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The Folly of Staying at Home.

OUBTLESS, as was suggested in the August magazine, many phases of our pursuit of culture are folly, and it is true that in countless instances our search for beauty is confounded with the pleasures of the chase. Pages have been written about the skip-hopand-jump of our progress through past centuries and across continents, and there is always more to tell. I once saw a tourist party of our fellow countrymen hurried through the Louvre, with an impatient cry on the part of the conductor: "Now, ladies, and gentlemen, you haven't time to stop to look at anything! Just walk on as fast as you can! This gallery is an eighth of a mile long!" It was only last summer that a motor-car was driven rapidly to the portal of Wells Cathedral; the American at the wheel jumped out, crying: "Now you do the inside, and we'll do the outside, and it won't take us more than fifteen minutes!" I am willing to admit, lest I seem to fail to understand that point of view with which I thoroughly disagree, that even funnier than our haste is the bewildering thoroughness of Our search. “Through bush, through briar," we go at full tilt, some queer survival of the Puritan conscience leading us on in Puck fashion, and with a Puck-like plan, to treat with the same superficial conscientiousness art and architecture, history, music, all visible and invisible phases of human achievement. A friend of mine tells of an American lady who once rushed up to her in the Vatican, asking breathlessly: "Can you tell me―have I seen the Pantheon?" The response: "Madam, you must know that better than I," brought a second swift question: "Has it a hole in it?" The admission that it has a hole in it elicited a quick sigh of gratitude. Then, said the tourist, with the relieved air of one who has one dash the less to make, then she had seen it. Perhaps the future will reveal to our inventive minds, a method of absorbing the value of the old masters by flying over them in aeroplanes, outdoing the motor-car in the matter of "making time" in the quest of the ideal, yet surely no phase of absurdity should shatter our faith in VOL. L.-47

the validity of the quest. Search under all the grotesque manifestations of our passion for "going to all," and going to see all, and you cannot fail to feel the pathos of it, the blind, dumb, wistful sense that there is something in the world besides machinery, and modern improvements, and the thin and tinkling phases of our civilization. Subtract the vanity that leads many, the joy of being seen; eliminate the restlessness, the American desire for perpetual motion; discount the passion for doing as the others do, one of the most potent passions of our lives-disregard all this, and you have at the heart of this folk-wandering, something deeper, a sense of dissatisfaction with that which we have achieved, a profound striving of the instinct for perfection.

How else, stranded between sea and sea, with no older and subtler civilization near to send us a deeper challenge, are we to acquire a sense of values? That we have worn out an intolerable deal of good shoe leather without fully acquiring it, I am ready to admit. I can still recall a vigorous western lady who loudly declaimed upon the deck of a returning steamer, that she had seen in her three months' journey, "all the big galleries in Europe," as she phrased it, Berlin, Dresden, Paris, London, and she had not seen any pictures that could for a moment compare with those at the art exhibition at Boulder, Colorado, the year before. Doubtless she was right, and for her the trail is long before she will find out wherein the difference consists, yet I thought that, in the loudness and the positiveness of her assertion lay some dim misgiving of real beauty, and a fear that all was not as she said in the world of art. We are still young, and have much to learn; it is fitting that we should trudge diligently to that dame-school where Europe sits and patiently teaches us the alphabet of the arts. It is at the shrines of dead genius, before the great pictures and the great cathedrals that we learn the failure of our own success, and in such sense of failure lies our only hope.

As for the assertion that it is folly to search out the places associated with the great, there are innumerable ways in which the sight of the

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eyes does mean "vision," and, standing where you can see the actual stream and meadow that the poet saw, you enter in wholly new fashion into his work. Meanings which escape you on the written page are made delicately clear by grass and tree and flower. For reasons that can never be fully explained, a glimpse of the ancient church and of the slow river at Stratford, the walk across the fields to Ann Hathaway's cottage bring deeper knowledge than can be gained from studying the German commentators. The stile, the foot-path way, have not vanished; lark and swallow help you understand, as do pleasant faces that make you feel that you are looking with Shakespeare's eyes at the moment when he first saw Bottom or Autolycus. At every step you draw nearer the poet of Hamlet's deepest questioning, the young poet of Midsummer Night's Dream, the older poet of the Winter's Tale, lover of primroses, violets, and daffodils. It needs neither mouse nor daisy to make the fields about Ayr betray Burns, and the passion and the pain of his love songs find out undiscovered depths within you as you watch the country lovers strolling arm in arm through the summer dusk. Still

and

"Come rigs, and barley rigs, An' corn rigs are bonnie";

"Green grow the rashes, O;

Green grow the rashes."

