This is

women who have not young children. true, of course, of hundreds of thousands of women. But there are others who make it a time of fascinating activities. The women who love work of the mind and hands find it the

most fertile period of the year. One company of middle-aged ladies spent two hours of each summer morning botanizing in the dim Wisconsin woods under the instruction of one of their number, who is a distinguished scientist.

These women also made themselves a workshop, and in it they did some truly exquisite cabinet work, using only fine and beautiful woods, and decorating their cabinet, chairs, and screen, which were the result of the

summer's industry, with carving, stenciling, and some pictorial inlaying of delicately colored woods. Nor was the least of their achievements the construction of a flight of steps down the bluff leading from the wooded plateau where stand their homes to the beach of a bewitching little lake. A spirit level tested the perfection of each step, the proper implements packed the mobile earth, and on the base of the upper steps ran certain lines from "M'Andrew's Hymn» in celebration of good workmanship. Surely a labor such as this must win the applause of all who like to have a needed thing well done. ELIA W. PEATTIE.

CHICAGO.

Τ

HE worst characteristic of matrimony is that it results in a pause, a cessation. Marriage should be a beginning. A girl is educated for marriage. It is her ambition, almost her destiny, certainly her thought. And when she marries the thing is done. Her destiny is accomplished. The result is domesticity, which to a husband who is still her lover is not at all what he married her for. This is why most marriages, where the man continues to feel about the girl as he felt before, are a disappointment. It is absolutely true that the most comfortable marriages are those in which each person takes the other as a matter of course. Is this sort of marriage a success? It depends on a man's ideal of matrimony, and fortunately most men are not burdened by individual ideals.

Marriages may perhaps be divided into three varieties,— marriages for a pretty face, marriages for money or position, and marriages for

companionship.

The marriage for a pretty face is probably the most common. We call it sentimentality, - a nice word for a sensuous thing. It is the shallowest of all motives. This marriage the soonest loses its reason; not so much because of the aging of the pretty face as because a man tires of one pretty face, or even of all.

Marriage for money is not marriage; it is an arrangement. It is repellant to a man of the least idealization because it partakes of buying. It is a civilized form of the slave market,-only here the slaves are willing. The immorality is the same, but the slave of antiquity had the excuse of unwillingness. Some day men will realize that morality and custom are innately alien; to use an old simile, morality is the water and custom is the oil. Only individual and original men can see that neither the universality of a custom or its antiquity is a reason for its existence or a sign of its excellence. Men to whom this would seem a reason are surely not capable of making good customs. Unfortu

nately for progress there are few individual or original men.

Marriage for companionship is the only real marriage whose reason can continue to exist. This alone would raise it above the others. And not only does the motive continue to exist, but it may even grow in intensity. Though companionship has transient reactions, yet, when founded on esteem and practised in courtesy, its course is onward, and it grows deeper as it grows closer, becoming clearer as it becomes placid. Companionship is beautiful because it implies willing self-forgetfulness in thought of another. It should mean openness, and simplicity, and unboasting reliance on the other's fidelity. Then it does not matter much if one is deceived, for the lesson has been learned. In companionship it is not what one gets that matters, it is what one gives. How fine a thing, then, is the companionship of a man and a woman, entered into voluntarily, with mutual understanding and respect,- a companionship not only of affections but of interests, not only of the emotions but of the mind! It makes marriage high and enduring. It is more than a fancy; it is more than a gain; it is an honor.

How few marriages are an "honor"! Most of them are a bore. The tragedy of marriage is not so much when the love of both the man and the woman eases off into indifference; that is at least indifference. It is when the love of one decays while the love of the other still lives, that love becomes a torment. The lover suffers a constant slight. The heart grows weary. It longs bitterly not to love. Cynicism rusts it. It aches beneath the ashes of livedout and long-dead passions. In the face of this indifference it stands in silence, pitiful, accumulating angers against its disappointment. The heart of its love grows rageful, and at last it hates. But it still loves, and that is the tragedy.

