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+Project Gutenberg's Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8), by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8)
+       A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more
+       than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Charles F. Horne
+
+Release Date: July 8, 2009 [EBook #29352]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT MEN AND FAMOUS WOMEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sigal Alon, Christine P. Travers and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected,
+all other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's
+spelling has been maintained.]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra.]
+
+
+
+
+GREAT MEN AND FAMOUS WOMEN
+
+
+_A Series of Pen and Pencil Sketches of_
+
+THE LIVES OF MORE THAN 200 OF THE MOST PROMINENT PERSONAGES IN HISTORY
+
+
+VOL. VIII.
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1894, BY SELMAR HESS
+
+edited by Charles F. Horne
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's arm.]
+
+New-York: Selmar Hess Publisher
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOLUME VIII.
+
+
+  SUBJECT                          AUTHOR                         PAGE
+
+  MICHAEL ANGELO,             _Anna Jameson_,                      214
+  BEETHOVEN,                  _C. E. Bourne_,                      319
+  SARAH BERNHARDT,            _H. S. Edwards_,                     382
+  ROSA BONHEUR,               _Clarence Cook_,                     276
+  EDWIN BOOTH,                _Clarence Cook_,                     370
+  CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN,          _Dutton Cook_,                       355
+  _Letter from Miss Cushman to a young friend on the subject
+     of "Self-conquest,"_                                          362
+  LEONARDO DA VINCI,          _Anna Jameson_,                      209
+  GUSTAVE DORÉ,               _Kenyon Cox_,                        298
+  ALBERT DÜRER,               _W. J. Holland_,                     231
+  EDWIN FORREST,              _Lawrence Barrett_,                  349
+  DAVID GARRICK,              _Samuel Archer_,                     343
+  GÉRÔME,                     _Clarence Cook_,                     281
+  HANDEL,                     _C. E. Bourne_,                      302
+  HAYDN,                      _C. E. Bourne_,                      315
+  WILLIAM HOGARTH,                                                 247
+  JOSEPH JEFFERSON,           _Clarence Cook_,                     374
+  FRANZ LISZT,                _Rev. Hugh R. Haweis, M.A._,         332
+  MEISSONIER,                 _Clarence Cook_,                     272
+  MENDELSSOHN,                _C. F. Bourne_,                      326
+  JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET,       _Clarence Cook_,                     265
+  MOZART,                     _C. E. Bourne_,                      308
+  PAGANINI,                                                        325
+  ADELINA PATTI,              _Frederick F. Buffen_,               378
+  PHIDIAS,                    _Clarence Cook_,                     203
+  RACHEL,                     _Dutton Cook_,                       363
+  RAPHAEL,                    _Mrs. Lee_,                          221
+  REMBRANDT,                  _Elizabeth Robins Pennell_,          240
+  SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS,        _Samuel Archer_,                     250
+  DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI,     _Edmund Gosse_,                      287
+  RUBENS,                     _Mrs. Lee_,                          236
+  THORWALDSEN,                _Hans Christian Andersen_,           258
+  TITIAN,                     _Giorgio Vasari_,                    226
+  GIUSEPPE VERDI,                                                  342
+  RICHARD WAGNER,             _Franklin Peterson, Mus. Bac._,      338
+  BENJAMIN WEST,              _Martha J. Lamb_,                    254
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+VOLUME VIII.
+
+PHOTOGRAVURES
+
+  ILLUSTRATION                               ARTIST            TO FACE
+                                                                 PAGE
+
+  SARAH BERNHARDT AS CLEOPATRA,         _Georges Clairin_ _Frontispiece_
+  MICHAEL ANGELO AND VITTORIA COLONNA,  _Hermann Schneider_         220
+  ALBERT DÜRER VISITS HANS SACHS,       _Richard Gross_             234
+  MARIE DE MEDICI AT THE HOUSE OF
+    RUBENS,                             _Florent Willems_           240
+  CONNOISSEURS AT REMBRANDT'S STUDIO,   _Adolphe-Alexandre Lesrel_  244
+  MEISSONIER'S ATELIER,                 _Georges Bretegnier_        272
+  MOZART SINGING HIS REQUIEM,           _Thomas W. Shields_         314
+  AN ANECDOTE ABOUT BEETHOVEN,          _Paul Leyendecker_          322
+  FRANZ LISZT,                          _Fortuné-Joseph-Seraphin
+                                           Layraud_                 334
+  WAGNER AND HIS FRIENDS,               _Wilhelm Beckmann_          340
+  RACHEL AS THE MUSE OF GREEK TRAGEDY,  _Jean Léon Gérôme_          368
+  JOE JEFFERSON AS BOB ACRES,           _From life_                 376
+
+
+  WOOD-ENGRAVINGS AND TYPOGRAVURES
+
+  RAPHAEL INTRODUCED TO DA VINCI,       _Brune Pagès_               212
+  LEO X. AT RAPHAEL'S BIER,             _Pietro Michis_             224
+  A FÊTE AT THE HOUSE OF TITIAN,        _F. Kraus_                  228
+  ALBERT DÜRER'S WEDDING,               _A. Bodenmüller_            232
+  HOGARTH SKETCHING THE HIGHWAY OF
+    QUEENBOROUGH,                                                   248
+  BENJAMIN WEST, PRESIDENT OF THE
+    ROYAL ACADEMY,                      _Sir Thomas Lawrence_       258
+  ROSA BONHEUR,                         _E. Dubufe_                 278
+  HANDEL'S RIVER-CONCERT FOR GEORGE I., _A. Hamman_                 304
+  HAYDN COMPOSING HIS "CREATION,"       _A. Hamman_                 318
+  PAGANINI IN PRISON,                   _Louis Boulanger_           326
+  GARRICK AS RICHARD III.,              _William Hogarth_           346
+  FORREST AS METAMORA,                  _From Photograph_           352
+  CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN AS MRS. HALLER,     _Watkins_                   360
+
+
+
+
+PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS
+
+
+
+
+PHIDIAS[1]
+
+         [Footnote 1: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(ABOUT 500-432 B.C.)
+
+
+Phidias, one of the greatest sculptors the world has seen, and whose
+name has become, as it were, the synonym of his art, was born at
+Athens about 500 B.C. He belonged to a family of artists, none of whom
+indeed were distinguished in their profession, but their varied
+occupations furnished the atmosphere in which such a talent as that of
+Phidias could best be fostered and brought to maturity. His father was
+Charmides, who is believed to have been an artist, because the Greeks,
+in their inscriptions, did not associate the name of the father with
+that of the son unless both were of the same calling. A brother of
+Phidias, Panoenos, was a painter, and is mentioned among those
+artists, twenty or more in number, who in conjunction with Polygnotus,
+one of the chief painters of his day, were employed in the decoration
+of the Poecile or Painted Portico, one of the many beautiful buildings
+erected by Cimon. The Poecile was simply a long platform, with a roof
+supported by a row of columns on one side and by a wall on the other.
+It was called "the painted," because the wall at the back was covered
+with a series of large historical pictures containing many figures,
+and recording some of the chief events of the time, together with
+others relating to an earlier and more shadowy epoch. The subject of
+the painting, executed, at least in part, by the brother of Phidias,
+was the Battle of Marathon, in which great event it is thought he may
+himself have taken part.
+
+The boyhood of Phidias fell in a time of national revival, when under
+the influence of an ennobling political excitement, all the arts were
+quickened to a fresh, original, and splendid growth. The contest
+between the Greeks and Persians, which had begun with the Ionian
+revolt, was in full activity at the time of his birth. He was ten
+years old when the battle of Marathon was fought, and when he was
+twenty, four of the most striking events in the history of Greece were
+crowded into a single year; the battle of Thermopylæ, the victory at
+Salamis, and the twin glories of Platæa and Mycale. His early youth,
+therefore, was nourished by the inspiring influences that come from
+the victorious struggle of a people to maintain their national life.
+He was by no means the only sculptor of his time whom fame remembers,
+but he alone, rejecting trivial themes, consecrated his talent to the
+nobler subjects of his country's religious life and the ideal
+conception of her protecting gods. No doubt, Phidias, like all who are
+born with the artistic temperament, would be interested from childhood
+in the progress of the splendid works with which Athens was enriching
+herself under the rule of Cimon. But his interest must have been
+greatly increased by the fact that his brother Panoenos was actively
+engaged in the decoration of one of those buildings. It would be
+natural that he should be often drawn to the place where his brother
+was at work, and that the sight of so many artists, most of them young
+men, filled with the generous ardor of youth, and inspired by the
+nature of their task, should have stirred in him an answering
+enthusiasm. It gives us a thrill of pleasure to read in the list of
+these youths the name of the great tragic poet, Euripides, who began
+life as a painter, and in whose plays we find more than one reference
+to the art. It cannot be thought unreasonable to suppose that two such
+intelligences as these must have had an attraction for one another,
+and that, as in the case of Dante and Giotto, the great poet and the
+great artist would be drawn together by a likeness in their taste and
+aims.
+
+Phidias studied his art first at Athens, with a native sculptor,
+Hegias, of whom we know nothing except from books. Later, he went to
+Argos, and there put himself under the instruction of Ageladas, a
+worker chiefly in bronze, and very famous in his time, of whom,
+however, nothing remains but the memory of a few of his more notable
+works. For us, his own works forgotten, he remains in honor as the
+teacher of Myron, of Polycletus, and of Phidias, the three chief
+sculptors of the next generation to his own. On leaving the workshop
+of Ageladas, Phidias executed several statues that brought him
+prominently before the public. For Delphi, he made a group of thirteen
+figures in bronze, to celebrate the battle of Marathon and apotheosize
+the heroes of Attica. In this group, Miltiades was placed in the
+centre, between Athena, the tutelary goddess of Athens, and Apollo,
+the guardian of Delphi; while on each side were five Athenian heroes,
+Theseus and Codrus with others, arranged in a semicircle. This
+important work was paid for by Athens out of her share in the spoils
+of Marathon. Another important commission executed by Phidias was a
+statue of Athena made for her temple at Platæa, and paid for with the
+eighty talents raised by the contributions of the other Grecian states
+as a reward for the splendid services of the Platæans at Marathon,
+where they played somewhat the same part as the Prussians at the
+battle of Waterloo. The head, hands, and feet of this statue were of
+marble, but the drapery was of gold; so arranged, probably, as in the
+case of the great statue of Athena designed later by Phidias for the
+Parthenon, as to be removable from the marble core at pleasure.
+Phidias made so many statues of the virgin goddess Athena, that his
+name became associated with hers, as at a later day that of Raphael
+was with the Virgin Mary. In the first period of his artistic career,
+moved perhaps by his patriotic gratitude for her intervention in
+behalf of his native state, he had represented the goddess as a
+warlike divinity, as here at Platæa; but in his later conceptions, as
+in a statue made for the Athenians of Lemnos, Athena appeared invested
+with milder attributes, and with a graceful and winning type of
+beauty.
+
+In their invasion of Attica the Persians had destroyed the city of
+Athens, and the people, who had fled to all quarters of the peninsula
+to seek refuge from the enemy, returned after the victory at Salamis
+and the flight of the Persians, to find their homes a heap of ruins.
+The dwelling-houses of the Greeks were everywhere, even in their
+largest cities, built of mean materials: walls of stubble overlaid
+with stucco and gayly painted. It was not long, therefore, before
+Athens resumed something of her old appearance, with such improvements
+as always follow the rebuilding of a city. The most important change
+effected was that brought about in the character of the great plateau,
+the fortified rock of the Acropolis. Here, as in many Greek cities,
+the temples of the gods had been erected, and about them, as about the
+cathedrals of the Middle Ages, there had grown up a swarm of houses
+and other buildings built by generations of people who sought there at
+once the protection of the stockade which enclosed the almost
+inaccessible site, and the still further safeguard of the presence of
+the divinities in their temples. The destructive hand of the Persian
+invaders had swept this platform clear of all these multiplied
+incumbrances, and in the rebuilding of the city it was determined to
+reserve the Acropolis for military and religious uses alone.
+
+The work of improvement was begun by Cimon, who, however, confined his
+attention chiefly to the lower city that clustered about the base of
+the Acropolis. Here, among other structures, he built the temple of
+Theseus and the Painted Portico, and he also erected, near the summit
+of the Acropolis, on the western side, the little gem-like temple of
+the Wingless Victory, Nike Apteros, in commemoration of the success of
+the Athenian arms at the battle of the Eurymedon. It was from Cimon
+that Phidias received his first commission for work upon the
+Acropolis, where later he was to build such a lasting monument to his
+own fame and to the fame of his native land. The commission given him
+by Cimon was to erect a bronze statue of Athena which was to stand on
+the citadel, at once a symbol of the power of Athens and a tribute to
+the protecting goddess of the city. The work upon the statue was
+probably begun under Cimon, but according to Ottfried Müller it was
+not completed at the death of Phidias. It stood in the open air, and
+nearly opposite the Colonnade at the entrance of the great flight of
+marble steps that led from the plain to the summit of the Acropolis,
+and was the first object to meet the eye on passing through the
+gateway. It represented the goddess, armed, and in a warlike attitude,
+from which it derived its name, Athena Promachos: Athena, the leader
+of the battle. With its pedestal it stood about seventy feet high,
+towering above the roof of the Parthenon, the gilded point of the
+brazen spear held by the goddess flashing back the sun to the ships as
+in approaching Athens they rounded the promontory of Sunium. We read
+that the statue was still standing so late as 395 A.D., and it is said
+that its towering height and threatening aspect caused a panic terror
+in Alaric and his horde of barbarians when they climbed the Acropolis
+to plunder its temple of its treasure.
+
+But it was under the rule of Pericles that Phidias was to find at
+Athens his richest employment. Pericles had determined, probably by
+the advice of Phidias, to make the Acropolis the seat and centre of
+the new and splendid city that was to arise under his administration.
+The first great undertaking was the building of a temple to Athena
+Parthenos, Athena the Virgin, a design believed to have been suggested
+to Pericles by Phidias. The plans were intrusted to Ictinus, an
+Athenian, one of the best architects of the day; but the general
+control and superintendence of the work were given to Phidias. As the
+building rose to completion, workmen in all branches of the arts
+flocked to Athens from every part of Greece and were given full
+employment by Phidias in the decoration and furnishing of the temple.
+
+The taste of Phidias controlled the whole scheme of decoration applied
+to the building, into which color entered, no doubt, to a much greater
+extent than was formerly believed. Even after time and the destructive
+hand of man have done their worst, there still remain sufficient
+traces of color to prove that the sculpture, and the whole upper part
+of the temple, were painted in bright but harmonious colors, and that
+metal ornaments and accessories accented the whole scheme with
+glittering points of light reflected from their shining surfaces.
+
+The sculptures with which the Parthenon was adorned by Phidias, and
+which were executed under his immediate superintendence, consisted of
+two great groups that filled the eastern and western pediments; of
+groups of two figures each in the ninety-two metopes or panels above
+the outer row of columns; and, finally, the famous frieze that ran
+completely round the temple itself, just below the ceiling of the
+colonnade, and at a height of about thirty-nine feet from the floor.
+
+The subject of the group that filled the eastern pediment, the one
+above the entrance door of the temple, was the birth of Athena. Just
+how the event was represented we do not know because quite half the
+group, including the principal figures, disappeared very early in our
+era, and no description of them remains in any ancient or modern
+writer. The group in the western pediment represented the contest
+between Athena and Poseidon for the dominion over Attica. According to
+the legend, the strife between the two divinities took place in an
+assembly of the gods on the Acropolis, who were to determine which of
+the two contestants should be the protector of the city. To prove his
+power, Poseidon struck the rock with his trident, and a salt spring
+leaped forth, as if the sea itself had obeyed the call of its lord.
+Athena struck the ground, and an olive-tree sprang up, the emblem of
+peace and of the victories of commerce, and the assembly awarded the
+prize to her. The goddess having thus received the sovereignty of
+Athens, it was but natural that a day should be set apart for her
+special honor, and a festival instituted to commemorate the great
+event. This was the greater Panathenaia, or All Athenians Day, which
+was celebrated every fourth year in honor of the goddess, and which,
+as its name implies, was taken part in by all the people of the city.
+It occurred in the early summer and lasted five days. On the fifth
+day, it closed with a procession which went through all the chief
+streets of the city and wound its way up the Great Stairway to the
+Acropolis, bearing the _peplos_ or embroidered robe woven by young
+virgin ladies of Athens, chosen from the highest families, and known
+for their skill in this kind of work. After the _peplos_ had been
+consecrated in the temple it was placed with due solemnities upon the
+ancient and venerable figure of the goddess, made of olive-wood, and
+said to have descended from heaven. From its subject, which thus
+celebrates the Panathenaic procession, the frieze is often called the
+Panathenaic frieze.
+
+It is carved from Pentelic marble, of which material the marble
+building is constructed. Its original length, running as it did around
+the entire building, was 522.80 feet, of which about 410 feet remain.
+Of this portion, 249 feet are in the British Museum in slabs and
+fragments; the remainder is chiefly in the Louvre, with scattered
+fragments in other places. As a connected subject this was the most
+extensive piece of sculpture ever made in Greece. From all that can be
+gathered from the study of the fragments that remain, the design of
+the frieze was of the utmost simplicity and characterized by the union
+of perfect taste and clear purpose that marks all the work of the
+great sculptor. The subject begins in the frieze at the western end of
+the temple, where we watch the assembling of the procession. It then
+proceeds along the northern and southern sides of the building, in
+what we are to suppose one continuous line, moving toward the east,
+since all the faces are turned that way; and at the eastern end,
+directly over the main entrance to the building, the two parts of the
+procession meet, in the presence of the magistrates and of the
+divinities who had places of worship in Athens.
+
+Of the grace, the skill in arrangement, the variety of invention, the
+happy union of movement and repose shown in this work, not only
+artists--men best fitted to judge its merits from a technical point of
+view--but the cultivated portion of the public, and a large and
+ever-increasing circle of every-day people, have by common consent
+agreed in praise. By the multiplication of casts, to be found now in
+all our principal museums, we are enabled to study and to enjoy the
+long procession even better than it could have been enjoyed in its
+original place, where it must have been seen at a great disadvantage
+in spite of the skill shown by Phidias in adapting it to its site;
+for, as the frieze stood thirty-nine feet from the floor, and as the
+width of the portico between the wall and the columns was only nine
+feet, it was seen at a very sharp angle, and owing to the projection
+of the roof beyond the wall of the temple the frieze received only
+reflected light from the marble pavement below.
+
+Apart from the marble sculptures on the exterior of the Parthenon, the
+two most famous works of Phidias were the statues of Athena, made for
+the interior of the Parthenon, and of Zeus for the temple of the god
+at Olympia in Elis. Both these statues were of the sort called
+_Chryselephantine_, from the Greek _chrousous_, golden, and
+_elephantinos_, of ivory; that is, they were constructed of plates of
+gold and ivory, laid upon a core of wood or stone. The style was not
+new, though its invention was at one time ascribed to Phidias. It came
+from the East, but it was now employed for the first time in Greece in
+a work of national importance.
+
+In the Athena, the face, neck, arms, hands, and feet were made of
+ivory, and the drapery and ornaments, the helmet, the shield, and the
+sandals of gold, which as in the case of the statue made for Platæa,
+was removable at pleasure. The height of the statue, including the
+pedestal, was nearly forty feet. The goddess stood erect, clothed with
+a tunic reaching to the ankles, and showing her richly sandalled feet.
+She had the ægis on her breast, her head was covered with a helmet,
+and her shield, richly embossed with the Battle of the Amazons, rested
+on the ground at her side. In one hand she held a spear, and in the
+other, an image of Victory six feet high.
+
+A still more splendid work, and one which raised the fame of Phidias
+to the highest point, was the statue of the Olympian Zeus, made for
+the Eleans. In this statue, Phidias essayed to embody the Homeric
+ideal of the supreme divinity of the people of Greece sitting on his
+throne as a monarch, and in an attitude of majestic repose. The
+throne, made of cedar-wood, was covered with plates of gold, and
+enriched with ivory, ebony, and precious stones. It rested on a
+platform twelve feet high, made of costly marble and carved with the
+images of the gods who formed the council of Zeus on Olympus. The feet
+of the god rested on a footstool supported by lions, and with the
+combat of Theseus and the Amazons in a bas-relief on the front and
+sides. In one hand Zeus held the sceptre, and in the other a winged
+Victory. His head was crowned with a laurel wreath; his mantle,
+falling from one shoulder, left his breast bare and covered the lower
+part of his person with its ample folds of pure gold enamelled with
+flowers. The whole height of the statue with the pedestal was about
+fifty feet; by its very disproportion to the size of the temple it was
+made to appear still larger than it really was. This statue was
+reckoned one of the wonders of the world. In it the Greeks seemed to
+behold Zeus face to face. To see it was a cure for all earthly woes,
+and to die without having seen it was reckoned a great calamity.
+
+The downfall of Pericles, due to the jealousies of his rivals, carried
+with it the ruin of Phidias, his close friend, to whom he had
+entrusted such great undertakings. An indictment was brought against
+the sculptor, charging him with appropriating to himself a portion of
+the gold given him for the adornment of the statue of Athena; and
+according to some authorities Pericles himself was included in the
+charge. The gold had, however, been attached to the statue in such a
+manner that it could be taken off and weighed, and in the proof, the
+charge had to be abandoned. But Phidias did not escape so easily. He
+was accused of sacrilege in having introduced portraits of himself and
+Pericles on the shield of the goddess, where, says Plutarch, in the
+bas-relief of the Battle of the Amazons, he carved his own portrait as
+a bald old man lifting a stone with both hands, and also introduced an
+excellent likeness of Pericles fighting with an Amazon.
+
+Phidias died in prison before the trial came off, and his name must be
+added to the long list of those whom an ungrateful world has rewarded
+for their services with ignominy and death.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+LEONARDO DA VINCI
+
+By ANNA JAMESON
+
+(1452-1519)
+
+
+[Illustration: Leonardo Da Vinci.]
+
+Leonardo da Vinci seems to present in his own person a _résumé_ of all
+the characteristics of the age in which he lived. He was _the_ miracle
+of that age of miracles. Ardent and versatile as youth; patient and
+persevering as age; a most profound and original thinker; the greatest
+mathematician and most ingenious mechanic of his time; architect,
+chemist, engineer, musician, poet, painter--we are not only astounded
+by the variety of his natural gifts and acquired knowledge, but by the
+practical direction of his amazing powers. The extracts which have
+been published from MSS. now existing in his own handwriting show him
+to have anticipated by the force of his own intellect some of the
+greatest discoveries made since his time. "These fragments," says Mr.
+Hallam, "are, according to our common estimate of the age in which he
+lived, more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to a single
+mind than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any established
+basis. The discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Castelli, and other
+names illustrious; the system of Copernicus, the very theories of
+recent geologists, are anticipated by Da Vinci within the compass of a
+few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most
+conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the
+awe of preternatural knowledge. In an age of so much dogmatism he
+first laid down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and
+observation must be the guides to just theory in the investigation of
+nature. If any doubt could be harbored, not as to the right of
+Leonardo da Vinci to stand as the first name of the fifteenth century,
+which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many
+discoveries, which probably no one man, especially in such
+circumstances, has ever made, it must be by an hypothesis not very
+untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a
+height which mere books do not record."
+
+It seems at first sight almost incomprehensible that, thus endowed as
+a philosopher, mechanic, inventor, discoverer, the fame of Leonardo
+should now rest on the works he has left as a painter. We cannot,
+within these limits, attempt to explain why and how it is that as the
+man of science he has been naturally and necessarily left behind by
+the onward march of intellectual progress, while as the poet-painter
+he still survives as a presence and a power. We must proceed at once
+to give some account of him in the character in which he exists to us
+and for us--that of the great artist.
+
+Leonardo was born at Vinci, near Florence, in the Lower Val d'Arno, on
+the borders of the territory of Pistoia. His father, Piero da Vinci,
+was an advocate of Florence--not rich, but in independent
+circumstances, and possessed of estates in land. The singular talents
+of his son induced Piero to give him, from an early age, the advantage
+of the best instructors. As a child he distinguished himself by his
+proficiency in arithmetic and mathematics. Music he studied early, as
+a science as well as an art. He invented a species of lyre for
+himself, and sung his own poetical compositions to his own music, both
+being frequently extemporaneous. But his favorite pursuit was the art
+of design in all its branches; he modelled in clay or wax, or
+attempted to draw every object which struck his fancy. His father sent
+him to study under Andrea Verrocchio, famous as a sculptor, chaser in
+metal, and painter. Andrea, who was an excellent and correct designer,
+but a bad and hard colorist, was soon after engaged to paint a picture
+of the baptism of our Saviour. He employed Leonardo, then a youth, to
+execute one of the angels; this he did with so much softness and
+richness of color, that it far surpassed the rest of the picture; and
+Verrocchio from that time threw away his palette, and confined himself
+wholly to his works in sculpture and design, "enraged," says Vessari,
+"that a child should thus excel him."
+
+The youth of Leonardo thus passed away in the pursuit of science and
+of art; sometimes he was deeply engaged in astronomical calculations
+and investigations; sometimes ardent in the study of natural history,
+botany, and anatomy; sometimes intent on new effects of color, light,
+shadow, or expression in representing objects animate or inanimate.
+Versatile, yet persevering, he varied his pursuits, but he never
+abandoned any. He was quite a young man when he conceived and
+demonstrated the practicability of two magnificent projects: one was
+to lift the whole of the church of San Giovanni, by means of immense
+levers, some feet higher than it now stands, and thus supply the
+deficient elevation; the other project was to form the Arno into a
+navigable canal as far as Pisa, which would have added greatly to the
+commercial advantages of Florence.
+
+It happened about this time that a peasant on the estate of Piero da
+Vinci brought him a circular piece of wood, cut horizontally from the
+trunk of a very large old fig-tree, which had been lately felled, and
+begged to have something painted on it as an ornament for his cottage.
+The man being an especial favorite, Piero desired his son Leonardo to
+gratify his request; and Leonardo, inspired by that wildness of fancy
+which was one of his characteristics, took the panel into his own
+room, and resolved to astonish his father by a most unlooked-for proof
+of his art. He determined to compose something which should have an
+effect similar to that of the Medusa on the shield of Perseus, and
+almost petrify beholders. Aided by his recent studies in natural
+history, he collected together from the neighboring swamps and the
+river-mud all kinds of hideous reptiles, as adders, lizards, toads,
+serpents: insects, as moths, locusts, and other crawling and flying
+obscene and obnoxious things; and out of these he composed a sort of
+monster or chimera, which he represented as about to issue from the
+shield, with eyes flashing fire, and of an aspect so fearful and
+abominable that it seemed to infect the very air around. When
+finished, he led his father into the room in which it was placed, and
+the terror and horror of Piero proved the success of his attempt. This
+production, afterward known as the "Rotello del Fico," from the
+material on which it was painted, was sold by Piero secretly for one
+hundred ducats to a merchant, who carried it to Milan, and sold it to
+the duke for three hundred. To the poor peasant, thus cheated of his
+"Rotello," Piero gave a wooden shield, on which was painted a heart
+transfixed by a dart, a device better suited to his taste and
+comprehension. In the subsequent troubles of Milan, Leonardo's picture
+disappeared, and was probably destroyed as an object of horror by
+those who did not understand its value as a work of art.
+
+During this first period of his life, which was wholly passed in
+Florence and its neighborhood, Leonardo painted several other pictures
+of a very different character, and designed some beautiful cartoons of
+sacred and mythological subjects, which showed that his sense of the
+beautiful, the elevated, and the graceful was not less a part of his
+mind than that eccentricity and almost perversion of fancy which made
+him delight in sketching ugly, exaggerated caricatures, and
+representing the deformed and the terrible.
+
+Leonardo da Vinci was now about thirty years old, in the prime of his
+life and talents. His taste for pleasure and expense was, however,
+equal to his genius and indefatigable industry; and anxious to secure
+a certain provision for the future, as well as a wider field for the
+exercise of his various talents, he accepted the invitation of
+Ludovico Sforza il Moro, then regent, afterward Duke of Milan, to
+reside in his court, and to execute a colossal equestrian statue of
+his ancestor, Francesco Sforza. Here begins the second period of his
+artistic career, which includes his sojourn at Milan, that is from
+1483 to 1499.
+
+Vasari says that Leonardo was invited to the court of Milan for the
+Duke Ludovico's amusement, "as a musician and performer on the lyre,
+and as the greatest singer and _improvisatore_ of his time;" but this
+is improbable. Leonardo, in his long letter to that prince, in which
+he recites his own qualifications for employment, dwells chiefly on
+his skill in engineering and fortification; and sums up his
+pretensions as an artist in these few brief words: "I understand the
+different modes of sculpture in marble, bronze, and terra-cotta. In
+painting, also, I may esteem myself equal to anyone, let him be who he
+may." Of his musical talents he makes no mention whatever, though
+undoubtedly these, as well as his other social accomplishments, his
+handsome person, his winning address, his wit and eloquence,
+recommended him to the notice of the prince, by whom he was greatly
+beloved, and in whose service he remained for about seventeen years.
