Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/22

 the Greek.—This is one of the few works of poetic elevation in the gallery: it is beautiful with a noble beauty, which one hardly knows whether rather to call womanly or impassive. It rests midway between coldness and warmth, without being lukewarm. It should be added that the merit is not exclusively Mr. Watts's, the head being truly "a translation from the Greek," i.e., adapted from the fine antique bust pointed out not long ago for admiration among the Arundel Marbles in Oxford.

328. —''Ariadne abandoned by Theseus. Ariadne watches for his return; Artemis releases her by death''.—This also is a pictare which claims to be of the poetic order, and sustains the claim; it may without rashness be pronounced the loftiest work Mr. Leighton has produced, reckoning together subject-matter, scale, and the result attained. To ignore the limitations of his style, or the symptoms of them which this picture also presents, would be futile. One might sum them up by saying that there is a certain hiatus between his perception of the poetic in art, and his power of expressing it; and that, though he bridges this over with a readiness of resource which is to himself almost as natural as the first perception, yet to others the artificiality of the bridge is glaringly and even irksomely apparent. But the picture of Ariadne is sufficiently noble to keep these considerations in the background, as soon as we have once for all fairly stated or implied them. The face is wrung with sorrow, yet is free from what we mean to condemn in a work of art when we term it "painful." One might say that this woman has died of the very weariness of daily renewed grief. But the calm now is as profound as the yearning heretofore; profound as the blue sea violet-tinted in its distant intensity, or as the lulling oppression of its clang in the sultry meridian, barely audible as a faint murmur at the dizzy height of Ariadne's rock-seat. There is a sensation of stationariness, as if Phœbus Apollo might be pausing in heaven to see how his sister Artemis has accomplished her mercy upon the outworn Ariadne. As I looked at the picture, a divine reminiscence of Shelley intervened;—