he would hardly have got access. Is it always because we care more about our own faith, that we are so much more exclusive with regard to that of others?

All these glimpses, grave and gay, into what English men and women were thinking and doing a hundred and twenty years ago make very pleasant reading to eyes fatigued with the newspaper reiteration of the obvious actualities of the present. To learn to read books is to learn to enjoy escapes into the unseen; and the power to live with the past is the first step towards being able to live with the imagination. No doubt living in Streatham Place is still a long way from living with the 'Faery Queen,' but it is also a long way from living with the halfpenny papers. Every one who can do it has taken the first step. Nor need any one who has taken this step be alarmed at the size or number of these volumes. There are dull pages in them-for instance, after Johnson dies, and before Miss Burney goes to Windsor-but they do not amount to an appreciable fraction of the whole. The cook who serves up our feast is a mistress of her art; and the company is royal; royal in the eyes of the 'Court Circular,' for we have kings and queens, princes and princesses, of the ancient lines of England and France; royal in act and genius, for we have more than one curious glimpse of Napoleon; royal in speech and character, for we have a thousand glimpses of Samuel Johnson. And, for all the interest of Windsor, and even of Waterloo, that last guest is the one we could least spare from the banquet. The diarist in her old age thought of the Streatham breakfast-room as the place where she had had as many conversations with Johnson as there are days in the year. She remembered nothing better; nor do we. Here, as everywhere, Johnson is king of his company; and if everything else in this book were forgotten, the Johnson chapters must still be read for ever as, after Boswell's immortal pages, the most vivid of all records of human speech, and the picture of the greatest of all human talkers.

J. C. BAILEY.

Art. VI.-ART UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE.

1. Die Wiener Genesis. By Wilhelm, Ritter von Hartel, and Franz Wickhoff. Vienna: Tempsky, 1895. (Partly translated, under the title 'Roman Art,' by Mrs S. Arthur Strong. London: Heinemann, 1900.)

2. Le Bas-relief romain à représentations historiques. By E. Courbaud. Paris: Fontemoing, 1899.

3. Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in Oesterreich-Ungarn. By A. Riegl. Vienna: Hof- und Staatdruckerei, 1901.

4. Orient oder Rom. By J. Strzygowski. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1901. (A bibliography of Strzygowski's work is contained in Byzantinische Denkmäler,' iii, p. 119 ff.) 5. The Golden Age of Classic Christian Art. By Jean Paul Richter and A. Cameron Taylor. London: Duckworth, 1904.

And other works.

TEN years ago the history of art under the Roman Empire was curtly dismissed as a mere epilogue to the splendid story of the art of Greece. It could not indeed be denied that the Romans were great architects, though some critics preferred to call them great builders, nor could their achievements in portrait-sculpture fail to arrest attention; but it was the almost universal belief that the period of Rome's unquestioned political supremacy was one of unchecked artistic decadence. In 1895, however, the reproduction in facsimile of the famous illustrated Ms. of Genesis, in the Imperial Library at Vienna, gave to Franz Wickhoff-a critic whose interests had hitherto lain chiefly in the field of medieval and Renaissance art-an opportunity of traversing the received doctrines in a brilliant and suggestive preface. Wickhoff treated the art of the Augustan age as the culmination of that which had been formed under the patronage of the Hellenistic monarchies, and claimed for it some of the monuments which had till then been regarded as masterpieces of the Hellenistic period, notably the finest of the 'pictorial' reliefs collected in the great publication of Theodor Schreiber. But the true manifestation of the Roman genius was to be seen, according to him,

in the 'illusionist' art of the Flavian period (in which he saw an anticipation of the impressionist principle introduced into modern art by Velasquez), and in the 'continuous' style of narrative-sculpture shown in the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius.

It was not to be expected that such startling views would remain unchallenged. But, for some time, the debate was mainly concerned with Wickhoff's account of Augustan art, and his assignment of the reliefs generally called Hellenistic to that period. Meantime, a series of magnificent publications was bringing the monuments of the Roman Empire nearer to students. The trophy of Adamklissi, the two Imperial columns at Rome, the silver treasure of Bosco Reale, and the vessels of the Hildesheim trouvaille in the Berlin Museum, were among those reproduced.