+It is not necessary, nor would it be possible here, to give a
+particular account of all the works in which Leonardo was engaged for
+his patron, nor of the great political events in which he was
+involved, more by his position than by his inclination; for instance,
+the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France, and the subsequent
+invasion of Milan by Louis XII., which ended in the destruction of the
+Duke Ludovico. The greatest work of all, and by far the grandest
+picture which, up to that time, had been executed in Italy, was the
+"Last Supper," painted on the wall of the refectory, or dining-room,
+of the Dominican convent of the Madonna delle Grazie. It occupied
+Leonardo about two years, from 1496 to 1498.
+
+The moment selected by the painter is described in the 26th chapter of
+St. Matthew, 21st and 22d verses: "And as they did eat, he said,
+Verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me: and they were
+exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him,
+Lord, is it I?" The knowledge of character displayed in the heads of
+the different apostles is even more wonderful than the skilful
+arrangement of the figures and the amazing beauty of the workmanship.
+The space occupied by the picture is a wall twenty-eight feet in
+length and the figures are larger than life.
+
+Of this magnificent creation of art, only the mouldering remains are
+now visible. It has been so often repaired that almost every vestige
+of the original painting is annihilated; but from the multiplicity of
+descriptions, engravings, and copies that exist, no picture is more
+universally known and celebrated. Perhaps the best judgment we can now
+form of its merits is from the fine copy executed by one of Leonardo's
+best pupils, Marco Uggione, for the Certosa at Pavia, and now in
+London, in the collection of the Royal Academy. Eleven other copies,
+by various pupils of Leonardo, painted either during his lifetime or
+within a few years after his death, while the picture was in perfect
+preservation, exist in different churches and collections.
+
+While engaged on the Cenacolo, Leonardo painted the portrait of
+Lucrezia Crivelli, now in the Louvre (No. 483). It has been engraved
+under the title of _La Belle Ferronnière_, but later researches leave
+us no doubt that it represents Lucrezia Crivelli, a beautiful favorite
+of Ludovico Sforza, and was painted at Milan in 1497. It is, as a work
+of art, of such extraordinary perfection that all critical admiration
+is lost in wonder.
+
+Of the grand equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, Leonardo never
+finished more than the model in clay, which was considered a
+masterpiece. Some years afterward (in 1499), when Milan was invaded by
+the French, it was used as a target by the Gascon bowmen, and
+completely destroyed. The profound anatomical studies which Leonardo
+made for this work still exist.
+
+[Illustration: Raphael Introduced to Da Vinci.]
+
+In the year 1500, the French being in possession of Milan, his patron
+Ludovico in captivity, and the affairs of the state in utter
+confusion, Leonardo returned to his native Florence, where he hoped to
+re-establish his broken fortunes, and to find employment. Here begins
+the third period of his artistic life, from 1500 to 1513, that is,
+from his forty-eighth to his sixtieth year. He found the Medici family
+in exile, but was received by Pietro Soderini (who governed the city
+as "_Gonfaloniêre perpetuo_") with great distinction, and a pension
+was assigned to him as painter in the service of the republic. One of
+his first works after his return to Florence was the famous portrait
+of Madonna Lisa del Giocondo, called in French _La Joconde_, and now
+in the Louvre (484), which after the death of Leonardo was purchased
+by Francis I. for 4,000 gold crowns, equal to 45,000 francs or £1,800,
+an enormous sum in those days; yet who ever thought it too much?
+
+Then began the rivalry between Leonardo and Michael Angelo, which
+lasted during the remainder of Leonardo's life. The difference of age
+(for Michael Angelo was twenty-two years younger) ought to have
+prevented all unseemly jealousy; but Michael Angelo was haughty and
+impatient of all superiority, or even equality; Leonardo, sensitive,
+capricious, and naturally disinclined to admit the pretensions of a
+rival, to whom he could say, and _did_ say, "I was famous before you
+were born!" With all their admiration of each other's genius, their
+mutual frailties prevented any real good-will on either side.
+
+Leonardo, during his stay at Florence, painted the portrait of Ginevra
+Benci, the reigning beauty of her time. We find that in 1502 he was
+engaged by Cæsar Borgia to visit and report on the fortifications of
+his territories, and in this office he was employed for two years. In
+1503 he formed a plan for turning the course of the Arno, and in the
+following year he lost his father. In 1505 he modelled the group which
+we now see over the northern door of the San Giovanni, at Florence. In
+1514 he was invited to Rome by Leo X., but more in his character of
+philosopher, mechanic, and alchemist, than as a painter. Here Raphael
+was at the height of his fame, and engaged in his greatest works, the
+frescos of the Vatican. The younger artist was introduced to the
+elder; and two pictures which Leonardo painted while at Rome--the
+"Madonna of St. Onofrio," and the "Holy Family," painted for Filiberta
+of Savoy, the pope's sister-in-law (which is now at St.
+Petersburg)--show that even this veteran in art felt the irresistible
+influence of the genius of his young rival. They are both
+_Raffaelesque_ in the subject and treatment.
+
+It appears that Leonardo was ill-satisfied with his sojourn at Rome.
+He had long been accustomed to hold the first rank as an artist
+wherever he resided; whereas at Rome he found himself only one among
+many who, if they acknowledged his greatness, affected to consider his
+day as past. He was conscious that many of the improvements in the
+arts which were now brought into use, and which enabled the painters
+of the day to produce such extraordinary effects, were invented or
+introduced by himself. If he could no longer assert that measureless
+superiority over all others which he had done in his younger days, it
+was because he himself had opened to them new paths to excellence. The
+arrival of his old competitor, Michael Angelo, and some slight on the
+part of Leo X., who was annoyed by his speculative and dilatory habits
+in executing the works intrusted to him, all added to his irritation
+and disgust. He left Rome, and set out for Pavia, where the French
+king, Francis I., then held his court. He was received by the young
+monarch with every mark of respect, loaded with favors, and a pension
+of 700 gold crowns settled on him for life. At the famous conference
+between Francis I. and Leo X., at Bologna, Leonardo attended his new
+patron, and was of essential service to him on that occasion. In the
+following year, 1516, he returned with Francis I. to France, and was
+attached to the French court as principal painter. It appears,
+however, that during his residence in France he did not paint a single
+picture. His health had begun to decline from the time he left Italy;
+and feeling his end approach, he prepared himself for it by religious
+meditation, by acts of charity, and by a most conscientious
+distribution by will of all his worldly possessions to his relatives
+and friends. At length, after protracted suffering, this great and
+most extraordinary man died at Cloux, near Amboise, May 2, 1519, being
+then in his sixty-seventh year. It is to be regretted that we cannot
+wholly credit the beautiful story of his dying in the arms of Francis
+I., who, as it is said, had come to visit him on his death-bed. It
+would indeed have been, as Fuseli expressed it, "an honor to the king,
+by which destiny would have atoned to that monarch for his future
+disaster at Pavia."
+
+
+
+
+MICHAEL ANGELO
+
+By ANNA JAMESON
+
+(1474-1564)
+
+
+[Illustration: Michael Angelo.]
+
+We have spoken of Leonardo da Vinci. Michael Angelo, the other great
+luminary of art, was twenty-two years younger, but the more severe and
+reflective cast of his mind rendered their difference of age far less
+in effect than in reality. It is usual to compare Michael Angelo with
+Raphael, but he is more aptly compared with Leonardo da Vinci. All the
+great artists of that time, even Raphael himself, were influenced more
+or less by these two extraordinary men, but they exercised no
+influence on each other. They started from opposite points; they
+pursued throughout their whole existence, and in all they planned and
+achieved, a course as different as their respective characters.
+
+Michael Angelo Buonarroti was born at Setignano, near Florence, in the
+year 1474. He was descended from a family once noble--even among the
+noblest of the feudal lords of Northern Italy--the Counts of Canossa;
+but that branch of it represented by his father, Luigi Leonardo
+Buonarroti Simoni, had for some generations become poorer and poorer,
+until the last descendant was thankful to accept an office in the law,
+and had been nominated magistrate or mayor (_Podesta_) of Chiusi. In
+this situation he had limited his ambition to the prospect of seeing
+his eldest son a notary or advocate in his native city. The young
+Michael Angelo showed the utmost distaste for the studies allotted to
+him, and was continually escaping from his home and from his desk to
+haunt the ateliers of the painters, particularly that of Ghirlandajo
+who was then at the height of his reputation.
+
+The father of Michael Angelo, who found his family increase too
+rapidly for his means, had destined some of his sons for commerce (it
+will be recollected that in Genoa and Florence the most powerful
+nobles were merchants or manufacturers), and others for civil or
+diplomatic employments; but the fine arts, as being at that time
+productive of little honor or emolument, he held in no esteem, and
+treated these tastes of his eldest son sometimes with contempt and
+sometimes even with harshness. Michael Angelo, however, had formed
+some friendships among the young painters, and particularly with
+Francesco Granacci, one of the best pupils of Ghirlandajo; he
+contrived to borrow models and drawings, and studied them in secret
+with such persevering assiduity and consequent improvement, that
+Ghirlandajo, captivated by his genius, undertook to plead his cause to
+his father, and at length prevailed over the old man's family pride
+and prejudices. At the age of fourteen Michael Angelo was received
+into the studio of Ghirlandajo as a regular pupil, and bound to him
+for three years; and such was the precocious talent of the boy, that,
+instead of being paid for his instruction, Ghirlandajo undertook to
+pay the father, Leonardo Buonarroti, for the first, second, and third
+years, six, eight, and twelve golden florins, as payment for the
+advantage he expected to derive from the labor of the son. Thus was
+the vocation of the young artist decided for life.
+
+At that time Lorenzo the Magnificent reigned over Florence. He had
+formed in his palace and gardens a collection of antique marbles,
+busts, statues, fragments, which he had converted into an academy for
+the use of young artists, placing at the head of it as director a
+sculptor of some eminence, named Bertoldo. Michael Angelo was one of
+the first who, through the recommendation of Ghirlandajo, was received
+into this new academy, afterward so famous and so memorable in the
+history of art. The young man, then not quite sixteen, had hitherto
+occupied himself chiefly in drawing; but now, fired by the beauties he
+beheld around him, and by the example and success of a fellow-pupil,
+Torregiano, he set himself to model in clay, and at length to copy in
+marble what was before him; but, as was natural in a character and
+genius so steeped in individuality, his copies became not so much
+imitations of form as original embodyings of the leading idea. For
+example: his first attempt in marble, when he was about fifteen, was a
+copy of an antique mask of an old laughing Faun; he treated this in a
+manner so different from the original, and so spirited as to excite
+the astonishment of Lorenzo de Medici, who criticised it, however,
+saying, "Thou shouldst have remembered that old folks do not retain
+all their teeth; some of them are always wanting." The boy struck the
+teeth out, giving it at once the most grotesque expression; and
+Lorenzo, infinitely amused, sent for his father and offered to attach
+his son to his own particular service, and to undertake the entire
+care of his education. The father consented, on condition of
+receiving for himself an office under the government, and thenceforth
+Michael Angelo was lodged in the palace of the Medici and treated by
+Lorenzo as his son.
+
+Michael Angelo continued his studies under the auspices of Lorenzo;
+but just as he had reached his eighteenth year he lost his generous
+patron, his second father, and was thenceforth thrown on his own
+resources. It is true that the son of Lorenzo, Piero de Medici,
+continued to extend his favor to the young artist, but with so little
+comprehension of his genius and character, that on one occasion,
+during the severe winter of 1494, he set him to form a statue of snow
+for the amusement of his guests.
+
+Michael Angelo, while he yielded, perforce, to the caprices of his
+protector, turned the energies of his mind to a new study--that of
+anatomy--and pursued it with all that fervor which belonged to his
+character. His attention was at the same time directed to literature,
+by the counsels and conversations of a very celebrated scholar and
+poet then residing in the court of Piero--Angelo Poliziano; and he
+pursued at the same time the cultivation of his mind and the practice
+of his art. Engrossed by his own studies, he was scarcely aware of
+what was passing around him, nor of the popular intrigues which were
+preparing the ruin of the Medici; suddenly this powerful family were
+flung from sovereignty to temporary disgrace and exile; and Michael
+Angelo, as one of their retainers, was obliged to fly from Florence,
+and took refuge in the city of Bologna. During the year he spent there
+he found a friend, who employed him on some works of sculpture; and on
+his return to Florence he executed a Cupid in marble, of such beauty
+that it found its way into the cabinet of the Duchess of Mantua as a
+real antique. On the discovery that the author of this beautiful
+statue was a young man of two-and-twenty, the Cardinal San Giorgio
+invited him to Rome, and for some time lodged him in his palace. Here
+Michael Angelo, surrounded and inspired by the grand remains of
+antiquity, pursued his studies with unceasing energy; he produced a
+statue of Bacchus, which added to his reputation; and in 1500, at the
+age of five-and-twenty, he produced the famous group of the dead
+Christ on the knees of his Virgin Mother (called the "Pietà"), which
+is now in the church of St. Peter's, at Rome; this last being
+frequently copied and imitated, obtained him so much applause and
+reputation, that he was recalled to Florence, to undertake several
+public works, and we find him once more established in his native city
+in the year 1502.
+
+In 1506 Michael Angelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II., who,
+while living, had conceived the idea of erecting a most splendid
+monument to perpetuate his memory. For this work, which was never
+completed, Michael Angelo executed the famous statue of Moses, seated,
+grasping his flowing beard with one hand, and with the other
+sustaining the tables of the Law. While employed on this tomb, the
+pope commanded him to undertake also the decoration of the ceiling of
+the Sistine Chapel. Pope Sixtus IV. had, in the year 1473, erected
+this famous chapel, and summoned the best painters of that time,
+Signorelli, Cosimo Roselli, Perugino, and Ghirlandajo, to decorate the
+interior; but down to the year 1508 the ceiling remained without any
+ornament; and Michael Angelo was called upon to cover this enormous
+vault, a space of one hundred and fifty feet in length by fifty in
+breadth, with a series of subjects representing the most important
+events connected, either literally or typically, with the fall and
+redemption of mankind.
+
+No part of Michael Angelo's long life is so interesting, so full of
+characteristic incident, as the history of his intercourse with Pope
+Julius II., which began in 1505, and ended only with the death of the
+pope in 1513.
+
+Michael Angelo had at all times a lofty idea of his own dignity as an
+artist, and never would stoop either to flatter a patron or to
+conciliate a rival. Julius II., though now seventy-four, was as
+impatient of contradiction as fiery in temper, as full of magnificent
+and ambitious projects as if he had been in the prime of life; in his
+service was the famous architect, Bramante, who beheld with jealousy
+and alarm the increasing fame of Michael Angelo, and his influence
+with the pontiff, and set himself by indirect means to lessen both. He
+insinuated to Julius that it was ominous to erect his own mausoleum
+during his lifetime, and the pope gradually fell off in his attentions
+to Michael Angelo, and neglected to supply him with the necessary
+funds for carrying on the work. On one occasion, Michael Angelo,
+finding it difficult to obtain access to the pope, sent a message to
+him to this effect, "that henceforth, if his Holiness desired to see
+him, he should send to seek him elsewhere;" and the same night,
+leaving orders with his servants to dispose of his property, he
+departed for Florence. The pope despatched five couriers after him
+with threats, persuasions, promises--but in vain. He wrote to the
+Gonfaloniere Soderini, then at the head of the government of Florence,
+commanding him, on pain of his extreme displeasure, to send Michael
+Angelo back to him; but the inflexible artist absolutely refused;
+three months were spent in vain negotiations. Soderini, at length,
+fearing the pope's anger, prevailed on Michael Angelo to return, and
+sent with him his relation, Cardinal Soderini, to make up the quarrel
+between the high contending powers.
+
+On his return to Rome, Michael Angelo wished to have resumed his work
+on the mausoleum; but the pope had resolved on the completion of the
+Sistine Chapel; he commanded Michael Angelo to undertake the
+decoration of the vaulted ceiling; and the artist was obliged, though
+reluctantly, to obey. At this time the frescos which Raphael and his
+pupils were painting in the chambers of the Vatican had excited the
+admiration of all Rome. Michael Angelo, who had never exercised
+himself in the mechanical part of the art of fresco, invited from
+Florence several painters of eminence, to execute his designs under
+his own superintendence; but they could not reach the grandeur of his
+conceptions, which became enfeebled under their hands, and one
+morning, in a mood of impatience, he destroyed all that they had done,
+closed the doors of the chapel against them, and would not thenceforth
+admit them to his presence. He then shut himself up, and proceeded
+with incredible perseverance and energy to accomplish his task alone;
+he even prepared his colors with his own hands. He began with the end
+toward the door, and in the two compartments first painted (though
+not first in the series), the "Deluge," and the "Vineyard of Noah;" he
+made the figures too numerous and too small to produce their full
+effect from below, a fault which he corrected in those executed
+subsequently. When almost half the work was completed, the pope
+insisted on viewing what was done, and the astonishment and admiration
+it excited rendered him more and more eager to have the whole
+completed at once. The progress, however, was not rapid enough to suit
+the impatient temper of the pontiff. On one occasion he demanded of
+the artist _when_ he meant to finish it; to which Michael Angelo
+replied calmly, "When I can." "When thou canst!" exclaimed the fiery
+old pope, "thou hast a mind that I should have thee thrown from the
+scaffold!" At length, on the day of All Saints, 1512, the ceiling was
+uncovered to public view. Michael Angelo had employed on the painting
+only, without reckoning the time spent in preparing the cartoons,
+twenty-two months, and he received in payment three thousand crowns.
+
+The collection of engravings after Michael Angelo in the British
+Museum is very imperfect, but it contains some fine old prints from
+the Prophets which should be studied by those who wish to understand
+the true merit of this great master, of whom Sir Joshua Reynolds said
+that, "to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his
+perfections, would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious
+man!"
+
+When the Sistine Chapel was completed Michael Angelo was in his
+thirty-ninth year; fifty years of a glorious though troubled career
+were still before him.
+
+Pope Julius II. died in 1513, and was succeeded by Leo X., the son of
+Lorenzo the Magnificent. As a Florentine and his father's son, we
+might naturally have expected that he would have gloried in
+patronizing and employing Michael Angelo; but such was not the case.
+There was something in the stern, unbending character, and retired and
+abstemious habits of Michael Angelo, repulsive to the temper of Leo,
+who preferred the graceful and amiable Raphael, then in the prime of
+his life and genius; hence arose the memorable rivalry between Michael
+Angelo and Raphael, which on the part of the latter was merely
+generous emulation, while it must be confessed that something like
+scorn mingled with the feelings of Michael Angelo. The pontificate of
+Leo X., an interval of ten years, was the least productive period of
+his life. In the year 1519, when the Signoria of Florence was
+negotiating with Ravenna for the restoration of the remains of Dante,
+he petitioned the pope that he might be allowed to execute, at his own
+labor and expense, a monument to the "Divine Poet." He was sent to
+Florence to superintend the building of the church of San Lorenzo and
+the completion of Santa Croce; but he differed with the pope on the
+choice of the marble, quarrelled with the officials, and scarcely
+anything was accomplished. Clement VII., another Medici, was elected
+pope in 1523. He had conceived the idea of consecrating a chapel in
+the church of San Lorenzo, to receive the tombs of his ancestors and
+relations, and which should be adorned with all the splendor of art.
+Michael Angelo planned and built the chapel, and for its interior
+decoration designed and executed six of his greatest works in
+sculpture.
+
+While Michael Angelo was engaged in these works his progress was
+interrupted by events which threw all Italy into commotion. Rome was
+taken and sacked by the Constable de Bourbon in 1527. The Medici were
+once more expelled from Florence; and Michael Angelo, in the midst of
+these strange vicissitudes, was employed by the republic to fortify
+his native city against his former patrons. Great as an engineer, as
+in every other department of art and science, he defended Florence for
+nine months. At length the city was given up by treachery, and,
+fearing the vengeance of the conquerors, Michael Angelo fled and
+concealed himself; but Clement VII. was too sensible of his merit to
+allow him to remain long in disgrace and exile. He was pardoned, and
+continued ever afterward in high favor with the pope, who employed him
+on the sculptures in the chapel of San Lorenzo during the remainder of
+his pontificate.
+
+In the year 1531 he had completed the statues of "Night and Morning,"
+and Clement, who heard of his incessant labors, sent him a brief
+commanding him, _on pain of excommunication_, to take care of his
+health, and not to accept of any other work but that which his
+Holiness had assigned him.
+
+Clement VII. was succeeded by Pope Paul III., of the Farnese family,
+in 1534. This pope, though nearly seventy when he was elected, was as
+anxious to immortalize his name by great undertakings as any of his
+predecessors had been. His first wish was to complete the decoration
+of the interior of the Sistine Chapel, left unfinished by Julius II.
+and Leo X. He summoned Michael Angelo, who endeavored to excuse
+himself, pleading other engagements; but the pope would listen to no
+excuses which interfered with his sovereign power to dissolve all
+other obligations; and thus the artist found himself, after an
+interval of twenty years, most reluctantly forced to abandon sculpture
+for painting; and, as Vasari expresses it, he consented to serve Pope
+Paul only because he _could_ not do otherwise.
+
+The same Pope Paul III. had in the meantime constructed a beautiful
+chapel, which was called after his name the chapel _Paolina_, and
+dedicated to St. Peter and St Paul. Michael Angelo was called upon to
+design the decorations. He painted on one side the "Conversion of St.
+Paul," and on the other the "Crucifixion of St. Peter," which were
+completed in 1549. But these fine paintings--of which existing old
+engravings give a better idea than the blackened and faded remains of
+the original frescos--were from the first ill-disposed as to the
+locality, and badly lighted, and at present they excite little
+interest compared with the more famous works in the Sistine.
+
+With the frescos in the Pauline Chapel ends Michael Angelo's career as
+a painter. He had been appointed chief architect of St. Peter's, in
+1547, by Paul III. He was then in his seventy-second year, and during
+the remainder of his life, a period of sixteen years, we find him
+wholly devoted to architecture. His vast and daring genius finding
+ample scope in the completion of St. Peter's, he has left behind him
+in his capacity of architect yet greater marvels than he has achieved
+as painter and sculptor. Who that has seen the cupola of St. Peter's
+soaring into the skies, but will think almost with awe of the
+universal and majestic intellect of the man who reared it?
+
+It appears, from the evidence of contemporary writers, that in the
+last years of his life the acknowledged worth and genius of Michael
+Angelo, his widespread fame, and his unblemished integrity, combined
+with his venerable age and the haughtiness and reserve of his
+deportment to invest him with a sort of princely dignity. It is
+recorded that, when he waited on Pope Julius III., to receive his
+commands, the pontiff rose on his approach, seated him, in spite of
+his excuses, on his right hand, and while a crowd of cardinals,
+prelates, and ambassadors, were standing round at humble distance,
+carried on the conference as equal with equal. When the Grand Duke
+Cosmo was in Rome, in 1560, he visited Michael Angelo, uncovered in
+his presence, and stood with his hat in his hand while speaking to
+him; but from the time when he made himself the tyrant of Florence he
+never could persuade Michael Angelo to visit, even for a day, his
+native city.
+
+The arrogance imputed to Michael Angelo seems rather to have arisen
+from a contempt for others than from any overweening opinion of
+himself. He was too proud to be vain. He had placed his standard of
+perfection so high, that to the latest hour of his life he considered
+himself as striving after that ideal excellence which had been
+revealed to him, but to which he conceived that others were blind or
+indifferent. In allusion to his own imperfections, he made a drawing,
+since become famous, which represents an aged man in a go-cart, and
+underneath the words "_Ancora impara_" (still learning).
+
+He continued to labor unremittingly, and with the same resolute energy
+of mind and purpose, till the gradual decay of his strength warned him
+of his approaching end. He did not suffer from any particular malady,
+and his mind was strong and clear to the last. He died at Rome, on
+February 18, 1564, in the ninetieth year of his age. A few days before
+his death he dictated his will in these few simple words: "I bequeath
+my soul to God, my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest
+relations." His nephew, Leonardo Buonarroti, who was his principal
+heir, by the orders of the Grand Duke Cosmo had his remains secretly
+conveyed out of Rome and brought to Florence; they were with due
+honors deposited in the church of Santa Croce, under a costly
+monument, on which we may see his noble bust surrounded by three very
+commonplace and ill-executed statues, representing the arts in which
+he excelled--Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. They might have
+added _Poetry_, for Michael Angelo was so fine a poet that his
+productions would have given him fame, though he had never peopled the
+Sistine with his giant creations, nor "suspended the Pantheon in the
+air." The object to whom his poems are chiefly addressed, Vittoria
+Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, was the widow of the celebrated
+commander who overcame Francis I. at the battle of Pavia; herself a
+poetess, and one of the most celebrated women of her time for beauty,
+talents, virtue, and piety. She died in 1547.
+
+[Illustration: Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna.]
+
+
+
+
+RAPHAEL
+
+By Mrs. LEE
+
+(1483-1520)
+
+
+[Illustration: Raphael.]
+
+The solemn and silent season of Lent had passed away; and, on the
+second evening of the joyful Easter, a house was seen brightly
+illuminated in one of the streets of Urbino. It was evident that a
+festival was held there on some happy occasion. The sound of music was
+heard, and guest after guest entered the mansion. No one, however, was
+more cordially welcomed than Pietro Perugino, the fellow-student of
+Leonardo da Vinci, at the school of the good old Andrea Verocchio.
+
+For a moment, general gayety was suspended in honor of the guest. He
+was considered at that time one of the greatest painters of the age;
+and the host, Giovanni di Sanzio, though himself only ranking in the
+second or third order of limners, knew well how to prize the rare
+talents of his visitor.
+
+The wife of Giovanni came forward, leading her son Raphael. Perugino
+had the eye of an artist: he gazed upon the mother and son with
+enthusiastic feeling; the striking resemblance they bore to each
+other, so exquisitely modulated by years and sex, was indeed a study
+for this minute copyist of nature.
+
+"Benvenuto, Messer Perugino," said the hostess, with her soft musical
+voice and graceful Italian accent, and she placed the hand of her boy
+in that of the artist. Gently he laid the other on the head of the
+youthful Raphael, and in a solemn and tender manner pronounced a
+benediction.
+
+"Your blessing is well timed, my honored friend," said Giovanni, "our
+festival is given to celebrate the birthday of our son."
+
+"Is this his birthday?" inquired Perugino.
+
+"Not so," replied the father, "he was born on April 7th, the evening
+of _Good Friday_, and it well befits us to be gay on the joyful Easter
+that succeeds it."
+
+"My friend," said Perugino, "if thou wilt entrust thy boy to my care,
+I will take him as my pupil."
+
+The father acceded with delight to this proposal. When the mother
+became acquainted with the arrangement, and found that her son was to
+quit his paternal dwelling at the early age of twelve, and reside
+wholly with Perugino, she could not restrain her tears. With hers the
+young Raphael's mingled, though ever and anon a bright smile darted
+like a sunbeam across his face.
+
+He remained with Perugino several years. Raphael was made for
+affection, and fondly did his heart cling to his instructor. For a
+time he was content to follow his manner; but at length he began to
+dwell upon his own beau ideal; he grew impatient of imitation, and
+felt that his style was deficient in freshness and originality. He
+longed to pass the narrow bounds to which his invention had been
+confined.
+
+With the approbation of Perugino and the consent of his parents, he
+repaired to Siena; here he was solicited to adorn the public library
+with fresco, and painted there with great success. But while he was
+busily engaged, his friend, Pinturrichio, one day entered. After
+looking at his friend's work very attentively, "Bravo!" he exclaimed,
+"thou hast done well, my Raphael--but I have just returned from
+Florence--oh, would that thou couldst behold the works of Leonardo da
+Vinci! Such horses! they paw the ground and shake the foam from their
+manes. Oh, my poor Raphael! thou hast never seen nature; thou art
+wasting time on these cartoons. Perugino is a good man and a good
+painter, I will not deny that--but Leonardo's horses!"
+
+Raphael threw aside his pencil and hastily rose.
+
+"Where now?" asked his friend; "whither art thou going so hastily?"
+
+"To Florence," exclaimed Raphael.
+
+"And what carries you so suddenly?"
+
+"The horses of Leonardo," replied the young artist, sportively;
+"seriously, however, the desire of excellence implanted in my soul."
+
+When he arrived at Florence he was charmed with the appearance of the
+city; but his whole mind was absorbed in the works of Leonardo da
+Vinci and of Michael Angelo, the rival artists of the age. As his stay
+was to be short, he did not enter upon laborious occupation. His
+mornings were passed in the reveries of his art; his evenings in the
+gay and fascinating society of Florence, where the fame of Perugino's
+beloved pupil had already reached. The frescos at Siena were spoken
+of; and the beautiful countenance and graceful deportment of Raphael
+won him the friendship of distinguished men. Taddeo Taddei, the
+learned friend of Cardinal Bembo, solicited him to reside in his
+house; he consented, and in return for the courtesy painted for him
+two pictures, in what is called his first style, that of Perugino.
