fumble, a canvas in which the goal is reached with the precision of the great master? And such a goal! Here is no simple sketch of uninteresting objects, but a mood of nature so subtle that thought of it even is intangible and enveloped within intricacies of form so elaborate that the rendering of them under most passive conditions would tax the powers of any technician; and yet this envelop of moist, rainy atmosphere is rendered with a direct touch, a transfer of pigment to canvas as direct and exact as a Franz Hals or a John Sargent, both the gods of direct painting, and in the finished result Mr. Inness has produced a work of unity and pure beauty, enough in itself to proclaim him a world master.

Or, again, may I direct the attention of these immature artists to that other well-known work and very noble example of direct painting, the "Summer Foliage," a picture in which the difficulties were enormous and the details most elaborate, involving, also, a control over greens, which is the most trying color to manage, and the brush of George Inness renders this with a sanity and joy that is fair necromancy? No juggler could have handled his material with more alertness and conviction, and there has never for an instant been the loss of the central vision of beauty. This was the creed of George Inness-beauty. Translated into all its forms, loved as spirit, religion, God, this he searched daily, hourly, and worshiped.

Could he have had an early intellectual, even scientific, training he would have reached tremendous heights intellectually, for his mind was that of an investigator. If to-day the things we read of him are incoherent, they are so rather in form than in substance. A careful analysis will discover the true center, the germ truth which he wished to convey, and nearly always it is a vision, a creation of an intense, yearning spirit. Intense, eager, often abandoned in his speech, there was the glow of idea behind all his thought: and however abstruse the theme, he carried it back with unerring persistence to

his work. There, he knew, was his chief hope of expression.

Does it matter if untrained minds can not read these things in his works? Does it matter if a large element of the general public, or even the artistic public, shall say these things are purely imaginary, no picture can contain such things, it is merely what it appears to be, and that ends it? The answer is, George Inness did not trouble himself to paint for the public. First and foremost, he, the artist, not the man, was to be satisfied; he must be able to discern in the work that significance he sought to hand on, and when he found it in his picture, that moment the canvas was finished. Finished then for him was expression. Try him by no other laws. Complain not of roughness. or smoothness, cavil not at incomplete or imperfectly rendered forms, at blemishes, or scratches, or unexplained spots. These may all be present, but behind all is the man, and his vision freely given and freely expressed. If we cannot see, the fault lies in ourselves.

Just as truly all these things may be said of any of the masters; of Corot less perhaps than of Rousseau, of Dupré more than of Millet; of Velasquez; of Hals; of everybody who has been remembered in the great mill-race flood of painters through the ages. Few, alas! can grapple with the mighty forces underlying a great work; but none surely may be frivolous or contemptuous in its presence, unless, indeed, he be a Post-impressionist or Futurist. But, then, I am speaking of human beings.

Can any sane man, however untrained, go into the presence of the great portrait of Innocent X by Velasquez and remain unmoved? Can any man of even partial culture remain unmoved in the presence of the great "Moonlight" recently shown by George Inness? These are of the essence of greatness, and it is this essence which George Inness distilled in the long years of his labor, until in the end the roll of his great achievements was very long.

He often wished that he might be privi

leged to paint only one truly great work. Perhaps, in those halls where gather the great of all times and ages and peoples he has been welcomed with this assurance. That might well be heaven indeed to so striving a soul.

Mr. Inness was most happily fortunate in his marriage. To one of his impetuous, easily ruffled nature the lack of sympathy in his wife would have been a constant irritation and impediment to his progress; but his wife was sensitive to his every mood, careful of his needs, keenly alive to his hopes in his work, and to the last hour of his life his comfort and his friend. That last cry at the Bridge-of-Allan, when he knew the final moment had come, was not to God or man. "Take me to my wife," he said. She was then his refuge and his strength, and we, who have had so much from him, must remember her with fullest gratitude.

You will search far in his work to find an insincere canvas or an irreverent one. If there were times when he painted the uncongenial thing because it was ordered, it was done that he might be free to pursue those beacons which ever burned ahead of him.

No man ever had a more bitter tongue for the thing which was untrue in art"a sham," as he called it. No man could scold with sterner rebuke, and none was more generous in praise when it was deserved.

