"Your supper will be sent here," said the prior. "Herr Goldstein will come to you before he goes away. You can give him the violin yourself."

The young monk pushed the Stradivarius from him.

"If he might have it now, if I might go back to my cell—I could n't have burned it; but there might be other ways," he ended under his breath.

Well enough the prior knew despair when he came across it, knew that it fathers strange offspring. All the same he did not hesitate for a moment, though his eyes never left the other's face. He merely leaned forward across the table, laying his hand on the neck of the violin.

Instinctively Bruno drew a little away from him, trembling all over.

"You will stay here," said the other, quietly. "You are not quite yourself tonight. Believe me, by and by you will feel very differently. Brother Anselmo has been too careless a guardian of all the instruments. I see there is one scratch here and another there." He passed thin fingers lightly over the shining surface. "The violin will be safer with you, now that it is sold. I trust you with it," he added emphatically. His glance went now to a red scar plainly visible under the monk's golden hair, an old mark, seemingly a saber-cut, healed long ago.

In former days, when a mere youth, it was whispered that the young Marchese Brunescho had once fought a duel in a great city where that thing by men called worldly honor flourishes like a weed. Bruno, like his father-in-law Spirini, had been counted punctilious to a fault. Had he not fought to save the good name of a woman scarcely known to him, a woman whose very friendlessness had served as a claim to an ignorant youngster's pity?

And the prior knew his' man, knew him as a general knows a captive on parole, knew him with that instinctive touch of discrimination, genius, call it what you will, which had seemingly been born with him, and by means of which he ruled his small world with a master's hand.

When Herr Goldstein came for the vio

lin, Bruno, and Bruno only, should give it himself. The voice of a secret desire, vainly disowned and hidden away in the depths of his own heart, for once made him pitiless.

As the heavy door closed behind his superior, Brother Bruno again sat down by the table, and his head fell forward on his folded arms. To a man without the temperament of a dreamer and a musical genius the emotion that racked him might have seemed morbid and fantastic; but to a man dependent almost for life on beauty of sound, possessed by it from his cradle, this closing of the doors of music, this silencing of his soul's voice, came cruelly, as maiming hands came once to those captive Greeks whose conquerors, sparing their lives, and knowing their passion for perfection, cut from each man an arm and a leg, so that they went halt and imperfect till they died.

Yet this evening mental anguish in Bruno was gradually swallowed up in physical suffering. All unheeded for the first twenty-four hours, pain new and subtle had been tearing at his chest, throbbing in his ears, and hammering in his overstrained brain.

As he sat there alone, everything in the room faded at last into a red cloud before his eyes-faded beyond pain into nothingness; into a pale dawn where all things ceased to be.

Very still Bruno sat, his head fallen forward on his arms, and his lips resting against the violin, which lay in front of him, almost touching his cheek. Nobody could have called his position a natural

one.

By and by over the violin and across the table there crept a dark stain. Like a crimson snake it moved on slowly till it touched the very book of white vellum in which the prior kept his daily record; circled it, joined again, and so traveled on, like some sinuous living thing, till it reached the table's edge, and fell over, drop by drop, making a dark pool on the stone floor.

An hour or more went by. The fire

N

I

EVER before in the history of international expositions has the participation of foreign nations been fraught with such hazards and encompassed by such well-nigh insurmountable obstacles as those that attended the organization and final realization of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

The outbreak of the war threatened the total collapse of the whole foreign participation, and in no department of the exposition was this felt more deeply than in the Department of Fine Arts, the chief of which, Mr. John E. D. Trask, saw the fully matured plans of two years nullified in a day as one cable after the other announced the withdrawal of neutrals as well as belligerents. The history of the reconstruction of these shattered hopes and their final realization would in itself not be the least-interesting chapter of these great times, and this brief reference to the

difficulties encountered by the Department of Fine Arts in meeting this unprecedented situation seems a fitting introduction to any consideration of the foreign fine arts in the exposition. That this participation falls below the standard established by previous international expositions should astonish no one at all familiar with what has taken place since August 1, 1914; but the fact that every nation of the world save Russia, Austria, Denmark, and Switzerland is in some sort represented, either officially or unofficially, by a more or less representative fine-arts exhibit is perhaps of interest to every one professing even the slightest interest in art.

To refuse to recognize the unique conditions under which this exhibit of foreign fine arts was organized is to admit an utter lack of the sense of proportion and critical balance that are the fundamentals of all serious criticism. This applies with peculiar fitness to the French official exhibit, no less than to the unofficial partici

pation of Hungarian artists, both of which were eleventh-hour arrangements, conIcluded a month before the exposition opened, under the stress of great national excitement. If these tokens, eloquent of their profound interest in the pursuits of civilization, are inferior to what we are accustomed to expect from these countries in times of peace, they are at least far from being negligible examples of their culture. No one at all familiar with the glorious achievements of modern French. art would presume to base a final judgment upon the collection heroically brought together by MM. Léonce Bénédite and Jean Guiffrey for this special occasion, despite the undeniable fact that it is in many respects the most important of all foreign art sections in the exposition; but every unprejudiced observer will readily admit that the glimpse of French culture afforded us by this collection is so pregnant with meaning as to form a valuable indication of its main tendencies to those unacquainted with the general drift of modern French art. In a broader sense the Hungarian collection performs a similar service. The five hundred works in oils, sculpture, and graphic and applied arts exhibited here by one hundred and seventeen of the foremost artists of Hungary give a fair idea of the esthetic activity of the Hungarian people.

