of Joseph, the story of Tobit, for each of which he made almost numberless drawings, and the story of Christ, which is the subject of his greatest etchings. He was a great painter, a great master of light and shade, a portrait painter who has excelled all others in the rendering of the human soul behind the features; but more than anything else he was a great story-teller, and his imaginative grasp of a story and his power of so telling it that it shall seem real and immediate to us, as if it had actually happened before our very eyes, is perhaps the most wonderful of his many wonderful gifts.

So great has been the dominance of the story in art that even the landscape painters of the seventeenth century, to whose main purpose story-telling was in no way necessary, nearly always put in a few figures supposed to represent the characters in some legend, sacred or profane; and the light and frivolous art of the eighteenth century tells stories too, though the stories may be as light and frivolous as the manner of telling.

But if you wish to know how seriously the telling of the story may be taken by a great artist you must read the fragments of criticism left us by that great nineteenthcentury classicist, Jean François Millet. In his letters, in the fragments of his conversation recorded for us by others, in his few formal announcements of his beliefs about art, you will find hardly anything else mentioned. For all he says about them, such things as drawing, or color, or the handling of his material, might as well not exist. Apparently his whole mind is concentrated on the story of the picture and the manner of its telling everything else is of value only as it helps the clarity and force of the expression. For him "Art is a language and . . . all language is intended for the expression of ideas." "The artist's first task is to find an arrangement that will give full and striking expression to his idea." And again, "To have painted things that mean nothing is to have borne no fruit." Hear him discoursing on a print, after his favorite master Poussin, of a man upon his death-bed: "How simple and austere the interior; only that which is necessary, no more; the grief of the family, how abject; the calm movement of the physician as he lays the back of his hand upon the dying

man's heart; and the dying man, the care and sorrow in his face, and his hands they show age, toil, and suffering." Not one word about anything else—all other things are but means-the telling of the story is the end and the essential. He has given us, in a letter to a critic of art, a more formal profession of faith-a brief statement of what he thought fundamental in art and of the principles by which he was consciously guided in his own work.

"The objects introduced in a picture," he says, "should not appear to be brought together by chance, and for the occasion, but should have a necessary and indispensable connection. I want the people that I represent to look as if they belonged to their place, and as if it would be impossible for them to think of being anything else but what they are. A work must be all of a piece, and persons and objects must always be there for a purpose. I wish to say fully and forcibly what is necessary, so much so that I think things feebly said had better not be said at all, since they are, as it were, spoilt and robbed of their charm. But I have the greatest horror of useless accessories, however brilliant they may be. These things only serve to distract and weaken the general effect.”

The Classic Spirit, in its austerest form, as it envisages the subject and its treatment, could not be more clearly expressed; and Millet's practice was strictly in accord with his theories. His pictures are seldom so specifically related to a written text as are those of Rembrandt, but each of his characters has a history and a station, and "could never think of being other than what it is." One of his very great works is "The Woman Carrying Water," which hangs beside "The Sower" in the Metropolitan Museum. Of its purely artistic merits I may have occasion to speak later, but what Millet meant it to represent-the story he had to tell he has himself put into words so perfectly that one must quote him again.

He says: "I have tried to show that she is neither a water-carrier nor yet a servant, but simply a woman drawing water for the use of her household-to make soup for her husband and children. I have tried to make her look as if she were carrying neither more nor less than the weight of the buckets full of water; and that through the kind of grimace which the load she bears

of horror, everything that might verge on the sentimental. On the contrary, I have tried to make her do her work simply and cheerfully, without regarding as a burden this act which, like other household duties, is part of her daily task, and the habit of her life. I have also tried to make people feel the freshness of the well, and to show by its ancient air how many generations have come there before her to draw water." Now, if I had told you that this was what I read in the picture, you might imagine that I had read into it what Millet himself had never thought of putting there; but you

going to mention next you will have to use your own judgment as to whether or not I am right in my reading. It is a picture owned by a collector in Chicago, an exquisite work by a true painter who, at the time it was painted, came nearer to the quality of the old Dutch masters than almost any other modern has done it is Alfred Stevens's "Une Veuve." It is, I say, exquisitely painted, and would be delightful to look at if it had no story whatever; but what I want you to observe, now, is the way the story is told. It dates from the sixties of the last century, and the costume and

the accessories are of the period to which it belongs. In an elegant interior, panelled in white and gold, a pretty young widow in a voluminous black gown leans back in the depths of a red velvet divan, her hands clasped in her lap with a gesture of nervous indecision. On the slender-legged stand beside her are a little silver bell, to show that she is accustomed to being waited upon, a bound book, and a couple of papercovered novels-just enough to indicate a refined and rather unoccupied existence. On the seat of the divan lies a great bouquet

in its wrapping of white paper, and on the floor at her feet is the envelope, seal uppermost, of the note that has come with the flowers. The story is very unlike Millet's. Its mixture of sentiment and delicate irony is as different from Millet's simple earnestness as the rank of this fashionable lady is different from that of Millet's peasant woman. But the art of the telling is of the same kind-there is the same clarity, the same precision, the same reticence.

"Persons and things are here for a purpose" and there is not one detail that is not necessary, not one "useless accessory."

There are a number of Stevens's early pictures of much the same quality, and if any one is tempted to think their fine literary tact a matter of no moment, and entirely beside the bargain, he had better compare them with the same artist's later works, in which the love of elegance deteriorates into a love of bric-a-brac and the painter of genteel comedy becomes little better than a very skilful master of still-life.

