creator of most of the paradoxes attributed, not only to Whistler, but to an entire school -if one may employ such a phrase. The frozen imperturbability of the poet, his cutting enunciation, his power of blasphemy, his affected hatred of nature, his love of the artificial, have been copied by the aesthetic blades of our day. He it was who first taunted nature with being an imitator of art, with being always the same. Oh, the monotonous sunsets! Oh, the quotidian eating and drinking! he cried. And as pessimist, too, he led the mode. Baudelaire, like Flaubert, grasped the murky torch of pessimism once held by Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, and Senancour and his morbid Obermann. Perhaps all this stemmed from Byronism. To-day it is as stale as Byronism.

Baudelaire's health failed rapidly, and he didn't have money enough to pay for doctor's prescriptions. He owed for the room in his hotel. At Namur, where he was visiting the father-in-law of Félicien Rops -March, 1866-he suffered from an attack of paralysis. He was removed to Brussels. His mother, who lived at Honfleur, in mourning for her husband, came to his aid. Taken to France he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia set in. He could only ejaculate a mild oath, and when he caught sight of himself in the mirror he would bow pleasantly as if to a stranger. His friends rallied, and they were among the most distinguished people in Paris, the elite of souls. Ladies visited him, one or two playing Wagner on the piano-which must have added a fresh nuance to death-and they

brought him flowers. He expressed his love for flowers and music to the last. He could not bear the sight of his mother; she revived in him some painful memories, but that passed, and he clamored for her when she was absent. If any one mentioned the names of Wagner or Manet he smiled. Madame Sabatier came: so did the Manets. And with a fixed stare, as if peering through some invisible window opening upon eternity, he died, August 31, 1867, aged forty-six.

Barbey d'Aurevilly, himself a Satanist and dandy (ah, those comical old attitudes of literature!) prophesied that the author of "Fleurs du Mal" would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of the cross. Baudelaire had the latter course forced upon him by fate after he had attempted spiritual suicide for how many years! (He once tried actual suicide, but the slight cut in his throat looked so ugly that he went no farther.) His soul had been a battle-field for the powers of good and evil. That at the end he brought the wreck of both soul and body to his God is not here a subject for comment. He was an extraordinary poet with a bad conscience, who lived miserably and was buried with honors. Then it was that his work was discovered (funeral orations over a genius are a species of public staircase wit). His reputation waxes with the years. He is an exotic gem in the crown of French poetry. Of him the supreme singer of England has chanted "Ave Atque Vale": "Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,

Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?"

I

USED to pride myself upon my power to read faces casually encountered, which is, I suppose, but another way of saying that I used to be young. Whole character sketches could I make out of the curve of the lips, the lines of the forehead, the contour of cheek and of brow, and, as I never again saw most of the people in question, and never really knew them, nobody was ever the wiser or the worse for my minute interpretations. It is only lately that I have begun to suspect that my instinct was more fallible than I had thought, that Dame Nature is a far more subtle lady than I had dreamed, and that, in creating faces, as elsewhere, she follows her usual method of almost wholly concealing her meaning by partially revealing it.

Misfit Faces

Not long since I went to a great meeting-I will not say what, I will not say where in which certain questions of civic reform were being debated in the presence of potentates, powers, and even trust magnates. Against the complacent faces of the boodlers and grafters, all of whom wore that direct and manly gaze we are taught to associate with honesty of character, one face stood out, narrow-eyed, a twist in the nose giving the whole countenance a sinister expression, a face that nine people out of ten would have picked out as that of the villain of the piece; yet it was the face of the one upright man there, whose salt of civic virtue will, peradventure, for he holds high office, save a whole city. I knew that he was good only because he did not, as the others did, talk loudly of the Virtues. It would make a noble theme for a novel or a play, rivalling in pathos Cyrano de Bergerac, the life-long fight of a good man against the contour of his outer shell; his final proof in deeds that he was not the villain that, by some touch of physical irony, he looked.

Is it from actual observation that we have grown to associate certain inner qualities with certain characteristics of cut and of coloring, or are fiction and drama responsible for our conventional beliefs? No amount of enlight enment can keep us from identifying golden hair with innocence; the black locks and heavy brow of the arch villain of melodrama, the

square chin of the man of decision, the straightforward gaze of conscious virtue-all these time-worn generalities dominate, though we do not know it, our observation. If we had the use of our eyes we should see, I fancy, that, in real life, the villain wears a look of conscious virtue more convincingly than does any one else, and that, unlike his image in fiction, he almost never realizes that he is a villain. We hide our real vision under the shreds and patches of worn-out fancy, and I think that the angels would laugh if they could hear, as mayhap they do, our interpretation of those whom we see hurrying past us upon the street, or sitting beside us in railway trains, or, dare I add? at our own hearths.

