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THE RETURN OF THE GENTLEWOMAN.

IT is true she has not wholly left us, but her presence has grown rare, and at times she seems vanishing, as fringed gentians have a way of doing in favorite meadows, where once there were blue stretches of them, until a summer comes when the most diligent searcher is only rewarded by a scattered half-dozen.

To-day every New England town possesses localities in whose still stately mansions lived families spoken of as "best." These "Best Families" having diminished and faded away, their dwellings stand with closed blinds, or, it may be, have developed into homes for the aged, orphan asylums, schools, places where people lodge and board. Here and there a house retains its original character, and its mistress goes serenely in and out. She is surrounded by souvenirs of the past and the flowers of her garden, is much given to hospitality and the reading of good books, uses the most charming English we have ever heard, and has on all subjects views that are wise and witty and, withal, consider ate and charitable. In brief, a Gentlewoman.

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But it is like the half-dozen fringed gentians in the meadow. Only now and then does one find her.

There is a descriptive word of dreary import formerly applied with freedom to a Gentlewoman in such moments of adversity as involved the loss of friends and fortune. In this sad situation one was apt to call her "decayed," exactly as if one were speaking of a fallen house or a ruined castle, instead of a sweet and gracious soul that would always be greater than anything that could happen

to it.

Heaven be thanked, this word, in her connection, is becoming obsolete and not likely to be associated with her in the future. The modern Gentlewoman will

have profited by the modern processes of life and learned how to defend herself against evil days.

The fashion of this world passeth, and it was no doubt decreed from the beginning that a number of things should cease to exist, that there should be a passing of the spare room, of the front dooryard, of the polite art of letter-writing, of the pleasant companionship of the horse in drives through town and country, of that receptacle, once so essential a part of a woman's dress, the convenient pocket. The Gentlewoman is not a fashion of this world. She is of that world that was and is and ever shall be.

But when she comes again, what will be the conditions? Will she serve tea as of old in delicate heirloom china? Will her pleasant rooms, hung with ancestral portraits, look into a well-kept garden, rose-planted, and shaded by ancestral fruit trees? Possibly, since the title she bears implies wealth of years, and hence opportunities of inheriting things having the charm of years. Still the immediate ancestors of the Gentlewoman of the future are no longer home-makers in the sense that their own ancestors were. Many of them are birds of passage, flitting from one point to another, collecting memories and experiences in greater numbers than household treasures or plants in gardens. They board; they live in apartments; they spend six months here and six months there; they give away their old gowns and coats and hats, instead of packing them in attic chests to be taken out half a century later for use in charades and tableaux and private theatricals. Or if too much occupied, or not sufficiently well-informed concerning the need of their neighbors to distribute intelligently of their abundance, societies stand ready to do this for them, societies

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which means, literally, if you have a ball dress, or a fan, or a volume of poems, or a piece of embroidery lying idle, send it to us and we will see that it gives pleasure elsewhere.

This habit of modern life, so essential to a Bird-of-Passage Person who has no hoarding-place save in the hired corner of a public storehouse, somewhat limits the future Gentlewoman's chances of inheriting ancestral articles. However, all people of to-day are not birds of passage. Some there be who have built or bought themselves houses, and in making the latter habitable, followed the tendency of the age to put old wine into new bottles, that is to say, old furniture collected from the earth's four corners into modern rooms. Having safely passed the unbeautiful period of parlor sets and chamber sets and vases in pairs, they thirst for unmatched pieces of antiquity. Go into a twentieth-century dwelling and you will find chairs and tables that must be enjoying a sensation of renewed youth, since in place of growing daily more venerable in native air, they have knocked about all over Bohemia, and are now making new acquaintances in a manner quite unusual with things of their day and generation. Here is a chair acquired yesterday at a sale of old colonial furniture from Virginia; here is a clock bought last summer in a Dutch fishing village; here is a dressing-table that once crossed the sea in that ship prepared, so the story runs, to rescue the unhappy Marie Antoinette, and finally obliged to set sail without her. Here is an old stool, carved and gilded, and a spinnet with some yellow music resting

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If these things, with others, can be kept together until the future Gentlewoman, now a child, has herself grown old among them, her surroundings, in appearance at least, will in no wise greatly differ from those of the Gentlewomen of her ancestors. The difference will be in the history of her surroundings.

The other day I heard some one say, alluding to the death of an aged relative, "She was the last gentlewoman of our family." It was as if the speaker had said, "The last princess of a royal line; there will never be another."

