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venturing daily, for luncheon, just down into Bourbon street, to the Christian Women's Exchange. Now, by all the laws of fortune he should in that time have seen in there, at least once or twice a day already, the face he was ever looking for. But he had not; nor did he to-day. He only saw, or thought he saw, the cashier - I should say the cashieress― glance crosswise at him with eyes that said:

"Fool; sneak; whelp; 'Cajun; our private detectives are watching you!"

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.

"Oh! wasn'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

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.

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THE HARDEST LOT.

O look upon the face of a dead friend
Is hard; but 't is not more than we can bear
If, haply, we can see peace written there,-
Peace after pain, and welcome so the end,
Whate'er the past, whatever death may send.

Yea, and that face a gracious smile may wear,
If love till death was perfect, sweet, and fair;
But there is woe from which may God defend:
To look upon our friendship lying dead,

While we live on, and eat, and drink, and sleep —
Mere bodies from which all the soul has fled

And that dead thing year after year to keep

Locked in cold silence in its dreamless bed:
There must be hell while there is such a deep.

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.

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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, the trustees came to overhaul his sketches, there 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

it and admit that Turner only sought, as was the case, chromatic relations which had no 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 "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

had such an awkward accident in it, insisted on my giving up the study, saying he would not stay in Chamonix for me to finish it. As I was his guest I complied with his wish, and we left the valley the next day.

This capriciousness is a characteristic of the man. In spite of the womanly tenderness of his nature, which is, when favorably moved, of a kindliness which measures no sacrifice, he is capable, under impulse, of treating a friend of one day with the most contemptuous aversion on the next, for some whim no more important than that which drove us out of Chamonix.

There is in his character a curious form of individuality so accentuated and so imperious that it produces in him the sense of infallibility. He speaks of his opinions not as matters of opinion but as positive knowledge; yet in personal intercourse I found nothing of the dogmatism which is so notable a feature in his writing. He listened to all objections, and often acknowledged, during discussion, the inconsequence of his conclusions; and during the long and vigorous debates which occupied our evenings he not infrequently admitted error, but on the next day held the old ground as firmly as ever. His intellect, with all its power and intensity, is of the purely feminine type. The love of purity; the quick, kindly, and unreasoning impulse; the uncompromising selfsacrifice when the feeling is on him, and the illogical self-assertion in reaction when it has passed; the passionate admiration of power; the waywardness and often inexplicable fickleness, all are there. But behind all these feminine traits there is the no less feminine quality of passionate love of justice, flecked, on occasions of personal implication, with acts of great injustice; there is a general inexhaustible tenderness, with occasional instances of absolute cruelty. Any present judgment of him as a whole is difficult if not impossible, because there are in him several different individuals, and the perspective in which we now see them makes of his position, as an art-teacher, the dominant element of his personality; whereas, in my persuasion, his art-teaching is in his own nature and work subordinate to his moral and humanitarian ideals. He always saw art through a religious medium, and this made him, from the beginning, strain his system of teaching and criticism to meet the demand of direct truth to nature, the roots of his enthusiasm and reverence being not in art but in nature and in her beneficial influence on humanity. A little incident of our Alpine summer will illustrate this view of his character better than all my appreciations. During our stay at Geneva he had some mountain drawing to do at the Perte du Rhône, and asked me to drive

down with him. Not far from the point of view which he had selected was a group of wretched dwellings miscalled cottages but which in America we call shanties, not the picturesque wall-and-thatch structures which the word cottage calls up in England, but built of boards, shabby without being picturesque, and to my American notions only capable of association with poverty and discomfort. Ruskin asked me to draw them while he was drawing the mountains. The subject was anything but attractive or pictorial, and though it should have been enough for me that he wished me to draw it carefully, I only obeyed my own feeling, and made a careless ten-minutes' pencil drawing, all the thing was worth to me. When Ruskin drove up to take me in on the way back to Geneva and saw what I had done, he was, and I must say with good reason, offended at the indifferent way in which I had complied with his request, and after a few reproachful words threw himself back in the carriage in a sullen temper. I replied that the subject did not interest me, and that the principal feeling I had in looking at it was that it must be a wretched home for human beings and promised more fevers than anything else, and that, in short, I did not think it worth drawing. Nothing more was said by either of us until we had driven half-way back to Geneva, when he broke out with, "You are right, Stillman, about those cottages; your way of looking at them was nobler than mine, and now, for the first time in my life, I understand how anybody can live in America." It has always seemed to me that this was a true epitome of the man's nature,- first the aesthetic, outside view of the matter; then the humanitarian, overpowering it; the womanish pettishness, and the generous admission of his error when seen; and after this confession his greater cordiality to me-for he always valued more any one who brought him a new idea, though he often broke friendship with those who differed from him too strongly.