+
+One evening he retired to his couch at a late hour. He had been the
+hero of a _fête_, and love and beauty had heedlessly scattered their
+flowers in the path of the living Adonis. In vain he sought a few
+hours of slumber. He had quaffed the juice of the grape, emptying
+goblet after goblet, till his beating pulse and throbbing temples
+refused to be quieted. He started from his couch and approached the
+lattice; the heavens had changed their aspect, the still serenity of
+the evening had passed away, and the clouds were hurrying over the
+pale and watery moon. Nothing was heard but the low sighing of the
+wind, and now and then a sudden gust swept through the lattice, and
+threatened to extinguish the taper which was burning dimly on the
+table. A slight noise made him turn his eyes, and he perceived a note
+that the wind had displaced. He hastily took it up. It was Perugino's
+handwriting. He cut the silken cord that fastened it, and read:
+
+"On me, my beloved Raffaello, devolves the task of informing you of
+the events which have taken place at Urbino. May this letter find you
+prepared for all the changes of life; a wise man will never suffer
+himself to be taken by surprise; this is true philosophy, and the
+_only philosophy_ that can serve us! An epidemic has prevailed at
+Urbino, and has entered your paternal dwelling. Need I say more? Come
+to me, my son, at Perugia, for I am the only parent that remains to
+you. Pietro Perugino."
+
+As he hastily arose, a crucifix which his mother had suspended to his
+neck at parting, fell from his bosom. Even the symbols of religion are
+sacred where the living principle has been early implanted in the
+heart. He pressed it to his lips: "Ah!" thought he, "what is the
+_philosophy_ of Perugino, compared to the _faith_ of which this is the
+emblem?" His thoughts went back to infancy and childhood, and his
+grief and remorse grew less intense. He dwelt on the deep and enduring
+love of his parents till he felt assured death could not extinguish
+it, and that he should see them again in a brighter sphere.
+
+When morning came it found Raphael calm and composed; the lines of
+grief and thought were deeply marked on his youthful face; but the
+whirlwind and the storm had passed. He took leave of his friends, and
+hastened to Perugino, who received him with the fondness of a parent.
+
+Here he remained some time, and at length collected sufficient
+resolution to return to Urbino, and once more enter the mansion of his
+desolated home.
+
+It was necessary for him to reside at his native place for a number of
+months. During that time he painted several fine pictures. His heart,
+however, yearned for Florence, and he returned to it once more with
+the determination of making it his home. With far different sensations
+did he a second time enter the city of beauty. The freshness of his
+gayety was blighted; lessons of earthly disappointment were ever
+present to his mind, and he returned to it with the resolute purpose
+of devoting himself to serious occupation.
+
+How well he fulfilled this resolution all Italy can bear witness. From
+this time he adopted what has been called his _second manner_. He
+painted for the Duke of Urbino the beautiful picture of the Saviour at
+sunrise, with the morning light cast over a face resplendent with
+divinity; the flowers glittering with dew, the two disciples beyond,
+still buried in slumber, at the time when the Saviour turns his eyes
+upon them with that tender and sorrowful exclamation, "Could ye not
+watch one hour?"
+
+Raphael enriched the city of Florence with his works. When asked what
+had suggested some of the beautiful combinations of his paintings, he
+said, "They came to me in my sleep." At other times he called them
+"visions;" and then again said they were the result of "una certa idea
+che mi viene alla mente." It was this power of drawing from the deep
+wells of his own mind that gave such character, originality, and
+freshness to his works. He found that power _within_ which so many
+seek, and seek in vain, _without_.
+
+At the age of twenty-five Raphael was summoned by the pope to paint
+the chambers of the Vatican. The famous frescos of the Vatican need
+neither enumeration nor description; the world is their judge and
+their eulogist.
+
+No artist ever consecrated his works more by his affections than
+Raphael. The same hallowed influence of the heart gave inexpressible
+charm to Correggio's, afterward. One of Raphael's friends said to him,
+in looking upon particular figures in his groups, "You have
+transmitted to posterity your own likeness."
+
+"See you nothing beyond that?" replied the artist.
+
+"I see," said the critic, "the deep-blue eye, and the long, fair hair
+parted on the forehead."
+
+"Observe," said Raphael, "the feminine softness of expression, the
+beautiful harmony of thought and feeling. When I take my pencil for
+high and noble purposes, the spirit of my mother hovers over me. It is
+her countenance, not my own, of which you trace the resemblance."
+
+This expression is always observable in his Madonnas. His portraits of
+the _Fornarina_ are widely different. Raphael, in his last and most
+excellent style, united what was graceful and exquisite in Leonardo
+with the sublime and noble manner of Michael Angelo. It is the
+privilege and glory of genius to appropriate to itself whatever is
+noble and true. The region of thought is thus made a common ground for
+all, and one master mind becomes a reservoir for the present and
+future times.
+
+When Raphael was invited to Rome by Pope Julius II., Michael Angelo
+was at the height of his glory; his character tended to inspire awe
+rather than affection; he delighted in the majestic and the terrible.
+In boldness of conception and grandeur of design, he surpassed
+Leonardo, but never could reach the sweetness and gentleness of his
+figures. Even his children lose something of their infantine beauty,
+and look mature; his women are commanding and lofty; his men of
+gigantic proportions. His painting, like his sculpture, is remarkable
+for anatomical exactness, and perfect expression of the muscles. For
+this union of magnificence and sublimity, it was necessary to prepare
+the mind; the first view was almost harsh, and it was by degrees that
+his mighty works produced their designed effect. Raphael, while he
+felt all the greatness of the Florentine, conceived that there might
+be something more like nature--something that should be harmonious,
+sweet, and flowing--that should convey the idea of intellectual rather
+than of external majesty. Without yielding any of the correctness of
+science, he avoided harshness, and imitated antiquity in uniting grace
+and elegance with a strict observation of science and of the rules of
+art.
+
+It was with surprise that Michael Angelo beheld in the youthful
+Raphael a rival artist; nor did he receive this truth meekly; he
+treated him with coldness and distance. In the meantime Raphael went
+on with his works; he completed the frescos of the Vatican, and
+designed the cartoons. He also produced those exquisite paintings in
+oil which seem the perfection of human art.
+
+[Illustration: Leo X. at Raphael's Bier.]
+
+Human affection is necessary to awaken the sympathy of human beings;
+and Raphael, in learning how to portray it, had found the way to the
+heart. In mere grandeur of invention he was surpassed by Michael
+Angelo. Titian excelled him in coloring, and Correggio in the
+beautiful gradation of tone; but Raphael knew how to paint the soul;
+in this he stood alone. This was the great secret of a power which
+seemed to operate like magic. In his paintings there is something
+which makes music on the chords of every heart; for they are the
+expression of a mind attuned to nature, and find answering sympathies
+in the universal soul.
+
+While Michael Angelo was exalted with the Epic grandeur of his own
+Dante, Raphael presented the most finished scenes of dramatic life,
+and might be compared to the immortal Shakespeare--scenes of spiritual
+beauty, of devotion, and of pastoral simplicity, yet uniting a classic
+elegance which the poet does not possess. Buonarroti was the wonder of
+Italy, and Raphael became its idol.
+
+Julius was so much enchanted with his paintings in the halls of the
+Vatican, that he ordered the frescos of former artists to be
+destroyed. Among them were some of Perugino's, but Raphael would not
+suffer these to be removed for his own; he viewed them as the relics
+of a beloved and honored friend, and they were consecrated by tender
+and grateful feelings.
+
+Raphael collected from every part of the world medallions of intaglios
+and antiques to assist him in his designs. He loved splendor and
+conviviality, and gave offence thereby to the rigid and austere. It
+was said that he had a prospect of changing the graceful beretta for a
+cardinal's hat; but this idea might have arisen from the delay which
+existed in his marriage with Cardinal Bibiano's niece, whose hand her
+uncle had offered to him. Peremptorily to reject this proposal of the
+cardinal without giving offence would have been impossible, and
+Raphael was too gentle in his own feelings voluntarily to injure
+another's; but he was not one to sacrifice his affections to ambition.
+
+Whatever were the struggles of his heart, they were early terminated.
+Amid the caresses of the great, the fond and devoted friendship of his
+equals, the enthusiastic love of his pupils, the adulation of his
+inferiors, while crowned with wealth, fame, and honor, and regarded as
+the equal of the hitherto greatest artist in the world, he was
+suddenly called away. He died on Good Friday, the day of his birth, at
+the age of thirty-seven, 1520.
+
+We are sometimes impressed with veneration when those who have even
+drunk the cup of life almost to its dregs resign it with resignation
+and Christian faith. But Raphael calmly and firmly resigned it when it
+was full to the brim.
+
+Leo X. and Cardinal Bibiano were by his bedside. The sublime picture
+of the "Transfiguration," the last and greatest which he painted, was
+placed opposite to him, by his own desire. How impressive must have
+been the scene! His dying eye turned from the crucifix he held in his
+hand to the glory of the beatified Saviour.
+
+His contemporaries speak of him as affectionate, disinterested,
+modest, and sincere; encouraging humble merit, and freely giving his
+advice and assistance where it was needed and deserved.
+
+
+
+
+TITIAN
+
+By GIORGIO VASARI[2]
+
+         [Footnote 2: Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary of Titian, and
+         himself a painter of no mean rank, wrote a series of lives of
+         the Italian artists, from which the following is extracted.
+         There are several slight inaccuracies in his work Titian was
+         born, not in 1480, but in 1477, and died in 1576. He was in
+         coloring the greatest artist who ever lived.]
+
+1477-1576
+
+
+[Illustration: Titian.]
+
+Titian was born in the year 1480, at Cadore, a small place distant
+about five miles from the foot of the Alps; he belonged to the family
+of the Vecelli, which is among the most noble of those parts. Giving
+early proof of much intelligence, he was sent at the age of ten to an
+uncle in Venice, an honorable citizen, who, seeing the boy to be much
+inclined to painting, placed him with the excellent painter, Gian
+Bellino, then very famous. Under his care, the youth soon proved
+himself to be endowed by nature with all the gifts of judgment and
+genius required for the art of painting. Now, Gian Bellino and the
+other masters of that country, not having the habit of studying the
+antique, were accustomed to copy only what they saw before them, and
+that in a dry, hard, labored manner, which Titian also acquired; but
+about the year 1507, Giorgione da Castel Franco, not being satisfied
+with that mode of proceeding, began to give to his works an unwonted
+softness and relief, painting them in a very beautiful manner; yet he
+by no means neglected to draw from the life, or to copy nature with
+his colors as closely as he could; and in doing the latter he shaded
+with colder or warmer tints as the living object might demand, but
+without first making a drawing; since he held that, to paint with the
+colors only, without any drawing on paper, was the best mode of
+proceeding, and most perfectly in accord with the true principles of
+design.
+
+Having seen the manner of Giorgione, Titian early resolved to abandon
+that of Gian Bellino, although well grounded therein. He now,
+therefore, devoted himself to this purpose, and in a short time so
+closely imitated Giorgione that his pictures were sometimes taken for
+those of that master, as will be related below. Increasing in age,
+judgment, and facility of hand, our young artist executed numerous
+works in fresco which cannot here be named individually, having been
+dispersed in various places; let it suffice to say, that they were
+such as to cause experienced men to anticipate the excellence to which
+he afterward attained. At the time when Titian began to adopt the
+manner of Giorgione, being then not more than eighteen, he took the
+portrait of a gentleman of the Barberigo family, who was his friend,
+and this was considered very beautiful, the coloring being true and
+natural, and the hair so distinctly painted that each one could be
+counted as might also the stitches in a satin doublet, painted in the
+same work; it was so well and carefully done, that it would have been
+taken for a picture by Giorgione, if Titian had not written his name
+on the dark ground.
+
+Giorgione meanwhile had executed the façade of the German Exchange,
+when, by the intervention of Barberigo, Titian was appointed to paint
+certain stories in the same building and over the Merceria. After
+which he executed a picture with figures the size of life, which is
+now in the Hall of Messer Andrea Loredano, who dwells near San
+Marcuola; this work represents "Our Lady" in her flight into Egypt.
+She is in the midst of a great wood, and the landscape of this picture
+is well done; Titian having practised that branch of art, and keeping
+certain Germans, who were excellent masters therein, for several
+months together in his own house. Within the wood he depicted various
+animals, all painted from the life, and so natural as to seem almost
+alive. In the house of Messer Giovanni Danna, a Flemish gentleman and
+merchant, who was his gossip, he painted a portrait which appears to
+breathe, with an "Ecce Homo," comprising numerous figures which, by
+Titian himself, as well as others, is considered to be a very good
+work. The same artist executed a picture of "Our Lady," with other
+figures the size of life, men and children being all taken from
+nature, and portraits of persons belonging to the Danna family.
+
+In the year 1507, when the Emperor Maximilian was making war on the
+Venetians, Titian, as he relates himself, painted the "Angel Raphael,
+with Tobit and a Dog," in the Church of San Marziliano. There is a
+distant landscape in this picture, wherein San Giovanni Battista is
+seen at prayer in a wood; he is looking up to heaven, and his face is
+illumined by a light descending thence; some believe this picture to
+have been done before that on the "Exchange of the Germans," mentioned
+above, was commenced. Now, it chanced that certain gentlemen, not
+knowing that Giorgione no longer worked at this façade, and that
+Titian was doing it (nay, had already given that part over the
+Merceria to public view), met the former, and began as friends to
+rejoice with him, declaring that he was acquitting himself better on
+the side of the Merceria than he had done on that of the "Grand
+Canal;" which remark caused Giorgione so much vexation, that he would
+scarcely permit himself to be seen until the whole work was completed,
+and Titian had become generally known as the painter; nor did he
+thenceforward hold any intercourse with the latter and they were no
+longer friends.
+
+In the year 1508, Titian published a wood-engraving of the "Triumph of
+Faith;" it comprised a vast number of figures: our first Parents, the
+Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Sybils, the Innocents, the Martyrs, the
+Apostles, and Our Saviour Christ borne in triumph by the four
+Evangelists, and the four Doctors, followed by the holy Confessors;
+here Titian displayed much boldness, a fine manner, and improving
+facility. I remember that Fra Bastiano del Piombo, speaking on this
+subject, told me that if Titian had then gone to Rome, and seen the
+works of Michael Angelo, with those of Raphael and the ancients, he
+was convinced, the admirable facility of his coloring considered, that
+he would have produced works of the most astonishing perfection;
+seeing that, as he well deserved to be called the most perfect
+imitator of Nature of our times, as regards coloring, he might thus
+have rendered himself equal to the Urbinese or Buonarroto, as regarded
+the great foundation of all, design. At a later period Titian repaired
+to Vicenza, where he painted "The Judgment of Solomon," on the
+Loggetta wherein the courts of justice are held; a very beautiful
+work. Returning to Venice, he then depicted the façade of the Germain;
+at Padua he painted certain frescos in the Church of Sant' Antonio,
+the subjects taken from the life of that saint; and in the Church of
+Santo Spirito he executed a small picture of San Marco seated in the
+midst of other saints, whose faces are portraits painted in oil with
+the utmost care; this picture has been taken for a work of Giorgione.
+
+Now, the death of Giovan Bellino had caused a story in the hall of the
+Great Council to remain unfinished; it was that which represents
+Federigo Barbarossa kneeling before Pope Alessandro III., who plants
+his foot on the emperor's neck. This was now finished by Titian, who
+altered many parts of it, introducing portraits of his friends and
+others. For this he received from the senate an office in the Exchange
+of the Germans called the Senseria, which brought him in three hundred
+crowns yearly, and which those Signori usually give to the most
+eminent painter of their city, on condition that from time to time he
+shall take the portrait of their doge, or prince when such shall be
+created, at the price of eight crowns, which the doge himself pays,
+the portrait being then preserved in the Palace of San Marco, as a
+memorial of that doge.
+
+After the completion of these works, our artist painted, for the
+Church of San Rocco, a figure of Christ bearing his cross; the Saviour
+has a rope round his neck, and is dragged forward by a Jew; many have
+thought this a work of Giorgione. It has become an object of the
+utmost devotion in Venice, and has received more crowns as offerings
+than have been earned by Titian and Giorgione both, through the whole
+course of their lives. Now, Titian had taken the portrait of Bembo,
+then secretary to Pope Leo X., and was by him invited to Rome, that he
+might see the city, with Raffaello da Urbino and other distinguished
+persons; but the artist having delayed his journey until 1520, when
+the pope and Raffaello were both dead, put it off for that time
+altogether. For the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore he painted a
+picture of "St. John the Baptist in the wilderness;" there is an angel
+beside him that appears to be living; and a distant landscape, with
+trees on the bank of a river, which are very graceful. He took
+portraits of the Prince Grimani and Loredano, which were considered
+admirable; and not long afterward he painted the portrait of King
+Francis, who was then leaving Italy to return to France.
+
+[Illustration: A Fête at the House of Titian.]
+
+In 1530, when the Emperor Charles V. was in Bologna, Titian, by the
+intervention of Pietro Aretino, was invited to that city by the
+Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, and there he made a magnificent portrait
+of his majesty in full armor. This gave so much satisfaction that the
+artist received a present of a thousand crowns for the same. Out of
+these he had subsequently to give the half to Alfonso Lombardi, the
+sculptor, who had made a model of that monarch to be executed in
+marble.
+
+Having returned to Venice, Titian there found that many gentlemen had
+begun to favor Pordenone, commending exceedingly the works executed by
+that artist in the ceiling of the Hall of the Pregai, and elsewhere.
+They had also procured him the commission for a small picture in the
+Church of San Giovanni Elemosynario, which they intended him to paint
+in competition with one representing that saint in his episcopal
+habits, which had previously been executed there by Titian. But
+whatever care and pains Pordenone took, he could not equal nor even
+approach the work of the former. Titian was then appointed to paint a
+picture of the Annunciation for the Church of Santa Maria degli
+Angeli, at Murano; but those who gave the commission for the work, not
+wishing to pay so much as five hundred crowns, which Titian required
+as its price, he sent it, by the advice of Pietro Aretino, as a gift
+to Charles V., who being greatly delighted with the work, made him a
+present of two thousand crowns. The place which the picture was to
+have occupied at Murano was then filled by one from the hand of
+Pordenone.
+
+When the emperor, some time after this, returned with his army from
+Hungary, and was again at Bologna, holding a conference with Clement
+VII., he desired to have another portrait taken of him by Titian, who,
+before he departed from the city, also painted that of the Cardinal
+Ippolito de Medici in the Hungarian dress, with another of the same
+prelate fully armed, which is somewhat smaller than the first; these
+are both now in the Guardaroba of Duke Cosimo. He painted the
+portraits of Alfonso, Marquis of Davalos, and of Pietro Aretino, at
+the same period, and these things having made him known to Federigo
+Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, he entered the service of the latter, and
+accompanied him to his states. At Mantua our artist made a portrait of
+the duke, which appears to breathe, and afterward executed that of his
+brother, the cardinal. These being finished, he painted twelve
+beautiful "Heads of the Twelve Cæsars," to decorate one of the rooms
+erected by Giulio Romano, and when they were done, Giulio painted a
+"Story from the Lives of the Emperors" beneath each head.
+
+The productions, but more especially the portraits, of Titian are so
+numerous that it would be almost impossible to make the record of them
+all. I will, therefore, speak of the principal only, and that without
+order of time, seeing that it does not much signify to tell which was
+painted earlier and which later. He took the portrait of Charles V.
+several times, as we have said, and was finally invited by that
+monarch to his court; there he painted him as he was in those last
+years; and so much was that most invincible emperor pleased with the
+manner of Titian, that once he had been portrayed by him, he would
+never permit himself to be taken by any other person. Each time that
+Titian painted the emperor he received a present of a thousand crowns
+of gold, and the artist was made a cavalier, or knight, by his
+majesty, with a revenue of two hundred crowns yearly, secured on the
+treasury of Naples, and attached to his title.
+
+When Titian painted Filippo, King of Spain, the son of Charles, he
+received another annuity of two hundred crowns; so that these four
+hundred, added to the three hundred from the German Exchange, make him
+a fixed income of seven hundred crowns, which he possesses without the
+necessity of exerting himself in any manner. Titian presented the
+portraits of Charles V. and his son Filippo to the Duke Cosimo, who
+has them now in his Guardaroba. He also took the portrait of
+Ferdinand, King of the Romans, who was afterward emperor, with those
+of his children, Maximilian, that is to say, now emperor, and his
+brother; he likewise painted the Queen Maria; and at the command of
+the Emperor Charles, he portrayed the Duke of Saxony, when the latter
+was in prison. But what a waste of time is this! when there has
+scarcely been a noble of high rank, scarcely a prince or lady of great
+name, whose portrait has not been taken by Titian, who in that branch
+of art is indeed an excellent painter.
+
+All these works, with many others which I omit to avoid prolixity,
+have been executed up to the present age of our artist, which is above
+seventy-six years. Titian has been always healthy and happy; he has
+been favored beyond the lot of most men, and has received from Heaven
+only favors and blessings. In his house he has entertained whatever
+princes, literati, or men of distinction have gone to or dwelt in
+Venice; for, to say nothing of his excellence in art, he has always
+distinguished himself by courtesy, hospitality, and rectitude.
+
+Titian has had some rivals in Venice, but not of any great ability,
+wherefore he has easily overcome them by the superiority of his art;
+while he has also rendered himself acceptable to the gentlemen of the
+city. He has gained a fair amount of wealth, his labors having always
+been well paid; and it would have been well if he had worked for his
+amusement alone during these latter years, that he might not have
+diminished the reputation gained in his best days by works of inferior
+merit, performed at a period of life when nature tends inevitably to
+decline, and consequent imperfection.
+
+In the year 1566, when Vasari, the writer of the present history, was
+at Venice, he went to visit Titian, as one who was his friend, and
+found him, although then very old, still with the pencils in his hand
+and painting busily. Great pleasure had Vasari in beholding his works
+and in conversing with the master.
+
+It may be affirmed, then, that Titian, having adorned Venice, or
+rather all Italy, and other parts of the world, with excellent
+paintings, well merits to be loved and respected by artists, and in
+many things to be admired and imitated also, as one who has produced,
+and is producing, work of infinite merit; nay, such as must endure
+while the memory of illustrious men shall remain.
+
+
+
+
+ALBERT DÜRER[3]
+
+         [Footnote 3: Copyright, 1894, by Helmar Hess.]
+
+By W. J. HOLLAND, Chancellor of the Western University of Pennsylvania
+
+(1471-1528)
+
+
+[Illustration: Albert Dürer.]
+
+It has been given to some men to be not only great in the domain of
+art by reason of that which they have themselves succeeded in
+producing, but by reason of that which they have inspired other men to
+produce. They have been not merely artists, but teachers, who by
+precept and example have moulded the whole current and drift of
+artistic thought in the ages and lands to which they have belonged.
+Among these lofty spirits, who live through the centuries not only in
+what their hands once fashioned, but still more in what they have
+inspired others to do, undoubtedly one of the greatest is Albert
+Dürer. Justly reckoned as the representative artist of Germany, he has
+the peculiar honor of having raised the craft of the engraver to its
+true position, as one of the fine arts. As a painter not unworthy to
+be classified with Titian and Raphael, his contemporaries upon Italian
+soil, he poured the wealth of his genius into woodcuts and
+copperplates, and taught men the practically measureless capacity of
+what before his day had been a rudimentary art.
+
+Dürer was born in Nuremberg on May 21, 1471. The family was of
+Hungarian origin, though the name is German, and is derived from
+Thürer, meaning a maker of doors. The ancestral calling of the family
+probably was that of the carpenter. Albert Dürer, the father of the
+great artist, was a goldsmith, and settled about 1460 in Nuremberg,
+where he served as an assistant to Hieronymus Holper, a master
+goldsmith, whose daughter, Barbara, he married in 1468. He was at the
+time forty years of age, and she fifteen. As the result of the union
+eighteen children were born into the world, of whom Albrecht was the
+second. The lad, as he grew up, became a great favorite with his
+father, who appeared to discern in him the promise of future ability.
+The feeling of attachment was reciprocated in the most filial manner,
+and there are extant two well-authenticated portraits of the father
+from the facile brush of the son, one in the Uffizi at Florence, the
+other in the possession of the Duke of Northumberland. It was the
+original intention of the father of the artist that he should follow
+the craft of the goldsmith, but after serving a period as an
+apprentice in his father's shop, his strong predilection for the
+calling of the painter manifested itself to such a degree that the
+father reluctantly consented to allow the boy to follow his natural
+bent, and placed him under the tutelage of Michael Wohlgemuth, the
+principal painter of Nuremberg. Wohlgemuth was a representative artist
+of his time, who followed his calling after a mechanical fashion,
+having a large shop filled with apprentices who, under his direction
+and with his assistance, busied themselves in turning out for a small
+consideration altar-pieces and pictures of martyrdoms, which were in
+vogue as necessary parts of decoration in churches. Numerous examples
+of the work of Wohlgemuth and his contemporaries survive, attesting,
+by the wealth of crudities and unintended caricatures with which they
+abound, the comparatively low stage of development attained by the art
+of the painter in Germany at that day. According to Dürer, the period
+of his apprenticeship to Wohlgemuth was spent profitably, and resulted
+in large acquisitions of technical skill. The period of his
+preliminary training being ended, he set forth upon his "Wanderjahre,"
+and travelled extensively. Just what points he visited cannot with
+certainty be determined. It is ascertained beyond doubt that he
+visited Colmar, where he was hospitably entertained by the family of
+Martin Schongauer, the greatest painter of his time on German soil,
+but who had died shortly before the visit of Dürer. He also visited
+Strasburg, and it is thought by many that he extended his journeyings
+as far as Venice. In 1494 he returned to Nuremberg, and in the month
+of July was married to Agnes Frey, the daughter of a prosperous
+merchant of the city. He was twenty-three years of age, and she
+somewhat younger. They lived together happily, though no children were
+born to them, and it has been proved that the reputation which has
+been given her, of being little better than a common scold, who
+imbittered his life by her termagancy, is the creation of the ill
+temper of one of the testy friends of Dürer, Willibald Pirkheimer,
+who, in the spirit of spitefulness, besmirched her character in a
+letter which unfortunately survives to this day, and in which he
+accuses her of having led her husband a mad and weary dance by her
+temper. The reason for this ebullition on the part of Pirkheimer
+appears to have been that, after Dürer's death, she refused to give
+him a pair of antlers which had belonged to her husband, and which
+Pirkheimer had set his heart upon having.
+
+[Illustration: Albert Dürer's Wedding.]
+
+The first eleven years of the married life of Dürer were spent in
+Nuremberg, where he devoted himself with unremitting assiduity to the
+prosecution of his art. During these years his powers unfolded
+rapidly, and there are extant two notable pictures, which were
+undoubtedly produced at this time, the triptych in the Dresden
+Gallery, and an altar-piece which is in the palace of the Archbishop
+of Vienna, at Ober St. Veit. These compositions, while remarkable in
+many respects, still reveal the influence of his master, Wohlgemuth,
+and give evidence of having been in part executed with the assistance
+of apprentices. In fact, the peak-gabled house at the foot of the
+castle-mound in Nuremberg was a picture factory like that of
+Wohlgemuth, in which, however, work of a higher order than any
+hitherto produced in Germany was being turned out. We know the names
+of four or five of those who served as apprentices under Dürer at
+this time and they are stars of lesser magnitude in the
+constellation of German art. But Dürer was not contented simply to
+employ his talents in the production of painted altar-pieces, and we
+find him turning out a number of engravings, the most noticeable among
+which are his sixteen great wood-cuts illustrating the Apocalypse,
+which were published in 1498. The theme was one which had peculiar
+fascinations for all classes at the time. The breaking up of all
+pre-existing systems, the wonderful stirrings of a new life which were
+beginning to be felt everywhere with the close of the Middle Age and
+the dawning of the Renaissance, had filled the minds of men with
+wonder, and caused them to turn to the writings of the Apocalyptic
+Seer with keenest interest. A recent critic, commenting upon his work
+as represented in these engravings, says: "The energy and undismayed
+simplicity of his imagination enable him, in this order of creations,
+to touch the highest point of human achievement. The four angels
+keeping back the winds that they blow not, the four riders, the
+loosing of the angels of the Euphrates to slay the third part of
+men--these and others are conceptions of such force, such grave or
+tempestuous grandeur, in the midst of grotesqueness, as the art of no
+other age or hand has produced."
