Chapter 5

This calico mare both gallops and trots While whisking you off to Bumpville; She paces, she shies, and she stumbles, in spots, In the tortuous road to Bumpville! And sometimes this strangely mercurial steed Will suddenly stop and refuse to proceed, Which, all will admit, is vexatious indeed, When one is en route to Bumpville!

She's scared of the cars when the engine goes "Toot!" Down by the crossing at Bumpville; You'd better look out for that treacherous brute Bearing you off to Bumpville! With a snort she rears up on her hindermost heels, And executes jigs and Virginia reels-- Words fail to explain how embarrassed one feels Dancing so wildly to Bumpville. It's bumpytybump and it's jiggytyjog, Journeying on to Bumpville; It's over the hilltop and down through the bog You ride on your way to Bumpville; It's rattletybang over boulder and stump, There are rivers to ford, there are fences to jump, And the corduroy road it goes bumpytybump, Mile after mile to Bumpville!

Perhaps you'll observe it's no easy thing Making the journey to Bumpville, So I think, on the whole, it were prudent to bring An end to this ride to Bumpville; For, though she has uttered no protest or plaint, The calico mare must be blowing and faint-- What's more to the point, I'm blowed if I ain't! So play we have got to Bumpville.

SO, SO, ROCK-A-BY SO!

So, so, rock-a-by so! Off to the garden where dreamikins grow; And here is a kiss on your winkyblink eyes, And here is a kiss on your dimpledown cheek, And here is a kiss for the treasure that lies In a beautiful garden way up in the skies Which you seek. Now mind these three kisses wherever you go-- So, so, rock-a-by so!

There's one little fumfay who lives there, I know, For he dances all night where the dreamikins grow; I send him this kiss on your droopydrop eyes. I send him this kiss on your rosyred cheek. And here is a kiss for the dream that shall rise When the fumfay shall dance in those far-away skies Which you seek. Be sure that you pay those three kisses you owe-- So, so, rock-a-by so!

And, by-low, as you rock-a-by go, Don't forget mother who loveth you so! And here is her kiss on your weepydeep eyes, And here is her kiss on your peachypink cheek, And here is her kiss for the dreamland that lies Like a babe on the breast of those far-away skies Which you seek-- The blinkywink garden where dreamikins grow-- So, so, rock-a-by so!

SEEIN' THINGS.

I ain't afeard uv snakes, or toads, or bugs, or worms, or mice, An' things 'at girls are skeered uv I think are awful nice! I'm pretty brave, I guess; an' yet I hate to go to bed, For when I'm tucked up warm an' snug an' when my prayers are said, Mother tells me "Happy dreams!" and takes away the light, An' leaves me lyin' all alone an' seein' things at night!

Sometimes they're in the corner, sometimes they're by the door, Sometimes they're all a-standin' in the middle uv the floor; Sometimes they are a-sittin' down, sometimes they're walkin' round So softly an' so creepy-like they never make a sound! Sometimes they are as black as ink, an' other times they're white-- But the color ain't no difference when you see things at night!

Once, when I licked a feller 'at had just moved on our street, An' father sent me up to bed without a bite to eat, I woke up in the dark an' saw things standin' in a row, A-lookin' at me cross-eyed an' p'intin' at me--so! Oh, my! I wuz so skeered that time I never slep' a mite-- It's almost alluz when I'm bad I see things at night!

Lucky thing I ain't a girl, or I'd be skeered to death! Bein' I'm a boy, I duck my head an' hold my breath; An' I am, oh! _so_ sorry I'm a naughty boy, an' then I promise to be better an' I say my prayers again! Gran'ma tells me that's the only way to make it right When a feller has been wicked an' sees things at night!

An' so, when other naughty boys would coax me into sin, I try to skwush the Tempter's voice 'at urges me within; An' when they's pie for supper, or cakes 'at 's big an' nice; I want to--but I do not pass my plate f'r them things twice! No, ruther let Starvation wipe me slowly out o' sight Than I should keep a-livin' on an' seein' things at night!

A CENTURY OF PAINTING.

NOTES BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL.--THE ART OF FRANCE IN THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.--DAVID AND HIS FOLLOWERS.

