Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

I never see a crowd of sheep without wanting a picture of them and thinking of pictures of others, although one can see cattle and horses and dogs and have no such pictorial wish or association. Why is this? Is it because sheep are so essentially pictorial—because, in the artist’s phrase, they always “compose”? I suppose so. However they stand or lie they make a harmony. That is why one so seldom sees a picture of sheep that is wholly bad; and similarly it is why every photograph of sheep is also a picture. An artist who sets out to depict sheep and makes an outrage must be crude indeed. No artist understood sheep better than Blake, although his type was, perhaps, a little too Eastern. But he made sheep lie about and occur exactly as sheep do. He did not force them into a picture, as Charles Jacque was a little too much inclined to do, nor pose them like Sidney Cooper. But then I have never seen sheep in real life like Sidney Cooper’s. My own favourite painters of sheep are Edward Calvert, Mauve, and J. F. Millet; but I possess a tiny drawing by Robert Hills, one of the founders of the Old Water-colour Society, which has as much feeling as any. I saw Millet’s most beautiful sheep-picture quite recently—his “Bergère gardant ses Moutons” under a full moon, and it is wonderful. I saw also three or four Jacques in the same collection—the new Chauchard Collection, just opened at the Louvre—and he again seemed to me a shade too brilliant for his subject. Millet came to his sheep as a part of life—the homely, melancholy, busy life that he knew—and painted them exactly in their relation to it; Jacque came to them rather as a heaven-sent subject for his brush. Millet, of course, poetised them, as he was bound to do, but never to their detriment: they remained sheep, just as his peasants, though poetised, remained peasants. Mauve saw sheep also as a part of the universe, but rather as a part of Nature than of life. Nor had Mauve Millet’s wistful depths. But there is a flock of sheep by Mauve, passing over the Laren dunes, that reaches, perhaps, the highest mark of true and beautiful animal-painting. Among the Old Masters I recall with most pleasure the sheep of the Bassano family, father and sons. In the gallery at Vienna they have a room to themselves, and a more attractive collection of warm stables and mangers I never saw. It is when I think of such pictures as these that my brain swoons at the idea of what the post-impressionists would make of a scene of sheep. There were none at the Grafton Galleries recently. May there never be any!

One pleasant development of sheep-nature that the lambing season brings about is accessibility. Usually there is no intercourse possible between man and sheep, except by the hard medium of a crook. Why sheep are so mistrustful I have never understood; for no one would hurt them, not even boys on Sunday afternoons. They know too that to man’s care they owe all their food and comfort, and yet the sight of a strange man or a child equally fills them with panic. How different a little early training can make sheep the adorable Billy proves. For Billy is as much a part of the human family as any child or grandfather ever was.

Billy is a pet lamb in the Midlands—in a river valley far from these austere hills. He is thick and sturdy, with a black face. He fears no one and nothing. His favourite resting-place is the very middle of a frequented path. When tired of repose he saunters about looking for mischief. If the gate is open he strolls into the street and pursues and butts the children. No lamb can ever have so entertained and exhilarated so many grown-up people. The children run and shout, Billy lowers his head and leaps and dances, the people rush to the doors to enjoy the fun. When there are no children he chases the hens or explores the back-gardens. Billy is fed with milk in an old oil can and at this formidable vessel he plunges several times a day, as though he had never eaten before, although he has been picking up trifles since dawn; and even when filled he rarely allows a stranger to pass without groping at his knees in an effort to derive sustenance from them.

I have never seen any other animal with more character than this three months old lamb. He is alive with it, as we say. His countenance is jaunty; his movements are elvish. He is in short an imp, as unlike, on the one hand, the timid foolish sheep of which our flocks are composed as, on the other, the sentimental pet lamb of Wordsworth’s poem. Looking at him one realizes what a waste of good spirits the ordinary method of sheep-rearing and sheep-tending leads to. If all lambs could be brought up by hand, one thinks, how merrie would England be!

But I have not put this possibility before Mus Penfold. He would smell something very treasonable. A humourist he may be, but he is no Radical.

Theologians at the Mitre

I remember hearing an ingenious journalist remark that if ever he were appointed editor of a literary paper he would now and then devote a whole number to reviews of one book only, each review to be the work of a critic of eminence who was unaware that his verdict was not (as is usual) the only one that would be printed. “Thus,” he added, “I should make an interesting number of my paper, while the differences of opinion in the reviews would healthily illustrate the vanity of criticism.”

After having just read, with much entertainment, in an old book, the record of the travels in England of an intelligent German in the year 1782, I am inclined to think that, were I the editor of a general paper, I should adapt my friend’s idea, and now and then induce several foreigners to visit my city or country and record their impressions in parallel columns; just to show the reader how we strike contemporaries and strangers. But here, of course, the differences of opinion would rather tend to complete the picture than to bring criticism into disrepute. The result would be like those myriad reflections of oneself that are obtained from the triple mirrors in hatters’ shops—all true, all different, and some exceedingly unfamiliar and surprising.

If one of my observers were a man as shrewd and philosophic as Charles Moritz, the 1782 traveller, the excellence of one column at any rate of that number would be assured, for Moritz had both eyes and a brain.