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began when, and have never ceased since, girls were admitted. Learning, however, like love, laughs at locksmiths. Mrs. Earle tells of a little girl who sat on the school-house steps for hours every day to overhear what she could of the lessons of the boys inside. Instances of highly educated women are not infrequent in old memoirs; and certainly many of our ancestresses wrote letters in a charming, playful, unaffected style-the unforced fruit of good reading.

His School

After all, the girls missed very little by not going to school. When a schoolmaster was expected to perform the duties of sexton and grave-digger, as well as to help the minister out with his parochial calls, and even to help the surgeon (and all for a diminutive salary), he could scarcely be expected to prepare very thoroughly for college. His greatest accomplishment-nay, his most solid branch-was an elaborate and ornamental handwriting. This he was expected to vary at will from "Saxon," "Gothic," and "old MS" to "chancery, Engrossing, Running Court, and Lettre Frisée." The smallest children wore hornbooks round their necks, sometimes calling them "horngigs," "absey-books," and "battledore books." These paper alphabets, protected by a thin sheet of horn, have perished from the face of the earth. But three, I think, are known to be in existence. From the hornbook they advanced to the New England primer, "Readingmadeasy," and the horrible arithmetics which they made (I suppose) "a shy" at understanding. But this their master himself could hardly have done. If we, in our luxurious childhood, tenderly lured through Greenleaf by pictures of apples, etc., found fractions hard, what would have been our situation confronted with the "Rule of Falsehood," "Redeeming of Pawnes and Geames," the "Backer Rule of Thirds," and "Tare and Trett." One term familiar to us, such as "the quotient," was then surrounded by a score of others now obsolete, such as "the Cloff," "the Suttle," and "the Neat." Happy little Puritan girls whose town fathers would waste no money on their education! Happy little boys who were kept at home to help on the farm! The schools were heated by a communal wood supply, each voter drawing a load to the school-house. If a father were delinquent in this respect, his children suffered for it; the seats farthest from the fire being assigned to

them. And yet I think the irrepressible boys who "larfed and smiled" in a Puritan meetinghouse could withstand the hardships of the Puritan school. No doubt they found means, then as now, to sweeten and diversify the pursuit of learning; and when the school-master came to board his week at their house, they were dull boys indeed if they did not manage to treat him in his turn to a system of rewards and punishments. At all events, they carried on their "nature study" in a way never to be equalled by our most approved methods. They became learned entomologists, herbalists, and ornithologists without book or teacher. The Puritan child needed no instruction in the great art of observing. He had an Audubonic knowledge of the gopher, field-mouse, woodchuck, muskrat, chipmunk, and bull-frog, "creatures more humorous than any in Collot." It is true, there were no kindergartens, and in this respect the Puritan children well deserve our pity. Poor substitute, for their tender years, was the severe school-master, with birch and dunce-cap, for those gentle maidens, votaresses of St. Froebel, who now entice their happiest descendants into caterpillar and butterfly games, and charming little pantomimic songs!

Perhaps, on the whole, it was fortunate that the Colonial schools were sparse and ill attended. The Colonial home was well able to fill their place with an excellent course in manual training. Childish industries were varied, interesting, and important. The Puritan child had the satisfaction of knowing that the household could get along but ill without him. Seeding raisins and "going to the store" were not then his chief employments respectively within doors and without. Besides driving the cows to and from pasture, the children hunted oak galls, spruce gum, and partridge eggs in the forest, hetchelled and carded wool, strung onions, apples, and corn for drying, dipped candles, "tried out" lard, tended the calves and hens, mended and spun, and caught the geese to be picked for pillows:

Rising up early,
Weeding the cabbages,
Going forth berrying
In the dim woodland;
Piling the hay, and
Picking up apples,
Or heaping the pumpkins
High in the bin:-

.. Thus their week-days.

Whittling occupied a good eminence. The hereditary art of boys was a fine and valued

one. They could make door-handles, pegs, spouts for maple sap, wooden spoons, and even the somewhat clumsy brooms used in that day. Tom Sawyer's aunt's fence, which had to be painted with such exceeding care, was paralleled every morning in the busy Puritan house, and many a boy and girl, we may be sure, "felt nationly" when the all-important task was deftly and cleverly done.

