CHAPTER LIII.

AFTERWARD.

There is little more to write. Four years, with their varying seasons, their endless procession of events, their multitude of joys and sorrows, have passed since Sissy died. Her place in the world, which seemed so blank and strange in its first vacancy, is closed up and lost in the crowding occupations of our ordinary life. She is not forgotten, but she has passed out of the light of common day into the quiet world of years gone by, where there is neither crowd nor haste, but soft shadows and shadowy sunshine, and time for every tender memory and thought. Even Aunt Harriet's sorrow is patient and subdued, and she sees her darling's face, with other long-lost faces, softened as in a gentle dream. She looks back to the past with no pain of longing. At seventy-eight she believes that she is nearer to those she loves by going forward yet a little farther. Nor are these last days sad, for in her loneliness Godfrey Hammond persuaded her to come to him, and she is happy in her place by his fireside. He is all that is left to her, and she is wrapped up in him. Nothing is good enough for Godfrey, and he says, with a smile, that she would make the planets revolve round him if she could. It is very possible that if she had her will she might attempt some little rearrangement of that kind. Her only fear is lest she should ever be a burden to him. But that will never be. Godfrey likes her delicate, old-fashioned ways and words, and is glad to see the kind old face which smiled on him long ago when he was a lad lighted up with gentle pleasure in his presence now. When he bids her good-night he knows that she will pray before she lies down, and he feels as if his home and he were the better for those simple prayers uttered night and morning in an unbroken sequence of more than seventy years. There is a tranquil happiness in that house, like the short, golden days of a St. Martin's summer or the November blooming of a rose.

In the February after Sissy's death Godfrey went to Rookleigh for a day, to be present at a wedding in the old church where the bridegroom had once lingered idly in the hot summer-time and pictured his marriage to another bride. That summer afternoon was not forgotten. Percival, standing on the uneven pavement above the Shadwells' vault, remembered his vision of Sissy's frightened eyes even while he uttered the words that bound him to Judith Lisle. But those words were not the less true because the thought of Sissy was hidden in his heart for ever.

Since that day Percival has spent almost all his time abroad, leading such a life as he pictured long ago, only the reality is fairer than the day-dream, because Judith shares it with him. Together they travel or linger as the fancy of the moment dictates. Percival does not own a square yard of the earth's surface, and therefore he is at liberty to wander over it as he will. He is conscious of a curious loneliness about Judith and himself. They have no child, no near relations: it seems as if they were freed from all ordinary ties and responsibilities. His vague aspirations are even less definite than of old; yet, though his life follows a wandering and uncertain track, fair flowers of kindliness, tolerance and courtesy spring up by that wayside. Judith and he do not so much draw closer day by day as find ever new similarity of thought and feeling already existing between them. His heart turns to her as to a haven of peace; all his possibilities of happiness are in her hands; he rests in the full assurance that neither deed nor word of hers can ever jar upon him; in his darker moods he thinks of her as clear, still sunlight, and he has no desire apart from her. Yet when he looks back he doubts whether his life can hold another moment so supreme in love and anguish as that moment when he looked into Sissy's eyes for the last time and knew himself forgiven.

SOME ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY ART.

The art of the present day succeeds to the art of past centuries not immediately nor by an insensible gradation. It is preceded by an interval of absolute deadness in matters artistic. Sixty years ago art in almost every branch was a sealed book to the majority of even well-educated persons, and contentedly contemplated by them as such. All love for it, with all knowledge of its history and all desire for its development, was for a generation or two confined to a few professed followers and a few devoted patrons, the mass of mankind thinking of it not at all. But slowly a revival came in the main centres of civilization--not much sooner in one than in another, though somewhat differently in each. In Germany we see it beginning with the famous Teutonic colony at Rome, reverent in spirit, cautious in method, severe in theory, restrained in style--culminating, on the one hand, in the academic pietism of Overbeck, on the other in the deliberate majesty of Cornelius. In France the new life begins with the successors of David, strenuous, impetuous, jealous and innovating, Ingres and outline waging deadly battle with color and Delacroix. In England architectural enthusiasm gave the first impulse, the "Gothic Revival" becoming the basis of all subsequent work.

If, before noting the points of difference between one branch and another of this modern art, we try to find the characteristics in which these branches resemble one another, and by which they collectively are distinguished from earlier developments, we find the most prominent one to be self-consciousness--not necessarily self-conceit, but the inward consciousness that they _are_, and the endeavor to realize just what they are. With these comes, when the art is conscientious, a desire to discover the noblest goal and to formulate the best methods of reaching it. Some, casting the horoscope for this struggling art of ours, find in these facts a great discouragement, believing that the vital germ of art is spontaneity--believing that there cannot again be a genuine form of art until there arise a fresh race of artists, unfed by the mummy-wheat of tradition, unfettered by the cere-cloths of criticism. Others, more sanguine, believe that spontaneity has done all it can, and that its place is in the future to be worthily filled by a wide eclecticism. Let us inquire what testimony as to the value of spontaneity and the influence of self-consciousness in art may be gathered from the methods and results of the past, and what from a contrast between the different contemporary schools in their methods and their results. Painting, as most prominently before our eyes and minds just now, will principally concern us.

To the making of every work of art go three things and no more--the material worked upon, the hand that works, and the intellect or imagination which guides that hand. When the proportion is perfect between the three, the work of art is perfect of its kind. But in the different kinds of art the necessary proportion is not the same. In music, for example, the medium is at its lowest value, the imagination at its highest. In architecture, on the other hand, material is most important. Musicians use the vibration of string and atmosphere, sculptors use bronze and marble, painters use color and canvas, poets use rhythm and rhyme, as vehicles to express their ideas. The architect's ideas are for the sake of his material. He takes his material as such, and embellishes it with his ideas--creates beauty merely by disposing its masses and enriching its surface. But in all and each of these processes, whether mind predominate or matter, there comes in as a further necessary factor the actual technical manipulation. Poetic visions and a noble mother-tongue do not constitute a man a poet if he cannot treat that language nobly according to the technique of his art. Nor, though Ariel sing in his brain and the everlasting harp of the atmosphere wait for him, is he a musician if he have not a sensitive ear and a knowledge of counter-point. More notably yet does the hand--and in this as a technical term I include the other bodily powers which go to form technical skill,--more notably yet does the hand come in play with the painter. Here the material is little, the imagination mighty indeed, but less overwhelming than with poet and musician; but the technique, the God-given and labor-trained cunning of retina and wrist, how all-important! often how all-sufficing!

In all criticism it is necessary first to reflect which of these three factors--intellectual power, physical endowment or propitious material--is most imperious. When we find this factor most perfectly developed, and the others, though subordinate, neither absent nor stunted, we shall find the art nearest to perfection. And the conditions of race and climate and society which most helpfully develop that factor without injuring the others are the conditions which will best further that art. And the critic who lays most stress on that factor, and is content to miss, if necessary, though noting the loss, a certain measure of the other two in order more entirely to gain the one that is vitalest, is the critic whose words are tonic. And he who, blending the province of the arts, calling them all with vagueness "art," exalts and demands the same factor first in all of them, must be detrimental, no matter how great his sincerity and his knowledge.

Before weighing any contemporary thing in the balance let us mark out in the past some standards of comparison. For it is useless to speculate upon theoretical methods if we can discover the actual methods employed by those whose art, if not ideally perfect, is yet so far beyond our present power as to be quite perfectly ideal. It needs no discussion to prove that to find the utmost that has been actually accomplished by human endeavor we must turn in sculpture and in language to Greece, in music to Germany, in architecture to Greece or to mediaeval Europe as our taste may pull, and in painting to the Italians.

The primary conception of art in its productive energy is as a certain inspiration. How did that inspiration work in those whom we acknowledge to have received it in fullest measure? If we think a moment we shall say, "Involuntarily"--by a sort of _possession_ rather than a voluntary intellectual effort. The sculpture of the Greeks, their tragedies and their temples, were all wrought simply, without effort, without conscious travailing, by a natural evolution, not by a potent egg-hatching process of instructive criticism and morbid self-inspection and consulting of previous models, native and foreign. Architectural motives were gathered from Egypt and the East, from Phoenicia and Anatolia, but they were worked in as material, not copied as patterns; and the architecture is as original as if no one had ever built before. Phidias and Praxiteles and the rest shaped and chiselled, aiming at perfection no doubt, trying to do their best, but without troubling themselves as to what that best "ought" to be. Criticism was rife in Athens of all places, but it was a criticism of things existing, not of things problematically desirable. Statue and temple-front were criticised, not sculptor and architect--surely not sculpture and architecture in the abstract. Not sculptors and architects, that is, when the question was of their works. The men came in for their share of criticism, but on a different count. Theseus and Athene were judged as works of art, not as lame though interesting revelations of Phidias's soul. And be sure no faintest sin of the chisel was excused on the plea that Phidias meant more than he could express, and so bungled in the expression. Nor was the plea advanced that such bungling after the infinite was better than simple perfection in the attainable. An artist was called upon to be an artist, not a poet nor a philosopher nor a moralist. When Plato confounded them all in a splendid confusion of criticism the fruit-time had gone by. There was left but to expatiate on the hoard which summer had bequeathed, or to speculate, if he chose, on the possible yield of a future and most problematical year.

In the rich Italian summer one sees the same thing. Men paint because they must--because put at anything else they come back to art as iron to the magnet. Not because art is lovely, nor because to be an artist is a desirable or a noble or a righteous thing, but because they are artists born, stamped, double-dyed, and, kick as they might, they could be nothing else--if not artists creative, yet artists critical and appreciative. Truly, they think and strive over their art, write treatises and dogmas and speculations, vie with and rival and outdo each other. But it is their _art_ they discuss, not themselves, not one another--technical methods, practical instruction, questions of pigment and model and touch, of perspective and chiaroscuro and varnish, not psychological aesthetics, biographical and psychical explanations as to facts of canvas and color. What is done is what is to be criticised. What can be done technically is what should be done theoretically, and what cannot be done with absolute and perfect technical success is out of the domain of art once and for ever. As the Greek did not try to carve marble eyelashes, so no Venetian tried to put his conscience on a panel. All Lionardo could see of Mona Lisa's soul he might paint, not all he could feel of Lionardo's. Mr. Ruskin himself quotes Duerer's note that Raphael sent him his drawings, not to show his soul nor his theories, but simply _seine Hand zu weisen_--to prove his touch. In Raphael's touch was implied Raphael's eye, and those two made the artist Raphael.

Nothing strikes one more in these men than the oblivion of self in their work. Only one of the first-rank men was self-conscious, and he, the most mighty as a man, is by no means the first as an artist. And even Michael Angelo had not the self-consciousness of to-day: it requires a clique of commentators and a brotherhood of artists equally infected to develop that. But just so far as he tried to put his mighty self into his work, just so far he failed of artistic perfection; and not every one is Michael Angelo to make even failure beautifully colossal. In architecture, which in his day was already a dead art to be galvanized, not alive and manly like the art of the painter, his self-consciousness shows most strongly and his failure is most conspicuous. Here he did not create, but avowedly composed--set himself deliberately to study the past and to decide what was best for the future. And upon none but him rests the blame of having driven out of the semi-unconscious, semi-original Renaissance style what elements of power it had, and sent it reeling down through two centuries crazed with conceit and distorted with self-inspection.

On the unconscious development of mediaeval architecture, due to no one man, but to a universal interest in and appreciation of the art, it is unnecessary to dwell. Nor need we for present purposes seek further illustration farther afield. Let us take time now to look more narrowly at the art of to-day, and try to mark the different shapes it has taken with different nations.

The most decided school is in France: her artists, many in number, confine, whether involuntarily or not, their individual differences within sharply-marked and easily-noted limits. In Germany the schools are two--one of so-called historical painting at Munich, one of what we may name domestic painting at Duesseldorf. This last may be put on one side as having no specially obtrusive characteristics, and by German pictures will be meant those of the Munich and Vienna type, whether actually from the studios of Munich and Vienna or not. In English contemporary art can one pretend to find a school at all in any true sense of the word? What we do find is a very widespread art-literature and talk of art, a large number of working artists varying in temperament, and a vast horde of amateurs, who are not content to be patrons, but yearn also to be practisers of art.

In England theories of art are more carefully discussed and more widely diffused than they are in any other country. But they are theories of an essentially untechnical, amateurish, literary kind. The English critic calls all law and philosophy, all rules of morals and manners, of religion and political economy and science and scientific aesthetics, to aid his critical faculty when he needs must speak of pictures. In Germany there is also much theorizing, but of a different kind. It is not so much the whole physical and psychical cosmos that the German critic studies as the past history of art in its most recondite phases and most subtle divergences. Upon this he draws for information as to the value of the work before him. On the other hand, we shall find French art-criticism to be almost purely technical.

As the critics differ, so do the criticised by the natural law of national coherence. An English painter is apt to be primarily an embodied theory of one sort or another; which theory is more or less directly connected with his actual work as a painter. A German painting is apt to be scientifically composed on theory also, but a theory drawn from the study of art _per se_, not of the whole world external to art. The work of a Frenchman, like the criticism of his commentator, is primarily technical.

