of the offences against society—the brawling, fighting, brutality and murder—which are the common accompaniments of excess in alcohol. But even as regards the consumer himself, the great majority of Europeans with experience of the Far East would, I am certain, agree with me as to the comparative harmlessness of opium. (I say nothing of Europeans in India, whose testimony the Commission will have the opportunity of hearing from themselves.)

It is, no doubt, commonly asserted in England that European opinion in the East is prejudiced by self-interest, and that the only testimony worth regarding as impartial is that of the missionaries. But as regards China there could hardly be a greater mistake. For, as a matter of fact, exceedingly few Europeans in the Far East are now interested at all in opium. Trade in the article is now almost exclusively confined to Parsees, Armenians, Hebrews and others who have been brought up and educated in the East. If there is any preponderance of prejudice, therefore, I venture to think it is on the side of the missionaries. All, or nearly all, of them go out to the East with a strong partisan spirit on the subject, and, without in the smallest degree questioning their complete bona fides, I am satisfied that many of them from the first look at the matter through coloured spectacles, and I regard it as only natural that they should incline to a view which so conveniently accounts for, or averts attention from, the enormous disparity between the efforts and money expended upon missionary enterprise in China and the results obtained. But for the anti-opium agitation in England it can scarcely be doubted that funds for Chinese missions would cease to flow in equal profusion, and the missionaries would scarcely be human if a knowledge of this probability did not, however unconsciously, affect their judgment. But, giving them, as I am quite willing to do, the benefit of the doubt, and supposing them to be quite impartial, I am unable to understand why men, who in other respects so frequently show themselves to have ordinary human failings, should be solely regarded as against the great majority of Europeans of Chinese experience who, like myself, are at least equally disinterested, and at least equally capable of forming a trustworthy judgment. A great preponderance of such opinion would, I know, agree with me not only as to the comparison of advantages and disadvantages between opium and alcohol, but also in the general view of the subject above expressed. This may be briefly summarised as follows, viz: that opium no doubt does harm in some few cases of inordinate excess, but to the very great majority it is, to say the least, innocent. If this be correct, the feeling which prompted a distinguished Bishop to say that he preferred an England free to an England sober, becomes specially applicable to the question of opium suppression. It would, I hold, be an act of intolerable despotism to place the least restraint on freedom in such a matter; while it would. be a monstrous wrong and injustice to deprive millions of men of one

of the few, perhaps the principal, pleasure of their very cheerless existence.

In conclusion, I wish to say that I am painfully aware that the reasons given for my opinions are by no means as strong as they might have been if I were not so completely separated as I am from books of reference, statistics and memoranda on the subject of China, as well as from all persons acquainted with the Far East. I have been compelled to trust entirely to a memory for the moment weakened by ill-health; and my statement is thus unduly defective in facts. In any case, it would have been impossible within reasonable compass to present all the innumerable incidents, information, and admissions which in the course of years have contributed to produce my conviction. I trust, however, that some weight may be given to an opinion from the mere fact of its having been formed at all by one who has had special opportunities for observation, and who, far from being naturally inclined to take the ordinary European view of native questions, has always been known, and has at times incurred much odium, for his sympathy with, and his strenuous protection of, the various subject races committed to his care.-I have, &c.,

G. W. DES VEUX.

To the Right Hon. Lord Brassey,

President of the Opium Commission.

Ir is but natural that a world dying of old age should profess an admiration for primitive art. Self-consciousness is fascinated at last by the wayward simplicity which long since it condemned to death. If childhood is curious in the search of things unseen, senility still hankers after the fresh and impossible. Thus it was that our own Pre-Raphaelites, neglecting the wisdom of the ages, embraced the vices, and mimicked the follies, of the quattro-centists. Thus it is that the Frenchman of to-day falls in adoration before M. Puvis de Chavannes or M. Aman Jean, and roundly asserts (being inevitably logical) that he learns to draw merely that he may forget so level an accomplishment. After the practical fashion of opening her money-bags, Britain began the revolution, whereto France gives so passionate an approval. Since the ancient days of the grand tour our countrymen have eagerly purchased the works of the Primitives. Indeed, a glance at the Catalogue of the National Gallery is proof enough of the extravagant importance we attach to the early art of Italy. For one Holbein (recently acquired) we have six Pinturrichios. We have spent upon one early Raphael the sum which purchased the whole Peel collection. Nor is the national wealth absorbed in Trafalgar square: the exhibition at the New Gallery is an earnest (so to say) of the treasures, priceless and innumerable, which are hidden in the private collections. of England.

Greece crowded her all too brief career of art into two generations. Italy measured some three centuries between her cradle and her grave. And though the exhibition in Regent Street stops short of the age of supreme triumph, it is none the less an amazing record of energy and taste. Moreover, it affords a far more diverse illustration of Italian art than the National Gallery, because it does not separate painting from the other crafts. In the early days of the Renaissance the painter was a craftsman, not an artist. It was his business to fill a space with an appropriate trinket rather than to create a masterpiece, which would live by its own beauty wherever it was set. And it is impossible to enter the New Gallery without recognising the simultaneous variety and unity of Italian handiwork. Whatever be the craft, the decorative instinct is unmistaken.

