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OTHING is more interesting than to see some of our writers and artists striving to seize and reproduce the outward physiognomy of New York, its character and mien at certain times and in certain localities-its "spirit of place." New York is not London or Paris or Rome for roPhysiognomy mantic possibilities of aspect, but it in Places and has moods and moments and maniIndividuals. festations of its own that can speak, even deeply, to the imagination. The endeavor to catch the look, the "feeling," of a great city's atmosphere and street-scenesthat elusive but most potent personal soul which all the interesting cities of the world possess is full of fascination for the artistic instinct, and closely allied to the interest in the human types which, in every city, seem to sum up in themselves and to localize all the diffused impressions that the mind receives from the peculiar life of the place. Such studies in New York types as certain of our artists have been making have had an interest confirmatory of the revelations of the many portraits of Americans that the foremost painters, native and foreign, have given to the world of late. Lay those studies by the side of certain views of the New York streets, especially of foggy nights or late, snowy afternoons, which the best illustrators have been able strikingly to represent, and the resultant perception that you will have is rather a curious one. The streets appear to suggest more than those clever faces of men and women. The human types which people the city have somehow less perspective; they seem to convey less than the setting in which they move.

It is certain that it is not so in the oldworld cities; and that leads one to various speculations as to what gives marked expressiveness to the human countenance. Leonardo da Vinci, who would not in such matters be accused of being a superficial observer, was of the opinion that the character of the habitation affected the physiognomy. He believed, for instance, that the face, the eyes especially, of persons who lived in big, old houses, lofty, and of a gloomy aspect, gained a singular degree of depth and intensity. This was what, in man or woman, attracted

him most, and what he sought persistently to put into his work; and one may therefore assume that it was more than a chance coincidence, discovered now and then, that made him associate some of those impassioned and tragic visages that he saw in the Italy of his day, and that we still may see in the Italy of ours, with the dark, massive, and ancient dwellings of many Italian towns. Some of those dwellings, then as now, might have been given over to squalor; but they had the details-the large rooms, high ceilings, broad staircases, dense walls discreetly muffling sound—of the noble in domestic architecture. They had, perchance, hanging over them, moreover, the sense of mystery that comes from an historic past. Such things breathe distinction and poetic dignity; they predispose to gravity, revery, and an undefined imaginativeness, to which the inmate may never be aware that he is subjected, yet which work their way subtly into his features. So far we know that the painter of Mona Lisa was right enough; but, having learned more as time has gone on, we also know that it is not the kind of house alone that people live in that influences unconsciously their mind and expression, their manner and carriage, but the mode in which they live in it. The habit of tubbing, flesh-brushing, exercising in the open air, and choosing sleepingrooms with a sunny exposure, would have lessened even within the shade of old palaces the number of those mysteriously affecting physiognomies that Leonardo found so haunting. It would have neutralized the spell of the sombre and romantic environment' in a sensible measure, and been a force tending toward the creation of what may be called the modern physiognomy-a physiognomy clear, open, straight-glancing, and practically shadowless. This is the physiognomy in which there is nothing morbid-in which the will expresses itself strongly, and the emotions may only express themselves very little-that can be studied in the portraits of Sargent and Alexander. It is this which we encounter oftenest in the New York types of Mr. Gibson. It is this, finally, which we oftenest see, in the flesh, in the streets and

In its most radiant examples, in handsome youths and happy, blooming girls, there is no gainsaying the physical attractiveness of this same modern, this ideally American, countenance. But youth and beauty are not the whole of life, and it comes to one at times that there might be said of this all-will and no-emotion face what Matthew Arnold said of the radiant Greek life of ancient days-that it was all very well until people were sick or sorry. There are many phases of existence that correspond to being sick or sorry. People become middle-aged, they lead stupid lives in a narrow orbit, they have middling means and middling interests. Of such is the vast population of every place. Out of such, precisely, the Leeches and Gavarnis of London and Paris drew some of their richest types, their most unctuously characteristic physiognomies. Out of such also, the great Italian and Spanish painters brought forth the models for their Madonnas and their saints. The up-and-doing masses of a representative American population, however, produce comparatively very few idiosyncratic countenances, very few faces (as has often been remarked) out of the normal in any direction, and easy either to caricature or at least at some points-very highly to idealize. Deprived of the flush of youthful beauty, the medium type of face of persons who live essentially the modern life-the life of energetic, concrete effort, of scientific sanitation in the home, and, outside of it, of cheerful acceptance of all sorts of promiscuous contacts, in cable-cars and Pullman sleepersis a type that does not offer to an artist the most varied resources. Who would quarrel with sanitation or the life of vigorous action? And yet it is sure that we do not conceive of Mona Lisa as troubling about ventilation and plumbing, or "going in" for golf!

