done away with the craftsman. True it is that some master-mind plans the design in the first pattern that becomes the father of thousands, but if these things had been made by human hands we should have had not one, but a thousand masters of their trade, instead of one artist only and an army of workmen doing some monotonous routine job for their daily bread. The whole system is a premium on dullness and mediocrity. It may be argued that this machinery more or less makes for cheapness, and on that account a man can become possessed of more goods than he would have had without it; but a man's life hardly consists in the abundance of things that he hath, and it is also quite on the cards that a few good possessions are worth a whole host of bad.

When we come to think that in the making of almost everything we wear, almost everything in the house upon which we step, sit, or lie, machinery has had a hand to the ousting of some craftsman, the enormity of our wickedness becomes clear.

Until quite lately those who had not bowed the knee to Baal were wont to congratulate themselves on one priceless unsullied possession. Our harmonious rural landscapes had become discordant, desecrated were the beauteous villages of our coasts, joy and poetry had fled the harvest field, the manhood of our towns was in a fair way to become a minus quantity altogether, our great towns had become like nothing that ever was in heaven or earth, handicraft had given place to machines and unskilled labour, the picturesqueness of our shipping was dying out, beauty in fact seemed to be veiling her face everywhere, but we still had our roads.

The wheelwright's art, the horse-breeder's powers of selection, and the daring of the colt-breaker furnished us with means of transit not unattuned to Nature, through whose alleys we made our way. Upon the roads, from one cause or another, strangely enough the blight of machinery had not fallen.

If some denizen of some far off planet were to alight upon this England of ours it could not but strike him that the sole end and object of our lives was to get about as quickly as we could. Whereat he would no doubt admire greatly, seeing that it was a fair land and for real enjoyment's sake one to be passed through slowly. He would no doubt think us to be a race of fools, and I wish I could make all men think so too. It would be at any rate a step in the right direction, if only an initial one.

Let us make believe for a minute. It is a spring morning. The air resounds with the love songs of the birds. The young buds by reason of the genial warmth of the sun are bursting into leaf. The springs, swollen with the winter's rains, gush forth in gladness. All nature is awaking and joyous with life and spirits. Perchance our horse beneath us is if anything a thought too much in keeping with the

rest of nature for a nervous rider. But there! he is but young, it's only play. But stay! it isn't though. Did you hear that raucous 'toot-toot?' 'Now then, steady old boy, it's all right, face it like a horse.'

A cloud of dust, a vision of goggles, the roar and whirl of machinery, a stink of petrol, and the motor has passed us. Twenty, thirty miles an hour was it, and past young horse? Are manners too being made by machinery?

He has gone, but the morning doesn't seem the same. There is a bad taste left in the mouth. What good purpose is served by this scurry along the leafy roads?

Bias of course will bring a man into strange thoughts, but trying to view it calmly, does any man of anything like decent feeling and education fail to feel the jar and incongruity of it? Can any man of refinement look upon this laying open of the roads to the rush of machinery as really an example of progress in any direction worth having?

I have in the above passages dotted down a few of the most striking instances of the results that have been brought about by machinery as they occurred to me, and probably if we were to follow up the subject in other directions we should come across pretty well as direful consequences.

Even as far as we have gone it does not make a pretty list, which, with the possibility of repeating myself-maybe more than onceI here set down:

Desecration of natural beauty, buildings for the description of which no respectable words can be found, joy and mirth gone from Arcadia, our houses filled with a host of utensils with no hall-mark of the artist on them, the decay of handicraft and the craftsman, labour-saving appliances for the ease, comfort, and consequent destruction of the body, and lastly, the abnegation of all good taste by allowing the rush and scurry of the towns along the country roads.

It might be interesting, if the patience of the reader would bear with it, to go into the reasons why, in the opinion of some of us, the inventive genius of mankind should in these latter days have turned out to be a curse rather than a blessing. It seems to me that a plausible solution of the mystery lies in this and I do not mean merely to juggle with plausible words that man is an animal, very largely at any rate, and he cannot suffer himself to wander very far from nature with impunity.

If in the art of architecture, for example, he goes straight to nature for his designs, his art is more or less alive in direct ratio to his faithfulness to her. Let his work, as it always does at a later stage, become stereotyped and it is acknowledged by critics to have lost its life and to be dead.

Is it not possible, though, without stretching the analogy too

far, that man, in setting to work forces extracted from nature, so to speak, as opposed to strictly natural forces-using the forces of steam, electricity, and abandoning the direct force of nature, the winds, the streams, his own muscles, and those of the beasts of burden-may not too be on the road that leads to moral and intellectual death?

In all human things there is a rise and fall. All blessings pushed beyond a certain limit become a curse. Systems and nations decay, and perhaps this may be one of nature's means for hastening the downfall of an effete civilisation.

