termined effort on their part to acquire the training necessary to enter the academies. We shall overlook entirely what an improved public-school system might do for them. They are offered an exceptional opportunity for an honorable career, and why should not they make the same sacrifices, if necessary, to enter the government schools as the same class of boys do to go through college? Many of them do, and they are the ones that succeed.

T

Imaginative Travelling

HERE has been a story told of a certain artist who, finding himself unable to go away one summer for any sort of change, bought a French Baedeker of New York, and proceeded to "see" his native town from a Frenchman's point of view. The incident, vouched for as authentic, is certainly suggestive. The average American, fleeing to Europe, and often knowing less of his own country than of Egypt or India, has never been able to repel successfully the attack of the foreigner who inwardly attributes the small account which the American tourist appears to make of America as a place of travel to a form of colonialism, a confession of provinciality. But the foreigner is by no means always right. The American tourist goes to Europe primarily because Europe means so great a change; and travelling in his own country does not mean a change in any radical sense, but only a repetition of familiar impressions. A native of almost any European country can, within two or three hours, plunge his brain into the refreshing currents of a new environment, a different speech, a moving panorama of faces that have different features and a different expression. The American must travel far to change the physiognomy of his surroundings. But now scientists explaining a fact which people have always acted on without knowing that they knew it-tell us that the brain wearies and sickens, becomes actually attacked by a sort of poison of fatigue, if it is forced for too long at a time into contact with the same things. No American tourist in Europe need therefore assume henceforth the apologetic attitude. Science has elucidated him to himself, and what was once a blind instinct has been recognized as a dignified necessity. It is a psychological "case."

But even while this is so, it is borne in upon us from various directions that the American tourist might very well get more fresh food, more change, for his brain without leaving his own latitude than he has hitherto been conscious of. There are signs that we are beginning slowly to awaken to the truth that the North American Continent holds elements of interest as deep and as full of elusive suggestiveness as the most imaginative traveller could desire. Our historic sense, which for so long was satisfied with Puritan and Cavalier, and made pathetically so much of colonial fireplaces and seventeenth-century pewter mugs, fastens on a vaster field indeed when it follows the ethnological and archæological research of recent years. A well-known composer has been pointing out the eagerness with which many of the more serious American songwriters are turning for inspiration to the vanishing records of native Indian music. This musical interest has been greatly affected by the newer researches of the ethnologist, did the composers only know it. So long as the American Indian was conceived of as unrelated to any other race -a conviction to which many ethnologists still obstinately, almost angrily, cling-so long was he without appreciable appeal to the historic imagination. him as having affiliations, however obscure and unverified, with remote, unknown, prehistoric civilizations, and his value changes. Let the American traveller follow the Indian traces and relics from Mexico to Canada, from the Yumas to the Hurons, with his mind set in this direction, and he can become steeped, for the time, in a change of ideas complete enough to cure any case of brainfag.

Conceive of

We have largely exploited the habitant of the Canadian woods and the Creole of New Orleans, but innumerable foot-tracks of a great thwarted Latin civilization are imprinted half-way across and into the heart of the Continent, and have never yet been sympathetically traced. Why not, laying aside a certain national hauteur, search out the less visible streams that lie behind our life, and have gone to make it? There is nothing, for a change, like seeing what the other fellow's idea was about it all.

Once have the intuition for the unbeaten track and there are reservoirs of refreshment for tired brains in all the corners of the world.

A

CHARDIN

RT," said Chardin, "is an island of which I have but skirted the coastline." Why, then, has he counted so many ardent admirers, so many extravagant friends? "Anticipation of the Impressionists." Yes, if you like the phrase; but one does not always love the anticipators. "Distinction of the highest and finest order in rendering mediocrity." Yes, but not all of us love the George Moores and Arnold Bennetts who, in our own day, have been crowned for their little successes in a parallel literary effort. Moreover, Chardin is no typical cosmopolitan. Though Frederick the Great bought his work for the Bagatelle, and the King of Sweden was another purchaser, though to-day one finds ten canvases of this the greatest of little masters in the collection of a Philadelphia lawyer, the painter himself did no such travelling as his paintings; his voyage, like de Maistre's, was around his own chamber.