In other terms, it apparently takes a great deal of inward, rather than outward, life to make a little of the facial suggestiveness that artists seek. And (other things being equal) that will sometimes come to sedentary, cooped-up persons rather than to those that exult in motion. A Frenchman would say that to be physiognomically expressive one must "pay with one's person." That is what a great city does. It pays with its person. It has scars and it shows them. And it is what we divine of the complexities of human

AN

N active member of our educational forces observed a short time ago that whatever a child understood he remembered. This was said in arguing against the supposed importance of cultivating, specifically, the memory in youth; and this view of the secondary place which should be assigned to memory, per se, is characteristic of the opinions prevailing throughout many departments of instruction at the present moment. rot-like memorizings of by-gone days have been set aside in the advanced systems of teaching, and it is perhaps one of the innovations that gives, to those technically interested in such matters, the greatest satisfaction.

Memory and the Lack of It.

The par

There is certainly another side to the questions involved, however, and it is at times borne in rather strongly upon the layman. Without doubt the drift of education, in what may be called the race-wide sense, is inevitably away from the very particular development of the memory. Practically, when man enters into the stage of the printing-press his memory ceases to be to him a faculty of the very first order of indispensableness; that is, its highest pitch of cultivation, the utmost that it can yield in stretch and tenacity, cease to be indispensable. Requirements that to men of to-day appear not short of phenomenal were demanded of the memory of generations that had the Vedas to hand down orally, every phrase exact, unimpaired. In Oriental countries, where the reverent retention of religious texts is still the major part of education, the memory receives a discipline that the Occidental peoples may be excused for feeling that they can well do without. Assuredly, to catch and hold words easily and for any length of time, if it be done without notion of the larger meaning behind the words, is but a comparatively poor use to make of the mind. The increasing purpose of the education of civilized men must then be to strengthen the understanding, rather than to set great store by the automatic action of memory, for whose services books and newspapers, and all the other agents of communication of modern life, offer so many substitutes.

Notwithstanding, it is possible to set too little store by the power of retaining accurately, with photographic fidelity, what has

been read or heard, and it cannot but strike one, in many ways, that this is what is occurring now. Those Hindoos, picked out any where from among the swarming millions of the population, who, as Mr. Kipling and other writers have told us, can pass on, unaltered by a syllable, an order, a message, a rallying-word, from one end of India to the other, testify to a general drill of the memory and a respect for verbal precision in a whole people, unthinkable in a modern country, and especially, one feels inclined to say, in America. It is really curious to observe how rare are the persons whom one meets in the miscellaneous relations of life who appear to be capable of repeating with perfect exactitude a statement which they may have listened to even a moment before, or a sentence to which their attention may have been but recently and very carefully called. They will give you the idea of it, more or less clearly; more or less intelligently they may "understand" what they have taken in, and what they seek to transmit farther. For all that, though, they have not closely remembered, in the verbal sense. They do not pass on the precise collocation of the words, of the statement heard, of the sentence seen. And, with all consideration for the opinion of those who hold that, with children, understanding and remembering are one, it is forced upon one that the two functions are, after all, distinct, and that it often matters seriously that the second faculty should be subordinated to the first. An individual who likes to know what colloquialism calls "the rights" of a fact or a remark, who prefers to be just in his judgments, and clear as to his own stand and that of others, develops a habit, unconsciously, of sifting the veriest trifles derived from hearsay with the caution of a German exegete over a disputed passage. He learns to distinguish "testimonies"; which to accept as trustworthy, and which to reject; and it may not infrequently happen that the rejected testimony

will be that of his best friends. They have no desire to deceive, they believe that they are conveying absolutely the truthful impression, but they are not textual, and hence they do deceive the unwary. One could probably not compute the disorders and confusions, and beclouding of sentiments and situations, due to innocent and honorable minds that have simply not been trained in the ability to reflect, mirror-like, an image just as they received it.