The seeking after machinery as a saving of labour is nothing more than a phase of the universal love of ease and luxury. In the struggle for ease and wealth, it appears from what the statisticians tell us that we are giving up the begetting of children. The nation that cannot see the writing on the wall-and what nation ever did ?-rushes on till its madness ends in suicide.

As individuals, however, would it not be well for us if we were to lead a less complex life and wander less far from the God of Nature from whence we came ? Supposing we were to insist on using handmade goods, in our food, clothing, furniture, and buildings, another race of craftsmen would spring up, much would be done to stay the depopulation of the country, the congestion of the towns, and the defiling of much beauty-and look at it which way we will, and be we of what religion we may, man has no right to soil the beauty of God's handiwork.

Supposing we were in reason to seek after hardness rather than luxury and ease-but why waste time in vain conjectures? Prophets have arisen in these latter days, and if we have not stoned them their words have but tickled the outer ear and fallen upon barren soil.

REGINALD NEWTON WEEKES.

GIOTTO IN MODERN LIFE

THE life-work of a great artist may be approached from two different points of view. We may make it our aim to detach ourselves, as far as is possible, from the peculiar or accidental conditions of the age and country we live in, and, taking our stand upon the ground of common humanity-the identity of the human spirit in all ageswe may attempt to determine its permanent and intrinsic worth. Or else we may address ourselves to a narrower, yet hardly less important question, and consider whether it has any special bearing upon human life as we know it; whether it exhibits qualities likely to give it a more than ordinary interest or value to the society or nation to which we ourselves belong. It is our purpose in the present article to approach the work of Giotto with the latter end in view; and we shall therefore do well to admit unreservedly at the outset that this second aim or method implies the first. We wish to set up a relation between what is permanent on one side, what is temporary on the other and we cannot do this till we have emancipated ourselves from the tyranny that the temporary conditions impose. These conditions operate like a refracting atmosphere, and distort the true shape of the object: they enter, unawares, into the mind and give a bias to all its observations: it cannot see anything that transcends them, because, unconsciously, it introduces them into everything that it sees. To relate ourselves truly to the object, we must first distinguish the object from ourselves.

It is the recognition of this truth which has dictated the somewhat stern spirit of strictly scientific criticism which prevails in art circles to-day. The kind of appreciation commonly accorded to works of art is treated with suspicion, and not without cause. The suspicion is, that pictures frequently give pleasure by virtue of qualities they do not possess, and are hardly ever admired most for the qualities which really make them conspicuous. The enthusiastic but misdirected eulogies of the crowd chill the heart of the more discriminating observer, and freeze the current of his praise. He stands before a work of art and admits little pleasure, less emotion, content to call attention in a dry, technical phraseology to the unfamiliar minutiæ of palette craft and brushwork. Yet no one knows

better than himself that those minutia are means, not ends, and that in a truly artistic comprehension they must be merged, if not ignored. The fact is that our whole attitude to art and particularly to the art of painting is characterised by a pervading atmosphere of artificiality and constraint. The interest taken by the public in pictures is enormously on the increase, but as a public interest it is hardly two generations old, and does not as yet stand securely on its feet. In this it may be compared with a still more recent outburst, the revival of the cult of St. Francis. A very slight acquaintance with the English neo-Franciscans serves to show that there is a certain uneasiness in their camp: they eye one another with mutual distrust, each suspecting that the rest are not quite genuine in their devotion. And it follows in consequence-our national character is so strangethat those who care much for St. Francis conceal their feeling, and those who care little give exaggerated expression to the feeling they know themselves to lack. The same kind of exaggeration, either in excess or defect, determines, in general, our attitude to works of art; it seems as if we could not be quite sincere either with ourselves or with them, as if it were more than we could do to see them in their natural light. Mr. Sturge Moore made a powerful protest lately against the unnecessary and injurious narrowness of modern artcriticism in his appreciative life of Dürer: and yet the general upshot of that work cannot have been quite what he wished it to be. It was the work, if we may so express it, of an expatriated Spartan: the restrictions which Mr. Moore discarded had their revenge upon him, and expressed themselves spitefully by leading him into the contrary excess.

The cause of this curious play at cross-purposes is deeply seated in the national life. It affects other than the specifically artistic instincts. An interesting example of its operation occurred in the course of the recent agitation for the national purchase of Aira Force. One of our leading literary men-I fancy it was the Poet Laureate himself-in addressing a company, brought together, we may presume, by common love of nature, told them how in the heat of an election contest he had retired to that secluded spot, and how while his ears were ringing with the jarring notes of human strife his spirit had found refreshment there in the mute music of nature and solitude. This method of approaching the matter seemed irrelevant to the British mind; the audience was disquieted, as if afraid the speaker was about to confess he had composed a poem there; it needed Sir Wilfrid Lawson to get up, and assure them that he was a Westmorland man and knew the district well-that he had often scrambled up the Force when he was a boy and had cracked jokes and nuts there-not less than this was needed to convince the company that the place was after all a healthy one, untainted by the Muse, and