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marks Miss Vivash, when the introductions are over. And, heeding her hosts no more than the Chinese monsters on the stove, she walks across to one of the window-curtains, then holds up a point of its moth-eaten texture between her finger and thumb. "If ever I leave Schloss Egmont alive, I shall feel it a duty to carry away a piece of the drawing-room tapestries for the British Museum-'Specimen of Teutonic arttaste, as shown in house-decoration.'"

Mamselle Ange seats herself on the central, most impossibly stiff-backed ottoman of the Saal, arranges her flounces, and clears her throat in a short, dry fashion that Jeanne knows to be prophetic.

"This drawing-room was furnished, as it now stands, when the Countess Dolores, one of the most noted beauties of her day, came here as a bride. That was in 'forty-one."

"'Forty-one-of which century?" inquires Vivian, with artless impertinence. "The seventeenth-the eighteenth? Surely these tapestries must date longer back than a hundred and fifty years ago?"

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They date back to July, 1841, my dear young lady, ten years or so before you were born."

Vivian's cheeks fire. She has, in truth, left her six-and-twentieth birthday some way behind, and the subject of age and dates is distasteful to her, as Mamselle Ange, with fine feminine intuition, would seem to have discovered.

"In 1841 Count Oloff brought his bride home, and the reception-rooms were redecorated according to her taste. Perhaps I might have counseled blue myself," says Mamselle Ange, "for I was blonde, and we washy blondes she glances at Vivian's artificially ebon locks"can not stand the neighborhood of warm color. The Countess Dolores had southern blood in her veins; the complexion of a pomegranate; dark eyes that seemed to light the room up at a glance. You never read the Duke de Rochefoucauld's Portraits,' Miss Vivash? So I should suppose. Dolores von Egmont is described there, under the title of Nuage.' She was celebrated in every court in Europe. I have seen kaisers, princes, ministers-I have seen," says Ange, launching, it may be feared, from the vero into the ben trovato, "the great Talleyrand himself, in this salon, at her feet."

How quite too awfully jolly!" responds Beauty, with her drawl. "If the great Talleyrand-whoever that venerable duffer may be—is still alive, pray have him over to Schloss Egmont for my benefit."

CHAPTER IV.

"CHAFF."

HALF-PAST twelve is the accustomed dinnertime at Schloss Egmont. Jeanne has passed her life, Mamselle Ange has spent over thirty years, in the Black Forest; and, whatever English proclivities linger in their hearts, their frugal tastes, their hours-shall I add their blessed contentment with themselves and with their lot?-are German.

This evening, however, for the first time in Jeanne's experience, a seven-o'clock dinner is to be served. Frau Myer from the parsonage has given her help as regards the arrangement of dishes. (The Herr Pastor spent a fortnight in Paris after his marriage, and his wife is still the acknowledged authority in taste throughout the district.) Hans the gardener, in rehabilitated livery, is to display his newly learned accomplishments as a waiter. The family plate, emancipated, like Ange's fan, from silver paper and darkness, decks the table. Elspeth the parlor-maid has appareled herself in her noisiest walkingshoes, in her stiffest Sonntagschleife—those marvelous black-silk bows projecting like kite's wings from either side of the forehead, with which the Black Forest women seek to enhance the scanty beauty Heaven has bestowed upon them. The rusty tocsin, or alarm-bell, is rung for a good five minutes before dinner, rung by Hans's stout arm with a will that sends forth bats and owls, affrighted, from every ivied jutty, frieze, and buttress into the flaring amber of the western sunlight.

"I know, by experience, how most evil things taste in the mouth," says Vivian, when the queerly assorted party has met at table in the diningroom-a table that would hold eighty, a room that would not be overcrowded by a hundred guests. "Schloss Egmont gives me a new and horrible sensation. I realize what one might feel as the heroine of a three-volume novel. Blue chambers, faded arras, owls, specters!" (This with a side-glance at Mamselle Ange's figure.) "I declare not an accessory is wanting."

"Except the Prince Charming of the story," remarks Sir Christopher. He has a voice at once treble and tragic, enunciates his syllables in a slow, methodical way that heightens, by contrast, the ever-changing comedy of his face. "Rawdon Crawley having gone the way of all flesh, the world can scarce hope to be regaled

The expression of Mamselle Ange's face is a with another Novel without a Hero.'"

study.

