furniture showing through varnish the genu-sistence by beating up copper jelly-moulds, ine grain of the deal or the birch of which it is made, in place of clumsy veneers of inferior mahogany, coarse grainings of impossible foreign woods, or the Quakerly uniformity of drab-paint, is an unmitigated benefit to good taste, economy, and cleanliness. But before we can proclaim a triumph, the false Duessa of sham art must be slain. As it is, the general upheaving of good taste has been more conspicuous in securing improvement of design than reality of material. We have instances in our eye in which the upward movement in one direction has been counteracted by a downward one in the other, and designs which the popular art-mind would not have swallowed twenty years back have been made possible by a complex ingenuity in sham, of which that generation would have been equally guiltless. Perhaps the Crystal Palace has something to answer for in this respect. The evil will for years to come be rampant in the semi-detached' stratum of society, from the plain fact that the builders of this class of houses are generally men who have to look to the immediate returns accruing from the rapidity with which they get their articles off their hands, and that the arbiters of the popularity of these houses are a class of persons to whom we should not ordinarily apply as authorities on questions of taste. Respectable English matrons, who would not think of frequenting casinos in false diamonds, yet see no immorality in installing themselves in the half of a semi-detached mansion compoed on the outside, and within grained and papier-mâchéed into sham-magnificence. These will be the last persons, in these times of fast civilisation, who will ever become, even under a combined Cole-Scott-Ruskin power, moulded into docile recipients of artistic truth and soberness. But, in the mean while, the continuous exhibition to the public of the nursery of real materials which displays like the Loan and the Permanent South Kensington Collections afford, and which, as we see, the International only partially provided, will pave the way to such a consummation-for cheap art can only come into healthy existence when the laws of dear art have been thoroughly settled. Another sufficient reason for such exhibitions is found in the absolute ignorance into which the public had fallen as to the very existence of many unfashionable methods of procedure. Pugin somewhere records that, when he first turned his attention to the reproduction of medieval metal-work, the only workman he could find who was capable of understanding and reproducing his ideas, was an old German, who earned an obscure sub the last base form in which the noble craft of repousse still survived in England. Now the casual meeting of the enthusiast and the grimy old operative has, in the course of a single generation, borne fruit, not only in the plate cases of Hardman, Kidmore, Keith, and Hart, but in the novel methods to which firms of ancient name have to resort, in order to keep themselves up to the running. The 1849 exhibition was of incalculable service to this movement, and we ourselves bear testimony to the healthy avidity with which the archæological art workman will avail himself of the opportunity of studying any ancient model which the sympathy of a collector places at his service. We venture accordingly, without having put any man to the pain of owning antecedent ignorance by confessing to large augmentation of knowledge, to prophesy that the offshoots of the loan deposits will sprout out of many unsuspected soils. Paradoxical as our statement may seem, we claim the omnigenous character of the Loan Collection as a positive gain to the truth and purity of art principles. No more Vandalic condition of things could exist than one in which the monetary-i.e. the collector's as opposed to the critic's-appreciation of ancient objects was founded solely on their presumed artistic excellence. Such an assumption would inevitably end in creating a subjective and not an objective basis of excellence. No age is ever large-minded enough to comprehend, in all their numberless diversities, the manifestations of art in the natural or artificial world. Many great schools of thought must, at all times, remain unappreciated. The result is that the general developement of the art sense, as opposed to the collecting instinct, is apt to lead to the want or neglect, if not to the intentional destruction, of all specimens which do not happen to fall in with the prevalent taste of the hour. The long neglect of medieval art by those whose criteria of taste were the rules of Vitruvius distilled through the Italian revivers of the sixteenth century, is a precedent as to what might again happen, pregnant with warning. Hardly less disastrous would be such a triumph of the Gothic revival as should lead to the disregard or obliteration of the art monuments of the old or Renaissance world. Inigo Jones proved his onesidedness when he inflicted his Corinthian portico on old St. Paul's. It would not be less ridiculous to stick a Gothic spire on to the flanks of the Madeleine. One school prefers one style; another school prefers another. We may have our own conviction as to which is nearer the truth, but we plead school may be in the eyes of men of critical taste. The critic will then