A yet greater tragedy is the bitterness

of love defiled. This is a woe of the soul which is everlasting, because there can be no re-raising of ideals. Of all bitternesses this is the deepest. And the vile ridicule of it all is that to the desecrated one there seems no desecration. Then the heart grows solitary, and it laughs.

The fact of being loved deeply, honorably, and lastingly surely entails some duties. One owes something to a love like this even if one does not share it. One owes a certain nobility of action toward the lover who has given one such a love. All high, courteous natures will pay the debt, and they will pay it in a way that absolves them from any blame of not sharing the love, in a way that is the dearest to the one who loves, in a way that is more valuable to themselves than any other act could be. They will repay it by trying to be the thing their lover dreamed them. But there are so few high, courteous natures!

The best thing in love is friendship, but few married people are friends. They are not enemies; they are too used to one another to be so, and it would be uncomfortable. But there is a vast fatigue of one another lying hid beneath the customary affection which they have made their surface. Interest in one another has lessened. Why? It is usually because one or the other has seemed to cease to grow, to change. Interest is soon satiated in one phase. When they marry, people adopt a certain character toward one another from which they seldom vary. And even when they do vary it is in their manner toward others, not toward each other. This soon wearies interest. Each feels that he or she knows the other, while often only the surface is known.

But, worse than this, one or the other often actually ceases to grow mentally. It is almost invariably the woman, particularly if she has offspring. The reason is obvious. She becomes a servant, and not only this, but a servant to creatures who are not adults. So her mental development stops. But the man goes

loves his wife; he is used to her. It is absolutely true. Woman's only chance of continued companionship is to grow with her husband. But this requires a rare woman.

Lastly it may be well to mention, among the things that make a marriage unhappy, the lack of control of temper. Two people living in companionship, supposing each to have some individuality, will certainly differ, not only on many subjects but in many ways. Yet friends may differ and not quarrel. Why could not people who are married do so? Perhaps the principal reasons are that-first-friends dread the breaking of friendship by a quarrel, while married people feel that they are bound to one another. But this is unworthy. Highminded people would not see it as an excuse. The second reason is that friendship is largely founded on mutual esteem, which is forgotten in marriage, mutual passion taking its place. The third reason is that married people usually do not allow each other a separate character, while friends do. In marriage there should be conformity as much as possible in two things,— actions and standards. But the character of each person should not conform. And many married people demand this both consciously and unconsciously. Their natures are at war.

And there is one other sort of temper very common and very troublesome in marriage,— the intermittent nature,- temper arising from uncontrolled moods, from exaggerated intensity of feelings about little things, or simply from hysterical tendencies. There is only one remedy, and this remedy lies only with the patient. It is what men call philosophy, a thing alien to most people. And there is only one relief for the victim,- for in this case the patient is not the victim,-and that is the constant realization that such moods are intermittent. In the presence of temper of this kind self-control is always superior, as stability is superior to instability. And it is at the same time the most dignified thing, the kindest, the least regrettable, and, if one desires revenge, the most revengeful, and it is sometimes even provocative of remorse-in thinking people.

Marriages are happy usually only between the very stupid and the very intelligent. But many are content, many are disagreeable, and a few are tragic marriages.

The truth of it all is that the best thing in love is friendship-and few people are capable of friendship! R. V. RISLEY.

NEW YORK.