Because both German work and English work are theoretical compared with French, I do not wish to imply that technically they are on a par. Aside from the difference of imaginative power in the two nations, which renders German conceptions more valuable in every way than contemporary English ideas, there is a great difference in the technical training of the two groups of artists. German work often shows technical qualities as notable as those we find in France, though of another kind. The noble physical endowment of an artist--that by reason of which, and by reason of which alone, he _is_ an artist--is twofold: power of eye and power of hand. By power of the eye I mean simple vision exalted into a special gift, a special appreciation of line, an ultra delicate and profound perception of color, and an exact, unconscious memory. This last is not imagination nor imaginative memory, but an automatic power, if I may so say, of the retina--as unconscious as is the pianist's memory of his notes, and as unerring. It is not the power to fix in the mind by conscious effort the objects before one, and to recall them deliberately, inch by inch, at any time, but the power, when the brush pauses trembling for the signal, to put down unerringly facts learned God knows where, or imagined God knows how. Automatic, I repeat, this power must be. The tongue might not be able to tell, nor the mind deliberately to recall in cold blood, what was the depth of blue on a distant hill or the vagueness of its outlines, or what the anatomical structure of a mistress's fingers. But the brush knows, as nothing but the brush of an artist can; and when it comes to painting them, aerial perspective and anatomical detail _must_ come right. This is the first and the great endowment. And the second is like unto it in--Shall I use the fashionable artistic slang and say _preciousness_? It is the gift of a dexterous hand, winged with lightness and steady as steel, sensitive as a blind man's finger-tips, yet unerring in its stroke as the piston of a steamship. This is a gift as well as the other, but it can, far more than the other, be improved and developed by practice and patience. Both gifts in equal perfection constitute a technical master. It is hardly necessary to say that no man--certainly no nation--can to-day claim the highest measure of both. The French are most highly gifted with the first, the Germans with the second. In the latter, patience and science, working upon a natural aptitude, have developed great strength and accuracy of wrist, and with this the power of composition and design, purity and accuracy of outline, and good chiaroscuro. But the whole race is deficient in a sense of color. Its work is marked by crudeness and harshness, or at the best reticence--splendor without softness or inoffensiveness without charm. In cases where much is attempted in color--as in what is undoubtedly one of the best of contemporary paintings, Knille's _Tannhaeuser and Venus_ in the Berlin Gallery--the success is by no means on a par with the great excellence of drawing and composition. In France the eye for color is present--I will not say as in Venice, but to a greater degree than in the two other nations.

If we leave now professional painters and professional critics and turn to the untrained public, we shall find, of course, all our modern faults more evident. The English public is pre-eminently untechnical in its judgments, pre-eminently literary or moral. But the French and the German public approximate more to the English--as is natural--than do their respective artists. I use the word _literary_ as it has often been used by others in characterizing the popular art-criticism of the time--and in England much of the professional criticism also--to denote a prominence given to the subject, the idea, the story--_l'anecdote_, as a French critic calls it--over the purely painter's work of a picture. It denotes the theory that a picture is not first to please the sense, but to catch the fancy or the intellect or to touch the heart. This feeling, which in France turns toward sensationalism, in England toward sentimentality, is something other than the interest which attaches to historical painting as the record of facts--in itself not the highest interest one can find in a work of art. If we think back for a moment, we shall see how different from either of these moods was the mood in which the great Italians painted. Some "subject" of course a painting must have that is not a portrait, but these men chose instinctively--hardly, it is to be supposed, theoretically--such subjects as were most familiar to their public, and therefore least likely to engage attention primarily, and to the exclusion of the absolute pictorial value of the painting as such. We never find Titian telling anecdotes. His portraits are quiescence itself--portraits of men and women standing in the fulness of beauty and strength to be painted by Titian. We do not find likenesses snatched in some occurrence of daily life or in some dramatic action of historical or biographical importance. Even Raphael's great frescoes are symbolical more truly than historical, expressing the significance of a whole series of events rather than literally rendering one single event. The first remark of many who, accustomed to the literary interest of modern pictures, are for the first time making acquaintance with the old masters, is, that the galleries are so unexcitingly monotonous: the subjects are not interesting. Portraits, scenes from sacred history or Greek mythology,--that is all among the Italians. Desiring nothing but beauty of line and color, and expressiveness provided it was beautiful, they sought a subject merely as the _raison d'etre_ of beauty. Raphael could paint the Madonna and Child a score of times, and Veronese his _Marriages of Cana_, and all of them Magdalenes and St. Sebastians by the dozen, without thinking of finding fresh subjects to excite fresh interest. Nor does this restricted range of subjects imply, under the hand of a master, monotony. There is more unlikeness in Raphael's Madonnas than in the figures of any modern artist, whatever their variety of name and action. Even a century later than Raphael, among the Flemings and Hollanders, the best pictures are the simplest, the least dependent for their interest upon anything dramatic or anecdotal in their subject. The triumphs of the Dutch school are the portraits of the guilds. The masterpieces of Rubens are his children and single figures and biblical scenes, not his _Marie de Medicis_. And what of Rembrandt is so perfect as his _Saskia with the Pink_ at Dresden? If we have a photograph even of such a picture as this constantly before us, with a modern picture of anecdotal interest, no matter how vivid and pleasant that interest may have been at first, it is not hard to predict which will please us longest--which will grow to be an element in the happiness of every day, while the other becomes at last _fade_ and insipid. This even if we suppose its technical excellence to be great. How, then, shall such interest take the place of technical excellence?

This modern love of _l'anecdote_ is not exactly the cause perhaps, nor yet the effect, of the self-consciousness of modern art, but it goes hand in hand with it: they are manifestations of the same spirit in the two different spheres of worker and spectator.

But it may be said, If Michael Angelo was self-conscious, it was because he first caught the infection of modern times. Life, the world, the nineteenth century, are self-conscious through and through. It is impossible to be otherwise. It is impossible for a world which has lived through what ours has, which has recorded its doings and sufferings and speculations for our benefit, ever to be naive or spontaneous in anything. Inspiration unsought and unquestioned is a thing of the past. Study, reflection, absorption, eclecticism,--these are the watchwords of the future. If this were granted, many would still think it an open question whether art of the highest kind would in the future be possible or not. But is by no means necessary to grant it, for we have had in the most learned and speculative of nations an art in our century--still surviving, indeed, in our very midst--the growth of which has been as rapid and the flowering as superb as the growth and bloom of sculpture in Greece or of painting in Italy. I mean, of course, music in Germany. And if we think a moment we shall see that its growth was as unpremeditated, its direction and development as unbiassed by theories, its votaries as untroubled with self-consciousness, as if they had been archaic sculptors or builders of the thirteenth century. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, what sublime unconsciousness of their own personality as the personality of artists and as influencing art! Does Richard Wagner seem at first sight to be a glaring exception to such a rule--seem to strive more than any other artist in any branch of art to be critic as well--seem, perhaps, to be most notably self-conscious even in an age of self-consciousness? The most highly gifted of the generation as an artist, his musical talent developed spontaneously, irresistibly. It had thus developed before he began to reason about it, to justify in theory that which had approved itself in fact. His power lies in the union we find in him of musician and dramatist. His dogmatizing and theorizing expatiate not on the way he works in either art, but on the propriety of combining the two. Not his theories, but his artist's instinct, taught him how to do it as it is done in the _Meistersinger_. His theories try to explain his work, but by just so much as his work is consciously founded on his theories, by just so much is it less perfect than it would have been had he preserved his unconsciousness. The fact of his self-consciousness tends in many eyes to mark him as the rearguard of a line of artists, the pioneer of a generation of critical musicians. May Liszt perhaps serve as a sample of such--learned, critical, self-conscious, productive, but unoriginal? And the worst sign in Germany is less that the young musicians copy Wagner than that they copy him not instinctively and by nature, but theoretically and of deliberate intent, exalting his theories to rank beside his work.

It seems at first strange that, music being at once the glory and the recreation of the whole German nation, and a knowledge of it being native to the vast majority of individual Germans, there is little existing musical criticism--none as compared with the abounding German criticism on every other branch of art and every other subject under the sun. The field offered here to the cobweb-spinning German brain is wide and attractive. It seems strange that it should be as yet uncultivated, unless we fall back on the theory that art at its vitalest is of necessity uncritical, and that where an inborn love of, and aptitude for, an art exists with a daily enjoyment of its technical perfection, we shall be least likely to find it elaborately criticised theoretically. Where practice is abundantly satisfactory theories are superfluous.

Below, though still in the same category with, the musical gift of the Germans we may cite the literary gift of the English. For though this may not be the greatest literary epoch of England, yet it will not be denied that the greatest of English aptitudes is for literature. The wide appreciation of it in England is unmatched by a like appreciation of any other form of art. The growth of English novel-writing and its healthy development, accompanied, it may be, by many fungus-growths due to over-fertility, afford us the spectacle of a contemporary yet spontaneous English art, unforced by hothouse cultivation, uninfluenced by theories. A century or so hence the hearty, unconscious bloom of narrative literature in our day and language may seem as strange as seems to us the spontaneous blossoming of Venetian painting, of Greek sculpture, or of architecture in the Ile de France. An Englishman of to-day who thinks painters can be spun out of theories would surely laugh with instinctive knowledge of the veritable requirements of their art if one were to propose supplying novelists or poets in a similar way.

If we thus acknowledge that two kinds of art--and those two requiring the greatest amount of imaginative power--can flourish with spontaneity even in so self-conscious a civilization as ours, we shall fail to see in that civilization a sufficient _a priori_ reason why the same might not have been the case with painting. If, however, still keeping to our own day, we look for the reverse of this picture, we shall find some approach to it in the condition of the painter's art in England. Here theory runs wild, practice falls far behind, and a great part of the practice that exists is inspired and regulated by theory. Artists are especially self-conscious, and the public, while much concerned with things artistic and fed on daily food of art-theory and speculation, is specially devoid of an innate artistic sense and an educated faculty for appreciating technical perfection.

In England, more even than on the Continent or with ourselves, is there a passion for story-telling with the brush, a desire to give ideas instead of pictures, a denial of the fact that the main object of a picture is to please the eye just as truly and as surely as the main object of a symphony is to please the ear. If we look through the catalogue of a Royal Academy exhibition, we notice the preponderance of scenes illustrative of English or other literature--of canvases that tell a story or point a moral or bear a punning or a sentimental title. And we notice the great number of quotations introduced into the catalogue without any actual explanatory necessity. Even landscapes are dragged into the domain of sentiment, and Mr. Millais, who copies Nature with the exactest reverence, cannot call his brook a brook, but "The sound of many waters;" and a graveyard is not named a graveyard, but "Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap;" and instead of _Winding the Clock_ we are told "The clock beats out the life of little men." A canvas representing "untrodden snow" must be ticketed, for increase of interest, "Within three miles of Charing Cross." Another is marked, "Christmas Eve: a welcome to old friends. (See _Silas Marner_.)" And so on, _ad infinitum_. May one not say _ad nauseam_ before a piece of marble labelled "Baby doesn't like the water," or a canvas by Faed, R. A., called "Little cold tooties," or the portrait by the president of the Academy of a child on her pony denoted not only by the child's name in full, but her pony's also?

Prominent also at a first visit to a London exhibition stands out the hesitancy; of English artists to deal with large canvases and life-size figures--their strict confinement to _genre_ of a domestic or bookishly archaeological type. This is not the place to discuss the causes of such a fact, nor to insist on the lack of certain technical qualities in even the best English work. Such discussions can only be profitable when the originals are at hand to recriticise the criticism.

More striking than anything to be seen in 1877 at the Royal Academy was the small collection of pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery, organized and controlled by a noble amateur--himself a painter also--with the avowed intention of exhibiting the latest and most eccentric phases of English art. To a Londoner the opening day was interesting, as revealing the newest works of the most conspicuous London artists. To a stranger fresh from continental pictures, old and new, eager to see the touch of hands so often described in print, it was a revelation not only of a few men's work, but of the tendency of a national art and the artistic temperament of a whole people. Superficially, these pictures seemed the exact opposite of those at the conservative Academy--as aberrant as the latter were commonplace. But to one who knew them as the work of a fashionable, highly-educated clique they seemed merely a reaction of the same spirit that produced the elder style. In striving to get out of the rut of commonplace which had so long held in its grip the wheels of English art, not originality, so much as deliberate, sought-out eccentricity, was the result. The scale of work, starting from the original bathos of domestic sentimentality, runs up to the veriest contortions of affected mediaevalism, rarely striking out a note of common sense. Simple English art is the apotheosis of the British middle-class spirit, of Mr. Arnold's "Philistinism." English art departing from this spirit shows, not Mr. Arnold's "sweetness and light," not calmness, repose, sureness of self, unconsciousness of its own springs of life, but theories running into vague contradictions, a far-fetched abnormalness, a morbid conception of beauty, a defiant disregard of the fact that a public exists which judges by common sense and the eye, not by a fine-spun confusion of theories and an undefined but omnipotent and deified "aesthetic sense" non-resident in the optic nerve. Mr. Whistler's pictures to-day, cleverly as he can paint if he will, are not pictures--I do not mean in fact, which is certainly true--but in title. They are "Natures in Black and Gold," or "In Blue and Silver," or "In Blue and Gold," or "Arrangements in Black," or "Harmonies in Amber and Brown." Here we have the desperate reaction from the idea that _l'anecdote_ is everything to the idea that it is sufficient to represent nothing (poetically conceived!) with little color and less form, with the vaguest and slightest and most untechnical technique. It is hard to say which would most puzzle Titian redivivus--"Little cold tooties," or a blue-gray wash with a point or two of yellow, bearing some imaginary resemblance to the Thames with its gaslights, and called a "Nocturne in Blue and Gold."