What unexpected, humorous revelations your wayward steps in a foreign town may bring! London never wears a greater charm than when it is lending you Lamb's "sweet security of streets!" "O her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardware men, pastry cooks, St. Paul's Church-yard, the Strand, Exeter Change, Charing Cross. These are thy gods, O London!" The British profiles on a single British 'bus have shown me in the flesh Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Sairey Gamp, and Mr. Carker. Did glass and stone ever take on such human resemblance as Thackeray's house in Young Street, London? It is a visible interpretation of him. Its very shape and contour; those two wise upper windows, so like the kindly eyes that must often have looked out of them; the graciousness of the front door; the hospitality of the whole face, bidding one welcome to the cosy nooks, mental or others, to be found within, made it, for the moment, identical with its vanished occupant. I never before saw a house look as if enjoying at length some kindly

joke. Was it fancy, or did the upper windows wink slightly, while a suggestion of a smile rippled over the façade? Such an experienced little house it is, with such a look of pluck and endurance, I really half expected it to speak, saying something brave and kind and funny. Never before had I realized the spiritual possibilities of brick and mortar; never since have I doubted that houses are inhabited by the souls of those who have lived visibly there.

"Dull would he be of soul who could pass by" a sight so touching as Grasmere without comprehending more fully the way in which the poet-spirit reached out and found spirit working through the beauty of nature. Who would stay at home, idly dreaming, when he might go to see, if but once, those pale green slopes that touch the clouds, the moss-grown stone fences crumbling back into the hills among the grazing sheep, the shining fern, and know the enchantment of that loveliest valley, forever set to the music of swift rippling streams and bird songs, as well as to the "still, sad music of humanity”?

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OT arrogance, but humility may lead you to wish to walk in the very footsteps of the great, lift your eyes to their hills, touch reverently the trunks of the trees under which they have rested. Crossing the threshold of the birthplace of genius may have deep symbolic value, giving hint or promise of crossing the threshold of the soul. There are places in which one glance will do for you what no amount of imagination musing over lives and letters will do. Go to Haworth, clinging with its gray-black stones to the green Yorkshire hill-side and climb the steep and narrow street past the Black Bull, whose name spells deeper tragedy than any biographer has yet recorded of Branwell Brontë. Enter the church-yard, where the shadows of the tall trees fall upon the flat tombstones. Where else, except upon the desolate, sunlit moor, will you meet the soul of Emily Brontë?

The Footsteps of the Great.

"I'll walk where my own nature would be leading; It vexes me to choose another guide:

Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding, Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side."

A step, and lo! you understand as you had not dreamed of doing. The very air is interpreter, and out among the heath and harebells of which she loved to write, the soft wind

breathing through the grass, the bees humming dreamily about, larks singing high in the blue sky, you discover something of the depth and the breadth of that nature. Surely it is well to be privileged to see the horizon line which taught Emily Brontë:

"There is not room for death,

Nor atom that his might could render void-!"

Homeliest, most uncompromising of birthplaces, open and bare to the sky, in level country where there is no obvious leafy picturesqueness, is Thomas Carlyle's Ecclefechan. In this hard little foreign-looking village, with house walls of stone or of plaster close to the street, no grace of tree or flower between them and the cobble-stone pavement, "encircled by the mystery of existence; under the deep heavenly firmament; waited on by the four golden seasons, did the child sit and learn." Where can you find another spot which the look of things betrays more fully the beginning of a life-struggle-soul against the material world? Where else can you learn so well Carlyle's message of the unreality of visible things, the wonder of the unseen? The little trudging legs adown the village street to-day suggest the beginning of his life-long pilgrimage, and, far across the level green, blue Skiddaw to the south lends the look of ethereal distance that is nearest heaven.

