floating ice is a good subject for a landscape painter, and the boats with their crews, in strong action, rowing or pushing off the ice cakes, afford fine opportunities for figure drawing. But can you tell what went before this crossing or is to come after it? Can you give any notion of the real and essential meaning of the incident? And how are you to make your hero conspicuous among the crowd of other actors. You can make him stand when others are seated; you can wrap him in a blowing cloak and give him an expression of brooding intentness; and you can relieve his well-known profile against the sky and put an American flag behind him. You will have made it plain that your subject is Washington crossing a river in the winter, and perhaps the historical knowledge of your audience may be ex

ject was, for once, admirably fitted to expression in graphic art, and the artist has, to use Millet's phrase again, "found an arrangement that gives full and striking expression to his idea." It is the surrender of a town that is taking place, and the character of the background makes it sufficiently plain that the scene is in the Low Countries-it is possible, indeed, that, to one who knows the region well enough, the localization is even more precise. The types and the costumes are sufficient evidence that it is a Dutch commander who is surrendering to a Spaniard, and we do not need to recognize the portraits of Justin of Nassau and Spinola to understand all that is necessary. To the right a great horse, a few heads, and twenty or thirty tall lances against the sky figure the Spanish army. To left are

the guards of the Dutch general with their shorter pikes and halberds. Justin bends low before his victor, who places a kindly hand upon his shoulder, and between their dark figures is a shield-shaped space of brilliant light in the midst of which, and almost in the exact middle of the picture, the key of the surrendered city stands out sharply. It is the key of the composition and of the story, no less than of Breda.

If the story to be told could often be expressed as clearly and as fully as it is in this instance, we should hear less objection to historical painting as a manner of artistic production.

But it is just in the one situation where there is a natural public demand for the historical subject that that kind of subject, particularly in this country, is most difficult to handle successfully. In asking that our public buildings should be decorated with paintings relating to our own history our people are only asking what every other people has asked from time immemorial. Unfortunately our history is short, our modern costume formless and ugly, and American historical subjects particularly

unfitted for pictorial and, especially, for decorative treatment. I have said that the highest walk of figure painting concerns itself with "the human figure, nude or so draped as to express rather than to conceal its structure and movement," but the costume of the last three centuries lends itself little to such treatment of the figure, and the painter who cares greatly for the expressiveness of the body will feel little attraction to belt buckles and brass buttons. Again, mural painting, from its association with architecture, is especially an art of formal and symmetrical composition, of monumental arrangements and balanced lines and masses, and such composition necessarily destroys all illusion of veracity in the depiction of an historical incident. Finally, decoration demands sumptuous and brilliant, or, at any rate, studied and beautiful, color; and too many of our historical subjects afford little opportunity for this.

Thus a love for the human figure, a love for monumental and truly decorative composition, and a love for color, all tend to lead our mural painters away from the historical subject and toward an allegori

cal, or rather symbolic, treatment, and this tendency is strong almost in exact proportion as the artist affected by it is a real decorator by temperament and training. Nor is the tendency a new one; it has existed since there was an art of painting. The walls of Italy are covered with frescoes and the palace of the Doges is lined with paintings, nearly all of which were intended to have some historical implication, but there are, apart from the renderings of sacred narrative, relatively few strictly historical pictures among them, and these are seldom the most effective. The most triumphantly decorative are allegories, naïf in the Spanish Chapel or the ceilings of Pinturicchio, superb in Veronese's "Venice Enthroned." It is true that the strictly historical subject may, on occasion, be so treated as to reduce its essentially undecorative character to a minimum. You may simplify it in arrangement and, in some cases, arrive almost at a monumental composition; you may eliminate light and shade and avoid strong contrasts and projecting modelling; you may weaken its pictorial character until it consents to stay on the wall, and to do little harm to the architectural ensemble, if it does no good to it. But when all is done it will not be essential decoration. You will still have to choose between historical pictures which are, at best, imperfectly and negatively decorative, and have lost much of their force in becoming so, and true monumental decorations, perfectly suited to their place and function, but symbolical rather than real in their treatment of history.

If you believe and I cannot see how you can help believing it—that the first end of a decoration is to decorate, there can be no doubt which you will prefer.