The French "impressionalist" clique, similar in spirit to these Englishmen, though less outre in practice, is not by any means of so great importance in France as they are in England. It has more than once been remarked in England that the old-fashioned amateur--patron and critic, _kenner_--is dying out, and that his modern substitute must not only choose, but experiment--not only admire, but be admired. This spirit, spreading through a nation, will not make it a nation of artists, but will make the nation's artists amateurs. No critic, no amateur, is more loath to try his own hand than the one who most deeply and rightly appreciates the skill of others, and the rare and God-given and difficult nature of that skill. The confusion of amateur with professional work lowers the standard, so there will be every year fewer to tell the mass of the nation that most useful of truths--how earnest a thing is true art, and how rare a native appreciation of its truest worth.

There is no place where the interest excited by national art is so widespread, where the exhibitions are so crowded, where they so regulate times and seasons, annual excursions to and departures from town, as in England. Yet there is no place where the interest in art seems to a stranger so factitious, so much a matter of fashion and custom, of instinctive following of chance-appointed bell-wethers. It would scarcely be a matter of surprise if the whole thing should collapse through some pin-thrust of rival interest or excitement, and next year's exhibition be a desert, next year's artists paint their theories and their souls for unregarding eyes, or rather for unheeding brains. Have we not an apology for such a suggestion in the history of the rage for Gothic architecture, so thoroughly demonstrated in every possible theoretical and philosophical way to be the only proper style for Englishmen present or future, so devotedly and exclusively followed for a while by the profession, only to be suddenly abandoned for its fresher rivals, the so-called styles of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne?

In the throngs that flocked to the opening of the Royal Academy, waiting hours before the doors were opened, fighting and struggling for a foothold on the stairs, eager to be the first to see, though there were weeks of opportunities ahead--in the rare recurrence through the hum of the vast criticising crowd of a word of technical judgment or sober artistic criticism--it was easy to recognize the same spirit that confuses morality with chair-legs, that finds a knocker more "sincere" and "right" than a door-bell, that insists as upon a vital necessity that the heads of all nails should be visible and that all lines should be straight, and would as soon have a shadow on its conscience as in the pattern of wall-paper. Nowhere was decorative art so non-existent a few years ago as in England--nowhere is it so universally dwelt upon to-day. Yet it is easy to see how entirely the revival is a child of theory and books and teachers and rules--how little owing to a spontaneous development of art-instinct in the people, a spontaneous desire for more beauty in their surroundings, a spontaneous knowledge of how it is best to be obtained.

The literary and un-painterlike--if I may use such an awkward term--nature of English art is shown perhaps more forcibly in its critics than in artists or public. One is especially struck in reading criticisms of whatever grade with the excessive prominence given to the artist's personality. The work of this year is judged not so much by its excellence as by comparison with the work of last year. A----'s pictures, and B----'s and C----'s and D----'s, are interesting and valuable mainly as showing A----'s improvement, or B----'s falling off, or C----'s unexpected change of theme, or D----'s fine mind and delicate sensibilities.

Mr. Ruskin is without doubt the most remarkable of English critics, and summarizes so many opposite theories and tendencies that his pages may in some sort be taken as an epitome of the whole matter. It would be impossible to abstract from their great bulk any consecutive or consistent system of thought or precept. His influence has been mainly by isolated ideas of more or less truth and value. It is impossible here to analyze his work. Such is the mixed tissue of his woof that the captive princess who was set to sort a roomful of birds' feathers had scarcely a harder task than one who should try to separate and classify his threads, some priceless and steady, some rotten, false, misleading. Morals, manners, religion, political economy, are mixed with art in every shape--art considered theoretically and technically, historically, philosophically and prophetically. Various as are his views on these varying subjects, on no one subject even do they remain invariable. Yet such is the charm of his style, delightfully sarcastic, and eloquent as a master's brush, so vividly is each idea presented in itself, that, each idea being enjoyed as it comes, all seem at first of equal value. We realize neither the fallacy of many taken singly nor the conflict of all taken together. His points are often cleverly and faithfully put, and our attention is so riveted on this cleverness and faithfulness that we take for granted the rightness of his deductions, slovenly, illogical or false though they may be. What we most remark in his books is how the purely artistic element in his nature--of a very high grade and very true instincts--is dwarfed of full development and stunted of full results by the theorizing literary bent which he has in common with his time and people. In theorizing even on truly-felt and clearly-stated facts, in explaining their origin and unfolding their effects, his guidance is least valuable. We may more safely ask him _what_ than _why_. His influence on English art has been great at the instant: whether it will be permanent is doubtful. At one time it was said that without having read his books one could tell by an inspection of the Royal Academy walls what Mr. Ruskin had written in the past year. Now, the most notable exponents of his teaching, whether consciously so or not, are on the one hand the shining lights of the Grosvenor Gallery--hierophants of mysticism and allegory and symbolism and painted souls and moral beauty expressed in the flesh, copying Ruskin's _Botticelli_ line for line, forgetting that what was naivete in him, and in him admirable, because all before him had done so much less well, becomes to-day in them the direst affectation, is reprehensible in them because many before them have done so much better. On the other hand, we have a naturalistic throng which follows Mr. Ruskin's precepts when he overweights the other side of the scale and says that art should "never exist alone, never for itself," never except as "representing a true"--defined as actually-existing--"thing or decorating a useful thing;" when he declares that every attempt by the imagination to "exalt or refine healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it." Mr. Ruskin bade men "go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning, _rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing_;" and Mr. Hamerton was literally obeying him when he exiled himself for five years in a hut on an island in a bleak Scotch lake to learn faithfully to portray the shores of that single lake. Was it thus that Titian studied in his youth, and learned how, years after in Venice, to paint the chestnuts and the hills of Cadore a thousand-fold more artistically and more truly, because more abstractly and more ideally, than could all the "pre-Raphaelite" copyists of to-day? Thus we see the two extremes of Mr. Ruskin's teaching--see him at one time exalting imagination and feeling over the pictorial part of art, at another degrading art into the servilest copying.

Observers may disagree as to whether these cognate things--self-consciousness in the artist, aesthetic philosophizing in the critic, and the taste for a literary rather than a pictorial value in the public--are on the increase or on the decrease in the various centres of art. Annual exhibitions--a significant illustration of our high-pressure life in art as in other things--would seem to tend toward deepening these faults. Attention must be attracted at all hazards, and the greater the number of exhibitors and the average attractiveness of their canvases the greater becomes the temptation to shine, not by excellence, but by eccentricities of treatment, or, still more, by the factitious interest of a "telling" subject. Is it due, perhaps, to this constant desire for notoriety on the part of the artist, and for more and more excitement on the part of the public, that in all modern schools, landscape art, as less possibly influenced by such a state of things, stands ahead of the art which has humanity for its subject? It is scarcely possible to find in France to-day a figure-painter who is a Daubigny, still less a Jules Dupre. Next to these unquestionably stand such animal-painters as Bonheur and Troyon; and it would be hard among the youngest file of artists to find a figure-painter who in his line should rival Van Marcke in his. In England also landscape ranks ahead, and it is perhaps in comparing it with French landscape that the difference between the schools is most truly though not most glaringly displayed. Even here, and in the allied fields of animal-painting, the desire for _l'anecdote_ creeps in, and Landseer with all his talent often prostitutes his brush in the attempt to make his brutes the centre of dramatic action, and forces into them semi-human characteristics in order to extract from them tales or ideas of human interest. It was not thus that Veronese painted dogs or Franz Snyders his lions and boars--not thus that the Greeks have put the horse into art. Nor, to take the best contemporary comparison, is it thus that Barye's bronzes are designed.

Landscape brings us inevitably to Turner. The most highly gifted of all English artists, past or present, his genius was hardly a logical outcome of the contemporary spirit of his nation. We have no right to say this of an artist, no right to call him anomalous, while we are still in doubt as to whether he may be only the advance-guard of a new national art, the herald of a new avatar. But when he with his generation dies, when another generation develops and bears fruit, and a third is beginning to blossom, and he still seems anomalous, it is fair to hold him exceptional in his country's art, rather than characteristic thereof. Together with wonderful endowments of eye and hand, and a prodigious power of work, Turner's earlier works show us an unconscious development and a healthy oblivion of his own personality. But later the fatal modern fever entered his blood, ending in something very like delirium. From a painter he became a theorist, contaminated by a rush of criticism alike indiscriminate in praise and injudicious in blame. We shall see the baleful effects of modern methods if we look, in the wonderful series at the National Gallery, first at the pictures painted when Turner was an artist thinking of painting, then to those done when he was a self-conscious experimentalist thinking of Turner--Turner worshipped by Ruskin, Turner sick with envy of the Dutchmen and defiance of Claude.

I have but a line to give to the one or two other men of abnormally splendid gifts whom this century has seen. Henri Regnault's extraordinary talent was extinguished almost at the first spark, and it is beyond prophecy to tell what it might have produced. His eccentricities seem to have been quite genuine, due to an overflow of power rather than to posing or grimace. His love of his art, his passion for color, were almost frantic in their intensity, but sincere. A certain exaggerated phrase of his is but the protest of reaction against the literary painting, the erudite and philosophical art, of his time. "La vie," he cries, "etant courte, il faut peindre tant qu'on a des yeux. Donc on ne doit pas les fatiguer a lire des stupides journaux." A crude way of putting the idea that to be an artist one needs but art.

Another wonderful talent is Hans Makart. Such an eye for color, it is quite safe to say, has not been born since Veronese. Had he been born at Venice among his peers, forced to work instead of experiment, outvied instead of foolishly extolled, surrounded by artists to surpass him if he tripped for a single instant, instead of critics to laud his most glaring faults and amateurs to pay thousands for his spoiled paper, we should have had another name to use as explanatory of genius. As it is, he is, according to present indications, utterly spoiled. Only those who know how he can draw if he will, how he has painted--portraits best, perhaps--when he would, are vexed beyond endurance by the folly and the carelessness and the sins he chooses to give us. It has been said that Raphael Mengs was a born genius spoiled by the coldness, the pseudo-classicism, the artificiality and eclecticism of the eighteenth century. A companion portrait is Hans Makart, ruined by the amateurishness, the rhapsodizing, the theorizing, the morbid self-consciousness of the nineteenth.

The so-called Spanish school of to-day is as yet too new for us to see exactly whither it tends. Its passion for glaring, metallic, aniline compound tints--tints that "scream," to use a French phrase--its horror of all shade and depth and of pure and simple colors, are, however, most certainly unhealthy. It is a diseased eye that in the desire for violent color loses all memory of chiaroscuro.

I have left till now unnoticed the contemporary Netherland artists, though their works are perhaps more entirely satisfactory than those of either of the three schools we have discussed. But their characteristics are less markedly distinct, less available for comparison, and can be best noted and appraised by a previously-gained knowledge of the peculiarities of English, French and German painting. The Belgian school is most closely allied to the French, and in technique is often its equal. In landscape and cattle-painting the types are similar, while Belgian figure-painting gains by the lack of the element which a French critic notes when he says modern art has become _mondain--surtout demi-mondain_. Nowhere does contemporary art seem so healthy and sane, so sure of itself, so consonant with the best nature and gifts of the people, as in the Netherlands: nowhere are its ideals so free from morbidness, affectation or sentimentality. Is it perhaps that in the studios of Amsterdam, in the great school of Antwerp, even in the galleries of Brussels, one is somewhat out of the wildest stream of modern life--less driven to analysis and theorizing and self-consciousness than in London, Paris or Munich? Whatever is cause, whatever effect, the Netherland school shows two things side by side--the least measure of self-consciousness, and the soundest contemporary painting: if not the most effective, it is, I think, the most full of promise. There seems to be forming the most healthy national soil for the development of future genius.