BY WILL H. LOW.

When the potter's daughter of remote antiquity first drew the incised line around her lover's shadow cast upon the wall by the accomplice sun, art had its birth. Before that time primitive man had endeavored--with who knows what desire to leave behind him some trace of his passage upon earth--to make upon bones rude tracings of his surroundings. The proof of the universality of art is in these manifestations, of which the logical outcome was the complete and splendid art of Greece. Through the sequence of Byzantine art we come to Giotto, who, a shepherd's son under the skies of Italy, was reinspired at the source of nature, and became the first painter as we to-day know painting. From Giotto descends in direct line the great family of artists who, in the service of the spiritual and temporal sovereigns of the earth, shed illustration upon their craft and undying lustre on their names until the old order, changing, giving way to the new, enfranchised art in the great upheaval of the latter part of the eighteenth century.

It is well, in order to understand the position in which this great revolution left art, to briefly consider the conditions preceding it. Painting, up to the end of the seventeenth century, had been essentially the handmaiden of religion; and religion in its turn had been so closely allied to the state that, when declining faith let down the barriers, art took for the first time its place among the liberal professions whose first duty is to find in the necessities of mankind a reason for their existence. Small wonder, then, that, accustomed to be fostered and encouraged, to be held aloof from the material necessity of earning their daily bread, the artists of this period sought protection from the only class which in those days had the leisure to appreciate or the fortune to encourage them. The people, the "general public," as we say to-day, did not exist, except as a mass of patient workers in the first part, as a clamorous rabble demanding its rights in the latter part, of the century. Hence the patronage of art, its very existence, depended on the pleasure of the nobility, and naturally enough its themes were measured according to the tastes of its patrons. Much that was charming was produced, but never before did art portray its epoch with such great limitations. The persistent blindness to the signs and portents gathering thick about them which characterized the higher classes of the time, may be felt in its art; of the great outside world, of the hungry masses so soon to rise in rebellion, nothing is seen. One may walk through the palaces at Versailles, may search through the pictures of the epoch in the Louvre, or linger at Sans Souci in Potsdam--where Frederick filled his house with sculptured duchesses in classical costume playing at Diana, and covered his walls with Watteaus and his ceilings with decorations by Pesne, a less worthy Frenchman--and remain in complete ignorance of hungry Jacques, who, with pike-staff and guillotine, was so soon to change all that and usher in the period of the Revolution, Before the evil day dawned for the gilded gentry of France, however, the British colonies in America, influenced by the teachings of the precursors of the French Revolution, and aided by their isolation, were to establish their independence.

It was undoubtedly at this time, when revolt was in the air and man was preoccupied with his primal right to liberty of existence, that art was given the bad name of a luxury. Until its long prostitution throughout the seventeenth century, its mission had been noble; but now, coincident to the fall of the old _régime_, the people, from an ignorance which was more their misfortune than their fault, confounded art with luxuries more than questionable, in which their whilom superiors had indulged while they lacked bread. With the curious assumption of Spartan virtue which rings with an almost convincing sound of true metal through so many of the resolutions passed by the National Convention of France, in the days following the holocaust of the Reign of Terror, there was serious debate as to whether pictures and statues were to be permitted to exist or their production encouraged.

This debate must have fallen strangely on the ears of one of the members of the Convention, who had already made his power as an artist felt, and who was from that time for more than forty years to be the directing influence, not only of French art, but of painting on the Continent in general. This man, Jacques Louis David, in point of fact was soon practically to demonstrate to his colleagues that art had as its mission other aims than those followed by the painters of the preceding generations. It fell that Lepelletier, one of the members of the Convention, was assassinated, and David's brush portrayed him as he lay dead; and the picture, being brought into the legislative hall, moved the entire assembly to a conviction that the art of the painter struck a human chord which vibrated deep in the heart of man.

But a little later, when Marat, "the Friend of Man," was stricken down, a voice rose in the Convention, "Where art thou, David?" And again, responding to the call, he painted the picture of the dead demagogue lying in his bath, his pen in hand, a half-written screed on a rude table improvised by placing a board across the tub; and again the picture, more eloquent, more explanatory of character and of epoch than any written page of history, was a convincing argument that painting was not a plaything.

