Chapter III: High Art (5)

He next appears on Canal street, by and beyond the Clay Monument, with occasional pauses at clothiers', and buys his shirts at Moody's, as he has probably often sworn not to do, because of its annoyingly frequent posters everywhere. He enters jewelers' shops and examines trinkets--serpents with ruby eyes curled in gold on beds of golden leaves with emerald dews upon them; pearls, pear-shaped and tearlike, brought up by swart, glittering divers, seven fathom deep, at Tuticorin or in the Persian Gulf; rubies and sapphires mined in Burmese Ava, and diamonds from Borneo and Brazil. Is he choosing a bridal present? It looks so; but no, he selects a splendid, brilliant solitaire, for which he pays eight hundred dollars out of a plethoric purse, and also a finger-ring, diamond too, for two hundred and fifty dollars. The jewelers are polite, as the bankers were. He must be a large cotton-planter, one of a class with whom a fondness for jewels serves as a means of dozing away life in a kind of crystallization. He otherwise adorns his stately person, till he has a Sublime Porte indeed, the very vizier of a fairy tale glittering in barbaric gems and gold. His taste, to speak it mildly, is expressed rather than subdued--not to be compared with the quiet elegance of your husband or lover, madam or miss, but not unsuited to his showy style, for all that. As the crimson-purple, plume-like prince's feather has its own royal charm in Southern gardens beside the pale and placidlily, so these luxuriant adornments, do not misbecome his full and not too fleshy person. There is a certain harmony in the Oriental sumptuousness of his attire, like radiant sunsets, appropriate to certain styles of man and woman. Let us humble creatures be content to have our portraits done in crayon, but the colonel calls for the color-box.

So adorned and radiant, this variety of the American aloe floats into the charmed circle of New Orleans society--that lively, sparkling epitome and relic of the old régime. He has good letters and a fair name, and mingles in the Mystick Krewe, that curious club, possible nowhere else, that has raised mummery into the sphere of aesthetics. Perhaps he has worn the gray, perhaps the blue. It is only in the very arcana of exclusive passion it makes much difference. But gray or blue, or North or South in birth, he is in every essential a Southerner, as many, like S.S. Prentiss, curiously independent of nativity, are. He is well received and courteously entreated. He has his little suppers at Moreau's, and knows the ways of the place and names of the waiters. He has his promenades, his drives, his club visits, is seen everywhere--a brilliant convolvulus now, twining the espaliers of that Saracenic fabric of society; to speak architecturally, its very summer-house. He visits the opera and gives it his frank approval, but confesses a preference for the old plantation-melodies. He crushes through the meshes of the Creole dandies, not offensively, but as the law of his volume and momentum dictates, and they yield the _pas_ to his superior weight and metal. They are civil, and he is civil, but they do not like one another, for all that. That Zodiac passed, they continue their own summery orbit of charm and conquest. He tends toward the aureal spheres and the green and pleasant banks of issue. The colonel is not here for pleasure, though he takes a little pleasure, as is his way, seasonably; but he means business, and that several thirsty, eager cotton-houses of repute know.

Of course they know. It came in his letters and distills in the aroma of his talk. It may even have slipped into the personals of the _Pic_ and _Times_ that Colonel Beverage has taken Millefleur and Rottenbottom plantations on Red River, and is going extensively into the cultivation of the staple. The colonel is modest over this: "not extensively, no, but to the extent of his limited means." In the mean while he looks out for some sound, well-recommended cotton-house.

This means business. In the North the farmer raises his crop on his own capital, and turns it over unencumbered to the merchant for the public. The credit system prevails in the agriculture of the South, and brings another precarious element into the already hazardous occupation of cotton-growing. A new party appears in the cotton-merchant. He is not merely the broker, yielding the proceeds, less a commission, to the planter. Either, by hypothecation on advances made during the year, he secures a legal pre-emption in the crop, or, by initiatory contract, he becomes an actual partner of limited liability in the crop itself. He agrees to furnish so much cash capital at periods for the cultivation and securing of the crop, which is husbanded by the planter. The money for these advances he obtains from the banks; and hence it is that in every cotton-crop raised South there are three or more principals actually interested--the banker, the merchant and the planter. This condition of planting is almost invariable. Even the small farmer, whose crop is a few bags, is ground into it. In his case the country-side grocer and dealer is banker and merchant, and his advances the bare necessaries. In this blending of interests the curious partnership rises, thrives, labors and sometimes falls--the planter, as a rule, undermost in that accident.

The Millefleur and Rottenbottom plantations are famous, and a hand well over the crops raised under such shrewd, experienced management as that of Colonel Beverage is a stroke of policy. Therefore, as the bankers and jewelers have been polite, so now the cotton-merchants are civil; but the colonel is shy--an old bird and a game bird.

Shy, but not suspicious. He chooses his own time, and at an early day walks into the business-house of Negocier & Duthem. They are pleased to see the colonel in the way of business, as they have been in society, and the pleasure is mutual. As he expounds his plans they are more and more convinced that he is a plumy bird of much waste feather.

