Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes | Page 4

it been necessary
I should have travelled a greater distance to have paid with my

testimony homage to the words of this evening's lecturer. It is not
saying more than the truth will allow me, or admitting more than my
own poignant feelings may to such expression give justification, when I
confirm with my lips the belief that I have for much time
dispassionately 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 Æstheticism.
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