I recall an acquaintance who had a face like those painted by Leonardo da Vinci, and that means with more power of expression than anything else in the world except, perhaps, an unfinished sketch by Leonardo! The brown hair and eyes, the wistful curves of cheek and of chin, the mouth, whose delicate lips seemed always about to quiver, belonged to a simple, practical, American business woman who never in her life had felt one of the rare emotions which she suggested and aroused. She confessed to me once, and, as I looked at her amazing beauty, I marvelled at her words, that her face had been her greatest curse.

"People expect me to be so-so remarkable," she said sadly, the simple, commonplace soul vainly trying to peep through the wonderful brown eyes, "and then, in a few days, they find me out." She had never discovered her true comrades, for they had all been frightened away by her glorified outer shell—and that, when you think of it, would make another good theme for a novel.

Another problem concerning faces has puzzled me much. Which suffer more deeply, the ferocious-looking people who are mild inside, or the mild-looking people who are inwardly fierce? I recall more than one gentle spirit, forever imprisoned behind a New England nose, shut out from due sympathy, from appreciation, from understanding by a mere barricade of bone and cartilage. The hawklike beak and dove-like eyes are an all too common combination; the formidable jaw too

often conceals from the casual observer an over-sensitive mouth, and I have noted that the most awe-inspiring giant stature may be accompanied by the shakiest arm and knee. It is just as unfair, and far more dangerous, the other way. The two meekest-looking old men I ever laid eyes upon were gory-minded anarchists, who were waiting, with an air of patriarchal calm, for a chance to throw bombs. I recall an elderly little lady, with a face like that of a worshipping mediæval saint, calling out-she was an artist and had some excusefor the blood of a missionary, an excellent American missionary, who had gone to teach the Japanese wood-carving! Who could have dreamed that, behind that illumined little countenance, the lust to kill lay hidden? In this list of contradictions belongs the imp across the street who acts on Sunday as choir boy, looking the part, and acts on week days in a fashion that I do not care to describe. Alas, I belong there myself! I, who inherited from one side of the family something of the look of the cherub, from the other, a bit of the mind of the wolf, feel that nature has given me an unfair advantage. The pious blue eye handed down from generations of ministerial ancestors veils all too completely a wicked and satiric temper that I got from the other side of the house. When I speak it is often as if the lamb had roared. I could have made myself, had I so chosen, a most complete villain without ever having anybody find me out.

The most interesting case of belying mask that I ever encountered was this: Some years ago, in a country hotel, I chanced to meet a veteran of the Civil War, who had with him a son of seventeen or eighteen. It was whispered to me that the father had gone through untold sufferings as prisoner and afterward as fugitive in the South, and I wondered that his face bore so little trace of it all. It was impassive, non-committal, carefully expressionless; even the eyes, when the lids were reluctantly lifted, betrayed nothing of the closelyguarded secret. But the boy's, for some reason too deep for me to fathom, told all. In the appealing eyes, the wistful lines of mouth and forehead, was an eloquence of expression that belied the fresh young face. The child of his father's suffering, he suggested, merely I think in physical imprint, a depth of experience not his own.

I have come to the conclusion that, in reality, very few people resemble themselves. Hoodwinking us is doubtless one of the ways

in which Dame Nature amuses herself in her eternity of task. Think of the infinite variety possible to her infinite resources in that great kneading trough wherein she mixes souls and bodies, joining the slant eye and the saintly mouth, the lifted eyebrow and the praying lips; taking back in the chin what she grants in the forehead, contradicting herself, quizzing us, with that old challenge to find out if we can what it really means. Doubtless there are in all faces subtle indications of the soul behind, but I fancy that they are, for the most part, too fine for us to read, and that the great Mother of us all, because, perhaps, she likes to see us play at wisdom, with humor unexpected, often so pointed that it amounts to wit, constantly makes misfit faces for our misleading.

Τ'

HERE are many things to be said about the tipping habit. Most of them have perhaps been said. It is not denied that it lends itself to abuse. There are those stern-souled reformers who maintain that, like the tippling habit, the tipping habit is itself an abuse, and that the only way to reform it is to reform it altogether. Many more there be who think that abusus non tollit usum, and that the temperance in tips may well stop short of total abstinence. But it is interesting and gratifying to observe that the recent suggestion of a certain politic convocation of publicans at Rome (not N. Y., but the Eternal City) has been universally repelled with rage and laughter. This was no less than a proposal that the publican should himself, like a brazen serpent or a golden calf, stand between the tipper and the tippee, that the plague of tipping might be stayed; should, in fact, erect himself into an almoner of his customers and distribute their gratuities, extending and withholding as he pleaseth.

Regulating Tips.

In sooth, "commercialism" has not issued in a more preposterous proposal. For the proposal sets at naught the whole philosophy and the whole psychology of tipping. The very point of the tip is that it operates to transfer the "condition of servitude," and to convert, for the period covered by the tip, the permanent servant of the landlord into the temporary servant of the "paying guest." The tippee acknowledges, or does not acknowledge, as the case may be, a divided duty. He must be prepared, if the occasion