He has taken Rottenbottom and Millefleur, and is going pretty well into cotton. He thinks he understands it: he ought to. Then he has his own capital--an advantage, certainly. Some of his friends, So-and-so--running over commercial and bankable names easily--have suggested the usual co-operation with some reputable house, and an extension, but he believes He will stay within limits. He has five thousand dollars in cash he wishes to deposit with some good firm for the year's supplies. He believes that will be sufficient, and he has called to hear their terms. All this comes not at once, but here and there in the business-conversation.

The reader will perceive one strong bait carelessly thrown out by the auriferous or folliferous colonel--the five thousand dollars cash in hand. The immediate use of that is a strong incentive to the house. They covet the colonel's business: they think well of the proposed extension. Cotton is sure to be up, and under practical, experienced cultivation must yield a handsome fortune. The result is foreseen. The cotton-house and the colonel enter into the usual agreement of such transactions. The colonel leaves his five thousand dollars, and draws on that, and for as much more as may be necessary in securing the crop.

The commercial reader North who has had no dealings South will smile at the credulous merchant who entrusts his credit to such a full-blown, thirsty tropical pitcher-plant as the colonel, who carries childish extravagances in his very dress; but he will judge hastily. We have seen this gaudy efflorescence pass over the curiously-wrought enameled gold-work, opals, pearls and rubies, and adorn himself with solid diamonds. The careful economist North puts his superfluous thousands in government bonds, or gambles them away in Erie stocks, because he likes the increase of Jacob's speckled sheep. The Southerner invests his in diamonds because he likes show, and diamonds have a pretty steady market value. There is method, too, in the colonel's associations, and all his acquaintance is gilt-edged and bankable.

His business is now done, and he does not tarry, but wings his way to Millefleur and Rottenbottom, where he moults all his fine feathers. He goes into fertilizers, beginning with crushed cotton-seed and barnyard manure, if possible, before February is over. He follows the shovel-plough with a slick-jack, and plants, and then the labor begins to fail him. He talks about importing Chinese, and writes about it in the local paper. He is sure it will do, as he is positive in all his opinions. He is true pluck, and tries to make new machinery make up for deficient labor. He buys "bull-tongues," "cotton-shovels," "fifteen-inch sweeps," "twenty-inch sweeps," "team-ploughs with seven-inch twisters," and a "finishing sweep of twenty-six inches." He hears of other inventions, and orders them. The South is flooded with a thousand quack contrivances now, about as applicable to cotton-raising as a pair of nut-crackers; but the colonel buys them. He is going to dispense with the hoe. That is the plan; and by that plan of furnishing a large plantation with new tools before Lent is over the five thousand dollars are gone. But he writes cheerfully. It is his nature to be sanguine, and to hope loudly, vaingloriously; and he writes it honestly enough to his merchant--and draws. The labor gets worse and worse. In the indolent summer days the negro, careless, thriftless, ignorant, works only at intervals. Perhaps the June rise catches him, and there is a heavy expense in ditching and damming to save the Rottenbottom crop. Maybe the merchant hears of the army-worm and is alarmed, but the colonel writes back assuring letters that it is only the grasshopper, and the grasshopper has helped more than hurt--and draws. Then possibly the army-worm comes sure enough, and cripples him. But he keeps up his courage--and draws. The five thousand dollars appear to have been employed in digging or building a sluice through which a constant current of currency flows from the city to Rottenbottom and Millefleur. The merchant has gone into bank, and the tide flows on. At last the planter writes: "The most magnificent crop ever raised on Red River, just waiting for the necessary hands to gather it in!" Of course the necessary sums are supplied, and at last the crop gets to market. It finds the market low, and declining steadily week by week. The banks begin to press: money is tight, as it is now while I write. The crop is sacrificed, for the merchant cannot wait, and some fine morning the house of Negocier & Duthem is closed, and Colonel Beverage is bankrupt.

And both are ruined? No. We will suppose the business-house is old and reputable: the banks are obliging and creditors prudently liberal, and by and by the firm resumes its old career. As for the colonel, the reader sees that to ruin him would be an absolute contradiction of nature. His friends or relations give him assistance, or he sells his diamonds, and soon you meet him at the St. Charles, as blooming, sanguine and splendiferous as ever. No, he cannot be ruined, but his is not an infrequent episode in the life of a Southern Planter.

WILL WALLACE HARNEY.

* * * * *

BABES IN THE WOOD.

I had two little babes, a boy and girl--
Two little babes that are not with me now:
On one bright brow full golden fell the curl--
The curl fell chestnut-brown on one bright brow.

I like to dream of them that some soft day,
Whilst wandering from home, their fitful feet
Went heedlessly through some still woodland way
Where light and shade harmoniously meet;

And that they wandered deeper and more deep
Into the forest's fragrant heart and fair,
Till just at evenfall they dropped asleep,
And ever since they have been resting there.

After their willful wandering that day
Each is so tired it does not wake at all,
Whilst over them the boughs that sigh and sway
Conspire to make perpetual evenfall.

And I, that must not join them, still am blest,
Passionately, though this poor heart grieves;
For memories, like birds, at my behest,
Have covered them with tender thoughts, like leaves.

EDGAR FAWCETT.

MY CHARGE ON THE LIFE-GUARDS.

Now that our little international troubles about consequential damages and the like are happily settled, and there is no danger that my revelations will augment them in any degree, I think I may venture to give the particulars of an affair of honor which I once had with a gigantic member of Her Britannic Majesty's household troops.