This collection is the only one among the foreign sections that aims to give a general survey of the development of a nation's art from the middle of the last century down to date, and in so doing it furnishes many surprises to those unacquainted with the evolution of Hungarian art. Not the least of these surprises is the revelation made here that Munkácsy was a landscape-painter of commanding power as well as a figure-painter of international repute, and that, moreover, he was not the only notable figure of his time in Hungarian art. The noble landscapes of Paál shown here, the glimpse afforded us of the distinguished art of Szinnyei-Merse, the figure, genre pieces, and landscapes of Lajos Bruck, and the portraits and Hungarian peasant scenes of Lotz reveal the

very interesting fact that Hungarian art of the latter half of the last century does not rest upon the fame of Munkácsy alone.

If the group of painters who then did. honor to Hungary are little known outside of its boundaries, the artists who today glorify their national esthetic instinct are scarcely better known. The strongly designed, decorative art of Rippl-Rónai ; the limpid, fluent impressionism of Csók, revivified by the Hungarians' natural sense of color; the beautiful, accomplished art of Vaszary and Ferenczy; the powerfully conceived and very personal art of Kernstock; and the clairvoyant magic of Berény-all were wholly unknown to the American public until presented in this collection, the diversity and historic value of which was made possible through the loyal coöperation of such eminent collectors as Count Gyula Andrássy, Count Lajos Batthyányi, Baron Hatvany, and the famous connoisseur Marczell Nemes, who supplemented the contributions made. by private owners and the few available artists not enlisted in the war.

Though covering little more than half a century of development, modern Hungarian art, as shown here, presents an exceedingly varied aspect. The Düsseldorf and Munich influences, which were potent factors in the evolution of American and Scandinavian art, are visible here in the work of Böhm and Brodszky and in the closely studied portraits by Miklós Barabás, the foremost Hungarian portrait-painter of the middle of the last century. His series of portraits of contemporary worthies, such as those of Count Lajos Batthyányi, Sr., and Ferencz Deák1 shown here, are true products of that same matter-of-fact point of view that in America found expression about the same time in the portraits of Chester Harding and Samuel F. B. Morse, and in Norway in the work of Gude and Tidemand. Like the little domestic anecdote related with such Düsseldorfian particularity in the "Christmas Mummers" by Pál Böhm, these portraits by Barabás betray their

1 Italics indicate exhibits in the collection under discussion.

derivation more strongly than the nativity of the painter. That these early German influences, like the later French, were soon assimilated and given a national flavor may be seen in the little "Gipsy Woman" by György Vastagh, as well as in the "Hungarian Peasant Wedding," the "End of the Harvest," and the "Hungarian Hussar" by Károly Lotz, whose early peasant pictures are authentic episodes out of the life of the people, much as are the corn huskings and the like by Eastman Johnson. In these early attempts to depict the life and character of his country one feels the emergence of qualities essentially Hungarian, not so readily apprehended in the portrait of the "Artist's Wife," or in the suavely painted "Bathing Women" that marks the entrance of Lotz into the field of decorative art that culminated in his frescos on the ceiling of the Budapest Royal Opera House, wherein the influence of his German teacher, Rahl, is plainly discernible.

Few, if any, of his immediate successors succeeded in giving to academic formulas the same force and fluency, though, to be sure, his gifted young pupil Andor Emerici attains in his "Crucifixion" and in the portrait of his sister entitled a "Girl's Head" a purity of feeling, a serene dignity, and power as of some old master scarcely equaled by Lotz himself. Full of rich promise, his creative activity was brought to a sudden close at the age of twenty-six, and four years later he died. Accompanying him on the path prepared by Barabás and Lotz, we find his stepfather, Béla Benczur, the well-known architect, who has turned his attention to landscape-painting; the unhappy Antal Zilzer, whose "Portrait" and the exquisitely modeled nude called "The Source" reveal him a true son of Munich; the accomplished portrait-painter Gyula Glatter; and last, but not least, Ödön Kaziány, the mystic, whose moonlit figure "Under the Cypress" and the fateful "Mors Peregrinans" betray his strong sympathies with the romanticism of Böcklin. The product of Munich influences, imbibed under Piloty, Gyula Benczur has given a certain

éclat to academic art in Hungary, where he repeated the triumphs of Lenbach in Germany, bringing to official portraiture something of its old-time pomp and dignity, admirably expressed in his closely studied portrait of the famous statesman Count Gyula Andrássy, Sr., painted at the height of his career. The recipient of all the honors his country can bestow, a lifemember of the House of Lords, and honorary citizen of his native town, Benczur forms the natural climax to those academic tendencies ably initiated by Barabás, which have gradually been superseded by the freer, more individual spirit introduced into Hungarian art by László Paál. In his all too brief career of thirty-two years this great, romantic, nature-loving landscape-painter became the foremost exponent in Hungary of the Barbison School, leaving at his death, in 1879, a number of works that powerfully influenced the trend of contemporary Hungarian art.

Directly or indirectly, paintings such as the "Summer Landscape" by Ferencz Olgyay and the romantic, strongly wrought "Landscape" by Béla Spányi are attributable to the movement instituted by him; while Kézdi-Kovács, Edvi-Illés, and Magyar-Mannheimer perpetuate this influence in the art of to-day very much as does Tryon, Dearth, and J. Francis Murphy in contemporary American art. Paál's Fontainebleau landscapes, no less than his interpretations of his own country, are surcharged with a brooding, poetic fervor, an intense dramatic quality, that find their true expression in the wistful melancholy of an "Autumn Landscape" after the crops have been harvested, or in the black menace of a "Storm Cloud" sweeping threateningly over denuded tree-tops. The mood as well as the manner of its presentation-the vigor that renders sentiment without sentimentality, that enforces the dramatic accent without theatricality— expresses the soul of the Hungarian people more profoundly than do the immense Salon pictures of Munkácsy, who was for many years the sole protagonist of Hungarian art to the outside world.