The Evergreen A Northern Seasonal

Abstract

IT is not often that a reviewer is called upon to write art criticism in the columns of NATURE. But the circumstances of the “Evergreen” are peculiar; it is published with a certain scientific sanction as the expression of a coming scientific Renascence of Art, and it is impossible to avoid glancing at its aesthetic merits. It is a semi-annual periodical emanating from the biological school of St. Andrews University. Mr. J. Arthur Thomson assists with the proem and the concluding article (“The Scots Renascence”), and other significant work in the volume is from the pen of Prof. Patrick Geddes. It may be assumed that a large section of the public will accept this volume as being representative of the younger generation of biological workers, and as indicating the æsthetic tendencies of a scientific training. What injustice may be done thereby a glance at the initial Almanac will show. In this page of “Scots Renascence” design the beautiful markings on the carapace of a crab and the exquisite convolutions of a ram's horn are alike replaced by unmeaning and clumsy spirals, the delicate outlines of a butterfly body by a gross shape like a soda-water bottle; its wings are indicated by three sausage-shaped excrescences on either side, and the vegetable forms in the decorative border are deprived of all variety and sinuosity in favour of a system of cast-iron semicircular curves. Now, as a matter of fact, provided there is no excess of diagram, his training should render the genuine biologist more acutely sensitive to these ugly and unmeaning distortions than the average educated man. Neither does a biological training blind the eye to the quite fortuitous arrangement of the black masses in Mr. Duncan's studies in the art of Mr. Beardsley, to the clumsy line of Mr. Mackie's reminiscences of Mr. Walter Crane, or to the amateurish quality of Mr. Burn-Murdoch. And when Mr. Riccardo Stephens honours Herrick on his intention rather than his execution, and Mr. Laubach, rejoicing “with tabret and string” at the advent of spring, bleats

The Evergreen. A Northern Seasonal.

Published in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues. (London: Fisher Unwin, 1895.)