When Rudyard Kipling's stories first gripped the imagination of the reading public, it became the fashion among a certain set of profound thinkers to go about asking whether such writings could really be regarded as works of art. The author's extraordinary powers of observation, his insight, his skill in telling his story and in impressing the imagination of his readers, could not be gainsaid; yet the thin shrill voices kept on repeating: "But is it art?"

I do not wish to pretend that the artist whose paintings have been reproduced in this volume can fairly be compared with Mr. Kipling. Mr. Robert Fowler does not aspire to fill such a place in the world of art as Mr. Kipling fills in the world of politics and letters. But incidentally there happen to be some few points in common between the two men. Neither of them cares a brass button for the formulas of the critics. Neither is oppressed by the weight of precedent and authority. They both look at things with their own eyes and weave the texture of their works out of their own thoughts, feelings, and sensations. They draw their inspiration from life rather than from the books or pictures of other men. They seem to hold that almost any material is capable of treatment. The one has boasted that he has found nothing "common or unclean," and the other that he has never seen an ugly thing in his life. And the parallel will be complete enough for my purpose when all the art critics of the kingdom begin to gird at Mr. Fowler's landscapes for their lack of artificiality, and to ask, as the book-reviewers asked of the Kipling stories: "But is it art?"

It may perhaps seem strange that I should imagine that Mr. Fowler's vivid and accomplished paintings are likely to provoke such an objection. But the temptation to judge by precedent, to test new things by their likeness to the old, is a very strong one. This is especially the case in matters of pictorial art. A picture that does not startle us out of our conventional grooves of thought seems to us to be the most natural thing in the world. We reward it for its complaisance by saying that it is like nature. But when we are confronted by an unconventional rendering of nature, we give expression to our ruffled feelings by saying, either that it is unnatural, or that it is not art. At the present time so much attention has been given to the careful study of nature's aspects that few are likely to overlook or deny the astonishing accuracy of Mr. Fowler's transcripts. On the other hand, those who have a great fondness for pictures are apt to feel that his work is too much like nature and not enough like other works of art. The design in his pictures is often so subtle and elusive that it either seems accidental or else is overlooked. The art is often so artfully concealed that the astonished critic is tempted to ask, "But is it art?" I know the temptation is very real, because—I may as well confess it—because I have succumbed to it myself.

When first I saw some of Mr. Fowler's paintings—it was at the end of 1903, in the Goupil Gallery in London—I was struck by the accuracy with which Mr. Fowler had reproduced his visual impressions of nature. The work didn't look as though it had been done by a human being. "If I had been told that these results had been produced by some new process of colour photography I should have believed it," I wrote on the spur of the moment. The artist seemed to have cut himself off so completely from the art of the past, to have de-humanised himself, so to speak, that it was perhaps natural for me to compare his methods of work with the cold impassivity of a machine. But, though natural enough, such an impression touches only on the most superficial aspect of Mr. Fowler's art. Unless it is treated merely as the first step towards a more intimate investigation, it is likely even to be misleading.

In the rough and tumble of everyday life we are often enough compelled to act upon our first hurried impressions. It is one of the greatest privileges of art to give us opportunities for correcting these first impressions, for disciplining and training our very faculties of perception. The art critic who understands his business will therefore be jealous of his right to amplify his first impressions of an artist's work by a more searching investigation. He will not overvalue a reputation for consistency, if only he can develop his half-truths into more fully articulated conceptions; he will be courageous enough to say to-day what he thinks to-day, and to-morrow what he thinks to-morrow.

What, then, is the result of a more prolonged experience of this artist's work? what are the essential qualities that I find in his work, when I have done what I can to rid myself of the conscious and unconscious prejudices that colour so inevitably one's first impressions?

In the first place, I think it is evident that Mr. Fowler is a painter who loves nature more than pictures—a much rarer thing than many people would suppose. Most painters learn to be original by imitating other artists. Mr. Fowler never seems to give us echoes of other men and of other men's works. His paintings are the immediate outcome of an overpowering desire to embody his own feelings and sensations. To many artists nature is interesting only in so far as she furthers their business of making pretty pictures. But the man who painted "The Stacks, Tenby," regarded nature as something more than the mere raw material of art. He seems to have said to himself, "Nature is greater than all our artifices," and to have abandoned himself to the might and splendour and incommensurability of the great mother. The tricks of the trade are all forgotten or abandoned. Here is no cunning artifice of line, no obvious formula of design. The scene itself speaks to us from the canvas: the art and the artist are forgotten.

It is the same with canvas after canvas. In the early morning scene of "Conway from Benarth" we forget that it is a painted scene that we have before our eyes, so resistless is the eloquence of the sleeping towers and hills. But this concealment of himself is the very triumph of the artist.