When, perhaps late in the afternoon, they ran out to play, their favorite games were probably the same as ours-oats peas beans, green gravel, Sally Waters, hide-and-seek, kitty in the corner, cross-tag, squat-tag, and hop-scotch. These games, we are told, derive from a remote antiquity. English children played them in their primrose fields when Crecy and Agincourt were yet to be fought. More modern is the pretty pageant "King William"-which, however, is strictly not a Puritan game at all. It seems to have taken root and flourished only where the Church of England was established. Thus in the old Episcopalian town of Arlington, Vt., it is still played by children in the town hall at Christmas parties, while it seems unknown in the other (Congregational) towns of Bennington County. The date of "King William" is easy to fix, for the opening rhymes plainly relate to the "glorious Revolution" of 1688:

His Play

"King William was king James's son:
Upon a royal race he run;
Upon his breast he wore a star
To point the way to London Bar."

Puritan boys played a great variety of games of ball. Trap-ball, fives, and other poor apologies for the national game were in vogue among them, and foot-ball appears to have been popular, especially in winter; when, according to the traveller Misson, it was played in the streets. Misson seems, however, to have been but little impressed with it. He writes as follows:

"It is kicked about from one to tother in the streets by him that can get it, and that is all the art of it."

Little girls lavished their affections on very clumsy and shapeless dolls, which perhaps roused all the more their imaginative motherhood. What were called "French dolls" were apparently the lankiest and most awkward of all: a parody on the Gallic name. The beds, chairs, and carriages made for these poor creatures, however, were often as beautiful and perfectly made as the full-sized models which we now hunt with undiminished ardor from farmhouse to farmhouse. Rag dolls cannot have been quite unknown, but rags were too precious to be used commonly for playthings. Very rich little girls perhaps had a rag doll or two in their nurseries.

The manners of the Puritan child were a little too formal and a little too meek. How could fathers and mothers ever endure being addressed as "esteemed parent," or "honored sir and madam"? A pert child must have been a great curiosity in Massachusetts Bay. Such a one was generally thought to be delirious or bewitched. No Puritan child in its senses was rude to its elders. When Ann Putnam, for example, spoke out boldly and saucily in meeting, she was supposed to be having a fit. I confess that I think there was a charm in the somewhat stiff manners of the little Puritans. Their bobbing courtesy has returned, and is the height of fashion in the metropolis. Why not, then, the more dignified "retiring courtesy" and the "cheese" as well? Delightful as is the free prattle of modern children, occasional "flashes of silence" would not come in amiss. The picture which Miss Repplier draws of the repressed and over-governed Wesleys and Martineaus seems far too dismal to be generally true. Certainly "Snowbound" paints the life of a Puritan farmer's boy in very glowing col

ors.

May we not, I wonder, comfort ourselves with the belief that children were children still, even under the theocracy, and that parents then as ever had much ado to keep from spoiling them? Eloquent of the Puritan parental heart is that brief entry left by one of them: "Fifty years ago to-day died my little John, Alas!"

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THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING that our American painters are mere reflec

N the catalogues of our museums you may find entries like this: "John Smith, American school; The Empty Jug" or what not. In such entries little more than a bare statement of nationality is intended. John Smith is an American, by birth or adoption; that is all that the statement is meant to convey. But the question occurs: have we an American school in a more specific sense than this? Have we a body of painters with certain traits in common and certain differences from the painters of other countries? Has our production in painting sufficient homogeneity and sufficient national and local accent to entitle it to the name of American school in the sense in which there is, undoubtedly, a French school and an English school?

Under the conditions of to-day there are no longer anywhere such distinctive local schools as existed in the Renaissance. In Italy, in those days, there were not only such great schools as the Venetian, the Florentine, and the Umbrian, differing widely in their point of view, their manner of seeing, and their technical traditions each little town had a school with something characteristic that separated its painters from those of other schools in the surrounding towns. To-day every one knows and is influenced by the work of every one else, and it is only broad national characteristics that still subsist. Modern pictures are singularly alike, but, on the whole, it is still possible to tell an English picture from a French one, and a German or Italian picture from either. We may still speak of a Dutch school or a Spanish school with some reasonableness. Is it similarly and equally reasonable to speak of an American school? Does a room full of American pictures have a different look from a room full of pictures by artists of any other nationality? Does one feel that the pictures in such a room have a something in common that makes them kin, and a something different that distinguishes them from the pictures of all other countries? I think the answer must be in the affirmative.

