WALTER CRANE'S "THE SIRENS THREE."* THESE pages of illustrated poem

are reprinted from the English Illustraleel Magazine, in which they have appeared in parts. They are now collected into a volume which is dedicated to William Morris. It is, in our opinion, a work of decided genius. We do not pretend to say that those critically inclined could find no flaws in it. But in the same way that a flaw in a diamond does not make a diamond less a diamond, so in this work, notwithstanding any shortcomings in detail, the whole level is so high, the conceptions so original, the execution of the designs so masterly, that it should be considered as we consider the productions of real genius. Setting aside its intrinsic merits as a work of art, Mr. Crane has used the language of design and poetry combined, to express what are evidently the strongest feelings and deepest thoughts of his nature. This fact alone places the book on a different and much higher level than that of any other illustrated work since that of William Blake. An artist who can and does think, who can and does feel, and who puts his most earnest thought and feeling into his art, is rare at any time; but it is only when we do meet with such conditions that we can truly conceive how really high a place art can take in life. The ultimate test of the worth of originality must naturally consist in how far originality justifies itself by adding to the wealth of ideas interesting to the world in general,—how far the individuality of the artist is suffi- ciently distinguished to justify his art being absorbed in his own personal thoughts and feelings. True, genuine originality does, we believe, always enrich and flavour life beneficially ; it is only the fantastic counterfeits which caricature the quaint side of original work, and which are indiscriminately called original because peculiar and outside academic law, which are useless and unnourishing. The present world is now, even perhaps more than ever, sceptical in the matter of contemporary genius, except in the cases of those who have won for them- selves a brilliant social position by their labours. In the hurry and strain after that mediocre culture in art, as in other things, which is merely sought after and acquired in order to be useful to the self-interests of the acquirer, people have found that there is a much shorter way of forming an opinion as to the merits of art and literature than the study necessary to make up one's own mind about it. It requires an attentive and earnest study in order, even from a distance, to perceive truly and appreciate the full worth of the beauty created and worked out by those who possess rare and exceptionally fine sensibilities of beauty,—who are, in simpler words, true poets or artists. Again, in these days, when the number who try to make a living out of art, crowd into the market thousands of pictures every year, more or less without any artistic sense guiding their manufacture, it is necessary to draw attention to the vast differ- ence which exists between such manufactures and the really distinguished work which is being created in our own day, and not to allow the effects of this to be swamped in the mass. We hardly realise how much the great number of bad pictures that exist, and the modern system of exhibit- ing them, tend to lessen the effect of our true artists' work, or how, under ordinary circumstances, all distinction gets blurred into the mass of mediocre work. The world has, however, even more abroad than at home, to our shame be it said, long since awakened to the appreciation of Mr. Crane's genius as a designer and illustrator of children's books ; but, as we have before tried to prove, there were evidences in these designs for children even of qualities touching the really great in art, far beyond the simpler gift for beautiful, ingenious, and original decoration. Mr. Crane's gift of colour has also been widely appreciated ; but in the book before us the designs are worked out in line engraving, so that, though an extraordinary sense of colour is suggested by the treatment in them of line and tone, one of the most popular elements in Mr. Crane's artistic gif ts, a beautiful and original arrangement of delicate tint, is absent. But in The Sirens Three, more than in any previous work of Mr.

• The Si,,',,, Three : e Poem. Written and Illustrated by Walter Crane. London Macmillau and Co. Crane's, a real strength of imaginative grasp is evinced,—more- over, that kind of imaginative grasp which places the work high among intellectual efforts, as well as among artistic achieve- ments. Over and above his gifts as a designer, as a colourist, as a draughtsman, Mr. Crane is, we think, distinctly a great artist, and we will try and prove the grounds on which we found our belief.