How rare is this power of self-suppression only those who have passed much of their time in the company of artists and pictures can fully realise. You will meet hundreds of clever, dexterous artists before you will find one sincere enough to efface himself in his work, to stand aside and let his subject speak to you for itself.

It seems to me that the largeness and peace of nature appeal most forcibly to the artist. Such pictures as the "Conway Estuary near Gogarth Abbey," "Llandudno Bay—a Nocturne," "A Sunny Field near Llanberis," are so musical with the respite and peace that the artist's soul found there. But whatever note she touches nature seldom finds him unresponsive. "Conway Castle and Quay" lazily dozing in the noon-tide heat, the cliffs like sleeping dragons guarding the lonely shore of the "Barmouth Estuary," the sullen gloom of "Moelwyn," the glamour and enchantment as of fairyland in the "Silvery Light on Conway Shore," the rush and resounding din of "The Swallow Falls,"—all these experiences has the artist lived through and stamped for us on the canvas.

There is one reward nature gives to those who love her with Mr. Fowler's self-abandonment, which the illustrations of this volume prove that the artist has gathered abundantly. He never seems to repeat himself. His work has something of nature's infinity, her prodigality and inexhaustible resources. We not only pass from scene to scene, but we share the myriad adventures of the days and hear the tramp of the seasons resounding through his pictures.

Mr. Fowler once adorned the walls of his studio with this motto: "The world has been enough invented: let us discover it." He meant that he had had the temerity to look at the world for himself, and that he wanted us also to see something of the glorious things he could discover—not invent. On another occasion he said: "I always laugh when I hear people say that my ideal is the camera. They never see the reality clearly enough in all its beauty to wish to reproduce it in its entirety. I would willingly be a camera if I could get some of the wonders I see in the fact." "Go out one of these glorious mornings," he added, "and look at the scene just as it lies on the retina, and ask what is wrong with this beautiful thing that one should have to haul in 'memories of other days' and other people's pictures."

Mr. Fowler's landscapes show that he is not one of those who fly to dreams to satisfy the craving for beauty that exists in every human breast. The reality, he feels, is infinitely more wonderful than anything we could imagine. But the full significance of reality is not displayed on the highway so that even the most careless and indifferent cannot fail to see it: it is only to the lover that the beauty of reality is revealed.

In a remarkable article dealing with certain modern developments in the art of painting which Mr. Fowler has recently published, a passage occurs which throws considerable light on his own aims as a painter. After criticising the absence of beauty which is noticeable in many of the works of the modern impressionists, and commenting on the tendency of such movements to harden into a formula, he writes: "Perhaps the demand is unreasonable, but what one would wish to see in the near future is the work of an artist who uses the brush simply, directly, and delightfully, and with such a sense of structure that all the finest nuances of form, even the most vague and distant—whether of cloud or mountain-side—get built in air as if by magic; whose colour will be so exquisitely true that, unlike the spectral treatment, no amount of analysis will disclose its secret; whose luminosity will not depend on theoretic and mechanical separation of colours, but on a more vivid visual analysis, and more consistent with the natural handling of a brush. Added to this one wants—abstracted from the natural scene—the noble elements of decoration and design. Also a hand so swift and sure that it is amply able to cope with the quickly-passing phase, and able to give back, in fact, tint for tint and tone for tone, and reproduce that inexorable logic and consistence of lighting on which the illusion of visual Nature herself depends. This will be 'to copy Nature,'"—and to copy nature is, according to many artists and writers, a thing to be avoided. "Well," adds Mr. Fowler, "it may be so. If one could only see it done once, one could be a better judge."

It seems to me that the artist has done well to insist upon this point. We hear so much of the antithesis of Beauty and Nature that we are apt to forget that beauty may be natural and nature beautiful. Hazlitt and Ruskin especially were constantly falling into the mistake of making the distinction between beauty or art and nature far too cutting. "Nature," wrote Hazlitt, "is consistent, unaffected, powerful, subtle; art is forgetful, apish, feeble, coarse. Nature is the original, and therefore right; art is the copy, and can but tread lamely in the same steps." But if art is the copy of nature, it is difficult to see how it can be so absolutely unlike its original as Hazlitt's impassioned rhetoric would make it out to be. Reynolds was not only a better painter than Hazlitt, but he proves himself a better critic when he insists that "a comprehensive and critical knowledge of the works of nature is the only source of beauty and grandeur"; and when he writes, "The terms beauty, or nature, are but different modes of expressing the same thing." Reynolds was therefore consistent when he blamed the Dutch painters—not for imitating nature, but for copying nature in a one-sided and vulgar way, and for missing the beauties that intelligent insight and loving sympathy can always discover.