And it may be that never again shall we see Gentlewomen like those now going from us, as it may be that never again will there be a field white and gold and fragrant in exactly the same manner as the one through which we walked last June, never again a summer night like that of last July, when the evening primroses, little sisters to the moon, were shining along the garden path; but the memory of the afternoon in June and of the evening in the midsummer garden is ours to keep forever, and each of us has a heritage bequeathed by the Gentlewoman we loved, also to keep forever, if a heritage that has nothing in common with real estate or the safety deposit bank, that is not subject to damage by fire or flood and yet demands more care than ever material possessions.

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Each year of living means more rush and more haste, and less time for thinking, since the main thing seems to be to arrive, and to do that one must run faster and faster. It is well to arrive, and advisable. It is also well to make one's haste after the fashion recommended by the German proverb, "Eile mit Weile," even at the risk of not arriving at all. It is safer for the heritage left us by the Gentlewoman we loved. In the breakneck speed of modern life there are so many chances of accidents to things other than limbs.

Happening to call upon a friend the other evening at the moment of a dinner

party, I was shown into the presence of the young son and daughter of the house, aged fourteen and thirteen. They gave me cordial greeting, and after I had been told the names of the guests in the dining-room, and we had somewhat discussed them and wondered how much longer they would sit at the table, and talked of the animals at the Zoo and the birds in the Park and the books we liked best, the children showed me a picture that had been occupying their attention when I entered.

It was a large colored print of a Christy girl playing golf.

"I am going to have it framed for my room," said Ruth. "What do you think of it? Oh! I forgot," she added, "you don't approve of the modern girl."

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There was a pretty apology in her voice, and nothing in her manner to give the impression that a person in the state of mind she had indicated might be unreasonable or unnatural or otherwise objectionable. But Richard arose, asking in a voice that sounded like a challenge, "Not approve of her, why not?" "Well," I said, "I don't exactly know. It's a sort of feeling. Of course it does n't include every modern girl. It would never include Ruth. The young woman in the picture is certainly bewitching, but I should n't think of giving such a picture to Ruth for her room; or at least I might give one, but not a whole row of them, there are so many other pictures to give her "

Under Richard's clear and questioning gaze I was growing confused, when Ruth spoke for me.

"You see, Richard," she said, " you were not with us last August, but there was a girl who used to come into the dining room with such a stride! and she always wore her sleeves stripped up above her elbows, and her arms had got fearfully burned; in fact, they were quite black, and she was so proud of them; but of course they did n't look very well, especially at dinner with pretty dresses; and her hair was rather wild, and she never wore a hat, not even when she went into the business part of the town; and she knew a good deal of slang, but she was a very nice girl, and ". Just here the dinner party was heard wending its way into the drawing-room, and we three being invited to join it, the strain of the situation ended.

What makes a Gentlewoman? Put the question in another form. Who made the Gentlewoman? God made her. To say that He made the Society Woman, and the Club Woman, and the Sportswoman with her sisterhood, would be not unlike saying that He made the town and the steam cars and green carnations and gray roses. But we may be quite sure that He made the Gentlewoman, and that with every generation adopting the best of things new and keeping the best of things old, she will return in all her sweet dignity to add to the joy of the world.

Harriet Lewis Bradley.

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all that is needed for the making of an artistic 66 movement is a handful of brushes, some colors, and a new trick. I remember the first exhibition of the New Salon, - it was new once. There was probably not a man there whom somebody or other was not calling "cher Maître." Well, these "schools" disappear. Even Whistler's following, that wonderful source of Whistlerian symphonies which in essence were neither Whistlerian nor symphonic, is not to-day what it was. But while the old cliques pass new ones arise, and the general tendency of artists to run after this or that specious novelty is always with us. It is comforting, therefore, whenever a book appears like the one which Mr. Gerald S. Davies has published on Hans Holbein the Younger. This author brought out, a year ago, a book on Frans Hals which showed that he was well qualified to assume the duties of an historian of art. He has knowledge, sympathy, taste, and common sense. These qualities have gone to the making of a book on Holbein which was much needed, for the bibliography of the subject has hitherto included nothing in English sufficiently comprehensive, nothing embodying all the fruits of recent research. Wornum's book is nearly forty years old, and the last edition of the translation of Woltmann's Holbein und Seine Zeit dates from 1872. Both works are of value, but for the preparation of a really definitive biography Mr. Davies has had practically a clear field. He has entered it not only well equipped as a writer, but with all the advantages which modern reproductive processes could give him. His illustrations include fine photogravures of the paintings, tinted facsimiles of the drawings, and good reproductions of Holbein's decorative designs and of the Dance of Death.

