perhaps pick out Zuloaga, the Spanish leader, as one of the significant personages who stands forth conspicuously in this showing of the world's art. His lead is not altogether due to the fact that the Italian committee have done him the honor to invite him to have a gallery to himself. If one or two of his canvases were placed in company with a general collection, as in the case of our Abbott H. Thayer, and George de Forest Brush, I feel sure they would arrest the intelligent observer.

They are not cheering in color and they are not rotund in form, but there is about them an air, a style, that cannot be reduced to words, but which, after all, is the essence of art. His group, while often ugly in subject and degenerate in impulse, may stand for the better sort of a bad sort of tendency. He acknowledges artistic He acknowledges artistic antecedents, but he is the creature of his age and of his entourage.

And so, in less artistic degree, it is with his fellow-countryman Aglada, whose title to particular remark is due perhaps more to the committee's indulgence of a room to himself than to his overwhelming merit. They are merry in the Roman press over his "green horse," and well they may be;

and as well, over his prismatic matadors and crazy-quilt donnas, and the size of his colossal canvases, the value of which is mentioned in dollars as denoting their artistic claims. But the secret is there in the corner, where two exquisite, large charcoal drawings of early Paris days show that the artistic insanity of the oils is half-assumed, one could not venture to say for the purpose of gaining réclame, though how else reconcile the recognition of real things, with the production of unreal?

And it is just this which characterizes the conscious work of all these capable men. You feel that they are embarrassed to say the simple words which they have been taught at the knee of the madonnas, at the shrine of Perugini, and the simple threshold of Ghirlandajo and Pinturicchio. They are appalled by the genuine originality of the masters. They have no ideas of their own to express; hence they go the way madness lies. And thus we have that able artist and ingenious experimenter Mancini. He is a Roman who has been, I am told, much praised by Mr. Sargent, and justly for many qualities of surprising technical adroitness. If you cannot paint with the inspired craftsmanship of Leo

nardo da Vinci, and you must paint, it is obviously well to use the skill that is in you. And if that skill runs to the crisscrossing of your subject in blocks by transverse strings, or in gaining your high lights by sticking bits of ephemeral tin and gilt metal into your paint, I suppose you are justified in doing it. I can admire these shifts that stand in the place of methods which have produced the enduring art of the world. They are clever, and they enable a less original talent to have its say in an experimental and ingenious manner, but that the products of this cleverness are therefore to be valued three hundred years from now in a gallery of Nova Zembla is a fallacy which I cannot credit. Go far enough away from the curious surface of these canvases, and they have style and taste. They are rather pictures of costume than of people; and thus Mancini dresses his models in the clothes of a medieval age, quite in opposition to the dernier cri of his own technic.

Other Italians there are who demand notice for modernity of subject or method, -Innocenti, for instance, who can paint exquisitely the worldly life of Rome.-but there is little that is wholesome or ad

vancing in the native galleries, though the visitor who is seeking entertainment, unconnected with tendencies, will be vastly amused at subjects odd and novel enough to us across the sea.

All of which leads to curiosity about the Italians' view of us. Is our art as odd and novel to them as some of theirs to us? I was told that the gossip of the old Greek restaurant in Via Condotti, where the cognoscenti have gathered since before the days of Thackeray, dealt with us adversely because we prudishly eschewed the nude and had less of composition than we ought. I can well understand their craving for the nude. To them it means freedom from what is considered conventional. They must be emancipated from that which went before, or they are lost. They cannot slavishly copy the ancient beauty and purity; they must have something to say for themselves. The talent of the masters does not hold out; it has gone with the simplicity of the antique lives. So they are left to celebrate what is bizarre and even what is ugly in order to release themselves from the haunting past.

They do not observe that our art does include the nude, as in Hassam's "June,"

a few, and some of them gaily humorous; but on the whole there is no imaginative work such as was inspired by the Bible among the great painters of the past; nothing that thrills the emotions and gives flight to the fancy, if we except our own landscapes by C. H. Davis and Ballard Will

iams and Tryon and Granville-Smith and Ranger and Garler, when they truly interpret "the poetry of earth."

AND the high opinion the English hold of American art is pretty well shown by their own deeds. A very loyal lady of