"Surely you could play the part by proxy," cries Lady Pamela, in her off-hand fashion"play it, at least, until the Count von Egmont

appears in person. You could not find a pleas- competition. They distribute dishes where plates anter occupation."

"Pleasant but dangerous-for the heroine," says Kit Marlowe, with a genial little internal smile he has the smile of a man who "fancies himself" above all things. "I know my own luck too well to put myself, vicariously, in an absent lover's shoes."

At which innocent remark the Beauty's cheeks fire. She is not without a certain limited conventional aptness. No woman with wits, intensified by a couple of rapidest London seasons, but must be posted in the second-hand persiflage, the acquired banter that pass muster, when politics is stagnant, and the dog-days approaching, for smartness. Here her sense of humor ends. A jest, the approach to a jest, upon the sacred subject of her own charms, is to Miss Vivash a blasphemy-the only one, it may be added, at which she would be greatly disposed to take umbrage.

Persiflage our great-grandmothers used the word, and shone in the accomplishment. Shades of sprightliest Fanny Burney and Thrale! can it be truly reproduced in the dreary compound of slang and cynicism, the scoffing at all things generous or solemn, which the present generation calls "chaff"? During the opening courses of dinner, things go off smoothly. Hans and Elspeth acquit themselves tolerably as long as Ange's oft-repeated warnings ring freshly in their ears. The soup, the fish, are served with decent quietness. The guests talk briskly between themselves. That their discourse seems to lack edge, seems occasionally to lack meaning, results doubtless from deficiency of apprehension in the hearers. Judging from the effect produced upon each other, 'tis a very feast of reason, a flow of soul, a jackdaws' parliament! The vast old room rings and reechoes to their incessant peals of laughter. What is the staple of their merriment? Buffoonery, it would seem, to the uninitiated rather than wit; heavily manufactured jokes whereof the point consists in the introduction of some one oft-reiterated current word; personalities, scandals, compared to which the reputations slain by Lady Sneerwell and Mr. Crabtree had been as nothing.

This lasts for a time. Then the travelers' spirits flag; and, with a child's quick sensitiveness, Jeanne detects that Vivian is casting round her for fresher diversion than our poor Sir Harry's loss of honor, our sweet Lady Jane's loss of complexion, and other remembered misfortunes of dearest absent friends. She has not far to seek. Hans and Elspeth, crimson with heat, are fast lapsing into the stage of obdurate incapacity, at which, when fairly put upon his metal, the Black Forest peasant defies all honest

should be; they plant plates in the center of the table; they fling about coroneted Von Egmont spoons as liberally as the personages in a fairytale are wont to throw about gold and silver. They wipe their sunburned, exudating foreheads. They talk aloud. They giggle.

Jeanne can see that Miss Vivash and Lady Pamela exchange glances.

The situation is crucial; but worse, far worse, is to come. Our good Mamselle Ange has not lived thirty years in the Wald without forgetting some of the axioms laid down by modern Chesterfields in handbooks of etiquette. She knots her table-napkin firmly under her chin at the commencement of dinner, cuts up her meat with the bold action of a demonstrating surgeon, eats cherry jam liberally between every course, and helps herself to all such lighter matters as gravy, condiments, or vegetables, upon the blade of her knife.

"We are told by our masters, the penny-aliners," says Sir Christopher, pointedly addressing himself to no one in particular, “that the avidity with which this generation flocks to sights of horror is a sign of decadence. Old Romefine ladies-gladiators. My taste is pure and uncorrupted. I have never been to an execution or a bull-fight, to see Blondin or Zadkiel. My blood runs cold at the thought of an innocent fellow creature" (he gives a little shudder, and sinks back in his chair) “risking his life for my diversion."