go to analyse, the student to discriminate, and the manufacturer to learn what to avoid no less than what to copy. Already we think we can discern the results of a more catholic study and appreciation of all the styles of art. Architecture is no longer confined to the direct imitation of a few stock patterns; and the furnishing of a house is no longer abandoned to the up for the recognition of a peculiar excellence in each distinctive style. The chimney-piece, admirably finished in its technical details, and exhibited in the nave of the Great Exhibition by a leading English firm, failed to give satisfaction, from the inharmonious manner in which it endeavoured to combine-not to fuse or strike the balance between-antagonistic styles. The natural corrective is a wide-spread if not indiscriminate spirit of collecting, under the condition that the specimens of each school shall be, as far as possi-holsterer's unenlightened judgment. Conble, good of their kind. The world in consequence will very likely be burdened with much rubbish which it might well be quit of; but the rubbish is, so to speak, the padding which saves really valuable, though for the time unfashionable, articles from the jostling and destruction of the machine's onward progress. The most tawdry Louis XVI. cabinet which our grands seigneurs please to set up in their country houses, or the guardians of the National Museum please to retain, is a pledge which collecting gives to art, that the chasses of the thirteenth, and the ivories of the fourteenth, and the corporation plate of the fifteenth centuries shall be respected. When the mere collector has finished his work of accumulation, he had better sit down and let the reapers come to the harvest. If he attempts to discriminate, he is apt to find himself travelling beyond the record, and to expose his useful profession to welldeserved criticism. The more indiscriminate he is in his acquisition of good things, the more truly he fulfils his duty, while he leaves the second-best articles to his humbler yet provincially useful confrères. He is no more an art teacher by virtue of his speciality than the picture collector is a painter or a lecturer. siderations of climate and of national habits, the close study of natural forms in human, animal, and vegetable life, bold experiments in the juxtaposition of colours, a wider employment of materials for constructive objects,-all indicate the germination of a new style derived from, but not servilely following, existing systems. We shall not recapitulate the means by which we have already had occasion to show we have arrived at the conviction that this style, while boldly eclectic in its details, must, in its main principles; vividly embody the historical characteristics of England, for whose material uses it will come into being. We are aware that in ven、 turing this anticipation we may excite the apprehension, and perhaps bring down the grave remonstrance, of those who are afraid to look beyond precedent. We are satisfied to take refuge in the conviction of the essential unity of all true art; while from that conviction we infer the unsoundness of all theories which hold up any antecedent age as an epoch of ideal perfection. The world's schooling had made some progress in the thirteenth century of the Christian era, compared with its condition in the fifth century before Christ. But for all that we are no more prepared with M. Viollet le Duc to take our stand on the thirteenth A.D. than with M. Quatremère de Quincy on the fifth B.C.: ergo, we feel ourselves at perfect liberty to study and to appropriate, with the necessary modifications, every principle of beauty which either epoch places at our disposal. Some few collectors there may be who combine both functions, as there are painters who are generous enough to form a gallery of other men's works, or vain enough to hoard up their own chefs-d'œuvre, or instructed enough to construct systems of art-teaching; but as a general rule there is a want of sympathy between these two classes in the art world, which may, indeed, be necessary towards the balance of forces on which progression depends. We are the more earnest in laying stress upon these considerations because the recognition of them is the best security against the dangers to high art which would otherwise environ the Loan Col-nature protests against either excess. lection. Let it be at once understood that it is no accumulation of articles selected for imitation, but only an omnium gatherum of objects of art manufacture, chosen for their collective value as samples of their respective schools, good, bad, or indifferent, as each Again, the exclusive study of art on a large scale, in its bigger manifestations such as architecture and sculpture, would be as misguiding as exclusive devotion to details coupled with an entire neglect of the great whole. No true artist ever made himself by confining his attention either to the broad mass or to the petty detail. The voice of The tree without its bulk and outline, or without the delicate ramifications of its twigs and its leaves, would be equally incomplete. There are many minds, indeed, which can only be trained to an appreciation of the general and the broad, by the process of individual gene ralization derived from the study of the small | the Augsburg chair may to the man of