cated; and the 'Christ in the House of His Parents' seems to show that Millais perceived this almost immediately. It would indeed appear that Millais, in conceiving the 'Lorenzo,' had started out, brilliant and gifted as he was, before he had really grasped the meaning of PreRaphaelism; and that, having started out, he pursued his particular false start for a month or two before turning back to the post.

6

We may discover much better what, at its first inception, Pre-Raphaelism was by looking at the 'Rienzi' and the Girlhood of Mary Virgin.' In both these pictures there is a real effort to reconstitute an old story, to see it with modern eyes, and to render it upon canvas as the painter saw it. Such stiffnesses as each picture displays are the result of want of skill; and such archaisms as are to be seen in them are the archaisms of 1848-9, and not those of the fourteenth century.

Mr Hunt's picture portrays, indeed, in its costumes, a certain attempt at archaism; but the knights with their pot-lid armour, the unmedieval shields, the attempts at modelling in the hindquarters and tails of the horses, and the very wrinklings of the hosiery of the dying child -all those things prove that Mr Hunt had painted realistically. He got together such properties as it was possible for a poor art-student to assemble in a London studio; and then he painted from those properties, and from nothing else, his touchingly naïve picture. In Rossetti's Girlhood of Mary Virgin,' these characteristics are even more pronounced. Everything here is just precisely what a poor boy of delicate tastes might have brought to the studio that he shared with Mr Hunt; and the picture is all the more sincere in that it represents a scene that really took place indoors. Mr Hunt calls the picture Overbeckian. The epithet is hardly worth repeating, save that, in characterising a picture, it is so very convenient to say what a picture is not. The scene is rendered precisely as Overbeck would not have rendered it. The touches of realism, the very folds of the gown clothing the Virgin, St Anne, and the tiny angel, would have been missing; and what modelling there is in the faces would have been absent altogether. Overbeck could paint; and, if he painted all flesh as a flat surface, it was because he chose to do so. Rossetti was incapable

of giving to his forms much relief. But he did his best. He borrowed his sister's dresses and painted them; he borrowed a child's night-gown and painted that on a small lay figure; he borrowed big books from his father and window curtains from the home in Charlotte Street. Such oddness of aspect as the picture displays arose simply from a want of skill. Each object in the picture, it must be remembered, he was painting for the very first time; and for the very first time he was arranging any composition at all. In Mr Hunt's picture there is even a certain deference paid to the ruling canons and conventions. The principal figure is in a strong light; it is emphasised by heavy masses of arbitrary shadow; there is practically no attempt at preserving an illusion of the open air. But the Girlhood of Mary Virgin,' such as it is, is an absolutely simple and unconventional attempt at rendering what a boy saw.

None of the three pictures has any great artistic value in itself, but they are at least milestones on the long road of the history of art, or rather signposts pointing in a new direction which that road has taken, into the region of that modern art we admire or despise. It is not insignificant that the very month which saw the publication of Mr Hunt's glorification of Pre-Raphaelism saw also the publication of an édition definitive of Sir Joshua Reynolds' 'Discourses.' Here once more, after a lapse of some fifty years, in which the canon of Pre-Raphaelism, the apotheosis of character, has remained unchallenged and has seemed unchallengeable, the great protagonist of the typical lifts up once more his voice and is saluted by the most modern of the moderns. For, as was inevitable, the weariness engendered by the individualistic struggle to which Pre-Raphaelism and its successors, Impressionism and all the rest, have condemned both painters and critics, has borne its own fruit. Once more we are almost ready to set out in the search for a formula; we are ready to examine with a sympathetic respect an almost forgotten creed.

Art. IV. THE GOVERNMENT AND SOUTH AFRICA. 1. Despatch transmitting Letters Patent and Order in Council providing for Constitutional Changes in the Transvaal. Presented to Parliament, April 1905. (Cd. 2400.)

2. Further Correspondence relating to Labour in the Transvaal Mines. Presented to Parliament, February 1906. (Cd. 2819.)

3. Parliamentary Debates, 1906. Hansard. Vol. CLII. 4. Transvaal Problems: some Notes on Current Politics. By Lionel Phillips. London: Murray, 1905.