Mamselle Ange at this moment is really performing prodigies of valor as she swallows poached eggs and spinach from the blade of her knife—an honest, circular-shaped weapon, fashioned doubtless at an epoch when to eat with one's fork would have been looked upon throughout the Fatherland as an effeminacy. She sees nothing of the little by-play going on between the guests, pays no more heed to Sir Christopher's attitude of sham horror than to Beauty's uplifted brow, or the twinkle of mischievous fun in Lady Pamela's eyes. Let Ange be once occupied with her knife and fork, the former especially, and there is about her a quite Socratic disregard for all besides. Minor accidental surroundings become

. . . . small and undistinguishable, Like far-off mountains turned into clouds." Little Jeanne suffers, as I believe children alone are capable of suffering, beneath ridicule. Until to-day Jeanne has regarded everything at Schloss Egmont-Ange's best flowered silk, the motheaten curtains, the pastel goddesses, the broadbladed knives-with the unquestioning faith of her age. She sees them, suddenly, as they must appear through the double eye-glasses of Miss

Vivian Vivash, and quivers as with a living, pas- tice, the remembrance of countless feminine crusionate shame! elties recked upon herself, have brought to perfection.

Accompanying dessert comes art-talk. The late Count von Egmont was himself an artist of no mean merit, and the Speise-saal is decorated with frescoes, painted under his direction, in memory of Germany's greatest classic poets. Above the music-gallery are medallions representing the leading scenes in Wieland's "Oberon." From an opposite side, the Virgin, lifesized, appears at the pillow of the sleeper Herder. Beneath a portrait of Schiller are groups from "Jeanne d'Arc" and "Marie Stuart." A huge mythological tableau from the second part of "Faust" covers the whole side of the room dedicated to Goethe. These frescoes, executed by a well-known Munich copyist, are from designs in the archducal palace at Weimar-designs classical throughout Germany. To Miss Vivash and her friends they are caviare. Miss Vivash, during the past season, has deeply studied her own likeness, in oil and in chalk, at the Royal Academy. She has also coached herself in the history of " Andromeda" (the title of a picture for which she and other town beauties sat as models), and has visited, chiefly on wet Sundays, the studios of several fashionable painters of note. What greater knowledge of the fine arts, unless they be connected with bismuth, antimony, and pearl-powder, should poor, half-educated Beauty need? What should she know of Goethe, Schiller-of paintings that never hung in Burlington Street-of an artist not introduced to her at the annual conversazione of the Royal Academy?

Ignorance, however, as in some other cases we wot of, does but lend a sharper edge to adverse criticism. Was ever such grouping seen --such chiaroscuro, such anatomy? At last, round the throat of one of the ruddy-locked nymphs in "Oberon," Vivian descries what she affirms to be a coral necklace-in truth, a wreath of crimson roses; but Beauty's eyesight is conveniently defective when she lists.

"I declare this is quite too adorably quaint," putting up her double eye-glass, as is her custom whenever she would be more than commonly supercilious. 'Coral necklaces with hair to match, are evidently the last thing out in the grand duchy of Baden."

And, posing her head a little on one side, she encounters Jeanne's dark, imploring glance with her stoniest stare-a stare that lengthened prac

(To be continued.)

The child feels every secret of her life—such innocent secrets as they are-pierced through by those pale eyes, those double glasses. Every separate bead in her luckless necklace seems to burn like a coal of fire round her throat.

"These primitive customs really take one back centuries," drawls Beauty, without removing her gaze from her victim's face. "I remember my grandmamma telling how, in her young days, the female infant invariably received a coral necklace from its godfather and godmother. Indeed, I think it stood, like King Charles in the oak, in the rubric.-Pray, Mamselle Ange, as we are speaking on serious subjects, shall we have an opportunity of attending Anglican service on Sundays? One would like to study the manners and customs of the British settler with impartiality."

It takes Ange long to answer the question. A person with normal convolutions of brain might reply briefly that there exists neither Anglican church nor Anglican service within a radius of a dozen miles. Mamselle Ange's mental processes, like her millinery, have in them some latent labyrinthine twist which forces her ever into the use of twenty words where one would be sufficient. Irrelevant anecdotes, dating back to her own confirmation; outlying sketches, in the main unfavorable, of Continental chaplains, their wives, their characters, their debts; a dissertation on the relative merits of the Calvinist and Lutheran beliefs, with a passing fling at what she is pleased to term the Materialism made Easy of the day— all these things does she manage, by fair means or foul, to bring in, Miss Vivash listening, with half-closed eyes, with yawns that she is not at the smallest trouble to dissemble. At length, just as Ange pauses for breath rather than lack of subject-matter, a ring comes at the outer, seldom-used bell of the Schloss.

