that of the inimical element he had been fighting. The reaction after the long strain had shown the President to be in bad health and in some depression of mind. It was the mood in which a man falls back upon his family and upon old friends and upon new friends who have shown themselves to be loyal.

A reticence which had in it elements both of modesty and of dignity had kept the White House family as immune from silly publicity as was possible in their position. Mrs. Johnson was an invalid, for years afflicted with the "old-fashioned" slow consumption; sweet-faced and with traces of former beauty; with traces of force of character as well, since her hand on the President's arm and a gentle, "Oh, Andrew!" never failed of influence over any mood. Both of the daughters, Mrs. Patterson, the wife of Senator D. N. Patterson, and Mrs. Stover, a widow, lived in the White House during the greater part of the administration, although Mrs. Patterson was the real mistress of the Executive Mansion. She had been educated in Washington; and, had had enough social experience to make her, "We are plain people from the mountains of Tennessee-I trust too much will not be expected of us," err on the side of modesty. In fact, these entirely unostentatious people gave the White House a simple, sober dignity which has never been excelled, greeting the hordes of callers incident to the restoration of the social routine the war had interrupted, with poise and cordiality; and following out a program of state entertaining that could not be criticized either in appointments or the sincerity of the welcome.

The state dinners were particularly well appointed; and the President, who understood fully the importance of the social side of public life, was a most hospitable host.

The oldest son of the Johnsons had died before this time; and Robert Johnson, who was the object of great devotion on the part of his father and who had served as a sort of political lieutenant in Tennessee, was ruining a promising career by drink and had, by this later period, been sent to a hospital in the hope of cure. His ability and personal charm made the tragedy a particularly cruel one. Andrew Johnson's letters to his son always reveal deep sympathy and an understanding of youth's intolerance of too much guidance. Everything the father wishes to have carried out is prefaced by, "I would suggest," or some other phrase showing a delicate avoidance of anything that might bruise young self-esteem. There was another son, young Andrew Johnson; and the President's standing with his daughters is shown by their being an “Andrew Johnson" in both the Patterson and Stover families. Besides these boys were the daughters of Mrs. Patterson and Mrs. Stover. The White House was rich in the life of children.

And in these children was most of the President's delight in these latter days in the White House. His real recreation was in long drives and picnics with young people whose happiness helped to heal the bruises of the long struggle. It is no merely accidental thing that Andrew Johnson celebrated his sixtieth birthday by giving the most wonderful children's party that the Executive Man

sion, perhaps, has ever known. The invitations were issued, not in the name of children or grandchildren but in his own. Even Mrs. Johnson made her public appearance, the second and last while in the White House, to greet the children; and the President had four little girls hanging on his arms to take out to dinner. In this attempt to get back to the true and simple things of life there was no one to misunderstand or to betray him. The impulse that made him revel in this party was every bit as sincere and as much a part of Andrew Johnson as was his later determination not to ride in a carriage with the incoming President at his Inauguration. It was after long consideration he decided he could not compromise with truth.

"No better people," commented Welles sadly after saying good-by to the outgoing family, "ever lived in the White House."

239

After what most men thought was Andrew Johnson's farewell to Washington-Welles being sure he was going home to die, and he did in fact come near dying-there was a remarkable postscript. After ten years spent in three campaigns for Congress, Johnson came back to the United States Senate. He had during those ten years been dominated by one constant purpose. That was to denounce, not the sincere fanaticism of Sumner nor the fierce embodiment of sectional hatred in Stevens, but that man whom he had liked, in whom he had believed but who, turning against that which he knew the country needed, had given a sick land over to the spoilers. The tide

had turned during the ten years and the wholesale dishonesty that disgraced the administration of Grantthat dishonesty of others whom the great soldier was too trusting to have understood-had changed the attitude of the country toward the man who had fought the political machine responsible for the dishonesty. Moreover, as the world loves a good fighter, former enemies welcomed Andrew Johnson back to the floor of the Senate. Flowers covered his desk; a roar of applause went up when, placidly shaking hands with men who had contended for his downfall, he stood for a moment the central figure in that place where he had once been impeached: the short figure not quite so burly, the fixed lines of the face graven deeper and subtly spiritualized, the coarse hair bleached white.

The speech he had planned for ten years to make he did make-not on that day but soon afterward. It was a tremendous indictment of Grant's administration, one of the best philippics ever delivered, a pitiless arraignment of the General's administrative faults. Political warfare and hard hitting Andrew Johnson could understand he had himself a mean tongue when campaigning. But betrayal of a man who had whole-heartedly given you his trust; the desertion of a cause prompted by your own self-interest-as he believed true of Grant-were not to be forgiven. Nor was one to pretend forgiveness. One should, instead, denounce both the wrong and the wrong-doer.

Having accomplished this duty Andrew Johnson went home and died.

T

HIS is an attempt to report an unseen Academy exhibition to which is added a few remarks on the ultramodern school. If the reader will go first with me to the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street he will find the familiar great rooms, one opening into the other, whose walls are covered with hand-painted pictures done in oil paints, and whose somber spaces also contain some sculpture. They will represent the work of a great number of men and women who have devoted their lives to the fabrication of what is termed, for want of a better word, Art. They are, for the most part, on that borderline which separates the proficient, uninspired brush-wielders from the genuine, but rare, article.

It is an easy jibe to make at the wasted effort of all this earnest endeavor. The persons who did it were doing their best-they were following the formula learned in early life when, as art students, they sunk any natural curiosity they may have had into a meek acceptance of such rules as were handed to them by their masters. The result now stands before you in unabashed and hopeless dullness.

Let us, for the sake of illustration, tabulate the different formula so that the mind of the artist may be seen clearly.