It will be objected that there is no such thing as a faultless reflection, that the personal element always enters to distort the outlines. Well, but the words can be remembered; one may not be sure as to the intention of the writer quoted and the speaker reported; but one can be sure as to the very words they used. All our current views and habits are such, nevertheless, that the verbal memory has paid to it, in practice as well as in theory, a very unimportant amount of regard. The mere fashion of our newspaper-reading, which skims, in the most superficial way, the most inconceivably heterogeneous mass of matter, day by day, relaxes the fibres of verbal memory, and makes us flippant as to its dignity. What is the use of painful precision when we have " got the drift" of a thing? We are like that light-hearted young critic whom Balzac described for us. 'If some one take the liberty to remind him that Raphael did not paint the Judith in the Pitti Palace-' Pedant!' he replies, laughing."

The memory may be one of those faculties that one might call clerkly. Perhaps it is mechanical, and a plodder. But there are circumstances in which nothing and no one can fill the place of a good clerk: a merchant who had secured one would not exchange him for Napoleon. And it may be that we are too much disposed just now to underrate the sheer mechanical memory, and that we shall be constrained to restore it to some of its past repute.

T

AN IDEAL SALON

HE Field of Art has received an article on this subject from Mr. André Saglio, son of a very well-known archæologist, and very lately charged with important work upon the Retrospective Exhibition of 1900, and Mr. Guy Wetmore Carryl. Attention is called to the discouraging effect upon the student of the overwhelming mass of paintings (four thousand and more), and the only less numerous array of important sculptures which a great exposition like that of Paris in 1900 includes. Advantage is taken of the existence of some excellent prints, the work of French engravers of the close of the seventeenth century, to call attention to the condition of the Salon in its earliest years. One of the prints shows the opening, or rather the preparation for the opening, of the Salon of that year. It is an "animated scene; trim valets, with sedulously rounded calves and arched ankles pose upon ladders in the act of hanging the three or four dozen pictures which compose the entire Salon of that halcyon epoch. The king himself-that Louis in whom no pressure of state affairs or preoccupation of his Court were able to crowd out the love and encouragement of the beautiful-after a short tour of the room, for the purpose of inspecting the paintings individually, had taken his seat beneath a canopy sprinkled with fleurs-de-lys, and from his throne surveyed, well-satisfied, the general harmony of the collection against its Gobelins background."

So far the quotation is verbatim from an early page of the long article mentioned. What follows is the second half of the paper, and this may be given complete without inverted commas :

Doubtless there is no need to emphasize the fact that the present arrangement of our expositions is precisely the opposite of this most simple system. Our paintings are hung with a discrimination akin to that of a fruiterer placing pears in his shop-window, against an invariable drapery, in an invariable light, and in the sole design that the frames should VOL. XXX. —69

fit, as nearly as possible, each to each. Written out thus coldly, the statement is one of almost incredible brutality, but, "pity 'tis, 'tis true." And how, we may ask, is our public to enter into any understanding of the sentiment with which our painter has fairly impregnated some sombre autumnal landscape, if this same landscape be flanked on the one hand by a scullion drinking the wine intended for the sauce, and on the other by an English admiral dying on the deck of his disabled ship? And this is an actual case, noted at the Exposition of 1900! And when we turn to the arrangement of sculpture in our exhibitions, the chaos is more hopeless still heads, legs, and arms inextricably confused within the range of vision, a bacchante dancing before a dying grenadier, a first communicant kneeling before a band of Roman roysterers, a modern beggar soliciting alms from a nude and chanting Apollo! Ah, no! Let us not boast too loudly of our civilization, for in these things we are barbarians still!

To make more coherent this project of an ideal Salon, let us picture to ourselves our imaginary rooms, and, by way of pointing the argument, place in them certain of the more notable works of art which figured in the United States' section of the Paris Exposition, and the memory of which is therefore fresh in the minds of all who saw them. We must suppose that for the purposes of this exhibition there is available a building similar to the city residence of one of our luxury-loving millionnaires, in which we have at our disposal fifteen or twenty spacious rooms, differently lighted. For it must be remembered that works of art have for a primary purpose the embellishment of a dwelling, and that, to form a proper estimate of their value, one should, so far as possible, see them in the ordinary light of such an interior as they are intended to occupy, rather than under the perpendicular illumination usually adopted in public galleries.

