712 An Inquiry into the State of Girls' Fashionable Schools. [June, head of the school acts as a teacher, it is likely that in such a despotic government her feelings and her justice will be set in array against each other, more than if she kept aloof from the collisions of the schoolroom. She ought to be a friend and a righteous judge to every pupil under her care. If teachers and pupils fell out, they would appeal to her, and her word would have weight, because she had not been mixed in the fray. Her dispassionate judgment will win respect even from the condemned. She may cherish her preferences in secret, because they will not bias her public course. For though it were unwise, indeed, for the pupils to expect, or the superiors to assume impeccability, yet the young can, with rare exceptions, preserve reverence for those who, in mingling with their squabbles, forget their own self-respect. We know of a school in which the head acts this wise part of general superintendance, providing herself with skilful and trustworthy teachers to carry on the subordinate office of giving headknowledge. She is the friend of her pupils when with her, and continues so in after-life, and, for some years now, has been in the habit of undertaking the charge of those old pupils' children. The larger the schools also, the less chance of flagrant injustice, and the less room for obvious favouritism. These two evils re medied, they will include in their redress that of many lesser grievances flowing from the greater. There remains a point on which we must touch, though but lightly, in this place. We allude to the great insufficiency of all directly religious instruction in some schools, and the hard and repulsive method of imparting it in those where much profession is made. We are aware that the greatest difficulty must attend a right discharge of this office in such a community as a school. But it is well if people generally can be brought to acknowledge the deficiency. We believe that many draw a contrast between the religious instruction at school, for boys and girls, strongly in favour of the latter. Alas, if they knew the barren drudgery of Sunday in a girls' school! The dressing for, and the walk to, the fashionable chapel; the formal turns after service; the dryness, doubly dry, of "Because it is the furthest off from In some professedly religious schools the girls are lectured and examined at church before any one who likes to be present. It is sad, indeed, when religion cannot be fenced in from vainglory and display. We have already hinted that in general girls have neither time nor place for their devotions in secret; and we ask every Christian parent how they can ex pect their children to escape the pol lution and angry tempers of the schoolroom, when unarmed by a single prayer offered in secret, or by one portion of Scripture laid upon their hearts for the day? Will the public prayer and reading, which can scarcely be otherwise than formal, stand instead of self-examination, and private appeals for that help which can alone bring them through the fire unscathed? We ask Christian schoolmistresses whether public instruction, religious controversy, and mere training of the head, will give their pupils strength to withstand the assaults of daily temptations? This is not the place for hints to supply such a defect. It is enough to have pointed it out; but we would press upon every teacher of girls give them motives for action within themselves, to teach them that life is in their own hearts and minds, not here, nor there; that so, when their pupils are cast adrift upon world at the very age when they most need guardianship, and are most open to influence, good or bad, they may be able to steer a steady course, There is not a more miserable object than a woman who, with all her fa culties about her, is yet ever restlessly seeking for her life without instead of within herself, and dwindling by degrees into such morbid peevishness, false cravings for excitement, and selfish repinings, as reduce her from the level of a feeling, thinking, rea soning being, to a mere creature just above nonentity, the disgrace of her own sex, the object of contempt to man. the PICTURE GOSSIP: IN A LETTER FROM MICHAEL ANGELO TITMARSH, ALL ILLUSTRISSIMO SIGNOR, IL MIO SIGNOR COLENDISSIMO, I AM going to fulfil the promise, my dear Augusto, which I uttered, with a faltering voice and streaming eyes, before I stepped into the jingling old courier's vehicle, which was to bear me from Rome to Florence. Can I forget that night-that parting? Gaunter stood by so affected, that for the last quarter of an hour he did not swear once; Flake's emotion exhibited itself in audible sobs; Jellyson said naught, but thrust a bundle of Torlonia's four-baiocchi cigars into the hand of the departing friend; and you yourself were so deeply agitated by the event, that you took four glasses of absinthe to string up your nerves for the fatal moment. Strange vision of past days!for vision it seems to me now. And have I been in Rome really and truly? Have I seen the great works of my Christian namesake of the Buonarotti family, and the light arcades of the Vatican? Have I seen the glorious Apollo, and that other divine fiddle-player whom Raphael painted? Yes-and the English dandies swaggering on the Pincian Hill! Yes-and have eaten woodcocks and drank Ovieto hard by the huge, broad-shouldered Pantheon Portico, in the comfortable parlours of the Falcone. Do you recollect that speech I made at Bertini's in proposing the health of the Pope of Rome on Christmas-day?