impulse popularly known as the proper steer " both to them and to the Executive.

Our anxiety may do us good in the end by teaching us to try, as far as lies in us, to take the saving stitch in time, which traditionally saves trouble. If it dawns on us, as it may well have dawned on most of us, that it makes some difference to our pockets and our peace of mind whom we send to Congress, perhaps we may exert ourselves with more vigor, when the chance comes, to send a good and able man, and once he is sent to keep him where he can be useful to us. As a matter of fact there are measures of domestic government that affect us just as nearly as war scares, but war scares are so tangible and definite, and so easily understood, that they are useful to wake us up to our dangers, and to our responsibilities as electors. We are rulers, and we cannot safely dodge the responsibility of ruling. But it is far better economy for us to rule by proxies wisely and carefully selected, than to be careless about our choice of proxies, and then tear our hair over the possible consequences of our neglect.

It would be hard to over-estimate the arduousness of the task, first, of discovering an impediment not already worn thin in the hands of the writers of an older fiction; second, of managing this with economy, so that it may hold out to the end. To-day the fatal chain of Manx tragedy breaks at the crucial point, just as, in 1748, the deviltry of Lovelace weakened at the crisis. The perplexity that results from an attempt to weave circumstances into a hopeless tangle ought to make every novelist an optimist as regards life, whatever pessimism it may induce in regard to the outlook for fiction.

Our novel-reading forefathers were content with objective troubles. The eighteenth century had its villain. He was perfect, but short-lived. The good die young. Analyzing

his own wickedness with charming artlessness in Richardson, or stalking, armed with sneer, cloak, and dagger up the secret stairways of Mrs. Radcliffe, or strolling in all his native innocence through the fresh green fields of Goldsmith, he was a bright and beautiful being whose loss can never be made good. He will not come again. Nor is it to be wished that he should. To keep him true to his villainy through seven or eight volumes was a Herculean task. They were giants who created him. The novelist of to-day could not cope with so magnificent a machine.

The cruel father too has disappeared, except from yellow paper novels. He and the villain lie buried in one grave. An undisciplined parent is too great an improbability to pass muster with a generation that demands transcripts of fact.

The novelist of the early nineteenth century took refuge in circumstances. Poverty warred with love. But even this single device was hard to manage. Great toil must have been expended in keeping David Copperfield and Philip and Pendennis so idle that industry should not end suspense. The hero of to-day whose path could be thus blocked would win small sympathy-from the American reader at least.

Unquestionably all the old external machinery, from belief in superhuman wickedness down to physical disaster, is out of date. Distance, absence, shipwreck can no longer serve as barriers, since steam, electricity, and the telephone have made communication inevitable. We are weary too of the more modern device for subjective obstacle. It is impossible to worry longer over the ascetic ideal as a barrier to matrimony. The Weismann idea of heredity has shaken the hero's noble resolve not to marry because of an unfortunate inheritance. And difference of belief in regard to economic, religious, or philosophic theory no longer seems adequate cause for the five hundred pages of unhappiness that we crave in the novel. The medical information of the modern woman's heroine ceases to thrill before the end of the tale. Anxiety lest the book shall not end at all hardly increases the requirements of artistic suspense. And the views of the young lady socialist no longer keep us on the qui vive, having been proved inadequate to baffle masculine determination.

In a word, all the familiar obstacles, objec

tive and subjective, the villain, the hardships of poverty, the fixed idea that makes for confusion of circumstances, have palled. The situation is grave. Already we have begun to borrow, and the Gallic convention of marriage as the one barrier to love is becoming Anglicized. Must the Saxon muse go a-begging for alms so poor?

It is evident that unless fresh ingenuity can suggest some new complicating force in human life, English fiction will die for lack of a difficulty for love to contend with. Happiness is apparently too easy, protracted unhappiness too hard to imagine. Clearly, the world is not sufficiently out of joint. Who will arise to set it wrong?

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F those things which have had a protean character through the ages "honor" is assuredly one. Even a short time ago it was a very different affair; and when one goes not so very far back it assumes shapes in which it is hardly recognizable at all. The time of Buckingham and of Cinq Mars was not assuredly the least “honorable " time in history, and "Les trois Mousquetaires" the least honorable" of men. Still they did things that in our modern eyes look very Honor. queerly, and in these days would get any one of them, if the question happened to come before a Board of Governors, expelled from any club to which he belonged. Not only the sturdy Porthos and the exquisite Aramis were peculiar in their dealings, but d'Artagnan, the jeune premier, the "first walking gentleman" of the piece, openly and carelessly commits an act that would do more to destroy a hero of the present than any crime or folly. It has never been considered that the elder Dumas, the “père prodigue," ever gave much attention to local color, and indeed that fashionable shade had not been discovered in his time; but in his careless way, with one bold stroke, he did more to differentiate his hero and characterize the time when he made

