Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/165

 academy; but such, I also believe, is the regular verdict. Every annual exhibition, as its day comes round, is thought to be rather worse than usual. I am not in a position to compare the Academy with itself, having seen hitherto but a single specimen of it. The most I can do is to compare it with the Paris Salon. This, indeed, I found myself doing spontaneously, as I walked through the brilliant chambers of Burlington House. I call them brilliant advisedly, for the first impression that one receives is that of extraordinary brightness of color. The walls of the Salon, by contrast, seem neutral and dusky. What shall I say that the next impression is? It is too composite and peculiar to be easily expressed, but I may say that, as I roamed about and eyed the pictures on the "line," it defined itself, on my own part, by a good deal of inoffensive smiling. My smiles were by no means contemptuous; they denoted entertainment and appreciation; yet the sense of something anomalous and inconsequent had a good deal to do with them.

I had had my private prevision of what the Academy would be. I had indeed not spent four or five consecutive months in England without venturing to elaborate a small theory of what, given the circumstances, it must be; and now I laughed to myself to find that I was so ridiculously right! The only way in which it differed from my anticipatory image was in being so much more so. That the people he lives among are not artistic, is, for the contemplative stranger, one of the foremost lessons of English life; and the exhibition of the Academy sets the official seal upon this admonition. What a strange picture-world it seems; what an extraordinary medley of inharmonious forces! The pictures, with very few exceptions, are "subjects"; they belong to what the French call the anecdotical class. You immediately perceive, moreover, that they are subjects addressed to a taste of a particularly unimaginative and unæsthetic order—to the taste of the British merchant and paterfamilias and his excellently regulated family. What this taste appears to demand of a picture is that it shall have a taking title, like a three-volume novel or an article in a magazine; that it shall embody in its lower flights some comfortable incident of the daily life of our period, suggestive more especially of its gentilities and proprieties and familiar moralities, and in its loftier scope some picturesque episode of history or fiction which may be substantiated by a long explanatory extract in the catalogue.

The Royal Academy of the present moment unquestionably represents a great deal of cleverness and ability; but in the way in which everything is painted down to the level of a vulgar trivial Philistinism there is something signally depressing. And this painting down, as I call it, seems to go on without a struggle, without a protest on the part of the domesticated Muse, with a strange, smug complacency on the part of the artists. They try of course to gather a little prettiness as they go, and some of them succeed in a measure which may be appreciated; but for the most part I confess they seem to revel in their bondage and to accept as the standard of perfection one's fitness for being reproduced in the "Graphic." Here and there is a partial exception; one complete and brilliant exception, indeed, the Academy of the present year contains. Mr. Frederick Leighton has always "gone in," as the phrase is, for beauty and style, and this year he has defined his ideal even more sharply than usual by sinking it in sculpture. His "Young man Struggling with a Python" is quite the eminent work of the exhibition. It is not only a wonderfully clever piece of sculpture for a painter, but it is a noble and beautiful work. It has that quality of appealing to our interest on behalf of form and aspect, of the plastic idea pure and simple, which is characteristic of the only art worthy of the name—the