— do you remember it? I don't. But his holiness, no doubt, heard of the oration, and was flattered by_the compliment of the illustrious English traveller. I went to the exhibition of the Royal Academy lately, and these reminiscences rushed back on a sudden with affecting volubility; not that there was anything in or out of the gallery which put me specially in mind of sumptuous and liberal Rome; but in the great room was a picture of a fellow in a broad Roman hat, in a velvet Roman coat, and large yellow mustachios, and that prodigious scowl which young artists assume when sitting for their portraits-he was one of our set at Rome; and the scenes of the winter came back pathetically to my mind, and all the friends of that season,Orifice and his sentimental songs; Father Giraldo and his poodle, and MacBrick, the trump of bankers. Hence the determination to write this letter; but the hand is crabbed, and the postage is dear, and instead of despatching it by the mail, I shall send it to you by means of the printer, knowing well that Fraser's Magazine is eagerly read at Rome, and not (on account of its morality) excluded in the Index Expurgatorius. And it will be doubly agreeable to me to write to you regarding the fine arts in England, because I know, my dear Augusto, that you have a thorough contempt for my opinion-indeed, for that of all persons, excepting, of course, one whose name is already written in this sentence. Such, however, is not the feeling respecting my critical powers in this country; here they know the merit of Michael Angelo Titmarsh better, and they say, "He paints so badly, that, hang it! he must be a good judge;" in the latter part of which opinion, of course, I agree. You should have seen the consternation of the fellows at my arrival!of our dear brethren who thought I was safe at Rome for the season, and that their works, exhibited in May, would be spared the dreadful ordeal of my ferocious eye. When I entered the club-room in St. Martin's Lane, and called for a glass of brandy-and-water like a bomb-shell, you should have seen the terror of some of the artists assembled! They knew that the frightful projectile just launched into their club-room must burst in the natural course of things. Who would be struck down by the explosion? was the thought of every one. Some of the hypocrites welcomed me meanly back, some of the timid trembled, some of the savage and guilty muttered curses at my arrival. You should have seen the ferocious looks of Daggerly, for example, as he scowled at me from the supper-table, and clutched the trenchant weapon with which he was dissevering his toasted cheese. From the period of my arrival un til that of the opening of the various galleries, I maintained with the artists every proper affability, but still was not too familiar. It is the custom of their friends before their pictures are sent in to the exhibitions, to visit the painter's works at their private studios, and there encourage them by saying, "Bravo, Jones (I don't mean Jones, R.A., for I defy any man to say bravo to him, but Jones in general)!" "Tomkins, this is your greatest work!" "Smith, my boy, they must elect you an associate for this!"-and so forth. These harmless banalities of compliment pass between the painters and their friends on such occasions. I, myself, have uttered many such civil phrases in former years under like circumstances. But it is different now. Fame has its privations as well as its pleasures. The friend may see his companions in private, but the JUDGE must not pay visits to his clients. I staid away from the ateliers of all the artists (at least, I only visited one, kindly telling him that he didn't count as an artist at all), would only see their pictures in the public galleries, and judge them in the fair race with their neigh bours. This announcement and conduct of mine filled all the Berners Street and Fitzroy Square district with terror. As I am writing this after having had my fill of their works, so publicly exhibited in the country, at a distance from catalogues, my only book of reference being an orchard whereof the trees are now bursting into full blossom,-it is probable that my remarks will be rather