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that is to condemn it now, it ought to have condemned it equally during any part of its past existence. The numbers who attended it before the Reformation cannot be ascertained. But take each century since the Reformation, and it has been computed that there were in round numbers an average of 180 students during each session of the seventeenth century, of 120 during the eighteenth, and of 160 during the present century. During the last few years there has been a decided tendency to an increase of numbers. Last session there were 187, this session there are 192 students. I assert, therefore, that no argument from paucity of numbers can be brought against St. Andrews which would not have been equally valid at any time during the last 300 years. I shall not say one word in disparagement of the larger Universities; nor shall I meddle with the controversy as to the merits of large or small professorial classes. That subject has been what newspaper editors call thrashed out." This only I will say the system of classes containing from 200 to 300 students has not been proved to be so altogether faultless that it ought to crush out a system where the classes consist of only from 30 to 50 students. If classes in which the students are counted by hundreds have some advantages, those in which they are counted by tens have their own compensations, which are obvious. These aremore intimate knowledge on the part of the professor of the ability and work of each individual student, and the greater amount of personal instruction which each student receives. The classes in St. Andrews are, both in numbers and in mode of instruction, more like those which meet in the lecture-rooms of tutors and professors in Oxford and Cambridge. The charge of fewness of numbers is never brought against these why should it be made so much of here? were it not that in Scotland educational efficiency has got to be estimated by quantity rather than by quality. Our comparative smallness of numbers gives us the opportunity, which I believe is not neglected, of bringing up the collective students to a higher average of attainment than we could do were the classes quadrupled in numbers.

Add to this, in a small, retired city like ours, in which the University is the chief centre of interest, academic life, with all its associations, is much more vivid and intense than it can be in large and populous towns, where the students are absorbed among the surrounding population. If that academic life is healthy and hightoned, there are few finer incentives to a young man's progress. And from this academic life, spent in such a situation as this, and girt round with such associations, it has come that few students anywhere hear to their university so deep and life-long affection as those of St. Andrews have always borne.

And now let my closing words be those of the same illustrious friend of St. Andrews with whose saying I opened my first paper:

This secluded sanctuary of ancient wisdom, with the foam-flakes of the northern ocean driving through its streets, with the skeleton of its antique magnificence lifting up its gaunt arms into the sky, still carries on the

tradition of its first beginnings. Two voices sound through it. 'One is of the sea, one of the Cathedral-each a mighty voice;' two inner corresponding voices also, which in any institution that has endured and deserves to endure, must be heard in unison-the voice of a potent past, and the voice of an invigorating future.-It may still be said of the local genius of St. Andrews, that through all the manifold changes of the Scottish ChurchCuldee, Catholic, Protestant, Episcopalian, Presbyterian-its spiritual identity has never been altogether broken, its historical grandeur never wholly forfeited.' J. C. SHAIRP.

AISE

RAIS

APOLLO THE FIDDLER.

A CHAPTER ON ARTISTIC ANACHRONISM.

up and hollow out your two hands, so as to shut out from your eyes all the vague, flickering shadows, so as to concentrate what little light you can upon that luckless unlit fresco over the prison cell window of the Signature Room of the Vatican. At first we can see scarcely anything except the light spots dancing before our eyes; but gradually the black wall seems to scoop itself out, to deepen, till the mass of blurs take shape, and become the ghost-haunted slopes of Parnassus. Vaguely still, and for ever sucked back into the darkness, flickers forth the company of poets: bearded, regal men, with filleted, gem-like heads, and robed youths with laurel wreaths in their long hair; and the Muses seated with lyre and flute, in gowns of white and green and tawny red; and, glimmering white in the midst of all, on the summit of the hill, beneath the straight-stemmed laurels, with the streams bubbling and the flowers opening between his naked feet, King Apollo, seated with his bow in his hand and his fiddle against his cheek. We look, and laugh, and ask ourselves why in the world Raphael should have chosen to paint Apollo as a fiddler? Why should Raphael have painted Apollo as a fiddler. Why indeed? Well, I have a notion that I can explain to you why Raphael painted Apollo as a fiddler, and I will try and expound my idea; but on one condition, that afterwards, in return, we shall do our best to explain why, Apollo having been painted as a fiddler, that circumstance should have made you laugh.

Why Raphael painted Apollo playing, not upon lyre or cithara, or any other imaginable antique instrument, but upon a fiddle— upon, of all things, the most modern, unantique of instruments, an instrument born of the Middle Ages, and raised to importance only in Raphael's own time-this is a question which has exercised the ingenuity of a variety of ingenious persons. Some have supposed that Raphael wished to indicate that Apollo was not only the god of poetry, but of music; and that he gave him, therefore, in contradistinction to the lyres and citharas and psalteries, instruments used solely to accompany lyrical declamation and therefore symbolical of poetry, handled by the Muses, the one instrument which seemed most purely musical, most disconnected with mere verse recitation-the violin. Others have imagined that the fiddle was placed in the hands of Apollo as a delicate or indelicate piece of favour-currying with some musical minion, some viol-playing page of Pope Leo X.; perhaps even that same lad, with dark wistful face, and long straight

hair, whose portrait Raphael painted, bow in hand, dressed in green velvet and fur. Others have put forward yet other explanations, with which we need not be troubled. Explanations of this sort people have felt bound to make, because the most obvious explanation of all-the explanation of the similar vagaries of Benozzo representing Babylon with Strozzi palaces and Chinese pagodas, of Pinturricchio painting Ulysses returning in the dress of a Sienese manat-arms to a weaving Penelope apparelled like the lady of any Petrucci, Tolomei, or Piccolomini of his day; nay, of Uccello painting a chameleon as a monster half camel, half lion-the simple explanation of blissful ignorance-cannot go any length to explain the fiddling Apollo of Raphael.