Sometimes the mere sight of a place betrays more than an individual, reveals a nation, faith, forgotten, or half known, or potent still. The Druid stones at Carmac, set in soft grass, or at Salisbury upon the downs, start your thoughts wandering farther than you can follow them. If modern Greece is disillusioning, and it may be to people who lack imagination to see in dust and stone-and think, what stone, Pentelic marble!-the glory of past days, who could stand at ancient Delphi and fail to comprehend the worship of Apollo, the sun-god? As, in earliest morning, the light through the cleft steals from peak to gray peak, touches the mountain side, and flows, a flood of glory through the deep gorge to the wide olive plain and Itea, far by the sea, visibly to his temple walks the god. The shrine clings to the steep mountain side, where wonderful Delphi still stands on the lower slopes of Mount Parnassus, whose peak is hidden, though perhaps the circling eagles about the grim heights see; and standing here one wonders how any people could have failed to worship the splendor thus revealed each day at dawn. Even so, to a wan

derer in another land, may the softer slopes about Assisi, the nibbling sheep, the barefooted poor, reveal St. Francis, and a deeper faith.

Happy are we if hands and feet can serve us in this quest, through which we are drawn by vague misgiving and sense of lack to the dim and hoary corners of antiquity. When one may go to listen to the "beauty born of murmuring sound," why should one stay stupidly at home and try to make it up? Why think that one can invent out of one's inner consciousness that to whose making a nation's faith, the endeavor of a race, has gone? Can you sit on your own door step and erect the Taj Mahal? Or raise the cunning walls of St. Sophia? Does not the charge of arrogance and conceit better fit this case than the other? If eye and ear and finger-tip may minister to the soul; if certain humble sense impressions may help the vision of that "inward eye which is the bliss" of the true disciple of beauty, were it not strange to ignore them? What is art but the creation for eye and ear of inner thought and feeling, the ministrant whereby the senses may become handmaidens of the spirit? Even so may the visible and tangible loveliness of places betray the "very sky and sea line" of a poet's nature; "nor soul helps sense," in this way, more than "sense helps soul."

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As to

"Survivals"

BRITISH friend sent me several months ago the report, in the London Times, of Lord Rosebery's speech in Edinburgh against the proposed abolition of the House of Lords. It is germane to the criticism which I am about to make that no American reader can have knowledge of such an address from his own compatriotic newspapers. He must know it from the page-long report in the London Times, or he will not know it at all. And such a speech is so very well worth knowing. The chiefest emotion it excited in my own mind was one of patriotic envy. "Is there any public man in the United States," I said to myself, "who could have made that speech to save his life?" The scholarship, the candor, the wit, the courtesy, almost above all what Boswell, speaking of Topham Beauclerk's way of telling a story, calls "a lively elegant manner, and that air of 'the world' which has I know not what impressive effect, as if there were something more than is expressed, or than perhaps we can perfectly understand." These are the qualities of British parliamentary eloquence, no doubt, and

have been, and will apparently continue to be, beyond the reach even of the athletes of American parliamentary eloquence. I comforted myself, in reading a speech otherwise so wounding to my patriotic self-love, with thinking that the American public speakers who could have come nearest to it-I need not name them would have been the first to allow that they could not have equalled it. Very likely they would have attributed their admitted inferiority to the inferiority of their audiences, whether in the Senate or on the “hustings," to the audiences of the noble lord, whether his immediate auditory in the hall at Edinburgh, or the greater secondary audience in the apprehension of which every British orator goes in fear, of the readers of the London Times.