VOL LIV.-27

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin was a painter of the eighteenth century-but he was neither courtier, Anglomaniac, nor revolutionary. The son of the king's billiardtable maker, he was elected to the Royal Academy in 1728 as "a painter of animals and fruits." One knows from this restrained class of subjects, later enlarged, that he was a petit bourgeois; though his attainment of reality without sordidness, his exquisiteness in the handling of accessories, might suggest to the more precious kind of psychologist that he was an aristocrat, rather-wilfully selecting such homely themes as had for him an initial strangeness bordering upon romance itself. Yet this would be a superficial inference; for it is obvious, not only that the painter of the "Morning Toilette" cherishes, but also that he has long lived with, his subjects. Cha teaubriand sometimes wore a red bandan handkerchief in privacy. Tolstoi a cobbler's costume. Loti at Rochefo

in a bedroom modelled on Breton peasant architecture, has a checked cotton bedspread, wears wooden shoes. All of this is theatricality-theatricality that is flawlessly reflected in the writings of these three notables. But there is no melodrama in the art of Chardin. He left all that to the other men of his century: to Rousseau, writer and foundlinghome moralist; to Boucher and Fragonard and Greuze, gallants and sentimentalists in paint. Greuze it was who counselled: "If you can't be true, be piquant." Chardin alone realized (to paraphrase W. M. Hunt) that beauty is that little something which, filling the whole world, may be glimpsed even

In America, the "man in the street" has it dinned into his ears that the French language affords no word for "home." Small wonder if he concludes that France, which surely shaped its language, contains no homes. This delusion is fortified by the circumstances that the French stage of to-day treats of little but home-breaking, and that few foreigners in France are granted the opportunity to see for themselves the modest graciousness of family life. As a matter of fact, the Frenchman has, if no direct word for home, several excellent phrases to choose from when he wishes to express its idea. Is he at home? Then he is chez lui. (Home is so

in a leg of mutton; realized (before Rodin) that there is little or nothing ugly in art but that which is without character-without exterior or interior truth; realized, finally, what some followers of Rodin do not, that of a beautiful and an ugly conception, both of them honest, the beautiful is the worthier achievement.

A little bourgeois of the St. Sulpice quarter of Paris-a quiet quarter relatively unchanged since the eighteenth century-we have no proof that he ever left the environs of his birthplace. Chardin made home the subject of his art-the French home. That is one reason why he is so national a painter. A Parisian born, he is, in his painting, less obviously Parisian than many a provincial. Watteau, in the seventeenth century, shared the life of comedians, and portrayed actors and mountebanks-you know his Gilles; in the nineteenth century, Degas is by no means the first great man to hold the mirror up to foot-lights. But Chardin was Frenchman before he was Parisian; and painted home. Nor did he make this home a theatre, as even his imitators did not fail to do.

much a part of him that one requires the personal pronoun to name it!) Does he wish to conjure up an image of his habitation? He will then use one of the most beautiful words in his language, the word foyer, which the dictionary equivalent, "hearth," scarcely suffices to translate. For the word "hearth" evokes only a picture of several square feet before the fireplacewarm or cold as chance will have it. Foyer connotes not only the hearth-stone, but the chairs drawn up about it; in those chairs the wife and children, without whose presence home is an echoing mockery.

Chardin, the French eighteenth-century painter, not only did his work at home and found his models there, but gave the central plane to its real centre, the wife. He paints fish with fervor, onions with gusto, monkeys with humor; he also does his own portrait in pastel, the portrait of a man resigned to the ravages of years, serene in spite of sufferings. The pamphlets of his own age charge Chardin with indolence, and certainly the restricted subject-matter of the painter strongly suggests, if not quite that, at least a certain deficiency in adventurousness, if

lems, addressing untried themes. Most men, butchers or statesmen or cabmen or financiers, are called out of doors by their occupations; their centre of activity lies outside the family circle. They return to their circle (whether as members or as almost strangers), but they return. Whereas the wife (in Chardin's bourgeois milieu of the eighteenth century) remains: and Chardin too remains, and paints her and all her home-keeping paraphernalia.