Mr. Fowler is right in refusing to admit that beauty is unnatural or that nature is unbeautiful. He is right in maintaining that it is not by listening to the "fond illusion of his heart" that the poet or the artist should create for us, but that he should see more clearly into the nature of reality than the majority of men. In his landscapes, at least, he has given up—so far as it may be—the desire to

and has resolved to "welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, and frequent sights of what is to be borne." That such a man should find so much of beauty and of joy in the world as Mr. Fowler has evidently found is surely something to be grateful for.

The reproductions of Mr. Fowler's paintings in this volume will serve to introduce his work to a larger public than that of the habitual haunters of picture galleries. But this does not mean that the artist is either a beginner or an unknown man. It is only as a landscape painter that Mr. Fowler might perhaps be regarded as a new-comer. As a figure painter he has already established a considerable reputation. His works have been bought for several of the great Continental collections, and his fine pictures of "Ariel" and "Eve and the Voices" are among the ornaments of the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. Still, as a landscape painter Mr. Fowler is practically a new-comer, and he has so far given the public few opportunities of becoming acquainted with his powers. A few years ago he held an exhibition at the Salon Gurlitt in Berlin of some eighty of his "nature-portraits," as the German critics styled his work, and in 1903 some thirty of his paintings were shown in one of the exhibitions at the Goupil Gallery in London. He has frequently exhibited figure subjects at the Royal Academy, but only once, in 1903, has he exhibited a landscape there. This was a large picture of "Conway Castle." It formed a notable feature of the Central Gallery, and proved that a new landscape painter had arisen sensitive, to an extraordinary degree, to the fugitive and exquisite charms of natural light. Such a picture could only have been painted by one who had devoted many years of study to subjects that lie outside the range of the ordinary figure painter.

It was not therefore surprising to find that the artist had painted something like two thousand studies in the open air before he could "reproduce that inexorable logic and consistence of lighting" which characterises the seventy or eighty pictures which are reproduced in the present volume. For thirty years the figure painter has devoted fragments of each year to what at first seemed the hopeless attempt to capture those subtle and elusive beauties of nature which, through evident lack of swiftness and skill, elude the painters, or, at best, can only be memorised. Each year had found the artist nerving himself to fresh efforts by saying to himself, "Nature can be actually reproduced in paint,—given the ability," and each winter he had returned to his studio from his campaign among the mountains wondering when, if ever, that ability would come to him. But gradually the hand has become quicker and more skilful, the eye more certain. After years of the most exacting discipline something of the very illusion of the sunbeams seemed to get on to the canvas, and the artist's hand learned the cunning of his swift, flying, vivid, suggestive touch—a touch which sometimes seems like an electric shock received from the tense and excited vision.

Perhaps it is one of Mr. Fowler's most conspicuous merits that his works seem to have sprung up spontaneously in response to the artist's passionate interest in nature's aspects. He has not turned for support to the formulas of abstract science. He has simply felt a genuine passion for the truth and beauty of the visible concrete reality, and he has clung with admirable tenacity and faith to what he has himself felt and proved to be of worth. For in art, as in every other walk of life, the enemy of all excellence and of all progress is the tendency to accept ready-made habits of thought, to go with the crowd, to rely upon routine and machinery. So few are ready to "pay in their person," to win their way to a higher standpoint by dint of their own sufferings, exertions, and failures.

It is this readiness to "pay in his person" that seems to form the distinguishing note of Mr. Fowler's work. He has discarded all picture-making formulas, setting himself to put on record as definite a statement as possible of his own feelings and sensations in the presence of nature. If only he could get something of what he himself had seen, he knew it would be beautiful enough. The whole merit of his work thus springs from his initial, his fundamental determination to see true, and to paint things in their actual relationship.

Work like that of Mr. Fowler is particularly liable to be misjudged by an ignorant or hasty glance. It is easy for those who do not consider what art is to call it artless, and for those who do not see deeply into the infinite beauty of nature to sneer at it as "a mere transcript of nature." "As painting is an art," says Reynolds—and he knew what he was talking about—"they" (the ignorant) "think they ought to be pleased in proportion as they see that art ostentatiously displayed; they will from this supposition prefer neatness, high finishing, and gaudy colouring to the truth, simplicity, and unity of nature." But it is not to the undiscriminating that Mr. Fowler's work makes its appeal; his aim is rather to use art than to make a display of it. And such work rewards us for all the interest we can take in it.

"Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most Divine, the most solemn."—Ruskin.

"All men completely organized and justly tempered enjoy colour; it is meant for the perpetual comfort and delight of the human heart."—Ruskin.