My guardian had a special veneration for England in general and for Oxford in particular, and I was brought up and sent to Yale with the full understanding that St. Bridget's, Oxon., was the place where I was to be "finished." I left Yale at the end of Junior year and crossed the ocean in the crack steamer of the then famous Collins line. I do not believe any young American ever had a more favorable introduction to England than I had, and the wonder is that, considering the philo-Anglican atmosphere in which I was educated, I did not become a thorough-paced renegade. I was, however, blessed with a tolerably independent spirit, and kept my nationality intact throughout my university course.

Like Tom Brown, I felt myself drawn to the sporting set, and, as I was always an adept at athletics, soon won repute as an oarsman, and was well satisfied to be looked upon as the Yankee champion sundry amateur rowing-and boxing-matches, as well as in the lecture-room. Of course, I was the mark for no end of good-natured chaff about my nationality, but was nearly always able, I believe, to sustain the honor of the American name, and so at length graduated in the "firsts" as to scholarship, and enjoyed the distinguished honor of pulling number four in the "'Varsity eight" in our annual match with Cambridge on the Thames. Moreover, I stood six feet in my stockings, had the muscle of a gladiator, and was physically the equal of any man at Oxford.

After the race was over my special cronies hung about London for a few days, usually making that classical "cave" of Evans's a rendezvous in the evening. Two or three young officers of the Guards were often with us, and one night, when the talk had turned, as it often did, on personal prowess, the superb average physique of their regiment was duly lauded by our soldier companions. At length one of them remarked, in that aggravatingly superior tone which some Englishmen assume, that any man in his troop could handle any two of the then present company. This provoked a general laugh of incredulity, and two or three of our college set turned to me with--"What do you say to that, Jonathan?"

"Nonsense!" said I. "I'll put on the gloves with the biggest fellow among them, any day."

This somewhat democratic readiness to spar with a private soldier led to remarks which I chose to consider insular, if not insolent, and I replied, supporting the principle of Yankee equality, until, losing my temper at something which one of the ensigns said, I delivered myself in some such fashion as this: "Well, gentlemen, I'm only one Yankee among many Englishmen, but I will bet a hundred guineas, and put up the money, that I will tumble one of those mighty warriors out of his saddle in front of the Horse Guards, and ride off on his horse before the guard can turn out and stop me."

Of course my bet was instantly taken by the officers, but my friends were so astounded at my rashness that I found no backers. However, my blood was up, and, possibly because Evans's bitter beer was buzzing slightly in my head, I booked several more bets at large odds in my own favor. As the hour was late, we separated with an agreement to meet and arrange details on the following day, keeping the whole affair strictly secret meanwhile.

I confess that my feelings were not of the pleasantest as I sat at my late London breakfast somewhere about noon the next day, and I was fain to admit to my special friend that I had put myself in an awkward, if not an unenviable, position. However, I was in for it, and being naturally of an elastic temperament, began to cast about for a cheerful view of my undertaking. In the course of the day preliminaries were arranged and reduced to writing with all the care which Englishmen practice in such affairs of "honor." I only stipulated that I should be allowed to use a stout walking-stick in my encounter; that I should be kept informed as to the detail for guard; that I should be freely allowed to see the regiment at drill and in quarters; and that I should select my time of attack within a fortnight, giving a few hours' notice to all parties concerned, so as to ensure their presence as witnesses.

Every one who has ever visited London has seen and admired the gigantic horsemen who sit on mighty black steeds, one on either side of the archway facing Whitehall, and who are presumed at once to guard the commander-in-chief's head-quarters and to serve as "specimen bricks" of the finest cavalry corps in the world. Splendid fellows they are! None of them are under six feet high, and many of them are considerably above that mark. They wear polished steel corselets and helmets, white buck-skin trowsers, high jack-boots, and at the time of which I write their arms consisted of a brace of heavy, single-barreled pistols in holsters, a carbine and a sabre. The firearms were, under ordinary circumstances, not loaded, and the sabre was held at a "carry" in the right hand. This last was the weapon against which I must guard, and I accordingly placed a traveling cap and a coat in the hands of a discreet tailor, who sewed steel bands into the crown of one and into the shoulders of the other, in such a way as afforded very efficient protection against a possible downward cut.

Besides attending to these defensive preparations, I at once looked about for a competent horseman with military experience who could give me some practical hints as to encounters between infantry and cavalry, and, singularly enough, was thrown in with that gallant young officer who rode into immortality in front of the Light Brigade at Balaklava a few years afterward. I learned that he was a superb horseman, was down upon the English system of cavalry training, and was using pen and tongue to bring about a change. A sudden inspiration led me to take him into my confidence, as the terms of our agreement permitted me to do. He caught the idea with enthusiasm. What an argument it would be in favor of his new system if a mere civilian unhorsed a Guardsman trained after the old fashion! For a week he drilled me more or less every day in getting him off his horse in various ways, and I speedily became a proficient in the art, he meanwhile gaining some new ideas on the subject, which were duly printed in his well-known book.