For Raphael was of all men the least likely to be guilty of a sin of ignorance. He was, above any artist of his time, of the literary, learned, or at least dilettante-learned, temperament. In the vague accounts we obtain of this rather pale-coloured and faintly drawn man of genius, almost the sole strongly-marked characteristic is the noble-patron-of-learning sort of interest, the refined, accomplished, scholarly gentleman delight in antiquities. It is true that many other artists of the Renaissance had as great, if not greater, passion for antiques as Raphael, but none, it would seem, from the same reasons. For them the antique was a mere subject of study. If Mantegna spent fortunes, and sold houses and orchards, in order to buy mutilated statues and battered bas-reliefs and half-obliterated coins, it was that to the strange, fantastic master of Mantua these things were as the ores and smelting-ovens of an alchemist. It was that he sought, in the broken, rust-stained marbles, what Leonardo sought in fanciful geometrical problems, and Michael Angelo in dead limbs and flayed bodies-a sort of magic, omnipotent spell, a sort of ineffable elixir of life-the secret of perfect proportion. But it was not so with Raphael: a student of Tuscan nudities, a dexterous imitator of Michael Angelo, he was yet at bottom an Umbrian, bred in the workshop, the manufactory of disembodied yearning saints, of Perugino; and the antique, although he studied it as he studied everything else, was never to Raphael a supreme teacher or a final problem. His love for all things antique, his constant alacrity to buy or have copied any ancient marbles that came within reach, his anxiety for the preservation of the ancient buildings of Rome, all this was merely the result of a sort of humanistic tendency, a sort of intellectual busybodyness, seeking for a vent in a man of far less literary training than many of his contemporary artists; an interest, in short, academic and archæological, in antiquities for their own sake, such as was shared by his nobler and more learned friends, Bembo and Castiglioni and Sadoleto and Fedra Inghirami, and in less degree by all the poeticules and prelatry of the court of Leo X. Raphael, therefore, cannot be supposed to have been ignorant of the antique instruments which might be placed in the hands of Apollo, nor to have been ignorant (at least for any length of time) of the

fact that the fiddle was not an antique instrument. He, who certainly took a vast deal of scholarly advice for his Vatican frescoes, who must have heard whole lectures on antique philosophy and poetry before he was able to compose The School of Athens and Mount Parnassus, could not have put a fiddle into the hands of Apollo from the mere stolid ignorance, the happy-go-lucky indifference, which made both Signorelli and an unknown pupil of Squarcione coolly sketch, the one an Apollo, the other an Orpheus, fiddling away in the face of all archæology.

If, therefore, an anachronism was committed by Raphael, by the pre-eminently archæological painter, it was certainly not without a motive. No, not exactly a motive, for a motive is self-conscious, and consciously restricted to one particular case. Rather a habit, unconscious and general, influencing in one case because it influenced in all cases. Raphael gave a fiddle to Apollo, not because the giving of the fiddle had any particular meaning in his eyes, but because the giving of the fiddle was consonant with the manner of conceiving subjects which Raphael shared with all the painters of his day; which the painters of his day shared with all the men and women of the Renaissance; and which the men and women of the Renaissance shared with the men and women of ancient Greece, of the Middle Ages, of Elizabethan England, of every country and every time which has possessed a really great and vigorous art-sculpture, painting, poetry, or music-the habit of conceiving of all subjects given to the artist as the mere material or pretext for a decoration, a show, a pageant; a pageant of sculptured or painted forms, of grouped and linked sounds, of images and emotions; a pageant to pass before the mind, ostensibly to tell some story or honour some person, really merely to delight, even as some great mystery play, with its processions of richly apparelled and grandly mounted soldiers, its cavalcades of mummers and musicians, its companies of singing choristers, its flower-wreathed poles and painted banners and flaring torches, its wheeled stages hung with arras and cressets, and peopled with strangely arrayed figures, may, to do honour to some prince, or to enforce some religious lesson, have passed slowly through the streets of a mediæval city.

To us such a conception of artistic subjects seems far-fetched, artificial, nay, almost impossible; yet it is in reality by far the earlier, the more natural, the more really artistic. The desire for realising an already known event, for imitating an already extant character, for placing before the imagination a fac-simile of something existing outside it, or for showing to the bodily eyes what was visible already to the memory; this desire for pitting together the artificial and the natural is, in point of fact, one of very late growth. It did not exist as long as events and characters seemed sufficiently interesting from their more practical bearing; as long as the past was too active a factor in the present and future to require any further reason for remembrance. It could not exist as long as artistic

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