If we are to estimate him correctly or fully, we must see clearly and bring together all these qualities, and then only may we discover the true worth of his work. It is not enough to say, "That 's a fine thing," of a work which contains so much. It is not enough to pass it with a slight comment, as we see frequently done by our critics. A great work merits great attention and deep consideration, and it is necessary to bring to such consideration ripe understanding. Also preconceived bias warps judgment. Mr. Inness was not always a good critic; his own thoughts dominated him, forced him to see things in his own way; and to yield to him palette and brushes was to unfold speedily

not a criticism, but an Inness. Perhaps this should be so, as a strong personality should not give up its own; but one would look elsewhere for criticism. For such reasons, no doubt, Mr. Inness had no pupils. He had from time to time certain men near him, but with him to teach meant to control.

I have always been glad that he was so violent. It is better to swallow one's spleen and learn than to chew the rag of discontent.

Nowhere in his work will be found any picture with likeness to the art of another; they are his own, warp and woof, and no shred of anybody else creeps in, and this despite his avowed admiration for many others. Time after time I 've heard him say of some finished thing, when his enthusiasm was ripe, "It 's like a Claude, or a Turner," and then slyly, but it s more like an Inness." For Claude and for Turner he had great admiration, but also ready criticism. He was hostile to any thing that was "niggled." Breadth was essential, and for this quality many of his own works were obliterated; but his relentless courage brought the great work to completion in time.

Much has been written of him as artist and man, much that savors merely of the reporter's comments, and some things so vague and wordy that nothing of an image remains. I, myself, have tried to set down in various places and ways my impressions gained in many years of close association, but I am aware of the futility of re-creation. He has gone, and the wisest and best way to know George Inness is to sit before his works, to search them to their depths, to study each item of composition, its bearing upon the great mass, to find, if one may, the law by which he constructed his proportions and placements, to discover the reasons for color or tone choice, or that deeper significance, the impulse, artistic and religious, which created it. So we will come into closer touch with his great genius, so we will live with his spirit, and presently be able to understand why he should be accorded that high place in landscape art which is second to none,

HE Siberian silence was about us all

Tthe drowsy afternoon. In its mo

notonous vastness it became physically oppressive, like the endless forest that gave it birth, stretching westward and eastward seven thousand miles from the Baltic to the Okhotsk Sea, southward so far as the windy Kirgheiz Steppe, and northward until the frozen tundras of the Arctic Ocean conquered its matted wilderness. We had come by slow steamboat down the yellow, twisting Ob into the heart of it, had been dumped one hot morning on a muddy bank beside a log cabin, and for two weeks had explored overland the notorious exile places that it held. After a vast number of official difficulties, full investigating powers for the entire Narym district had been obtained, as many things were wont to be obtained from the old Russian régime, seemingly by pure chance. Special envoys, even a minister plenipotentiary, had tried to get something more than mere permission to pass through this region, and had failed. Then one bright day for us a governor nodded, and the road was made easy, which is not to speak of the vile trails we had been following since we left the boat. Nothing short of aeroplanes could have made easy those intangible tracks through the forest, which seemed to have been purposely cut over the roughest ground possible, and bristled with stumps and boulders. Up hill and down dale, through sluggish creeks and abominable steaming marshes, we had traveled dashingly in curious four-wheeled wagons which the Russians call telegas. They are innocent of springs, and the two Mongolian beasts that drag each of them, always at a gallop, lack only stripes and horn to rival untamed unicorns.

On this particular afternoon we had as our Jehu a leathery Ostiak who presided with yelling, demoniacal daring over horses and wagon and was just one degree worse than no coachman at all. His skill was impeccable, his judgment desperately at fault. In a little more than two hours he had carried us over thirty miles of stumps and stones, with only two complete turnovers and one broken tire, and we were coming at sunset to the desolate assemblage of miserable huts called on the gendarmes' official maps the selo of Chigara.

I was inspecting the exile district as representative of the American embassy in connection with the care of German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. This tremendous task of alleviating as much as possible the lot of both civilian and military war prisoners had been assumed by the United States at the beginning of the war for the Central powers in Russia, and for England and France in Germany and Austria. Germany and Austria. From comparatively small beginnings the relief operations spread until the scale on which they were carried forward was stupendous. The minister of a neutral country, while visiting the relief division of our embassy at Petrograd, suddenly exclaimed, "You do not have a chancellery here, but a department of government."

My only companion was Alexander Ivanovich, which is n't his real name at all. Through his fluent English and beautiful Russian the exile villages became articulate for me, and his brown Polish eyes frequently pierced the veil of those inner mysteries of Russian things which otherwise would have brought me only blank amazement.

The unceasing yells of the Ostiak as he