pendia of definite beliefs and accepted principles. There is no need further to describe their looks; everybody knows them. They were not limber - minded men, not readily agnostic, not nicely skeptical; they were, neither more nor less, excepting the sprinkling of foreign bloods, eighteenth-century Englishmen. Of course I have nothing to do with history neither framed nor hung; I merely render a procès-verbal of the testimony delivered by the portraits in this gallery. In the main hall, into which the spectator, having paid his toll, entered directly, most of the English portraits were hung. There were Sir Joshuas, Gainsboroughs, Hoppners, Romneys, and others, as well as a few Van Dycks, and two of that "right noble Claudio," surnamed Coello. The English painters must take our exclusive attention. Reynolds, of right, comes foremost. In the corner hung Colonel Cussmaker, a handsome, haughty young person of quality, not without dignity, nez retroussé, mouth well curved; he stands carelessly, clad in red jacket and white breeches, by the side of his horse, embodying leisure,eminently a person of a class apart. Certainly he has poise of mind and properly balanced physical constitution. The Reynolds young women are right-minded, healthy, simple beings, not indifferent to their own loveliness, with the naturalness of flowers and somewhat of their grace; all of them, matron and maid, of pleasing mien and soft, curving lines, all compact of serene dignity and calm. No man ever made a happier comment on happy life than Reynolds's soft, sweeping, feminine line from ear to shoulder. These ladies led lives unvexed; natural affections, a few brief saws, a half-dozen principles, kept their brows smooth, their cheeks ripe, their lips most wooable. Even the coquettish little actress, Miss Kitty Fisher, is as much of a country girl in mind as any of them. At first the admirer takes this serene loveliness, this quiet leisure, this simple pensive

pleasantness, to be the genial nature of Sir Joshua Reynolds, put by him upon his canvases. If, however, we take a step or two, and look at Gainsborough's ladies, at Romney's, or Hoppner's, we find the same attributes, in almost wearying repetition, of calm, of simplicity, of dignity, of leisure; all lovely ladies led into the ways of peace and pleasantness by simple right-mindedness, homely principles, ancestral precepts, and natural affections. Inasmuch as I refer to Reynolds's portraits as scientific facts, it may not be out of place to refer to Ruskin's criticism of him: "Considered as a painter of individuality in the human form and mind, I think him . . . the prince of portrait painters. Titian paints nobler pictures, and Van Dyck had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and temper."

...

If this group of portraits brought together in the American Art Galleries be deemed too small-haphazard though it is, and of most interesting pecuniary value to serve as the basis of any hypothesis, a brief visit to any well-stocked gallery will bring confirmatory evidence. For example, in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, besides several very charming Sir Joshuas, there are a number of other English portraits of that epoch. There is a portrait of Lady Hardwick, by Francis Cotes, a gentle, graceful, tranquil, happy figure of feminine leisure; there is Mrs. Reid, as Sultana, by Robert Edge Pine, happy the seraglio so presided over, no envy, no malice, no faint praise, no hidden sneer; there is Gainsborough's Mr. Burroughs, a wellbred, pleasant, vacant-minded gentleman; there is Sir William Beechey's portrait of a young lady, tranquil as an English landscape. These are all of one placid family, dwellers, as it were, in a garden of foxglove and honeysuckle. Even the fashionable sprightliness of Sir Thomas Lawrence's sitters, with their airs and graces, such as the luckless Mrs.