"A visitor at the big gate!" exclaims little Jeanne, her cheeks reddening.

"It must be the ladies from the Residenz," cries Mamselle Ange. "Luckily, the guest-room for once is in order. The ladies from the Residenz, or the Herr Baron von Katzenellenbogen." And then the door of the dining-room opens, and on the threshold-dusty, travel-stained, more poverty-stricken in his dress than usual-there appears the master-Wolfgang.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH PICTURES.

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FTER all, France is a bigger country than England." Such was the trite reflection which I made to console myself for the impression produced by the first glimpse of the Paris Salon; and, such is the power of platitude, that it did bring to me some small amount of consolation. But when one comes to consider the matter carefully, there does not seem to be any very potent reason why the size of the country should render the arrangement of its picture-galleries superior in proportion to that size, but rather the reverse would seem likely to be the case, and the smaller country would be expected to provide adequate accommodation for its works of art with greater facility. Taking other things to be equal, it must be easier to find room for a thousand pictures than for five thousand, and London must be small and poor indeed if she can not afford the space or the money to show her artists' work in a decently satisfactory manner. We know, however, that in truth London is neither small nor poor, and that when money is required for any adequate object it flows in from many sources almost too profusely. Is it possible, therefore, that we do not consider it to be an adequate object that the works of our artists should be properly displayed, that the accommodation for such works and those who come to see them should be ample, and that even the minor wants of the visitors-as, for instance, rest, fresh air, sensible refreshment, and perhaps even the possibility of a few whiffs of pipe or cigar-should all be considered carefully? And if we do not consider this to be necessary or desirable, would it not be well if we were to pause for a moment in our admiration for pictures, and ask ourselves why we are thus minded-why we crowd a gallery as if it were a railway station, provide eatables and drinkables of a kind which is unknown except during the mad five minutes which we spend at a railway refreshment bar, why we shut out the fresh air, and restrict the seats, and forbid smoking as severely as at a Dorcas meeting?

Think how different all this is at Paris! You stroll up the Champs-Elysées till you come to a building which is about as large as Charing Cross Railway Station, and you pay your franc and enter. Surely this can not be a picture-gallery! No one takes away your umbrella or your cigar, and you advance into an enormous hall, roofed with glass, and filled with flowers and statuesflowers of every conceivable kind, not displayed in boxes or arranged in glasses or bouquets, but

growing in profusion in the long beds, and almost concealing the pedestals of the statues; everywhere flowers and seats, and groups of people standing before the statues, chattering and laughing, smoking, whispering criticisms, or eating, but neither angry, hurried, nor tired. And when you leave this hall and ascend to the galleries above, you still meet with the same amount of fresh air and possibility of free movement. The rooms are so large and lofty, and there are so many of them, that they are never really crowded; and even on Thursday and Sunday, when the people are admitted without payment, the pictures can at all times be comfortably seen. What reason is there in the order of things why all this should not be the case in England? I will tell you; for, strange as it may seem, this trivial question of the nature and arrangement of the exhibition, leads us down to the main cause of the difference between French and English art. The reason for our indifference to the bad arrangement of our picture-galleries is that we do not care for our pictures. It would shock us if the Prince and Princess of Wales were to live, say, in an inn on the Edgware Road, but we should see no incongruity in housing our best pictures in any watertight room, no matter how unsightly or how inconvenient. Pictures or statues are nothing to us, except appropriate objects to fill spaces on our walls and dark corners in our drawing-room; and, were we able, we should degrade all the best art of England to the decoration of a sofa or the pattern of a plate. That is the real reason why we can only have uncomfortable picture-galleries, inadequate alike for the artists and the spectators. We have, we think, gone beyond art, have advanced into high intellectual regions whence we can afford to look down upon the pretty plaything which has in former ages raised the enthusiasm, heightened the joy, and soothed the sorrow of every civilization that has left its mark upon the world's history; and so we are growing daily more contemptuous of art, more wrong-headed in our way of looking at its influence and its aims. Rightly understood, the present fashion for art patronage is even a worse sign than the neglect that preceded it; for the fashion is founded upon no real love or wish for what is beautiful and true, but only on a sort of desire to present to the world the sight of an enlightened public who encourage in a generous manner all the refinements of life.

