to men of wealth. Moreover, my impression of the majority of Americans in Europe is that it gratifies them to see their Ambassadors resplendently housed and maintaining a generous social state. They do not want their representative in London to live in West Kensington or in the French or German equivalents of West Kensington, but on the Park Lane or the Carlton House Terrace of the city to which he is accredited. It gives them, so far as I can judge, a real pleasure to feel that the American Ambassador is more than holding his own in the social game, and that on all occasions of public or semi-public display, and in all the outward embellishments of life, he plays an elegant and conspicuous, and even a brilliant, part. If the Americans in Berlin, for instance, had been polled a year ago I do not doubt they would have voted to make Mr. Charlemagne Tower Ambassador for life; and they were probably just as disappointed as the Kaiser himself when Mr. Tower's successor turned out to be a gentleman whose tastes were those of a student and a scholar, and whose resources made it impossible for him to follow in Mr. Tower's footsteps with the same assurance and éclat. gard to the London Embassy, the case is even more embarrassing. The last three American Ambassadors have all been men of very large private means, which they have spent ungrudgingly in their country's service. They have accustomed both Englishmen Americans to a certain style and scale of doing things; and the transition from a millionaire to a man of moderate means, whether wholesome or not, would undoubtedly entail a certain amount of social and political inconvenience and unfairness. But that is not the limit of Mr. Taft's embarrassments. There are plenty of men in America who are millionaires, but who have not the social, literary, and intellectual In re and qualifications that we have come to expect as a matter of course from the American Ambassador; and there are plenty of men who are amply endowed with these latter qualifications but who are vexed by the external want of pence. To hit upon the individual who combines both sets of requisites is no easy matter. That Mr. Taft, however, will succeed in discovering him I make no doubt. We always think that no American Ambassador can be so good as the one who is just leaving us, and we are always proved to be delightfully wrong; and the Americans themselves are justly jealous of the fame of their London Embassy, and have no intention of lowering its unexampled prestige. I have long held that the kind of man who should represent Great Britain in the United States is the kind of man who for the past two generations has represented the United States in Great Britain. Times have changed since Sir Stratford Canning described the Washington Embassy as very pleasant socially, but not requiring any great talents politically. During the past ten or twelve years the office of British representative at Washington has been in many ways one of the most exacting in the service. I know, indeed, of no post which makes so insistent a demand on the level-headedness and adaptability of its occupants. I say occupants, because in Washington less than in any other capital can the British Ambassador's wife be dissociated from her husband's failure or success. The prestige of the British Embassy will often depend more on her social flexibility than on her husband's merits as a diplomatist. Very few English women, so far as my observation goes, are happy or popular in the United States, or know how to take Americans, or can help being jarred, and, what is more, showing that they are jarred, by the thousand and one bright and keen intelligence and a fund of real humor she unites a thorough knowledge of American life and of the American people, a disposition that has inherited more than a touch of American vivacity, and a sure command of all the arts of social success. little differences between English and American social standards and ways of doing things. The wife of the British Ambassador has to accommodate herself to a social environment that is all the more difficult to gauge because of its similarity in general outline and its dissimilarity in detail to what she is used to at home or in the capitals of Europe. It asks a very high degree of tact and self-control sometimes to accept persons and things as they come without comment or surprise, and to recognize that what would be counted easygoingness or curiosity in London may in Washington be merely a novel token of friendliness and interest. A British Ambassador's wife in the American capital has always to bear in mind that in matters of social usage the English and Americans, while aiming at the same mark and meaning essentially the same thing, often behave and express themselves in opposite senses. Not every British Ambassador at Washington has had a wife who possessed these qualities of perception; and more than one hostess at the Embassy on Connecticut Avenue has passed her time, like Lady Barberina in Mr. Henry James's incomparable tale, in a state of hopeless alienation from, and misunderstanding of, her new surroundngs. When this is the case the result is retroactively disastrous because Washington resembles nothing so much as a whispering-gallery, its society is small, exceedingly intimate, and enjoys a highly specialized code of etiquette that is all its own, and a mistake, especially a mistake on the part of the British Ambassador's wife, becomes public property at once. I count it emphatically not the least of Mr. Bryce's qualifications for his post, and not the least among the causes of his unequalled success in it, that a mastery of all these social nuances and minutiæ is with Mrs. confirms the average American's worst Bryce a matter of instinct. To a But if the conditions thus impose on the wife of the British Ambassador an unusual degree of diplomatic wariness, the Ambassador himself has to be doubly on his guard. For