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The twentieth century, however, was destined to bring new ideas to the birth. In 1901 a Polish scholar, Josef Strzygowski, chiefly known as a student of Byzantine civilisation, flung out a fresh challenge and shifted the centre of interest by the publication of Orient oder Rom,' a series of essays on art-products as far apart as Palmyrene frescoes and Egyptian textile fabrics. Strzygowski aimed at destroying the Wickhoffian portrait of Roman Imperial art,' denying to Rome the leading place in artistic development, and representing the period of the Empire as that in which the rising tide of Orientalism, finally triumphant under Constantine, gradually submerged the landmarks of classical, i.e. Hellenistic, civilisation. Since 1901 he has poured forth an unceasing and bewildering stream of publications, written in several languages, and sustaining the most diverse theses; but the motto which he never wearies of repeating is, 'Hellas dies in the embrace of the East.'

Alois Riegl holds a place as important as that of Strzygowski for students of the history and philosophy of art. In his essays on the history of ornament, published in 1893 under the title of Stilfragen,' he had expressed the view (naturally quoted with commendation by Wickhoff) that there was in the antique art of the

Since these pages were written, Riegl's early death has left a gap in the ranks of archæologists which it will be hard to fill.

Roman Empire a development along the ascending line, and not merely a decadence, as is universally believed.' This thesis he expanded and fortified with many pages of closely-woven argument in his great work on 'Late Roman Industrial Art in Austria-Hungary,' of which only one volume has appeared. This book is ostensibly concerned with certain products of the goldsmith's industry of the fourth and later centuries A.D.; but its author contributes some prefatory chapters in which he reviews the history of ancient art in its successive phases. These chapters surpass in the subtlety of their argumentation anything which has been written in recent times on the principles of art. Riegl's style comes perilously near to being grotesque; and his endeavour to show artistic progress in the stunted, wooden figures of the bas-reliefs of Constantine seems at first sight hopeless. But he is right in his main aim, to trace the 'definite artistic intention' which inspires each successive period, and to prove that the transformation which befell ancient art when the classical standard was dethroned was no mere technical decadence, but a search for new paths.

It is clear that, in the debate which Strzygowski and Riegl have raised, Christian art demands as close a study as that of pagan Rome. Until recent times it had been treated almost exclusively by those interested in the subjects of its representation rather than in its artistic forms. But Strzygowski has passed beyond this one-sided treatment; and we must therefore welcome such recent publications as those of Monsignor Wilpert and Dr J. P. Richter, which are doing for Christian art what the works of the last decade of the nineteenth century did for that of Imperial Rome. M. Wilpert, indeed, treats the paintings of the Catacombs mainly from the iconographic point of view; but Dr Richter has made a fearless endeavour to assign the mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore to their place in the general history of art; and his effort, though (as we believe) unsuccessful, is none the less stimulating. At the present time, therefore, the history of art in the first four centuries of the Christian era is taking its place amongst the burning questions of archæological debate. How far from solution are the problems which it raises may be inferred from the fact that the trophy of Adamklissi, generally believed to date from Vol. 204.-No. 406,

the reign of Trajan, is still maintained by Furtwängler, with characteristic vigour and obstinacy, to be a work of the year 29 B.C. Nevertheless, some landmarks appear to emerge definitely from the troubled sea of controversy.

In the last century of the Republic, Rome had already become the centre of the world's civilisation, and had thus entered into the inheritance laid up for her by Alexander and his successors. The Diadochi had created a type of territorial state whose life was nearer to our own than was that of the Greek city or of the feudal monarchy. All the great lines of cleavage which split up modern communities into their infinite diversity of interest now become apparent. The individual and the state, the city and the country, capital and labour, the leisured and the professional class-these and other contrasts are resolved in the harmony or discord of the new societies. But their splendid material civilisation is concentrated in the great cities; and their art is the art of courts and academies.

To trace the history of the Greek genius in its later transformations would be foreign to our present purpose; it will be sufficient to say that in the first century B.C. it had spent its creative force, but had achieved a mastery of technique. No longer the spontaneous expression of national life and feeling, but the minister of private luxury, art followed the current set by criticism; and the return to classical models without the revival of the classical spirit seemed about to issue in the unchallenged reign of academic conventions. Only in one direction were signs of independence to be seen. The accurate observation and faithful reproduction of natural forms, both animal and vegetable, were not neglected by artists with whom study took the place of inspiration; while, in the field of ornament, a great transformation was in progress. In no branch of art were the characters of the time so clearly traceable as in that of the silversmith, whose creations were specially fitted to enhance the splendour with which private wealth now began to surround itself. The treasures of silver plate, of which the most famous is that whose owners were entrapped by the eruption of Vesuvius in the villa of Bosco Reale, near Pompeii, furnish us with masterpieces admirable in their technical perfection and grace of form; yet there is no reason to think that chance has here preserved to