THE STUART EXHIBITION.
THE interest attaching to this unique Exhibition is assuredly not artistic in the pure sense of the word; it is historical, antiquarian, and smacks of a vague melancholy not wholly one with the pathos so curiously inherent in all art-work which is truly beautiful. The House of Stuart, in whose period there was a more pervading sense of loveliness than England has known before or since, in spite of its dearth of real painters, was unfortunate; and its kings, who in the light of evolution must be regarded as survivals bound to be swept away at last, fell not wholly by their own fault or crimes, but as obstructions which could not remain. Even now it is hard to view them impartially without pity or contempt, in the uncoloured light of pure history ; and the melancholy interest which still attaches to the least of these relics, cast up now by one swirl of the stream of time in the safe but temporary sanctuary of the New Gallery, shows that the hour of their final judgment has not yet come. Their most enduring monuments are negative, the Puritanic gloom and unnatural hatred of loveliness, which certainly have not wholly passed away from the land in which they were so gay and gallant, in which and for which they fought and died, and on which they looked as their own by Divine right until the last of the Royal and persistent Stuarts vanished from the earth in an age which was not their own — not indeed that they were the effective cause of that gloom, but they at least added to the movement of the Reformation which only then truly reached Eng- land. For the Restoration ' roses and raptures of vice' were but a last unhealthy growth which died suddenly when 'the lilies and languors of virtue,' which we suppose yet flourish in the land, came in with Dutch gardening and tulip bulbs.
As it is hard to speak impartially of the Stuarts themselves, so, from a critical point of view, it is diffi- cult to judge the greater bulk of the portraits which here hang upon, but in no sense decorate, the walls. From the view of the antiquarian they may be as satisfactory as can be expected, but we are not all antiquarians, and to an artist their very existence would be painful were it not for their crying aloud that portrait-painting by Englishmen, if not at its zenith, is surely not at its nadir. Most of those that are worthy of study are Vandycks, and even in them one cannot be blind to the fact that the quality which is so loudly praised is often nothing but the unearned artistic increment of time. To ask what the bad work must have looked like when it was new seems more utterly recondite than the pleasing speculations of Sir Thomas Browne when he wrote ' What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.' It would be a delightful metaphysical problem to inquire, by the subtler mathematics Professor de Morgan de- lighted in, and whose vague bounds include the theories connected with ' four dimensions,' whether there can be anything flatter than flat, and, if so, whether the delineators of the Stuarts did not prac- tically stumble upon it when they amused themselves and their rulers by trying to model the subtle planes of a human head. Yet, perhaps, this may seem a little hard upon those artists, considering the age in which they lived and the conditions under which they worked ; for George Jameson's canvases (he died in l6ii or thereabouts) are not wholly without merit, though his portraits here are imaginary heads of the first and unpainted Stuarts. As the chief figure in the whole collection, chief by her sex and melancholy fate, Mary Queen of Scots is most frequently re- presented, and very often in an amiable light. The sweetest face of all is 33, by an unnamed or unknown painter ; and perhaps the most remarkable is that next to it in the Catalogue (which, by the way, is as puzzling as a pi-ayer-book), by F. Zucchero. No. 52 (Esme Stuart) is a curious piece of painting worth notice; while 57 is a replica (or a copy .^) of the group at Windsor by Vandyck, which includes Charles I., Maria, and two of their children. The most re- markable of all are the three views of that king in profile, full face, and three-quarters (69), which recalls by its arrangement Bordone's three Richelieus.
When we go from the West to the North Gallery, which stares villainously with Sir Peter Lely's work, it is hard to refrain from turning round and leaving it in its merited obscurity. How such a painter rose to emi- nence in any except the stone age is another artistic puzzle. Unfortunately, art is different from morality ; in this last one evil example is a sermon worth a hundred good precepts ; in art one good work is worth more than a hundred bad paintings. Were it not so, there might be an excuse for the preservation of the work of this fashionable and fascinating painter. 107, Charles 11. at a ball at The Hague, is deliciously funny, but at least we get the costumes of the period ; and 136, by W. Dobson, is full of very sweet feeling, which takes one by surprise. 1S3, a portrait of Princess Maria Clementina, is distinctly not so bad. The whole collection includes, besides, what at the least may be reckoned suggestions of many well-known personages, including Flora Macdonald, the heroine of the Stuart history.
The cases in the West Gallery are devoted to miniatures and relics. The former are interesting, and often good examples of the art which practically died with the introduction of photography, and with the decease
