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 SUDDEN turn in the road brings us in full view of a wild sweet valley, throuhh which rushes with much ado a most important and busy little stream, skipping and tumbling over rocks and boulders, very much pressed for time. jll day long the women stand here, their skirts tucked up above their knees, washing clothes, by the practice so universal on the Continent of rolling anil hitting them on the smoother slabs of rock. As we balance ourselves with some difficulty, being burdened with canvas and easel, sketching-stool and materials, on this mountain path which overhangs the stream, we occasion no remark from the women, who are quite used to us. The generic term for artists here, by-the-by, is ' Iiig/csi.' The first artists who came, about fifty years ago, haing been Englishmen. it is a perfectly natui-al logical sequence for the rustic intellect that therefore all artists are Englishmen ; or, for that matter, the converse — that all Englishmen are artists, in which latter case I fear that they would be more mistaken than the former. 1 thought, fii'st of all, tliat it was an elaborately conceived compliment — a deliberate hyperbole to hasten the advent of the eer- expected halfpenny. But I have since come to think that I did more than justice to their estimation both of an English artist's self-appreciation, and of an artistic Englishman's cool and insular complacency. Be that as it may, if a man is a painter, be he Italian, French, Spanish, Jew, Turk, or Infidel, an Englishman he is here, and will be until generations of school boards, or the nearer apjjroach of the civilising railway, have sharpened and enlightened their dull, dark minds. Savages they are to all intents and purj)Oses — these bronzed and beautiful peasants, without a thought beyond their gimi lined, or the nihicslm (or macaroni soup) that they shall eat at the next faiu. To what beyond this do their long hours of pastoral leisure for contemplation lead them ? Still to-day, as Milton sang of those Shepherds of Bethlehem, who, ' on the