In conclusion, it may be noted that we in America, whose art is just beginning even to strive, are subjected to a somewhat strange cross-fire of influences. Lineally the children of England, we are spiritually and by temperament in many things her opposites. Our taste in art seems to turn resolutely away from her. For each hundred of French and score of German pictures that comes to us, how many come from England? What can one who has not crossed the sea learn of English pictures from our private collections and picture-dealers' shops? Was not all we knew prior to the Exhibition of 1876 gleaned from _Vernon Gallery_ plates and Turner's _Rogers_ or _Rivers of France_? But while our dealers and students and millionaires throng the studios of Paris and Munich, and our eyes are being daily educated to demand above all things _technique_, our brains are constantly being worked upon by a stream of art-literature from England. Taste pulls us one way--identity of English speech, with consequent openness to English ideas, pulls us the other. Pictures preach one thing, books another. Our boy who has worked in Paris comes home to try to realize Ruskin. Both influences are too new, and our art is as yet too unsteady, for any one to guess as to the ultimate result. One thing only can be unreservedly inculcated: Let us shun self-analyzation, self-consciousness, morbidness, affectation, attitudinizing. Let us look ahead as little as possible, keeping our eyes on our brushes and on the world of beauty around us. One thing only can with safety be predicted: If we are, or are to be, a people of artists, creative or appreciative as the case may be, we shall learn whatever of technique the world has to teach us, and shall improve upon it, and we shall perhaps digest the small measure of theory for which we have appetites left. But if we are _not_ artists, actual or future, technique will be impossible, and will seem undesirable. We shall greedily fill our stomachs with the wind of art-philosophy, shall work with the reason instead of with the eye and the fingers, shall symbolize our aspirations, our theorizings, our souls and our consciences, and fondly dream we are painting pictures. Or we shall copy with a hopeless effort after literalness the first face or weed we meet, and call the imperfect, mechanical result a work of art.

M. G. VAN RENSSELAER.

THREE WATCHES

I sat in the silence, in moonlight that gathered and glowed Far over the field and the forest with tender increase: The low, rushing winds in the trees were like waters that flowed From sources of passionate joy to an ocean of peace. And I watched, and was glad in my heart, though the shadows were deep, Till one came and asked me: "Say, why dost thou watch through the night?" And I said, "I am watching my joy. They who sorrow may sleep, But the soul that is glad cannot part with one hour of delight."

Again in the silence I watched, and the moon had gone down; The shadows were hidden in darkness; the winds had passed by; The midnight sat throned, and the jewels were bright in her crown, For stars glimmered softly--oh softly!--from depths of the sky. And I sighed as I watched all alone, till again came a voice: "Ah! why dost thou watch? Joy is over, and sorrow is vain." And I said, "I am watching my grief. Let them sleep who rejoice, But the spirit that loves cannot part with one hour of its pain."

Once more I sat watching, in darkness that fell like a death-- The deep solemn darkness that comes to make way for the dawn: I looked on the earth, and it slept without motion or breath, And blindly I looked on the sky, but the stars were withdrawn. And the voice spoke once more: "Cease thy watching, for what dost thou gain?" But I said, "I am watching my soul, to this darkness laid bare. Let them sleep to whom love giveth joy, to whom love giveth pain, But the soul left alone cannot part with one moment of prayer."

MARION COUTHOUY.

SISTER SILVIA.

Monte Compatri is one of the eastern outlying peaks of the Alban Mountains, and, like so many Italian mountains, has its road climbing to and fro in long loops to a gray little city at the top. This city of Monte Compatri is a full and busy hive, with solid blocks of houses, and the narrowest of streets that break now and then into stairs. For those old builders respected the features of a landscape as though they had been the features of a face, and no more thought of levelling inequalities of land than of shaving down or raising up noses. When a man had a house-lot in a hollow, he built his house there, and made Steps to go down to it: his neighbor, who owned a rocky knoll, built his house at the top, and made stairs to go up to it. Moreover, if the land was a bit in the city, the house was made in the shape of it, and was as likely to have corners in obtuse or acute as in right angles.

The inhabitants of Monte Compatri have two streets of which they are immensely proud--the Lungara, which wriggles through the middle of the town, and the Giro, which makes the entire circuit of the town, leaving outside only the rim of houses that rise from the edge of the mountain, some of them founded on the natural rock, others stretching roots of masonry far down into the earth.

One of these houses on the Giro had for generations been in the possession of the Guai family. One after another had held it at an easy rent from Prince Borghese, the owner of the town. The vineyard and orchard below in the Campagna they owned, and from those their wealth was derived. For it was wealth for such people to have a house full of furniture, linen and porcelain--where, perhaps, a connoisseur might have found some rare bits of old china--besides having a thousand scudi in bank.

In this position was the head of the family when he died, leaving a grown-up son and daughter, and his wife about to become a mother for the third time.

"Pepina shall have her portion in money, since she is to marry soon," the father said. "Give her three hundred scudi in gold and a hundred in pearls. The rest of the money shall be for my wife to do as she likes with. For the little one; when it shall come, Matteo shall put in the bank every year thirty scudi, and when it shall be of age, be it girl or boy, he shall divide the land equally with it."

So said Giovanni Guai, and died, and his wife let him talk uncontradicted, since it was for the last time. They had lived a stormy life, his heavy fist opposed to her indefatigable tongue, and she contemplated with silent triumph the prospect of being left in possession of the field. Besides, would he not see afterward what she did--see and be helpless to oppose? So she let him die fancying that he had disposed of his property.

"The child is sure to be a girl," she said afterward, "and I mean her to be a nun. The land shall not be cut up. Matteo shall be a rich man and pile up a fortune. He shall be the richest man in Monte Compatri, and a girl shall not stand in his way."

Nature verified the mother's prophecy and sent a little girl. Silvia they called her, and, since she was surely to be a nun, she grew to be called Sister Silvia by everybody, even before she was old enough to recognize her own name.

The house of the Guai, on its inner wall, opened on the comparatively quiet Giro. From the windows and door could be heard the buzz and hum of the Lungara, where everybody--men, women, children, cats and dogs--were out with every species of work and play when the sun began to decline. This was the part of the house most frequented and liked by the family. They could see their neighbors even when they were at work in their houses, and could exchange gossip and stir the polenta at the same time. The other side of the house they avoided. It was lonely and it was sunny. For Italians would have the sun, like the Lord, to be for ever knocking at the door and for ever shut out. It must shine upon their outer walls, but not by any means enter their windows.

As years passed, however, there grew to be one exception in this regard. Sister Silvia loved not the town with its busy streets, nor the front windows with their gossiping heads thrust out or in. She had her own chamber on the Campagna side, and there she sat the livelong day with knitting or sewing, never going out, except at early morning to hear mass. There her mother accompanied her--a large, self-satisfied woman beside a pallid little maiden who never raised her eyes. Or, if her mother could not go, Matteo stalked along by her side, and with his black looks made everybody afraid to glance her way. Nobody liked to encounter the two black eyes of Matteo Guai. It was understood that the knife in his belt was sharp, and that no scruple of conscience would stand between him and any vengeance he might choose to take for any affront he might choose to imagine.

After mass, then, and the little work her mother permitted the girl to do for health's sake, Silvia sat alone by her window and looked out on the splendor which her eyes alone could appreciate. There lay the Campagna rolling and waving for miles and miles around, till the Sabines, all rose and amethyst, hemmed it in with their exquisite wall, and the sea curved a gleaming sickle to cut off its flowery passage, or the nearer mountains stood guard, almost covered by the green spray it threw up their rocky sides. She sat and stared at Rome while her busy fingers knit--at the wonderful city where she was one day to go and be a nun, where the pope lived and kings came to worship him. In the morning light the Holy City lay in the midst of the Campagna like her mother's wedding-pearls when dropped in a heap on their green cushion; and Silvia knelt with her face that way and prayed for a soul as white, for she was to be the spouse of Christ, and her purity was all that she could bring Him as a dowry. But when evening came, and that other airy sea of fine golden mist flowed in from the west, and made a gorgeous blur of all things, then the city seemed to float upward from the earth and rise toward heaven all stirring with the wings of its guardian angels, and Silvia would beg that the New Jerusalem might not be assumed till she should have the happiness of being in it.

But there was a lovely view nearer than this visionary one, though the little nun seldom looked at it. If she should lean from her window she would see the mountain-side dropping from the gray walls of her home, with clinging flowery vines and trees growing downward, while the olives and grapevines of the Campagna came to meet them, setting here and there a precarious little garden halfway up the steep. Just under her window an almost perpendicular path came up, crept round the walls and entered the town. But no one ever used this road now, for a far wider and better one had been constructed at the other side of the mountain, and all the people came up that way when the day's work was over in the Campagna.

One summer afternoon Silvia's reveries were broken by her mother's voice calling her: "Silvia, come and prepare the salad for Matteo."

It was an extraordinary request, but the girl went at once without question. She seized upon every opportunity to practise obedience in preparation for that time when her life would be made up of obedience and prayer.

Her mother was sitting by one of the windows talking with Matteo, who had just came up from the Campagna. He had an unsocial habit of eating alone, and, as he ate nothing when down in the vineyard, always wanted his supper as soon as he came up. The table was set for him with snow-white cloth and napkin, silver knife, fork and spoon, a loaf of bread and a decanter of golden-sparkling wine icy cold from the grotto hewn in the rock beneath the house; and he was just eating his _minestra_ of vegetables when his sister came in. At the other end of the long table was a head of crisp white lettuce lying on a clean linen towel, and two bottles--one of white vinegar, the other of oil as sweet as cream and as bright as sunshine. Monte Compatri had no need to send to Lucca for oil of olives while its own orchards dropped such streams of pure richness.

The room was large and dingy. The brick floor had never known other cleansing than sprinkling and sweeping, the yellow-washed walls had become with time a pale, mottled brown, the paint had disappeared under a fixed dinginess which the dusting-brush alone could not remove, and the glass of the windows had never been washed except by the rain. Yet, for all that, the place had an air of cleanliness. For though these people do not clean their houses more than they clean their yards, yet their clothing and tables and beds are clean. Plentiful white linen, stockings like snow, and bright dishes and metals give a look of freshness and show well on the dim background. Heavy walnut presses, carved and black with age, stood against the walls, drinking-glasses and candlesticks sparkled on a dark bureau-top, there was a bright picture or two, and the sunlighted tinware of a house at the other side of the street threw a cluster of tiny rays like a bouquet of light in at the window. Silvia received these sun-blossoms on her head when she placed herself at the lower end of the table. She pushed the sleeves of her white sack back from her slim white arms, and began washing the lettuce-leaves in a bowl of fresh water and breaking them in the towel. The leaves broke with a fine snap and dropped in pieces as stiff as paper into a large dark-blue plate of old Japanese ware. A connoisseur in porcelain would have set such a plate on his drawing-room wall as a picture.

"How does Claudio work?" the mother asked of her son.

"He works well," Matteo replied. "He is worth two of our common fellows, if he _is_ educated."

"Nevertheless, I should not have employed him," the mother said. "He has disobeyed and disappointed his parents, and he should be punished. They meant him to be a priest, and raked and scraped every soldo to educate him. Now, just when he is at the point of being able to repay them, he makes up his mind that he has no vocation for the priesthood, and breaks their hearts by his ingratitude. It is nonsense to set one's will up so and have such scruples. Obedience is vocation enough for anything. There should be a prison where parents could put the children who disobey them."

The Sora Guai spoke sternly, and looked as if she would not have hesitated to put a refractory child in the deepest of dungeons.

"He was a fool, but he earns his money," Matteo responded, and, drawing a plate of deliciously fried frogs toward him, began to gnaw them and throw the bones on the floor.

Silvia gave him the salad, and poured wine and water into the tumbler for him, while his mother went to the kitchen for a dish of fricasseed pigeons.

"There's no onion in the salad," Matteo grumbled when she came back.

Silvia uttered an exclamation of dismay, ran for a silvery-white little onion and sliced it thinly into the salad.

"Forgive me, Matteo," she said. "I was distracted by the thought of Claudio. It seems such a terrible thing."

"It would be a much more terrible thing if it were a girl who disobeyed," Matteo growled. He did not like that girls should criticise men.

"So it would," the girl responded with meek readiness.

"I don't know why I feel so tired to-day," the mother said, sinking into a chair again. "My bones ache as if I had been working in the vineyard all day."

"You are not ill, mamma?" exclaimed Silvia, blushing with alarm.

The answer was a hesitating one: "I don't see what can ail me. It wouldn't be anything, only that I am so tired without having done much."

"Perhaps it's the weather, mamma," Silvia suggested.

Gentle as she was, she had adopted the ruthless and ungrateful Italian custom of ascribing every ache and pain of the body to some almost imperceptible change in their too beautiful weather. The smallest cloud goes laden with more accusations than it holds drops of rain, and the ill winds that blow nobody any good blow through those shining skies from morning till night and from night till morning again.

The Sora Guai was sicker than she dreamed. It was not the summer sun that scorched her so, nor the _scirocco_ that made her head so heavy. What malaria she had found to breathe on the mountain-top it would be hard to say; but the dreaded _perniciosa_ had caught her in its grasp, and she was doomed. The fever burned fiercely for a few days, and when it was quenched there was nothing left but ashes.

And thus died the only earthly thing to which Sister Silvia's heart clung. The mother had been stern, but the daughter was too submissive to need correction. She had never had any will of her own, except to love and obey. Collision between them was therefore impossible, and the daughter felt as a frail plant growing under a shadowing tree might feel if the tree were cut down. She was bare to every wind that blew. She had no companions of her own age--she had no companion of any age, in fact--and she had not been accustomed to think for herself in the smallest thing.

