in
the public--are on the increase or on the decrease in the various
centres of art. Annual exhibitions--a significant illustration of our
high-pressure life in art as in other things--would seem to tend toward
deepening these faults. Attention must be attracted at all hazards, and
the greater the number of exhibitors and the average attractiveness of
their canvases the greater becomes the temptation to shine, not by
excellence, but by eccentricities of treatment, or, still more, by the
factitious interest of a "telling" subject. Is it due, perhaps, to this
constant desire for notoriety on the part of the artist, and for more
and more excitement on the part of the public, that in all modern
schools, landscape art, as less possibly influenced by such a state of
things, stands ahead of the art which has humanity for its subject? It
is scarcely possible to find in France to-day a figure-painter who is a
Daubigny, still less a Jules Dupre. Next to these unquestionably stand
such animal-painters as Bonheur and Troyon; and it would be hard among
the youngest file of artists to find a figure-painter who in his line
should rival Van Marcke in his. In England also landscape ranks ahead,
and it is perhaps in comparing it with French landscape that the
difference between the schools is most truly though not most glaringly
displayed. Even here, and in the allied fields of animal-painting, the
desire for _l'anecdote_ creeps in, and Landseer with all his talent
often prostitutes his brush in the attempt to make his brutes the centre
of dramatic action, and forces into them semi-human characteristics in
order to extract from them tales or ideas of human interest. It was not
thus that Veronese painted dogs or Franz Snyders his lions and
boars--not thus that the Greeks have put the horse into art. Nor, to
take the best contemporary comparison, is it thus that Barye's bronzes
are designed.

Landscape brings us inevitably to Turner. The most highly gifted of all
English artists, past or present, his genius was hardly a logical
outcome of the contemporary spirit of his nation. We have no right to
say this of an artist, no right to call him anomalous, while we are
still in doubt as to whether he may be only the advance-guard of a new
national art, the herald of a new avatar. But when he with his
generation dies, when another generation develops and bears fruit, and
a third is beginning to blossom, and he still seems anomalous, it is
fair t