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or customs or events, showing our forebears at work and at play. T. H. Matteson's "Redeeming Forfeits" recalls the thrill of boyhood days when something dangled over one's head to the query, "fine or superfine?" Jerome Thompson's "The Old Oaken Bucket" and Eastman Johnson's "Husking Bee" show typical scenes on the farm. The oldfashioned turkey-shoot was painted by Charles Deas. J. G. Clonney's "Militia Training" brings vividly before us training-day, which is now but the vaguest recollection. That greater national holiday, as pictured in J. G. Krimmel's "Fourth of July in Centre Square," was evidently then a day of general jollification in which the jug of rum played a not unimportant part. And that in Philadelphia! In this early picture the boy with the fire-cracker does not

appear, but boyhood was not neglected by the painters. Mount in "The Bird Trap" and "The Trap Sprung," and J. G. Chapman in "The Snare," showed boys trapping birds. "Disagreeable Surprise" by Mount discloses boys playing cards in a barn, while healthier forms of amusement are depicted in Henry Inman's jolly little record of "Mumblethe-Peg," LeClear's "Marble Players," and Edwin White's "Hop Scotch." Winslow Homer, the marine painter, belongs to a later generation, but it seems worth noting that one of his earlier pictures was entitled "Snap the Whip."

Our annual display of government by the people formed the subject of Krimmel's "Election Day in Philadelphia," but better known are George C. Bingham's "County Canvas," "Canvassing

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for a Vote," and "Verdict of the People." These pictures by Bingham are full of figures and life and movement, while the most familiar of his paintings, "Jolly Flatboatmen," known to us through a large mezzotint engraving by Doney, shows only a few figures grouped on the bow of a flatboat, one of them dancing to the playing of a fiddler. The fiddle was evidently popular and much illtreated in those days. The scene makes a somewhat awkward composition of which the artist could not make much. Its chief interest is as a record of the life of these boatmen, which is illustrated also in Bingham's "Raftsmen Playing Cards" and "Fur Traders Descending the Missouri." Bingham was identified with Missouri, and his pictures are of decided value to students of the social history of the Middle West. It is that quality which explains their popularity in their day rather than any extraordinary artistic worth. However, it should be noted that in planning his canvases, he made

careful studies from life, which bear evidence of first-hand impressions of the scenes that interested him.

Bingham, by the way, painted also "The Emigration of Daniel Boone," and the same pioneer's "First View of Kentucky" formed the subject of a painting by William Ranney. These, and Ranney's "Trapper's Last Shot," bring us to the threshold of that great West beyond the Mississippi, the very mention of which calls up visions of Indians, pioneers, trappers, emigrants, pony riders, with the limitless prairies as a setting. Charles Deas and William M. Cary were among the forerunners of men who were to achieve distinction as painters of the West, such as Frederick Remington, W. Herbert Dunton, and W. R. Leigh. Deas's titles are full of suggestion: "The Voyageur," "The Trapper," "Hunters on the Prairie," "The Last Shot" (Battle of the Rio Grande), "Indian Guide," and "The Wounded Pawnee." Indian subjects were the specialty of George

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Catlin, Carl Wimar, and Karl Bodmer. The red man persists as a model for the painter of our own day, when the warlike splendor of his presence is fading into the past.

The negro, too, forms an interesting figure in our art. Sometimes he serves as a clown in the picture, at other times he is introduced with a touch of sentiment or pathos, as in Mount's "Power of Music." But he was always a side issue in the pictures of those days. Later he was given the center of the stage when he was painted, and there came artists who made him their specialty. This change came with the Civil War. Two fairly well-known pictures may have had something of the effect of propaganda on both sides of the slavery question in their day. The one, Eastman Johnson's "An Old Kentucky Home" (1859), draws a picture of negro quarters which has been characterized as the "rose-water side of the institution" of slavery, but which does not strike one as an exaggerated

view of Southern plantation life as it often must have been under the rule of a humane "Old Massa." In the other, Edwin White's "Thoughts of Liberia, Emancipation" (1861), a lone negro is dozing and dreaming by the fireside. It reflects the feeling and impulse that resulted in the fifteenth amendment, and is a quiet, but effective, appeal to the imagination. A different type of the Southern-bred colored man is well depicted in his stately courtliness in T. W. Wood's "Baltimore News Vendor."

Now, all these pictures show one thing clearly, and that is that historical painting is not only the painting of the doings of the great or of the actions of war. We did not lack pictures of this latter type here, and especially did our wars inspire our painters. One of the best known of the pictures depicting scenes in the Revolution has some of the spirit of genre art, so that it may be included here. That is A. B. Durand's "Capture of André," a simple, straightforward

presentation, without any melodramatics. André is in civilian garb, which brought him within the category of a spy, but his dignity is inborn. His three captors may possibly be a little idealized, but the effect of the whole is convincing.