We have already passed the stage of mere apprenticeship, and it can no longer be said

tions of their European masters. Twenty, or even ten, years ago there may have been some truth in the accusation. To-day many of our younger painters have had no foreign training at all, or have had such as has left no specific mark of a particular master; and from the work of most of our older painters it would be difficult to guess who their masters were without reference to a catalogue. They have, through long work in America and under American conditions, developed styles of their own bearing no discoverable resemblance to the styles of their first instructors. To take specific examples, who would imagine from the mural paintings of Blashfield or the decorations by Mowbray in the University Club of New York that either had been a pupil of Bonnat? Or who, looking at the exquisite landscapes or delicate figure pieces of Weir, would find anything to recall the name of Gérôme? Some of the pupils of Carolus Duran are almost the only painters we have who acquired in their school-days a distinctive method of work which still marks their production, and even they are hardly distinguishable to-day from others; for the method of Duran, as modified and exemplified by John Sargent, has become the method of all the world, and a pupil of Carolus simply paints in the modern manner, like the rest. Those American painters who have adopted the impressionist point of view, again, have modified its technic to suit their own purposes, and are at least as different from the impressionists of France as are the impressionists of Scandinavia. We have painters who are undeniably influenced by Whistler, but so have other countries-the school of Whistler is international-and, after all, Whistler was an American. In short, the resemblances between American painting to-day and the painting of other countries are no greater than the resemblances between the painting of any two of those countries. And I think the differences between American painting and that of other countries are quite as great as, if not greater than, the differences between the paintings of any two of those countries.

Another accusation that used to be heard against our painters has been outlived. We used to be told, with some truth, that we had learned to paint but had nothing to say with our painting; that we produced admirable studies but no pictures. The accusation never was true of our landscape painting. What ever may be the final estimation of the works of Inness and Wyant, there can be no doubt that they produced pictures-things conceived and worked out to give one definite and complete impression; things in which what was presented and what was eliminated were equally determined by a definite purpose; things in which accident and the immediate dominance of nature had little or no part. As for Winslow Homer, whether in landscape or figure painting, his work was unfailingly pictorial, whatever else it might be. He was a great and original designer, and every canvas of his was completely and definitely composed -a quality which at once removes from the category of mere sketches and studies even his slighter and more rapid productions. And our landscape painters of to-day are equally painters of pictures. Some of them might be thought, by a modern taste, too conventionally painters of pictures-too much occupied with composition and tone and other pictorial qualities at the expense of freshness of observation -while our briskest and most original observers have, many of them, a power of design and a manner of casting even their freshest observations into pictorial form that is as admirable as it is remarkable.

No one could enter one of our exhibitions without feeling the definitely pictorial quality of American landscape painting, but these exhibitions do less justice to the achievement of our figure painters. The principal reason for this is that many of our most serious figure painters have been so much occupied with mural decoration that their work seldom appears in the exhibitions at all, while the work that they have done is so scattered over our vast country that we rather forget its existence and, assuredly, have little realization of its amount. It is one of the defects of our exhibition system that work of this kind, while it is, of course, on permanent exhibition in the place for which it is painted, is hardly ever "exhibited," in the ordinary sense, in the centres where it is produced. The regular visitor to the Paris salons might know almost all that has been done in France in the way of mural painting. The public of our American exhi

bitions knows only vaguely and by hearsay what our mural painters have done and are doing. It is true that such work is infinitely better seen in place, but it is a pity it cannot be seen, even imperfectly, by the people who attend our exhibitions-people who can rarely have the necessary knowledge to read such collections of sketches, studies, and photographs as are shown at the exhibitions of the Architectural League where, alone, our mural painters can show anything. If it were seen it would surely alter the estimation in which American figure painting is held. Such work as was done by the late John La Farge, such work as is being done by Blashfield and Mowbray and Simmons and a dozen others, if not, in the most limited sense of the word, pictorial, is even further removed from the mere sketch or study-the mere bit of good painting— than is the finest easel picture.

But it is not only in mural decoration that serious figure painting is being done in this country. I do not see how any one can deny the name of pictures to the genre paintings of Mr. Tarbell and Mr. Paxton unless he is prepared to deny pictorial quality to the whole Dutch school of the seventeenth century; and the example of these men is influencing a number of others toward the production of thoroughly thought out and executed genre pictures. We have long had such serious figure painters as Thayer and Brush, Dewing and Weir. The late Louis Loeb was attempting figure subjects of a very elaborate sort. To-day every exhibition shows an increasing number of worthy efforts at figure painting in either the naturalistic or the ideal vein. We have pictures with subjects intelligently chosen and intelligibly treated, pictures with a pattern and a clear arrangement of line and mass, pictures soundly drawn and harmoniously colored as well as admirably painted.