general than particular, that I shall only discourse about those pictures which I especially remember, or, indeed, upon any other point suitable to my honour and your delectation. I went round the galleries with a young friend of mine, who, like yourself at present, has been a student of "High Art" at Rome. He had been a pupil of Monsieur Ingres, at Paris. He could draw rude figures of eight feet high to a nicety, and had produced many heroic compositions of that pleasing class and size, to the great profit of the paper-stretchers both in Paris and Rome. He came back from the latter place a year of course. He could find no room because, for the purposes of art, he Well, sir, this youth and I went to the exhibitions together, and I watched his behaviour before the pictures. At the tragic, swaggering, theatrical, historical pictures, he yawned; before some of the grand, flashy landscapes, he stood without the least emotion; but before some quiet scenes of humour or pathos, or some easy little copy of nature, the youth stood in pleased contempla tion, the nails of his highlows seemed to be screwed into the floor there, "These little pictures," said he, on since, with his beard and mustachios burg. There is something painful to me in this naïve exhibition of incompetency, this imbecility that is so unconscious of its own failure. If, however, the aspiring men don't succeed, the modest do; and what they have really seen or experienced, our artists can depict with successful accuracy and delightful skill. Hence," says he, "I would sooner have So-and-so's little sketch (A Donkey on a Common') than What-d'ye-call-'em's enormous picture (Sir Walter Manny and the Crusaders discovering Nova Scotia),' and prefer yonder unpretending sketch, Shrimp-Catchers, Morning,' (how exquisitely the long and level sands are touched off! how beautifully the morning light touches the countenances of the fishermen, and illumines the rosy features of the shrimps!) to yonder pretensious illustration from Spenser, Sir Botibol rescues Una from Sir Uglimore in the Cave of the Enchantress Ichthyosaura.' I am only mentioning another's opinion of these pictures, and would not of course, for my own part, wish to give pain by provoking comparisons that must be disagreeable to some persons. But I could not help agreeing with my young friend, and saying, "Well, then, in the name of goodness, my dear fellow, if you only like what is real, and natural, and unaffected-if upon such works you gaze with delight, while from more pretensious performers you turn away with weariness, why the deuce must you be in the heroic vein ? Why don't you do what you like?" The young man turned round on the iron-heel of his high-lows, and walked downstairs clinking them sulkily. There are a variety of classes and divisions into which the works of our geniuses may be separated. There are the heroic pictures, the theatricalheroic, the religious, the historicalsentimental, the historical-familiar, the namby-pamby, and so forth. Among the heroic pictures of course Mr. Haydon's ranks the first, its size and pretensions call for that place. It roars out to you as it were with a Titanic voice from among all the competition to public favour, "Come and look at me." A broadshouldered, swaggering, hulking archangel, with those rolling eyes and distending nostrils which belong to the species of sublime caricature, stands scowling on a sphere from which the devil is just descending bound earthwards. Planets, comets, and other astronomical phenomena, roll and blaze round the pair and flame in the new blue sky. There is something burly and bold in this resolute genius which will attack only enormous subjects, which will deal with nothing but the epic, something respectable even in the defeats of such characters. I was looking the other day at Southampton at a stout gentleman in a green coat and white hat, who a year or two since fully believed that he could walk upon the water, and set off in the presence of a great concourse of people upon his supermarine journey. There is no need to tell you that the poor fellow got a wetting and sank amidst the jeers of all his beholders. I think somehow they should not have laughed at that honest ducked gentleman, they should have respected the faith and simplicity which led him unhesitatingly to venture upon that watery experiment; and so, instead of laughing at Haydon, which you and I were just about to do, let us check our jocularity, and give him credit for his great earnestness of purpose. I begin to find the world growing more pathetic daily, and laugh less every year of my life. Why laugh at idle hopes, or vain purposes, or_utter blundering self-confidence? Let us be gentle with them henceforth, who knows whether there may not be something of the sort chez nous ? But I am wandering from Haydon and his big picture. Let us hope somebody will buy. Who, I