She had got bent into a certain shape, however, and her brother and sister felt quite safe on her account. Everybody knew that she was to be a nun of the Perpetual Adoration; that she was soon to go to the convent of Santa Maria Maddalena on the Quirinal in Rome; and that, once entered there, she would never again see a person from outside. The town's-people were accustomed to the wall of silence and seclusion which had already grown up about her, and they did not even seek to salute her when they met her going to and from church in the morning. To these simple citizens, ignorant but reverential, Sister Silvia's lowered eyelids were as inviolate as the pearl gates of the New Jerusalem. Besides, to help their reverence, there were the fierce black eyes and strange reputation of Matteo. So when, a day or two after her mother's death, his sister begged him to accompany her to church in the early morning, and leave her in the care of some decent woman there, Matteo replied that she might go by herself.

She set out for the first time alone on what had ever been to her a _via sacra_, and was now become a _via dolorosa_, where her tears dropped as she walked. And going so once, she went again. Pepina, the elder sister, a widow now, had come home to keep house for Matteo, but she was too much taken up with work, the care of her two children and looking out for a second husband to have time to watch Silvia, and after a few weeks the young girl went as unheeded as a matron in her daily walk.

At home her life was nearly the same. She mended the clothes from the washing and knit stockings, and sat at her window and looked off over the Campagna toward Rome.

One evening she sat there before going to bed and watched the moonlight turn all the earth to black and silver under the purple sky--a black like velvet, so deep and soft was it, and a silver like white fire, clear and splendid, yet beautifully soft. She was feeling desolate, and her tears dropped down, now and then breaking into sobs. It had been pleasant to sit there alone when she knew that her mother was below stairs, strong, healthy and gay. All that life had been as the oil over which her little flame burned. Lacking it, she grew dim, just as the floating wick in her little blue vase before the Madonna grew dim when the oil was gone.

As she wept and heard unconsciously the nightingales, she grew conscious of another song that mingled with theirs. It was a human voice, clear and sweet as an angel's, and it sang a melody she knew in little snatches that seemed to begin and end in a sigh. The voice came nearer and paused beneath a fig tree, and the words grew distinct.

"Pieta, signore, di me dolente," it sang.

Silvia leaned out of the window and looked down at the singer. His face was lifted to the white moonlight, and seemed in its pallid beauty a concentration of the moonlight. Only his face was visible, for the shadow of the tree hid all his figure. One might almost have expected to catch a glimmer of two motionless wings bearing up that face, so fair it was.

To Silvia it was as if another self, who grieved also, but who could speak, were uttering all her pain, and lightening it so. She recognized Claudio's voice. He was the chief singer in the cathedral, and sang like an angel. She was afraid that Claudio had done very wrong in not being a priest, but, for all that, she had often found her devotion increased by his singing. The Christmas night would not have been half so joyful lacking his _Adeste Fideles_; the _Stabat Mater_ sung by him in Holy Week made her tears of religious sorrow burst forth afresh; and when on Easter morning he sang the _Gloria_ it had seemed to her that the heavens were opening.

For all that, however, he had been to her not a person, but a voice. That he should come here and express her sorrow made him seem different. For the first time she looked at his face. By daylight it was thin and finely featured, and of a clear darkness like shaded water, through which the faintest tinge of color is visible. In this transfigurating moonlight it became of a luminous whiteness.

The song ended, the singer turned his head slightly and looked up at Silvia's window. She did not draw back. There was no recognition of any human sympathy with him, and no slightest consciousness of that airy and silent friendship which had long been weaving itself over the tops of the mountains that separated them. How could she know that Claudio had sung for her, and that it had been the measure of his success to see her head droop or lift as he sang of sorrow and pain or of joy and triumph? The choir had their post over the door; and, besides, she never glanced up even in going out. Therefore she gazed down into his uplifted face with a sweet and sorrowful tranquillity, her soul pure and candid to its uttermost depths.

For Claudio, who had sung to express his sympathy for her, but had not dreamed of seeing her, it was as if the dark-blue sky above had opened and an angel had looked out when he saw her face. He could only stretch his clasped hands toward her.

The gesture made her weep anew, for it was like human kindness. She hid her face in her handkerchief, and he saw her wipe the tears away again and again.

Claudio remembered a note he carried. It had been written the night before--not with any hope of her ever seeing it, but, as he had written her hundreds of notes before, pouring out his heart into them because it was too full to bear without that relief. He took the note out, but how should he give it to her? The window was too far above for him to toss so light a thing unless it should be weighted with a stone; and he could not throw a stone at Silvia's window. He held it up, and, that she might see it more clearly, tore up a handful of red poppies and laid it white on the blossoms that were a deep red by night.

Silvia understood, and after a moment's study dropped him down the ball of her knitting; and soon the note came swaying up through the still air resting on its cushion of poppies, for Claudio had wound the thread about both flowers and letter.

He smiled with an almost incredulous delight as he saw the package arrive safely at its destination and caught afterward the faint red light of the lamp that Silvia had taken down from before her Madonna to read the note by. Since she was a little thing only five or six years old his heart had turned toward her, and her small white face had been to him the one star in a dim life. He still kept two or three tiny flowers she had given him years before when his family and hers were coming together down from Monte San Silvestro at the other side of Monte Compatri. The two children, with others, had stopped to stick fresh flowers through the wire screen before the great crucifix halfway up the mountain, and Silvia had given Claudio these blossoms. He had laid them away with his treasures and relics--the bit of muslin from the veil of Our Lady of Loretto, the almost invisible speck from the cord of St. Francis of Assisi and the little paper of the ashes of Blessed Joseph Labre. In those days he was the little priest and she the little nun, and their companions stood respectfully back for them. Now he was no more the priest, and she was up there in her window against the sky reading the note he had written her.

This is what the note said:

"My heart is breaking for your sorrow. Why should such eyes as yours be permitted to weep? Who is there to wipe those tears away? Oh that I might catch them as they fall! Drop me down a handkerchief that has been wet with them, that I may keep it as a relic. Tell me of some way in which I can console you and spend my life to serve you."

She read with a mingling of consolation and astonishment. Why, this was more than her mother cared for her! But perhaps men were really more strongly loving than women. It would seem so, since God, who knows all, when He wanted to express His love to mankind, took the form of a man, not of a woman. Then she considered whether, and how, she should answer this note, and the result of her considering was this, written hastily on a bit of paper in which some Agnus Dei had been wrapped:

"I do not know what I ought to write to you, but I thank you for your kindness. It comforts me, and I have need of comfort. I think, though, that it may be wrong for you to speak of my handkerchief as if it were a relic. Relics are things which have belonged to the saints, and I am not a saint at all, though I hope to become one. I frequently do wrong. Spend your life in serving God, and pray for me. You pray in singing, and your singing is very sweet.

SILVIA."

It seemed to her a simple and merely polite note. To him it was as the spark to a magazine of powder. All the possibilities of his life, only half hoped or half dreamed of, burst at once into a flame of certainty. She had need of comfort, and he comforted her! His voice was sweet to her, and his singing was a prayer!

Silvia should not be a nun. She should break the bond imposed by her mother, as he had broken that imposed by his parents. She should be his wife, and they would live in Rome. He knew that his voice would find bread for them.

All this flashed through his mind as he read, and pressed to his lips the handkerchief which she had dropped down to him, though it was not a relic. He lifted his arms upward toward her window with a rapturous joy, as if to embrace her, but she did not look out again. A little scruple for having deprived the Madonna for a moment of her lamp had made her resolve to say at once a decade of the rosary in expiation. He waited till the sound of closing doors and wandering voices told that the inhabitants gathered for the evening in the Lungara were separating to their homes, then went reluctantly away. Matteo would be at home, and Matteo's face might look down at him from that other window beside Silvia's. So he also went home, with the moonlight between his feet and the ground and stars sparkling in his brain. He felt as if his head were the sky.

This was an August night. One day in October, Matteo told his sister that she was to go to Rome with him the next morning to pass a month with a family they knew there, and afterward begin her noviciate in the convent of the Sacramentarians at Monte Cavallo. He had received a letter from the Signora Fantini, who would receive her and do everything for her. He and Pepina had no time, now that the vintage had begun, to attend to such affairs, even if they knew how.

Silvia grew pale. She had not expected to go before the spring, and now all was arranged without a word being said to her, and she was to go without saying good-bye to any one.

Matteo's sharp eyes were watching her. "You will be ready to start at seven o'clock," he said: "I must be back to-morrow night."

"Yes, Matteo," she faltered, hesitated a moment, then ventured to add, "I did not expect to go so soon."

"And what of that?" he demanded roughly. "You were to go at the proper time, and the proper time is to-morrow."

She trembled, but ventured another word: "I should like to see my confessor first."

"He will come here this evening to see you," her brother replied: "I have already talked with him. You have nothing else to do. Pepina will pack your trunk while you are talking with the priest."

Silvia had no more to say. She was bound hand and foot. Besides, she was willing to go, she assured herself. It was her duty to obey her parents, or the ones who stood in their place and had authority over her. Matteo said she must go; therefore it was her duty to go, and she was willing.

But the willing girl looked very pale and walked about with a very feeble step, and it was hard work to keep the tears that were every moment rising to her eyes from falling over her cheeks. It was such a pitiful face, indeed, that Father Teodoli, when he came just before Ave Maria, asked if Silvia were ill.

"She has had a toothache," Matteo said quickly, and gave his sister a glance.

"And what have you done for it, my child?" the priest asked kindly.

"Nothing," Silvia faltered out.

"I will leave you to give Silvia all the advice she needs," Matteo said after the compliments of welcome were over. "I have to go down the Lungara for men to work in the vineyard to-morrow.--Silvia, come and shut the door after me: there is too much draught here."

Silvia followed her brother to the door, trembling for what he might say or do. Well she knew that his command was given only that he might have a chance to speak with her alone.

"Mind what you say to your confessor," he whispered, grasping her arm and speaking in her ear. "You are to be a nun: you wish to be, and you are willing to set out to-morrow. Tell him no nonsense--do you hear?--or it will be worse for you. I shall know every word you say. If he asks if you had a toothache say Yes. Do you hear?"

"Yes, Matteo."

She went back half fainting, and did as she had been commanded. If there had been any little lurking impulse to beg for another week or month, it died of fear. If she had any confession to make of other wishes than those chosen for her, she postponed it. Matteo might be behind the door listening, or in the next room or at the window. It seemed to her that he could make himself invisible in order to keep guard over her.

So the priest talked a little, learned nothing, gave some advice, recommended himself to her prayers, gave her his benediction, and went. Then Pepina called her to see the trunk all packed with linen that had been laid by for her for years, and Matteo, who had really been lurking about the house, told her to go to bed, and himself really went off this time to the Lungara. Pepina's lover came for her to sit out on the doorstep with him, and Silvia was left alone. Nobody cared for her. All had other interests, and they forgot her the moment she was out of their sight. Worse, even: they wanted her to be for ever out of their sight, that they might never have to think of her.

But no: there was one who did not forget her--who would perhaps now have heard that she was going away, and be waiting in the mountain-path for her. She hastened to her room, locked the door and went to the window. He made a gesture of haste, and she dropped the ball down to him. This was not the second time that their conversation had been held by means of a thread. Indeed, they had come to talk so every night. At first it had been a few words only, and Silvia's unconsciousness and her sincerity in her intention to follow her mother's will had imposed silence on the young man. But little by little he had ventured, and she had understood; and within the last week there had been no concealments between them, though Silvia still resisted all his prayers to change her resolution and brave her brother.

His first note was in her hands in a moment:

"Is it possible that what I hear is true? I will not believe it: I will not let you go."

"Yes, and I must go," she wrote back. "I have to start at seven in the morning. Dear Claudio, be resigned: there is no help for it."

"Silvia, why will you persist in ruining your life and mine? It is a sin. Say that you are too sick to go to-morrow. Stay in bed all day, and by night I will have a rope-ladder for you to come down to me. We can run away and hide somewhere."

"I cannot. We could never hide from Matteo: he would find us out and kill us both."

"I will go to the Holy Father and tell him all. We could be in Rome early in the morning if we should walk all night."

"Matteo would hear us: he hears everything. We should never reach Rome. He would find us wherever we might be hidden. If we were dead and buried he would pull us out of the ground to stab us. I must go. I have sinned in having so much intercourse with you. Be resigned, Claudio. Be a good man, and we shall meet in heaven. The earth is a terrible place: I am afraid of it. I want to shut myself up in the convent and be at peace. I fear so much that I tremble all the time. Say addio."

"I cannot. Will you stay in bed to-morrow, and let me try if I cannot go to Rome?"

"Say addio, Claudio. I dare not stay here any longer: I hear some one outside my door. I say addio to you now. I shall not drop the ball again."

She did not even draw it up again, for the thread caught on a nail in the wall and broke. And at the same time there was a knock at her door.

"Silvia, why do you not go to bed?" Matteo called out: "I hear you up."

"I am going now," she made haste to answer, and in her terror threw herself on the bed without undressing. She wondered if Matteo could hear her heart beat through the wall or see how she was shaking.