The painters of America are no longer followers of foreign masters or students learning technique and indifferent to anything else. They are a school, producing work differing in character from that of other schools and at least equal in quality to that of any school existing to-day.

If so much may be taken as proved, the question remains for consideration: what are the characteristics of the American School of Painting? Its most striking characteristic is one that may be considered a fault or a virtue according to the point of view and the prepossessions of the observer. It is a characteristic

that has certainly been a cause of the relatively small success of American work at recent international exhibitions. The American school is, among the schools of to-day, singularly oldfashioned. This characteristic has, undoubtedly, puzzled and repelled the foreigner. It is a time when the madness for novelty seems to be carrying everything before it, when anything may be accepted so long as it is or seems new, when the effort of all artists is to get rid of conventions and to shake off the "shackles of tradition." Here is a new people in the blessed state of having no traditions to shake off, and from whom, therefore, some peppery wildness might be expected for the tickling of jaded palates. Behold, they are sturdily setting themselves to recover for art the things the others have thrown away! They are trying to revive the old fashion of thoughtful composition, the old fashion of good drawing, the old fashion of lovely color, and the old fashion of sound and beautiful workmanship.

This conservatism of American painting, however, is not of the kind that still marks so much of the painting of England. Excepting exceptions, English painting is somewhat stolidly staying where it was. America's conservatism is ardent, determined, living. It is not standing still; it is going somewhere as rapidly as possible-it might, perhaps, be more truly called, not conservatism, but reaction. We have, of course, our ultramodernists, but their audacities are mild compared to those of the French or German models they imitate. We have, even more of course, the followers of the easiest way-the practitioners of current and accepted methods who are alike everywhere. But our most original and most distinguished painters, those who give the tone to our exhibitions and the national accent to our school, are almost all engaged in trying to get back one or another of the qualities that marked the great art of the past. They have gone back of the art of the day and are retying the knots that should bind together the art of all ages.

This tendency shows itself strongly even in those whose work seems, at first sight, most purely naturalistic or impressionistic. Among those of our painters who have adopted and retained the impressionist technique, with its hatching of broken colors, the two most notable are Mr. Hassam and Mr. Weir. But Mr. Hassam is a designer with a sense of balance and of classic grace almost equal to that of Corot, and he uses the impressionist method

to express otherwise the shimmer of delicate foliage that Corot loved. Nay, so little is he a pure naturalist, he cannot resist letting the white sides of naked nymphs gleam among his tree trunks he cannot refrain from the artist's immemorial dream of Arcady. As for Mr. Weir, surely nothing could be more unlike the instantaneousness of true impressionism than his long-brooded-over, subtle-toned, infinitely sensitive art.

There is little dreaminess in the work of Mr. Tarbell and the growing number of his followers. Theirs is almost a pure naturalism, a "making it like." Yet, notably in the work of Mr. Tarbell himself, and to some extent in that of the others, there is an elegance of arrangement, a thoroughness in the notation of gradations of light, a beauty and a charm that were learned of no modern. Their art is an effort to bring back the artistic quality of the most artistic naturalism ever practised, that of Vermeer of Delft.

Others of our artists are going still further back in the history of art for a part of their inspiration. Mr. Brush has always been a linealist and a student of form, but his earlier canvases, admirable as they were, were those of a docile pupil of Gérôme applying the thoroughness of Gérôme's method to a new range of subjects, and painting the American Indian as Gérôme had painted the modern Egyptian. In recent years each new picture of his has shown more clearly the influence of the early Italians-each has been more nearly a symphony of pure line.

Even in purely technical matters our painters have been experimenting backward, trying to recover lost technical beauties. The last pictures of Louis Loeb were under-painted throughout in monochrome, the final colors being applied in glazes and rubbings, and today a number of others, landscape and figure painters, are attempting to restore and master this, the pure Venetian method; while still others, among them Emil Carlsen, are reviving the use of tempera.

But it is in our mural painting even more than elsewhere that the conservative or reactionary tendency of American painting is most clearly marked. John La Farge was always himself, but when the general movement in mural painting began in this country with the Chicago World's Fair and the subsequent decoration of the Library of Congress, the rest of us were much under the influence of Puvis de Chavannes. Even then the design

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