L

"T

HE true work of art," says Michael Angelo, "is but a shadow of the divine perfection." "The art of an age or nation," writes another, "is the efflorescence of its whole spiritual life and endeavor." The art of a people is therefore only the embodiment of its prevailing ideas, affections, and conceptions, in architecture, in sculpture, and on the glowing canvas. A nation's art is but a mirror reflecting the image of the features and body of the age, its finer spirit and its inner strivings and longings. Victor Hugo, in "Les Miserables," says, "There is a spectacle grander than the sea,- that is the sky; there is a spectacle grander than the sky,- that is the interior of the soul." It is because artists have sought to give us a view into the inner workings of the soul of which the poet sings, the preacher discourses, and upon which the philosopher meditates, because they have sought to give us a glimpse of the heights and depths of this inner sky, that art must go down the centuries interlocked, as it were, in the holy bonds of wedlock with religion. And where shall the artist find grander and more inspiring scenes, more tragic incidents, tenderer emotions, sublimer examples of patriotism and devotion for his pencil or chisel to portray, than in the religion of his fathers, in which are so strangely blended all the holier feelings of love, adoration, and romantic honor. Religion is the gauge of human progress and bears the same relation to art that cause does to effect in the philosophical world. As a river can never rise higher than its source, so a people can rise no higher than its objects of worship, be they what they will, -wood or stone, as those of the Congos of equatorial Africa, or the Triune God of the Jews, who was, who is, and who shall be. Go back to the remotest antiquity, where history fades into myth and legend; search among the ruins of decayed empires; examine the monumental remains of Asiatic civilization,- and everywhere the truth stands out boldly that everything worthy of the name of art has sprung from religion. On the banks of the Nile rose the pyramids and catacombs,— vast receptacles for the dead. On these huge structures were exhausted the wealth, the skill, and the lives of countless generations. And for what? To give the dead a royal resting-place. The Egyptian believed in the transmigration of souls. He believed that his soul, and those of his wife and children, would at death enter

some animal, and then another, and so on forever. Therefore the Egyptian cared more for the dead than he did for the living. Hence the worship of animals, the embalming of the dead, and the vast and costly sepulchres.

So in the same manner we can trace the art of Greece to its religion. The religion of the Greeks was the deification of nature and the affection and faculties of man.

Their gods and goddesses who dwelt on Mount Olympus were only beautiful and powerful men and women, such as we might conceive our first parents were when in the Garden of Eden. The religion of the Greeks was essentially terrestrial in its nature. Its fundamental proposition, as manifested in its votaries, was pleasure,-pleasure of the senses, of the imagination, and of the intellect. The future was nothing, the present everything. Such, in short, was the religion of this precocious race. Its art we can easily imagine. Beauty of form and majesty of intellect will be its highest ideals. And such we find it to be. It could not be otherwise. Their gods and goddesses, who were removed only a few degrees in power and strength and beauty above mortals, became the ideal of all true and genuine artists, who found in them materials for immortality. To express the form divine and the rich intellectual endowments which the Greeks attributed to their deities, statuary was the most effective and the best adapted. Therefore we find that sculpture was the central art among the Hellenic race, around which all the others were wreathed as a garland. It was the religion of the Greeks that furnished their artists their sublimest conceptions and the style of dress best suited to exhibit the soul within the crystal shrine.

The same relation can be traced between modern art and Christianity as that which existed between Grecian art and Grecian mythology. The Christian religion is in its character essentially different from that of the Greeks. It is divine in its origin and in its aims. The present, compared with the future, is nothing. It is only a vale of tears, a day's journey, a cold and barren point between two eternities. In the divine economy of this new faith the physical man is nothing; the spiritual man is everything. It is only as he is related to infinity that he becomes a little lower than the angels and crowned with glory and honor. It is present at all times and everywhere. Sculpture being unable to express the infinite, the

boundless, Christianity had to resort to painting as the art best adapted to express its fundamental idea. Hence painting is the central art of modern civilization, to which all others are subordinate. Like sculpture in Greece it became the national art as it brought forth in fuller relief the religious conceptions of the people. A picture has no merit in the eyes of the moderns unless it is related to the whole universe; back of the objects represented must be a wide perspective of grand mountains and solemn seas fading away into the infinite. It is the same with architecture. Compare Grecian temples with the Catholic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. The former combine gracefulness with masculine grandeur, elegance with sublime plainness. The latter are vast, varied, and fantastic. Of them Hawthorne writes:

"Their walls, columns, and arches seem a quarry of precious stones, so beautiful and costly are the marbles with which they are inlaid. Around their lofty cornices hover flights of sculptured angels; and within the swelling interior of the dome there are frescoes of such brilliancy, and wrought with so artful a perspective, that the sky peopled with sainted forms appears to be opened only a little way above the spectator."

