their intercourse he had scarcely twice looked rite's. The hair, arranged differently, and far her full in the face. Afterward she had simply more effectively than he had ever seen it on become in memory the exponent of an ideal. Marguerite's head, seemed even more luxuriHe found himself often, now, asking himself, ous than hers. There was altogether a finer Why are my eyes always looking for her? dignity in this one's carriage than in that of Should I, actually, know her, were I to see the little maid of the inn. And see, now,— her on this sidewalk or in this street-car? And now!—as she turns her head to glance into while still asking himself these silent questions, this shop window! It is, and it is n't, it is n't and what does he do one day but fall-to all intents it is, and-no, no, it is not Marguerite! It is like and purposes, at least-fall in love-pell-mell her, in profile; singularly like, yet far beyond -up to the eyebrows with another girl! her; the nose a little too fine, and a certain sad firmness about the mouth and eyes, as well as he could see in the profile,- but profiles are so deceptive,- that he had never seen in Marguerite. Do you remember Uncle Remus's story of Brer Rabbit with the bucket of honey inverted on him? It was the same way with Claude. "He wa' n't des only bedobble wid it, he wuz des kiver'd." It happened thus: An artist friend whose studio was in Carondelet street, just off Canal, had rented to him for a workroom a little loft above the studio. It had one window looking out over roofs and chimney-pots upon the western sky, and another down into the studio itself. It is right to say friend, although there was no acquaintanceship until it grew out of this arrangement. The artist, a single man, was much Claude's senior; but Claude's taste for design and love of work, and the artist's grave sincerity, simplicity, and cordiality of character - he was a Spaniard with a Spaniard's perfect courtesy made a mutual regard, which only a common diffidence prevented from running into comradeship. One Saturday afternoon Claude, thirsting for outdoor air, left his aerie for a short turn in Canal street. The matinée audiences were just out, and the wide balcony-shaded sidewalks were crowded with young faces and bright attires. Claude was crossing the "neutral ground" toward Bourbon street, when he saw coming out of it a young man who might be a Creole, and two young girls in light and what seemed to him extremely beautiful dresses, especially that of the farther one, who, as the three turned with buoyant step into Canal street to their left, showed for an instant the profile of her face, and then only her back. Claude's heart beat consciously, and he hurried to lessen the distance between them. He had seen no more than the profile, but for the moment in which he saw it it seemed to be none other than the face of Marguerite! XIII. THE CHASE. CLAUDE came on close behind. No; now he could see his mistake,- it was not she. But he could not regret it. This was Marguerite repeated, yet transcended. The stature was just perceptibly superior. The breadth and grace of these shoulders were better than Margue "But how do I know? What do I know?" he asked himself, still following on. "The Marguerite I know is but a thing of my dreams, and this is not that Marguerite of my actual sight, to whom I never gave a word or smile or glance that calls for redemption. This is the Marguerite of my dreams." Claude was still following, when without any cause that one could see the young man of the group looked back. He had an unpleasant face; it showed a small offensive energy that seemed to assert simply him and all his against you and all yours. His eyes were black, piercing, and hostile. They darted their glances straight into Claude's. Guilty Claude! dogging the steps of ladies on the street! He thrilled with shame, turned a corner into Exchange Alley, walked a little way down it, came back, saw the great crowd coming and going, vehicles of all sorts hurrying here and there; ranks of street-cars waiting their turns to start to all points of the compass; sellers of peanuts and walking-sticks, buyers of bouquets, acquaintances meeting or overtaking one another, nodding bonnets, lifted hats, faces, faces, faces; but the one face was gone. Caught, Claude? And by a mere face? The charge is too unkind. Young folly, yes, or old folly, may read goodness rashly into all beauty, or not care to read it in any. But it need not be so. Upon the face of youth the soul within writes its confessions and promises; and when the warm pulses of young nature are sanctified by upward yearnings and a pure conscience, the soul that seeks its mate will seek that face which, behind and through all excellences of mere tint and feature, mirrors back the seeker's own faiths and hopes; and when that is found, that to such a one is beauty. Judge not; you never saw this face, fairer than Marguerite's, to say whether its beauty was mere face, or the transparent shrine of an equal nobility within. Besides, Claude would have fired up and denied the first word of the charge with unpleasant flatness. To be caught means to be in love; to be in love implies a wish and hope to marry, and these were just what Claude could not allow. May not a man, nevertheless, have an ideal of truth and beauty and look worshipfully upon its embodiment? Humph! His eyes sought her in vain not only on that afternoon, but on many following. The sun was setting every day later and later through the black lace-work of pecan-trees and behind low dark curtains of orange groves, yet he began to be more and more tardy each succeeding day in meeting his father under the river-side oaks of the Exposition grounds. Then, on the seventh day, he saw her again. 