The choice, once made, will carry with it much more than an increase of decorative beauty-it will greatly enlarge the scope of the ideas you may express, and increase the clarity and force with which you may express them. I chose, a while ago, to illustrate the difficulty of the purely historical subject, the theme of the Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and pointed out how it reduced itself, if realistically treated, to a man writing at a table, in the presence of a number of other men. But admit the element of symbolism and the difficulty vanishes at once. You may paint "Lincoln Emancipating the Slave," in a

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way that shall be perfectly intelligible to every one, and you may go further and convey the whole meaning of the struggle for freedom and suggest the vast upheaval of the Civil War by a use of allegorical figures. Velazquez was particularly happy, in his "Surrender of Breda," in finding a subject suited to realistic expression and in finding, also, the exact expression needed. But even that prince of naturalists, when he would paint "the Expulsion of the Moors," had to fall back on allegory like all the world before him. From the point of view of expression as from the point of view of form there is really no alternative. We must admit the symbolical or we must give up monumental and decorative painting altogether.

To what degree the symbolical element shall displace entirely the historical must be a question, largely, of the temper and ability of the artist. Some will feel most at home in an atmosphere of pure symbolism, where nothing shall hamper their sense of beauty or intrude considerations of fact or costume. Others will be able to include a good deal of fact and costume without feeling that it impedes their creation of decorative beauty. In this style of partly historical, partly symbolic, art are two notably successful works by American artists, one in sculpture and one in painting, SaintGaudens's "Sherman" and Blashfield's decoration in the Baltimore Court House, "Washington Laying Down his Commission." In the "Sherman" the contrast between the modern soldier and the antique victory troubles some people who would have felt no incongruity, probably, if the general had been a warrior in fifteenthcentury armor, or had worn the habit of a Roman emperor, though in either case the mingling of fact and fiction would have been the same. So swiftly is time foreshortened as it recedes into the past that Washington, in blue and buff, seems naturally enough placed amid the half-mediaval, half-ancient, costumes of the symbolical figures about him. They are all removed from the present, which is, for us, the only real, and seem equally to belong to an ideal world. The effect of the whole is sumptuously decorative, while the larger implications of the story to be told are much more clearly expressed than they could be by a realistic representation of the scene that occurred at Annapolis in 1783.

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XXIV

ARRY looked about the room in a bewildered way and then tiptoed to St. George's bed. It had been a day of surprises, but this last had completely upset him. St. George dependent on the charity of his old cook and without other attendant than Todd! Why had he been deserted by everybody who loved him? Why was he not at Wesley or Craddock? Why should he be here of all places in the world?

All these thoughts surged through his mind as he stood above the patient watching his slow, labored breathing. That he had been ill for some time was evident in his emaciated face and the deep hollows into which his closed eyes were sunken.

Aunt Jemima rose and handed him her chair. He sat down noiselessly beside him; once his uncle coughed, and in the effort drew the coverlet close about his throat, his eyes still shut-but whether from weakness or drowsiness, Harry could not tell. Presently he shifted his body, and moving his head on the pillow, called softly: "Jemima?"

The old woman bent over him.

"Yes, Marse George."

Jemima shook her head: "He wouldn't hab none; he ain't been clean beat out till day befo' yisterday an' den I got skeered an'-" Something in the tones of his voice must have awakened a memory; she leaned closer, scrutinized Harry's face; clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming, and staggered back to her chair.

St. George raised his head from the pillow and stared into the shadows. "Who is talking? I heard somebody speak? Jemima-you haven't disobeyed me, have you?"

Harry slipped to the bedside and laid his fingers on the sick man's wrist:

"Uncle George," he said gently. Temple lowered his head as if to focus his gaze.

"Yes, there is some one!" he cried in a stronger voice. "Who are you, sir?—not a doctor, are you? I didn't send for you!— I don't want any doctor, I told my servant so. Jemima!- Todd! Why do you—”

Harry tightened his grasp on the slim wrist. "No, Uncle George, it's Harry! I'm just back."

"What did he say, Todd? Harry!Harry! Did he say he was Harry, or am I losing my mind?""

In his eagerness to understand he lifted

Harry drew back into the shadow cast over one end of the cot and rear wall by the low lamp on the hearth. Whether to slip his hand gently over his uncle's and declare himself, or whether to wait until he dozed again and return in the morning, when he would be less tired and could better withstand the shock of the meeting, was the question which disturbed him. And yet he could not leave until he satisfied himself of just what ought to be done. If he left him at all it must be for help of some kind. He leaned over and whispered in Jemima's

ear:

"Has he had a doctor?"

ing over the speaker's body, resting on his head-on his shoulders, arms and hands, as if trying to solve some problem which constantly eluded him.