+
+At this period Dürer was also engaged in experimenting upon the art of
+copper-plate engraving, in which he restricted himself mainly to
+reproducing copies of the works of other artists, among them those of
+Jacopo de Barbari, a painter of the Italian school, who was residing
+in Nuremberg, and who among other things gave the great artist
+instruction in plastic anatomy. The influence of his instructor is
+plain, when we compare engravings executed about 1504 with those
+published at a previous date, and especially when we examine his
+design of the Passion of our Lord painted in white upon a green
+ground, commonly known as "The Green Passion," which is treasured in
+the Albertina at Prague. He also during these twelve years finished
+seven of the twelve great wood-cuts illustrating the passion, and
+sixteen of the twenty cuts which compose the series known as "The Life
+of the Virgin." The activities of Dürer in Nuremberg were temporarily
+interrupted by a journey to Italy, which he undertook in the fall of
+the year 1505. What the immediate occasion for undertaking this
+journey may have been is not plain, though it seems most likely that
+one of his objects was to enable him to recuperate from the effects of
+a protracted illness, from which he had suffered during the summer of
+this year, and also incidentally to secure a market for his wares in
+Venice, the commercial relationships of which with Nuremberg were very
+close at this period. A German colony, composed largely of Nuremberg
+factors and merchants, was located at this time in Venice, and they
+had secured the privilege of dedicating a great painting in the church
+of St. Bartholomew. The commission for the execution of this painting
+was secured by Dürer. It represents the adoration of the Virgin, but
+has been commonly known under the name of "The Feast of the Rose
+Garlands." After having undergone many vicissitudes, it is preserved
+to-day in a highly mutilated condition in the monastery of Strachow,
+near Prague. Dürer's stay in Venice was signalized not only by the
+production of this painting, but of three or four other notable works
+which still exist, and which reflect the great influence upon him of
+the Italian school of painting, with which he had attained
+familiarity. His stay in Venice lasted about a year. In the fall of
+1506, he returned to Nuremberg, and there remained for the next
+fourteen years, engaged in the practice of his art. These years were
+years of success and prosperity. His name and fame had spread over the
+whole of Europe, and the greatest artists of the day were glad to do
+him homage. Raphael said of him, when contemplating some of his
+designs, "Truly this man would have surpassed us all, if he had the
+masterpieces of ancient art constantly before his eyes as we have." A
+friendly correspondence was maintained between the immortal Italian
+and his German contemporary, and in his own country, all men, from the
+emperor to the peasant, delighted to do honor to his genius, the
+products of which were found alike in church and palace, and through
+his printed designs in the homes of the humble poor.
+
+The proud old imperial city of Nuremberg had gathered within its
+battlemented walls a multitude of men who were distinguished not only
+for their commercial enterprise and wealth, but many of whom were the
+exponents of the literary and artistic culture of the time. Among the
+men with whom Dürer found congenial companionship were Adam Krafft,
+the sculptor; Veit Stoss, whose exquisite carvings in wood may reflect
+in some measure in the wild luxuriance of the imagination which they
+display, the restless, "dare-devil" spirit with which his biographers
+invest him; Peter Vischer, the bronze founder; and last but not least.
+Hans Sachs, the cobbler poet, whose quaint rhymes are a source of
+delight to this day, and were a mighty force in the great work of the
+Reformation, by which the fetters of mediæval traditions and
+ecclesiastical abuse were thrown off by the German people.
+
+Of the personal appearance of Dürer at this time, we are not left in
+ignorance. A portrait of himself from his own hands has been preserved
+and is well known. His features reveal refinement and great
+intellectuality, united with grace, and his attire shows that he was
+not oblivious to matters of personal adornment. After the fashion of
+the time, his hair was worn in long and graceful ringlets, which fell
+in heavy masses about his shoulders.
+
+The first six years which followed his return from Venice were almost
+wholly given to painting, and his productions give evidence of the
+fact that he had dismissed from his employment the retinue of
+assistants and apprentices, whom he had employed in his earlier years.
+From this period date most of his great masterpieces, which are still
+preserved, among them the "Adam and Eve," in the Pitti Palace; the
+"Ten Thousand Martyrs of Nicomedia," in the Imperial Gallery, at
+Vienna; the "Adoration of the Trinity," at the Belvedere, in Vienna;
+and "The Assumption of the Virgin," the original of which was
+destroyed by fire more than three hundred years ago, but of which a
+good copy is preserved at Frankfort. To this period belong the
+portraits of Charlemagne and of the Emperor Sigismund, which are
+preserved in the National German Museum at Nuremberg.
+
+[Illustration: Albert Dürer Visits Hans Sachs.]
+
+But while prosecuting the work of the painter, he did not neglect the
+art of the engraver, and in 1511, brought out in complete form his
+great book of woodcuts in folio, and began to develop that marvellous
+art of etching which is indissolubly connected with his name. Among
+the products of the etcher's needle which attest his activity in this
+direction are those masterpieces which have for centuries been at once
+the delight and the puzzle of artistic minds: the "Melancholia," "The
+Knight and the Devil," and "St. Jerome in his Cell." The most
+reasonable explanation of these weird fancies is that they were
+intended to represent in allegorical style the three temperaments--the
+melancholic, the sanguine, and the phlegmatic. The Diet of Augsburg,
+which was convened in 1518, gave Dürer a passing opportunity to depict
+the lineaments of the Emperor Maximilian, who gave him several
+sittings, and who manifested great interest in the painter. The death
+of the emperor in the following year, the outbreak of an epidemic in
+Nuremberg, together with the coronation of Charles V. at
+Aix-la-Chapelle, led Dürer to undertake a journey to the Low
+Countries, in which he was accompanied by his faithful wife. He was
+present at the coronation and was one of the distinguished civilians
+whose appearance added dignity to the occasion. His diary, in which he
+recounts his experiences upon this journey, and which is accompanied
+by a multitude of wayside sketches, is still preserved, and contains,
+besides the dry entries of his current expenditures, most entertaining
+allusions to the distinguished people whom he met, and who received
+him with the utmost cordiality. Intermingled with these narrative
+details are outbursts of feeling, which are provoked by passing
+political and ecclesiastical events, in which he took a profound
+interest, though he never appears to have committed himself with
+positive openness to the party of reform. His sympathies are, however,
+clearly shown by his writings, as well as by his works of art, to have
+been with the Reformers, and he lived on terms of intimacy with
+Erasmus and Melancthon, of both of whom we have portraits from his
+hand.
+
+Dürer returned from the Netherlands in 1521, about the middle of July,
+and the remaining years of his life were spent in the prosecution of
+the art of the engraver, in painting, and in the effort to elucidate
+the sciences of perspective, geometry, and fortification, upon all of
+which he has left treatises.
+
+His labors, though they had not brought with them great wealth, had
+secured for him a competency, and the latter years of his life were
+devoted more and more to labors which, while dignified, did not tend
+to add greatly to his already magnificent reputation. These labors
+were prosecuted in spite of ever-failing health. While in the
+Netherlands he had contracted a malarial fever, the effects of which
+clung to him, in spite of the best treatment which could be secured,
+and left him the wreck of his former self. On April 6, 1528, death
+suddenly overtook him. There was not even time to summon his friends
+to his side before his spirit had fled. The city which had been his
+home from childhood was filled with mourning. They took up his remains
+and gently laid them to rest in the burial vault of his wife's family
+in the graveyard of the Church of St. John, where the setting sun
+pours its last glowing beams at evening over the low Franconian
+hill-tops. The vault has since been changed and the last
+resting-place of the remains of the Raphael of the North is a lowly
+mound, reverently approached by all who visit the quaint imperial
+city, upon which is a slab, covered with a bronze tablet upon which
+are the words:
+
+      Quicquid Alberti Dureri Mortale
+      Fuit Sub Hoc Conditum Tumulo.
+      Emigravit VIII Idus Aprilis, MDXXVIIL
+
+
+  "_Emigravit_ is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies;
+  Dead he is not, but departed--for the artist never dies.
+  Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair,
+  That he once has trod its pavement, that he once has breathed its air!"
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+RUBENS
+
+By Mrs. LEE
+
+(1577-1640)
+
+
+[Illustration: Rubens.]
+
+"It is just one hundred and twenty years to-day," said a young artist
+to his friend, as he stood in the hall of St. Mark, at Venice,
+contemplating the noble works of Titian. "Time, the destroyer, has
+here stayed his hand; the colors are as vivid and as fresh as if they
+were laid on but yesterday. Would that my old friend and master, Otho
+Venius, was here! At least I will carry back to Antwerp that in my
+coloring which shall prove to him that I have not played truant to the
+art."
+
+"Just one hundred and twenty years," repeated he, "since Titian was
+born. Venice was then in its glory, but now it is all falling; its
+churches and palaces are crumbling to dust, its commerce interrupted.
+The republic continually harassed by the Porte, and obliged to call on
+foreign aid; depressed by her internal despotism, her council of ten,
+and state inquisitors; her decline, though gradual, is sure; yet the
+splendor of her arts remains, and the genius of Titian, her favorite
+son, is yet in the bloom and brilliancy of youth!"
+
+Such was the enthusiastic exclamation of Rubens, as he contemplated
+those paintings which had brought him from Antwerp. How many gifted
+minds spoke to him from the noble works which were before him! The
+three Bellinis, the founders of the Venetian school; Giorgione,
+Titian, and Tintoretto. Then Paolo Veronese, who, though born at
+Verona, in 1537, adopted Venice as his home, and became the
+fellow-artist of Tintoretto, and the disciple of Titian. Pordenone,
+too, who viewed Titian as a rival and an enemy. Palma the young, and
+Palma the old, born in 1548, and the Bassanos, who died near 1627.
+
+All these were present to the eye of Rubens, their genius embodied on
+the canvas in the halls of St. Mark. "These," he exclaimed, "have
+formed the Venetian school, and these shall be my study!"
+
+From this time, the young artist might daily be seen with his sheets
+of white paper, and his pencil in his hand. A few strokes preserved
+the outline which his memory filled up; and by an intuitive glance,
+his genius understood and appropriated every signal beauty.
+
+In Venice he became acquainted with the Archduke Albert, who
+introduced him to the Duke of Mantua, whither he went for the purpose
+of studying the works of Julio Romano. From thence he proceeded to
+Rome; here Raphael was his model, and Michael Angelo his wonder. He
+devoted himself to painting with a fervor that belongs only to genius;
+and he soon proved that, whatever he gained by ancient study, the
+originality of his own conceptions would still remain and appear. To
+the vivid and splendid coloring of the Venetian school, he was perhaps
+more indebted than to any other model. The affectionate and constant
+intercourse, by letters, that subsisted between Rubens and his mother,
+made his long residence in Italy one of pleasure. At Rome he was
+employed to adorn, by his paintings, the Church of Santa Croce, and
+also the "Chiesa Nova."
+
+Rubens had been originally destined by his mother for one of the
+learned professions. His father was born at Antwerp, and held the
+honorable office of councillor of state. When the civil war broke out
+he repaired to Cologne, where his son, Peter Paul Rubens, was born. He
+died soon after his return to Antwerp, and left his property much
+diminished from losses occasioned by the civil war. The mother of
+Rubens put him early to the best schools, where he was initiated in
+learning and discovered a taste for belles-lettres; but all the
+intervals of necessary study were devoted to drawing. His mother
+perceiving it, determined to indulge his inclination, and placed him
+in the studio of Van Noort.
+
+The correct taste of the scholar soon led him to perceive that he
+could not adopt this artist's style, and he became the pupil of Otho
+Venius. Similarity of thought and feeling united them closely, and it
+was with true disinterestedness that the master urged his pupil to
+quit his confined circle and repair to Italy, the great school of art.
+
+Time flew rapidly with Rubens, while engaged in his beloved and
+honorable pursuit; he looked forward to the period when he might
+return to Antwerp and place his mother in her former affluence. Nearly
+seven years had passed since he took leave of her. Of late he thought
+her letters had been less cheerful; she spoke of her declining
+health, of her earnest hope that she might live to embrace him once
+more. This hint was enough for his affectionate heart. He immediately
+broke off all his engagements and prepared to return. Everyone knows
+what impatience is created when one first begins to contemplate home,
+after a long absence, and the heart is turned toward it. "Seven years
+absent?" wrote Rubens to his mother, "how is it possible I have lived
+so long away from you? It is too long; henceforth I will devote myself
+to your happiness. Antwerp shall be my future residence. I have
+acquired a taste for horticulture; our little garden shall be enlarged
+and cultivated, and our home will be a paradise."
+
+What are human anticipations and projects! the day before he was to
+quit Rome he received a letter informing him that his mother was very
+ill, and begging him to return with all speed. With breathless haste
+he hurried back, without sleep or rest. When he reached the city he
+dared not make any inquiries. At length he stood before the paternal
+mansion; he saw the gloomy tiles and half-closed window-shutters. It
+was the fall of the trees. He observed people going in and out at the
+door; to speak was impossible. At length he rushed in and heard the
+appalling sentence, "Too late," a sentence that often strikes
+desolation to the human heart. His mother had expired that morning.
+
+While he was struggling with the bitterness of sorrow, he met with
+Elizabeth Brants. There was something in the tone of her voice which
+infused tranquillity into his mind, and affection came in a new form
+to assuage his loss. She was the "ladye of his love," and afterward
+his wife. He built a magnificent house at Antwerp, with a saloon in
+form of a rotunda, which he ornamented and enriched with antique
+statues, busts, vases, and pictures by the most celebrated painters.
+Thus surrounded by the gems of art, he devoted himself to the
+execution of works which were the pride of his native country, and
+caused honors and wealth to be heaped upon him.
+
+There were those found who could not endure the splendor of his
+success; these calumniated. There were others who tried to draw him
+into visionary speculations. A chemist offered him a share of his
+laboratory, to join in his search for the philosopher's stone. He
+carried the visionary to his painting-room, and said, "The offer comes
+too late. You see I have found out the art of making gold by my
+palette and pencils."
+
+Rubens was now at the height of prosperity and happiness, a dangerous
+eminence, and one on which few are permitted to rest. A second time
+his heart was pierced with sorrow: he lost his young wife, Elizabeth,
+a few years after their union. Deep as was his sorrow, he had yet
+resolution enough to feel the necessity of exertion. He left the place
+which constantly reminded him of domestic enjoyment, the memory of
+which contrasted so sadly with the present silence and solitude, and
+travelled for some time in Holland. After his return, he received a
+commission from Mary de Medici, of France, to adorn the palace of the
+Luxembourg. He executed for this purpose a number of paintings at
+Antwerp, and instructed several pupils in his art.
+
+At this time Rubens devoted himself wholly to painting, and scarcely
+allowed himself time for recreation. He considered it one of the most
+effectual means of instruction, to allow his pupils to observe his
+method of using his paints. He therefore had them with him while he
+worked on his large pictures. Teniers, Snyders, Jordaens, and Vandyke
+were among his pupils--all names well known.
+
+When Rubens had executed the commission given him by Mary de Medici,
+wife of Henry IV., he repaired to Paris to arrange his pictures at the
+Luxembourg palace, and there painted two more, and likewise the
+galleries, representing passages of her life.
+
+Here he became acquainted with the Duke of Buckingham, as that
+nobleman was on his way to Madrid with Prince Charles. On his return
+to Antwerp, he was summoned to the presence of the Infanta Isabella,
+who had, through Buckingham, become interested in his character. She
+thought him worthy of a political mission to the court of Madrid,
+where he was most graciously received by Philip. While at Madrid he
+painted four pictures for the convent of the Carmelites, and a fine
+portrait of the king on horseback, with many other pictures; for these
+extraordinary productions he was richly rewarded, received the honor
+of knighthood, and was presented with the golden key.
+
+While in Spain, Don John, Duke of Braganza, who was afterward king of
+Portugal, sent and invited him to visit him at Villa Vitiosa, the
+place of his residence. Rubens, perhaps, might at this time have been
+a little dazzled with his uncommon elevation. He was now _Sir Paul_
+and celebrated all over Europe. It was proper he should make the visit
+as one person of high rank visits another. His preparations were great
+to appear in a becoming style, and not to shame his noble host. At
+length the morning arrived, and, attended by a numerous train of
+courteous friends and hired attendants, the long cavalcade began the
+journey. When not far distant from Villa Vitiosa, Rubens learned that
+Don John had sent an embassy to meet him. Such an honor had seldom
+been accorded to a private gentleman, and Rubens schooled himself to
+receive it with suitable humility and becoming dignity.
+
+He put up at a little distance from Villa Vitiosa, awaiting the
+arrival of the embassy; finally it came, in the form of a single
+gentleman, who civilly told him that the duke, his master, had been
+obliged to leave home on business that could not be dispensed with,
+and therefore must deny himself the pleasure of the visit; but as he
+had probably been at some extra expense in coming so far, he begged
+him to accept of fifty pistoles as a remuneration.
+
+Rubens refused the pistoles, and could not forbear adding that he had
+"brought two thousand along with him, which he had meant to spend at
+his court during the fifteen days he was to spend there."
+
+The truth was, that when Don John was informed that Rubens was coming
+in the style of a prince to see him, it was wholly foreign to his
+plan; he was a great lover of painting, and had wished to see him as
+an artist. He therefore determined to prevent the visit.
+
+The second marriage of Rubens, with Helena Forman, was, no less than
+the first, one of affection; she had great beauty, and became a model
+for his pencil. His favor with the great continued. Mary de Medici
+visited him at his own home more than once; and the Infanta Isabella
+was so much satisfied with his mission in Spain, that she sent him to
+England, to sound the disposition of the government on the subject of
+a peace.
+
+Rubens disclosed in this embassy his diplomatic talents; he first
+appeared there in his character of artist, and insensibly won upon the
+confidence of Charles. The king requested him to paint the ceiling of
+the banqueting-house at Whitehall. While he was employed upon it,
+Charles frequently visited him and criticised the work. Rubens, very
+naturally introducing the subject, and finding, from the tenor of his
+conversation, that he was by no means averse to a peace with Spain, at
+length produced his credentials. The king received his mission most
+graciously, and Rubens returned to the Netherlands crowned with honors
+and success.
+
+He had passed his fiftieth year when his health began to fail, and he
+was attacked with a severe fit of the gout. Those who have witnessed
+the irritation attendant upon that disorder will appreciate the
+perfect harmony and gentleness that existed between Rubens and his
+wife. With untiring tenderness she devoted herself to him, and was
+ingenious in devising alleviations and comforts.
+
+The severe attacks of Rubens' disorder debilitated his frame, yet he
+continued painting at his easel almost to the last; and, amid
+suffering and sickness, never failed in giving the energy of intellect
+to his pictures. He died at the age of sixty-three, in the year 1640,
+leaving great wealth. The pomp and circumstance of funeral rite can
+only be of consequence as showing the estimation in which a departed
+citizen is held. Public funeral honors were awarded, and men of every
+rank were eager to manifest their respect to his memory. He was buried
+in the Church of St. James, at Antwerp, under the altar of his private
+chapel, which was decorated with one of his own noble pictures.
+
+
+
+
+REMBRANDT[4]
+
+         [Footnote 4: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+
+(1606-1669)
+
+
+[Illustration: Rembrandt.]
+
+A heretic in art Rembrandt was to many of his Dutch contemporaries; to
+us, he is the master, supreme alike in genius and accomplishment.
+Because, as time went on, he broke completely from tradition and in
+his work gave full play to his originality, his pictures were looked
+at askance; because he chose to live his own life, indifferent to
+accepted conventions, he himself was misunderstood. It was his cruel
+fate to enjoy prosperity and popularity in his earlier years, only to
+meet with neglect in his old age. But this he felt probably less than
+other men; he was not a courtier, with Velasquez, nor vowed to
+worldly success, with Rubens. His pleasure and his reward, he found
+in his work. So long as easel and canvas, brushes and paints were left
+to him, he demanded no greater happiness.
+
+[Illustration: Marie De Medici at the House of Rubens.]
+
+In Leyden, a town already made famous by another master, Lucas van
+Leyden, Rembrandt was born in 1606; though this date has been
+disputed, some authorities suggesting 1607, others, 1608. His family
+were respectable, if not distinguished, burghers, his father, Harmen
+Gerritszoon, being a miller by trade, his mother, Neeltjen Willems of
+Zuitbroeck, the daughter of a baker. Not until early in the
+seventeenth century did permanent surnames become common among
+Dutchmen; hitherto children had been given their father's, in addition
+to their own Christian name; Rembrandt for many years was known as
+Rembrandt Harmenzoon, or the son of Harmen. But the miller, to be in
+the growing fashion, had called himself Van Ryn--of the Rhine--and
+thus, later on, Rembrandt also signed himself. Harmen was well-to-do;
+he owned houses in Leyden, and beyond the walls, gardens, and fields,
+and the mill where Rembrandt, because he once drew a mill, was
+supposed to have been born. But there was no reason for Neeltjen to
+move from a comfortable house in town into such rustic quarters, and
+it is more likely that Rembrandt's birthplace was the house pointed
+out in the Nordeinde Street. A commercial career had been chosen for
+his four older brothers. But Harmen, his means allowing the luxury,
+decided to make of his fifth son a man of letters and learning, and
+Rembrandt was sent to the University of Leyden. That letters, however,
+had small charm for him, was clear from the first. Better than his
+books he loved the engravings of Swanenburch, better still, the
+pictures of Lucas van Leyden, which he could look at to his heart's
+content on gala days, when the Town Hall, where they hung, was thrown
+open to the public. His hours of study were less profitable than his
+hours of recreation when he rambled in the country, through his
+father's estate, and, sometimes as far as the sea, a sketch-book, the
+chances are, for sole companion. Certainly, by the time he was
+fifteen, so strong were the proofs of his indifference to the classics
+and his love for art, that his father, sacrificing his own ambitions,
+allowed Rembrandt to leave the university for the studio of Van
+Swanenburch. From this day forth, his life's history is told in the
+single word--work; his indeed was the genius of industry.
+
+Van Swanenburch had studied in Italy; but his own painting, to judge
+by the few examples still in existence, was entirely commonplace.
+Three years were more than enough to be passed under his tuition. At
+the end of the third, Rembrandt went to Amsterdam, and there entered
+the studio of Lastman. His second master also had studied in Italy,
+and also was a painter of mediocre talent, popular in his own
+times--the Apelles of the day, he was called--but remembered now
+chiefly because of his relations to his pupil. From the first,
+Rembrandt, even if obliged to paint the stock subjects of the day, was
+determined to treat them in his own way, and not to follow set forms
+that happened to be adopted in the schools. He used real men and women
+for models, and painted them as he saw them, not as he was bidden to
+look at them through his teacher's spectacles. In six months he had
+learned at least one thing, that Lastman had nothing more to teach
+him. The man of genius must ever be his own master, though he remain
+the hard-working student all his days. Back to Leyden and to his
+father's house, Rembrandt had not returned to lead a life of idleness.
+He worked tremendously in these early years. Even needed models he
+found in the members of his family; he has made the face of his mother
+as familiar as that of a friend; his own, with the heavy features, the
+thick, bushy hair, the small intelligent eyes, between them the
+vertical line, fast deepening on the fine forehead, he drew and etched
+and painted, again and again. More elaborate compositions he also
+undertook. As in his maturity, it was to the Bible he turned for
+suggestions: Saint Paul in prison, Samson and Delilah, the
+Presentation in the Temple--these were the themes then in vogue which
+he preferred, rendering them with the realism which distinguished his
+later, more famous Samsons and Abrahams and Christs, making them the
+motive for a fine arrangement of color, for a striking study of light
+and shadow. A pleasant picture one can fancy of his life at this
+period; he was with his own people, for whom his love was tender; busy
+with brush, pencil, and etching-needle; he was strengthening his
+powers of observation, developing and perfecting his style,
+occasionally producing work that won for him renown in Leyden; and,
+gradually, he gathered round him a small group of earnest
+fellow-workers, chief among them Lievens, Gerard Dou, and Van Vliet,
+the last two, though but slightly his juniors, looking up to him as
+master. These were the years of his true apprenticeship.
+
+Leyden, however, was not the best place for a young painter who had
+his fortunes to make. It was essentially a university town; interest
+was concentrated upon letters; art was but of secondary consideration.
+It was different in Amsterdam, the great commercial centre of Holland.
+There, all was life and activity and progress; there, was money to be
+spent, and the liberal patron willing to lavish it upon the artist.
+Holland just then was in the first flush of prosperity and patriotism,
+following upon her virtual independence from Spain. Not a citizen but
+glowed with self-respect at the thought of the victory he had, in one
+way or another, helped to win; the state, as represented by the good
+burghers, was supreme in every man's mind. It was natural that
+individuals and corporations alike should seek to immortalize their
+greatness by means of the painter's art, which, in Holland, had long
+since ceased to be a monopoly of the church. Hence the age became
+essentially one of portrait-painting. Many were the painters whose
+portraits had already achieved distinction. De Keyser was busy in
+Amsterdam; a far greater genius, Franz Hals, but fifteen years
+Rembrandt's senior, was creating his masterpieces in The Hague and
+Harlem. It was as inevitable that Rembrandt should turn to
+portraiture, as that he should find commissions less numerous in
+Leyden than in Amsterdam. Often in the latter town his services were
+required; so often, indeed, that at last, about 1631, when he was just
+twenty-five, he settled there permanently and set up a studio of his
+own.
+
+Success was his from the start. Sitter after sitter sought him out in
+his house on the Bloemgracht; the most distinguished men in the town
+hastened to patronize him. His work was liked by the burghers whom he
+painted, its strength was felt by artists, whose canvases soon showed
+its influence. Admirers crowded to his studio. He had not been in
+Amsterdam a twelvemonth when, before he was yet twenty-six, he was
+entrusted with an order of more than usual importance. This was the
+portrait of Dr. Tulp and his class of surgeons: the famous "Lesson in
+Anatomy" now in the Gallery at The Hague. The subject at the time was
+very popular. Many artists, De Keyser among others, had already, in
+painting prominent surgeons, placed them around the subject they were
+dissecting; indeed, this was the arrangement insisted upon by the
+surgeons themselves, and, as there seems to have been no limit to
+their vanity, "Lessons in Anatomy" were almost as plentiful in Holland
+as "Madonnas" in Umbria. Rembrandt in his composition was simply
+adhering to accepted tradition. It is true that he instilled life into
+a group hitherto, on other painters' canvases, stiff and perfunctory;
+but, though the picture was a wonderful production for a man of his
+years, it is not to be ranked with his greatest work.
+
+Commissions now poured in still faster. It was at this time he painted
+several of his best known portraits: the "Master Shipbuilder and his
+Wife," at present in Buckingham Palace; that simply marvellous old
+woman at the National Gallery in London, made familiar to everyone by
+countless photographs and other reproductions; the man in ruff and
+woman in coif at the Brunswick Museum; and a score of others scarce
+less important. With increasing popularity, he was able to command his
+own prices, so that only a part of his time was it necessary for him
+to devote to the portraits which were his chief source of income.
+During the leisure he reserved, he painted biblical subjects, ever his
+delight, and made etchings and drawings, today the most prized
+treasures in the world's great galleries. As in Leyden, he drew about
+him students; a few, notably Ferdinand Bol and Christophe Paudiss,
+destined, in their turn, to gain name and fame. Indifferent to social
+claims and honors--an indifference the burghers, his patrons, found it
+hard to forgive, his one amusement was in collecting pictures and
+engravings, old stuffs and jewels, and every kind of _bric-à-brac_,
+until his house in Amsterdam was a veritable museum. This amusement
+later was to cost him dear.
+
+Four years after the "Lesson in Anatomy" was painted, when he was at
+the height of prosperity, in 1634, he married Saskia van Uylenborch,
+the Saskia of so many an etching and picture. She was of a good
+Frisian family, and brought with her a dowry of no mean proportions.
+Rembrandt's marriage made small changes in his way of living. Into the
+society, so ready to receive him, he never went, not even now that he
+had a wife to introduce. It bored him, and he was no toady to waste
+his time fawning upon possible patrons. "When I desire to rest my
+spirit, I do not seek honors, but liberty," was his explanation. The
+companionship of artists he always welcomed; sometimes he visited the
+humbler burghers, whose ways were as simple as his own; sometimes he
+sought the humblest classes of all, because of their picturesqueness,
+and his contemporaries took him to task for his perverted taste for
+low company. The truth is that always he devoted himself solely and
+wholly to his art; the only difference, once he was married, was that,
+when he sat at his easel all day or over his copperplate, and
+sketchbook all evening, Saskia was with him. She shared all his
+interests, all his ambitions; she had no will but his. During his
+working hours, she was his model, obedient to his call. She never
+tired of posing for him, nor he of painting her now simply as Saskia,
+now as Delilah feasting with Samson, as Susanna surprised by the
+Elders, as the Jewish Betrothed at her toilet. Sometimes he
+represented her alone, sometimes with himself at her side; once, in
+the famous Dresden portrait, on his knee, as if to proclaim the love
+they bore for one another. And he, who could render faithfully the
+ways of the beggar, the austere black of the burgher, for himself and
+Saskia found no masquerading too gay or extravagant. In inventing
+costumes for their own portraits, he gave his exuberant fancy free
+play: in gorgeous embroidered robes, waving plumes, and priceless gems
+they arrayed themselves, until even the resources of his collection
+were exhausted: the same rich mantle, the same jewels appear, and
+reappear in picture after picture.
+
+Rembrandt's short married years were happy, though not without their
+sorrows. Of Saskia's five children, four died in infancy; the fifth,
+Titus, was not a year old when, in 1642, the end came for Saskia, and
+Rembrandt, who had just reached his thirty-seventh year, was left in
+his great house alone with an infant son and his pupils. Her
+confidence in him is shown by her will, in which the inheritance of
+Titus is left in the father's charge, though already Rembrandt's
+affairs must have given signs of coming complications.
+
+[Illustration: Connoisseurs at Rembrandt's Studio.]
