1 22 Taste in Art. 



of light, but Tidemand has successfully carried us with him and 

 made us listen to his tale. We have as yet no such painter to 

 deal in a spirit of equal earnestness with the phases of our vil- 

 lage life. We are tired of the same children at the same school, 

 with the same light streaming through the same casement, and 

 falling upon the same deal boards ; quite sick of peasant girls 

 carrying pitchers, or gleaning, and polished up to the same degree 

 of drawing-room correctness ; and we want some one who can 

 discover that working people are men and women, with hopes, 

 fears, loves, hatreds, and aspirations, just like the more fortu- 

 nate inhabitants of fashionable clothes. Historical pictures 

 will not be much wanted now that society finds its good and 

 evil determined, more by a multiplicity of unknown individual 

 exertions, than by startling events ; the classical gods and god- 

 desses are used up, we have outgrown angels that look like 

 celestial poultry, and would not be sorry if Mr. Frost's nymphs 

 should be bound in perpetual ice. We want realities of to-day 

 — not the less real because contemplated in their ideal aspect, 

 and if we get them we care not from whence they come — 

 whether Mr. Goodall brings us a stately pilgrim from sun- 

 burnt Egypt, or Mr. Millais finds his romance in the break- 

 fast-room of a country squire. Let our artists, however, pay 

 some attention to the meaning of what they are about. It is 

 melancholy to find a big canvas by Mr. Ansdell pretending to 

 illustrate Longfellow's " Excelsior." In that poem he ought 

 to have known that the scenery is accessory and quite subsi- 

 diary to the moral which the author intended to convey. The 

 "banner with the strange device," the mountain height, the 

 struggling youth, and the voice which ' e fell like a falling star," 

 are all in keeping in the magic verse, but Mr. Ansdell strives 

 to give us a caput mortuum which does not make us care 

 for the defunct traveller, and suggests no memories of Long- 

 fellow's rhyme. Another artist, Mr. Solomon, with far more 

 cleverness, tells us in his motto exactly what he is not about. 

 To illustrate the sentiment of the text, "Thou hast turned 

 for me my mourning into dancing ; thou hast put off my 

 sackcloth and girded me with gladness," he depicts a family 

 startled by the return of a member supposed to be no more. 

 The mother, instead of " dancing" is likely to faint, the sisters, 

 instead of being " girded with gladness," are scared out of 

 their wits. A still worse offender in misunderstanding words, 

 is Mr. Witherby, who takes the last verse of Tennyson's poem, 

 commencing — 



" Break, break, break 

 On my cold grey stones, oh sea," 



as the motto of a picture in which certain crags are made un- 

 commonly hot in a sunset's reddening blaze. Our poets supply 