The next morning at seven o'clock Silvia and her brother took their seats in the clumsy coach that goes from Monte Compatri to Rome whenever there are passengers enough to fill it, and after confused leavetakings from all but the one she wished most to see they set out. Claudio was invisible. In fact, he had lain on the ground all night beneath her window, and now, hidden in a tree, was watching the winding road for an occasional glimpse of the carriage as it bore his love away.

The peasants of Italy, when they see the Milky Way stretching its wavering, cloudy path across the sky, shining as if made up of the footprints of innumerable saints, say that it is the road to Jerusalem. The road to the New Jerusalem has no such pallid and spiritual glory: its colors are those of life. No death but that of martyrdom, with its rosy blood, waving palm-branch and golden crown, is figured there. Life, and the joy of life, beauty so profuse that it can afford to have a few blemishes like a slatternly Venus, and the _dolce far niente_ of poverty that neither works nor starves,--they lie all along the road.

Silvia was young, and had all her life looked forward to this journey. She could not be quite indifferent. She looked and listened, though all the time her heart was heavy for Claudio. They reached the gate of St. John Lateran just as all the bells began to ring for the noon _Angelus_, and in fifteen minutes were at the Signora Fantini's door and Silvia in the kind lady's arms. It seemed to the girl that she had found her mother again. That this lady was more gracious, graceful, kind and beautiful than her mother had ever been she would not think. She was simply another mother. And when Matteo had gone away home again, not too soon, and when, after a few days' sightseeing, the signora, suspecting that the continued sadness of her young guest had some other cause than separation from her brother and sister, sought persistently and artfully to win her secret, Silvia told her all with many tears. She was going to be a nun because her mother had said that she must; and she was willing to be a nun--certainly she was willing. But, for all that, if it could have been so, she would have been so happy with Claudio, and she never should be quite happy without him.

"Then you must not be a nun," the signora said decidedly. "The thing is all wrong. You have no vocation. You should have said all this before."

For already the signora had taken Silvia to see the Superior at Monte Cavallo, who had promised to receive the young novice in three weeks, and had told her what work she could perform in the convent. "You are not strong, I think," she had said, "but you can knit the stockings. All have to work."

And Monsignor Catinari, whose business it was to examine all candidates for the conventual life, had held a long conversation with her and gone away perfectly satisfied.

But when the signora proposed to undo all this, Silvia was wild with terror. No, no, she would be a nun. Her mother had said so, she wished it, and Matteo would kill her if she should refuse.

"Leave it all to me," the signora said, and laid her motherly hand on the trembling little ones held out to her in entreaty. "We will look out for that. Matteo shall not hurt you or Claudio. I am going to send for Monsignor Catinari again, and you must tell him the truth this time. And then we will see what can be done in the case. Don't look so terrified, child. Do you think that Matteo rules the world?"

Poor little Silvia could not be reassured, for to her other terrors was now added Monsignor Catinari's possible wrath. To her, men were objects of terror. The doctrine of masculine supremacy, so pitilessly upheld in Italy, was exaggerated to her mind by her brother's character; and though she believed that help was sometimes possible, she also believed that it often came too late, as in the case of poor Beatrice Cenci. They might stand between her and Matteo, but if he had first killed her, what good would it do? She had a fixed idea that he would kill her.

Monsignor Catinari was indeed much provoked when the signora told him the true story of the little novice.

"Just see what creatures girls are!" he exclaimed. "How are we to know if they have a vocation or not? That girl professed herself both willing and desirous to be a nun."

He did not scold Silvia, however. When he saw her pretty frightened face his heart relented. "You have told me a good many lies, my child," he said, "but I forgive you, since they were not intended in malice. We will say no more about it. I learn from the signora that this Claudio is a good young man, so the sooner you are married the better. Cheer up: we will have you a bride by the first week of November; and if Claudio has such a wonderful voice, he can make his way in Rome."

The reassurances of a man were more effectual than those of a woman.

"At last I believe! at last I fear no more!" Silvia cried, throwing herself into the arms of the Signora Fantini when the Monsignor was gone. "Oh how beautiful the earth is! how beautiful life is!"

"We will then begin immediately to enjoy life," the signora replied. "Collation is ready, and Nanna has bought us some of the most delicious grapes. See how large and rich they are! One could almost slice them. There! these black figs are like honey. Try one now, before your soup. The macaroni that will be brought in presently was made in the house--none of your Naples stuff, made nobody knows how or by whom. What else Nanna has for us I cannot say. She was very secret this morning, and I suspect that means riceballs seasoned with mushrooms and hashed giblets of turkey. She always becomes mysterious when those are in preparation. Eat well, child, and get a little flesh and color before Claudio comes."

They made a merry breakfast, with the noon sun sending its golden arrows through every tiniest chink of the closed shutters and an almost summer heat reigning without. Then there was an hour of sleep, then a drive to the Pincio to see all the notable people who came up there to look at or speak to each other while the sun sank behind St. Peter's. And in the evening after dinner they went to the housetop to see the fireworks which were being displayed for some festa or other; and later there was music, and then to bed.

Life became an enchantment to the little bride-elect, as life in Italy will become to any one who has not too heavy a cross to bear. For peace in this beautiful land means delight, not merely the absence of pain. How the sun shone! and how the fountains danced! What roses bloomed everywhere! what fruits of Eden were everywhere piled! How soft the speech was! and how sweet the smiles! And when it was discovered that Silvia had a beautiful voice, so that she and Claudio would be like a pair of birds together, then it seemed to her that a nest of twigs on a tree-branch would be all that she could desire.

They took her to see the pope on one of those days. It was as if they had taken her to heaven. To her he was the soul of Rome, the reason why Rome was; and when she saw his white figure against the scarlet background of cardinals she remembered how Rome looked against the rosy Campagna at sunset from her far-away window in Monte Compatri.

"A little _sposa_, is she?" the pope said when Monsignor Catinari presented her.--"I bless you, my child: wear this in memory of me." He gave her a little gold medal from a tiny pocket at his side, laid his hand on her head and passed on. It was too much: she had to weep for joy.

Then, when the audience was over, they took her through the museum and library, and some one gave her a bunch of roses out of the pope's private garden, and she was put into a carriage and driven home, her heart beating somewhere in her head, her feet winged and her eyes dazzled.

There was a rapturous letter from Claudio awaiting her, and by that she knew that it was not all a dream. She rattled the paper in her hands as she sat with her eyes shut, half dreaming, to make sure and keep sure that she was not to wake up presently to bitterness. Claudio would come to Rome in a week, and perhaps they would be married before he should go back. There was no letter from Matteo. So much the better.

One golden day succeeded another, and Silvia changed from a lily to a rose with marvellous rapidity. She was not a ruddy, full-leaved rose, though, but like one of those delicate ones with clouds of red on them and petals that only touch the calyx, as if they were wings and must be free to move. She was slim and frail, and her color wavered, and her head had a little droop, and her voice was low. She had always been the stillest creature alive; and now, full of happiness as she was, her feelings showed themselves in an uneasy stirring, like that of a flower in which a bee has hidden itself. After the first outburst she did not so much say that she was happy as breathe and look it.

One noonday, when life seemed too beautiful to last, and they all sat together after breakfast, the signora, her daughter and Silvia, too contented to say a word, the door opened, and Matteo Guai came in with a black, smileless face, and not the slightest salutation for his sister. He had come to take Silvia home, he replied briefly to the signora's compliments. She must be ready in an hour. The vintage was suffering by his absence, and it was necessary that he should return at once.

Signora Fantini poured out the most voluble exclamations, prayers and protests. She had forty engagements for Silvia. They had had only a few days' visit from her, and she was to have stayed a month. They would themselves accompany her to Monte Compatri later if it was necessary that she should go. But, in fine, Monsignor Catinari did not expect her to return.

"I am the head of the family, and my sister has to obey me till she is married," Matteo replied doggedly. "I suppose that Monsignor Catinari will not deny that. The Church always supports the authority of the master of the family."

"Why, of course," the signora replied, rather confused by this irresistible argument, "you have the right, and no one will resist you. But as a favor now--" and the signora assumed her most coaxing smile, and even advanced a plump white hand to touch Matteo's sleeve.

She might as well have tried to bewitch and persuade the bronze Augustus on the Capitoline Hill.

"Things are changed since it was promised that Silvia should stay a month with you," Matteo replied. "There is work at home for her to do. Since she is not to be a nun, she must work. Let her be ready to start in an hour: my carriage is waiting at the door. I am going out into the piazza for a little while. I will send a man up for her trunk when I am ready to start."

Silvia uttered not a word. At sight of her brother she had sunk back in her chair white and speechless. On hearing his voice she had closed her eyes.

He half turned to her before going out, looking at her out of the corners of his evil eyes, a cold, strange smile wreathing his lips. "So you are not going to be a nun?" he said.

She did not respond. Only the quiver of her lowered eyelids and a slight shiver told that she knew he was addressing her.

Matteo went out, and the signora, at her wits' end, undertook to encourage Silvia. There was no time to see Monsignor Catinari or to appeal to any authority; and if there were, it would have availed nothing perhaps. Almost any one would have said that the girl's terrors were fanciful, and that it was quite natural her brother, who would lose five hundred scudi by her change of purpose, should require her to work as other girls of her condition worked.

"Cheer up and go with him, _figlia mia_," she said, "and leave all to me. I will see Monsignor Catinari this very evening, and post a letter to you before I go to bed. If Matteo is unkind to you, we will have you taken away from him at once. And, in any case, you shall be married in a few weeks at the most, as Monsignor promised. Don't cry so: don't say that you cannot go. I am sorry and vexed, my dear, but I see no way but for you to go. Depend upon me. No harm shall come to you. I will myself come to Monte Compatri within the week, and arrange all for you. Besides, recollect that you will see Claudio: he is there waiting for you. Perhaps you may see him this very evening."

The Signora Fantini's efforts to cheer and reassure the sister were as ineffectual as her efforts to persuade the brother had been. Silvia submitted because she had no strength to resist.

"O Madonna mia!" she kept murmuring, "he will kill me! he will kill me! O Madonna mia! pray for me."

When an Italian says that he will come back in an hour, you may look for him after two hours. Matteo was no exception to the rule. It was already mid-afternoon when the porter came up and said that Silvia's brother was waiting for her below.

The signora gave her a tumbler half full of _vin santo_, which she kept for special occasions--a strong, delicious wine with the perfume of a whole garden in it. "Drink every drop," she commanded: "it will give you courage. You had better be a little tipsy than fainting away. And put this bottle into your pocket to drink when you have need on the way."

More dead than alive, Silvia was placed in the little old-fashioned carriage that Matteo had hired to come to Rome in, and her brother took his seat beside her. The Signora Fantini and her daughter leaned from the window, kissing their hands to her and shaking their handkerchiefs as long as she was in sight. And as long as she was in sight they saw her pale face turned backward, looking at them. Then the tawny stone of a church-corner hid her from their eyes for ever.

Who knows or can guess what that drive was? The two passed through Frascati, and Matteo stopped to speak to an acquaintance there. They drove around Monte Porzio, and Matteo stopped again, to buy a glass of wine and some figs. He offered some to his sister, but she shook her head.

"She is sleepy," her brother said to the man of whom he had bought. "Give me another tumbler of wine: it isn't bad."

"It is the last barrel I have of the vintage of two years ago," the man replied. "It was a good vintage. If the signorina would take a drop she would sleep the better. Besides, the night is coming on and there is a chill in the air."

Silvia opened her eyes and made the little horizontal motion with her fore finger which in Italy means no.

"She will sleep well enough," Matteo said, and drove on.

Night was coming on, and they had no more towns to pass--only a bit more of lonely level road and the lonely road that wound to and fro up the mountain-side. At the best, they could not reach home before ten o'clock. The road went to and fro--sometimes open, to give a view of the Campagna and the Sabine Mountains, and Soracte swimming in a lustrous dimness on the horizon; sometimes shut in closely by trees, that made it almost black in spite of the moon. For the moon was low and gave but little light, being but a crescent as yet. There was a shooting star now and then, breaking out like a rocket with a trail of sparks or slipping small and pallid across the sky.

One of these latter might have been poor Silvia's soul slipping away from the earth. It went out there somewhere on the mountain-side. Matteo said the carriage tilted, and she, being asleep, fell out before he could prevent. Her temple struck a sharp rock, and Claudio missed his bride.

He had to keep quiet about it, though. What could he prove? what could any one prove? Where knives are sharp and people mind their own business, or express their opinions only by a shrug of the shoulders and a grimace, how is a poor boy, how is even a rich man or a rich woman, to come at the truth in such a case? Besides, the truth would not have brought her back, poor little Silvia!

MARY AGNES TINCKER.

A SPANISH STORY-TELLER

In these days of pessimism in literature, when Tourgueneff and Sacher-Masoch represent man as the victim of blind Chance and annihilation his greatest happiness, it is pleasant to turn to a writer who still believes in God, his country and the family, and recognizes an overruling Providence that directs the world. It is not strange that these old-fashioned ideas should be found in Spain, where, in spite of much ignorance and superstition, the lower classes are deeply religious in the best sense of the word, and distinguished for their patriotism and intense love for their homes.