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Gibbon floating like a pantomimic Ariel to an éternité chantante, does not conceal the fundamental qualities of the type. It is also worth while to notice the portraits of Johann Zoffany, R. A., whose testimony is the more valuable as coming from a foreigner, and Hoppner's painting of Mrs. Bache, Franklin's daughter, steady and dignified, as was necessary, being so fathered. This last picture and such portraits as Copley's serve as connecting links, if any were needed, between the eighteenth-century English type in England and the like type here. In setting forth these facts there is the danger, not wholly to be avoided, of merely cataloguing; I will abridge the record as far as I can, and yet I must refer, very briefly, to a few French pictures of the same period. In the American Galleries was the portrait of a notaire, M. Laidequine, by de Latour, a placid, round-cheeked, amiable man, capped ornamentally after the fashion affected by baldish men, of a good digestion, capon on feast days, turbot on fast, — undisturbed by red notarial tape and the rumblings of '89; a plump, sleek man, of pure French blood, of plain ideas, of philosophic calm. He is of the bourgeoisie, but the next portrait is of the blood royal. M. Nattier's portrait of the dauphin, son to Louis Quatorze, depicts a round-faced, rosy-cheeked, pleasant young gentleman with a little mouth and a petulant expression, and yet furnished with that same inward gentleness, which so it was objected might proceed from the geniality of Reynolds, but in truth proceeds from a stable physique and a wellordered, logical, dogmatic philosophy. Another portrait, Le Chevalier Eusèbe de Montour, by Vanloo, is a youth of dignified aspect, in spite of his snub nose and narrow mind. Further on, the Princesse Lamballe has the air of one who has lived in a doll's house, most of the time with her hair-dresser, a weasel-like little lady, whose head befitted a milliner's block better than a guillotine.

All these portraits, American, English, French, make a most happy and attractive picture of life in the eighteenth century. They chant a chorus of praise for national character, for class distinctions, for dogma and belief, for character, for good manners, for honor, for contemplation, for vision to look upon life as a whole, for appreciation that the world is to be enjoyed, for freedom from democracy, for capacity in lighter mood to treat existence as a comedy told by Goldoni. Such a self-satisfied benedicite irritated the susceptibility of that nouveau riche, the nineteenth century, itself not devoid of self-satisfaction, and drew from it a great deal of unsympathetic and unscientific criticism; in fact, the nineteenth century was more dependent on its own spectacles than any century of which we have record. We must endeavor to steer between the self-flattery of the one century and the jeers of the other, and briefly consider the traits and qualities revealed by the portraits.

They portray a pure national breed, wherein like bred with like in happy homogeneity, traits paired with consanguineous traits, racial habits and national predispositions mated after their kind; the physiological and psychological niceties, which sprang from the differentiation of races and nations, were protected from the disquiet and distress of crossbreeding, deep affinities herded together, and the offspring were saved from the racking strain and distortion that beset a hybrid generation. This physical stability begot mental calm; peace of body insured peace of mind. Likewise, but in less degree, class spirit, and smallness of numbers, aided to preserve fixedness and peace; especially the peasants, kith of the cattle, kin of the corn, laid a hardy animal foundation, preaching silently the great teaching of Nature that physical life shall dominate mental life.

The abundant praise of animal life, of healthy body, of beauty of face, shouted out by these portraits, does not, however,

exceed their testimony in favor of health of mind. The calm and quiet of Sir Joshua's age are scarcely more physical than moral. It is a period of the Ten Commandments, of belief, of dogma, of fixed principles, of ethical laws; to us it looks like a little world, such stress they laid on simple rules, on reverence, on the gradations of respect, on inherited morality, on denial of the democratic ethics that one virtue is as good as another. It had the merits of the village, -the gentleman of the big house, his inherited principles burnished by intercourse with his peers, the and the parson parson's wife, with old-fashioned Christianity, the circle round the tavern fire that concerned itself with what Dr. Johnson had pronounced, the group of critics in the store that threshed out a rough garnered morality under the lead of the schoolmaster, and all the influences which keep unobstructed the ancient highways of thought, principle, and conduct;these are the more obvious symbols of the conservative forces which made the sitters to Gilbert Stuart, to Gainsborough, to Vanloo, what they were. No doubt the prevailing trait in the portraits cited is leisure, aristocratic leisure; but leisure is the substance, aristocratic hue merely the superficial coloring. If these eighteenth-century painters had painted peasants, their portraits would have manifested leisure, too. It is not leisure in our mercantile sense of intervals between paroxysms of money-getting, mince pies at railway stops, but mental leisure, the "content surpassing wealth, the sage in meditation found," the contemplation that brings peace, consequent upon a dogmatic orderliness of ideas and principles, an acceptance of that condition of body and mind to which it has pleased God to call men, the leisure that can express itself in poetry, in art, in good manners. Those quiet sitters had none of the perplexity and inconsequence which mark a generation that plays its game with no rules; their courses of con

moral

duct were all meted out by principle and maintained by authority.