I hope I have proved that much of our modern scorn for the story-telling picture is undeserved, and that there must be something worthy of serious attention in a side of art that has occupied the greatest masters since the practice of painting began. Yet there must be some cause for that scorn-there must be some reason why the mere epithet "story-telling," applied to a picture, has become a term of reproach. I think there are three main reasons for this

state of affairs: painters have told stories that were too trivial; they have told stories that, however important and interesting in themselves, were ill-fitted for pictorial narration; and they have, partly because of this initial fault in the choice of the story to be told, told stories badly.

I have heard a little anecdote that illustrates pretty well one of these faults, as well as the modern suspicion of any interest in a picture other than the purely pictorial. A modern painter had painted a girl resting upon the sea-steps of a Venetian palace, and on the step below her he had painted a little crab at which she was looking. But his conscience troubled him on the score of that crab, and he gravely consulted a friend as to whether it ought not to be painted out, as introducing too much literary interest! Well, I laughed, at first, when I heard the tale, but afterward I found myself sympathizing with the artist and his scruples. I could not swallow that crab myself! And then it occurred to me that perhaps it was

only the painter's reason that was wrong. The crab was not "too literary"; it was not literary enough. The interest it introduced was a slight and trivial one. As regards the girl it was a "useless accessory," and the story of the girl and her fatigue, or her idle dreams, would have been better told without it.

To be fitted for pictorial treatment a story should have some degree of importance and of universal interest, and it should be such a story as may be told in lines and colors, with no necessary reliance on the written word, or on anything outside its frame, for the explanation of its essential features. Then it must be told "fully and forcibly," without the frittering away of interest on the unimportant. Even the light stories of eighteenth-century French art have something of this necessary universality-they appeal to a permanent, if not a high, element in human nature. The stories of Michelangelo and of Millet are of the most fundamental and universal inter

est to mankind. The intelligibility of a story may be greatly aided by the degree in which it is well known to every one, and Rembrandt's Bible stories, like Michelangelo's myths of the Creation, are greatly helped by this universal knowledge, though his own genius for pictorial imagination was his main reliance. It is when we have, in art, stories that of themselves have little import, as with so many modern English pictures; stories that cannot be told by the means at the disposal of the painter, as often with Hogarth; stories that are poorly or falsely and melodramatically told, as with Greuze, that the story-telling picture justifies our contempt of it.

You have heard Millet describe Poussin's manner of painting a death-bed scenenow see Greuze's way of doing it in "The Punished Son." Look at the daughter at the left whose child tugs at her, note her gesture of despair and the careful disarrangement of her fichu-for, even in his most moral mood, Greuze must always give a little spice for the voluptuary. Look at the other daughter, beyond the bed, at her wild excitement and outstretched arm, as if she were dashing a scorpion from the brow of the dying man. Look at the attitudes of any of the figures, and try to imagine for a moment that you are a spectator of anything but a theatrical performance. This is not story-telling, or is story-telling only in the sense in which we were reproached with the habit in our infancy. It is telling lies. And the jugs and warming pans and crutches that clutter the floor are perfect examples of useless accessories.

So much for how not to tell a story: for an instance of the story that cannot be told clearly in art we shall go to Hogarth. He was a real painter, almost a great one, at his best, but he wanted to do more than painting can properly do. So, in his series of moral tales, he is forced to all sorts of expedients to make his meaning plain. We will take him at his best and most mature, in the admirably painted "Marriage à-laMode." The first scene represents "The Contract," and the artist wants to tell us all sorts of things. This is a loveless marriage, so the contracting couple are placed ostentatiously back to back, although there is nothing for the bridegroom to look at and he must smirk at empty space. The bride is, for the same reason, playing with her en

gagement ring on her handkerchief, instead of leaving it on her finger; and, as she is afterward to have an affair with the young lawyer, he is already flirting with her before both families. The new house which is building for the young couple is seen through the open window and, lest you should think it any other house, the parson is comparing it with the plainly lettered plan. The father of the bridegroom has an actual family tree to which he can point with one hand while he points to himself with the other, and the document which the bride's father offers him is conspicuously labelled "Mortgage." Even the contract must be carefully held sidewise, as no one would ever hold it, in order that the endorsement may be read. Well, the story is certainly told, but not by pictorial means. And Hogarth cannot escape from this shoring up and buttressing of his story by the written word. In the second scene of this same series we have the steward's packet with the paper on top marked "Bill" in large letters, and the book on the floor is opened at the title-page-which, by the way, is where the title-page never is-that we may read "Hoyle on Whist," and know what game was playing the night before. The only alternative to this sort of thing, if one insists on telling stories of this elaborate sort, is to paint a picture which may be fairly comprehensible after one has read the catalogue, but which means anything or nothing without its title.

It is the unfitness of many stories for telling in the language of painting that makes so many historical pictures altogether unsatisfactory and dismal. Let us suppose an American painter proposing to paint the Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Here is a subject of great dignityof overwhelming importance but how is its dignity and importance to be expressed? You will have a number of people gathered about a table, and one of them will be signing something, but unless you resort to a written label you have no means of telling what that something is. Even so, I have conceded too much. Some one is writing something, but it may be anything, from his signature on a State paper to a washinglist, so far as you can tell from the action itself. The best you can make of the subject is a portrait group, like Rembrandt's "Syndics of the Cloth Hall." As such it may be