for me to become reasonable again!' He went back to his studio and set to work immediately in his old manner. With no effort at all his brush rediscovered its old magic; he seemed to touch with enchantment all the subjects he painted. canvasses Again on his vibrant flowers came into blossom, fruits and trees appeared, again one saw there those laughing nymphs, heroes, and shepherds, forests and gardens, battles and masquerades, laughter and tears. 'What the devil is this?' shouted the picture dealer to whom he showed these treasures of light and joy. "These are n't St. John Lagneau's. No one would buy that for a St. John Lagneau! What's the matter with you? Don't you know that if you change your style you are finished?' St. John went elsewhere, but always received the same answer. Very soon it began to be whispered that St. John Lagneau was done-empty. The unhappy man understood at last that he was condemned to create ugliness all his life so true it is that the sin against the spirit is the unforgivable sin. In his despair he hanged himself! When he was dead, the Devil went to find the Prince of the Demons, and said to him: 'Well, we got him, but it cost me fifty thousand francs.' "That's very dear,' said Lucifer. 'I got Judas for thirty pieces of silver!' 'Everything is going up,' answered Satan. [The Athenæum] NEGRO SCULPTURE BY CLIVE BELL ALREADY the show of African and Oceanian sculpture is sending the cultivated public to the ethnographical collections in the British Museum, just as, last autumn, the show organized in Paris by M. Paul Guillaume filled the Trocadero. Fine ladies, young painters, and exquisite amateurs are now to be seen in those long, dreary rooms that once were abandoned to missionaries, anthropologists, and colonial soldiers, enhancing their prestige by pointing out to stayat-home cousins the relics of a civilization they helped to destroy. For my part I like the change. I congratulate the galleries and admire the visitors, though the young painters, I cannot help thinking, have been a little slow. Negro art was discovered its real merit was first recognized, I meansome fifteen years ago, in Paris, by the painters there. Picasso, Derain, Matisse, and Vlaminck began picking up such pieces as they could find in old curiosity and pawn shops; with Guillaume Apollinaire, literary apostle, following apostolically at their heels. Thus a demand was created which M. Paul Guillaume was there to meet, and stimulate. But, indeed, the part played by that enterprising dealer is highly commendable; for, the Trocadero collections being, unlike the British, mediocre both in quantity and quality, it was he who put the most sensitive public in Europe-a little cosmopolitan group of artists, critics, and amateurs in the way of seeing a number of first-rate things. Because, in the past, Negro art has been treated with absurd contempt, we are all inclined now to overpraise it; and because I mean to keep my head, I shall doubtless, by my best friends, be called a fool. Judging from the available data no great stock by the way -I should say that Negro art was entitled to a place among the great schools, but that it was no match for the greatest. With the greatest I would compare it. would compare it. I would compare it with the art of the supreme Pars Chinese periods (from Han to Sung), with archaic Greek, with Byzantine, with Mahomedan, which, for archæological purposes, begins under the Sassanians a hundred years and more before the birth of the prophet; I would compare it with Romanesque and early Italian (from Giotto to Raffael); but I would place it below all these. On the other hand, when I consider the whole corpus of black art known to us, and compare it with Assyrian, Roman, Indian, true Gothic (not Romanesque, that is to say), or late Renaissance, it seems to me that the blacks have the best of it. And, on the whole, I should be inclined to place West and Central African art, at any rate, on a level with Egyptian. Such sweeping classifications, however, are not to be taken too seriously. All I want to say is that, though the capital achievements of the greatest schools do seem to me to have an absolute superiority over anything Negro I have seen, yet the finest black sculpture is so rich in artistic qualities that it is entitled to a place beside them. I write, thinking mainly of sculpture, because it was an exhibition of sculpture that set me off. It should be remembered, however, that perhaps the most perfect achievements of these savages are to be found among their textiles and basket-work. Here, their exquisite taste and sense of quality and their unsurpassed gift for filling a space are seen to greatest advantage, while their shortcomings lie almost hid. But it is their sculpture which, at the moment, excites us most, and by it they may fairly be judged. Exquisiteness of quality is its most attractive characteristic. Touch one of these African figures and it will remind you of the rarest Chinese porcelain. What delicacy in the artist's sense of relief and modeling