ! " Hapless youth ! 

 Let us hope that his father has found time to instruct him 

 in " the fundamental phenomena of evaporation." 



After such a tirade against scientific men, one might 

 suppose that Mr. Brett would be disposed rather to avoid 

 them, or at least not to show himself ostentatiously in 

 their company. And yet the reader will be amused to 

 discover him, in the midst of these rabid denunciations, 

 contriving to find room for a statement that he himself 

 has written a scientific paper which has been published 

 in a scientific journal, and that this important fact may 

 not be missed, he quotes the paper in a footnote ! Is Saul 

 also among the prophets ? There would be something 

 pathetic, were it not so ludicrous, to see the proud pater- 

 nal way in which the artist brings forward his feeble little 

 scientific bantling. We should not be surprised if he 

 thought more of it than of some of the pictures that have 

 made his fame. His contempt for " lovers of jargon" and 

 "real gibberish'' is apparently equalled by his profound 

 satisfaction with his own achievements. Not content with 

 indicating the artistic value of his work, he claims that, 

 " if these sketches have any distinct peculiarity worthy of 

 notice, it is that they are optically correct, or at least are 

 intended to be so, and that intention, strange to say, is 

 new in pictorial art " ! It would be interesting to hear 

 the painter's defence of the " optical correctness "of some 

 of the pictures. Did he ever see, for instance, a castle 

 standing as he has depicted one in No. 22 .' Of his pecu- 

 liar greens and blues we need not speak. They are part 

 of his " confirmed mannerism," to use his own phrase, 

 and are characteristic of his canvas, no matter under 

 what skies and among what seas and rocks he may 

 paint. 



The pamphlet to which reference has been made in 

 this article would not, of course, have been noticed here 

 but for the name of its author. Science owes much to 

 art, as art in turn lies under many obligations to science, 

 and it should be the aim of each to help forward the 

 other. That a man of Mr. Brett's artistic attainments 

 should have gone out of his way to pen this "form of 