Whether it be painted canvas or chiselled bronze, brocaded cope or printed page, the result is always (within limits) sumptuous and impressive. The effect of the West Gallery is an effect of unparalleled splendour. The framed pictures weave themselves into a delightful pattern. You are not tempted to disengage them one from another. They fall involuntarily into a homogeneous scheme of decoration. The long, flat panels would doubtless have a nobler aspect in the cassone from which they have been ripped; the Madonnas had been more wisely left, maybe, in the churches for which they were destined. But they are handsome enough as they are if you do not examine them too rigorously. Their gilt frames are a perfect enrichment ; each keeps its appointed place with that mellow restraint which only centuries can give; nor does the most strident clamour for separate notice. Contrast with this sober decoration the chastest wall that ever was seen within Burlington House! There the painters, with all their knowledge and accomplishment, fight furious and red-handed for the supremacy. Even if a rare masterpiece be found in so unaccustomed a place, its neighbour is not likely to permit a peaceful contemplation of its quality. And it is only the serenity of Italian art that reminds you, pleasantly enough, of our annual discord.

But when you examine the pictures, not as squares in a pattern, but as independent works, you are at once aware of certain limitations. The Primitives had the slenderest equipment of knowledge. Their work was the seed of art, not the flower. True, in after years it blossomed amazingly, but its inevitable unripeness has seemed to many its chiefest merit. When painting was reinvented after the night of the middle ages, its materials could but be imperfectly understood. The earliest craftsmen fumbled and experimented. Their colours were few and conventional. They treated their canvas as a plaque of metal-being also goldsmiths-and furrowed it over with lines until, in the elaboration of the parts, the whole was perforce forgotten. Now it is the fashion to exalt and imitate the very shortcomings of the Primitives-shortcomings which arose, not from malice but from ignorance—until you are asked to believe that a certain holiness lurks in the mistakes of Giotto. 'How noble to observe,' says the less prudent admirer of the ancients, 'an ardent soul striving after the unattainable!' Noble indeed, if we realise that failure is not of itself respectable. So many admirable qualities do the Primitives possess-such as a sense of line and ornament, and the intelligence to adapt that ornament to its place that they stand in no need of false admiration. Indeed, a frank recognition of their faults is the most candid method of appreciation. Their works are frequently not pictures at all, in the more modern sense. Seldom do you find an attempt to translate landscape into decoration; rare, indeed, is direct observation visible. The secret of tone was yet undiscovered, and for a harmony of colour you must trust to luck or

time. Gold and vermilion produce an excellent effect in a sombre church, but they are not all-sufficient in another environment. Take Giotto's Triptych,' for instance, and how can you define it otherwise than as a curio? To be sure it is naïve; so naïve, indeed, that a child might have designed it; but quaintness is not always a merit, and the grammar of every art is worth mastery. Again, how can you look at Ambrogio Lorenzetti's 'Hermit Saints of the Desert,' save in a spirit of gibery? Not only are the figures most ingenuously ill-drawn, but the landscape of ice-cream and the sentry-boxes inhabited by the hermits are as little artistic as a Dutch doll. One may legitimately wonder that so strange an object was produced in the fourteenth century; one may legitimately 'place' it in the history of art, or prize it as a rare postage-stamp. But it is the merest fantasy to admire it for qualities of colour or composition, to which it makes no pretension. Even as you advance in the century, you find a like failure to compose, a like desire for superfluous definition. Piero di Cosimo's 'Hylas and the Naiads' has had all the beauty tortured out of it. So worried is the foreground with its grasses and flowers, that the eye can scarcely reach the figures; and, whatever interest lurk in its corners, you cannot think of it as a separate and consistent work. Then, what could be more ingenuously awkward than Filippo Lippi's 'Cupid and Psyche'? The trees recall the Noah's Ark of your childhood, while the personages are marvels of grotesquery. And yet it would be strange were it not so. Antiquity is not always meritorious, nor was art born fully equipped like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. The Primitives were the forerunners of Titian and Veronese. Their ceaseless experiments, their intrepid attempts to outrun their knowledge, led on to the glory of Venice, and that is honour sufficient, without the adulation of indiscreet partisans.

But despite their freshness, despite their eagerness to penetrate the unknown, their works are often marred by a strange timidity of style. The technique is so seldom characteristic. Whatever the school, the pupils agree in tickling their canvas into an indistinguishable smoothness. You look in vain for an individual handwriting. There is, of course, no lack of expression, but the expression is reached by emotional rather than by æsthetic means. Features are distorted, bodies are twisted, infinite symbols urge the spectator to be harrowed. But Botticelli and his contemporaries did not employ the resources of their art to produce pity or fear. They did not realise that colour and technique are the most eloquent interpreters of the emotions. For them it was enough to petrify pathos in an anxious face. Their style was still deliberately smooth and mannered, however poignant the motive. You will not detect a fury of expression in the painting of one of them, for they had not yet realised that they were employing a language which had symbols of its own, and which was remote