Well, to make my story short, I gave notice to interested parties on the tenth day, put on my steel-ribbed cap and my armor-plated coat, and with stick in hand walked over to a hairdresser's with whom I had previously communicated, had my complexion darkened to a Spanish olive, put on a false beard, and was ready for service. I had arranged with this tonsorial artist, whose shop was in the Strand near Northumberland House, that he should be prepared to remove these traces of disguise as speedily as he had put them on, and that I should leave a stylish coat and hat in his charge, to be donned in haste should occasion require. I next engaged two boys to stand opposite Northumberland House, and be ready to hold a horse. These boys I partially paid beforehand, and promised more liberal largess if they did their duty. Preliminaries having been thus arranged, I strolled down Whitehall, feeling very much as I did years afterward when I found myself going into action for the first time in Dixie.

It was early afternoon on a lovely spring day. The Strand was a roaring stream of omnibuses and drays, carriages were beginning to roll along the drives leading to Rotten Row, and all London was in the streets. I was assured that at this hour I should find a big but father clumsy giant on post; and there he was, sure enough, sitting like a colossal statue on his coal-black charger, the crest of his helmet almost touching the keystone of the arch under which he sat, his accoutrements shining like jewels, and he looking every inch a British cavalryman. I walked past on the opposite side of Whitehall, meeting, without being recognized, all my aiders and abettors in this most heinous attack on Her Majesty's Guards. I then crossed the street and took a good look at my man. He and his companion-sentry under the other arch were aware of officers in "mufti" on the opposite sidewalk, and kept their eyes immovably to the front. Evidently nothing much short of an earthquake could cause either to relax a muscle. The little circle of admiring beholders which is always on hand inspecting these splendid horsemen was present, of course, with varying elements, and I had to wait a few minutes until a small number of innocuous spectators coincided with the aphelion of the periodical policeman.

It was not a pleasant thing to contemplate that tower of polished leather, brass and steel, with a man inside of it some forty pounds heavier than I, and think that in a minute or so we two should be engaged in a close grapple, whose termination involved considerable risk for me physically as well as pecuniarily. However, there was, in addition to the feeling of apprehension, a touch of elation at the thought that I, a lone Yankee, was about to beard the British lion in his most formidable shape, almost under the walls of Buckingham Palace.

I looked my antagonist carefully over, deciding several minor points in my mind, and then at a favorable moment stepped quietly within striking distance, and delivered a sharp blow with my stick on his left instep, as far forward as I could without hitting the stirrup. The man seemed to be in a sort of military trance, for he never winced. Quick as thought, I repeated the blow, and this time the fellow fairly yelled with rage, astonishment and pain. I have since made up my mind that his nerve-fibre must have been of that inert sort which transmits waves of sensation but slowly, so that the perception of the first blow reached the interior of his helmet just about as the second descended. At all events, he jerked back his foot, and somehow, between the involuntary contraction of his flexor muscles from pain and the glancing of my stick, his foot slipped from the stirrup. This, as I had learned from my instructor, was a great point gained, and in an instant I had him by the ankle and by the top of his jack-boot, doubling his leg, at the same time heaving mightily upward.

As I gave my whole strength to the effort I was dimly aware of screams and panic among the nursery--maids and children who were but a moment before my fellow-spectators. At the same time I caught the flash of the Guardsman's sabre as he cut down at me after the fashion prescribed in the broadsword exercise. Fortune, however, did not desert me. My antagonist had not enough elbow-room, and his sword-point was shivered against the stone arch overhead, the blade descending flatways and harmlessly upon my well-protected shoulder just as, with a final effort, I tumbled him out his saddle.

The recollection of the ludicrous figure which that Guardsman cut haunts me still. His pipeclayed gloves clutched wildly at holster and cantle as he went over. Down came the gleaming helmet crashing upon the pavement, and with a calamitous rattle and bang the whole complicated structure of corselet, scabbard, carbine, cross-belts, spurs and boots went into the inside corner of the archway, a helpless heap.

That started the horse. The noble animal had stood my assault as steadily as if he had been cast in bronze, but precisely such an emergency as this had never been contemplated in his training, as it had not in that of his master, and he now started forward rather wildly. I had my hand on the bridle before he had moved a foot, and swung myself half over his back as he dashed across the sidewalk and up Whitehall. The Guards' saddles are very easy when once you are in them, and I had reason, temporarily at least, to approve the English style of riding with short stirrups, for I readily found my seat, and ascertained that I could touch bottom with my toes. As I left the scene of my victory behind me I heard the guards turning out, and caught a glimpse as of all London running in my direction, but by the time that I had secured the control of my horse I had distanced the crowd, and as we entered the Strand we attracted comparatively little notice. In driving, the English turn out to the left instead of to the right, as is the custom here, and I was obliged to cross the westward-bound line of vehicles before I could fall in with that which would bring me to my boys. I decided to make a "carom" of it, and nearly took the heads off a pair of horses, and the pole off the omnibus to which they were attached, as I dashed through. Turning to the right, I soon lost the torrent of invective hurled after me by the driver and conductor of the discomfited 'bus, and in less than two minutes--which seemed to me an age, for the pursuit was drawing near--I reached my boys, dropped them a half sov. apiece, which I had ready in my hand, and bolted for my hairdresser's, the boys leading the horse in the opposite direction, as previously ordered.

It was none too soon, for as I ran up stairs I saw three or four policemen running toward the horse, and there was a gleam of dancing plumes and shining helmets toward Whitehall. My false beard and complexion were changed with marvelous rapidity, and, assuming my promenade costume, I sauntered down stairs and out upon the sidewalk in time to see the whole street jammed with a crowd of excited Britons, while the recaptured horse was turned over to the Guardsmen, and the two boys were marched off to Bow street for examination before a magistrate.