oriand the detailed. For such minds, and they ginal imagination be the parent of some new are many, a collection of minute art treasures masterpiece of architectural genius. When is invaluable. The undoubted power of wide we appeal in particular to metal work and to and indiscriminate appreciation which in ceramics as probable engines of architectural different ways sustains the modern ardour of progression, we do not pretend to give uttercollecting as well as colours the modern sys- ance to more than what theologians term a tem of art criticism, though often treated as pious opinion.' Whether we are right or an æsthetic, is more properly a metaphysical wrong in this respect, it is certain that, with phenomenon of the age, which requires due only the more fully tried materials to handle, practical acknowledgment as well as respect- the sharp-witted artist has ample scope for ful investigation. No doubt this character- wide inventiveness. istic, if pushed to excess, would naturally lead to the violation, and ultimately to the negation, of fixed canons; but it is equally certain that within due limits it symbolises a state of society in which the science of criticism has attained a philosophic amplitude hitherto unknown. All that is wanting a great deficiency, we willingly own-is a man of genius who can profit by the analysis ready made to his hand of the various types of beauty, or it may be of deformity, which belong to past times and different lands, and who can construct therefrom that more perfect system which shall bear the same relation to its predecessors as Greek did to Egyptian, Roman to Greek, Romanesque to Roman, and Gothic to Romanesque. But here we are crossed with the question -What has all this to do with the Loan Exhibition? The Loan Exhibition may be very valuable, some may say, to the jeweller, the potter, the ivory-carver, or the glassblower, but what part or lot in it does the great artist possess? We shall not answer the cavil by a mere appeal to names; or by reminding our objector that within the walls of the Loan Court are to be found the productions of Van Eyck, Fra Angelico, Michael Angelo, and della Robbia-not to mention other names of less catholic celebrity. We prefer to appeal to facts. We rather refer to the circumstance that the tendencies of the age obviously lead to the more gigantic reproduction of what has hitherto been only ornamental material on a constructional scale. We call on our objector to take in with his mind's eye the spectacle, not further removed in time or place than the eastern dome of the Great Exhibition; and with that panorama in view, to own that the metal-worker and the potter are already treading on the architect's heels, and that the forests of another hemisphere are calling on the cabinetmaker and builder to find fresh combinations suited to the fresh stores, fresh opportunities of colour and material, poured into the lap of commerce. Accordingly, as the leaf of the water-plant is said to have given Sir Joseph Paxton the first idea of the Crystal Palace of 1851, so the Henry Deux ware or We have indicated the semi-detached house of the suburbs as a last stronghold of bad taste. We look to the country house, properly so called, as a likely field for successful originality. Both architect and employer breathe more freely in the country than in a town, where some respect must always be shown to neighbours. The elbow-room is greater, and the indispensable funds are usually more unsparingly granted. The building either stands in connexion or is planned to accord with some natural beauty of site, or some exhibition of ornamental gardening, itself a branch of the fine arts, and one which is extensively and justly popular both in its formal and in its landscape shape, or better still as it combines each method in the same plaisance. The owner, if a man of means, has usually some collection of pictures or curiosities, which the architect of ready resource will not forget when he calculates his effects, any more than he will overlook the fittings and the furniture as parts of the artistic whole. The offices and the houses required for the chief dependents of the estate afford as happy an opportunity for the introduction of experiments in cheap real art as the central pile for more costly exhibitions. In short, all concerned in carrying out a country house have the opportunity of being natural, as they can nowhere else, and in following nature they can hardly fail to reach art. We trust that we have given sufficient reasons for the general acceptability of miscellaneous art museums even on the part of those who are personally most strongly wedded to any particular school of taste. The inference which we would draw from this concession is that of the utility of such exhibitions as the Loan one taken in concert with the permanent property of the South Kensington Muse um. It would thus stand to reason that as a museum that institution has established its claims to general confidence. But its very comprehensiveness in the character of a museum raises strong doubts whether it be desirable that it much longer remain an integral portion of a school of design. A school and a collection need not be identical. We know no other case where they are so, though they tuted professional chairs for the arts and sciences, we stick to our text. Everywhere