d'Artagnan open Milady's letter than many another has done with repeated stippling. Still we are made to understand that the fiery Gascon was particularly keen" on the subject of" honor," and indeed his hand would have quickly flown to the hilt if anything had happened that had touched his seventeenth century sensitiveness. Indeed the conception of individual honor" has changed in these days; and with this change, more unrecognized but quite as certain, has come a change in the idea of honor among nations. The temptation is still to be naturally something of the "ruffling gallant," ready for conflict at the slightest provocation, although personally one would feel such a course of conduct at the present time unsuitable. Nowadays if a man stumbles against you in the walk you are not obliged, like d'Artagnan, in order to support your self-respect, to put his life in jeopardy; and it seems strange that very often a nation is called upon to resent something that with a private individual could be easily arranged. Everyone is rather afraid of being behind his neighbor in spirit and patriotism, and so the cruder ideas of an earlier time when races and nations were supposed to be, and were in fact necessarily inimical, have for the greater part prevailed. But the world, for all they may say, is better bred than it used to be, and nations in good standing do not go out of the way to insult each other any more than people in good society. In the latter case when this happens nowadays there is hardly any doubt in regard to it; and a man generally "does something about it," and so it must be with a nation. One of the gains of the present in society is the general assumption that we" mean well "—the assumption of our forefathers with any stranger being generally quite the opposite; and since in practice it is really upon this basis that international affairs are now conducted, it is a pity that it is not more fully recognized as an acting theory, and as a national state of mind.

LOAN EXHIBITIONS

JOAN exhibitions have gradually become a favorite means of raising money for charitable and other purposes in New York, having in great measure supplanted the erstwhile popular fancy fair; and their success may be said to depend largely, as did that of the fairs, upon the importance or conspicuousness of the persons interested actively or otherwise in their organization and management. To both a large and fashionable list of patrons and patronesses is a prime necessity, and the experience of most of them has been that the more teapouring there is by "society ladies to the accompaniment of an Hungarian band, the greater the receipts.

While this aspect of the case may well put us to the blush, there are other points of view from which we may take heart, and even plume ourselves upon our advance as an artloving community.

To begin with, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has always owed much of its attractiveness to a succession of loan exhibitions, and is even now to a large extent a loan collection, and as such a standing monument to the public spirit of our collectors who magnanimously strip their houses for our delectation. Beginning at Fifth Avenue and Fiftythird Street it moved in 1872 to the Douglas mansion in Fourteenth Street, at which time its permanent collections consisted of little more than the Blodgett pictures and a portion of the Cesnola collection. It became necessary to call upon private collectors for assistance. This was freely rendered, Mr.

VOL. XIX.-70

Prime alone filling one room with his collection of pottery and porcelains. From that day to this, except that the gradual increase of the permanent collections has left less room for loan exhibitions, the policy of the Museum has remained unchanged, following that of the South Kensington Museum, which has always been ready to exhibit any collection of sufficient importance which may be lent to it.

Even in earlier days the loan exhibition was regarded as a means of raising money for charities. One was held, in a temporary structure erected for the purpose in Union Square, during the war, in connection with the Sanitary Fair. This consisted almost entirely of American pictures.

The next of any importance was held at the National Academy of Design and at the Metropolitan Museum in Fourteenth Street simultaneously, in 1876, and was called the Centennial Loan. It consisted entirely of pictures, and was supplemented by the exhibition of Mr. August Belmont's collection in his own house, which he generously threw open to the public. It remained open the entire summer, one hundred and twenty-five days, attracting many visitors from among the thousands who thronged to the Philadelphia Exposition, and netting nearly thirty-eight

thousand dollars, Chinese Fan, painted in Holland; probwhich was divided

ably early eighteenth century.

between the Metropolitan Museum and the Academy of Design. In 1878 another exhibition was opened in the academy for the benefit of the Society of Decorative Art, consisting of objets d'art almost to the entire exclusion of paintings.

Many objects and collections of great value and interest were exhibited, but the catalogue reads to-day like that of a sale of bric-a-brac. To give an example (I purposely omit the owners' names):

501, 502. One Panel with Sujet," Italian Re

naissance.

503. Old Cabinet.

504. Pieces of Gobelin Tapestry, Versailles.

505. Plaster Bas-relief, Floren

tine, sixteenth century.