The whole is admirably designed to impress the soul with an awe-inspiring grandeur and with the insignificance of man. Compare Greek art with Italian art. The one is the perfect fruit

of the religion of Homer; the other the perfect fruit of the religion of the Nazarene. In the one, time and genius have wrought their perfect work; in the other "we catch foregleams and visions of eternity and immortality." In the former the divine was merged into the human by clothing the dwellers of Olympus with flesh and blood; in the latter the human is exalted into the divine by giving the human form the wings and appearance of angels. The one attained its ideal perfection when cut off from all the relations of its surroundings; the other reaches its highest perfection as it stands related to the whole universe of God. Grecian art is therefore more expressive. Christian art, on the other hand, is more suggestive. The one is satisfaction; the other aspiration. As in geometry the asymptote continually approaches the point of meeting on a curve and never touches it, so Christian art is its struggle to attain the ideal, which is nothing less than God. Though never succeeding in its efforts, still, as the years roll on, it will grow grander, sublimer, as it catches the reflecting rays of the jasper pavement and the resplendence of the divine majesty as it approaches nearer and nearer to the object of its lofty aspirations. PHILIP JAMIESON.

ST. LOUIS, Mo.

T

HE PIANOFORTE is the most widely used and popular of all musical instruments. Many other instruments, as the violin or flute, can give forth but one voice-the melody, but the piano enables one to add harmony to melody, and it thus rivals, to a certain extent, the combination of several voices or orchestral instruments. By means of the pianoforte the noblest works of the masters are familiarized to us. Almost every family circle finds pleasure in its music, and it is a sign of culture in every household. A brief glance at its history will therefore be of interest to many.

It is usual to point to Bartolomeo Cristofori as the inventor of the pianoforte, but it seems probable that others also attempted work on the same lines simultaneously with him. Instruments whose strings were struck by hammers, and which had dampers to stop the vibration of the strings after the keys were released, were invented in the early part of the eighteenth century, and while the Italians dispute all claims to this discovery excepting Cristofori's, it is pretty certain that one Christopher Gottlieb Schröter, of Saxony, and a Frenchman named Marius, also invented such an action. inventors were contemporaries and made their discoveries without knowledge of each other. The instruments made by them were called forte-pianos, because they could produce either

These

loud or soft tones, something which had been impossible on preceding instruments. The harpsichord had just then reached its highest development, and it was some time before pianos gained public favor. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, they came into universal use to the exclusion of all other forms.

In the year 1709 Cristofori completed four instruments, but he was not fully satisfied with the mechanism of any of them. He worked continuously, and a few years later made others which were a great advance on his early productions. Pianofortes made by Cristofori still exist; one bears the date of 1720 and another that of 1726.

It may be said that the modern pianoforte had two immediate predecessors, -the clavichord and the harpsichord. The latter went under different names according to the forms in which it was made and the countries where it was used. The clavichord and harpsichord were quite distinct from each other and were developed from different sources. The clavichord was the descendant of the ancient monochord, which, as the name implies, had but one string. The bridge of the monochord was movable, so that its shifting made possible the production of the different notes of the scale. The harpsichord was developed, without doubt,

whose strings were strung over a soundingboard made in the form of a harp. These strings were struck with little hammers held by the performer. About the thirteenth or fourteenth century a keyboard was attached to one of these instruments, forming the first and primitive clavicembalo.

The dulcimer is known to be a very ancient Hebrew instrument,- mention of its use being found in the book of Daniel; but a musical instrument which is still more ancient, and in which is plainly seen the foreshadowing of the pianoforte, is the Chinese pien king. This is said to be the oldest percussion instrument of which anything is known. It had a number of metal plates, varying in size, suspended on two horizontal bars, which, when struck in their order, gave out the notes of the Chinese scale.