+
+Much of his best work remained to be done, but after Saskia's death
+his worldly fortunes and his popularity never again touched such
+high-water mark. The reason for this is not far to seek. During all
+these years, Rembrandt's powers had matured, his methods broadened,
+and his individuality strengthened. With each new canvas, his
+originality became more conspicuous. It was not only that the world of
+nature, and not imagination, supplied his models. Many of the Dutch
+painters now were no less realists than he. It was not only that he
+solved certain problems of _chiaro oscuro_, there were men, like
+Lievens, who were as eager as he in the study of light and shadow. But
+Rembrandt brought to his every experiment an independence that
+startled the average man. He painted well because he saw well. If no
+one else saw things as he did, the loss was theirs. But he paid for
+his keener vision; because he did not paint like other artists, his
+methods were mistrusted. To be misunderstood is the penalty of genius.
+The picture which, of all his work, is now the most famous, marks the
+turn in the tide of his affairs. Shortly before Saskia's death, he had
+been commissioned to paint a portrait group of Banning Cock and the
+military company which he commanded. These portrait groups of the
+military corporations rivalled in popularity the "Lessons in Anatomy."
+Each member, or officer, paid to be included in the composition, and,
+as a rule, a stiff, formal picture, with each individual posed as for
+a photograph, was the result. Rembrandt, apparently, was in nowise
+restricted when he undertook the work for Banning Cock, and so,
+instead of the stupid, hackneyed arrangement, he made of the portrait
+of the company a picture of armed men marching forth to beating of
+drums and waving of banners, "The Night Watch," as it must ever be
+known--more accurately, "The Sortie of the Company of Banning
+Cock"--now in the Ryks Museum of Amsterdam. With the men for whom it
+was painted, it proved a failure. The grouping, the arrangement
+displeased them. Many of the company were left in deep shadow, which
+was not the privilege for which they had agreed to pay good money.
+Rembrandt was not the man to compromise. After this many burghers, who
+cared much for themselves and their own faces, and not in the least
+for art, were afraid to entrust their portraits to him lest their
+importance might be sacrificed to the painter's effects. Certain it is
+that six years later, in 1648, when the independence of Holland was
+formally recognized at the Congress of Westphalia, though Terburg and
+Van der Heist celebrated the event on canvas, Rembrandt's services
+were not secured. Good friends were left to him--men of intelligence
+who appreciated his strong individuality and the great originality of
+his work. Banning Cock himself was not among the discontented. A few
+leading citizens, like Dr. Tulp and the Burgomeister Six, were ever
+his devoted patrons. Artists still gathered about him; pupils still
+crowded to his studio; Nicolas Maes, De Gelder, Kneller among them.
+Many of his finest portraits--those of Hendrickje Stoffels, of his
+son, of himself in his old age, of the Burgomeister Six, above all,
+his masterpiece, "The Syndics of the Guild of Clothmakers," now in
+Amsterdam; many of his finest etchings, the little landscapes, the
+famous "Hundred Guilder Print," "Christ Healing the Sick," belong to
+this later period. There was no falling off, but rather an increase,
+in his powers, despite the clouds that darkened his years of middle
+age.
+
+Of these clouds, the darkest was due to his financial troubles.
+Rembrandt had made large sums of money; Saskia's dowry had been by no
+means small. But he also spent lavishly. He had absolutely no business
+capacity. Once he was accused of miserliness; that he would at times
+lunch on dry bread and a herring served as reproach against him; there
+was a story current that his pupils would drop bits of paper painted
+to look like money in order to see him stoop to pick them up. Both
+charges are too foolish to answer seriously. When he was at work, it
+mattered little to him what he ate, so that he was not disturbed; who
+would not stoop to pick up coins apparently scattered on the floor?
+The money he devoted to his collection is sufficient to show how small
+a fancy he had for hoarding; upon it a princely fortune had been
+squandered. To his own people in Leyden, when times were hard, he had
+not been slow to hold out a generous hand. It was because he was not
+enough of a miser, because he gave too little heed to business
+matters, that difficulties at length overwhelmed him. It is too sad a
+story to tell in detail. Perhaps the beginning was when he bought a
+house for which he had not the ready money to pay, and borrowed a
+large sum for the purpose. More and more involved became his affairs.
+In time his creditors grew clamorous, and at length the blow fell
+when, in 1657, he was declared bankrupt. The collection of years, the
+embroidered mantles and draperies, the jewels with which Saskia had
+been so gayly decked, the plumes and furs and gorgeous robes in which
+he himself had masqueraded, the armor and plate, the engravings and
+pictures which had filled his house--all were sold. He, the master,
+had, at the age of fifty-one, to begin life anew as if he were still
+but the apprentice.
+
+In the midst of his troubles and losses, Hendrickje Stoffels, whose
+portrait hangs in the Louvre, was the friend who cheered and comforted
+him. She had been his servant; afterward she lived with him as his
+wife, though legally they were not married. To Titus, as to her own
+children, she was ever a tender mother, and Titus, in return, seems to
+have loved her no less well. In the end, they together took
+Rembrandt's business interests into their own hands, the son,
+probably, using his inheritance in the enterprise. Renting a house in
+their own name, they became his print and picture dealers.
+
+But as time went on, Rembrandt's work brought lower and lower prices,
+and he, himself, the last two years of his life, was almost forgotten.
+Though he still lived in Amsterdam, the town from which he had so
+seldom journeyed, and then never far, he had fallen into such
+obscurity, that report now established him in Stockholm as painter to
+the King of Sweden, now in Hull, or Yarmouth. In his own family
+nothing but sorrow was in store for him. Hendrickje died, probably
+about 1664, and he was once more alone; and next he lost Titus, who
+then had been married but a few short months.
+
+Fortunately for Rembrandt, he did not long survive them. In 1669, at
+the age of sixty-two, his release came. He was buried in the West
+Church, quietly and simply. Thirteen florins his funeral cost, and
+even this small expense had to be met by his daughter-in-law. When an
+inventory of his possessions was taken, these were found to consist of
+nothing but his own wardrobe and his painter's tools.
+
+But better than a mere fortune, his work he left as an heirloom for
+all time; his drawings, not the least among them without the stamp of
+his genius; his prints, still unsurpassed, though it was he who first
+developed the possibilities of etching; his pictures, "painted with
+light," as Fromentin has said. His subjects he may have borrowed from
+the fashions and traditions of the time; certain mannerisms of
+technique and arrangement his pupils may have copied. But for all
+that, his work belongs to no special school or group; like all the
+world's great masterpieces, whether produced in Spain by a Velasquez,
+in Venice by a Titian, in England by a Whistler, it stands alone and
+supreme.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM HOGARTH
+
+(1697-1764)
+
+
+[Illustration: William Hogarth.]
+
+"I was born," says Hogarth, in his Memoirs of himself, "in the city of
+London, November 10, 1697. My father's pen, like that of many authors,
+did not enable him to do more than put me in a way of shifting for
+myself. As I had naturally a good eye and a fondness for drawing,
+shows of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant; and
+mimicry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early access
+to a neighboring painter drew my attention from play, and I was, at
+every possible opportunity, employed in making drawings. I picked up
+an acquaintance of the same turn, and soon learned to draw the
+alphabet with great correctness. My exercises when at school were more
+remarkable for the ornaments which adorned them than for the exercise
+itself. In the former I soon found that blockheads with better
+memories could much surpass me, but for the latter I was particularly
+distinguished."
+
+To this account of Hogarth's childhood we have only to add that his
+father, an enthusiastic and laborious scholar, who, like many of his
+craft, owed little to the favor of fortune, consulted these
+indications of talent as well as his means would allow, and bound his
+son apprentice to a silver-plate engraver. But Hogarth aspired after
+something higher than drawing ciphers and coats-of-arms; and before
+the expiration of his indentures he had made himself a good
+draughtsman, and obtained considerable knowledge of coloring. It was
+his ambition to become distinguished as an artist; and not content
+with being the mere copier of other men's productions, he sought to
+combine the functions of the painter with those of the engraver, and
+to gain the power of delineating his own ideas and the fruits of his
+acute observation. He has himself explained the nature of his views in
+a passage which is worth attention:
+
+"Many reasons led me to wish that I could find the shorter path--fix
+forms and characters in my mind--and instead of copying the lines, try
+to read the language, and, if possible, find the grammar of the art by
+bringing into one focus the various observations I have made, and then
+trying by my power on the canvas how far my plan enabled me to combine
+and apply them to practice. For this purpose I considered what
+various ways, and to what different purposes, the memory might be
+applied, and fell upon one most suitable to my situation and idle
+disposition; laying it down first as an axiom, that he who could by
+any means acquire and retain in his memory perfect ideas of the
+subjects he meant to draw, would have as clear a knowledge of the
+figure as a man who can write freely hath of the twenty-five letters
+of the alphabet and their infinite combinations." Acting on these
+principles, he improved, by constant exercise, his natural powers of
+observation and recollection. We find him roaming through the country,
+now at Yarmouth and again at Queenborough, sketching everywhere. In
+his rambles among the motley scenes of London he was ever on the watch
+for striking features or incidents; and not trusting entirely to
+memory, he was accustomed, when any face struck him as being
+peculiarly grotesque or expressive, to sketch it on his thumb-nail, to
+be treasured up on paper at his return home.
+
+For some time after the expiration of his apprenticeship, Hogarth
+continued to practise the trade to which he was bred; and his
+shop-bills, coats-of-arms, engravings upon tankards, etc., have been
+collected with an eagerness quite disproportionate to their value.
+Soon he procured employment in furnishing frontispieces and designs
+for the booksellers. The most remarkable of these are the plates to an
+edition of "Hudibras," published in 1726; but even these are of no
+distinguished merit. About 1728 he began to seek employment as a
+portrait-painter. Most of his performances were small family pictures,
+containing several figures, which he calls "Conversation Pieces," from
+twelve to fifteen inches high. These for a time were very popular, and
+his practice was considerable, as his price was low. His life-size
+portraits are few; the most remarkable are that of Captain Coram, in
+the "Foundling Hospital," and that of Garrick as King Richard III.,
+which is reproduced in the present volume. But his practice as a
+portrait-painter was not lucrative, nor his popularity lasting.
+Although many of his likenesses were strong and characteristic, in the
+representation of beauty, elegance, and high-breeding he was little
+skilled. The nature of the artist was as uncourtly as his pencil. When
+Hogarth obtained employment and eminence of another sort through his
+wonderful prints, he abandoned portrait-painting, with a growl at the
+jealousy of his professional brethren; and the vanity and blindness of
+the public.
+
+March 25, 1729, Hogarth contracted a stolen marriage with the only
+daughter of the once fashionable painter, Sir James Thornhill. The
+father, for some time implacable, relented at last; and the
+reconciliation, it is said, was much forwarded by his admiration of
+the "Harlot's Progress," a series of six prints, commenced in 1731 and
+published in 1734. The novelty as well as merit of this series of
+prints won for them extraordinary popularity; and their success
+encouraged Hogarth to undertake a similar history of the "Rake's
+Progress," in eight prints, which appeared in 1735. The third, and
+perhaps the most popular, as it is the least objectionable of these
+pictorial novels, "Marriage à la Mode," was not engraved till 1745.
+
+[Illustration: Hogarth Sketching the Highway of Queenborough.]
+
+The merits of these prints were sufficiently intelligible to the
+public: their originality and boldness of design, the force and
+freedom of their execution, rough as it is, won for them an
+extensive popularity and a rapid and continued sale. The "Harlot's
+Progress" was the most eminently successful, from its novelty rather
+than from its superior excellence. Twelve hundred subscribers' names
+were entered for it; it was dramatized in several forms; and we may
+note, in illustration of the difference of past and present manners,
+that fan-mounts were engraved containing miniature copies of the six
+plates. The merits of the pictures were less obvious to the few who
+could afford to spend large sums on works of art, and Hogarth, too
+proud to let them go for prices much below the value which he put upon
+them, waited for a long time, and waited in vain, for a purchaser. At
+last he determined to commit them to public sale; but instead of the
+common method of auction, he devised a new and complex plan with the
+intention of excluding picture-dealers, and obliging men of rank and
+wealth who wished to purchase to judge and bid for themselves. The
+scheme failed, as might have been expected. Nineteen of Hogarth's best
+pictures, the "Harlot's Progress," the "Rake's Progress," the "Four
+Times of the Day," and "Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn"
+produced only £427 7s., not averaging £22 10s. each. The "Harlot's
+Progress" was purchased by Mr. Beckford at the rate of fourteen
+guineas a picture; five of the series perished in the fire at
+Fonthill. The "Rake's Progress" averaged twenty-two guineas a picture;
+it has passed into the possession of Sir John Soane, at the advanced
+price of five hundred and seventy guineas. The same eminent architect
+became the proprietor of the four pictures of an "Election" for the
+sum of £1,732. "Marriage à la Mode" was disposed of in a similar way
+in 1750; and on the day of the sale one bidder appeared, who became
+master of the six pictures, together with their frames, for £115 10s.
+Mr. Angerstein purchased them, in 1797, for £1,381, and they now form
+a striking feature in the National Gallery.
+
+The satire of Hogarth was not often of a personal nature; but he knew
+his own power, and he sometimes exercised it. Two of his prints, "The
+Times," produced a memorable quarrel between himself, on one side, and
+Wilkes and Churchhill, on the other. The satire of the prints of "The
+Times," which were published in 1762, was directed, not against Wilkes
+himself, but his political friends, Pitt and Temple; nor is it so
+biting as to have required Wilkes, in defence of his party, to
+retaliate upon one with whom he had lived in familiar and friendly
+intercourse. He did so, however, in a number of the _North Briton_,
+containing not only abuse of the artist, but unjust and injurious
+mention of his wife. Hogarth was deeply wounded by this attack; he
+retorted by the well-known portrait of Wilkes with the cap of liberty,
+and he afterward represented Churchill as a bear. The quarrel was
+unworthy the talents either of the painter or poet. It is more to be
+regretted because its effects, as he himself intimates, were injurious
+to Hogarth's declining health. The summer of 1764 he spent at
+Chiswick, and the free air and exercise worked a partial renovation of
+his strength. The amendment, however, was but temporary, and he died
+suddenly, October 26th, the day after his return to his London
+residence in Leicester Square.
+
+
+
+
+SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS
+
+By SAMUEL ARCHER
+
+(1723-1792)
+
+
+[Illustration: Sir Joshua Reynolds.]
+
+Sir Joshua Reynolds, the celebrated painter, was, on July 16, 1723,
+born at Plympton, a small town in Devonshire, England. His father was
+a minister of the parish, and also master of the grammar school; and
+being a man of learning and philanthropy, he was beloved and respected
+by all to whom he was known. Such a man, it will naturally be
+supposed, was assiduous in the cultivation of the minds of his
+children, among whom his son Joshua shone conspicuous, by displaying
+at a very early period a superiority of genius and the rudiments of a
+correct taste. Unlike other boys, who generally content themselves
+with giving a literal explanation of their author, regardless of his
+beauties or his faults, young Reynolds attended to both these,
+displaying a happy knowledge of what he read, and entering with ardor
+into the spirit of his author. He discovered likewise talents for
+composition, and a natural propensity to drawing, in which his friends
+and intimates thought him qualified to excel. Emulation was a
+distinguishing characteristic of his mind, which his father perceived
+with the delight natural to a parent; and designing him for the
+church, in which he hoped that his talents might raise him to
+eminence, he sent him to one of the universities.
+
+Soon after this period he grew passionately fond of painting; and by
+the perusal of Richardson's theory of that art was determined to make
+it his profession through life. At his own earnest request, therefore,
+he was removed to London; and about the year 1742 became a pupil to
+Mr. Hudson, who, though not himself an eminent painter, was preceptor
+to many who afterward excelled in the art. One of the first advices
+which he gave to Mr. Reynolds was to copy carefully Guercino's
+drawings. This was done with such skill, that many of the copies are
+said to be now preserved in the cabinets of the curious as the
+originals of that very great master.
+
+About the year 1749, Mr. Reynolds went to Italy under the auspices,
+and in the company, of the late Lord (then Commodore) Keppel, who was
+appointed to the command of the British squadron in the Mediterranean.
+In this garden of the world, this magic seat of arts, he failed not to
+visit the schools of the great masters, to study the productions of
+different ages, and to contemplate with unwearied attention the
+various beauties which are characteristic of each. His labor here, as
+has been observed of another painter, was "the labor of love, not the
+task of the hireling;" and how much he profited by it is known to all
+Europe.
+
+Having remained about two years in Italy, and studied the language as
+well as the arts of the country with great success, he returned to
+England, improved by travel and refined by education. On the road to
+London from the port where he landed, he accidentally found in the inn
+where he lodged Johnson's life of Savage, and was so taken with the
+charms of composition, and the masterly delineation of character
+displayed in that work, that, having begun to read it while leaning
+his arm on the chimney-piece, he continued in that attitude,
+insensible of pain till he was hardly able to raise his hand to his
+head. The admiration of the work naturally led him to seek the
+acquaintance of its author, who continued one of his sincerest
+admirers and warmest friends till 1784, when they were separated by
+the stroke of death.
+
+The first thing that distinguished him after his return to his native
+country was a full-length portrait of Commodore Keppel; which in
+polite circles was spoken of in terms of the highest encomium, and
+testified to what a degree of eminence he had arrived in his
+profession. This was followed by a portrait of Lord Edgecombe, and a
+few others, which at once introduced him to the first business in
+portrait-painting; and that branch of the art he cultivated with such
+success as will forever establish his fame with all descriptions of
+refined society. Having painted some of the first-rate beauties of the
+age, the polite world flocked to see the graces and the charms of his
+pencil; and he soon became the most fashionable painter not only in
+England, but in all Europe. He has indeed preserved the resemblance of
+so many illustrious characters, that we feel the less regret at his
+having left behind him so few historical paintings; though what he has
+done in that way shows him to have been qualified to excel in both
+departments. The only landscape, perhaps, which he ever painted,
+except those beautiful and chaste ones which compose the backgrounds
+of many of his portraits, is "A View on the Thames from Richmond,"
+which in 1784 was exhibited by the Society for Promoting Painting and
+Design in Liverpool.
+
+In 1764 Mr. Reynolds had the merit of being the first promoter of that
+club, which, having long existed without a name, became at last
+distinguished by the appellation of the _Literary Club_. Upon the
+foundation of the Royal Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and
+Architecture, he was appointed president; and his acknowledged
+excellence in his profession made the appointment acceptable to all
+the lovers of art. To add to the dignity of this new institution, his
+majesty conferred on the president the honor of knighthood; and Sir
+Joshua delivered his first discourse at the opening of the Academy, on
+January 2, 1769. The merit of that discourse has been universally
+admitted among painters; but it contains some directions, respecting
+the proper mode of prosecuting their studies, to which every student
+of every art would do well to pay attention. "I would chiefly
+recommend (says he) that an implicit obedience to the _rules of art_,
+as established by the practice of the great masters, should be exacted
+from the young students. That those models, which have passed through
+the approbation of ages, should be considered by them as perfect and
+infallible guides, as subjects for their imitation, not their
+criticism. I am confident that this is the only efficacious method of
+making a progress in the arts; and that he who sets out with doubting
+will find life finished before he becomes master of the rudiments. For
+it may be laid down as a maxim, that he who begins by presuming on his
+own sense, has ended his studies as soon as he has commenced them.
+Every opportunity, therefore, should be taken to discountenance that
+false and vulgar opinion, that rules are the fetters of genius. They
+are fetters only to men of no genius; as that armor, which upon the
+strong becomes an ornament and a defence, upon the weak and misshapen
+turns into a load, and cripples the body which it was made to
+protect."
+
+Each succeeding year, on the distribution of the prizes, Sir Joshua
+delivered to the students a discourse of equal merit with this; and
+perhaps we do not hazard too much when we say, that from the whole
+collected, the lovers of belles-lettres and the fine arts will acquire
+juster notions of what is meant by taste in general, and better rules
+for acquiring a correct taste, than from the multitude of those
+volumes which have been professedly written on the subject.
+
+In the autumn of 1785 he went to Brussels, where he expended about
+£1,000 on the purchase of paintings which, having been taken from the
+different monasteries and religious houses in Flanders and Germany,
+were then exposed to sale by the command of the Emperor Joseph.
+Gainsborough and he had engaged to paint each other's portrait; and
+the canvas for both being actually stretched, Sir Joshua gave one
+sitting to his distinguished rival; but to the regret of every admirer
+of the art, the unexpected death of the latter prevented all further
+progress.
+
+In 1790 he was anxiously desirous to procure the vacant professorship
+of perspective in the academy for Mr. Bonomi, an Italian architect;
+but that artist not having been yet elected an associate, was, of
+course, no academician, and it became necessary to raise him to those
+positions, in order to qualify him for being a professor. Mr. Gilpin
+being his competitor for the associateship, the numbers on the ballot
+proved equal, when the president, on his casting vote, decided the
+election in favor of his friend, who was thereby advanced so far
+toward the professorship. Soon after this, an academic seat being
+vacant, Sir Joshua exerted all his influence to obtain it for Mr.
+Bonomi; but finding himself out-voted by a majority of two to one, he
+quitted the chair with great dissatisfaction, and next day sent to the
+secretary of the academy a formal resignation of the office, which for
+twenty-one years he had filled with honor to himself and to his
+country. His indignation, however, subsiding, he suffered himself to
+be prevailed upon to return to the chair, which, within a year and a
+half, he was again desirous to quit for a better reason.
+
+Finding a disease of languor, occasioned by an enlargement of the
+liver, to which he had for some time been subject, increase, and daily
+expecting a total loss of sight, he wrote a letter to the academy,
+intimating his intention to resign the office of president on account
+of bodily infirmities, which disabled him from executing the duties
+of it to his own satisfaction. The academy received this intelligence
+with the respectful concern due to the talents and virtues of their
+president, and either then did enter, or designed to enter, into a
+resolution honorable to all parties, namely, that a deputation from
+the whole body of the academy should wait upon him, and inform him of
+their wish, that the authority and privileges of the office of
+president might be his during his life, declaring their willingness to
+permit the performance of any of its duties which might be irksome to
+him by a deputy.
+
+From this period Sir Joshua never painted more. The last effort of his
+pencil was the portrait of the honorable Charles James Fox, which was
+executed in his best style, and shows that his fancy, his imagination,
+and his other great powers in the art which he professed, remained
+unabated to the end of his life. When the last touches were given to
+this picture,
+
+  "The hand of Reynolds fell, to rise no more."
+
+On Thursday, February 23, 1792, the world was deprived of this amiable
+man and excellent artist, at the age of sixty-eight years; a man than
+whom no one, according to Johnson, had passed through life with more
+observations of men and manners. The following character of him is
+said to be the production of Mr. Burke:
+
+"His illness was long, but borne with a mild and cheerful fortitude,
+without the least mixture of anything irritable or querulous,
+agreeably to the placid and even tenor of his whole life. He had, from
+the beginning of his malady, a distinct view of his dissolution, which
+he contemplated with that entire composure which nothing but the
+innocence, integrity, and usefulness of his life, and an unaffected
+submission to the will of Providence, could bestow. In this situation
+he had every consolation from family tenderness, which his tenderness
+to his family had always merited.
+
+"Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on very many accounts, one of the most
+memorable men of his time; he was the first Englishman who added the
+praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In
+taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in richness and
+harmony of coloring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned
+ages. In portrait he went beyond them; for he communicated to that
+branch of the art in which English artists are the most engaged, a
+variety, a fancy, and a dignity derived from the higher branches,
+which even those who professed them in a superior manner did not
+always preserve when they delineated individual nature. His portraits
+reminded the spectator of the invention of history and the amenity of
+landscape. In painting portraits he appears not to be raised upon that
+platform, but to descend to it from a higher sphere. His paintings
+illustrate his lessons, and his lessons seem to be derived from his
+paintings.
+
+"He possessed the theory as perfectly as the practice of his art. To
+be such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating philosopher.
+
+"In full happiness of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert
+in art, and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed
+by sovereign powers, and celebrated by distinguished poets, his native
+humility, modesty, and candor never forsook him, even on surprise or
+provocation; nor was the least degree of arrogance or assumption
+visible to the most scrutinizing eye in any part of his conduct or
+discourse.
+
+"His talents of every kind--powerful from nature, and not meanly
+cultivated in letters--his social virtues in all the relations and all
+the habitudes of life, rendered him the centre of a very great and
+unparalleled variety of agreeable societies, which will be dissipated
+by his death. He had too much merit not to excite some jealousy, too
+much innocence to provoke any enmity. The loss of no man of his time
+can be felt with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow."
+
+
+
+
+BENJAMIN WEST
+
+By MARTHA J. LAMB[5]
+
+         [Footnote 5: Reprinted by permission, from the Magazine of
+         American History.]
+
+(1738-1820)
+
+
+[Illustration: Benjamin West.]
+
+In the wilds of the new world, a century and a half ago, there was,
+apparently, no spot less likely to produce a famous painter than the
+Quaker province of Pennsylvania. And yet, when George Washington was
+only six years old there was born, in the little town of Springfield,
+Chester County, a boy whose interesting and remarkable career from
+infancy to old age has provided one of the most instructive lessons
+for students in art that America affords.
+
+Perhaps Benjamin West's aptitude for picture-making in his infancy,
+while he was learning to walk and to talk, did not exceed that of
+hosts of other children, in like circumstances, in every generation
+since his time. But many curious things were remembered and told of
+this baby's performances after he had developed a decided talent for
+reproducing the beautiful objects that captivated his eye. It was in
+the summer of 1745, a few months before he was seven years old that
+his married sister came home for a visit, bringing with her an infant
+daughter. The next morning after her arrival, little Benjamin was left
+to keep the flies off the sleeping baby, while his mother and sister
+went to the garden for flowers. The baby smiled in its sleep, and the
+boy was captivated. He must catch that smile and keep it. He found
+some paper on the table, scrambled for a pen, and with red and black
+ink made a hasty but striking picture of the little beauty. He heard
+his mother returning, and conscious of having been in mischief, tried
+to conceal his production; but she detected and captured it, and
+regarded it long and lovingly, exclaiming as her daughter entered, "He
+has really made a likeness of little Sally!" She then caught up the
+boy in her arms, and kissed instead of chiding him, and he--looking up
+encouraged--told her he could make the flowers, too, if she would
+permit. The awakening of genius in Benjamin West has been distinctly
+traced to this incident, as the time when he first discovered that he
+could imitate the forms of such objects as pleased his sense of sight.
+And the incident itself has been aptly styled "the birth of fine arts
+in the New World."
+
+The Quaker boy, in course of years, left the wilderness of America to
+become the president of the Royal Academy in London. His
+irreproachable character not less than his excellence as an artist,
+gave him commanding position among his contemporaries. From first to
+last he was distinguished for his indefatigable industry. The number
+of his pictures has been estimated, by a writer in _Blackwood's
+Magazine_, at three thousand; and Dunlap says that a gallery capable
+of holding them would be four hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and
+forty feet high--or a wall a quarter of a mile long.
+
+The parents of Benjamin West were sincere and self-respecting, and in
+the language of the times, well-to-do. His mother's grandfather was
+the intimate and confidential friend of William Penn. The family of
+his father claimed direct descent from the Black Prince and Lord
+Delaware, of the time of King Edward III. Colonel James West was the
+friend and companion in arms of John Hampden. When Benjamin West was at
+work upon his great picture of the "Institution of the Garter," the
+King of England was delighted when the Duke of Buckingham assured him
+that West had an ancestral right to a place among the warriors and
+knights of his own painting. The Quaker associates of the parents of
+the artist, the patriarchs of Pennsylvania, regarded their asylum in
+America as the place for affectionate intercourse--free from all the
+military predilections and political jealousies of Europe. The result
+was a state of society more contented, peaceful, and pleasing than the
+world had ever before exhibited. At the time of the birth of Benjamin
+West the interior settlements in Pennsylvania had attained
+considerable wealth, and unlimited hospitality formed a part of the
+regular economy of the principal families. Those who resided near the
+highways were in the habit, after supper and the religious exercises
+of the evening, of making a large fire in the hallway, and spreading a
+table with refreshments for such travellers as might pass in the
+night, who were expected to step in and help themselves. This was
+conspicuously the case in Springfield. Other acts of liberality were
+performed by this community, to an extent that would have beggared the
+munificence of the old world. Poverty was not known in this region.
+But whether families traced their lineage to ancient and noble
+sources, or otherwise, their pride was so tempered with the meekness
+of their faith, that it lent a singular dignity to their benevolence.
+
+The Indians mingled freely with the people, and when they paid their
+annual visits to the plantations, raised their wigwams in the fields
+and orchards without asking permission, and were never molested.
+Shortly after Benjamin West's first efforts with pen and ink, a party
+of red men reached and encamped in Springfield. The boy-artist showed
+them his sketches of birds and flowers, which seemed to amuse them
+greatly. They at once proceeded to teach him how to prepare the red
+and yellow colors with which they decorated their ornaments. To these
+Mrs. West added blue, by contributing a piece of indigo. Thus the boy
+had three prismatic colors for his use. What could be more picturesque
+than the scene where the untutored Indian gave the future artist his
+first lesson in mixing paints! These wild men also taught him archery,
+that he might shoot birds for models if he wanted their bright plumage
+to copy.