GROUP A

THE GREEN BOWL. Girl holding bowl. Either a professional model or the artist's wife.

THE BLUE KIMONO. Girl wearing kimono; same model. Varied by Japanese print on the wall.

THE DAFFODIL. Girl holding daffodil. Same.

THE JADE NECKLACE. Girl wearing necklace. Variant-model seated in Windsor chair.

THE QUIET HOUR. Several girls seated in colonial chairs around a gate-legged table reading books.

These are all the result of the same mind, a mind which has no invention nor eagerness. The list could be extended to cover the Girls on the Hilltop or The Azalea Bush (girl standing beside bush) or Halcyon Days (girl in rowboat with parasol) or any one of fifty variants of the same soul-stirring theme. It is a device utterly without significance as presented by the picture makers for the reason that inherently the subject is so vacuous that only a very great artist could raise it beyond the banal.

Having considered the posed-girl pictures let us move on, despite our sinking spirits, to the landscapes and seascapes. The former may be arranged under:

GROUP B

THE VALLEY AT TWILIGHT. An apricot-colored moon rises over a low range of hills. Far down in the dusk a lighted window shows. Calculated to arouse a pleasant sense of melancholy in the breast of the observer. It does.

IN A HIGH KEY. Vivid, arbitrary color-wholly an artificial product. Known as "good color."

HILLSIDE IN NEW ENGLAND. Stony "middle ground," scrub pines and painty cumulus clouds overhead.

Street in the BERKSHIRES. Overhanging elms and the façade of a white church. Team of oxen is optional.

As with Group A this list could be elaborated but the above catches the more standardized patterns.

The seascapes arrange themselves as follows: (a) Waves breaking on the stern and rock-bound coast of Maine. (b) Waves curling in long lines on a sandy shore. Either is always on hand and about the only difference in the several offerings is the artist's signature.

The next group are the snow landscapes and are allied to the two foregoing fancies.

GROUP C

HILLSIDE IN SNOW. Herein the shadows are long and blue and mauve. Pines and birches make a pattern but, as we said, the chief justification of the device is to exploit the blue shadow.

THE RED BRIDGE. This is a pleasant and popular variant and represents a riverside in winter. The red bridge spans the stream, a few humble houses weighted down with snow

straggle in the foreground and in the road is a "pung" driven by a man who wears a blue coat.

With a feeling that Nature has been surprised in her more intimate moments to such an extent that further inquisitiveness would be indelicate let us turn to the portraits. This department is indeed a cruel one. Aged and infirm ladies and gentlemen have sat in cataleptic poses while, out in the studios in front of them, the artists have committed their indiscretions. College presidents, relatives, banking officials, prelates have all made themselves parties to the dolorous array which confronts us. There seems to be no help for this, for there is a constant demand, based on human vanity, which determines the supply.

GROUP D

Here is the pseudo-intellectual manner. It hovers between the decorative and the realistic. On the canvas a woman reaches languidly for a bunch of grapes. Her costume is Florentine. A nude child sits apathetically on the ground. A little girl in modern dress holds her skirt up hoping that something will fall into it. The artist, out of the atrophy of his despair, has called it "Indian Summer." Again, a tall and rangy female with upraised arms becomes the compelling note in "The Invocation to the Dawn." All of the ladies in this group are infinitely sad-life has dealt them nothing but attitudes and melancholy.

By this time the spirit of the observer is broken and the thought of contemplating the cattle and sheep drives him into the sculpture wherein he will discover:

GROUP E

Fountains, mostly by women. Nude boy holding

frog

fish

turtle

sea-horse duck

crab or any other aquatic. These are supposed to be for the embellishment of the gardens of the rich. It is possible that some of them do arrive at such destinations and so the great work of standardization goes forward.

Now all this product has an official, if not a popular, standing. It has received the accolade. It also receives the money prizes and the gold and silver medals. It is of, for and by the Academy-every academy the world over for the reason that the academic idea is a thing that can be taught and is a thing begot of mediocrity and sameness, a tame, pallid old frump who masquerades as art. Such floods of banality can only be accounted for by the academic art schools whose training, for the most part, puts a premium on the technical performance of putting paint on canvas. At no point is the student warned that what he is learning is but the grammar of art and that outside the walls of the studio is being enacted the great pageant of life-that in police courts, in a city park, in a Childs restaurant, in a Chinese laundry, in a Park Avenue apartment reside the material for the seeing eye and the eager mind. Like an anodyne the old patterns lull such curiosity and interest as God may have given him and presently he is painting "The Lilac Sunbonnet" and the "Spanish Shawl."

He has no power to lead you beyond the frame of his picture. He induces no glow because he himself did not glow, except, perhaps, over some small and useless piece of technical bravura.

Painted pictures, if they are to have any meaning for the public, must stimulate just as a fine novel or poem or symphony stimulates. And you cannot do that with a weary output which has all the wild imagination of a cold New England boiled dinner.

This is no new complaint. Twentyfive years ago George Moore was inveighing against the same thing in the Royal Academy. It will persist as long as there are academies. Nothing will shake the lethargy from the organized mind. It has jelled.

The late George Bellows was an exceedingly interesting artist. Let us take him for an example. Here was a young man who, at an early age, knew instinctively the tricks of painting and who, had his mind been less restless might have developed into a dealer's sleek portraitpainter. But a good fairy flung him out into the world "for to admire and for to see" and straightway he found a wonderful spectacle full of movement and color and zest. Prize-fights and wharf-rats and river scenes and portraits and summer resorts and all manner of luscious subjects beckoned him so that he, in his short span of years, left a record of what life can mean to a live, curious man. John Sloan has loved and recorded the various aspects of urban life with a fidelity that is amazing. Such men should be eye-openers to the drowsy fabricants who fill the Academy