A private room and an elaborate dinner at the United Service Club closed the day; and I must admit that my military friends swallowed their evident chagrin with a very good grace. Of course I was told that I could not do it again, which I readily admitted; and that there was not another man in the troop whom I could have unhorsed--an assertion which I as persistently combated. The affair was officially hushed up, and probably not more than a few thousand people ever heard of it outside military circles.

How I escaped arrest and punishment to the extent of the law I did not know for many years, for the duke of Wellington, who was then commander-in-chief, had only to order the officers concerned under arrest, and I should have been in honor bound to come forward with a voluntary confession.

My giant was sent for to the old duke's private room the day after his overthrow, and questioned sharply by the adjutant, who, with pardonable incredulity, suspected that bribery alone could have brought about so direful a catastrophe. The duke was from the first convinced of the soldier's, honesty and bravery, and presently broke in upon the adjutant's examination with--"Well, well! speak to me now. What have you to say for yourself?"

"May it please yer ludship," said the undismayed soldier, "I've never fought a civilian sence I 'listed, an' yer ludship will bear me witness that there's nothing in the cavalry drill about resisting a charge of foot when a mon's on post at the Horse Guards."

This speech was delivered with the most perfect sincerity and sobriety, and although it reflected upon the efficiency of the army under the hero of Waterloo, the Iron Duke was so much impressed by the affair that he sent word to Lieutenant-Colonel Varian, commanding the regiment, not to order the man any punishment whatever, but to see that his command was thereafter trained in view of possible attacks, even when posted in front of army head-quarters.

CHARLES L. NORTON.

PAINTING AND A PAINTER.

Charles V. once said, "Titian should be served by Caesar;" and Michael Angelo, we read, was treated by Lorenzo de' Medici "as a son;" Raphael, his contemporary, was great enough to revere him, and thank God he had lived at the same time. In England, in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Spain at this day, the poet and the painter stand hedged about by the divinity of their gifts, and the people are proud to recognize their kingship.

Has "Reverence, that angel of the world," as Shakespeare beautifully says, forgot to visit America? Or must we consider ourselves less capable yet of delicate appreciation, such as older nations possess? Or are we over-occupied in gaining possession of material comforts and luxuries, and so forget to revere our poets and painters till it is too late, and the curtain has fallen upon their unobtrusive and often struggling earthly career? What a millennium will have arrived when we learn to be as _faithful_ to our love as we are sincere!

Questions like these have been asked also in times preceding ours. Alfred de Musset wrote upon this subject in 1833, in Paris: "There are people who tell you our age is preoccupied, that men no longer read anything or care for anything. Napoleon was occupied, I think, at Beresina: he, however, had his _Ossian_ with him. When did Thought lose the power of being able to leap into the saddle behind Action? When did man forget to rush like Tyrtaeus to the combat, a sword in one hand, the lyre in the other? Since the world still has a body, it has a soul."

Monsieur Charles Blanc writes: "In order to have an idea of the importance of the arts, it is enough to fancy what the great nations of the world would be if the monuments they have erected to their faiths, and the works whereon they have left the mark of their genius, were suppressed from history. It is with people as with men--after death only the emanations of their mind remain; that is to say, literature and art, written poems, and poems inscribed on stone, in marble or in color."

The same writer, in his admirable book, _Grammaire des arts du dessin,_ from which we are tempted to quote again and again, says: "The artist who limits himself simply to the imitation of Nature reaches only _individuality_: he is a slave. He who interprets Nature sees in her happy qualities; he evolves _character_ from her; he is master. The artist who idealizes her discovers in her or imprints upon her the image of _beauty_: this last is a great master.... Placed between Nature and the ideal, between what is and what must be, the artist has a vast career before him in order to pass from the reality he sees to the beauty he divines. If we follow him in this career, we see his model transform itself successively before his eyes.... But the artist must give to these creations of his soul the imprint of life, and he can only find this imprint in the individuals Nature has created. The two are inseparable--the type, which is a product of thought, and the individual, which is a child of life."

With this excellent analysis before us, we will recall one by one some of the best-known and most interesting works of W.M. Hunt, a painter who now holds a prominent place among the artists of America. We will try to discover by careful observation if the high gifts of Verity and Imagination, the sign and seal of the true artist, really belong to him: if so, where these qualities are expressed, and what value we should set upon them.