Somewhere, in contemplating the writ1 Hans Holbein the Younger. By GERALD S. DAVIES, M. A. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1903.

ings of the Fathers, and the huge mass of literature based on the firm foundation they provided, Matthew Arnold speaks of the disposition of the man of imagination, "in spite of her tendency to burn him," to gravitate toward the Church of Rome. In spite of its tendency to freeze him, the connoisseur must always, sooner or later, gravitate toward the school whose principles make for law and order. It does not smother idiosyncrasy, but it has a way of putting that element of artistic interest in its proper place. It implies, no doubt, certain renunciations, and the rank and file in any age, but especially in our own, find it difficult, if not impossible, to accept its conditions. But there have been great masters to whom the keen airs on the heights most congenial to the methods of this school are as the very breath of life, and Hans Holbein was one of them. He is great, first by virtue of the clearness of his vision, and then through the perfection of his skill in realizing what he saw in terms of form and color, without even the most trifling deviation into obscurity or mannerism. He, too, made his renunciations, though it is perhaps more accurate to say that his works involve renunciations for us rather than for him, since he was indubitably unconscious of just what was sacrificed to the realistic trend of his genius. The point refers, of course, to the diminution of the force of the spiritual motive in Holbein by the assertiveness of that material fabric which it was his peculiar gift to express. Mr. Davies takes a more favorable view of the matter, but this is due, I fear, to the common weakness of biographers, who cannot well live absorbed for a long period in the works of a single master without unconsciously seeing them too much with that master's eyes.

He says of the central figure in the Solothurn Madonna that "nothing more womanly, more pure, more gentle, more sweet, and yet more strong has been given to us by any painter who has essayed

this subject and made us richer by this vision or by that of divine motherhood." Passing from this to the Meier Madonna at Darmstadt, he maintains the same attitude. It is hard to quarrel with him. Both pictures have great sweetness and beauty as religious conceptions. But in such conceptions the North must yield to the South, and though a completely Italianized Holbein would have been a Holbein weakened, it seems to me that admiration of his Madonnas should rest, if it is to be discriminating, somewhere on the safe side of the ecstatic. Mr. Davies is even more provocative in what he has to say in describing the two panels in monochrome at Basel, the Ecce Homo and Mater Dolorosa. Both designs are powerful, but when this biographer remarks that "the figure of Christ in the Man of Sorrows has, for its expressiveness of its great theme, few equals in Art," he is overstating the case. Is it really possible, in studying this famous panel, to place the artist's purely anatomical preoccupation in the subsidiary position to which it should be relegated? I doubt it. The difficulty, and the loss that it implies, will be made manifest even more clearly, perhaps, by a comparison of the Entombment, also at Basel, with, say, Mantegna's Dead Christ, in the Brera, with Michael Angelo's Pietà, in St. Peter's, or with the latter's beautiful drawing in the British Museum. Instantly Holbein's want of tragic passion makes itself felt. But to dwell on his limitations would be, after all, seriously to distort the perspective in which Holbein must be seen, and it is pleasant, in returning to the qualities that give him his high rank, to find the best possible light thrown upon them in a passage by Mr. Davies.

Alluding to the German's realistic method, which is, "in the hands of any man of less genius, apt to degenerate into mere laborious accuracy, or to take the place and usurp the interest in the picture which ought to be left for the products

of the higher imagination," he points out that with Holbein it never takes this pedestrian turn, and continues: "It is to him the natural and only method of expressing himself, -absolute perfection of craftsmanship, in all that he handles, carried into every part of the picture, and yet all of it so kept in due relation and due subordination, because of the dominating presence of the higher interests and aims of the picture, that you are unconscious, until you begin purposely to forget these higher interests in order to search into his way of doing things, that you are looking at a work in which industry and perfect craftsmanship have borne their part in carrying out the master thought." There is a sure touchstone here, ready to the hand of the student of Holbein; and it is gratifying to observe that Mr. Davies renders a further service to his reader in laying stress upon the fact that while his artist's method is wholly unlike that of later painters, such as Velasquez, Frans Hals, and Van Dyck, "neither method is righter than the other."

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If Holbein's method rests too much upon a basis of reality to lift his religious pictures to the loftiest plane, it serves, at all events, to make him one of the supreme masters of portraiture. In what he has to say under this head, Mr. Davies rarely provokes dissent. His efforts to deprive Holbein of the Dorothea Offenburg and the Lais Corinthiaca, and to give them to Cesare da Sesto, are more zealous and ingenious than convincing, -I do not believe the Milanese ever saw either of the two, - but in traversing the bulk of the master's work as a portrait painter, he is content to avoid adventurous hypotheses. He might have taken safely a firmer line in following Miss Hervey's opinion, rather than that of Mr. W. F. Dickes, in the curious controversy over the identity of the figures in the Ambassadors, of the National Gallery. The main point, however, is that he does full justice to those incomparable portraits, like the George Gyze,

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