Observers may disagree as to whether these cognate things--self-consciousness in the artist, æsthetic philosophizing in the critic, and the taste for a literary rather than a pictorial value in the public--are on the increase or on the decrease in the various centres of art. Annual exhibitions--a significant illustration of our high-pressure life in art as in other things--would seem to tend toward deepening these faults. Attention must be attracted at all hazards, and the greater the number of exhibitors and the average attractiveness of their canvases the greater becomes the temptation to shine, not by excellence, but by eccentricities of treatment, or, still more, by the factitious interest of a "telling" subject. Is it due, perhaps, to this constant desire for notoriety on the part of the artist, and for more and more excitement on the part of the public, that in all modern schools, landscape art, as less possibly influenced by such a state of things, stands ahead of the art which has humanity for its subject? It is scarcely possible to find in France to-day a figure-painter who is a Daubigny, still less a Jules Dupré. Next to these unquestionably stand such animal-painters as Bonheur and Troyon; and it would be hard among the youngest file of artists to find a figure-painter who in his line should rival Van Marcke in his. In England also landscape ranks ahead, and it is perhaps in comparing it with French landscape that the difference between the schools is most truly though not most glaringly displayed. Even here, and in the allied fields of animal-painting, the desire for _l'anecdote_ creeps in, and Landseer with all his talent often prostitutes his brush in the attempt to make his brutes the centre of dramatic action, and forces into them semi-human characteristics in order to extract from them tales or ideas of human interest. It was not thus that Veronese painted dogs or Franz Snyders his lions and boars--not thus that the Greeks have put the horse into art. Nor, to take the best contemporary comparison, is it thus that Barye's bronzes are designed.
Landscape brings us inevitably to Turner. The most highly gifted of all English artists, past or present, his genius was hardly a logical outcome of the contemporary spirit of his nation. We have no right to say this of an artist, no right to call him anomalous, while we are still in doubt as to whether he may be only the advance-guard of a new national art, the herald of a new avatar. But when he with his generation dies, when another generation develops and bears fruit, and a third is beginning to blossom, and he still seems anomalous, it is fair to hold him exceptional in his country's art, rather than characteristic thereof. Together with wonderful endowments of eye and hand, and a prodigious power of work, Turner's earlier works show us an unconscious development and a healthy oblivion of his own personality. But later the fatal modern fever entered his blood, ending in something very like delirium. From a painter he became a theorist, contaminated by a rush of criticism alike indiscriminate in praise and injudicious in blame. We shall see the baleful effects of modern methods if we look, in the wonderful series at the National Gallery, first at the pictures painted when Turner was an artist thinking of painting, then to those done when he was a self-conscious experimentalist thinking of Turner--Turner worshipped by Ruskin, Turner sick with envy of the Dutchmen and defiance of Claude.