First, perhaps, for those readers remote from New England who may never have seen any pictures by this artist, a few words should be said by way of describing some characteristics of his work and the limitations of it; which limitations are rather loudly dwelt upon by connoisseurs and lovers of the popular modern French school. Artists discern these limitations of course more keenly even than others, but their tribute to verity and ideal beauty as represented by this painter is too sincere to allow caviling to find expression. This limitation to which we refer causes Mr. Hunt to allow _ideal suggestions_, rather than pictures, to pass from his studio, and makes him cowardly before his own work. It recalls in a contrary sense that saying of the sculptor Puget: "The marble trembles before me." Mr. Hunt trembles before his new-born idea. His swift nature has allowed him in the first hour of work to put into his picture the tenderness or rapture, the unconscious grace or tempestuous force, which he despaired at first of ever being able to express. In the flush of success he stops: he has it, the idea; the chief interest of the subject is portrayed before him; the delicate presence (and what can be more delicate than the thoughts he has delineated?) is there, and may vanish if touched in a less fortunate moment. But is this lack of fulfillment in the artist entirely without precedent or parallel? Had not Sir Joshua Reynolds a studio full of young artists who "finished off" his pictures? Were not the very faces themselves painted with such rapidity and want of proper method as to drop off, on occasion, entirely from the canvas, as in case of the boy's head, in being carried through the street? Hunt is of our own age, and would scorn the suggestion of having a hand or a foot painted for him, as if it were a matter of small importance what individual expression a hand or a foot should wear; but who can tell for what future age he has painted the wise, abrupt, kind, persistent, simple, strong old Judge in his Yankee coat; or the genial, resolute, hopeful, self-sacrificing governor of Massachusetts; and the Master of the boys, with his keen, loving, uncompromising face? These are pictures that, when children say, "Tell us about the Governor who helped Massachusetts bring her men first into the field during our war," we may lead them up before and reply, "He was this man!" So also with the portraits of the Judge, of the Master of the boys, of the old man with clear eyes and firm mouth, and that sweet American girl standing, unconscious of observation, plucking at the daisy in her hat and guessing at her fate.

Hurry, impatience and a worship of crude thought are characteristics of our present American life. Hunt is one of us. If these faults mark and mar his work, they show him also to be a child of the time. His quick sympathies are caught by the wayside and somewhat frayed out among his fellows; but nevertheless one essential of a great painter, that of _Verity_, will be accorded to him after an examination of the pictures we have mentioned.

But truth, character, skill, the many gifts and great labor which must unite to lead an artist to the foot of his shadowy, sun-crowned mountain, can then carry him no step farther unless ideal Beauty join him, and he comprehend her nature and follow to her height. Again we quote from Charles Blanc--for why should we rewrite what he says so ably?--"All the germs of beauty are in Nature, but it belongs to the spirit of man alone to disengage them. When Nature is beautiful, the painter _knows_ that she is beautiful, but Nature knows nothing of it. Thus beauty exists only on the condition of being understood--that is to say, of receiving a second life in the human thought. Art has something else to do than to copy Nature exactly: it must penetrate into the spirit of things, it must evoke the soul of its hero. It can then not only rival Nature, but surpass her. What is indeed the superiority of Nature? It is the life which animates all her forms. But man possesses a treasure which Nature does not possess--thought. Now thought is more than life, for it is life at its highest power, life in its glory. Man can then contest with Nature by manifesting thought in the forms of art, as Nature manifests life in her forms. In this sense the philosopher Hegel was able to say that the creations of art were truer than the phenomena of the physical world and the realities of history."

Now, thought in the soul of the true artist for ever labors to evolve the beautiful. This is what the thought of a picture means to him--how to express beauty, which he finds underlying even the imperfect individual of Nature's decaying birth. To the high insight this is always discernible. None are so fallen that some ray of God's light may not touch them, and this possibility, the faith in light for ever, radiates from the spirit of the artist, and renders him a messenger of joy. No immortal works have bloomed in despondency: they may have taken root in the slime of the earth, but they have blossomed into lilies.

We call this divine power to discern beauty in every manifestation of the Deity, imagination. As it expresses itself in painting, it is so closely allied with what is highest and holiest in our natures that painting has come to be esteemed a Christian art, as contrasted in its development subsequent to the Christian era with the less human works of sculpture. "Christianity came, and instead of physical beauty substituted moral beauty, infinitely preferring the expression of the soul to the perfection of the body. Every man was great in its eyes, not by his perishable members, but by his immortal soul. With this religion begins the reign of painting, which is a more subtle art, more immaterial, than the others--more expressive, and also more individual. We will give some proofs of it. Instead of acting, like architecture and sculpture, upon the three dimensions of heavy matter, painting acts only upon one surface, and produces its effects with an imponderable thing, which is color--that is to say, light. Hegel has said with admirable wisdom: 'In sculpture and architecture forms are rendered visible by exterior light. In painting, on the contrary, matter, obscure in itself, has within itself its internal element, its ideal--light: it draws from itself both clearness and obscurity. Now, unity, the combination of light and dark, is color.' The painter, then, proposes to himself to represent, not bodies with their real thickness, but simply their appearance, their image; but by this means it is the mind which he addresses. Visible but impalpable, and in some sense immaterial, his work does not meet the touch, which is the sight of the body: it only meets the eye, which is the touch of the soul. Painting is then, from this point of view, the essential art of Christianity.... If the painter, like Phidias or Lysippus, had only to portray the types of humanity, the majesty of Jupiter, the strength of Hercules, he might do without the riches of color, and paint in one tone, modified only by light and shade; but the most heroic man among Christians is not a demigod: he is a being profoundly individual, tormented, combating, suffering, and who throughout his real life shares with environing Nature, and receives from every side the reflection of her colors. Sculpture, generalizing, raises itself to the dignity of allegory--painting, individualizing, descends to the familiarity of portraiture."