Antonio de Trueba, the subject of this sketch, was born in 1821 at Montellano, a little village in Biscay. He thus describes the home of his childhood in the preface to his collected poems: "On the brow of one of the mountains that surround a valley of Biscay there are four little houses, white as four doves, hidden in a grove of chestnut and walnut trees--four houses that can only be seen at a distance when the autumn has removed the leaves from the trees. There I spent the first fifteen years of my life. In the bottom of the valley there is a church whose belfry pierces the arch of foliage and rises majestic above the ash and walnut trees, as if to signify that the voice of God rises above Nature; and in that church two masses were said on Sunday--one at sunrise and the other two hours later. We children rose with the song of the birds and went down to the first mass, singing and leaping through the shady oak-groves, while our elders came down later to high mass. While our parents and grand-parents were attending it I sat down beneath some cherry trees that were opposite my father's house--for from that spot could be seen the whole valley that ended in the sea--and shortly after four or five young girls came to seek me, red as the cherries that hung over my head or as the graceful knots of ribbon that tied the long braids of their hair, and made me compose couplets for them to sing to their sweethearts in the afternoon, to the sound of the tambourine, under the walnut trees where the young people danced and the elders chatted and enjoyed our pleasure."

The young poet's parents were simple tillers of the soil, who gave their son a meagre education. In one of his letters he says that his father's library consisted of the _Fueros de Viscaya_ (the old laws of Biscay), the _Fables_ of Samaniego, _Don Quixote_, some ballads brought from Valmaseda or Bilbao, and two or three lives of the saints. Antonio seems to have had from his earliest childhood an ardent love of poetry, and in the passage quoted above he mentions his own compositions. He continues by saying, "I remember one day one of those girls was very sad because her sweetheart was going away for a long time. She wanted a song to express her grief, and I composed one at her request. A few days later she did not need my aid to sing her sorrow: in proportion as it had increased her ability to sing it herself had also increased, for poetry is the child of feeling. Her songs, as well as those I composed, soon became popular in the valley."

When the poet was fifteen years old the civil war waged by Don Carlos was desolating Spain. The inhabitants of Biscay espoused his cause, but Antonio's parents were unwilling to expose their son to the dangers he must run if he remained at home, and therefore decided to send him to a distant relative in Madrid who kept a hardware-shop. "One night in November," says Trueba, "I departed from my village, perhaps--my God!--never to return. I descended the valley with my eyes bathed in tears. The cocks began to crow, the dogs barked, the owls hooted in the mountains, the wind moaned in the tops of the walnut trees, and the river roared furiously rushing down the valley; but the inhabitants of the village slept peaceably, except my parents and brothers, who from the window followed weeping the sound of my footsteps, about to be lost in the noise of the valley. I was just leaving the last house of the village when one of those girls who had so often sought me under the cherry trees approached the window and took leave of me sobbing. On crossing a hill, about to lose the valley from my sight, I heard a distant song, and stopped. That same girl was sending me her last farewell in a song as beautiful as the sentiment that inspired it."

Antonio devoted himself to his duties during the day and pursued his studies with eagerness during the night. What he suffered from home-sickness the reader can easily imagine. All through his later works are scattered reminiscences of those unhappy years in Madrid, when his memory fondly turned to the mountains and cherry-groves of his beloved Encartaciones.[1] Often dreaming of the country, which, he says, is his perpetual dream, he imagined the moment in which God would permit him to return to the valley in which he was born. "When this happens, I say to myself, my brow will be wrinkled and my hair gray. The day on which I return to my native valley will be a festal day, and on crossing the hill from which I can behold the whole valley, I shall hear the bells ringing for high mass. How sweetly will resound in my ears those bells that so often rilled my childhood with delight! I shall enter the valley, my heart beating, my breathing difficult and my eyes bathed with tears of joy. There will be, with its white and sonorous belfry, the church where the holy water of baptism was poured upon the brows of my parents and my own; there will be the walnut and chestnut trees beneath whose shade we danced on Sunday afternoons; there will be the wood where my brothers and I looked for birds' nests and made whistles out of the chestnut and walnut bark; there, along the road, will be the apple trees whose fruit my companions and I knocked off with stones when we went to school; there will be the little white house where my grand-parents, my father, my brothers and I were born; there will be all that does not feel or breathe. But where will be, my God, all those who with tears in their eyes bade me farewell so many years ago? I shall follow the valley down: I shall recognize the valley, but not its inhabitants. Judge whether there will be among sorrows a greater sorrow than mine! The people gathered in the portico of the church waiting for mass to begin will look over the wall along the road, and others will look out of the windows, all to see the stranger pass. And they will not know me, and I shall not know them, for those children and those youths and those old men will not be the old men nor the youths nor the children whom I left in my native valley. I shall follow sadly the valley down. 'All that has felt,' I shall exclaim, 'has changed or died. What is it that preserves here pure and immaculate the sentiments which I inspired?' And then some village-woman will sing one of those songs in which I enclosed the deepest feelings of my soul, and on hearing her my heart will want to leap from my breast, and I shall fall on my knees, and, if emotion and sobs do not stifle my voice, I shall exclaim, 'Holy and thrice holy, blessed and thrice blessed, poetry which immortalizes human sentiment!'"

Antonio after a time left his relative's shop to enter another in the same business, from which he was relieved by the owner's financial difficulties. He then determined to devote himself to literature, and became a writer for the papers. In 1852 he published _Libro de Cantares_ (_Book of Songs_), which at once made his name a household word throughout Spain. He tells us that most of the poems in it were composed mentally while dreaming of his native country and wandering about the environs of Madrid, "wherever the birds sing and the people display their virtues and their vices, for the noble Spanish people have a little of everything." He warns his readers not to expect from him what he cannot give them: "Do not seek in this book erudition or culture or art. Seek recollections and feeling, and nothing more. Fifteen years ago I left my solitary village: these fifteen years, instead of singing under the cherry trees of my native country, I sing in the midst of the Babylon which rises on the banks of the Manzanares; and, notwithstanding, I still amuse myself with counting from here the trees that shade the little white house where I was born, and where, God willing, I shall die: my songs still resemble those of fifteen years ago. What do I understand of Greek or Latin, of the precepts of Horace or of Aristotle? Speak to me of the blue skies and seas, of birds and boughs, of harvests and trees laden with golden fruit, of the loves and joys and griefs of the upright and simple villagers, and then I shall understand you, because I understand nothing more than this."

These poems are what the author calls them, nothing more--pure and simple records of the life of the people around him, their loves and griefs, their hopes and disappointments. The most usual metre is the simple Spanish _asonante_, or eight-syllable trochaic verse, with the vowel rhyme called _asonante_.[2] They are pervaded by a tender spirit of melancholy, very different from the _Weltschmerz_ of Heine, with some of whose lyrics the Spanish poet's _cantares_ may be compared without losing anything by the comparison. In one poem he says: "In the depths of my heart are great sorrows: some of them are known to men, others to God alone. But I shall rarely mention my griefs in my songs, for I have no hope that they can be alleviated; and where is the mortal who, in passing through this valley, has not encountered among the flowers some sharp thorn?" In the same poem he says: "All ask me, Who taught you to sing? No one: I sing because God wills it--I sing like the birds;" and he explains his method by a touching incident. One evening he was singing on the bank of the Manzanares when he saw a child smiling on the breast of its mother. The poet went and caressed it, and the child threw its arms about Antonio's neck and turning to its mother cried, "Mother, Antonio, he of the songs, is a blind man who sees."[3] The poet continues: "I am a blind man who sees: that angel told the truth. With my guitar resting on my loving heart, you may see me wandering from the city to the valley, from the cabin of the poor to the palace of the great, weeping with those who weep, singing with those who sing, for my rude guitar is the lasting echo of all joys and all sorrows. I shall sing my songs in the simple language of the laborer and the soldier, of the children and the mothers, of those who have not frequented learned schools.... In this language I shall extol the faith and the holy combats of the soldiers of Christ with the sacrilegious Saracen; I shall sing the heroic efforts of our fathers to conquer the proud legions of Bonaparte; and the beauty of the skies, and the flowers of the valley, and love and innocence--all that is beautiful and great--will find a lasting echo in my rude guitar."

Many of these songs are ingenious variations on a theme supplied by some old and well-known poem, a few lines of which are woven into each division of the new song.

The success of the _Libro de los Cantares_ was immediate and great; the first three editions were exhausted in a few months; the duc de Montpensier wished to defray the expenses of the fourth, and Queen Isabella of the fifth; since then others have followed. Some years later the poet married, and since then has written chiefly in prose.

In 1859 appeared a volume of short tales entitled _Rose-colored Stories_ (_Cuentos de Color de Rosa_): these were followed by _Tales of the Country_ (_Cuentos campesinos_), _Popular Tales_ (_Cuentos popolares_), _Popular Narrations_ (_Narraciones popolares_), _Tales of Various Colors_, _Tales of the Dead and Living_, etc.[4]

Before examining in detail any of these collections it may be well to learn the author's views of his task and definition of his subject. In the introduction to the _Popular Tales_ he says, addressing his friend Don Jose de Castro y Serrano: "The object of this preface is simply to tell you why I have given the name of _Popular Tales_ to those contained in this volume, what I understand by popular literature, and why I write tales instead of writing novels or comedies or cookbooks. There are two reasons why I have called these tales popular. First, because many of them are told by the people; and, secondly, because in retelling them I have used the simple and plain style of the people.... In my conception, popular literature can be defined in this manner: That literature which by its simplicity and clearness is within the reach of the intelligence of the people.... However, in popular literature the simplicity of form is not enough: it is necessary to reproduce Nature, because if not reproduced there will be no truth in it; and if there is no truth in it the people will not believe it; and if they do not believe it they will not feel it. For my part, I take such pains in studying Nature, in order that my pictures may be true, that I fear you will accuse me of extravagance, and will laugh at me when you read the two examples I am going to cite. On a very severe night in January I was writing in the fourth story of the street Lope de Vega, No. 32, the tale which I named _De Patas en el Infierno_ ('The Feet in Hell'), and when a detail occurred which consisted in explaining the changes in the sound made by water in filling a jar at a fountain, I found that I had never studied these changes, and I did not have in the house at that moment water enough to study them. The printers were going to send for the story early in the morning, and it must be finished that night. Do you know what I did to get out of my difficulty? At three o'clock in the morning, facing the darkness, rain and wind, I went to the little fountain near by with a jar under my cloak, and spent a quarter of an hour there listening to the sound of the water as it fell into the jar. A short time after I was preparing to write the rural tale called _Las Siembras y las Cosechas_ ('Seed-time and Harvest'), and the description of a sunrise in the country entered into my plan. I had often seen the sun rise in the country, but it was necessary to contemplate and study anew that beautiful spectacle in order to describe it exactly; and early one morning, long before the dawn, accompanied by two friends, I went to the hills of Vicalvaro, where we made some good studies, but were very much frightened by some thieves who attacked us knife in hand, believing we were people who carried watches."

These words of the author reveal better than we could explain his aim and method. He is a follower of Fernan Caballero, in so far as he has devoted himself to illustrate the every-day life of the Spanish people. The former writer has filled her pages with brilliant pictures of the life of Andalusia. Her canvas is, however, larger than Trueba's: she depicts the society of the South in all its grades; Trueba has chosen a more limited circle on which he has lavished all his care.

The volume of _Rose-colored Tales_ is in many respects the best that Trueba has produced. The dedication to his wife explains the title and reveals the author's optimistic views. He says: "I call them _Rose-colored Tales_ because they are the reverse of that pessimistic literature which delights in representing the world as a boundless desert in which no flower blooms, and life as a perpetual night in which no star shines. I, poor son of Adam, in whom the curse of the Lord on our first parents has not ceased to be accomplished a single day since the time when, still a child, I left my beloved valley of the Encartaciones,--I shall love this life, and shall not believe myself exiled in the world while God, friendship, love and the family exist in it, while the sun shines on me every morning, while the moon lights me every night and the flowers and birds visit me every day."

The scene of all the stories of this collection is in the Encartaciones, and an examination of a few of them will make us acquainted with the usual range of characters and the author's mode of treatment. The first is entitled "The Resurrection of the Soul" (_La Resurreccion del Alma_), and opens with an account of the village of C----, one of the fifteen composing the Encartaciones. Here lived Santiago and Catalina, the latter a foundling whom Santiago's parents had found at their door one winter morning. The good people, who had always desired a daughter, cared tenderly for the little stranger, and she grew up with their son, who was a few years older. It had been decided that when Santiago was fifteen he should go to his uncle in Mexico; which country, for the simple inhabitants of Biscay, is still "India," and the retired merchants who return to spend their last days in their native towns are "Indians"--a class that often play an important part in the denouement of Trueba's simple plots. At the beginning of the story the two children (Santiago was nearly fifteen) had gone off to play and allowed the goats to get into the fields. The angry father is about to punish Catalina, who has assumed all the blame, but his wife mollifies him by reminding him that they have received a piece of good news. Ramon good-humoredly says, "You women always have your own way," and proceeds to tell a story to illustrate it. We give it as an example of the popular tales that Trueba often weaves into his stories:

"Once upon a time, when Christ went through the world healing the sick and raising the dead, a woman came out to meet him and said to him, seizing hold of his cloak and weeping like a Magdalen, 'Lord, do me the favor to come and raise my husband, who died this morning.'