Harry continued to pat his wrist soothingly.

"Yes, it's Harry, Uncle George," he answered-"but don't talk-lie down. I'm all right-I got in yesterday and have been looking for you everywhere. Pawson told me you were at Wesley. I found Todd a few minutes ago by the merest accident, and he brought me here. No, you must lie down-let me help-rest yourself on me— so." He was as tender with him as if he had been his own mother.

The sick man shook himself free-he was stronger than Harry thought. He was convinced now that there was some trick being played upon him-one Jemima in her anxiety had devised.

"How dare you, sir, lie to me like that!" he cried indignantly. "Who asked you to come here? Todd-send this fellow from the room!"

Harry drew back out of his uncle's vision and carefully watched the sick man. His uncle's mind was evidently unhinged and it would be better not to thwart him.

Todd now crept up. He had seen his master like this once before and had had all he could do to keep him in bed.

"Dat ain't no doctor, Marse George," he pleaded, his voice trembling. "Dat's Marse Harry come back agin alive. It's de hair on his face make him look dat way; dat fool me too. It's Marse Harry, fo' sho'-I fotch him yere myse'f. He's jes' come from de big ship."

St. George twisted his head, looked long and earnestly into Harry's face, and with a sudden cry of joy stretched out his hand and motioned him nearer. Harry bent low and sank to his knees beside the bed. St. George curved one arm about his neck, drew him tightly to his breast as he would a woman, and fell back upon the pillow with Harry's head next his own. There he lay with eyes half closed, thick sobs choking his utterance, the tears streaming down his pale cheeks; his thin white fingers caressing the brown hair of the boy he loved. At last, with a heavy, indrawn sigh, not of grief, but of joy as if his heart would break if he did not let it out, he said feebly to him

self:

"Harry home! Harry home!" Then, after a long pause, releasing his grasp: "I did not know how weak I was. Maybe I had better not talk. To-morrow I will be stronger-I can't stand much. Come tomorrow and tell me about it. . . . There is no bed for you here-Pawson might give you one. . . . I am sorry. . . . but you must go away-you couldn't be comfortable. Todd-"

The darky started forward-both he and Aunt Jemima were crying:

"Yes, Marse George."

"Take the lamp and light Mr. Rutter downstairs. To-morrow-to-morrow Har

ry. My God!-Harry home! Harry home!" and he turned his face to the wall.

On the way back-first to the stable, where Harry found the horse had been properly cared for and his bill ready—and then to his lodgings, Todd told him the story of what had happened, the recital bringing the tears more than once to his eyes.

His master had at first firmly intended going to the Eastern Shore-evidently for a long stay-for he had ordered his own and Todd's trunks packed with everything they both owned in the way of clothes. On the next day, however—the day before the boat left-Mr. Temple had made a visit to Jemima to bid her good-by, and had then learned that her white lodger had decamped between suns, leaving two months board unpaid. In the effort to find this man, or compel his employer to pay his bill, out of some wages still due him-in both of which he failed-his master had missed the boat and they were obliged to wait another week. During this interim, not wishing to return to Pawson, and being as he said very comfortable where he was with his two servants to wait upon him, and the place as clean as a pin-his master had moved his own and Todd's trunks from the steamboat warehouse where they had been stored, and had had them brought to Jemima's. Two days later-whether from exposure in tramping the streets in his efforts to collect the old woman's bill, or whether the change of lodgings had affected him—he was taken down with a chill and had been in bed ever since. With this situation staring both Jemima and himself in the face-for neither she nor Mr. Temple had much money left-Todd had appealed to Gadgem-(he being the only man in his experience who could always produce a roll of bills when everybody else failed)—who took him to the stableman whose accounts he collected—and who had once bought one of St. George's saddles-and who then and there hired Todd as night attendant. His wages, added to what Jemima could earn over her tubs, had kept the three alive. All this had taken place four weeks or more ago.

None of all this, he assured Harry, had he told Gadgem or anybody else, his master's positive directions being to keep his abode and his condition a secret from everybody. All the collector knew was that Mr. Tem