save at South Kensington, the school and the collection have been kept jealously separate. Why should that one institution of modern date be a standing exception to a well-recog nised and salutary rule? Before we conclude we have a debt of gratitude to discharge to the managers of the Loan Exhibition. The most convinced dualist need not desire a stronger contrast than that which has been presented between the Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition and its non-illustrated correlative over the way. The charity of our nature forbids our recalling the scandals of the former publication. A certain number of copies has, we believe, been sold; and such of them as have crept into public libraries will keep alive the recollection of the most gigantic speculation in literary puffery ever perpetrated on this side of the Atlantic. The Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition, which has modestly appeared in five successive parts may occasionally be combined in a university. I cussion of the very question we desired to But Brompton is emphatically no place for a avoid. We have been led to show that this university. The South Kensington Museum useful institution has not yet divested itself of has hitherto been endeavouring to fulfil both its double and chimæra-like nature. Until functions. It is a central school of design for the Royal Academy has proved that the the whole kingdom; it has also, as we have necessities of its teaching require that it seen, become the British Museum of post- should be made possessor of the National Galclassical art. We have now to ask how long|lery, and until the British Museum has instiits characteristic system of art teaching can coexist with that rapid development of its collecting power which has made its museum, the casual loans included, no longer a choice assortment of articles intended as direct models for the draughtsman and the copyist in certain given styles, but a conglomeration of every style brought together upon the simple consideration that such things once were, and therefore claim recognition from the living world. Such a museum, to be perfect, must freely expand into the realms of ugliness. No collection can pretend to be complete which does not exhibit typal examples of the bad as well as the good taste of past generations. We have shown that otherwise there is no guarantee that the good will survive the fluctuations of taste. But then what becomes of your art teaching? We await Mr. Cole's answer to our inquiry; and in the mean while we suggest a more complete administrative divorce than has yet been faced between the school and the collection, which are now fixed in the same building un der the common name of the South Kensing-under revision,' and edited by Mr. Robinton Museum. The collection itself will be son, has been carried through on the antagomore broadly available for the purposes of nistic principle .of never, except in a few study when it is understood that the direct special cases, allowing an exhibitor to describe instruction of the student is not the primary his own property. The result is the cheap cause of its acquisition. Its curators them- publication of a permanent repertory of art selves will be more free to buy all articles the literature, ranging over 721 pp. of small value of which consists in the illustrations octavo, partly essay and partly inventory. In they afford of history or art, when it is addition to general supervision, the editor has known that the purchase presumes no judg- specially undertaken the classes of sculpture, ment on their artistic excellence. Special Renaissance ivories, bronzes, furniture, memuseums, like the one which once adorned diæval art in various branches, Henri Deux, the now demolished East India House, might Palissy, Majolica, and Persian ware, and part then be amalgamated with it on grounds of of the Sèvres porcelain, antique and other historical value. The school will of course, gems, with sundry miscellaneous objects. Mr. as at present, wherever its site may be fixed, Franks's share includes mediæval ivories, the possess its own collection of models, copies, early and later Limoges and miscellaneous and photographs, while the national collec- enamels and glass. Mr. Robert Smith furtion will be available to its constant use as the nishes the notices of ancient Irish and Anglocabinets of the genial private collector fly Saxon art, decorative plate belonging to the open to the artist. But the administration of Universities' (it should have been said Colthe two institutions will be separated. Thus, leges) of Oxford and Cambridge,' and the although the Museum may unhappily be con- plate, &c., of various corporate bodies, as well demned to continue at Brompton as the te- as a section of miscellaneous objects, includ nant of buildings which are too valuable to being the Limerick crozier' (properly speaking abandoned, yet the head School of Design will be at liberty to seek fresh quarters in some more central situation. We might say much more, but we forbear. We have insensibly been drawn into a dis 6 pastoral staff, the crozier being the archiepiscopal cross, not the bishop's crook) and mitre, the Oscott lectern, the Solticoff cross, the Augsburg chair, and miscellaneous rings. Dr. Rock, after describing his own portable. altar, treats of ecclesiastical