"'I cannot stop,' answered the Lord. 'I am going to perform a great miracle--that is, find a good mother among the women who are fond of bull-fights; but everything will turn out well if the ass doesn't stop. All I can do for you is that if you take it into your head to raise your husband, your husband will be raised.'

"And indeed the wife took it into her head that her husband must be raised, and her husband was raised, for even the dead can't resist the whims of women."

The good news that Ramon had received was a letter from his brother, who wished Santiago to be sent to him by the first steamer leaving Bilbao. It was the 15th of August, the Feast of the Assumption, when Santiago, accompanied by his father, prepared to start for Bilbao.

"Quica, who until the moment of departure had not shed a tear, because she had only seen her son on the way to happiness, as you saw yours, disconsolate mother, who now see only a sepulchre in the Americas,--Quica now wept without restraint. Poor Catalina had wept so much for a month and a half that there were no tears left in her eyes: she did not weep, but she felt the faintness and sorrow which the dying must experience. Santiago's eyes were moist at times, but soon shone with joy.

"'Come, come! You are like a lot of crying children,' exclaimed Ramon, tearing his son from the arms of Quica and Catalina. 'One would say that it is a matter to cry over. Don't you see me? I too have a soul in my soul-case....'

"And indeed he had, for tears as large as nuts rolled from his eyes. Santiago and Ramon departed. Quica and Catalina sorrowfully followed them with their eyes until they crossed a neighboring hill. Then the young girl made an almost supernatural effort to calm herself, and said, 'Mother, I am going to take the sheep to the mountain.'

"'Do what you wish, my daughter,' answered Quica mechanically.

"It was Catalina's custom to open, the gate every morning to a flock of sheep and lead them a stone's throw from the farmhouse, where she left them alone; but this day she went with them as far as the hill that Ramon and Santiago had just crossed, and from that hill she went on to the next and the next, with her eyes always fixed on the road to Bilbao, until, overcome by fatigue and dying with grief, she bowed her beautiful head, and instead of retracing her steps to the farmhouse of Ipenza, she went to the church in the valley and fell on her knees before the altar of the Virgin of Solitude."

Santiago reaches Mexico in safety, and is kindly received by his uncle, who dies ten years later and leaves him an immense fortune. Santiago at once plunges into every species of dissipation, and soon destroys his health. His physician recommends him as a last resort to return to his native country and try the effect of the mountain-air. Meanwhile, Catalina had grown up one of the prettiest girls of the village, and Santiago's parents had died, leaving her a handsome dowry and the use of the farm until it should be claimed by Santiago.

"One dark and rainy night Santiago returned to his home, broken down in health and profoundly weary of life. Catalina receives him, and is amazed at his changed appearance.

"'Are you ill, Santiago?' asked Catalina with infinite tenderness.

"'Yes--ill in body and mind.'

"'How do you feel, brother of my heart?'

"'I do not feel anything: that is my greatest misfortune.'"

In truth, the unfortunate Santiago had lost all the better feelings of his heart. His return to the home of his innocent boyhood failed to evoke any pure and noble sentiments: his heart continued paralyzed, cold, indifferent to everything. But it was impossible for him to remain in this condition under the influence of Catalina. He gradually began to take an interest in the life around him and employ his wealth for the benefit of his neighbors. Gradually, he awoke from his lethargy and became well in body and mind. As the reader can imagine, the story closes with his marriage to Catalina, who had such a great share in his recovery.

In the story called "From One's Country to Heaven" (_Desde la Patria al Cielo_) the author's endeavors show that the surest happiness is to be found in one's native village. He begins with an ironical description of the village of S---- in the Encartaciones, in which he depicts the simplicity of the inhabitants and their backwardness, in regard to the spirit of the age. In this village lived, among others, Teresa, a poor widow, and her only child, Pedro. One day, while passing the palace of a wealthy "Indian," he called her and said he was obliged to return to America, and wished her to take care of his house during his absence. The poor woman now saw herself relieved from want and able to educate her son. The latter found in the rich library of the "Indian" food for many years of study, and soon became dissatisfied with his quiet life in the village, and eager to travel and see the countries about which he had read such charming tales. He soon grew to despise everything around him, and treated with scorn his neighbor Rose, who had long loved him tenderly.

One day news arrived from Mexico that the "Indian" had died, leaving to Teresa his palace at S---- and a large sum of money besides. Pedro was now able to fulfil his dreams of travel, and started on his journey. He first visits the Pass of Roncesvalles, and is nearly killed by the indignant Frenchmen whom he asks about the defeat of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers. Pedro then proceeds to Bayonne, where he is so shocked by the sight of young girls selling their hair to the highest bidder that he determines to leave France, and we next find him in a Swiss chalet, where he is disgusted by the lack of cleanliness. His feelings can be imagined when he finds that the peasants have no popular traditions and are not acquainted even with the name of William Tell. In despair, Pedro directs his course to Germany, but finds no sylphs or sirens on the banks of the Rhine, while maidens with blue eyes and golden hair are no more abundant there than elsewhere. Greece next receives the wanderer, who hears in Athens of railroads and consolidated funds: on Olympus he finds a guano manufactory, and on Pindus a poet writing fourteen-syllable endecasyllabics. He visits with a similar disenchantment Constantinople, and then makes his way to England. There poor Pedro is disgusted by the sordid, selfish spirit of the people. An absurd scene at a village church fills him with horror. The bare walls of the temple chill his heart, and after the service a domestic quarrel between the curate and his jealous wife caps the climax and Pedro flees to America. On landing in New York he is robbed of his watch: the thief is arrested, but gives the watch to the magistrate, keeping the chain for himself, and Pedro is condemned to pay the costs and the damages suffered by the thief's character. On returning that evening from the theatre he is garroted and robbed of all he has with him. The landlord tells him that no one thinks of going out at night without a pair of six-shooters, and adds that what happens in New York is nothing to what goes on at Boston, Baltimore and New Orleans. The next day he reads an editorial in the _New York Herald_ advising American merchants to repudiate their foreign debts. He then determines to visit the different States, and on passing through the South thanks God that slavery is unknown in Europe. Railroad accidents, murders and political and social corruption cause him to regard with profound horror the young republic, which seems to him old in vice, and he starts for South America, the Spanish part of which reminds him of a virgin overwhelmed with misfortunes, but still full of youth and faith. In Vera Cruz, Pedro visits the sepulchre of the "Indian" to whom he owes his fortune. A letter from his mother is awaiting him there, and he bursts into tears, and sails at once for his beloved home, which he reaches one beautiful Sunday morning in May. His meeting with his mother takes place in the church, and there also he sees Rose, whose constancy is now rewarded. The story closes with the lines from Lista: "Happy he who has never seen any other stream than that of his native place, and, an old man, sleeps in the shade where he played a boy!"

Another story of the same collection, and one of the author's best, is entitled _Juan Paloma_. The principal characters are Don Juan de Urrutia, nicknamed Juan Paloma ("dovelike"), a wealthy and crusty old bachelor, and Antonio de Molinar, a poor peasant, and his wife. The moral of the story is in Don Juan's last words: "Blessed be the family!" and in Juana's remark: "Alas for him who lives alone in the world, for only his dogs will weep for him when he dies!"

The other stories of this volume, "The Mother-in-Law," "The Judas of the Household" and "I Believe in God," all contain many charming scenes. In the last a young girl is educated by an infidel father, and after his death marries Diego, a village lad. She becomes a mother, but still retains in her heart the seeds of atheism sown there by her father. Her child, a girl, becomes ill, and a doctor is sent for from Bilbao.

"The doctor was long in coming, and Ascensita was devoured by impatience and uncertainty. He arrived at last, and examined the child attentively, observing a deep silence, which caused the poor mother the most sorrowful anxiety.

"'Will the daughter of my heart recover?' Ascensita asked him in tears. 'For God's sake, speak to me frankly, for this uncertainty is more cruel than the death of my daughter.'

"'Senora,' answered the doctor, 'God alone can save the child.'

"Ascensita fell senseless by the side of the cradle containing her dying child. When she returned to herself Diego alone was at her side. The unhappy mother placed her ear to the child's lips, and perceived that it still breathed.

"'Diego,' she exclaimed, 'take care of the child of my soul!' and flying down the stairs hastened to a hermitage near by, and falling on her knees before the Virgin of Consolation exclaimed in grief, 'Holy Virgin! pity me! Save the child of my heart! And if she has flown to heaven since I left her side to fall at thy feet, beg thy holy Son to restore her to life, as He did the maid of Galilee!'

"A woman who was praying in a corner of the temple arose weeping with joy and grief, and hastened to clasp the unhappy mother in her arms and call her daughter. It was her husband's mother, Agustina, who had also gone to the temple to pray for the restoration of the child.

"'Mother,' exclaimed Ascensita, 'I believe in God! I believe in God and hope in His mercy!'

"'My daughter, no one believes in it in vain,' answered Agustina, bursting into tears. And both again knelt and prayed."

The mother's prayer was heard and the child recovered.

In the _Popular Narrations_, Trueba works up themes already popular among the people, but clothes them in his own words and varies them to suit his own taste. He says in the preface: "The task which I undertook some time ago, and still continue, consists in collecting the narrations, tales or anecdotes that circulate among the people and are the work of the popular invention, which sometimes creates and at others imitates, if it does not plagiarize, trying when it imitates to give to the imitation the form of the original. Some of the writers or collectors abroad, and especially in Germany, who have devoted themselves to a similar task, have followed a method different from mine; since, like the Brothers Grimm, they reproduce the popular tales almost as they have collected them from the lips of the people. This system is not to my taste, because almost all popular tales, although they have a precious base, have an absurd form, and in order to enter worthily into the products of the literary art they need to be perfected by art, and have a moral or philosophical end, which nothing in the sphere of art should be without."

The subjects of some of these stories are well known out of Spain. "St. Peter's Doubts" (_Las Dudas de San Pedro_) is as old as the _Gesta Romanorum_ (cap. 80), and is familiar to English readers from Parnell's _Hermit_. Another, "A Century in a Moment" (_Un Siglo en un Momento_), is the story of the woman allowed after death to come back to the earth and see her lover, whom she finds faithless. Still another, _Tragaldabas_, is familiar to the readers of Grimm's _Household Tales_, where it figures as "Godfather Death."

The volume of _Popular Tales_ contains nineteen stories of the most varying description. Some are popular in the broadest sense, as "The Three Counsels" (_Los Consejos_), in which a soldier whose time of service has expired buys from his captain with his pay three pieces of advice: Always take the short cut on a road, Do not inquire into what does not concern you, and Do nothing without reflection. The soldier on his way home has occasion to put in practice all three counsels, and thereby saves his life and property. Others, are legendary, as _Ofero_, the legend of St. Christopher, and _Casilda_, the story of the Moorish king's daughter converted to the Christian religion by a physician from Judea, who proves to be Our Lord. One, "The Wife of the Architect" (_La Mujer del Arquitecto_), is a local tradition of Toledo, and another, "The Prince without a Memory" (_El Principe Desmemoriado_), is taken from Gracian Dantisco's _Galateo Espanol_.

We may say of this collection, as of the last, that, although the stories show much humor and skill, they are not among the author's best. He is most at home in the simple pictures of life in the Encartaciones or in the country near Madrid. The latter is the scene of the stories in the volume entitled _Rural Tales_ (_Cuentos campesinos_), which contains some of the author's most charming productions. They are generally longer than the others--one, "Domestic Happiness" (_La Felicidad domestica_), filling over ninety-two octavo pages. "Seed-time and Harvest" (_Las Siembras y las Cosechas_) is a charming story of Pepe and his wife Pepa, the former of whom sows wheat in his fields, and the latter economy, love and virtue by the fireside. The best story of the collection, however--and, to our mind, one of the best that Trueba has written--is the one called "The Style is the Man" (_El Estilo es el Hombre_), which is so well worth a translation that we will not spoil it by an analysis.

We have said that Trueba's works have been great popular successes. He has endeared himself to all who love poetry and the simple, honest life of the Spanish people. His beloved province has not forgotten him, and in 1862 unanimously elected him archivist and chronicler of Biscay, with a salary of nine hundred dollars a year. The poet henceforth turned his attention to a history of Biscay, which has not yet appeared, though some preliminary studies have been published in a work entitled _Chapters of a Book_ (_Capitulos de un Libro_). Trueba resided at this period of his life at Bilbao, which he was obliged to leave in haste during the last Carlist war, and he has since lived in Madrid. He has published there several volumes of romances and historical novels, some of which have been very successful; but Trueba's real strength is in his poetry and short stories, which may be favorably compared with the best of this class of literature--with Auerbach's _Tales of the Black Forest_, for example. The reader is at once attracted to the author, whose personality shines through most of his stories and is always apparent in his poetry. Simple, honest, patriotic, religious, he is a type of the best class of Spaniards--a class that will some day win for their country the respect of other nations and bring back a better glory than that founded on conquest.

T. F. CRANE.

THROUGH WINDING WAYS.