+
+The neighbors were attracted by the boy's drawings, and finally a
+relative, Mr. Pennington, a prominent merchant of Philadelphia, came
+to pay the family a visit. He thought the boy's crude pictures were
+wonderful, as he was then only entering his eighth year. When he went
+home he immediately sent the little fellow a box of paints, with six
+engravings by Grevling. John Gait, who wrote from the artist's own
+statements, describes the effect of this gift upon the boy. In going
+to bed he placed the box so near his couch, that he could hug and
+caress it every time he wakened. Next morning he rose early, and
+taking his paints and canvas to the garret, began to work. He went to
+breakfast, and then stole back to his post under the roof, forgetting
+all about school. When dinnertime came he presented himself at table,
+as usual, but said nothing of his occupation. He had been absent from
+school some days before the master called on his parents to inquire
+what had become of him. This led to the discovery of his secret
+painting, for his mother proceeded to the garret and found the truant.
+She was, however, so astonished with the creation upon his canvas,
+that she took him in her arms and kissed him with transports of
+affection. He had made a composition of his own out of two of the
+engravings--which he had colored from his ideas of the proper tints to
+be used--and so perfect did the picture appear to Mrs. West that,
+although half the canvas remained to be covered, she would not suffer
+the child to add another touch with his brush. Sixty-seven years
+afterward, Mr. Gait saw this production in the exact state in which it
+was left, and Mr. West himself acknowledged that in subsequent efforts
+he had never been able to excel some of the touches of invention in
+this first picture.
+
+The first instruction in art which the artist received was from Mr.
+William Williams, a painter in Philadelphia. Young West's first
+attempt at portraiture was at Lancaster, where he painted "The Death
+of Socrates" for William Henry, a gunsmith. He was not yet sixteen,
+but other paintings followed which possessed so much genuine merit,
+that they have been preserved as treasures. One of these is in
+possession of General Meredith Reed, of Paris, France, a descendant of
+the signer. West returned to his home in Springfield, in 1754, to
+discuss the question of his future vocation. He had an inclination for
+military life, and volunteered as a recruit in the old French war;
+but military attractions vanished among the hardships involved, and in
+1756, when eighteen years old, he established himself in Philadelphia
+as a portrait-painter, his price being "five guineas a head." Two
+years later he went to New York, where he passed eleven months, and
+was liberally employed by the merchants and others. He painted the
+portrait of Bishop Provoost, those of Gerardus Duyekinck and his
+wife--full length--one of Mrs. Samuel Breese, and many others, which
+are in the families of descendants, and characteristic examples of his
+early work.
+
+In 1760 an opportunity offered for him to visit Rome, Italy. He
+carried letters to Cardinal Albani and other celebrities, and as he
+was very handsome and intelligent, and came from a far-away land about
+which hung the perpetual charm of tradition and romance, he soon
+became the lion of the day among the imaginative Italians. It was a
+novelty then for an American to appear in the Eternal City, and the
+very morning after his arrival a curious party followed his steps to
+observe his pursuit of art. He remained in Italy until 1763, and while
+there he painted, among others, his pictures of "Cimon and Iphigenia,"
+and "Angelica and Medora." His portrait of Lord Grantham excited much
+interest, and that nobleman's introduction facilitated his visit to
+London, which proved so prolific in results. There was no great living
+historical painter in England just then; and at first there was no
+sale for West's pictures, as it was unfashionable to buy any but "old
+masters." But the young artist was undaunted, and presently attracted
+attention in high places. His picture of "Agrippina Landing with the
+Ashes of Germanicus," painted for Dr. Drummond, Archbishop of York,
+secured him the favor of George III., and the commission from his
+majesty to paint the "Departure of Regulus from Rome." His untiring
+industry and gentlemanly habits were conspicuous, and may be regarded
+as among the great secrets of his continual advance and public
+recognition. His "Parting of Hector and Andromache," and "Return of
+the Prodigal Son," were among his notable productions of this period.
+His "Death of General Wolfe" has been, says Tuckerman, "truly declared
+to have created an era in English art, by the successful example it
+initiated of the abandonment of classic costume--a reform advocated by
+Reynolds, who glories in the popular innovation." His characters were
+clad in the dress of their time. Reynolds said to the Archbishop of
+York: "I foresee that this picture will not only become one of the
+most popular, but will occasion a revolution in art." It was purchased
+by Lord Grosvenor. Among the long list of paintings executed by order
+of the king were "The Death of Chevalier Bayard;" "Edward III.
+Embracing his Son on the Field of Battle at Cressy;" "The Installation
+of the Order of the Garter;" "The Black Prince Receiving the King of
+France and his Son Prisoners at Poictiers," and "Queen Philippa
+Interceding with Edward for the Burgesses of Calais." West was one of
+the founders, in 1768, of the Royal Academy, and succeeded Sir Joshua
+Reynolds as president of the institution in 1792, which post he held
+almost uninterruptedly until 1815.
+
+In the year 1780 he proposed a series of pictures on the progress of
+revealed religion, of which there were thirty-six subjects in all,
+but he never executed but twenty-eight of these, owing to the mental
+trouble which befell the king. He then commenced a new series of
+important works, of which "Christ Healing the Sick" was purchased by
+an institution in Great Britain for £3,000, and was subsequently
+copied for the Pennsylvania Hospital. "Penn's Treaty with the Indians"
+was painted for Granville Penn, the scene representing the founding of
+Pennsylvania. West wrote to one of his family that he had taken the
+liberty of introducing in this painting the likeness of his father and
+his brother Thomas. "That is the likeness of our brother," he says,
+"standing immediately behind Penn, leaning on his cane. I need not
+point out the picture of our father, as I believe you will find it in
+the print from memory." Tuckerman says that the work which, in the
+opinion of many critics, best illustrates the skill of West in
+composition, drawing, expression, and dramatic effect, is his "Death
+on the Pale Horse." His "Cupid," owned in Philadelphia, is one of his
+most effective pictures as to color.
+
+The full-length portrait of West, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A.,
+represents the great artist in his character as president of the Royal
+Academy, delivering a lecture on "coloring" to the students. Under his
+right hand may be noticed, standing on an easel, a copy of Raphael's
+cartoon of the "Death of Ananias." The picture of West's face has been
+considered a perfect likeness, but the figure somewhat too large and
+too tall in its effects. A copy of this portrait was made by Charles
+R. Leslie; and Washington Allston also painted a portrait of the
+artist. There exists, it is said, a portrait of West from his own
+hand, taken apparently at about the age of forty, three-quarter
+length, in Quaker costume.
+
+[Illustration: Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy.]
+
+
+
+
+THORWALDSEN
+
+By HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
+
+(1770-1844)
+
+
+It was in Copenhagen, on November 19, 1770, that a carver of figures
+for ships' heads, by name Gottskalk Thorwaldsen, was presented by his
+wife, Karen Grönlund, the daughter of a clergyman in Jutland, with a
+son, who at his baptism received the name of Bertel, or Albert.
+
+The father had come from Iceland, and lived in poor circumstances.
+They dwelt in _Lille Grönnegade_ (Little Green Street), not far from
+the Academy of Arts. The moon has often peeped into their poor room;
+she has told us about it in "A Picture-book without Pictures":
+
+[Illustration: Thorwaldsen.]
+
+"The father and mother slept, but their little son did not sleep;
+where the flowered cotton bed-curtains moved I saw the child peep out.
+I thought at first that he looked at the Bornholm clock, for it was
+finely painted with red and green, and there was a cuckoo on the top;
+it had heavy leaden weights, and the pendulum with its shining brass
+plate went to and fro with a 'tick! tick!' But it was not that he
+looked at; no, it was his mother's spinning-wheel, which stood
+directly under the clock; this was the dearest piece of furniture in
+the whole house for the boy; but he dared not touch it, for if he did,
+he got a rap over the fingers. While his mother spun, he would sit for
+hours together looking at the buzzing spindle and the revolving wheel,
+and then he had his own thoughts. Oh! if he only durst spin that
+wheel! His father and mother slept; he looked at them, he looked at
+the wheel, and then by degrees a little naked foot was stuck out of
+bed, and then another naked foot, then there came two small legs, and,
+with a jump, he stood on the floor. He turned round once more, to see
+if his parents slept; yes, they did, and so he went softly, quite
+softly, only in his little shirt, up to the wheel, and began to spin.
+The cord flew off, and the wheel then ran much quicker. His mother
+awoke at the same moment; the curtains moved; she looked out and
+thought of the brownie, or another little spectral being. 'Have mercy
+on us!' said she, and in her fear she struck her husband in the side;
+he opened his eyes, rubbed them with his hands, and looked at the busy
+little fellow. 'It is Bertel, woman,' said he."
+
+What the moon relates we see here as the first picture in
+Thorwaldsen's life's gallery; for it is a reflection of the reality.
+Thorwaldsen has himself, when in familiar conversation at Nysöe, told
+the author almost word for word what he, in his "Picture-book," lets
+the moon say. It was one of his earliest remembrances, how he, in his
+little short shirt, sat in the moonlight and spun his mother's wheel,
+while she, dear soul, took him for a little spectre.
+
+A few years ago there still lived an old ship-carpenter, who
+remembered the little, light-haired, blue-eyed boy, that came to his
+father in the carving-house at the dock-yard; he was to learn his
+father's trade; and as the latter felt how bad it was not to be able
+to draw, the boy, then eleven years of age, was sent to the
+drawing-school at the Academy of Arts, where he made rapid progress.
+Two years afterward, Bertel, or Albert, as we shall in future call
+him, was of great assistance to his father; nay, he even improved his
+work.
+
+See the hovering ships on the wharves! The Dannebrog waves, the
+workmen sit in circle under the shade at their frugal breakfasts; but
+foremost stands the principal figure in this picture: it is a boy who
+cuts with a bold hand the lifelike features in the wooden image for
+the beak-head of the vessel. It is the ship's guardian spirit, and, as
+the first image from the hand of Albert Thorwaldsen, it shall wander
+out into the wide world. The eternally swelling sea should baptize it
+with its waters, and hang its wreaths of wet plants around it.
+
+Our next picture advances a step forward. Unobserved among the other
+boys, he has now frequented the Academy's school for six years
+already, where, always taciturn and silent, he stood by his
+drawing-board. His answer was "yes" or "no," a nod or a shake of the
+head; but mildness shone from his features, and good-nature was in
+every expression. The picture shows us Albert as a candidate for
+confirmation. He is now seventeen years of age--not a very young age
+to ratify his baptismal compact; his place at the dean's house is the
+last among the poor boys, for his knowledge is not sufficient to place
+him higher. There had just at that time been an account in the
+newspapers, that the pupil Thorwaldsen had gained the Academy's
+smaller medal for a bas-relief representing a "Cupid Reposing." "Is it
+your brother that has gained the medal?" inquired the dean. "It is
+myself," said Albert, and the clergyman looked kindly on him, placed
+him first among all the boys, and from that time always called him
+Monsieur Thorwaldsen. Oh! how deeply did that "Monsieur" then sound in
+his mind! As he has often said since, it sounded far more powerfully
+than any title that kings could give him; he never afterward forgot
+it.
+
+In a small house in Aabeuraa--the street where Holberg lets his poor
+poets dwell--lived Albert Thorwaldsen with his parents, and divided
+his time between the study of art and assisting his father. The
+Academy's lesser gold was then the prize to be obtained for sculpture.
+Our artist was now twenty years of age; his friends knew his abilities
+better than himself, and they compelled him to enter on the task. The
+subject proposed was, "Heliodorus Driven out of the Temple."
+
+We are now in Charlottenburg; but the little chamber in which
+Thorwaldsen lately sat to make his sketch is empty, and he, chased by
+the demons of fear and distrust, hastens down the narrow back-stairs
+with the intention not to return. Nothing is accidental in the life of
+a great genius; an apparent insignificance is a God's guiding finger.
+Thorwaldsen was to complete his task. Who is it that stops him on the
+dark stairs? One of the professors just comes that way, speaks to him,
+questions, admonishes him. He returns, and in four hours the sketch is
+finished, and the gold medal won. This was on August 15, 1791.
+
+Count Ditlew de Reventlow, minister of state, saw the young artist's
+work, and became his protector; he placed his own name at the head of
+a subscription that enabled Thorwaldsen to devote his time to the
+study of his art. Two years afterward the large gold medal was to be
+contended for at the Academy, the successful candidate thereby gaining
+the right to a travelling _stipendium_. Thorwaldsen was again the
+first; but before he entered on his travels, it was deemed necessary
+to extend that knowledge which an indifferent education at school had
+left him in want of. He read, studied, and the Academy gave him its
+support; acknowledgment smiled on him, a greater and more spiritual
+sphere lay open to him.
+
+A portrait figure stands now before us; it is that of a Dane, the
+learned and severe Zoega, to whom the young artist is specially
+recommended, but who only sees in him a common talent; whose words are
+only those of censure, and whose eye sees only a servile imitation of
+the antique in his works. Strictly honest in his judgment, according
+to his own ideas, is this man, who should be Thorwaldsen's guide.
+
+We let three years glide away after the arrival of Thorwaldsen, and
+ask Zoega what he now says of Albert, or, as the Italians call him,
+Alberto, and the severe man shakes his head and says: "There is much
+to blame, little to be satisfied with, and diligent he is not!" Yet he
+was diligent in a high degree; but genius is foreign to a foreign
+mind. "The snow had just then thawed from my eyes," he has himself
+often repeated. The drawings of the Danish painter Carstens formed one
+of those spiritual books that shed its holy baptism over that growing
+genius. The little _atelier_ looked like a battle-field, for
+roundabout were broken statues. Genius formed them often in the
+midnight hours; despondency over their faults broke them in the day.
+
+The three years, for which he had received a _stipendium_, were as if
+they had flown away, and as yet he had produced nothing. The time for
+his return drew nigh. One work, however, he must complete, that it
+might not with justice be said in Denmark, "Thorwaldsen has quite
+wasted his time in Rome." Doubting his genius just when it embraced
+him most affectionately; not expecting a victory, while he already
+stood on its open road, he modelled "Jason who has Gained the Golden
+Fleece." It was this that Thorwaldsen would have gained in the kingdom
+of arts, and which he now thought he must resign. The figure stood
+there in clay, many eyes looked carelessly on it, and--he broke it to
+pieces!
+
+It was in April, 1801, that his return home was fixed, in company with
+Zoega. It was put off until the autumn. During this time "Jason"
+occupied all his thoughts. A new, a larger figure of the hero was
+formed, an immortal work; but it had not then been announced to the
+world, nor understood by it. "Here is something more than common!" was
+said by many. Even the man to whom all paid homage, the illustrious
+Canova, started, and exclaimed: "Quest' opera di quel giovane Danese è
+fatta in uno stilo nuovo, e grandioso!" Zoega smiled. "It is bravely
+done!" said he. The Danish songstress, Frederikke Brunn, was then in
+Rome and sang enthusiastically about Thorwaldsen's "Jason." She
+assisted the artist, so that he was enabled to get this figure cast in
+plaster; for he himself had no more money than was just sufficient for
+his expenses home.
+
+The last glass of wine had been already drunk as a farewell, the boxes
+packed, and the _vetturino's_ carriage was before the door at daybreak;
+the boxes were fastened behind. Then came a fellow-traveller--the
+sculptor, Hagemann, who was returning to his native city, Berlin. His
+passport was not ready. Their departure must be put off until the next
+day; and Thorwaldsen promised, although the _vetturino_ complained and
+abused him, to remain so long. He stayed--stayed to win an immortal name
+on earth, and cast a lustre over Denmark.
+
+Though forty years resident in Rome, rich and independent, he lived
+and worked with the thought of once returning home to Denmark, there
+to rest himself; unaccustomed to the great comforts of other rich
+artists in Rome, he lived a bachelor's life. Was his heart, then, no
+longer open to love since his first departure from Copenhagen? A
+thousand beautiful Cupids in marble will tell us how warmly that heart
+beat. Love belongs to life's mysteries.
+
+We know that Thorwaldsen left a daughter in Rome, whose birth he
+acknowledged; we also know that more than one female of quality would
+willingly have given her hand to the great artist. The year before his
+first return to Denmark he lay ill at Naples, and was nursed by an
+English lady who felt the most ardent affection for him; and, from
+that feeling of gratitude which was awakened in him, he immediately
+consented to their union. When he had recovered and afterward returned
+to Rome, this promise preyed on his mind, he felt that he was not now
+formed to be a husband, acknowledged that gratitude was not love, and
+that they were not suited for each other; after a long combat with
+himself, he wrote and informed her of his determination. Thorwaldsen
+was never married.
+
+The following trait is as characteristic of his heart as of his whole
+personality. One day, while in Rome, there came a poor countryman to
+him, an artisan, who had long been ill. He came to say farewell, and
+to thank him for the money that he and others of his countrymen had
+subscribed together, with which he was to reach home.
+
+"But you will not walk the whole way?" said Thorwaldsen.
+
+"I am obliged to do so," replied the man.
+
+"But you are still too weak to walk--you cannot bear the fatigue, nor
+must you do it!" said he.
+
+The man assured him of the necessity of doing so.
+
+Thorwaldsen went and opened a drawer, took out a handful of _scudi_
+and gave them to him, saying, "See, now you will ride the whole way!"
+
+The man thanked him, but assured him that his gift would not be more
+than sufficient to carry him to Florence.
+
+"Well!" said Thorwaldsen, clapping him on the shoulder, as he went a
+second time to the drawer and took out another handful. The man was
+grateful in the highest degree, and was going. "Now you can ride the
+whole way home and be comfortable on the way," said he, as he followed
+the man to the door.
+
+"I am very glad," said the man. "God bless you for it! but to ride the
+whole way requires a little capital."
+
+"Well, then, tell me how great that must be," he asked, and looked
+earnestly at him. The man in a modest manner named the requisite sum,
+and Thorwaldsen went a third time to the drawer, counted out the sum,
+accompanied him to the door, pressed his hand, and repeated, "But now
+you will ride, for you have not strength to walk!"
+
+Our artist did not belong to the class of great talkers; it was only
+in a small circle that he could be brought to say anything, but then
+it was always with humor and gayety. A few energetic exclamations of
+his are preserved. A well-known sculptor, expressing himself one day
+with much self-feeling, entered into a dispute with Thorwaldsen, and
+set his own works over the latter's. "You may bind my hands behind
+me," said Thorwaldsen, "and I will bite the marble out with my teeth
+better than you can carve it."
+
+Thorwaldsen possessed specimens in plaster of all his works; these,
+together with the rich marble statues and bas-reliefs which he had
+collected of his own accord, without orders, and the number of
+paintings that he every year bought of young artists, formed a
+treasure that he wished to have in his proper home, Copenhagen.
+Therefore, when the Danish government sent vessels of war to the
+Mediterranean, in order to fetch the works that were ready for the
+palace or the churches, he always sent a number of his own things with
+them. Denmark was to inherit these treasures of art; and, in order to
+see them collected in a place worthy of them, a zeal was awakened in
+the nation to build a museum for their reception. A committee of his
+Danish admirers and friends sent out a requisition to the people, that
+everyone might give their mite; many a poor servant-girl and many a
+peasant gave theirs, so that a good sum was soon collected. Frederick
+VI. gave ground for the building, and the erection thereof was
+committed to the architect, Bindesbol.
+
+Thorwaldsen, in 1838, had attained universal fame. The frigate Rota
+was dispatched to bring a cargo of his works to Copenhagen, and he was
+to arrive at the same time, perhaps to remain in Denmark. Close to
+Presto Bay, surrounded by wood-grown banks, lies Nysöe, the principal
+seat of the barony of Stampenborg, a place which, through Thorwaldsen,
+has become remarkable in Denmark. The open strand, the beautiful beech
+woods, even the little town seen through the orchards, at some few
+hundred paces from the mansion, make the place worthy of a visit on
+account of its truly Danish scenery. Here Thorwaldsen found his best
+home in Denmark; here he seemed to increase his fame, and here a
+series of his last beautiful bas-reliefs were produced.
+
+Baron Stampe was one of nature's noblest-minded men; his hospitality
+and his lady's daughterly affection for Thorwaldsen opened a home for
+him here, a comfortable and good one. A great energetic power in the
+baroness incited his activity; she attended him with a daughter's
+care, elicited from him every little wish, and executed it. Directly
+after his first visit to Nysöe, a short tour to Moen's chalk cliffs
+was arranged, and during the few days that were passed there, a little
+_atelier_ was erected in the garden at Nysöe, close to the canal which
+half encircles the principal building; here, and in a corner room of
+the mansion, on the first floor facing the sea, most of Thorwaldsen's
+works, during the last years of his life, were executed: "Christ
+Bearing the Cross," "The Entry into Jerusalem," "Rebecca at the Well,"
+his own portrait-statue, Oehlenschlæger's and Holberg's busts, etc.
+Baroness Stampe was in faithful attendance on him, lent him a helping
+hand, and read aloud for him from Holberg. Driving abroad, weekly
+concerts, and in the evenings his fondest play, "The Lottery," were
+what most easily excited him, and on these occasions he would say many
+amusing things. He has represented the Stampe family in two
+bas-reliefs: in the one, representing the mother, the two daughters,
+and the youngest son, is the artist himself; the other exhibits the
+father and the two eldest sons.
+
+All circles sought to attract Thorwaldsen; he was at every great
+festival, in every great society, and every evening in the theatre by
+the side of Oehlenschlæger. His greatness was allied to a mildness, a
+straightforwardness, that in the highest degree fascinated the
+stranger who approached him for the first time. His _atelier_ in
+Copenhagen was visited daily; he therefore felt himself more
+comfortable and undisturbed at Nysöe. Baron Stampe and his family
+accompanied him to Italy in 1841, when he again visited that country.
+The whole journey, which was by way of Berlin, Dresden, Frankfort, the
+Rhine towns, and Munich, was a continued triumphal procession. The
+winter was passed in Rome, and the Danes there had a home in which
+they found a welcome.
+
+The following year Thorwaldsen was again in Denmark, and at his
+favorite place, Nysöe. On Christmas eve he here formed his beautiful
+bas-relief, "Christmas Joys in Heaven," which Oehlenschlæger
+consecrated with a poem. The last birthday of his life was celebrated
+here; the performance of one of Holberg's vaudevilles was arranged,
+and strangers invited; yet the morning of that day was the homeliest,
+when only the family and the author of this memoir, who had written a
+merry song for the occasion, which was still wet on the paper, placed
+themselves outside the artist's door, each with a pair of tongs, a
+gong, or a bottle on which they rubbed a cork, as an accompaniment,
+and sung the song as a morning greeting. Thorwaldsen, in his morning
+gown, opened the door, laughing; he twirled his black Raphael's cap,
+took a pair of tongs himself, and accompanied us, while he danced
+round and joined the others in the loud "hurra!"
+
+A charming bas-relief, "The Genius of Poetry," was just completed; it
+was the same that Thorwaldsen, on the last day of his life, bequeathed
+to Oehlenschlæger, and said, "It may serve as a medal for you."
+
+On Sunday, March 24, 1844, a small party of friends were assembled at
+the residence of Baron Stampe, in Copenhagen. Thorwaldsen was there
+and was unusually lively, told stories, and spoke of a journey that he
+intended to make to Italy in the course of the summer. Cahn's tragedy
+of "Griseldis" was to be performed for the first time that evening at
+the theatre. Tragedy was not his favorite subject, but comedy, and
+particularly the comedies of Holberg; but it was something new that he
+was to see, and it had become a sort of habit with him to pass the
+evening in the theatre. About six o'clock, therefore, he went to the
+theatre alone. The overture had begun; on entering he shook hands with
+a few of his friends, took his usual seat, stood up again to allow one
+to pass him, sat down again, bent his head, and was no more! The music
+continued. Those nearest to him thought he was only in a swoon, and he
+was borne out; but he was numbered with the dead.
+
+The mournful intelligence of his death soon spread through the country
+and through all lands; funeral dirges were sung and funeral festivals
+were arranged in Berlin and Rome; in the Danish theatre, whence his
+soul took its flight to God there was a festival; the place where he
+sat was decorated with crape and laurel wreaths, and a poem by Heiberg
+was recited, in which his greatness and his death were alluded to.
+
+The day before Thorwaldsen's death the interior of his tomb was
+finished, for it was his wish that his remains might rest in the
+centre of the court-yard of the museum; it was then walled round, and
+he begged that there might be a marble edge around it, and a few
+rose-trees and flowers planted on it as his monument. The whole
+building, with the rich treasures which he presented to his
+fatherland, will be his monument; his works are to be placed in the
+rooms of the square building that surrounds the open court-yard, and
+which, both internally and externally, are painted in the Pompeian
+style. His arrival in the roads of Copenhagen and landing at the
+custom-house form the subjects depicted in the compartments under the
+windows of one side of the museum. Through centuries to come will
+nations wander to Denmark; not allured by our charming green islands,
+with their fresh beech-woods alone--no, but to see these works and
+this tomb.
+
+There is, however, one place more that the stranger will visit, the
+little spot at Nysöe where his _atelier_ stands, and where the tree
+bends its branches over the canal to the solitary swan which he fed.
+The name of Thorwaldsen will be remembered in England by his statues
+of Jason and Byron; in Switzerland, by his "recumbent lion;" in
+Roeskilde, by his figure of Christian the Fourth. It will live in
+every breast in which a love of art is enkindled.
+
+
+
+
+JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET[6]
+
+         [Footnote 6: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(1814-1875)
+
+
+[Illustration: Jean-François Millet.]
+
+We read that on one occasion, when a picture by some Dutch artist,
+representing peasants at their sports, was shown to Louis XIV., he
+angrily exclaimed, "Take away those vermin!" Such subjects had never
+been chosen by French artists, nor indeed had they been seen anywhere
+in Europe before the Dutch artists began to paint them in the
+seventeenth century. The Italian painters of the early and the later
+Renaissance, working almost exclusively for the churches, or for the
+palaces of pleasure-loving princes, did not consider the peasant or
+the laboring man, by himself, a proper subject for his art. If he were
+introduced at any time into picture or bas-relief, it was only as a
+necessary actor in some religious story, such as "The Adoration of the
+Shepherds," or in the representations of the months or the seasons, as
+in the Fountain of the Public Square at Perugia, where we see the
+peasant engaged in the labors of the farm or vineyard: cutting the
+wheat, gathering in the grapes, and treading out the wine, and, in
+the later season, dressing the hog he has been killing; for in those
+less sophisticated times, Art, no more than Poetry, despised the ruder
+side of rustic life.
+
+The German artists of the sixteenth century introduced peasants and
+peasant-life into their designs whenever the subject admitted. Albert
+Dürer was especially given to this, and it often gives a particular
+savor, sometimes a half-humorous expression, to his treatment of even
+religious subjects; as where, in his design, "The Repose in Egypt," he
+shows Joseph, the foster-father of Jesus, making a water-trough out of
+a huge log, and a bevy of cherub-urchins about him gathering up the
+chips. Mary, meanwhile, as the peasant mother, sits by, spinning and
+rocking the cradle of the Holy Child with her foot.
+
+But these examples only serve to make clearer the fact that in the
+earlier times there was no place found in art for the representation
+of the laboring man, whether in the field or in the shop, except as an
+illustration of some allegorical or religious theme. Nor in the Dutch
+pictures that Louis XIV. despised, and that our own time finds so
+valuable for their artistic qualities, was there anything outside of
+their beauty or richness of tone or color to redeem their coarseness
+and vulgarity. There was no poetry in the treatment, nor any sympathy
+with anything higher than the grossest guzzling, fighting, and
+horseplay. The great monarch, who, according to his lights, was a man
+of delicacy and refinement, was certainly right in contemning such
+subjects, and it is perhaps to his credit that he did not care enough
+for "Art for Art's sake" to excuse the brutality of the theme for the
+sake of the beauty of the painting.
+
+The next appearance of the peasant in art was of a very different
+sort, and represented a very different state of social feeling from
+the "peasants" of the Dutch painters. In the Salon of 1850 there
+appeared a picture called "The Sower" and representing a young peasant
+sowing grain. There was nothing in the subject to connect it
+particularly with any religious symbolism--not even with the Parable
+of the Sower who went forth to sow; nor with any series of
+personifications of the months. This was a simple peasant of the
+Norman coast, in his red blouse and blue trousers, his legs wrapped in
+straw, and his weather-beaten hat, full of holes. He marches with the
+rhythmic step made necessary by his task, over the downs that top the
+high cliffs, followed by a cloud of crows that pounce upon the grain
+as he sows it. At first sight there would seem to be nothing in this
+picture to call for particular notice; but the public, the artists,
+the critics, were with one accord strongly drawn to it. Something in
+the picture appealed to feelings deeper than mere curiosity, and an
+interest was excited such as did not naturally belong to a picture of
+a man sowing a field of grain. The secret was this: that a man born
+and bred in the midst of laboring people, struggling with the hard
+necessities of life--himself a laborer, and one who knew by experience
+all the lights and shades of the laborer's life--had painted this
+picture out of his own deep sympathy with his fellows, and to please
+himself by reproducing the most significant and poetical act in the
+life of the farmer.
+
+The painter of this picture, the first man of our time to give the
+laborer in the fields and on the farm a place in art, and to set
+people to thinking about him, as a man, not merely as an illustration
+of some sacred text, or an image in a book of allegories, was
+Jean-François Millet, known as the peasant painter of peasants.