Let us now return to consider William Hunt's pictures from this second point of view. The gift of Verity having been already assumed, can we also discern that higher power of Imagination whose crown and seal is the Beautiful. To decide this question we have, unhappily, to consider his work as lyrical, rather than dramatic, and for this reason we must study his power under disadvantage. That he possesses dramatic power will hardly be denied by those who know his "Hamlet," "The Drummer-Boy," and "The Boy and the Butterfly;" but the exigencies of life appear to prevent him from occupying himself with compositions such as filled years in the existence of the old painters.

Portraiture being the highest and most difficult labor to which an artist can aspire, to this branch of art Hunt has chiefly confined himself, and from this point of view he must be studied. We do not forget, in saying this, his angel with the flaming torch, strong and beautiful and of unearthly presence, nor the shadowy, half-portrayed figures which dart and flit across his easel; but as we may _understand_ the power of Titian from his portraits, yet never revel in it fully until we look upon "The Presentation" or "The Assumption"--never comprehend the painter's joy or his divine rest in endeavor until the achievement lies before us--we must speak of Hunt only from the work to which he has devoted himself, and not do him the injustice to predict dramas he has never yet composed.

First, pre-eminently appears that worship for moral beauty which suffers him to fear no ugliness. This power allies him with keen sympathy to every living thing. He sees kinship and the immortal spark in each breathing being. The soul of love goes out and paints the dark or the suffering or the repellant faithfully, bringing it in to the light where God's sunshine may fall upon it, and men and women, seeing for the first time, may help to wipe away the stain. This tendency he shares with the great French painter Millet, whom he loves to call Master, and with Dore, whose terrible picture of "The Mountebanks" should call men and women from their homes to penetrate the fastnesses of vice and strive to heal the sorrows of their kind.

This love of moral beauty, which forces painters to paint such pictures, was never in any age more evident. Hunt in his beggar-man, in his forlorn children, and other pictures of the same class, unfolds a beauty that men should be thankful for.

On the other hand, his love of beauty and his power of expressing it should be studied in its _direct_ influence. The beauty of flesh and blood, even the loveliness of children, seems to have slight hold upon him, compared with the significance of character and the lustre with which his imagination endows everything. This lustre is a distinguishing power with him. The depth to which he sees and feels causes him to give higher lights and deeper shadows than other men. White flowers are not only white to him--they shine like stars. His pictures give a sense of splendor.

In his sketch of the poor mother cuddling her child, it is the feeling of rest, the mother's sleeping joy, the relaxed limbs, the folding embrace, which he has given us to enjoy. These are the beauty of the picture--not rounded flesh, nor graceful curves, nor fair complexion; and so with the singing-girls: they are not beautiful girls, but they are simple--they love to sing, they are full of tenderness and music. We might go over all his pictures to weariness in this way. The young girl plucking at the daisy as she stands in an open field must, however, not be omitted. The natural elegance of this portrait renders it peculiarly, we should say, such a one as any woman would be proud to see of herself. Doubtless this young girl, like others, may have worn ear-rings and chains and pins and rings, but the artist knew her better than she knew herself, and has portrayed that exquisite crown of simplicity with which, it should seem, Nature only endows beggars and her royal favorites.

In all the ages since Hamlet was created there appears never to have been an era in which his character has excited such strong and universal interest as in America at this time. William Hunt has thrown upon the canvas a figure of Hamlet beautiful and living. There is no suggestion of any actor in it. Hamlet walks new-born from the painter's brain. His "cursed spite" bends the youthful shoulders, and the figure marches past unmindful of terrestrial presences.

One other picture will illustrate more clearly, perhaps, than everything which has gone before, this gift of imagination. In "The Boy and the Butterfly," now on the walls of the Century Club-house, the loveliness of the child, the power of action, the subtle management of color and light, are all subordinated to the ideas of defeat and endeavor. Energy, the irrepressible strength of the spirit upheld by a divine light of indestructible youth, shines out from the canvas. The boy who cannot catch the butterfly is transmuted as we stand into the Soul of Beauty reaching out in vain for satisfaction, and ready to follow its aspiration to another sphere.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

WILHELMINE VON HILLERN.

German literature, despite its extraordinary productiveness and its possession of a few great masterpieces, is far from being rich in the department of belles-lettres, especially in works of fiction. It has no list of novelists like those which include such names as Fielding, Scott and Thackeray, Balzac, Hugo and Sand. In fact, there is scarcely an instance of a male writer in Germany who has devoted himself exclusively to this branch of literature, and has won high distinction in it. It has been cultivated with success chiefly by a few writers of the other sex, whose delineations have gained a popularity in America only less than that which they enjoy at home--in part because the life which they depict has closer internal analogies to our own than to that of England or of France, still more perhaps because the pictures themselves, whatever their intrinsic fidelity, are suffused with a romantic glow which has long since faded from those of the thoroughly realistic art now dominant in the two latter countries.

In none of them is this characteristic more apparent than in the works of Wilhelmine von Hillern, which bear also in a marked degree the stamp of a mind at once vigorous and sympathetic, and are thus calculated to awaken the interest of readers in regard to the author's personal history.