cannot tell; it will not do for a chapel; it is too big for a house: I have it-it might answer to hang up over a caravan at a fair, if a travelling orrery were exhibited inside. This may be sheer impertinence and error, the picture may suit some tastes, it does The Times for instance, which pronounces it to be a noble work of the highest art; whereas the Post won't believe a bit, and passes it by with scorn. What a comfort it is that there are different tastes then, and that almost all artists have thus a chance of getting a livelihood somehow! There is Martin, for another instance, with his brace of pictures about Adam and Eve, which I would venture to place in the theatrical-heroic class. One looks at those strange pieces and wonders how people can be found to admire, and yet they do. Grave old people, with chains and seals, look dumb-foundered into those vast perspectives, and think the apex of the sublime is reached there. In one of Sir Bulwer Lytton's novels there is a passage to that effect. I forget where, but there is a new edition of them coming out in single volumes, and am positive you will find the sentiment somewhere; they come up to his conceptions of the sublime, they answer his ideas of beauty of the Beautiful as he writes with a large B. He is himself an artist and a man of genius. What right have we poor devils to question such an authority? Do you recollect how we used to laugh in the Capitol at the Domenichino Sybil which this same author praises so enthusiastically? a wooden, pink-faced, goggleeyed, ogling creature, we said it was, with no more beauty or sentiment than a wax doll. But this was our conceit, dear Augusto; on subjects of art, perhaps, there is no reasoning after all: or who can tell why children have a passion for lollypops, and this man worships beef while t'other adores mutton? To the child lolly pops may be the truthful and beautiful, and why should not some men find Martin's pictures as much to their taste as Milton? Another instance of the blessed variety of tastes may be mentioned here advantageously; while, as you have seen, The Times awards the palm to Haydon, and Sir Lytton exalts Martin as the greatest painter of the English school, The Chronicle, quite as well informed, no doubt, says that Mr. Eddis is the great genius of the present season, and that his picture of Moses's mother parting with him before leaving him in the bulrushes is a great and noble composi tion. This critic must have a taste for the neat and agreeable, that is clear. Mr. Eddis's picture is nicely coloured; the figures in fine clean draperies, the sky a bright clean colour; Moses's mother is a handsome woman; and as she holds her child to her breast for the last time, and lifts up her fine eyes to heaven, the beholder may be reasonably moved by a decent bourgeois compassion; a handsome woman parting from her child is always an object of proper sympathy: but as for the greatness of the picture as a work of art, that is another question of tastes again. This picture seemed to me to be essentially a prose composition, nota poetical one. It tells you no more than you can see. It has no more wonder or poetry about it than a police report or a newspaper paragraph, and should be placed, as I take it, in the historic-sentimental school, which is pretty much followed in England-nay, as close as possible to the namby-pamby quarter. Of the latter sort there are some illustrious examples; and as it is the fashion for critics to award prizes, I would for my part cheerfully award the prize of a new silver tea-spoon to Mr. Redgrave, that champion of suffering female innocence, for his "Governess." That picture is more decidedly spoony than, perhaps, any other of this present season; and the subject seems to be a favourite with the artist. We have had the "Governess" one year before, or a variation of her under the name of "The Teacher," or vice versa. The Teacher's young pupils are at play in the garden, she sits sadly in the schoolroom, there she sits, poor dear!-the piano is open beside her, and (oh, harrowing thought!)" Home, sweet home!" is open in the music-book. She sits and thinks of that dear place, with a sheet of black-edged note-paper in her hand. They have brought her her tea and bread and butter on a tray. She has drunk the tea, she has not tasted the bread and butter. There is pathos for you! there is art! This is, indeed, a love for lollypops with a vengeance, a regular babyhood of taste, about which a man with a manly stomach may be allowed to protest a little peevishly, and implore the public to give up such puling food. There is a gentleman in the Octagon Room who, to be sure, runs Mr. Redgrave rather hard, and should have a silver pap-spoon at any rate, if the tea-spoon is irrevocably awarded to his rival. The Octagon Room prize is a picture called the " Arrival of the Overland Mail." A lady is |