for the dog, which should stay his canine stomach against the night journey in the baggage-car to New York. An untidy girl asked me what I required and I said I should like a half-dozen of ham sandwiches. As she was wrapping them up, I was idiotic enough to say (without meaning anything insulting) "I am going to give them to my dog." The girl's eyes blazed; she put the sandwiches back under the dome of glass, and said in a withering tone, "We don't furnish meals to dogs." In vain I entreated her; I apologized humbly; I informed her that I should love to eat the sandwiches myself, but the dog's necessity was greater than mine, as I had a dining-car at my disposal; I offered to pay her three times the regular price for each sandwich. All in vain she ordered me and my dog to leave the shop at once. I admired and still admire that girl, for really, wasn't she fine? She had a soul above commercialism. She took a pride in that horrible restaurant, a fierce pride that made her deaf to flattery and blind to bribery. I felt as if I had unwittingly insulted a queen. I wish to pay homage to the Portland (Oregon) Morning Oregonian, which in its issue for February 18 had a long editorial on the remarks on fishing which I had printed in this corner of culture. The editorial is too long to quote in full, and too good to condense, but if ever a man was rewarded by wit and wisdom, I felt that I was and am on reading this brilliant article. It rebuked me for my antifishing propensities, and rebuked me in a way that would have done credit to Izaak himself. It has been a lifelong regret to me that I was not born on New Year's Day; I should have been had not my father been a clergyman. In 1865 the 1st of January came on Sunday, which in our house was strictly observed. Nothing secular was allowed to happen. Accordingly I arrived before dawn on Monday, January 2. It is really too bad. Here is an absolute proof that I have grown old. Although I love victory and hate to be beaten in golf, I had rather lose in the sunshine than win in the rain. Eugene O'Neill, in his original play "The Great God Brown," built a powerful drama on the idea that we all wear masks. The first time I realized the difference between a mask and reality was when I was six years old. I was walking up Chapel Street, New Haven, and as I neared the corner of College Street, I saw a very old man, bent over with infirmities, wearing a copious white beard. He kept stopping pedestrians, and asked in a broken, pathetic whine: "Won't you give a poor old man a penny?" I looked at him with profound pity. Suddenly he came over to me, and whispered: “Don't you worry about me. I've got loads of money." He whipped out of his pocket a canvas bag, containing a pint of solid cash. Then he raised his beard, and behold, he was a smooth-shaven young man. He laughed gaily. On the instant he turned from me, stopped a stranger, and asked his begging question with extreme pathos. Now why do you suppose he made that revelation to a little boy? Did some impulse force him to do it? Was the expression on my face so sincere that he could not bear to deceive a child, or was it that he could not bear to see me suffer in sympathy for one who was really so abundantly able to take care of himself? I did not give him away. Some thirty years later, I stood in line at a railway ticket-office, and marvelled at the courtesy and deference shown by the ticket-seller to the silly and flustered Their questions, it seemed to me, would have ruffled the patience of Job. "How much did you say it was? Are you sure the train stops there? Is there no train before the next one?" To all of these superfluous questions the ticket-agent replied with sweet and smiling courtesy, showing not the slightest irritation. When I finally reached him, I quietly complimented him on his steady politeness. He said: "J- C! J-C!! One of these days I'll kill the whole GD-d bunch of G D- -d fools!" I must have touched a nerve and released a pent-up spring in this apparently patient man. For current announcements of the leading publishers see the front advertising section. T is permissible, I hope, for the critic to rejoice in the turn of fate that aggrandizes the artist in whose gifts he has profound faith. On the present occasion I have to rejoice in just that, in the good fortune of a young painter who long ago convinced me that he deserved it. Writing in these pages early in 1924 about the work of Eugene Savage, I ventured to make these observations: We have never had a more instinctively decorative painter, and if I owned that fearful wild fowl, a king's ransom, I would promptly use it to obtain from Mr. Savage the embellishment of some such vast spaces as were handed over to the early masters in Florence, Siena, and Assisi. He would, among other things, make them glow. What he had to say would be recondite and possibly obscure, but it would convey its message even to beholders not much given to abstruse feel the beauty implicit in this artist's concepreflection. If they felt nothing else, they would tions and in his fine workmanship. Through some mischance the king's ransom has never fallen into my hands, but it has materialized just the same, and Mr. Savage has been vouchsafed the opportunity I craved for him. It has come to him in the great central hall of the Elks National Memorial at Chicago, and even as I write, his paintings for that building are on the verge of