Not that Chardin imported woman into French painting. He found her already enthroned there, as in the salon itself; for (to quote Gaston Maugras) the novels, engravings, letters, furniture, paintings, sculptures of the Regency, all repeat a drama of

querading shepherdess or aspiring Marianne, but Mme. Chardin.

In the French family of the middle class, such as our painter's, the wife is not only the natural centre; she is the dominant figure. She is not only the woman, that is, the producer of men-she is also the director of her own man. And this has been essentially true even where the man has stayed at home, as do concierges, hôtelliers, and small shopkeepers. All who travel know how true this is in Latin countries. The man smokes by the fireplace, or behind the counter; the goodwife orders him here and there, and is the ruling member of the little partnership, which she makes really profitable. Who wastes time discussing the price of his room

cient spouse?

Chardin, then, paints the housewife at her tasks scrubbing the copper till it shines as only a good housekeeper (or a Chardin) can make it; peeling potatoes for dinner; waiting, before she serves the soup, until her child has finished saying the simple little blessing. Chardin's work is itself a blessing. In an age when the air was thick with intrigue and febrile with decay he paints the French family and its persistently wholesome surroundings, that have defied generations of decadence to do their worst. It is a delusion to call him a "mere" painter of still life: he is the master whose nature morte is a resurrection. There is more genuine interest, more suggestion of the realities, in an uncooked breakfast, painted by Chardin, than in a melodrama staged by a brother painter.

one kind of popularity, for the public applauds bumptiousness; but there are some of us who think that, in painting at least, the reporter who loves his theme is preferable to orator or preacher or tale-bearer. To such as hold this view, Chardin's low-pitched appeal is very strong. Certainly it is always

That Chardin is no one's "pupil" is selfevident. To what extent he echoes the Dutch genre painters, and thus links Vermeer of Delft and Tarbell of Boston, U. S. A., is a subject for the professional art critic, along with the painter's mastery of a modest palette, the cool refreshment of his backgrounds, the magic of his whites that are not whites, his discriminating realism. In 1880 a British critic could write, "Chardin is not known in England"; in the painter's lifetime Hogarth falsely boasted that "France hath not produced one remarkably good colorist "--but meantime Diderot waxed enthusiastic over his peaches, "that invite the hand"; while his scenes from domestic life, in which figures as well as accessories play their due part, were favorite subjects of contemporary engravers-Laurent Cars, Lepicié, Surugue, Le Bas. Yet Chardin is not the most "literary" painter of his teeming century, any more than he is the most modish. He reports what he sees at hand, but does not go out of his way to preach sermons or tell stories. Neither is he a painter with a social thesis or democratic preten

a gentle magic: never insistent, never raccrocheuse. Chardin is not the painter to pluck you by the sleeve; his calm masterpieces, hung in a shop window, would draw no crowd. He did not, in his own lifetime, draw crowds -only the family.

And in the family we still enjoy himpastels and all. His canvases, some of them, hang in the Louvre. They would as appropriately hang in your living-roomand, though they no longer can be had for five and eight dollars apiece (prices recorded by the Goncourts), perhaps you can afford one of the engravings that were multiplied in his own day and issued at a couple of francs apiece, engravings that have hung on the walls of bourgeois households, for all the world like those they reflected. The obvious detraction is that Chardin lacked imagination, just as he lacked the business instinct and the spirit of adventure. Yet, however local this artist is in types or settings or spirit, he is never a foreigner, whether we know him through the medium of pigment or through black and white. He demands no interpreter, like some of our contemporaries, who cry to heaven, but cry confusedly; he speaks a language understood. Chardin's career was far from romantic, though he married twice; we must look to him for uprightness in all the relations of life, including his métier, rather than for showiness of deed or word. Not a heroic painter, as painter, and long undervalued (as he undervalues himself); merely a painter of the undistinguished persons and minor incidents that go to make life tolerable.

WARREN BARTON BLAKE.