But, of course, this deprecation, so far from attenuating the criticism, at once sharpens and enlarges it. Even if an American orator could make as "great" a speech, the deprecation would import he could not get an equal hearing. Manifestly, this impeachment of the auditory, immediate or secondary, is a more serious national impeachment than would be the mere confession that we had not, at present, any orators of Lord Rosebery's rank; because it is a confession that we cannot furnish an equally intelligent audience. Doubtless there is no newspaper in the United States which would report an American speech as important as that of Lord Rosebery at Edinburgh, with a fulness equal to that of the London Times. We cannot afford the space, would be the explanation. But when you consider the ephemera and the trivialities to which the newspapers of wide circulation would postpone the full presentation of a "great argument," involving large present and future issues of national destiny, the explanation is an aggravation. Meanwhile, it is consolatory to the believer in democracy to reflect, the doleful vaticinations of the British Conservative Cassandras have been sufficiently refuted by the fact that such a speech as this should have been fully reported in a "leading organ" in 1911, and disseminated throughout the English-reading world to fulfil its proper mission with intelligent, candid and conscientious

readers of the English language. While the Reform Bill of 1832 was under discussion, its opponents were predicting that its passage would be the end of statesmanship. Still more doleful were the vaticinations of the Cassandras of 1866, upon the what, to American readers, seemed very moderate extension then proposed to the very moderate reform of 1832. Upon ears not even yet stricken with surdity fell the eloquent deprecations of Robert Lowe: "Democracy you can have at any time. Night and day the gate stands open which leads to that bare and arid plain where every ant-hill is a mountain, and every thistle is a forest tree." And yet, forty-five years later, comes evidence that, to the enlarged British constituencies, the ant-hill and the mountain, the thistle and the forest tree, are very much where they were. It is true, there is some evidence to the contrary. Mr. Asquith himself must have grinned, though perhaps ruefully if not grudgingly, at the epigram which appeared in a London paper most Britannically without title or explicit comment: I hold the office held by Pitt;

Where Peel and Gladstone sat, I sit;
You pay me fifteen pounds a day;
And yet I say the things I say.

But, upon the whole, one would be rash to assert that the public life of England reflects less accurately the national movement than the public life of America, which is theoretically so much more "advanced." From the 'point of view of a merely theoretical political evolution, Lord Rosebery, in his capacity of hereditary legislator, is an anomaly and a "survival," and the average American senator, the average American M. C., whatever else he may be, is at least the accurate representative of "the Spirit of the Age." This theoretical conclusion will hardly survive the shock of the facts. For, almost at the same moment when Lord Rosebery was approving himself at Edinburgh the most enlightened of the moderns, there were emerging, into such light as is afforded by the comparatively illegible reports of the debates in Congress, strange pleiosaurs and pterodactyls, survivals of an antediluvian world, heaved up out of due time from "the dead and most untouched deep water of the sea."

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fact that it must be studied at close range, make it a thing to be enjoyed in a small exhibition gallery, in the quiet of a print room or of a private collector's study.

Like any work of art, the print demands the thought and sympathy of the beholder, in order to insure full appreciation. There must be as thorough a con

style, and of technical methods. The last plays an important part in the charm of the print. As in painting we have oil and water color and pastel each with its distinct characteristics and potentialities, so in black-and-white prints (not to speak of color work for the present) etching, line engraving on copper, mezzotint, aquatinting and other like methods, wood-engraving and lithography, each presents quite different effects and possibilities. The limits that each medium imposes on those who use it yet leave great freeIdom within their bounds. Witness such obvious contrasts as Whistler's Thames series and his later Venetian scenes in etching (or, say, Meryon's visions of Paris and Bracquemond's glorification of "The Old Cock," if comparison of different personalities be preferred), Sargent's unctuous blacks, the bravura of Isabey, and the silver-point delicacy of Legros in lithography, the

[graphic]

The Nativity.

From the wood-engraving by Dürer.

ception as possible of the artist's viewpoint and intention. Two general principles which govern all good art are in force here as well: the artist must respect the limits of his medium, and he must tell something worth saying. In other words, the expression of individuality should manifest itself within the limitation set by the tools used.

The field of the print may seem restricted at first sight, but even the slightest survey of four centuries of achievement discloses an enormous variety of artistic individuality, of subject, of VOL. L.-48

severe restraint of Mantegna, and the brilliant tours de force of Drevet in line engraving; the Teutonic vigor of Dürer (who worked with a full understanding of the possibilities of facsimile cutting on the block), the sensitive decorativeness of the Japanese or the remarkable American translations of paintings into the language of the burin in wood-engraving. Each medium, then, has its own distinct character and attraction.

The taste for prints may be more or less a specialized one, but how broad a specialty it is,

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