5. The Africander Land. By Archibald R. Colquhoun. London: Murray, 1906.

WHEN the late Government, in obedience to their most trusted advisers, sanctioned the importation of indentured Chinese into the Transvaal, they were well aware that they were following a course which in no circumstances could bring them popularity at home. Had they been negligent of the interests of the Empire and looked only to their own credit with the country, they would have waved the question aside with a few imposing platitudes. For in the nature of the case their defence was lengthy and intricate, and demanded a certain knowledge of South African conditions which no electorate possesses. The average voter had neither the patience nor the intelligence to master the facts of the complex economic situation on which their justification was based. On the other hand, the attack was such as the wayfaring man, though a fool, would understand. With many honest people the word 'slavery' is sufficient to suspend all jndgment and turn them into noisy abolitionists. Many, again, were impressed with the cry that a war which had been avowedly fought for the white workman had resulted in dispossessing him and filling his place with cheap coloured labour. The old suspicion of the capitalist was awakened; and appeals were made to that Judenhetze which is dormant in all northern nations. The Liberal party embarked on their electioneering with as fine a hand of cards as was ever held by an Opposition, and they made good use of their opportunities. The most sacred of moral appeals was prostituted in the party

game. Posters and picture-cards represented mine-owners as Legrees, and the labourers as shivering and tortured slaves, or, with the logic common to such tactics, showed a Chinaman in bloated prosperity driving out an emaciated British workman. In most constituencies the humble voter believed that in the Transvaal a wrong had been committed against civilisation and humanity, and returned their Liberal member to ensure its instant abolition.

The elections are over; and Liberal Ministers with an unparalleled majority at their back, have left irresponsible rhetoric behind them and are face to face with the hard facts of government. Not the least difficult of their problems is that of South Africa and its future; and it is idle to pretend that in their dealing with it they are not handicapped by their conduct in the past two years. An atmosphere of suspicion has been created. Men who see in the gold industry the only guarantee of South Africa's political progress may reasonably fear that the contemptuous attitude adopted in opposition may be followed by a hasty and unconsidered policy in power. And the dread is intensified by another fact for which we cannot altogether hold the new Government responsible. It numbers among its supporters some of the most irreconcilable opponents of the late war. The Bond in Cape Colony and Het Volk in the Transvaal have chosen to claim the Liberal party as their allies, and to look to it for that official countenance hitherto denied them.

The new Government is an Imperialist Government, as every British Government must be. The Empire is not the possession of any one party; and any attempt to claim Imperialism as the perquisite of Liberal or Conservative deserves the gravest reprobation. The Empire is part of the data of our politics; its well-being is, like the monarchy, an axiom of all sane political creeds. Any British Cabinet must be assumed to desire to cherish the fortunes of each colony and dependency as zealously as they foster the prosperity of these islands. We must assume that, if they blunder, they blunder honestly; and that the remedy is fuller information and better logic, and not a change of disposition. This being so, it is surely the path of wisdom to make it easy for them to forget their hasty electioneering dogmas and to welcome any steps taken which point towards sound policy. For this

reason a speech such as Lord Milner delivered in the House of Lords on February 26, with its freedom from party bias and its insistence upon the cardinal facts of the situation, seems to us infinitely wiser than the attempts made in the Lower House by Mr Chamberlain and others to 'corner' Ministers on their past utterances. No doubt it is the business of an Opposition to oppose; but it is also the business of a patriotic Opposition to do nothing to compromise the settlement of a great Imperial question. The Liberal Government has sufficient ghosts from its past, and enough fanatics and doctrinaires among its following, to make its path difficult. The matter is too urgent for wasting time on mere debating points. If, as we are bound to believe, Lord Elgin has the interests of South Africa at heart, it is our business to make a fair compromise easy.

On one matter the new Government is committed. It is bound as soon as possible to shift the responsibility for the continuance of Chinese labour from its own shoulders. The burden must be left to the Transvaal; and that colony must be given the earliest possible opportunity of deciding the question for itself. Three months ago, as Lord Milner pointed out, the wounds. made by war were almost healed. Trade returns, railway returns, and revenue, all showed satisfactory results. 'The surplus population was almost absorbed, and there would soon have been a demand for further immigration.' The revival of industrial and agricultural prosperity was raising the spirits of the people—the only cure for the 'asperities of racial rivalry.' Once more everything is in the melting-pot; and uncertainty has brought with it stagnation. Deplorable though the result is, the blame is not altogether on a Ministry which, holding honestly certain views, is placed by the swing of the party pendulum in a position to enforce them. They were bound by their pledges to wash their hands of the Chinese business; and, to this end, while recognising existing licenses, they have refused to grant any new ones, and have announced their intention of giving the colony full responsible government at the earliest convenient date.

To abolish Chinese labour forthwith is, on their own admission, impossible. In the latest Blue-book, Lord