installation. I first saw some of them in the exhibition of the Architectural League last winter, and from my impressions then and from subsequent study of the subject I know that my judgment of three years ago has been confirmed. Before developing this conclusion in detail I must say something about the building which it has been Savage's privilege to adorn. I like that last saying. People too often think of the classic idiom in American the Order of Elks served in the Great War and more than a thousand of them died in service. Seeking to commemorate the patriotism embodied in these facts, the Elks decided to erect a building which should be both memorial and national headquarters. They found a beautiful site in Chicago at a point sharing in the distinction of Lincoln Park and Lake Michigan, a site free from the danger of overshadowing by tall structures in the future. Forthwith they invited various architects to participate in a competition, and this was won by Mr. Egerton Swartwout, of New York City. He too enjoyed a splendid opportunity and proceeded to take advantage of it. He designed an austere, lowlying mass for the administrative offices, with a majestic circular memorial hall rising in the centre. This hall is a kind of Pantheon, a truly monumental edifice, on the style of which I may cite the architect's own words: I might say it was classic, and more Roman than Greek; I would prefer to say it was modern, and that it was American. It is certainly modern in its conception, and while it is classic, it is not archæological. It follows along the lines of that adaptation Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. of the classic which got such a noble start in this country just after the Revolution-the style used in the Capitol and other buildings in Washington. It is our national heritage. From the painting by Eugene Savage. architecture as purely a borrowed veneer, forgetting the long processes through which it has entered the blood of Amer ican art. But this is not a disquisition with its gorgeous marbles and its rich on the building, admirable though the coffered ceiling, and the scope which Mr. Symbol-Bearers: Charity. From the painting by Eugene Savage. theme may be that it provides, and I further touch upon it only to stress the magnificence of the vast pillared hall, Swartwout gave here and elsewhere to the decorator. The embellishment of the scheme begins as we approach it. Two pedestals flank the path that leads up to the entrance to the Memorial Hall. For these Mrs. Laura Gardin Fraser has modelled two reclining elk in bronze. Around the exterior of the hall, just below the stately colonnade which supports the dome, runs a frieze by A. A. Weinman, his composition being divided into two parts. One of these is dedicated to The Terror of War and the other to The Glory of Peace. For the west lobby leading from the Memorial Hall to the Grand Reception Room Mr. E. H. Blashfield has painted three large decorations. One panel symbolizes Charity, another Peace and Harmony, and the third Justice and Fidelity. For four niches in the great hall Mr. James Earle Fraser has been made responsible, filling them with statues of Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love, and Fidelity. The decoration of the Grand Reception Room has been given to Mr. Savage, but I say nothing of it, for it is only in the preliminary stages, and my purpose here is to deal with work that he has done. Again I must delay contact with it in order rapidly to traverse the experience that has led up to it. EUGENE SAVAGE was born at Covington, Ind., in 1883. He came from old pioneer stock. His father was a banker, his mother a woman who occupied her leisure hours with drawing and music, especially regular visits. For the last seven years music. She governed the singing in the he has had his studio in New York, local church and reared her children on the choral masterpieces of Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven. Musing on the things that have aided him, Savage alludes to "Gregorian restraint." There is nothing "precious" about this phrase as he uses it. I can feel in his work the play of that ancient simplicity. The elder Savage died when his son was only three. Mrs. Savage, making decisions for her family, was not satisfied with the resources of a small town and so moved to Washington. There her son went to Gonzaga College and studied at the Corcoran School at night. By the time he was seventeen he was established in Chicago, making commercial drawings and attending night classes at the Art Institute. He studied also at the Academy there. It was as a student in Chicago in 1912, when he was twenty-nine, that he won a fellowship in the American Academy at Rome, and there his destiny was fixed. His years in Rome gave him, as he frankly puts it, everything on which he stands, though it was during his Roman period that he went off to Munich and spent a couple of months there studying painting from life. Back in America in 1916, he taught at Cooper Union for a time, and then for two years pursued the same course at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. He has been Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. steadily teaching. He has had charge of the painting classes at Yale since 1924. But this is made possible by and has produced most of those pictures which have made him known in the exhibitions and have won him numer |