+
+He was born at Gruchy, a small hamlet on the coast of Normandy, where
+his family, well known in the region for several generations, lived by
+the labor of their hands, cultivating their fields and exercising the
+simple virtues of that pastoral life, without ambition and without
+desire for change. This content was a part of the religion of the
+country and must not be looked upon as arguing a low state of
+intelligence or of manners. Of their neighbors we have no account, but
+the Millet household contained many of the elements that go to sustain
+the intellectual no less than the spiritual life. If there was plain
+living, there was high thinking; there were books and of the best, and
+more than one member of the circle valued learning for its own sake.
+Millet owed much to his grandmother, a woman of great strength of
+character and of a deeply religious nature. As his godmother she gave
+him his name, calling him Jean, after his father, and François, after
+Saint Francis of Assisi. As is usual in Catholic countries, the boy
+was called after the name of his patron saint, and in the case of
+Millet, Saint Francis, the ardent lover of nature, the friend of the
+birds and of all the animate creation, was well chosen as the guardian
+of one who was to prove himself, all his life, the passionate lover of
+nature.
+
+The boyhood of Millet was passed at home. He had no schooling except
+some small instruction in Latin from the village priest and from a
+neighboring curate, but he made good use of what he learned. He worked
+on the farm with his father and his men, ploughing, harrowing, sowing,
+reaping, mowing, winnowing--in a word, sharing actively and
+contentedly in all the work that belongs to the farmer's life. And in
+the long winter evenings or in the few hours of rest that the day
+afforded, he would hungrily devour the books that were at hand--the
+"Lives of the Saints," the "Confessions of Saint Augustine," the "Life
+of Saint Jerome," and especially his letters, which he read and
+re-read all his life. These and the philosophers of Port Royal, with
+Bossuet, and Fénelon, with the Bible and Virgil, were his mental food.
+Virgil and the Bible he read always in the Latin; he was so familiar
+with them both that, when a man, his biographer, Sensier, says he
+never met a more eloquent translator of these two books. When the time
+came, therefore, for Millet to go up to Paris, he was not, as has been
+said by some writer, an ignorant peasant, but a well-taught man who
+had read much and digested what he had read, and knew good books from
+bad. The needs of his narrow life absorbed him so seriously that the
+seeds of art that lay hid in his nature found a way to the light with
+difficulty. But his master-passion was soon to assert itself, and, as
+in all such cases, in an unexpected manner.
+
+Millet's attempts at drawing had hitherto been confined to studies
+made in hours stolen from rest. He had copied the engravings found in
+an old family Bible, and he had drawn, from his window, the garden,
+the stable, the field running down to the edge of the high cliff, and
+with the sea in the horizon, and he had sometimes tried his hand at
+sketching the cows and sheep in the pasture. But he was now to take a
+step in advance. Coming home one day from church, he walked behind an
+old man bent with age and feebleness, painfully making his way. The
+foreshortening and the movement of the man's figure struck the boy
+forcibly, and in a flash he discovered the secret of perspective and
+the mystery of planes. He ran quickly home, got a pencil and drew from
+memory a picture of the old man, so lively in its resemblance that as
+soon as his parents saw it, they recognized it and fell a-laughing.
+Talk with his boy revealed to the father his son's strong desire to be
+an artist; but before such a serious step could be taken, it was
+necessary to consult with some person better able to judge than any
+one in the Millet household. Cherbourg, the nearest large town, was
+the natural place where to seek advice; thither Millet and his father
+repaired, the boy with two drawings under his arm that he had made for
+the occasion, and these were submitted to the critical eye of Mouchel,
+an old pupil of David, who eked out the scanty living he got by
+painting by giving lessons in drawing. When the two drawings made by
+young Millet were shown him he refused to believe they were the work
+of the lad of fifteen. The very subjects chosen by the boy showed
+something out of the common. One was a sort of home idyl: two
+shepherds were in a little orchard close, one playing on the flute,
+the other listening; some sheep were browsing near. The men wore the
+blouse and wooden shoes of Millet's country; the orchard was one that
+belonged to his father. The other drawing showed a starry night. A man
+was coming from the house with loaves of bread in his hand which he
+gave to another man who eagerly received them. Underneath, in Latin,
+were the words from St. Luke: "Though he will not rise and give him
+because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise
+and give him as many as he needeth." A friend of Millet's, who saw
+these drawings thirty years after, said they were the work of a man
+who already knew the great significance of art, the effects it was
+capable of, and what were its resources.
+
+Mouchel consented to receive Millet as a pupil, but, as it proved, he
+could do little for him in the way of direct teaching. He left the boy
+free to follow his own devices. He said to him: "Do whatever you wish;
+choose whatever model you find in my studio that pleases you, and
+study in the Museum." This might not be the course to follow with
+every boy, but Mouchel had the artist's penetration and knew with whom
+he had to deal.
+
+The death of Millet's father interrupted his studies and he returned
+home for awhile to help his mother on the farm. But it was thought
+best that he should keep on with the work he had begun. The
+grandmother urged his return: "My François," she said, "we must accept
+the will of God. Thy father, my son, Jean-Louis, said that you were to
+be a painter; obey him, and go back to Cherbourg."
+
+Millet did not need persuasion from his family. Friends in Cherbourg
+urged him to come back, promised him commissions, and assured him a
+place in the studio of Langlois, a painter of a higher grade than
+Mouchel, who had recently set up his easel in the town. Once more
+established at Cherbourg Millet continued his studies after the same
+easy fashion with Langlois as with his former master. Langlois, who
+was as much impressed by his pupil's talent as Mouchel had been and
+willing to serve him, made a personal appeal to the mayor and council,
+asking that Millet, as a promising young artist and one likely to do
+credit to the town, might be assisted in going to Paris to study under
+better advantages than he could enjoy at home.
+
+On the strength of this appeal, the council of Cherbourg agreed to
+allow Millet an annuity of four hundred francs, equal to eighty
+dollars. With this small sum, and the addition of two hundred francs
+given him at parting by his mother and grandmother, making one hundred
+and twenty dollars in all, Millet left his quiet life in Normandy
+behind him and set out for Paris, where, as his biographer, Sensier,
+says, he was to pass as a captive the richest years of his life.
+
+Millet was twenty-two years old when he went first to Paris and he
+remained there, with occasional visits to Gruchy and Cherbourg, for
+the next thirteen years. Paris was, from the first, more than
+distasteful to him. He was thoroughly unhappy there. Outside the
+Louvre and the studios of a few artist-friends, he found nothing that
+appealed to what was deepest in him. His first experiences were
+unusually bitter. The struggle with poverty was hard to bear, but
+perhaps a more serious drawback was his want of an aim in art, of a
+substantial reason, so to speak, for the profession he had chosen,
+leading him to one false move after another in search of a subject.
+Unformed and unrecognized in his mind lay the desire to express in art
+the life he had left behind him in Normandy; but it was long before he
+arrived at the knowledge of himself and of his true vocation. He seems
+to have had no one in Paris to guide or direct him, and he rather
+stumbled into the studio of Delaroche, than entered it deliberately.
+He made but a brief stay there, and although he won the respect of his
+master, who would willingly have retained him as pupil and assistant,
+he was conscious that he learned nothing from Delaroche; and
+accordingly, in company with another pupil, Marolles, who had taken a
+great liking to him, he left the studio without much ceremony; and the
+two friends improvised a studio and a lodging for themselves in a
+garret in a poor quarter of the city, and began their search for a
+means of pleasing the public. But the way was not opened to either of
+them; they could not sell what they painted, and they were reduced to
+serious straits. It was not the fault of the public. Marolles was but
+an indifferent painter at any time, and Millet would not have blamed
+the public for its indifference to subjects in which he himself took
+no real interest.
+
+Millet was at a loss what to do for bread. His mind ran back
+continually to his rural life at Gruchy. "What if I should paint men
+mowing or winnowing?" he said to Marolles; "their movements are
+picturesque!" "You could not sell them," replied his friend. "Well,
+then, what do you say to fauns and dryads?" "Who in Paris cares for
+fauns and dryads?" "What shall I do, then?" said Millet in despair.
+"What does the public like?" "It likes Boucher's Cupids, Watteau's
+Pastorals, nudities, anecdotes, and copies of the past." It was hard
+for Millet, but hunger drove him. He would not appeal to his family,
+life was as difficult for them as for him. But before yielding he
+would make one more trial, painting something from his own fancy. He
+made a small picture representing "Charity"--a sad-faced woman
+cherishing three children in her arms. He carried it to the dealers:
+not one of them would buy it. He came back to Marolles. "Give me a
+subject," he said, "and I will paint it."
+
+To this time belong the pictures for which Millet has been much
+criticised by people who did not appreciate his position. Some of them
+recall Watteau, others Boucher, but they have a charm, a grace of
+their own; they are far from being copies of these men. Others were
+fanciful subjects to which Marolles gave names likely to attract the
+notice of picture-buyers in search of a subject. But all was in vain.
+The dealers were obstinate: the public unsympathetic. The highest
+price that was offered was never above twenty francs, or five dollars.
+Yet with this in his pocket, Millet deemed himself already on the high
+road to fortune, and saw the day not distant when he could paint at
+his pleasure the rustic subjects, memories of his home, that had
+always been in his mind.
+
+Several times in the course of this hard novitiate, Millet had escaped
+from Paris for a visit to his own country. At one time he had remained
+for a year at Cherbourg, where he painted portraits for such small
+sums as he could get, and here he and one of his sitters, a young girl
+of Cherbourg, falling in love with one another, were married. The
+marriage only added, as might have been foreseen, to Millet's
+troubles: his wife's health was always delicate; after her marriage it
+became worse, and she died four years after in Paris. Not long after
+her death Millet married again, and this proved a fortunate venture.
+His wife came with him to Paris, and the struggle with life began
+anew. The turning-point in the long period of Millet's uncertainties
+and disappointments with himself came in 1849, when the political
+troubles of the time, and the visit of the cholera, combined to drive
+him and his family from Paris. They took refuge at Barbizon, a small
+hamlet on the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau, and here, in
+the place that was to be forever associated with his name and work,
+Millet passed, with few interruptions, the remaining years of his
+life.
+
+The phrase so often heard to-day, "The Barbizon School," is rather
+wider than a strict interpretation would warrant, since Millet and
+Rousseau were the only ones of the group who lived in the village.
+Corot was not acquainted with Millet. Decamps was never in Millet's
+house except as a rare visitor to his studio. Diaz lived in Paris.
+Jacque, the painter of sheep, was a friend of Millet, and for a time
+at least lived at Barbizon in the house where he lodged before he
+procured a home of his own. The artistic relationship between these
+artists is slight, except in the case of Rousseau and Diaz, and even
+there it is only occasionally to be detected. All these men, with
+Dupré, Courbet and Delacroix, were counted heretics in art by the
+Academy and the official critics, and as Millet was the most marked
+figure in the group and was greatly admired and respected by all who
+composed it, it was perhaps natural that they should be considered by
+the public as disciples of the peasant painter of Barbizon.
+
+Here, then, at Barbizon, Millet lived for the remaining twenty-seven
+years of his life, dividing his day between the labors of his farm in
+the morning hours, painting in his studio in the afternoon--he always
+preferred the half-light for painting--and in the evening enjoying the
+society of his wife and children and of such friends as might join the
+circle. Occasional visits to Paris, to the galleries, and to the
+studios of his artist-circle, kept him in touch with the world to
+which he belonged. His books, too, were his unfailing companions,
+though he never cared to stray far beyond the circle of his youthful
+friendships, Homer, and Virgil, and especially the Bible, which he
+looked upon as the book of painters, the inexhaustible source of the
+noblest and most touching subjects, capable of expression in the
+grandest forms.
+
+But it was in the rural life about him, the life in which he actively
+shared, that he found the world wherein he could pour all his
+thoughts, feelings, and experiences with the certainty of seeing them
+emerge in forms answering to his conception. It was not until he came
+to Barbizon that he began truly to live the artist-life as he
+understood it, where the work is a faithful reflection of the only
+things a man really cares for--the things he knows by heart. In the
+pictures painted at Barbizon, and in the multitude of slight sketches
+for subjects never painted, with finished drawings and pastels, Millet
+has composed a series of moral eclogues well worthy of a place with
+those of Virgil and Theocritus. All the world knows them; all the
+world loves them: the "Mother Feeding Her Children," "The Peasant
+Grafting," "The First Step," "Going to Work," "The Sower," "The
+Gleaners," "The Sheep-Shearing," "The Angelus"--even to name them
+would carry us far beyond our limits. They made the fame of Millet
+while he still lived, although the pecuniary reward of his labors was
+not what they deserved nor what it would have been had he earlier
+found his true way or had his life been prolonged to the normal limit.
+He died in 1875 at the age of sixty-one. Since his death more than one
+of his pictures has been sold at a price exceeding all that he earned
+during his whole lifetime. Seen from the world's side, there was much
+in his life that was sad and discouraging, but from the spiritual side
+there was far more to cheer and uplift. His private life was honorable
+and happy, his friends were many and among the chosen ones of the
+time, and he had the happiness of seeing his work accepted and rated
+at something like its true worth before he left it.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+MEISSONIER[7]
+
+         [Footnote 7: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(1813-1891)
+
+
+[Illustration: Meissonier.]
+
+Among the many beautiful paintings collected in the Metropolitan
+Museum of Art of New York, there is one that always attracts a crowd,
+on the free-days and holidays when the general public finds admission.
+This is the picture called simply, "Friedland: 1807," and representing
+the soldiers of Napoleon saluting the emperor at the battle of
+Friedland. It was painted by Jean Louis Meissonier for the late A. T.
+Stewart, of New York, who paid for it what seemed a very large sum,
+$60,000; but when Mr. Stewart died, and his pictures were sold at
+auction, this painting brought the still larger sum of $66,000,
+showing that a great many people admired the work, and were willing to
+pay a good price for it. The picture was bought by Judge Hilton, of
+New York, and was presented by him to the Metropolitan Museum as a
+memorial of the long friendship that had existed between himself and
+Mr. Stewart. No doubt the facts of the high price paid for the
+picture, and that a gift of such value should be made to the Museum,
+have caused a great many people to look at the painting with more
+interest than they would, had the circumstances been less uncommon.
+But a great many more people find this picture interesting for its own
+sake; they are moved rather by the spirited way in which it tells its
+story, and find their curiosity excited by the studious accuracy shown
+by the artist in the painting of every detail.
+
+The scene of the action is a field that has been planted with grain
+which now lies trampled under the feet of men and horses. The
+turning-point in the battle has been reached, and in the joy of coming
+victory, the body-guard of the emperor, spurring their jaded horses to
+the hillock where he sits on his white charger surrounded by his
+mounted staff, salute him with loud cries as they rush madly by him.
+Napoleon, calm and self-possessed, returns the salute, but it is plain
+his thoughts are busier with the battle that is raging in the distance
+than with these demonstrations of his body-guard's loyalty. This
+picture was the favorite work of the artist; he calls it, "the life
+and joy of my studio," and he is said to have worked on it at
+intervals during fifteen years.
+
+[Illustration: Meissonier's Atelier.]
+
+Somebody has said that "genius" means nothing but "taking pains." In
+that case, Meissonier must have been a man of genius, for, with
+whatever he painted, were it small or great, he took infinite pains,
+never content until he had done everything in his power to show things
+exactly as they were. Thus, in the picture we have just been
+describing, we may be sure that we know, from looking at it, exactly
+how Napoleon was dressed on the day of Friedland, and also how each
+member of his military staff was dressed; not a button, nor a strap,
+nor any smallest detail but has been faithfully copied from the thing
+itself, while every head in the group is a trustworthy portrait. When
+it was not possible to get the actual dress worn by the person he was
+painting, Meissonier spared no pains nor money to obtain an exact
+copy. How it was in the case of the "Friedland," we do not know, but
+when he painted the "March to Paris," Meissonier borrowed from the
+Museum, in Paris, where relics of all the kings of France are kept
+(the _Musée des Souverains_), the famous "little gray riding-coat"
+worn by Napoleon at the battle of the Pyramids and in other
+engagements. This coat, Meissonier had copied by a tailor, with the
+minutest accuracy, and it was then worn by the model while he was
+painting the picture. The same pains were taken with the cuirassiers
+who are dashing across the front of the picture in the "Friedland." As
+will be seen on looking closely, one model served for all the men in
+the front rank, but as the uniform was the same it was only necessary
+to vary the attitude. The uniform and all the accoutrements were
+carefully reproduced by workmen from originals of the time, borrowed
+by Meissonier for the purpose, and the model was then mounted on a
+jointed wooden horse and made to take the attitude required: the
+action of the horse was as carefully studied from that of the living
+animal. By the time that Meissonier came to paint this picture, he was
+so famous an artist, and had gained such a place in the world, that he
+could have almost anything he asked for to aid him in his work. So,
+when, with the same desire for accuracy that he had shown in painting
+other parts of the picture, he came to paint the trampled grain, the
+Government, or so we are told, bought the use of a field of ripe grain
+and lent Meissonier the services of a company of cuirassiers who were
+set to dashing about in it until they had got it into proper
+condition. We can see that the cost of all this accuracy would, in the
+end, amount to a considerable sum, and when we reckon the time of an
+artist so distinguished as Meissonier, it is not so surprising as it
+may have appeared at first, that his picture should have brought so
+much money.
+
+Of course, Meissonier did not come all at once to fame and prosperity.
+The rewards he gained were such as are earned only by hard and
+constant labor. When he came to Paris about the year 1832, from Lyons,
+where he was born, he was about nineteen years old. His parents were
+in humble circumstances, and would seem to have been able to do
+nothing to advance the lad, who arrived in Paris with little money in
+his pocket, and with no friends at hand. He had, however, the
+materials out of which friends and money are made: health, a generous
+spirit, energy, and a clear purpose, and with these he went to work.
+We do not hear much about his early life in Paris. When he first
+appears in sight, he is working in the same studio with Daubigny, the
+landscape-painter, the two painting pictures for a dollar the square
+yard, religious pictures probably, and probably also copies, to be
+sent into the country and hung up in the parish churches. Although
+this may have seemed like hardship at the time, yet there is no doubt
+it was good practice, for among artists we are told it is an accepted
+doctrine that in order to paint on a small scale really well, you must
+be able to paint on a larger. And it is said that Meissonier was in
+the habit all his life of making life-size studies in order to keep
+his style from falling into pettiness. So, after all, the painting of
+these big pictures may have been a useful ordeal for the artist who
+for the next sixty years was to reap fame by painting small ones.
+
+While he was earning a scanty living by this hack-work, Meissonier
+found time to paint two pictures which he sent to the Salon of 1836.
+One of these attracted the attention of a clever artist, Tony
+Johannot, who introduced him to Léon Cogniet, with whom he studied for
+a time, but from whom he learned but little. The mechanism of his art
+he had pretty well mastered already, as was shown by the Salon
+accepting his early pictures, and the chief advantage he gained from
+his stay in Cogniet's studio was a wider acquaintance with the world
+of artists; for Cogniet was a favorite teacher, and had a great many
+pupils, not a few of whom became distinguished painters. But his style
+of painting was not one to attract Meissonier, who was ambitious to
+paint like the old Dutch artists, Terburg, Metzu, Mieris, and others,
+who have the charm that their pictures are finished with the most
+exquisite minuteness, and yet treated in such a large way that, after
+awhile, we forget the microscopic wonder of the performance and think
+only of the skill the artist has shown in painting character.
+Meissonier was the first artist to bring back into favor the Dutch
+school of painting of the seventeenth century. Louis XIV., who set the
+fashion in everything in his day, had set the fashion of despising the
+Dutch painters, and the French people had never unlearned the lesson.
+It was Meissonier who brought back the taste, and taught the public to
+admire these small panels where interest in the subject is for the
+most part lost in the exquisite beauty of the painting and where the
+Dutch painters of similar subjects are successfully met on their own
+ground and equalled in every respect except in the charm of color.
+
+There is an old saying: "Imitation is the sincerest mode of flattery;"
+and Meissonier's immediate success with the public was the signal for
+a bevy of imitators to try to win a like success by like methods. Some
+of these artists were very clever, but an imitator is but an imitator
+after all, and is more apt to call attention to his model than to
+himself. It must be admitted that Meissonier himself has suffered
+somewhat in the same way: the evident fact that his methods of
+painting were inspired by the study of the Dutch masters has led to
+his being called an imitator, and his pictures are often compared, and
+not to their advantage, with those of his models. Meissonier is,
+however, very much more than an imitator; he was inspired by the Dutch
+painters, but he soon found a way of his own, and he has put so much
+of himself into his work, that the charge of imitation long since
+ceased to be brought against him.
+
+While he was still not much known to the public, the Duke of Orleans
+bought of him, for six hundred francs, a picture that to-day is worth
+thirty thousand francs. As is usual in such affairs, the purchase was
+made, not by the duke in person, but by an agent: in this case, it was
+his secretary, M. Adaline, who bought the picture from Meissonier, who
+as an acknowledgment of the service gave the secretary a water-color
+drawing which, to-day, like everything coming from the hand of
+Meissonier, would bring the owner a good round sum if offered for
+sale.
+
+In 1865, Meissonier's son Charles, himself a very good painter, went
+to a costume-ball dressed like a Fleming of the seventeenth century
+and looking as if he had stepped out of a picture by Terburg. The
+costume had been made with the greatest accuracy, and Meissonier was
+so pleased with his son's appearance that he made a study and sold it
+for two thousand francs. Twenty years after, in 1884, hearing that it
+was to be sold at auction, and desiring, out of affection for his son,
+to have the study back again, he asked his friend, M. Petit, to buy it
+for him, at whatever cost. A rich Parisian, M. Secretan, who had a
+collection of pictures since become famous--it was to him that
+Millet's "L'Angelus" belonged--and who had such an admiration for
+Meissonier and his work that he had paid no less than four hundred
+thousand francs for his picture "Les Cuirassiers," hearing from M.
+Petit of Meissonier's desire for the portrait of his son, bought the
+picture for twenty-five thousand francs and presented it to the
+artist. These stories are told only as illustrations of the growth of
+Meissonier's reputation and of the increased number of people who
+desire to have an example of his work. The rise in value of a small
+sketch of a single figure, from $500 to $5,000, in fifteen years, is
+no greater in proportion than has happened in the case of every one of
+Meissonier's pictures, drawings, studies, and even his slight
+sketches, on some of which originally he would have placed no value at
+all. Yet everything he left behind him, even unconsidered trifles, are
+found to be of value, and the sale of the contents of his studio just
+ended in Paris brought nearly five hundred thousand francs, although
+the collection contained not a single finished picture of importance,
+but was made up almost entirely of unfinished studies and of sketches.
+
+Meissonier's industry was constant and untiring. It is told of him
+that he rarely had the pencil or the brush out of his hand when in the
+house, and that when he called at a friend's house and was kept
+waiting he used the spare minutes in sketching upon the first piece of
+paper that he found at hand. One of his friends, who knew of this
+habit, collected in the course of many visits he received from the
+artist enough of these scraps to fill a small album; while it is told
+of another of his friends that he instructed his servant to put beside
+Meissonier's coffee-cup after dinner a number of bits of paper of the
+size of cigarette-papers but of better quality on which Meissonier in
+his absent way would fall to drawing as he chatted with his
+companions. After dinner these jottings remained as a valuable
+memorial of his visit. Perhaps if they were all collected, these
+slight affairs might bring enough at auction to pay for all the
+dinners to which the prudent host had invited the artist.
+
+The world of subjects included in Meissonier's art was a very narrow
+one, and was not calculated to interest men and women in general. The
+nearest that he came to striking the popular note was in his Napoleon
+subjects, and beside the excellence of the painting, these pictures
+really make a valuable series of historical documents by reason of
+their accuracy. But the greater number of the pictures which he left
+behind him are chiefly interesting from the beautiful way in which
+they are painted: we accept the subject for the sake of the art. The
+world rewarded him for all this patient labor, this exquisite
+workmanship, by an immense fortune that enabled him to live in
+splendor, and to be generous without stint. From the humble lodgings
+of his youth in the Rue des Ecouffes, he passed, in time, to the
+palace in the Place Malsherbes where he spent the latter half of his
+long life in luxurious surroundings: pictures and statues, rich
+furniture, tapestries and armor and curiosities of art from every
+land. But the visitor, after passing through all this splendor, came
+upon the artist in a studio, ample and well lighted indeed, but
+furnished only for work, where, to the end of his life, he pursued his
+industrious calling with all the energy and ardor of youth. He died in
+1891, and was buried by the government with all the honors that
+befitted one of her most illustrious citizens.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+ROSA BONHEUR[8]
+
+         [Footnote 8: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(BORN 1822)
+
+
+A girl of something over ten, of sturdy build, with a dark complexion,
+deep blue eyes, and strong features crowned by a head of clustering
+curls, is sitting in the window of a plainly furnished room, high up
+in an apartment-house in Paris. In a cage at her side is a parrot,
+which, with its head on one side, is gravely calling out the letters
+of the alphabet, while the child as gravely repeats them, interrupting
+the lesson every now and then by a visit to the other side of the
+room, where a pet lamb greets its young mistress with a friendly
+bleat.
+
+This is our first glimpse of Rosalie, known now to all the world as
+Rosa Bonheur, the painter of "The Horse Fair" and of many another
+picture, which have earned for her the distinction of the best
+animal-painter of her time.
+
+Her father's family belonged to Bordeaux. Raymond Bonheur had gone up
+as a youth to Paris to study art. After the usual apprenticeship to
+privation which art exacts from her servants, he had become moderately
+successful, when the condition of his parents, now old and
+poorly-off, moved him to return to Bordeaux and do what he could to
+make their life easier. As the chances for a professional artist were
+small, he adopted the modest employment of drawing-teacher. His skill
+soon brought him pupils; among them a young lady from Altona, between
+whom and her teacher a mutual interest sprang up which led to their
+marriage. Raymond Bonheur brought his wife home to his father's house,
+where she was welcomed as a daughter, and for the brief term of her
+life all went well. What the husband earned by his drawing-lessons,
+the wife supplemented by her lessons in music; but this happiness was
+not to last. The parents of Raymond Bonheur died, and then, after not
+more than twelve years of marriage, the wife died, leaving behind her
+four children, Rosalie, Francois-Auguste, Jules-Isidore, and Juliette.
+
+[Illustration: Rosa Bonheur.]
+
+Rosalie is the best known of these four children of Raymond Bonheur;
+but each of them has honorably connected his name with the art of
+modern France. Francois-Auguste has a reputation as an animal-painter
+almost equal to that of his sister Rosa. A fine picture painted by
+him, "Cattle in the Forest of Fontainebleau," was once the property of
+the late A. T. Stewart. His merit secured him the Cross of the Legion
+of Honor in 1867. He died in 1880. The other brother, Jules-Isidore,
+has gained distinction as a sculptor of animals; most of his work is
+on a small scale, but he has designed some large pieces that decorate
+his sister's château near Fontainebleau. Juliette Bonheur married a M.
+Peyrol, and joining her family-name to his, is known in the art-world
+as Mme. Peyrol Bonheur. It is thus she signs her pictures, mostly
+still-life and animal subjects, which have gained for her a good
+position among the minor artists of France.
+
+Rosa, the eldest of the family, born in 1822, was ten years old when
+her mother died. Not long after, Raymond Bonheur decided to leave
+Bordeaux and to return to Paris, where the chances for professional
+success were better than in a provincial town, and where there were
+greater opportunities for the education of his young children. The
+change proved very distasteful, however, to the little ones.
+Accustomed to the comparative freedom of the town in which they had
+been brought up, and where their family had been so long rooted that
+their circle of friends and relatives gave them playmates and
+companions in plenty, they found themselves very lonely in Paris,
+where they were reduced for a good part of the time to such amusement
+as they could find in the narrow quarters of their rooms on the sixth
+floor of an apartment-house. It is not the custom in Paris for the
+children, even of the poor, to make a playground of the street, and
+our little ones had nobody to walk out with them but an old servant
+who had come with them from Bordeaux, and who was ill-fitted, for all
+her virtues, to take a mother's place to the children. She was honest
+and faithful, but like all of her class, she liked routine and order,
+and she could make no allowances for the restlessness of her
+bright-minded charge. Rosa was her especial torment; the black sheep
+of the brood. Household tasks she despised, and study, as it was
+pursued in the successive schools to which her despairing father sent
+her, had no charms for her. Her best playmates were animals; the
+horses and dogs she saw in the streets and which she fearlessly
+accosted; the sheep that found itself queerly lodged on the top floor
+of a city house; and the parrot which, as we have seen, was not only
+her playmate but her schoolmaster.