vestments and embroideries-a subject which he has made his own. The sections of portrait miniatures, bookbinding, historical relics, and certain miscellanies, are due to Mr. Beck. Chaffers has himself contributed the descriptions of locks, keys, and such articles, jewellery, personal ornaments, and gems, clocks, watches, crystal and sardonyx objects, knives and forks, together with (under revision by Dr. Rock) Sèvres, Dresden, and some other porcelain, snuff-boxes, and bijouterie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, decorative arms and armour, and (under revision by Dr. Beck) the plate of English manufacture. The crystal section, which appears in the last part, is not equal to the remaining catalogue, and shows evident marks of haste. Messrs. Bailey and Russell French describe the plate of the City Companies and of some country corporations. Illuminated MSS. are disposed of by Mr. Holmes; while Mr. Poole handles the subjects of damascened work, and Mr. Waterton is the historian of his own unrivalled collection of rings. The whole work, with all the disadvantages of hurry under which it has been produced, is so satisfactory that we are justified in calling upon its authors not to rest content with the easy glory of a safe provisional success, but to bring out a revised and enlarged edition of a publication which will live as a record of the most complete exhibition of European art which has yet been brought together. The million will not, of course, care to buy it as soon as the speciality of the Loan Exhibition has been merged in the general Kensington undertaking, but it will remain a volume of reference for all those persons for whose appreciation the compilers must really have laboured. Public opinion is pretty well agreed that another English International Exhibition is not to be desired. ing another London International Exhibition, we dare anticipate that many special Exhibitions of Art Treasures will yet be held. Our advice is, that for the future the range of subMr.jects should be more circumscribed, so that each successive display may in its degree supply the void that the break-down of the omnibus system may have created. Supposing, for example, that in any particular year the arts called up for illustration are those of the goldsmith and silversmith, then the famous, if not already hackneyed, masterpieces of the old men will be ranged on one side of the hall; on the other side will be found, not the large shop-fronts in which the capitalist goldsmiths of London and Paris luxuriated during last summer, but a few choice specimens, two or three from each, labelled with the names of the designer and modeller, and ranged in direct comparison with the dead no less than with the living. So, too, in another year old Sèvres and new. Sèvres, modern and ancient Dresden, the Potteries and Gubbio, may fairly be ranged in friendly antagonism. Exhibitions of this kind possess a more practical value than the exclusive display either of ancient or of modern art. They appeal, to be sure, to a more critical audience than that which has been invited uncritically to admire either the Loan or International Exhibitions. They represent, in short, that second stage in which general popularity gives place to professional progress. Above all, the claptrap of medals and mentions must be abandoned, and the juries, if there are any, kept strict to their legitimate duties of describing, criticising, and teaching. The fact, to be sure, that such a display would be what we conclude the wordmongers will dub-though we do not do so-interæval,' ought to be a guarantee against the repetition of such folly; for it would be a reductio ad absurdum to have to advertise for the heirs-at-law of Ruker, Palissy, or Cellini to receive a large bronze medal. It would be as absurd to pass them over if Brown, Jones, and Robinson got rewarded. Still we cannot make sure that official insensibility to the ridiculous might not suggest the revival of the system in the case at least of the moderns; and so we lodge our caveat by anticipation. How this general agreement should have been reached, it is not for us to explain. We are sorry for it, as it implies mismanagement somewhere; but of the correctness of the unanimous judgment we have not the slightest doubt. It is otherwise, we are glad to think, with the Loan Exhibition. The gratification which it has afforded has been great and general. The complaints to which it has given rise have not reached our ears. Various as are the branches of art with which it has to do, it possesses a unity of purpose which vindicates the undertaking. Many as were the treasures, their portability brought the whole show within the compass of a single apartment. The student could work on inch by inch, while the general visitor took his glance and departed unbewildered. So, whatever may be the chance of our see The South Kensington Muscum, in its large purchases of 1862, has made a great advance towards setting up a permanent basis of comparison of the nature we have outlined; but the competition must be kept alive. Fresh elements of comparison must ever be ready; and the real verdict must be sought, not from any jury hurriedly called together, working in the spirit of compromise, and anxious above all things to transiger its troublesome responsibility, but from the free |