Taking the several instruments which preceded the piano, they may be arranged in somewhat the following order: the pien king, dulcimer, psaltery, virginal, spinet, clavichord, and harpsichord. The psaltery was a species of lyre or harp. The virginal was a small keyed instrument which was placed upon a table when played upon. It was much used in Queen Elizabeth's time. The spinet followed, and has been called "a couched harp," being a harp-shaped instrument which rested on a stand with legs. The virginal, spinet, and harpsichord were quilled instruments; that is, the tones were produced by an arrangement of plectra which plucked the strings. These plectra were made of quills, pieces of ivory, or hard wood, and were set in the upper end of a bit of wood called the jack, which rested on the farther end of the key. When the key was pressed down the jack moved upward and past the string, which was caught and twanged by the plectrum. The clavichord was much like the spinet; its tone was agreeable and impressive, but not strong. The harpsichord resembled the modern grand pianoforte in shape, but sometimes had two rows of keys,- one set producing a softer tone than the other because the wires

were struck an octave higher. In many of the earlier instruments there were not as many strings as keys, but a different pitch was produced by striking the same string at different places. When the equal tempering of the scale was introduced, each key had its own string.

All of the instruments preceding the pianoforte were inexpressive, incapable of accent, and lacked resonance. There was a great desire for a more enduring tone, the brevity of the sound making it impossible to sustain melody. This need led Cristofori and the others to make their experiments and resulted finally in their invention of the pianoforte, the mechansm of which was quite different from all its predecessors.

It is said that pedals were invented in 1670

were not then introduced, for we find that pianos made in 1766 did not have any. Pedals were patented by John Broadwood (an English piano-maker) in 1783, and from that date have been in constant use. Before the introduction of pedals, pianos had draw-stops at the left hand of the player; when these were pushed in, dampers were pressed on the wires; while drawing them out raised the dampers and left the wires free. It will be seen that any rapid use of these draw-stops was impossible, and therefore many of the beautiful musical effects of to-day were unknown.

The earliest pianofortes had a compass not exceeding four octaves. In 1793 keyboards were extended to five and a half octaves; in 1811 to six and a half; and in 1851 to seven octaves. Since 1851 three notes have been added, but they lend little, if any, improvement. The development of power, sonority, and tonal brilliancy has been very marked in recent years.

Bach, Händel, Haydn, and others of the great masters used only the instruments which preceded the pianoforte. In 1817 Broadwood presented Beethoven with a piano which had a compass of six octaves. Mozart used an instrument having five octaves. After the introduction of pedals Beethoven discovered certain effects by the use of the shifting (or "soft") pedal. Later on Schumann and Chopin brought pedalling to perfection,- especially the use of the damper pedal. This latter pedal is popularly called the "loud" pedal, many persons thinking that its use is simply to increase volume of tone. Chopin was the first to reveal to the world the proper use of this pedal. Through him was learned its capacity for sustaining melody and for producing fine effects in "overtones.»

Names famous as workers upon, and manufacturers of, the pianoforte in its development are: Cristofori, of Italy; Schröter and Silbermann, of Saxony; Stein, of Augsberg; Zumpe and Pohlmann, who were German manufacturers in London; Americus Backers, assisted by John Broadwood and Robert Stodart; Erará. in France; Pleyel, Roller, and many others, until we come to our own times and the celebrated makers of this country.

From the Chinese pien king to the nineteenth-century grand piano is a long distance. The development has been gradual but steady. There has been a succession of improvements, one gradual evolution, until we have to-day an instrument of such perfect mechanism that we feel a reverence for the patient perseverance which it evidences and a deep sense of gratitude for the possession of an instrument which makes possible such musical interpretation as we have, at the present time, in pianoforte music. FRANCES C. ROBINSON.

WAKEFIELD, MASS.