This is the first contrast between the Salon and the Academy: that the first with all its er

rors and, as we shall proceed to show, they are very many and very great-is still the work of men who have in their hearts the right feeling for art, even when they fail to grasp its expression; and the second is the work of those who do not in their hearts care for art or understand its power. And in each case the real moving agency is the way in which the nation thinks; for it is the nation which moves the artists as well as produces them, and you can no more have a body of good artists when all right feeling for art has been lost, or is yet unborn in the hearts of the people, than you can have fruit and flowers from a tree without the sun and air which nourish its growth.

And now I can fancy that my readers will be likely to remark that I am all wrong in this assertion, that art is not really cared for and understood by the English people, and they will point triumphantly to the wall-papers, dados, lustered pottery, and art needlework, and ask if all that does not show the fondness of the people for art. So I will venture to devote a few words to the explanation of what seems to me to be the function of the highest art; for it is only by clearly understanding that, that we can form any correct judgment as to our own or our neighbors' merits or shortcomings. To do this, we must consider very briefly the relation in which painting stands to the sister arts of poetry and music. In Lessing's "Laocoon," the chief book which has treated of this relation in any adequate manner, painting and sculpture are placed in an inferior relation to poetry, the author limiting their expressional value to one instant of time, and thence drawing various conclusions as to the inferior rank they must necessarily hold to an art which may cover an almost infinite series of actions. So far as this goes, it is undoubtedly correct; but it does not go far enough to express the truth, as may be seen from thinking for a moment of the scope of poetry. In the highest developments of this art, we find that the chief merit is that of placing ordinary events and actions before us in a manner which throws a new light upon them-the thought or the action being precise and definite in itself, no matter how many avenues of thought and feeling it may open up—and, taken as a rule, we discover that in the greatest poets the more simple is the material, the more powerful is its effect. Thus the new light which Shelley throws upon the song of the skylark, or the manner in which Homer paints the simple love of Hector and Andromache, is of greater value than when the one describes the divinities of the air, or the other the revels of the gods. Newman's "Dream of St. Gerontius" is magnificent poetry, but it is far inferior to his expression of simple faith in "Lead, kindly light"; and Tennyson is greater

VOL. VII.-14

when he paints "the long fields of barley and of rye, that clothe the wold and meet the sky,” than when he shows us the fairy barge moving across the still lake to the island-valley of Avillion.

Thus the essential function of poetry is not to describe the things which have "not entered into the heart of man," but to glorify those that have, to shed the inconceivable light over things not only conceivable, but even common, to touch with the glory and the dream our most prosaic facts.

This is the chief power of poetry; and if you examine the great masters, from Homer to Tennyson, you will always find their principal beauty to lie in the fact that they have been essentially human in their sympathies. Now think for a moment of music. Certainly it is evident that the mission is widely different. You may gladden men's hearts with a tune on a fiddle, or rouse their warlike energies with the clashing of cymbals and the braying of trumpets, or wake their laughter with merry ditties; but when you come to music at its utmost height, you make men neither glad, nor angry, nor mirthful, and, if you do not make them sad, it is only because you arouse in them the thoughts that "lie too deep for tears." Notice that the great contrast of poetry and music is, that in the first the poet illuminates his reader with some of his own wisdom, in the second the hearer illuminates himself. The poet may direct our thoughts into a new channel of fuller knowledge; the musician reveals to us depths of feeling which lie behind our thoughts, unknown and unsuspected. The one changes, the other creates. Thus, while a recited poem will say the same thing to all who hear it, a piece of great music will say as many things as there are hearers. Its interpretation will depend entirely upon the personality to whom it is addressed; or, rather, it has no interpretation at all, and is but a means of creating within another's mind some conception which has no actual resemblance to the creating power. What poetry and music do perfectly, painting does in a lesser degree, combining the work of both. It will express an old story or thought in a new way, so as to add to its meaning; and it will do more than this, for it will take up the province of music after having exhausted that of poetry, and express in the harmonies of form and color that which finds perfect expression only in the harmonies of sound. Thus, for instance, you may express perfectly in poetry the beauty of a fresh spring day, and you may express in music the gladness of heart which such a day arouses; but in painting alone can you combine the two, and express alike the gladness and the beauty of the scene. The two great divisions of the best painting might be called the musical and the poetical-the latter including

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