506. Two Pictures, St. Luke and

St. John, sixteenth century,

507. One Piece Spanish Embroidery, time Ferdinand and Isabella.

508. Eight Pieces Stained Glass. 509. One Copper Holy Water Vase, seventeenth century.

510. Trousseau Chest, seventeenth century, from an old château in Normandy.

511. Old Majolica Plate, Abruzzi trail.

512. Three Pieces Point de Venise.

39 66

came

very

The attention of the uninitiated visitor was guided by such naïve comments as "very fine," "best period genuineness shown by the light weight," 66 'age 200 years, ""stolen from the palace," fine, old," out in the Mayflower," curious," etc.; instances might be multiplied ad nauseam, but while we laugh we must not forget that examples of this auctioneer's jargon are not altogether absent from our most recent catalogues, even from those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

estal for the colossal statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, by Bartholdi, presented by the French people to the United States and now standing at the entrance of New York Harbor.

It was managed by no less than thirty committees, not including the Executive Committee, of which the late Allen Thorndike Rice was President. It opened on December 3d, and remained open for four weeks. The paintings were all foreign, and mostly of the French school, that being in prime favor with collectors for the moment. General Grant lent what was somewhat pompously called "the Grant Treasure," consisting

chiefly of caskets in which the freedom of various cities had been presented to him. There were also old prints from the West and Sewall collections, and a number of original drawings by William Blake, lent by Dr. C. E. West. Books of hours, manuscript and printed; stained glass, lace, porcelain, lacquers, costumes, arms and armor, embroideries, fans, old jewelry and silver, coins and medals, metal work, furniture and musical instruments, among which was a violin lent by Mrs. Ole Bull, and since presented by her to The PlayIt was made in 1568 by Gaspard da Salo, and has a scroll terminating in a cherub's head, with finger - board and tail-piece carved by Benvenuto Cellini. This remarkable instrument was made by the orders of Cardinal Aldobrandini, and figured in various adventures before reaching its pres

ers.

ent haven of repose.

In January, 1884, a loan collection of pictures was held in Brooklyn for the same purpose.

The Washington Centennial Loan Exhibition, held in the Metropolitan Opera House in 1889, consisted of portraits, silver, and other relics of the Revolutionary period. It revealed an extraordinary wealth of these objects owned in New York and the neighboring cities, an idea of which may be gained from the fact that no less than forty-eight portraits of Washington alone. were exhibited, not in

the finest ever held here. The rooms of old masters contained a collection of paintings which it would have taxed many a public gallery in Europe to surpass. Mr. H. O. Havemeyer lent his famous Rembrandts-" The Gilder,"

clusive of engravings, busts, or medals; there was also an immense number of personal relics of the founders of the republic, and a very large collection of silverware of the same period, much of which had a personal and historic interest, while the Fellowcraft Club contributed a collection of American newspapers and magazines of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In 1892 the Academy again opened a small loan collection of paintings by American artists in celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America.

In 1893 two loan exhibitions were held in the city of New York, one in the then newly erected Fine Arts Society's Building in Fiftyseventh Street, the other at the old Academy of Design. Both were intended to benefit the institutions in which they were held. That at the Fine Arts Society was probably

Louis Quinze Fan; pearl and gold sticks, painted parchment leaf.

66

Burgomaster Six and his Wife," and an old woman, together with a Pieter de Hooghe of the first quality.

A superb Turner, an equally fine Constable, a Crome, a Reynolds, and a Gainsborough were borrowed from Montreal, and Mr. W. H. Fuller's collection of early

English masters was shown in its entirety. Other schools, more particularly the Dutch, were well represented, while the great Vanderbilt gallery contained a collection of modern French paintings carefully picked from all the most important collections in the country. Besides these, the collection of Greek Art was larger and more interesting than any ever shown in New York, and the ceramics and lacquers were quite wonderful. The collection of Barye bronzes was also very remarkable.

The exhibition at the National Academy contained the Belmont collection of pictures, together with others, Mr. James A. Garland's collection of Chinese porcelains, and Mr. Heber Bishop's of Oriental works in bronze and iron.

Leaving for a moment the exhibition of "Portraits of Women," held in 1894, to be considered in connection with its successor, held in 1895, the next loan exhibition on the list, though not so successful as many others, was in some ways the most noteworthy of all. It was held in the spring of the present year at 366 Fifth Avenue for the benefit of several deserving charities, and was the outcome of the New York State Loan Exhibit at the World's Columbian Exhibition. Special pains were taken with the historical and educational sides of this enterprise, and it may safely be said that nothing more complete has ever been shown in New York than the collection of lace arranged by Miss Newbold's committee, the historic book