is here implied! What tireless industry and patience! Run your hand over a limb, or a torso, or, better still, over some wooden vessel; there is no flaw, no break in the continuity of the surface; the thing is alive from end to end. And this extraordinary sense of quality seems to be universal among them. I think I never saw a genuine nigger object that was vulgar -except, of course, things made quite recently under European direction. This is a delicious virtue, but it is a precarious one. It is precarious because it is not self-conscious: because it has not been reached by the intelligent understanding of an artist, but springs from the instinctive taste of primitive people. I have seen an Oxfordshire laborer work himself beautifully a handle for his hoe, in the true spirit of a savage and an artist, admiring and envying all the time the lifeless machine-made article hanging, out of his reach, in the village shop. The savage gift is precarious because it is unconscious. Once let the black or the peasant become acquainted with the showy utensils of industrialism, or with cheap, realistic painting and sculpture, and, having no critical sense wherewith to protect himself, he will be bowled over for a certainty. He will admire; he will imitate; he will be undone. At the root of this lack of artistic self-consciousness lies the defect which accounts for the essential inferiority of Negro to the very greatest art. Savages lack self-consciousness and the critical sense because they lack intelligence. And because they lack intelligence they are incapable of profound conceptions. Beauty, taste, quality, and skill, all are here; but profundity of vision is not. And because they cannot grasp complicated ideas they fail, generally, to create organic wholes. One of the chief characteristics of the very greatest artists is this power of creating wholes which, as wholes, are of infinitely greater value than the sum of their parts. That, it seems to me, is what savage artists generally fail to do. Also they lack originality. I do not forget that Negro sculptors have had to work in a very strict convention. They have been making figures of tribal gods and fetishes, and have been obliged meticulously to respect the tradition. But were not European primitives and Buddhists similarly bound, and did they not contrive to circumvent their doctrinal limitations? That the African artists seem hardly to have attempted to conceive the figure afresh for themselves and realize in wood a personal vision does, I think, imply a definite want of creative imagination. Just how serious a defect you will hold this to be, will depend on the degree of importance you attach to complete self-expression. Savage artists seem to express themselves in details. You must seek their personality in the quality of their relief, their modulation of surface, their handling of material, and their choice of ornament. Seek, and you will be handsomely rewarded; in these things the niggers have never been surpassed. Only when you begin to look for that passionate affirmation of a personal vision which we Europeans, at any rate, expect to find in the greatest art, will you run a risk of being disappointed. It will be then, if ever, that you will be tempted to think that these exquisitely gifted black artists are, perhaps, as much like birds building their nests as men expressing their profoundest emotions. possible to say something vague; about them We know that Portuguese adventurers had a considerable influence on African art in the sixteenth, and even in the fifteenth, century. There begins our certain knowledge. Of work so influenced a small quantity exists. Of earlier periods we know nothing pre cise. There are oral traditions of migrations, empires, and dynasties: often there is evidence of past invasions and the supersession of one culture by another: and that is all. The discoveries of explorers have so far thrown little light on archæology; and, in most parts of West and Central Africa, it would be impossible trained archæologists to establish a chronological sequence such as can be formed when objects are found buried in the sand one above the other. But, in fact, it is to vague traders and missionaries, rather than to trained archæologists, that we owe most of our fine pieces, which, as often as not, have And now come the inevitable ques- been passed from hand to hand till, tions — where were these things made, after many wanderings, they reached and when? 