To begin at random, let us imagine a room of extreme but strictly refined richness, and of the most brilliant but the most harmonious

coloring. As a base, we should have draperies and wall-hangings of cherry-colored damask, serving on one side as a background for a colossal mirror, framed, after the style of Louis XIII., by elaborate and heavily gilt carvings. From the centre of the ceiling should depend a great bronze chandelier in a design of electric bulbs grouped like fruits among their leaves, while couches and chairs, still Louis XIII. in style, and with upholstery of old Genoese velvet, held by brass nails and in tone a deeper red than the draperies, should stand out upon a rich Savonnerie carpet. At one end of the room we should have an immense table with spiral legs and a top of polished marquetry, and thereon an equestrian statuette in silver, or one of George Gray Barnard's beautiful pagan divinities in smooth bronze, patiné. Around this bit of statuary should be scattered prints and books in costly bindings, and on half columns at the corners, busts in white marble or gilded bronze. Finally, a rare old cabinet should contain a collection of precious objects, jewelry, miniatures, and medals. It is in such a sumptuous setting alone that Sargent's superb portrait of a lady and her children could fitly be displayed. We should see it in the place of honor, its only companions such canvases as were peculiarly suggestive of light, as the Indian pictures of Edwin Lord Weeks and the Japanese studies of John La Farge, and others where richness of tone had been particularly cultivated-Abbey's "Hamlet," for example, or The Expansionist" of Francis Millet.

By way of contrast, the succeeding room should be of an aspect much more sombre. A foundation of tanned leather should stretch from the ceiling down to a breast-high panel of dark-hued walnut, and above a high marble mantle, cream-white in color and intricately carved, should be installed that portrait of a mother and child wherein George de Forrest Brush so skilfully recalls the pictures of the Italian Renaissance, in an old frame with side columns, bearing faint traces of once brilliant blue and gold. Here, too, should be hung the portrait of a mother and daughter by Cecelia Beaux, that by Sargent of the principal of a woman's college, and Winslow Homer's deep-toned marines, "A Summer's Night" and "The Coast of Maine." On a great easel, draped with a Chinese fabric, blue-black in color and showing here and there a strand of gold, should be placed, up

right, Whistler's portrait of himself, while one side of the room should be occupied by a broad, low book-case, filled with books in iridescent bindings of violet, plum, olive-green, brown, and nasturtium orange. On this, just at eye level, should be ranged pieces of Tiffany glass, between portraits in bas-relief by Saint-Gaudens, and bits of sculpture in bronze, wood, and ivory, by Proctor, Borglum, Bartlett, and others. Upon a table, a few feet from a window, a reduction of Saint-Gaudens's severe and stately statue of General Sherman should add a final note of dignity.

Again let us picture a room draped in heavy stuffs of faded rose, and furnished with moss-green divans very wide and deep, upon a rug of a similar but somewhat brighter green. In this we should have a harmonious setting for the subtle work of John Alexander, Walter MacEwen, and Alexander Harrison, while from a window an illuminating light should fall upon the soft brilliance of Mrs. MacMonnies's "Lilies and Roses." Elsewhere, touches of freshness would be lent by aquarelles, or by a series of delicate little interiors by Walter Gay, forming a frieze above the simple lines of a dark wood working-desk. Finally, in this interior we should see, in the centre of a panel and framed in deep-toned laurel and feathery fringed bamboo, the antique grace of Saint-Gaudens's "Angel with a Tablet."

As for the silvery dream-pictures of J. Humphreys Johnston, the landscapes of George Inness and Dessar, and the melancholy marines of Charles H. Fromuth and Eugene Vail, we should see them in an oval room, lighted with a sort of mystery, from the ceiling, against hangings of flax-gray. Here should be a blue-black carpet, and, in the centre of the room, a circular divan of embossed and gilded leather, around a stand supporting a bed of flaming geraniums, in the midst of which should dance MacMonnies's "Bacchante." At the two ends of the room credences should bear busts in white marble and lotus flowers, and chrysanthemums in Grecian vases with narrow necks.

We might long pursue this train of fancy, until we had placed all the works of art of the American section of the Exposition in surroundings designed to bring out their full value. But it is enough by these few illustrations to prove the point of our plea.

It may be argued that the cost of such an experiment would be excessive, but it should