Besides this absorbing passion for the spiritual ideal, the mental constitution whose compass was set to the immovable pole of the most exalted morality, he had a curious facility for seeing things as he wished to. He saw through his feelings and prepossessions, and even looking at nature he only saw certain things, and those in general through his predisposition. So he always held Turner true although the. thing he saw was false. In one drawing where Turner has given the full moon rising in cool night-mists at the left of the picture and the sun setting golden at the right, Ruskin explains it as intended to be two pictures. He praises Turner for mingled effects of sunlight and moonlight when he ought to know

that the full moon will cast no shadow until the sun has set nearly or quite an hour. Turner continually puts figures in full light in the foreground of a picture which has the sun setting in the view, the shadows on the figures being consequently on the side nearest the sun, yet Ruskin has never admitted the painter's indifference to the poets of nature.

II.

To the world at large Ruskin's reputation, even as an art critic, rests on the first volume of his "Modern Painters." Very few people have read the second volume, and fewer still the whole five, though the early editions have been sold and a reprint of one thousand since. Of this first volume, what most impressed the public was not the soundness of his views of art, of which it could not judge at all, or his knowledge of nature, of which it could judge but little, but his eloquence, his magnificent diction. Take for instance the following from the comparison of Turner with Poussin, which every reader of the book will remember as what is called a " word picture" of extraordinary power:

the attainments of Turner it is as exaggerated for one as it is unfair for the other; for the effects there described are no more in the power of color than in the feeling of either of those artists. It is not nature-painting at all; neither true to the sense nor to the details of nature. As mastery of the English language I shall not attempt to criticise it, but as statement of what is to be seen in nature or rendered in art it bears about the same relation to the most ideal and orchestral effects of Turner as those do to sober nature. I have put in italics certain expressions to which I ask the grave critical attention of the reader. I leave out the singular topographical inaccuracies which, in a work devoted to truth of nature, ought to claim some attention, but in such a work we may ask the sober meaning of such expressions as "Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle"; "Every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life, each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald"; the rocks "dark though flushed with scarlet lichen-casting their quiet shadows [are shadows ever anything but quiet?] across its restless radiance" [why restless radiance except, like much else in the passage, for alliteration ?]. The color epithets, to an artist, only express a crudity of pigment as unlike Turner as nature; the " arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks" ... "silver flakes of orange spray [dreamed of from some other locality, for neither exists at Aricia] tossed into the air around them ... into a thousand separate of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as stars"; and "every separate leaf," show as with rain. I cannot call it color, it was conflagration. great contempt for the possibilties of painting Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of in the rendering of detail for the human eye as God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley, indifference to the aims of landscape painting, in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life, each, as it turned to reflect either by Poussin or Turner. The "Purple, or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the God's tabernacle," is apocalyptic, not naturalgreen vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed istic, and the entire passage, when we consider along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange that it is part of an essay intended to advocate spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the the close adherence to the facts of nature in gray walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fad- landscape painting, can only be put aside as ing and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted or let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the passing legitimate criticism or justifiable comgolden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as parison. It is safe to say that of a thousand the foliage broke and closed above it as sheet light landscape painters and amateurs habituated ning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless masses to look at nature, taking the best and the most of dark rock. dark though flushed with scarlet lichen -casting their quiet shadows across its restless radi- trivial, not one who had passed by Aricia would ance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble recognize as fact a single characteristic of the hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, and, over all, description by Ruskin. I know the place betthe multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to illu- ter than I do New York, and am confident in mine, were seen in fathomless intervals, between the saying that neither in the ensemble nor in the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines passing detail is there anything there which Ruskin to lose themselves in the last white, blinding lustre of imagines he saw. Much is mere sound, allitthe measureless line, where the Campagna melted into eration which is in place in poetry but not in art criticism, and much only the expression of vague imaginings far less like nature than the great scenic compositions of John Martin.

"But as I climbed the long slopes of the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano, and the graceful darkness of its ilex grove rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper sky gradually flush ing through the last fragments of rain-cloud in deep, palpitating azure, half ether and half dew. The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of entangled and tall foliage,

whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure

the blaze of the sea."

Magnificent this is as rhetoric, but if intended to show the shortcomings of Poussin or

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