66 Now he was more confident than ever that this vision and he, except in dreams, had never spoken to each other. Yet the likeness was wonderful. But so, too, was the unlikeness. True, this time she only flashed across his sight-out of a bank, into a carriage where a very " American "-looking lady sat waiting for her, and was gone. But the bank; the carriage; that lady; those earlier companions, no, this could not be Marguerite. Marguerite would have been with her mother. Now, if one could see Madame Beausoleil's daughter with Madame Beausoleil at her side, to identify her and distinguish her from this flashing and vanishing apparition, it would clear away a trying perplexity. Why not be bold and call upon them where they were dwelling? But where? Their names were not in the directory. Now, inventive talent, do your best. "WELL!" said St. Pierre after a long silence. Claude and he were out on the swollen Mississippi pulling with steady leisure for the homeside shore, their skiff pointed half to and half from the boiling current. The sun was gone; a purple dusk wrapped each low bank; a steamboat that had passed up-stream was now, at the turning of the bend, only a cluster of soft red lights; Venus began to make a faint silvery pathway across the waters. St. Pierre had the forward seat, at Claude's back. The father looked with fond perplexity at the strong young shoulders swinging silently with his own, forward and backward in slow, monotonous strokes, and said again: "Well! Whass matter? Look like cat got yo' tongue. Makin' new mash-in?" Then in a low, dissatisfied tone "I reckon somet'in' mighty curious." He repeated the last three words in the Acadian speech: "Tcheuquechose bien tchurieux." "Yes," replied the son; "mighty strange. I tell you when we come at home.' He told all, recounted all his heart's longings, all his dreams, every least pang of selfreproach, the idealization of Marguerite, and the finding of that ideal incarnated in one who was and yet seemed not to be, or rather seemed to be and yet was not, Marguerite. Then he went on to reassure his father that this could never mean marriage, never mean the father's supplanting. A man could worship what he could never hope to possess. He would rather worship this than win such kind as he would dare woo. He said all these things in a very quiet way, with now and then a silent pause, and now and then a calm, self-contained tone in resuming; yet his sentences were often disconnected, and often were half soliloquy. Such were the only betrayals of emotion on either side until Claude began to treat -in the words just given-his father's own heart interests; then the father's eyes stood brimming full. But St. Pierre did not speak. From the first he had listened in silence, and he offered no interruption until at length Claude came to that part about the object of his regard being so far, so utterly beyond, his reach. Then "Stop! Dass all foolishness! You want her? You kin have her!" "Ah, papa! you dawn't awnstand! What I am?" "Ah, bah! What anybody is? What she is? She invanted bigger mash-in dan you? a mo' better corn-stubbl' destroyer and plant-corner?" He meant corn-planter. "She invant a mo' handier doubl'-action pea-vine rake? What she done, mak' her so gran'? Naw, sir! She look fine in de face, yass; and dass all you know. Well, dass all right; dass de 'Cajun way-pick 'em out by face. You begin 'Cajun way, for why you dawn't finish 'Cajun way? All you got do, you git good saddlehoss and ride. Bom-bye you see her, you ride behind her till you find where her daddy livin' at. Den you ride pas' yondah every day till fo', five days, and den you see de ole man come scrape friend' wid you. Den he hass you drop round, and fus' t'ing you know — adjieu la calége!" Claude did not dispute the point, though he hardly thought this case could be worked that way. He returned in silent thought to the question, how to find Madame Beausoleil. He tried the mail; no response. He thought of advertising; but that would never do. Imagine: "If Madame Beausoleil, late of Vermillionville, will leave her address at this office, she will hear of something not in the least to her advantage." He could n't advertise. It was midday following the eve of his confession to his father. For the last eleven or twelve days-ever since he had seen that blessed apparition turn with the two young friends into Canal street out of Bourbon-he had been venturing daily, for luncheon, just down into Both rooms and the veranda were full of ladies and gentlemen, whose faces he dared not lift his eyes to look into. Yet even in that frame there suddenly came to him one of those happy thoughts that are supposed to be the inspirations of inventive genius. A pleasant little female voice near him said: "And apartments upstairs that they rent to ladies only!" Instantly the thought came that Marguerite and her mother might be living there. One more lump of bread, a final gulp of coffee, a short search for the waiter's check, and he stands at the cashier's desk. She makes change without looking at him or ceasing to tell a small hunchbacked spinster standing by about somebody's wedding. But suddenly she starts. stop! yes, I can! no, I can't! let 's see! yes, yes, yes, I can; I've got it; yes, there! I did n't think I had it." She turned again to Claude with sisterly confidence. "Excuse me for keeping you waiting; have n't I met you at the Y. M. C. A. sociable? Well, you must excuse me, but I was sure I had. Of course I did n't if you was never there; but you know in a big city like this you 're always meeting somebody that 's ne-e-early somebody else that you know-oh! did n't you ask me? — oh, yes! Madame Beausoleil! Yes, she lives here, she and her daughter. But she's not in. Oh, I'm sorry! Neither of them is here. She's not in the city; has n't been for two weeks. They're coming back; we're expecting them every day. She heard of the death of a relative down in Terrebonne somewhere. I wish they would come back; we miss them here; I judge they 're relatives of yours, if I don't