one thing, he finds the duties of his office carried on in a glare of publicity that in Europe is not only unknown but unimaginable. For another, there is always a party in the United States anxious to score a point against Great Britain, and there are always votes to be won though not many, happily, in these days-by an anti-British campaign. Our Ambassador, therefore, has to practise in the sphere of politics the same tactfulness and discrimination demanded from his wife in the sphere of society. He must be ever ready to make allowances; he must constantly remember that America is the exception; he must know what to discount. This is a kind of knowledge-like the not less essential knowledge of all the intricacies of the American system of government-that can hardly ever be gained by instinct or picked up by a few months' study. It is the sort of knowledge that only a man with a prolonged and intimate acquaintance with the United States is likely to possess, and that the official type of British diplomatist, pitchforked into Washington from one of the capitals of Europe, is not only most certain to lack but to be unable to acquire. But what, above all, is necessary is that the British Ambassador should have the instinct for taking the Americans in the right way. If he has that he has the one thing needful. If, on the other hand, he suspicions of British angularity and re serve, if he seems stiff and self-contained and unable to let himself go, if he has not a natural sympathy with the American people and with the spirit of their social life, his abilities are as good as wasted. But a man who can take the Americans as Lord Grey is taking the Canadians may be very sure that the term of his Ambassadorship at Washington will pass pleasantly for himself and profitably for his country. It is because I have believed men of this stamp and flexiblity to be more easily come by outside the official service than in it-Lord Dufferins do not grow on every diplomatic tree-and because I have felt that the British Ambassador in Washington should stand out among his colleagues, should be distinguished by attainments other than diplomatic, should be qualified to mingle in American public life, and should be a man whom Americans would honor without reference to his official position, that I have long argued in favor of filling the Washington Embassy from outside the ranks of the professional service. The experiment has been twice tried and has twice succeeded. Sir Julian Pauncefote went to Washington with out any previous training in diplomacy, and by the sheer frankness, honesty, and manliness of his bearing wore down that all too flattering suspiciousness of British diplomacy that fifteen years ago was an American obsession. Mr. Bryce in the last two and a half years has done even better. Indeed, Mr. Bryce appeals to my judgment as the perfection of the type of man who should always represent us in Washington. The appointment, as every one who knew both Mr. Bryce and America foretold, has proved an ideal one. He sailed for New York, of course, with many advantages in his favor that none of his successors is ever likely to possess. He was not only known to Americans but more intimately known and more highly thought of than any other Briton. For twenty years at least no one on this side of the Atlantic has had one-half of Mr. Bryce's influence on American opinion. I well remember how, when I was endeavoring to hold up the British end of the Boer War at public meetings in America, nothing handicapped me so much as the fact that Mr. Bryce had pronounced on the other side. For the great majority of the Americans the rights and wrongs of that struggle were settled when Mr. Bryce's views were known. Ever since the appearance of his "American Commonwealth" all thinking America has felt itself the debtor to Mr. Bryce. Many things have changed in the United States since its publication, but Mr. Bryce's volumes still retain their easy pre-eminence. You will find them used to-day as the text-book on the American system of government in every high school, college, and university in the country. Mr. Bryce not only interpreted America to the Americans but discovered more than one feature in the American fabric of which the Americans themselves were ignorant. It has been his happy fortune to be the founder of a whole school of American political inquiry, and all its professors look to him as their master. And besides this, his learning, his historical and biographical writings, his uniform friendliness to America, his unrivalled knowledge of the country and its ways, his broad democratic instincts, his freedom from pedantry and "side," and his tremendous and infectious vitality, assured him a unique welcome when he arrived in Washington, not as a private student and traveller but as his country's representative. I cannot better summarize Mr. Bryce's achievements as Ambassador than by saying he has adapted to American conditions the example set by . Mr. Lowell, Mr. Hay, Mr. Choate, and Mr. Whitelaw Reid in England. The past two and a half years have been a continuous record of political and social successes. Mr. Bryce has negotiated and carried through some six or seven important treaties. He has practically wiped the slate clean of every contentious issue. More than that, he has won the confidence of Canada and Newfoundland. He is the first British Ambassador at Washington who has visited Ottawa during his term of office. He is the first who has secured for Canada a recognized status in the conduct of Anglo-American diplomacy. He is the first, in short, who has done something tangible towards disabusing the Canadian mind of the notion that the British Embassy in Washington exists to cultivate American goodwill at the expense of Canadian interests. But, above and beyond all this, Mr. Bryce has broken all precedents by declining to confine himself to the Embassy on Connecticut The Fortnightly Review. Avenue