My business was, not to analyze, but to describe, rather merely to sum up those random faces in general terms; and to give a composite account of them, and it is time to present the evidence concerning our American bodies and souls. Naturally enough Mr. Sargent's portraits by their immense dexterity, their truthfulness, their extraordinary combination of crudeness and refinement, of vigor and art, - he is the Barbarian Conqueror, the Tamerlane, of painters, make the chief witnesses; but their evidence is so fully confirmed by men of markedly different qualities, that any objection to Sargent, as a man of peculiar temperament and genius, would be hypercritical. He was born to depict a hybrid people, vagabonds of the mind, to portray the strain of physiological and psychological transformation in the evolution of a new species. His talents dovetail with the exigencies of our epoch; hence his great historical importance.

The obvious qualities in his portraits are disquiet, lack of equilibrium, absence of principle; a general sense of migrating tenants, of distrainer and replevin, of a mind unoccupied by the rightful heirs, as if the home of principle and dogma had been transformed into an inn for wayfarers. Sargent's women are more marked than his men; women, as physically more delicate, are the first to reveal the strain of physical and psychical maladjustment. The thin spirit of life shivers pathetically in its "fleshly dress;" in the intensity of its eagerness it is all unconscious of its spiritual fidgeting on finding itself astray, no path, no blazings, the old forgotten, the new not formed. These are signs that accompany the physiological development of a new species. Sargent's pictures, his handling of women, poor human documents, are too well known to justify further description.

Sargent, however, is not idiosyncratic; his testimony is corroborated by the portraits of painters differing as widely from him as is possible. Take the portrait of a lady, by Mr. Abbott H. Thayer, a most charming picture of a very attractive subject, but still exhibiting the drowsy insomnia of the soul, never all awake, never all asleep. Take a portrait by Mr. J. W. Alexander, in which we see the indefinite, unphysical charm of American womanhood, the eager pursuit of an unseen good, the restless pacing in the body's cage. The physique of these pictured women is as marked as the soul within. There is no semblance of the simple English type, like Sir Joshua's Mrs. Arnold, the blending of health and peace, of grace and ease; none of twilight walks within a garden's wall; the American woman's body, too slight for a rich animal life, too frail for deep maternal feelings, seems a kind of temporary makeshift, as if life were a hasty and probably futile experiment. In her, passion fades before self-consciousness, and maternal love, shriveled to a sentimental duty, hardly suggests the once fierce animal instinct, the unloosed vital bond between mother and child. American mothers are dutiful, but duty is a very experimental prop in a new species, to serve in place of instinct. One should compare Hoppner's Lady Burling ton and Child, or Romney's Mrs. Carwardine and Child (the latter I have only seen in copies), with a Mother and Child by Sargent. Romney's mother bends over her child; birth has caused no spiritual separation; she and it are one creature; her arm holds it, her hand woos it, her heart spreads its wings over it. In Sargent's picture the mother waits, as in an antechamber, for a formal introduction to the child; coincidence of surname in the catalogue alone suggests a previous acquaintance.

American men, as seen in Sargent, or in almost any contemporary painter, exhibit a definite variability in this evo