mistake the resemblance; you seem to take after the daughter; wait a minute.” Some one coming up to pay looked at Claude to see what the daughter was like, and the young man slipped away, outblushing the night sky when the marshes are afire. The question was settled-settled the wrong way. He hurried on across Canal street. Marguerite had not been-so he had construed the inaccurate statement in the city for two weeks. Resemblances need delude him no longer. He went on into Carondelet street, and was drawing near the door and stairway leading to his friend's studio and his own little workroom above it, when suddenly from that very stairway and door issued she whom, alas! he might now no longer mistake for Marguerite, yet who, none the less for lessening hope, held him captive. (To be concluded.) "Oh! was n't that right? You gave me four bits, did n't you? And I gave you back two bits and a picayune, and—sir? Does Madame who? Oh, yes! I did n't understand you; I'm a little deaf on this side; scarlet fever when I was a little girl. I'm not the regular cashier; she's gone to attend the wedding of a friend. Just wait a moment, please, while I make change for these ladies. Oh, dear, ma'am! is that the smallest you 've got? I don't believe I can change that, ma'am. Yes-no George W. Cable. T THE HARDEST LOT. O look upon the face of a dead friend Is hard; but 't is not more than we can bear Yea, and that face a gracious smile may wear, While we live on, and eat, and drink, and sleep — And that dead thing year after year to keep Locked in cold silence in its dreamless bed: -- John White Chadwick. I. JOHN RUSKIN. the great majority of our race Turner is seen through the eyes of Ruskin, and Ruskin is only known as the eulogist of Turner. WAS sitting one afternoon with Longfellow, on the The conjunction leaves both misunderstood porch of the old house at by the general mind. Ruskin looks at the Cambridge, when the con- works of the great landscape painter much as versation turned on intel- the latter looked at nature,-not for what is lectual development, and in the thing looked at, but for the sentiments he referred to a curious phe- it awakens. The world's art does not present nomenon, of which he in- anything to rival Turner's in its defiance of stanced several cases, and which he compared nature. He used nature when it pleased him to the double stars, of two minds not personally to do so, but when it pleased him better he related but forming a binary system, revolving belied her with the most reckless audacity. simultaneously around each other and around He had absolutely no respect for truth. His some principle which they regarded in differ- color was the most splendid of impossibilities, ent lights. I do not remember his instances, and his topography like the geography of but that which at once came to my mind was dreams; yet Ruskin has spent a great deal the very interesting one of Turner and Ruskin. of his life in persuading himself and the The complementary relation of the great writer world that his color was scientifically correct, and the imaginative painter is one of the most and in hunting for the points of view from -indeed the most-interesting that I know in which he drew his compositions. His convicintellectual history: the one a master in all that tion that Turner was always doing his best, belongs to verbal expression but singularly if in a mysterious way, to tell the truth about deficient in the gifts of the artist, feeble in nature is invincible. Early in the period of drawing, with a most inaccurate perception of my acquaintance with him we had a vivacolor and no power of invention; the other cious discussion on this matter in his own the most stupendous of idealists, the most house; and to convince him that Turner was consummate master of color orchestration the quite indifferent as to matters of natural pheworld has ever seen, but so curiously devoid nomena, I called Ruskin's attention to the view of the gifts of language that he could hardly out of the window, which was of the Surrey hills, learn to write grammatically or coherently, a rolling country whose grassy heights were and when he spoke omitting so many words basking in a glorious summer sunlight and that often his utterances, like those of a child, backed by a pure blue sky, requesting him then required interpretation by one accustomed to have brought down from the room where it to his ways before a stranger could understand was hung a drawing by Turner in which a them. Ruskin is a man reared and molded similar effect was treated. The hill in nature in the straightest Puritanism, abhorring un- was, as it always will be if covered by vegecleanness of all kinds, generous to extrava- tation and under the same circumstances, disgance, moved by the noblest humanitarian tinctly darker than the sky; Turner's was impulses, morbidly averse to anything that relieved in pale yellow green against a deep partakes of sensuality, and responsive as a blue sky, stippled down to a delicious aërial young girl to appeals to his tenderness and profundity. Ruskin gave up the case in point, compassion. Turner was a miser; churlish; a but still clung to the general rule. In fact, satyr in his morals, not merely a sensualist, having begun his system of art teaching on but satisfied only by occasional indulgences the hypothesis that Turner's way of seeing in the most degrading debauchery; and even nature was scientifically the most correct that in his painting sometimes giving expression art knew, he had never been able to abandon to images so filthy that when, after his death, it and admit that Turner only sought, as was the trustees came to overhaul his sketches, there the case, chromatic relations which had no were many which they were obliged to destroy in regard for common decency. It is hardly possible to conceive of a more complete antithesis than that in the natures of these two, who