and his official summer residence in Massachusetts. He has made a point of seeing something of the country and its people. He has established himself as an intimate part of the world of American letters and of the yet larger world of public endeavor. He has delivered addresses at meetings, congresses, and universities. He has attended political conventions; he has received honorary degrees. He has openly shown his passionate interest in all that touches on American life. For the first time the British Ambassador in Washington occupies a position analogous to that of the American Ambassador in London. He is at last a distinctive figure; he has ceased to be a mere name to the masses; he is marked out from his colleagues in the diplomatic corps in ways and to a degree that represent and correspond with the special relationship that exists between the two main branches of the English-speaking peoples. Sydney Brooks. THE ROYAL ACADEMY AND THE SALON. "Some of these little things are very nice," said a lady at the private view of the Royal Academy, making her way up to Sir L. Alma-Tadema's picture, a centre of attraction in its usual position in Gallery III. The condescension of the remark applied (perhaps not consciously) to the work of one of the most learned and accomplished painters of the day was amusing enough; but it suggested some reflections as to size in relation to subject in a picture; perhaps also it might stand for a kind of characterization of the Academy as contrasted with the Salon, where everything is on so great a scale that the collection at Burlington House impresses one, by comparison, as an exhibition of cabinet pictures. A practical measure of the difference of scale is furnished by the appearance at the Salon of Mr. Ralph Peacock's fine painting of mountain scenery at last year's Academy, where it looked emphatically a "Gallery picture," but looks much smaller and, it must be admitted, less powerful at the Salon than it did at the Academy. Mr. Edgar Bundy's rather crude piece of tragedy, The Sands of Life, which made somewhat of a sensation at the Academy, and occupied the centre of a wall, might easily be overlooked at the Salon. The excuse (or the necessity) for these spacious galleries lies in the encouragement given in France to public art-to decorative paintings on a great scale for the embellishment of museums and town halls; such paintings as hardly exist in England, and for which the Academy rooms could not afford space, but which form no inconsiderable proportion of the contents of the annual Salon. It must be admitted, however, that French artists are somewhat demoralized, by the knowledge of the great space at their disposal at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, into painting a good many pictures on a larger scale than their subjects will justify. For there is a certain fitness of relation between subject and scale in a picture. It is a mistake to paint lifesize a mere domestic incident of no great significance, and in which much of the canvas is occupied by the representation of objects of subordinate interest. There are two very clever pictures prominent in the present Academy, Mr. G. Harcourt's The Tracing, and Mr. Campbell Taylor's Bedtime, which certainly do not justify their scale, unless it is replied that they are practically and in intention portrait groups, which would put them in another category. Otherwise they are genre, and all that is in them might very well have been painted half the size at most. Mr. Harcourt's picture, with the lady standing against the light of the window, and turning her head to look down at her children, is a very good one: there is an ease and grace of line about the principal figure, and the children are charming; but these qualities might have been equally well presented on a smaller expanse of canvas. To adapt Ben Jonson a little In small proportions we just beauties see, And in small frames pictures may perfect be. And it is not only a question of the significance of the subject, but of the value of the objects painted and the degree in which they are worth elabo ration. Sir L. Alma-Tadema prefers to paint on a small scale, but his "little" picture of this year, the interior of a Roman bath, would very well have borne to be painted on a larger scale. There are two nude figures (or as much of them as is seen above the water) in the foreground, and other figures in the beautiful classic costume, and details of Roman architecture; all these are better worth painting on a large scale than modern dresses and carpets and furniture. There is no great picture in this year's Academy, no predominating work which is admittedly the picture of the year. This is so far a loss; but, taken as a whole, it is an interesting exhibition, above the average-at least as far as the pictures are concerned. There is some interest in the fact that one or two artists have broken new ground. Mr. David Murray surprises us by a sea-and a very good one. broad and free in style and excellent in drawing-a "seascape" much to be preferred to his rather ragged and uncomposed landscapes. Mr. Colton, hitherto known as a fine sculptor of the human figure, exhibits a powerful lifesize study of a tiger. There is one decorative mural painting by Mr. Sargent; a semicircular lunette rerpesenting Israel and the Law, surrounded by a Hebrew inscription which presumably gives the key to the subject, and might as well have been translated in the Catalogue for the benefit of the Gentile visitor. It is painted in a heated pinky tone which is not agreeable in its present position, but we do not know for what conditions of lighting and surroundings it may have been intended. In a decorative sense it is defective, in that the composition of the group does not properly fill the semicircular space, and shows an irregular lumpy outline leaving shapeless intervals between it and the border line, with an effect uagracious to the eye. |