Her father, Doctor Christian Birch, a Dane by birth and originally a diplomatist by profession, held for many years the post of secretary of legation at London and Paris. He withdrew from this career on the occasion of his marriage with a German lady connected with the stage in the triple capacity of author, manager and actress. Madame Birch-Pfeiffer, as she is commonly called, was one of the celebrities of her time, and her dramatic productions still keep possession of the stage. Soon after the birth of her daughter, which took place at Munich, she was invited to assume the direction of the theatre of Zurich. Here Wilhelmine passed several years of her childhood, separated from her father, whose engagements as a political writer retained him in Germany, and scarcely less divided from her mother, whose duties at this period did not permit her to give much attention to domestic cares. Without companions of her own age, and left almost wholly to the charge of an invalid aunt, she led a monotonous existence, which left an impression on her mind all the more deep from its contrast with the life which opened upon her in her eighth year, when Madame Birch-Pfeiffer was summoned to Berlin to hold an appointment at the court theatre.

In the Prussian capital the family was again united, and became the centre of a social circle embracing many persons connected with dramatic art and literature. Devrient, Dawison and Jenny Lind were among the visitors whose conversation was greedily listened to by the little girl while supposed to be immersed in her lessons or her plays. Under such influences it would have been strange if even a less active brain had not been fired with aspirations, which took the form of an irresistible impulse when, at thirteen, Wilhelmine was allowed for the first time to visit the theatre and witness the acting of Dawison in Hamlet and other parts. Henceforth all opposition had to give way, and in her seventeenth year she made her _début_ as Juliet at the ducal theatre of Coburg. Two qualities, we are told, distinguished her acting: a strong conception worked out in the minutest details, and an intensity of passion which knew no restraint, and at its culminating point overpowered even hostile criticism. Subsequently careful training under Edward Devrient and Madame Glossbrenner enabled her to bring her emotions under better control, repressing all tendency to extravagance; and, greeted with the assurance that she was destined to become the German Rachel, she entered upon her career with a round of performances at the principal theatres of Germany, including those of Frankfort, Hamburg and Berlin.

These triumphs were followed by the acceptance of a permanent engagement at Mannheim, which, however, had hardly been concluded when it gave place to one of a different kind, followed by her marriage and sudden relinquishment of the vocation embraced with such ardor and pursued for a short period with such brilliant promise. Dawison is said to have remarked that by her retirement the German stage had lost its last genuine tragic actress.

Since her marriage Madame von Hillern has resided at Freiburg, in the grand duchy of Baden, where her husband holds a legal position analogous to that of the judge of a superior court. Her social life is one of great activity, though much of her time is given to superintending the education of her two daughters. But the abounding energy of her nature made it inevitable that her artistic instincts, repressed in one direction, should seek their full development in another. Literature was naturally her choice. Her first work, _Doppelleben_, appeared in 1865, and though defective in construction, owing to a change of plan in the process of composition, served to give assurance of her powers and to inspire her with the requisite confidence. Three years later _Ein Arzt der Seele_, of which a translation under the title of _Only a Girl_ has been widely circulated in America, established her claim to a high place among the writers of her class. Her third work, _Aus eigener Kraft (By his own Might)_, met with equal success, securing for its author a large circle of readers on both sides of the Atlantic ready to welcome the future productions of her pen. The qualities which distinguish her writings are vigor of conception, sharpness of characterization, a moral earnestness pervading the judgments and reflections, and an ardor, sometimes too exuberant, which gives intensity to the delineation even while exciting doubts of its fidelity. Similar qualities had characterized her acting, and they spring from a nature which a close observer has described as clear in perception yet swayed by fantasy; strong of will yet impulsive as quicksilver; finding enjoyment now in animated discussion, now in impetuous riding, now in absolute repose; full of maternal tenderness, yet fond of splendor and the excitements of society; a nature, in short, abounding in contrasts, but substantially that of a true, noble and lovable woman.

HIS NAME?

(_An incident of the Boston fire_.)

I.

--Oh the billows of fire!
With maëlstrom-like swirl,
Their surges they hurl
Over roof--over spire,
Mad--masterless--higher,--
Till with rumble--crack--crash,
Down boom with a flash,
Whole columns of granite and marble;--see! see!
Sucked in as a weed on the ocean might be,
Or engulfed as a sail
In the hurricane riot and wreak of the gale!

II.

Ha! yonder they rush where the death-dealing stream,
Over-pent, waits their gleam,
To shiver the city with earthquake!--Who, _who_
Will adventure, mid-flame, and unfasten the screw,--
Set the fiend loose, and save us so?--Fireman, you,
_You_ willing?--Would God you might hazard it!--
Nay,
The red tongues are licking the faucets now: Stay!
--Too late,--'tis too late!
If ruin comes, wait
Its coming: To go, is to perish:--Hold! Hold!
You are young,--I am old,--
You've a wife, too--and children?--O God! he is gone
Straight into destruction! The pipes, men! On, on,
Play the water-stream on him,--full--faster--the whole!
And now--Christ save his soul!

III.

--I stifle--I choke;
And _he_,--Heaven grant that he smother in smoke
Ere the fearful explosion comes. Hark! What's the shout?
--_Is he saved_?--_Is he out?_
--Did he compass his purpose,--the Hero?--_(One_ name
To-night we shall write on the records of fame,--
The perilous deed was so noble!) Why here
On my cheek is a tear,
Which not a whole city in ashes could claim!
--His name, now: _Can nobody tell me his name?_

M. J. P.

UNPUBLISHED LETTER FROM LORD NELSON TO LADY HAMILTON.