turn, and will turn so long as English art and English letters endure, around the same center of art and each around the other. In fact, to more to do with facts of color than the music of Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" has to do with the emotions of the occasion on which it is played. His assumption of Turner's veracity is the corner-stone of his system, and its rejection would be the demolition of that system. His art criticism is radically and irretrievably wrong. No art can be gauged by its fidelity to nature unless we admit in that term the wider sense which makes nature of the human soul and all that is, the sense of music, the perception of beauty, the grasp of imagination, "the light that never was, on sea or land," as well as that which serves the lens of the photographer; and Ruskin's own work, his teaching in his classes, and his application of his own standards to all great work, show that he understands the term 66 fidelity to nature" to mean the adherence to physical facts, the scientific aspects of nature. Greek art he never has really sympathized with, nor at heart accepted as supreme, though years after he took the position he never has avowedly abandoned, he found that in Greek coinage there were artistic qualities of the highest refinement; but Watts has told me that he expressed his surprise that the artist could keep before him so ugly a thing as the Oxford Venus, a cast of which was in his studio, and that he pronounced the horse an animal devoid of all beauty. In my opinion he cares nothing for the plastic qualities of art, or for the human figure, otherwise than as it embodies humanity and moral dignity. The diverse criticisms he makes on Titian, Michael Angelo, and Raphael, put side by side with his notes on Holman Hunt, on George Leslie and Miss Thompson in the Royal Academy, and Miss Alexander's drawings, show his appreciation of figure art to be absolutely without any criterion of style or motive in figure painting, if this were not already apparent from his contradictions at different periods of his life. These are puzzling to the casual reader. When he says, in the early part of" Modern Painters," that the work of Michael Angelo in general, the Madonna di San Sisto, and some other works are at the height of human excellence, and later demolishes poor Buonarotti like a bad plaster cast, and sets Raphael down as a mere posturer and dexterous academician, one is at a loss to reconcile his opinions with any standard. The fact I believe to be that his early art education, which was in great part due to J. D. Harding, a painter of high executive powers and keen appreciation of technical abilities in the Italian painters, was in the vein of orthodox standards; that while under the influence of his reverence for his teachers he accepted the judgment which they, in common with most artists, have passed on the old masters; but that when left to himself, with no kind of sympathy with ideal figure art, nor, I believe, with any form of figure art as such, but with a passion for landscape, a curious enthusiasm for what is minute and intense in execution, and an over weening estimate of his own standards and opinions, he gradually lost all this vicarious appreciation and retained of his admiration of old art only what was in accordance with his own feelings, i. e., the intensity of moral and religious fervor, and, above all, anything that savored of mysticism, the ascetic and didactic-especially the art of the schools of religious passion. This was due to the profound devotional feeling which was the basis of his intellectual nature. He said to me once that he was a long time in doubt whether he should give himself to the church or to art. So far as the world is concerned I think he took the wrong road. In the church he might not have been, as his father hoped, a bishop, for his views have been too individual for church discipline, but I believe he would have produced a far greater and more beneficial effect on his age. As an art critic he has been like one writing on the sea-sands - his system and his doctrines of art are repudiated by every thoughtful artist I know. Art in certain forms touches him profoundly but only emotionally. Although he drew earnestly for years he never seemed to understand style in drawing, master as he is of style (sui generis) in language; his perception of color is so deficient that he appears to me unable to recognize the true optical color of any object; that is, its color in sunshine as distinguished from its color in shadow; and in painting from nature he is always best pleased with what is most like Turner. I painted or sketched with him during a summer in Switzerland, and therefore I do not speak from a moral consciousness. What he most admired in my work, and sought in his own, was excessive elaboration and photographic fidelity, and he did not easily apprehend the larger relations of the landscape. He used to wonder at my getting over the detail so fast; but he always got angry with the work when I reached a point where I found it necessary to bring the masses into relation according to my own ideas. At Chamonix I one day began a large study of the Mer de Glace from opposite the glacier, looking up it with the Aiguille de Dru in the center of the distance. The whole subject was rapidly laid in in general effect until it got down to the foreground, where I began finishing elaborately to his entire satisfaction, which continued for several days and until I pointed out to him a difficulty which it puzzled me to get over without violating the topographical fidelity of the study. There were several of the main lines of the distance which formed approximately radii from a point of no importance in the composition. He had not noticed it; but when I pointed it out he got into a state of vexation, and, declaring that nothing could be done with a subject which |