Born August 21, 1748, a man over fifty years of age when this century commenced, David may yet be considered entirely our own; for the ideas of his country, despite minor influences that have affected modern art, have prevailed in the art of all other countries, and these principles were largely formulated by him. France has been throughout this century the only country which has steadfastly encouraged art, with a system of education unsurpassed in any epoch, and by the maintenance of a standard which, however rebellious at times, every serious artist has been and is obliged to acknowledge. A cousin--or, as some authorities have it, a grand-nephew--of Boucher (the artist who best typifies the frivolity of the art of the eighteenth century, so that there is grim humor in the thought that this iconoclast was of his blood), David was twenty-seven years of age when, in 1775, he won the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to go to Italy for four years at the expense of the government. He was the pupil of Vien, a painter whose chief merit it was to have inspired his pupil with a hatred of the frivolous Pompadour art of the epoch; and David only obtained the coveted prize after competing five successive years. It is instructive to learn that of this first sojourn at Rome almost nothing remains in the way of painting; for the young artist, endowed with the patience which is, according to Goethe, synonomous with genius, devoted all his time to drawing from the antique.

It was here and during this time, doubtless, that he formed his conviction that painting of the highest type must conform to classical tradition--that all nature was to be remoulded in the form of antique sculpture. But it was also at this time, and owing to his stern apprenticeship to the study of form, that he acquired the mastery of drawing which served him so well when in the presence of nature; and with no other preoccupation than to reproduce his model, he painted the people of his time and produced his greatest works. For by a strange yet not unprecedented contradiction, David's fame to-day rests, not upon the great classical pictures which were the admiration of his time and by which he thought to be remembered, but on the portraits which, with his mastery of technical acquirement, he painted with surprising truth and reality.

The time was propitious, however, for David. France, the seeds of revolution germinating in its soil, looked upon the Republic of Rome as the type from which a system could be evolved that would usher in a new day of virtuous government; and when, after a second visit to Rome, David returned home with a picture representing the oath of the Horatii, Paris received him with open arms. The picture was exhibited, and viewed by crowds, burning, doubtless, in their turn to have weapons placed in their hands with which to conquer their liberties. This was in 1786; but years after, in the catalogue of the Salon of 1819, we read this note: "The Oath of the Horatii, the first masterpiece which restored to the French school of painting the purity of antique taste."

At the outbreak of the Revolution David abandoned painting; and on January 17, 1793, as a member of the Convention, voted for the execution of Louis XVI. It was during this period that were painted his pictures of Lepelletier and Marat, in which his cold, statuesque, and correct manner was revivified and warmed to life--paradoxically enough, to paint death. A friend of Robespierre, he was carried down at the overthrow of the "little lawyer from Arras," and imprisoned in the Luxembourg. His wife--who had left him at the outset of his political life, horrified at the excesses of the time--now rejoined him in his misfortune; and inspired by her devotion, David made the first sketch of the Sabine women.

Released from prison October 26, 1795, he returned to his art; and in 1800 the Sabines was exhibited in a room in the Louvre, where it remained for more than five years, during which time it constantly attracted visitors, and brought to the painter in entrance fees more than thirteen thousand dollars. Early in the career of Napoleon, David had attracted his attention; and he had vainly endeavored to induce the artist to accompany him on the Egyptian campaign. On the accession of Napoleon as Emperor, therefore, we find in the Salon catalogues, "Monsieur David, first painter to his Imperial Majesty," in place of plain "Citizen David" of the Revolutionary years.

Napoleon ordered from David four great paintings. The Coronation and the Distribution of Flags alone were painted when the overthrow of the Empire, and the loyalty of David to his imperial patron, caused him to be exiled in 1816. He went to Brussels, where, on December 29, 1825, he died. The Bourbons, masters of France, refused to allow his body to be brought back to his country; but Belgium gave him a public funeral, after which he was laid to rest in the Cathedral of Brussels.