But those who faithfully pictured the uneventful every-day life about them were just as much historical painters. They told the history of the plain people. This spirit in American art, this human interest in home subjects, was brought to a large public through the engravers who reproduced the painters' works.

People, ideas, and ideals changed with the times. To-day genre art is not in vogue. Our painters are not concerned with the details of the life about them. They do not paint from the point of view of the pictorial reporter, who catches social history in the making, as did Mount and the others. When we and our times have receded into the domain of history, our descendants will study the works (what will be left of them) of our illustrators to see how life looked in these days. No doubt it will seem quaint enough to them.

Rhapsody

By MARTIN ARMSTRONG

As when trees are shrouded in December,
Men recall the perfumes of the flower-time;
So we sing a life we half remember:
How we heard in some primeval shower-time
Liquid song of rain upon blue rivers;
Dreamed on isles, in windless oceans planted,
Where a dim-green twilight, bird enchanted,
Under domes of drooping leafage quivers;
How we climbed on many a hidden planet
Eagle heights stirred by a starry breeze;
Watched by coffined kings in tombs of granite,
Where the darkness hangs like boughs of trees,
Glimpsing in the reddening light of torches
Ghosts of somber vaults and looming porches,
Cyclopean faces, giant knees;

How we anchored in a violet haven,
Seeking under light of unknown stars
Mountains paler than the moonlight, graven
Into shapes of pinnacles and scars;
Where our boat set all the lilies swinging,
Sailed up rivers hushed and leafy-arbored,
And, in caves of hanging blossom harbored,
Heard the sound of an immortal singing.

As when breathed upon, the ashen ember
Blossoms into fire again and fades,

So bright Junes flame up through our December,
And at random whiles we half remember

Sudden gusts of an immortal singing,

Ancient visions of remote crusades.

William and Mary

By MAX BEERBOHM
Illustrations by George Wright

EMORIES, like olives, are an acquired taste. William and Mary (I give them the Christian names that were indeed theirs-the joint title by which their friends always referred to them) were for some years an interest in my life, and had a hold on my affection. But a time came when, though I had known and liked them too well ever to forget them, I gave them but a few thoughts now and then. How, being dead, could they keep their place in the mind of a young man surrounded with large and constantly renewed consignments of the living? As one grows older, the charm of novelty wears off. One finds that there is no such thing as novelty-or, at any rate, that one has lost the faculty for perceiving it. One sees every newcomer not as something strange and special, but as a ticketed specimen of this or that very familiar genus. The world has ceased to be remarkable; and one tends to think more and more often of the days when it was so very remarkable indeed.

I suppose that had I been thirty years older when first I knew him William would have seemed to me little worthier of attention than a penny-halfpenny postage-stamp seems to-day. Yet, no: William really had some oddities that would have caught even an oldster's eye. In himself he was commonplace enough (as I, coeval though I was with him, soon saw). But in details of surface he was unusual. In them he happened to be rather ahead of his time. He was a socialist, for example. In 1890 there was only one other socialist in Oxford, and he not at all an undergraduate, but a retired chimneysweep, named Hines, who made speeches, to which nobody, except perhaps William, listened, near the Martyrs' Memorial. And William wore a flannel shirt, and rode a bicycle very

strange habits in those days, and very horrible. He was said to be (though he was short-sighted and wore glasses) a first-rate "back" at football; but, as football was a thing frowned on by the rowing men, and coldly ignored by the bloods, his talent for it did not help him: he was one of the principal pariahs of our College; and it was rather in a spirit of bravado, and to show how sure of myself I was, that I began, in my second year, to cultivate his acquaintance.

We had little in common. I could not think Political Economy "the most exciting thing in the world," as he used to call it. Nor could I without yawning listen to more than a few lines of Mr. William Morris' interminable smooth Icelandic Sagas, which my friend, pious young Socialist that he was, thought "glorious." He had begun to write an Icelandic Saga himself, and had already achieved some hundreds of verses. None of these pleased him, though to me they seemed very like his master's. I can see him now, standing on his hearth-rug, holding his MS. close to his short-sighted eyes, declaiming the verses and trying, with many angular gestures of his left hand, to animate them-a tall, broad, raw-boned fellow, with long brown hair flung back from his forehead, and a very shabby suit of clothes. Because of his clothes and his socialism, and his habit of offering beer to a guest, I had at first supposed him quite poor; and I was surprised when he told me that he had from his guardian (his parents being dead) an allowance of £350, and that when he came of age he would have an income of £400. "All out of dividends," he would groan. I would hint that Mr. Hines and similar zealots might disembarrass him of this load, if he asked them nicely. "No," he would say quite seriously, "I can't do that," and would read out pas-. sages from "Fabian Essays" to show that

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