lutionary process. They have divested themselves of the old English traits, calm, poise, and the like, and show markedly adaptive characters. What the future type may be, if it ever become fixed, cannot be accurately predicted, but the process of specialization necessarily involves a casting off of certain old traits and the acquisition of new, often displaying curious instances of correlation of parts. Accompanying the mental process must go a corresponding physical change, by which certain parts of the system are expanded, while other parts stand still, or, perhaps, atrophy, until the old systematic affinity is broken up and another formed, much after the fashion of the process which took place when the unwinged animal put forth wings, or the paw evolved into the hand. Vivisection, even upon men of a different color, being prohibited by public opinion, or by what statesmen deem public opinion, the inward physiological changes can only be inferred from the new traits, outward indices of interior processes. These male portraits indicate that the logical, the intellectual, the imaginative, the romantic faculties, have been discarded and shaken off, doubtless because they did not tend to procure the success coveted by the nascent variety; and, in their stead, keen, exceedingly simple powers of vision and action are developing. This type is found in Sargent, Frank Holl, Bonnat, Chase, Richard Hall. Perhaps the best example is the portrait of Mr. Daniel Lamont, by Zorn. Too great stress cannot be laid on the impression we make upon quick-sighted foreigners. This portrait represents a shrewd, prompt, quick, keen, compact man, well, almost brilliantly, equipped for dealing with the immediate present; he has the morale of the tennis player, concentration, utter absorption, in volley and take. Of faculties needful to deal with the remote imagination, logic, intellect, faith - there is no trace. Craft, the power that deals with a few facts

so are promptitude and vigor; reason, the power that deals with many facts, remote, recalcitrant, which require the mind to hold many pictured combinations at once or in quick succession, is not there. The portrait indicates the usual American amiability, domestic kindliness, and aversion to cruel sights and cruel sounds. The logical faculty which compels a man to reconcile his theories, to unite religion and conduct, to combine principle and policy, to fuse the various parts of his philosophy into one non-self-contradicting whole, is entirely omitted. The chief trait in this typical portrait is ability to react quickly and effectively to stimuli of the immediate present, an essential quality in a prospering species; the chief lack is imagination. How such equipment will serve in the future, when the world shall have passed beyond the colonizing and commercial epochs of history, is of course wholly beyond the scope of this essay. There are a number of feminine portraits of this type, by Carolus Duran, by Mr. Benjamin C. Porter (an American painter), by Mr. Chase, which have the unimaginative look, the terre-à-terre spirit, the self-consciousness, of the male examples, although they commonly lack keenness and vigor.

The most interesting portrait for our purposes in the whole millionaire exposition, as a masculine example of that extreme variation which had seemed peculiarly feminine, is a painting entitled W. A. Clark (lent by Senator W. A. Clark), by M. Besnard, the famous French painter, whose method is sufficiently distinct from that of the other painters to give peculiar value to any corroborative evidence offered by him to facts testified by them. W. A. Clark (of the portrait) is a slim, slight man, with reddish hair of a decided color and curl, with beard and mustache of like appearance, all hérissés, like the fur of a cat in a thunderstorm ; there is no speculation in the gray-blue,

delicate nose are drawn and pinched together, chest and waist are narrow, fingers but skin on bones. The tightly buttoned frock coat, never worn before the sittings, abetted by the brand-new silk hat and gloves, makes a brave attempt, with its blue boutonnière, to suggest the air of a boulevardier. From hair hérissé, pinched face, crooked arm, and wellpainted sweep of frock coat, emanates physical and mental distress, such as must accompany perturbations in Nature, when she, in desperate endeavor for a new type, hurls her wild experiments through the delicate organization of the human body, distorting all the nice adjustments of species and genus. No dogmas vex this nervous spirit, no principles chafe it, no contemplation dulls it, no discipline confines it; it ramps wildly in the strait compass of the present, knowing no past, unhampered by reverence or respect, foreseeing no future, unhindered by faith or upliftedness. It is an extreme example, but immensely interesting, for though it may be merely an erratic variation, it is near enough other examples of the type to indicate the characteristic traits of the new American nationality; or it may be an instance of that curious prophetic power of Nature, by which she creates an individual a whole generation ahead of his type. Nevertheless, a more conservative judgment would surmise that Zorn's portrait represents the normal type of the present generation, and Besnard's an exaggerated example of certain American traits.

Perhaps the most vivid of the impressions carried away from that picture gallery by the inartistic spectator was admiration for the adaptive power of Nature. In a hundred years, with simple means, taking a vast expanse of land, metaled and watered, for her work-table, with a not too extravagant use of Irish, Germans, Scots, Jews, French, and Poles for her tools, she has by delicate adaptive processes-keeping steady eye on her