Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes | Page 4

held that Alfred Stevens, with Turner, were the first artists that England produced from the middle of the eighteenth to that of the nineteenth centuries; and that, compared with the great oracles of the past, he reasonably approaches Michael Angelo, who he unquestionably touches and sometimes surpasses. To state my views, having received elementary drawing instructions from a friend of Stevens, I think that there is evidence, in carefully examining the figures upon the Wellington Monument and the Dorchester House chimney-piece a finer knowledge of line in Stevens's work. Michael Angelo's Medici figures, and indeed, his other famous works, are not so unequivocably good; the effigies superimposing the sarcophagi are, for brief instance, "pillowy," though they may be more anatomic. The suavity of nature's hypo-refined grace is not traceable in their easy posture. The fact is, that they pose for something; generally their own animal idiosyncrasy, if not respectable vanity. Stevens's figures, on the contrary, always for their own decency, which throws into the core, the heart of the monument such an expression of beauty, giving rise to the word innate, quenching the sense of frivolity, which unrestrained, disordered state of things oozes out somewhere, or is at any rate felt "in the air" in Michael Angelo's works. Stevens's head was wonderfully poised on his own "torso" to know and feel this with such thrilling, vital, consistent certainty. You catch awhile his lovely idea in the strong fragrant symmetry permeating his work. The iron soul of the man implants his lines of strength far inside the actual bounds of the visible crust, and the mind of the idea, naturally expanding is caught at the salient "processes" in curves and features, betokening nothing--that touches--but grace. I should mention that there is one fact which describes minutely my veneration for Stevens's work at its best, perhaps the fullest; whereby I mean that inspection of his intellectual labour has always restored to me the time so wisely occupied in regarding it, proving that there is goodness, virtue, essence in it, past all fellowship with ephemeral things. There is a true, not a laconic, logical, and prophetic inference in it that is apropriately styled, "time"; the finest embodiment of musical equipoise; felt to a "tick"; no faltering, barbaric, or false quantities, but a sustained and equable, uniform tone of chromatic measure, meted out as by a mind imbued by but sacrificing the scale of colour to its own actual, achieved end. One misses the heated passion of Watts's best pictures, which flow through the ordered channel of recognisable expression and make one adore them as poetry. But there, of a truth, invidious comparison ends, and reticence shall ever guard the space that intervenes betwixt the grounds sacred to the exposition of the embodiment of these master lights.

_MUSIC._
From the BATH CHRONICLE, _January 30th,_ 1902.
MEDITATION ON BERTHOLD TOURS' EVENING SERVICE IN "D."
_To the Editor of the Bath Chronicle._
Sir,--Personally it occurs to me that in a public sense it may not appear to be out of due place nor uninstructive to the readers of the pages of the "Bath Chronicle," if they were allowed to pursue quietly the "meditation" which I have thought fit, with, some amount of feasible excuse, to set in fair order, concerning the apotheosis of an evening service in musical form, from the versatile pen of Mr. Berthold Tours, in the key of D, which, with no inconsiderable _éclat_ was in the sequence of events, produced at St. Raphael's Church, Bristol, on Sunday, the 12th inst. A companion to the graceful evening service or setting of the appointed Canticles in F major, which be it observed, is the most popular, and from a purely suitable point of view, most successful of modern evening services, it marks a phase of expression, at once ethereal and predilectious. Produced at a more mature period, and under certainly different circumstances, it confirms, honours indeed, the fecundity of the age of its inception, namely, the era of British ?stheticism.
Commenting upon its attributes discursively, it was at the period of its original initiation in London my privilege to be present; nor must I omit to graphically allude to my belief, not choosing to be otherwise than candid with my first impressions, that I had never listened to anything which so rapturously illustrated the spirit of those soul-elevating times; even to experiencing a passing pang, since the perplexing principles or established secrets of decorative or ?sthetic art, as understood by me, had so curiously been cajoled or interwoven into the very sanctuary of Classic Music. Every phrase appeared eloquently to illustrate and tell aloud the great burst of passionate fervour, felt to be with serious activity glistening, sparkling around, in painting and in decorative device. It was, as it were the unition, the brazing together of these serious impinging forces,