This dominant artistic influence of France in the first quarter of this century is not entirely extinguished to-day. The classical spirit has never been entirely absent from any intellectual manifestation of the French; but in David and his pupils it was carried to an extremity against which the painters of the next generation were to struggle almost hopelessly. Time, which sets all things right, has placed David in his proper place; and while to-day we may admire the immense knowledge of the man as manifested in the great classical pictures, like the Horatii, the Sabines, or the Leonidas at Thermopylæ, we remain cold before their array of painted statues. His portraits--Marat, the charming sketch of Madame Recamier, his own portrait as a young man, the group of Michel Gérard and his family, and the Pope Pius VII.--give the touch of nature which is needed to kindle the fire of humanity in this man of iron.

It is as though nature had wished a contrast to this coldly intellectual type that there should have existed at the same time a painter who, seeking at the same inexhaustible fountain-head of classicism, found inspiration for an art almost morbid in excess of sentiment. Pierre Prud'hon was born at Cluny in Burgundy, April 4, 1758, the son of a poor mason who, dying soon after the boy's birth, left him to the care of the monks of the Abbey of Cluny. The pictures decorating the monastery visibly affecting the youth, the Bishop of Macon placed him under the tuition of one Desvoges, who directed the school of painting at Dijon. Here his progress was rapid, but at nineteen the too susceptible youth married a woman whose character and habits were such that his life was rendered unhappy thenceforward.

In 1780 Prud'hon went to Paris to prosecute his studies; and there, two years after, was awarded a prize, founded by his province, which enabled him to go to Rome. It is characteristic of the man that, in the competition for this prize, he was so touched by the despair of one of his comrades competing with him that he repainted completely his friend's picture--with such success that it was the friend to whom the prize was awarded, and who, but for a tardy awakening of conscience, would have gone to Rome in his place.

The judgment rectified, Prud'hon went to Rome, where he stayed seven years, studying Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and above all Correggio, whose influence is manifest in his work, and returned to Paris in 1789. Unknown, and timid by nature, he attracted little attention, and for some years gained his living by designing letter-heads, visiting cards, which were then of an ornate description, and the many trifles which constitute a present resource to the unsuccessful painter even to-day.

It was not until 1796 that some of the charming drawings which he had made commenced to attract attention. A series of designs illustrating Daphnis and Chloe, for the publishing house of Didot _ainé_, were particularly noticeable; and through this work he made the acquaintance of M. Frochot, by whose influence he received a commission for a decoration for the palace of St. Cloud, which is now placed in the Louvre.

Life now became somewhat easier, and in 1803--having long been separated from his wife--a talented young woman, Mlle. Mayer, became his pupil, and relations of a more tender character were established. The pictures of Mlle. Mayer are influenced by her master to a degree that makes them minor productions of his own; and her unselfish, though unconsecrated, devotion to him makes up the sum of the little happiness which he may have had.

In 1808 Prud'hon's picture of Justice and Divine Vengeance pursuing Crime was ordered for the Palace of Justice, and was shown at the Salon of that year, where the presence of David's Sabines and its influence as shown in many of the productions of his pupils were not enough to rob Prud'hon of a legitimate success, and the cross of the Legion of Honor was accorded him. The Assumption of the Virgin was exhibited in 1819; but before that Prud'hon had been made a member of the Institute, and (it passed for a distinction) drawing-master to the Empress Marie Louise.

Many pictures, all characterized by a subtile charm, were produced during this happy period; but in 1821 Mlle. Mayer, preyed upon by her false position, committed suicide, and Prud'hon lingered in continual sorrow until February 16, 1823, when he died. The work of Prud'hon covers a wide range, of which not the least important are the drawings which he made with a lavish hand. As has been observed, he was a true child of his time, and the classic influence is strongly felt in his work; but translated through his temperament, it is no longer lifeless and cold. It is eloquent of the early ages of the world, when life was young and maturity and age bore the impress of a simple life, little perplexed by intricate problems of existence. Throughout his work, in the recreation of the myths of antiquity or in the rarer representation of Christian legend, his style is sober and dignified--as truly classic as that of David; but permeating it all is the indescribable essence of beauty and youth, the reflection, undoubtedly, of a man who, rarely fortunate, capable of grave mistakes, has nevertheless left much testimony to the love and esteem in which he was held.