'United with a singularly fine decorator's instinct for arranging line with richness, intricacy, beauty, and origin- ality, there will be found in his designs a wealth of meaning and graceful fancy. Again, Mr. Crane's facility in drawing and designing can only be best described by saying he seems to draw as easily as other people form letters in writing; and when we con- sider that drawing in his case implies not only artistic invention, but invention of ideas of an intellectual as well as of a dramatic interest, such facility is indeed, as far as we know, unique. Herr Joachim, the king of violinists, said to one of his admirers who was astounded by the perfect ease with which he played a difficult passage, and who asked him whether it was not very difficult :—" No, it is not difficult ; if it was difficult, it could not be done." So there is that quality about Mr. Crane's work which could not exist were it done with difficulty ; and that, after all, is one of the most real tests of the artist being great. The ever-ready power of the hand to put down with ease in the form of line and colour the facts and suggestions in Nature which the eye and brain together assimilate as beautiful, and out of such an assimilation to create a thing which is beautiful in itself as a work of art, is a power belonging only to the most rarely gifted. A great painter is not always a great artist. For instance, in Millais's case, great painter as he is, great painter even among great painters of all times, Millais is not, in the opinion of the present writer, a great artist. This, not only because the intellectual quality in his work is so subordinate to the simpler instinct of imitation, of seizing the real aspect of people and things, and forcibly render- ing it by manipulating paint with a brush ; but because that peculiar sensitiveness which creates out of natural objects some- thing which arranges itself into a beautiful thing in itself, let alone the likeness to the thing represented, let alone the power of expressing dramatic sentiment and interest, is wanting in Millais's work. It matters little whether he manipulates with the careful elaboration of the pre-Raphaelite school or with the free brushwork of a Sir Joshua Reynolds, we feel the great artistic instinct wanting. Compare the early work of Millais with that of Van Eyck. Can any detail be more highly finished, can vividness of colour be more brilliantly rendered, than in the work of Van Eyck ? Yet nothing seems to jump out of the canvas as if put under a special microscopic power, nothing asserts itself in glaring gaudiness ; every fact holds its right place, atmosphere plays round every object, dividing it courteously from its neighbour. .There is evinced that particular sense of being able to fit parts to a whole which, inde- pendently of other interest, makes the picture a beautiful impression as a whole. The people he painted may be quaint and ugly ; the picture, nevertheless, is a beautiful thing in itself. A great artistic sense has breathed beauty into it, as Nature breathes beauty over and into all natural objects in a healthy state. So in the case of Sir J. Reynolds. Although details with him may only be indicated by the slightest and most rapid touches, those touches fly about in a manner always suggesting a sense of beauty, and which make collectively a beautiful arrangement which is certainly not the case in many of Millais's pictures. We in no wise wish, especially at this moment, to detract from his greatness as a painter; but that power of using paint to realise in a picture most forcibly the actual aspect and expression of a countenance or a landscape, is quite a different power to that of the great artist who creates a new impression of beauty through his own artistic sense, not only repeating and recalling one aspect of Nature, but creating a new thing beautiful in itself, adding on to the truth of Nature a truth of Art,—those qualities which assimilate great art to the larger conditions and the deeper, more abiding laws of Nature. Now, that power Mr. Crane possesses very distinctly.

In The Sirens Three, as we have before said, Mr. Crane more than maintains his claims to distinction. Many who cannot appreciate the great qualities in the designs will nevertheless be able to see much imaginative power in the poem,—though, separated in any way from the designs, the poem would lose much. As in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, we have the poem and the picture put decoratively

on the page together, the letters of the poem being drawn by Mr. Crane himself, not printed in ordinary type. Both writing and designs are sointerwoven with one another, that it is clear that thought, word, and design have struck simultaneously, more or less distinctly, the mind of the author. To quote, therefore, from the poem alone would give but a very inadequate impres- sion of the power of the original seen with its rich garlands of design, for these carry the meaning of the words into regions of suggestion unreachable by written words alone. The reader must get the book for himself. No second-hand way of knowing it is possible, however elaborately we described in detail the poem or designs. The following, however, is a bare outline of the drift of the poem. A soul drifting wide on a sleepless sea—in

other words, a life aimless but restless—is beckoned to a shore by "the Sirens three" (these symbolising "No More, and Golden Now, and dark To Be") on which it strands. From hence it

realises the universe as the indisputable facts of its history explain it, the aims and personal life. " The bodies of lost Faith and Love" are cast out. In all the strange relics and ruins of the past, the soul seeks for Truth ; but Truth eludes the search till the traveller reaches a portal, the entrance to the House of. Time. Into this he enters, and sees pass before him the pageant of the world's history, the history of its development, man's efforts, strain, superstitions, strifes, the struggle of good and evil, the yearning for Freedom, the injustice of Tyranny. At last, most weary of the seemingly meaningless, unsatisfying state of the human conditions of the " Now," he turns and passes out of the portal where he entered, and Hope draws back the painted veil of things that are, and, standing on her gilded prow, the soul looks out into the " To Be," and from it

sees-

" The Dragons slain of last and greed, Of gold and power, that waste to serve their need Poor human lives ;"

the laws of liberty, equality, fraternity, perfectly carried out. And regenerate man becomes,

" A child again on Mother Nature's knee." After this vision of the future, sleep comes :— " I saw, I heard no more, for sleep like rain Fell soft at last upon my restless brain."

In the whole work there is a great sense of mouvement, an

impetuous rush of ideas, the pulse of modern days in the quick time it beats ; but the temperament evinced is of a more agitated fervour than that we find, as a rule, expressed in the strains of the nineteenth century, or with very few exceptions in any modern art. There is a great resistance to things as they are,

but there is the hopefulness of a gifted worker in the advent of a better future. Sadness and pessimism are not to be endured as a lasting condition by a nature real enough to be earnest, but healthy enough to be hopeful. T here are many lines, did our space permit, which we might quote as specially containing word-painted suggestions of a wide-reaching and truly imagina-

tive order ; but we can only indicate those pages which, taken as a whole, design and poem together, strike us as most beautiful. It will be noticed how ingeniously Mr. Crane uses the human figure, not only to tell his story, but as the form containing the most subtle lines for decorative beauty. Three of these happen to come together, from verse xii., which begins by the lines,-

" The blue-breast bird of space his fan outspread,

And shook the starry splendour o'er my head,"

to the page ending with verse xx. Another singularly beautiful page is that beginning with verse lxxiv., and, in a more restrained manner of design, the page beginning with verse lxx. But in searching for those that have struck us most on a first reading, we are inclined to include more and more in the category of what is most striking, till, indeed, the whole book would be selected. It was once said by a very wise Bishop that no one should be allowed to be critical who could not also be enthusiastic. The effect worked by the power of genius is to produce more the enthusiastic than the critical condition, and we close The Sirens Three with

little inclination to draw attention to any flaws in so clear an evidence of true genius.