'At different times and in different places,' would be the most sensible reply. About the provenance of any particular piece it is generally even for the coast. Add to all this the fact that most African sculpture is in wood (except of course those famous prod ucts of early European influence, the bronze castings from Benin), that this wood is exposed to a devastating climate- hot and damp-to say nothing of the still more deadly white ants, and you will probably agree that the dealer or amateur who betickets his prizes with such little tags as Gabun, tenth century,' evinces a perhaps exaggerated confidence in our gullibility. Whenever these artists may have flourished, it seems they flourish no more. The production of idols and fetishes continues, but the production of fine art is apparently at an end. The tradition is moribund, a misfort. une one is tempted to attribute, along with most that have lately afflicted that unhappy continent, to the whites. To do so, however, would not be altogether just. Such evidence as we possess and pretty slight it is goes to show that even in the uninvaded parts of West Central Africa the arts are decadent: wherever the modern white man has been busy they are, of course, extinct. According to experts, Negro art, already in the eighteenth century, was falling into a decline from some obscure, internal cause. Be that as it may, it was doomed in any case. Before the bagman with his Brummagem goods, an art of this sort was bound to go the way that in Europe our applied arts, the art of the potter, the weaver, the builder, and the joiner, the arts that in some sort resembled it, have gone. No purely instinctive art can stand against the machine. And thus it comes about that, at the present moment, we have in Europe the extraordinary spectacle of a grand efflorescence of the highly self-conscious, selfcritical, intellectual, individualistic art of painting among the ruins of the instinctive, uncritical, communal, and easily impressed arts of utility. Industrialism, which, with its vulgar finish and superabundant ornament, has destroyed not only popular art but popular taste, has merely isolated the self-conscious artist and the critical appreciator; and the nineteenth century (from Stephenson to Mr. Ford), which ruined the crafts, in painting (from Ingres to Picasso) rivals the fifteenth. Meanwhile, the scholarly activities of dealers and journalists notwithstanding, there is no such thing as nigger archæology; for which let us be thankful. Here, at any rate, are no great names to scare us into dishonest admiration. Here is no question of dates and schools to give the lecturer his chance of spoiling our pleasure. Here is nothing to distract our attention from the one thing that matters -æsthetic significance. Here is nigger sculpture: you may like it or dislike it, but at any rate you have no inducement to judge it on anything but its merits. The Of [The Cornhill Magazine] A WOMAN'S MEMORIES OF OLD VIENNA To me, sitting here alone, reading the accounts of suffering in the United Empires, there comes a strange vision. I see no ruin, no suffering. With me is only the tender grace of a day that is dead dead beyond earthly resurrection. Even now in my memory it is hardly a 'vision splendid,' but it is graceful and gracious, youth adorns it, careless gaiety is in its laugh, its smiles are as sunshine. Dancing souls had nimble feet, no misgivings sobered, nor were there hollow echoes of world sorrows to disturb the ear of the dancers. I was young, too, but for me the sense of tragedy was ever present, for to my family and myelf came the distant voices of the American Civil War. There was no submarine cable then; we had only laggard posts, heavy with serious news, freighted with accounts of battles in which friends and relatives might have lost their lives lives given for a cause which they thought vital to their nation, a cause for which that great prophet and mystic, Father Abraham, was offered up as the supreme sacrifice. Even so - yet I am telling my light tale as it then came to.me! distinctions, his striking appearance, his knowledge of languages, his social gifts, and could make his way in spite of political opinions certainly not those of most of his colleagues. I once heard him described as 'un homme très aimable mais affreusement rouge!' Our younger, more humble, contributions included knowledge of necessary foreign languages, which we owed to parental oversight of our education. Vienna society was unlike any other that I have ever seen. The Emperor Francis Joseph, in 1848, when frightened kings in various lands were stampeding in different directions, was chosen to succeed his abdicating predecessor and uncle; Francis Joseph, who on assuming the Imperial title said, 'Ade, meine Jugend!' (Adieu, my Youth!), was then reigning as he continued to do until extreme old age. That might be his revenge for the loss of his youth, although it was not a full compensation, for, as I once heard a still beautiful English woman (whom time was touching) complain, 'Life is too long at the wrong end!' At this period, in the sixties, the tragedies had not yet come which were to sear his life, although they did not break it. Still also at one great Court Ball in the year the stately form of the magnificent Empress Elizabeth swept up the palace floor in diaphanous robes of white tulle, her wealth of bright chestnut hair, falling almost to her waist at the back, powdered with diamond stars; other splendid crown jewels adorning her.* Often, it was balls, to *There were smaller or Kammer had his personal which diplomats were not bidden. |