+
+There came a time when the charge of such a child, so averse to rules
+and so given to strange ways of passing her time, became too much for
+the old servant with her orthodox views of life, and she persuaded
+Rosa's father to put her as a day-scholar with the nuns at Chaillot, a
+small suburb of Paris. How it happened that she was allowed to go back
+and forth alone, between home and school, we do not know; but it is
+not to be wondered at if she were irregular in her hours; if, one day,
+she set the nuns wondering why she did not appear at school-opening,
+and another day put the old servant into a twitter because she did not
+come home in season. The truth was, she had found that there was
+something better in Paris than streets and shops and tall houses; she
+had discovered a wood there, a veritable forest, with trees, and pools
+of water, and birds, and wild flowers, and though this enchanted spot
+which citizens called the Bois de Boulogne--not then a formal park as
+it is to-day--was off the road to Chaillot, yet it was not so far that
+she need fear getting lost in going there or in coming back. No
+wonder, then, if, once this way discovered of escape from tiresome
+school duties, it was travelled so often by Rosalie, and that her
+school-work became in consequence so unsatisfactory that at length the
+patient nuns remonstrated. They advised Rosa's father, since she
+neither would nor could learn anything from books, that it would be
+better to put her to some useful trade by which she might earn her
+living; and the good sisters suggested--dressmaking! The wisdom of
+these ladies, who could not see that they were dealing with the last
+woman in the world to whom dressmaking could be interesting, was
+matched by that of the father, who showed himself so blind to the
+character of his daughter that he resolved to act at once upon the
+advice of the nuns; and without consulting the wishes of poor Rosalie
+he apprenticed her straightway to a Parisian dressmaker. The docile
+girl allowed the yoke to be slipped over her head without complaint,
+but the confinement wore upon her health and spirits, and after a
+short trial the experiment had to be abandoned. Her father yielded to
+her entreaties and took her home.
+
+[Illustration: Rosa Bonheur.]
+
+The girl was long in coming to a knowledge of herself. Although she
+was to be, in time, a famous artist, the familiar legend of the
+biographers is wanting in her case; we read nothing about scribbled
+books or walls defaced by childish sketches, nor does she appear to
+have handled a pencil or a brush until she was a girl well grown.
+Her father's means were not sufficient to give Rosa or his other
+children an education such as he could wish; but an expedient
+suggested itself in his perplexity over this latest experiment in
+providing for his eldest daughter: he proposed to the principal of a
+young ladies' school where he taught drawing, that his services should
+be accepted in payment of Rosa's education. The offer was accepted,
+and in the regular course of study Rosa became a member of her
+father's drawing-class. It was not long before she surpassed all her
+school-fellows in that department, and found herself for the first
+time in her life in possession of the key to that happiness which
+consists in knowing what we can do, and feeling the strength within us
+to do it. Some of the biographers of Rosa's life speak of unhappy days
+at this school: the richer girls made sport of the dress of the
+drawing-master's daughter, and of her independent, awkward ways. Her
+progress in drawing, too, was counterbalanced by her slowness in her
+other studies; in fact her new accomplishment was such a delight to
+her, that in her devotion to it she became less and less interested in
+her books; and as for dress--that it should be clean and suited both
+to her means and to the work she was doing, was all that concerned
+her, then or since!
+
+At the end of her first year in school, Rosa obtained her father's
+permission to give up her other studies and to enter his studio as
+pupil and assistant. From that time, though as yet she had not found
+the reason of her vocation, yet her true life had begun. She worked
+diligently under the direction of a master she loved, and her father,
+in his turn, delighted at the discovery of a talent so long hid,
+redoubled his efforts to advance his pupil and to make up for lost
+time.
+
+Rosa worked for some months at copying in the Louvre, but though she
+worked with such diligence and skill as to win the praise of the
+director, she came, after a time, to feel that the mere copying of the
+works of other men, however great, was not the goal she was striving
+after; so one day she took a sudden determination, left the Louvre,
+packed up her painting materials, and started off for one of the rural
+suburbs of Paris, where she sat herself down to sketch from nature.
+Her love of animals, hitherto an aimless pleasure, now took on a new
+phase as she saw her beloved cows and sheep in their place in nature
+giving life and animation to the landscape.
+
+In the winter season, when work out-of-doors was no longer pleasant or
+profitable, Rosa made what use she could of the few opportunities
+Paris had to offer for the study of animals. She spent what time she
+could spare from work at the horse-market; she visited the
+slaughter-houses, and the suburban fairs where cattle and horses,
+sheep and pigs compete for prizes, and in these places she filled her
+portfolios with sketches.
+
+In 1840 she sent her first picture to the Salon, and as it was
+accepted and well received, she continued to send her work every year;
+but, up to 1849, her pictures were small, and had little more interest
+than belongs to simple studies from nature; 1849 was a memorable year
+to her, as it was to France. In this year her father died of cholera,
+just as he had been appointed director of the School of Design for
+Young Girls. Rosa was appointed to succeed him with the title of
+Honorary Directress, and her sister Juliette was made a teacher in the
+school. In the same year she exhibited the picture that may be said to
+have made her reputation with the artists and amateurs, as well as
+with the general public. This was her "Oxen of Cantal," a picture that
+combined with no little feeling for landscape the most admirable
+painting of cattle in repose. Its high qualities were immediately
+recognized. Horace Vernet, in the name of the Provisional Government,
+presented her with a handsome vase of Sèvres porcelain, and the gold
+medal for painting. In 1851, the jury selected for exhibition at the
+World's Fair in London another picture by Rosa, "Ploughing in the
+Nivernais," which made the artist's name known to England, where the
+national love of animals secured for her no end of praise and of
+substantial reward. In 1856 Rosa painted her most popular picture,
+"The Horse Fair," now in the Metropolitan Museum. This painting went
+from Paris to London, where it was bought for rising £1,500, and
+created such an interest in the artist's personality as would have
+turned the head of any ordinary woman; but Rosa Bonheur's whole life
+proves her no ordinary woman.
+
+For many years Mlle. Bonheur lived in Paris in a house surrounded by a
+large garden where she kept a number of animals, partly for the
+pleasure of their companionship, partly for the opportunity it gave
+her of studying their habits, and using them as models. She now
+resides in the Château By, near Fontainebleau, where she leads the
+same industrious life in her advancing years that she did in the
+beginning of her career. She rises early, and works at her painting
+all day, and often spends the evening in drawing: for she takes but
+little interest in what is called society, and cares only for the
+companionship of her intimate friends, which she can enjoy without
+disarranging her life, or neglecting the studies she loves. She
+dresses with great simplicity at all times, and even when she accepts
+invitations, makes no concessions to the caprices of fashion. In her
+student-days, when visiting the abattoirs, markets, and fairs, she
+accustomed herself to wear such a modification of man's dress as would
+permit her to move about among rough men without compromising her sex.
+But, beside that her dignity was always safe in her own keeping, she
+bears testimony to the good manners and the good dispositions of the
+men she came in contact with. Rosa Bonheur has always been an honor to
+art and an honor to her sex. At seventy-two she finds herself in the
+enjoyment of many things that go to make a happy life. She has a
+well-earned fame as an artist; an abundant fortune gained by her own
+industry and used as honorably as it has been gained; and she has
+troops of friends drawn to her by her solid worth of character.
+
+Of the great number of pictures Rosa Bonheur has painted, by far the
+most are of subjects found in France, but a few of the best were
+painted in Scotland. She has received many public honors in medals and
+decorations. In 1856, after painting the "Horse Fair," the Empress
+Eugénie visited her at her studio and bestowed upon her the Cross of
+the Legion of Honor, fastening the decoration to the artist's dress
+with her own hands. When the invading army of Prussia reached Paris,
+the Crown Prince gave orders that the studio of Rosa Bonheur should be
+respected. But though she, no doubt, holds all these honors at their
+worth, yet she holds still more dear the art to which she owes, not
+only these, but all that has made her life a treasury of happy
+remembrances.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+GÉRÔME[9]
+
+         [Footnote 9: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(BORN 1824)
+
+
+[Illustration: Gérôme.]
+
+In the Paris Salon of 1847, a small picture appeared, representing a
+Greek boy and girl stirring up two game-cocks to fight. Although it
+was the work of an unknown painter, and had to contend with an
+unusually brilliant display of pictures, many of them by men already
+famous, yet it strongly attracted the general public, partly by the
+novelty of the subject, and partly by the careful and finished manner
+of the painting. It delighted the critics as well, and one of the most
+distinguished of them, Théophile Gautier, wrote: "A new Greek is born
+to us, and his name is Gérôme!"
+
+This picture, which was to prove the first leaf in a laurel-crown to
+be awarded the painter in his lifetime, and not, as is so often the
+case, by the tardy hand of Death, was the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a
+young man of twenty-three. He had been for six years under the
+teaching of Paul Delaroche, part of the time in Italy, but most of it
+in Paris. He was born at Vesoul, a small, dull town in the Department
+of Haute-Saône, in 1824. His father was a goldsmith, who, like most
+French fathers in his rank of life, had hoped to bring up his son to
+succeed him in his business. The boy did for a time, we believe, work
+in his father's shop, but he had a stronger natural bent for painting;
+something perhaps in the occupation fostered, or even created, this
+taste--for not a few distinguished painters have been apprenticed to
+the goldsmith's trade--and his father, like a wise man, instead of
+opposing his son's wishes, did what he could to further them. He
+bought him painting-materials; and instead of sending him to a "school
+of design," or putting him under the tutelage of some third-rate
+drawing-master, such as is commonly found in country towns, he bought
+him a picture by Decamps, an artist since become famous, but then just
+in the dawn of his fame, and put it before his son as a model. Young
+Gérôme made a copy of this picture, and an artist from Paris, who
+happened to be passing through Vesoul, saw it, and discerning the
+boy's talent, gave him a letter to Paul Delaroche, encouraging him to
+go to Paris and there to take up the study of art as a profession. At
+seventeen years of age, with his father's consent and $250 in his
+pocket, Gérôme went up to Paris, and presenting his letter to
+Delaroche, was well received by him, and entered the School of Fine
+Arts (École des Beaux-Arts) as his pupil.
+
+He had been with Delaroche three years and had proved himself one of
+the most loyal and diligent of his pupils, when an event occurred,
+insignificant in itself, but which was to have an important influence
+upon his life and give a new direction to his talent.
+
+French studios are not as a rule very orderly places. The young men
+who frequent them are left pretty much to themselves, with no one to
+govern them or to oversee them. The artist they are studying under
+makes, at the most, a brief daily visit, going the round of the
+easels, saying a word or two to each pupil, although it often happens
+that he says nothing, and then departs for his proper work, leaving
+his pupils to their own devices. The students are for the most part
+like young men everywhere, a turbulent set, full of animal spirits,
+which sometimes carry them beyond reasonable bounds. It was a
+boisterous outbreak of this sort, but far wilder than common, that
+occurred in the studio of Delaroche, and which brought about the
+crisis in Gérôme's life to which we have alluded. Fortunately for him,
+the incident took place while Gérôme was on a visit to his parents at
+Vesoul, so that he was in no way implicated in the affair. He came
+back to find the studio closed; Delaroche, deeply disturbed, had
+dismissed all his pupils and announced his intention to visit Italy.
+His studio was to be taken during his absence, by Gleyre, and he
+advised those of his pupils in whom he took a personal interest, to
+continue their studies under his successor. Gérôme was one of those to
+whom he gave this advice, but Gérôme was too much attached to his
+master to leave him for another, and bluntly announced his purpose of
+following him to Rome. A few of the other pupils of Delaroche were of
+the same mind, and they all set out for Italy together. Arrived in
+Rome, Gérôme, always a hard worker, threw himself energetically into
+his studies; drawing the ancient buildings, the Capitol, the
+Colosseum; sketching in the Forum and on the Campagna; copying the
+pictures and the statues, saturating his mind in the spirit of antique
+art, and schooling his hand in its forms, until he had laid up a rich
+store of material for use in future pictures. On his return to Paris
+he worked for a while in Gleyre's studio, but when Delaroche came back
+from Italy, Gérôme again joined him and renewed his old relation as
+pupil and assistant--working, among other tasks, on the painting of
+"Charlemagne Crossing the Alps," a commission given to Delaroche by
+the Government, for the _Grande Galerie des Batailles_ at Versailles:
+a vast apartment lined with pictures of all the victories of the
+French from Soissons to Solferino.
+
+Such work as this, however, had little interest for Gérôme. His mind
+at this time was full of the Greeks and Romans; his enthusiasm for
+Napoleon, which later was to give birth to so many pictures, had not
+yet awakened; nor did he care for the subjects from the histories of
+France and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that
+had provided his master, Delaroche, with so many tragic themes for his
+pencil: "The Death of the Duke of Guise," "The Children of Edward,"
+the "Death of Queen Elizabeth," "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey,"
+"Cromwell at the Coffin of Charles I.," and others of the same strain.
+
+Gérôme's visit to Italy had awakened in him a strong interest in the
+life of the antique world, and this would naturally be strengthened by
+all that he would hear and see of the growing interest of the public
+in the same subject: an interest kindled by the discoveries of
+archaeologists in classic soil: in Greece and Italy, in Assyria and
+Egypt. These discoveries had filled the museums and the cabinets of
+private collectors with beautiful and interesting fragments
+illustrating the external life of the past, and illuminating its
+poetry; and it is no wonder that some of the younger artists rejoiced
+in the new world of anecdote and story that opened so richly before
+them.
+
+However it came about--whether his own interest in the antique life
+communicated itself to his fellows, or whether they, all together,
+simply shared in the interest taken in the subject by the world about
+them--Gérôme and some of his companions in Delaroche's studio showed
+such a predilection for classic themes, that they were nicknamed by
+the critics "The New Greeks." Among Gérôme's fellow-pupils were two
+young men, Hamon and Aubert, who later gained no small applause by
+their playful and familiar way of treating classic themes. They are
+well known to us by engravings from their pictures, which are in all
+our shops. Hamon's "My Sister is not at home," and Aubert's various
+pretty fancies of nymphs and cupids, while they are not great works of
+art, are reasonably sure of a long life, due to their innocent
+freshness and simplicity.
+
+Delaroche's pupils were working all together in friendly competition
+for the grand Roman prize which was to give the fortunate one the
+right to four years' study in Rome at the expense of the state.
+Gérôme's studio was shared by his friends Picou and Hamon. Hamon,
+writing in later years about his youthful days, says: "Companions and
+rivals at the same time, we were all working together for the Grand
+Prix de Rome. Gérôme inspired us all with the love of hard work, and
+of hard work to the accompaniment of singing and laughing."
+
+But in the intervals of his hard work for the prize, Gérôme was also
+working on a picture which he hoped to have accepted for the Salon.
+This was the picture we spoke of in the beginning of this notice: "Two
+Young Greeks stirring-up Game-cocks to fight." When it was finished
+Gérôme showed it to his master with many misgivings; but Delaroche
+encouraged him to send it to the Salon. It was accepted, and as we
+have seen, won for Gérôme a great success with the public. The next
+year, 1848, he again exhibited, but the impression he made was less
+marked than on the first occasion. His former picture had a subject
+such as it was, of his own devising. The "Cock-fight" was not an
+illustration of any passage in Greek poetry, and in spite of its
+antique setting, it had a modern air, and to this, no doubt, its
+popularity was largely due. But in 1848 he essayed an illustration of
+the Greek poet, Anacreon, translating into picture the poem that tells
+how, one winter evening, sitting by his fire, the old poet was
+surprised by a sound of weeping outside his door, and opening it,
+found Cupid wet and shivering and begging for a shelter from the cold.
+The man takes the pretty, dimpled mischief to his bosom, warms his
+feet and hands at the fire, dries his bow and arrows, and lets him sip
+wine from his cup. Then, when Cupid is refreshed and warmed, he tries
+his arrows, now here, now there, and at last aims one straight at his
+benefactor's heart, and laughing at the jest, flies out at the open
+door. Gérôme's picture was in three panels. The first showed the poet
+opening the door to the sobbing Cupid, with his bedraggled wings and
+dripping curls; in the next, the rosy ingrate wounds his benefactor;
+in the third, the poet sits disconsolate by his hearth, musing over
+the days when Love was his guest, if but for an hour. As the story was
+an old one, so many an artist before Gérôme had played with it as a
+subject for a picture. Jean-François Millet himself, another pupil of
+Delaroche, though earlier than Gérôme, had tried his hand at
+illustrating Anacreon's fable before he found his proper field of work
+in portraying the occupations of the men and women about him, the
+peasants among whom he was born and bred.
+
+Gérôme's picture did nothing to advance his fortunes with the public.
+1848 was a stormy time in France and in all Europe, and people were
+not in the mood to be amused with such trifles as Anacreon and his
+Cupid. The pictures in that year's Salon that drew the public in
+crowds about them were Couture's "The Romans of the Decline of the
+Empire," in which all Paris saw, or thought it saw, the
+handwriting-on-the-wall for the government of Louis-Philippe; and the
+"Shipwrecked Sailors in a Bark," of Delacroix, a wild and stormy scene
+of terror that seemed to echo the prophecies of evil days at hand for
+France with which the time was rife.
+
+Gérôme's next picture, however, was to bring him once more before the
+public, and to carry his name beyond his native France even as far as
+America. Leaving for the nonce his chosen field of antiquity, where
+yet he was to distinguish himself, he looked for a subject in the
+Paris of his own day. "The Duel after the Masquerade" opens for us a
+corner of the Bois de Boulogne--the fashionable park on the outskirts
+of Paris--where in the still dawn of a winter's day, a group of men
+are met to witness a duel between two of their companions who have
+quarrelled at a masked ball. The ground is covered with a light fall
+of snow; the bare branches of the trees weave their network across the
+gray sky, and in the distance we see the carriages that have brought
+the disputants to the field. The duel is over. One of the men, dressed
+in the costume of Pierrot, the loose white trousers and slippers, the
+baggy white shirt, and white skull-cap, falls, mortally wounded, into
+the arms of his second: the pallor of coming death masked by the
+white-painted face. The other combatant, a Mohawk Indian (once a
+staple character at every masked-ball in Paris: curious survival of
+the popularity of Cooper's novels), is led wounded off the field by a
+friend dressed as Harlequin. Gérôme in this striking picture showed
+for the first time that talent as a story-teller to which he is so
+largely indebted for his reputation. Whatever his subject may be, it
+is always set forth in the clearest manner, so that everyone may
+understand the story without the need of an interpreter.
+
+Leaving out of view the few pictures he painted illustrating passages
+in Napoleon's career, it may be said that Gérôme's taste led him away
+from scenes of modern life; for even his many oriental subjects so
+relate to forms of life belonging in reality to the past, that they
+make no exception to the statement. He did not therefore follow up
+"The Duel" with other comments on the follies of modern society--for
+in the temper of that time this picture, like Couture's "Roman Orgie"
+and Millet's "Man with the Hoe," was looked upon as a satire and a
+warning, and owed its popularity as much to this conviction on the
+part of the public as to its pictorial merits--but returned to antique
+times, and showed in his treatment of themes from that source an
+equal, if not a greater power to interest the public.
+
+Gérôme's two pictures, the "Ave Cæsar! Morituri te Salutant," "Hail,
+Cæsar! Those about to die, salute Thee," and "The Gladiators," are so
+universally known as to need no description. Whatever criticism may be
+made upon them, they will always remain interesting to the world at
+large; from their subject, from the way in which the discoveries of
+archæology are made familiar, and, not least, from the impression they
+make of the artist's own strong interest in what he had to say. In
+both pictures he succeeded in showing the Colosseum as no longer a
+ruin, but as, so to speak, a living place peopled by the swarm of the
+Roman populace, with the emperor and his court, and the College of the
+Vestal Virgins, and, for chief actors, the hapless wretches who are
+"butchered to make a Roman holiday." Another picture that greatly
+increased Gérôme's reputation, was his "Death of Julius Cæsar," though
+it must be confessed there was a touch of the stage in the arrangement
+of the scene, and in the action of the body of senators and
+conspirators leaving the hall with brandished swords and as if singing
+in chorus, that was absent from the pictures of the amphitheatre.
+There was also less material for the curiosity of the lovers of
+archæology; no such striking point, for instance, as the reproduction
+of the gladiators' helmets and armor recently discovered in
+Herculaneum; but the body of the dead Cæsar lying "even at the base of
+Pompey's statue" with his face muffled in his toga, was a masterly
+performance; some critic, moved by the grandeur of the lines, said it
+was not a mere piece of foreshortening, it was "a perspective." Gérôme
+made a life-size painting of the Cæsar in this picture. It is in the
+Corcoran Gallery at Washington.
+
+Gérôme painted several other pictures from classic subjects, but none
+of them had the interest for the general public of those we have
+described. In 1854 he exhibited a huge canvas, called "The Age of
+Augustus," a picture suggested, perhaps, by the "Hemicycle" of his
+master Delaroche, on which he himself had painted. It represented
+heroes, poets, sages, of the Augustan age, grouped about the cradle of
+the infant Christ; it procured for Gérôme the red ribbon of the Legion
+of Honor, and is now, as the artist himself jestingly says, "the
+'greatest' picture in the Museum of Amiens." In the same year Gérôme
+went to Egypt for the first time; since then he has more than once
+visited it, but it is doubtful if he could renew the pleasure of his
+youthful experience. "I set out," he says, "with my friends, I the
+fifth, all of us lightly furnished with money, but full of youthful
+enthusiasm. Life was then easy in Egypt; we lived at a very moderate
+rate; we hired a boat and lived four months upon the Nile, hunting,
+painting, fishing by turns, from Damietta to Philæ. We returned to
+Cairo and remained there four months longer in a house in the older
+part of the town, belonging to Soleman Pasha. As Frenchmen, he treated
+us with cordial hospitality. Happy period of youth, of freedom from
+care! Hope and the future opened bright before us; the sky was blue!"
+
+Gérôme's pictures of Eastern life make a gallery by themselves. A few
+of them are historic, such as his "Cleopatra visiting Cæsar," but the
+most of them are simply scenes and incidents drawn from the daily life
+of the modern inhabitants of Cairo and the desert, illustrating their
+manners and customs. The mere titles would fill up a large part of our
+space. Many of the best of them are owned in this country, and all
+have been reproduced by engraving or by photography.
+
+In another field Gérôme won great distinction, painting scenes from
+the history of France in the reign of Louis XIV.; subjects drawn from
+what may be called the high comedy of court-life, and treated by
+Gérôme with remarkable refinement and distinction. Among these
+pictures the best known are: "Molière Breakfasting with Louis XIV.,"
+illustrating the story of the king's rebuke to his courtiers who
+affected to despise the man of genius; "Père Joseph," the priest who
+under the guise of humility and self-abnegation reduces the greatest
+nobles to the state of lackeys; "Louis XIV. Receiving the Great
+Condé," and "Collaboration," two poets of Louis XIV.'s time working
+together over a play. Among his accomplishments as an artist we must
+not forget the talent that Gérôme has shown as a sculptor. He has
+modelled several figures from his own pictures, with such admirable
+skill as to prove that he might easily have made sculpture a
+profession had he not chosen to devote himself to painting.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI[10]
+
+         [Footnote 10: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By EDMUND GOSSE
+
+(1828-1882)
+
+
+[Illustration: Dante Gabriel Rossetti.]
+
+Those whose privilege it was to meet the late Mr. Gabriel Rossetti, at
+once in the plenitude of his powers and in the freshness of their own
+impressions, will not expect to be moved again through life by so
+magnetic a presence. In his dealings with those much younger than
+himself, his tact and influence were unequalled; he received a shy but
+ardent youth with such a noble courtesy, with so much sympathy yet
+with no condescension, with so grand an air and yet so warm a welcome,
+that his new acquaintance was enslaved at the first sentence. This
+seems to me to have been in a certain sense the key-note of the man.
+He was essentially a point of fire; not a peripatetic in any sense,
+not a person of wide circumference, but a nucleus of pure imagination
+that never stirred or shifted, but scintillated in all directions. The
+function of Gabriel Rossetti, or at least his most obvious function,
+was to sit in isolation, and to have vaguely glimmering spirits
+presented to him for complete illumination. He was the most prompt in
+suggestion, the most regal in giving, the most sympathetic in
+response, of the men I have known or seen; and this without a single
+touch of the prophetic manner, the air of such professional seers as
+Coleridge or Carlyle. What he had to give was not mystical or
+abstract; it was purely concrete. His mind was full of practical
+artistic schemes, only a few of which were suited to his own practice
+in painting or poetry; the rest were at the service of whoever would
+come in a friendly spirit and take them. I find among his letters to
+me, which I have just been reading once again, a paper of delightful
+suggestions about the cover of a book of verse; the next youth who
+waited upon him would perhaps be a painter, and would find that the
+great genius and master did not disdain the discussion of
+picture-frames. This was but the undercurrent of his influence; as we
+shall see more and more every year as the central decades of this
+century become history, its main stream directed the two great arts of
+painting and poetry into new channels, and set a score of diverse
+talents in motion.
+
+But, as far as anything can be seen plainly about Rossetti at present,
+to me the fact of his immovability, his self-support, his curious
+reserve, seems to be the most interesting. He held in all things to
+the essential and not to the accidental; he preferred the dry grain of
+musk to a diluted flood of perfume. An Italian by birth and deeply
+moved by all things Italian, he never visited Italy; a lover of ritual
+and a sympathizer with all the mysteries of the Roman creed, he never
+joined the Catholic Church; a poet whose form and substance alike
+influenced almost all the men of his generation, he was more than
+forty years of age before he gave his verse to the public; a painter
+who considered the attitude of the past with more ardor and faith than
+almost any artist of his time, he never chose to visit the churches or
+galleries of Europe. It has been said, among the many absurd things
+which his death has provoked, that he shrank from publicity from
+timidity, or spurned it from ill-temper. One brilliant journalist has
+described him as sulking like Hector in his tent. It used to be
+Achilles who sulked when I was at school; but it certainly never was
+Gabriel Rossetti. Those who only knew him, after his constitution had
+passed under the yoke of the drug which killed him, cannot judge of
+his natural reserve from that artificial and morbid reserve which
+embittered the last years of his life. The former was not connected
+with any objection to new faces or dislike of cordial society, but
+with the indomitable characteristic of the man, which made him give
+out the treasures of the spirit, and never need to receive them. So
+far from disliking society, it is my impression that he craved it as a
+necessity, although he chose to select its constituents and narrow its
+range.
+
+He was born in 1828. The story of his parentage is well known, and has
+been told in full detail since his death. He was born in London and
+christened Gabriel Charles Rossetti; it was not, I am told, until he
+was of age to appreciate the value of the name that he took upon
+himself the cognomen which his father had borne, the Dante by which
+the world, though not his friends, have known him. Living with his
+father in Charlotte street, with two sisters and a brother no less
+ardently trained in letters than himself, he seems to have been turned
+to poetry, as he was afterward sustained in it, by the interior flame.
+The household has been described to me by one who saw it in 1847: the
+father, titular professor of Italian literature, but with no
+professional duties, seated the livelong day, with a shade over his
+eyes, writing devotional or patriotic poetry in his native tongue; the
+girls reading Dante aloud with their rich maiden voices; Gabriel
+buried here in his writing, or darting round the corner of the street
+to the studio where he painted. From this seclusion he wrote to the
+friend who has kindly helped me in preparing these notes, and whose
+memories of the poet extend over a longer period than those of any
+survivor not related to him.
+
+Mr. W. B. Scott, now so well known in more arts than one, had then
+but just published his first book, his mystical and transcendental
+poem of "The Year of the World." This seems to have fallen under
+Rossetti's notice, for on November 25, 1847, he wrote to the author, a
+perfect stranger to himself, a letter of warm sympathy and
+acknowledgment. Mr. Scott was living in Newcastle, and, instead of
+meeting, the young poets at first made acquaintance with each other by
+correspondence. Rossetti soon mentioned, of course, his own schemes
+and ambitions, and he sent, as a sample of his powers, his poems of
+"The Blessed Damozel," and "My Sister's Sleep," which he had written
+about eighteen months before.
+
+Mr. Scott tells me that his first feeling on receiving these poems,
+written in English by an Italian boy of eighteen, was one of
+amazement. I cannot wonder at it. If the "Blessed Damozel," when it
+was published a quarter of a century later, seemed a masterpiece to
+those who had, in the meanwhile, read so much that was vaguely
+inspired by it, what must it have been in 1846? Certain pieces in
+Tennyson's "Poems," of 1842, and a few fragments of Browning's "Bells
+and Pomegranates" were the only English poems which can be supposed to
+have given it birth, even indirectly. In its interpretation of
+mystical thoughts by concrete images, in its mediæval fervor and
+consistence of fancy, in its peculiar metrical facility, it was
+distinctly new--original as few poems except those by the acknowledged
+masters of the craft can ever be.
+
+  "The sun was gone now; the curled moon
+     Was like a little feather
+   Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
+     She spoke through the clear weather.
+   Her voice was like the voice the stars
+     Had when they sang together."
+
+This was a strange accent in 1846. Miss Barrett and Mr. Tennyson were
+then the most accepted poets. Mr. Browning spoke fluently and
+persistently, but only to a very little circle; Mr. Horne's "Orion"
+and Mr. Bailey's "Festus" were the recent outcomes of Keats and
+Goethe; the Spasmodic School, to be presently born of much unwise
+study of "Festus," was still unknown; Mr. Clough, Mr. Matthew Arnold,
+and Mr. Patmore were quite unapparent, taking form and voice in
+solitude; and here was a new singer, utterly unlike them all, pouring
+out his first notes with the precision and independence of the
+new-fledged thrush in the woodland chorus.
+
+In painting, the process was somewhat different. In this art, no less
+than in poetry, Rossetti understood at once what it was that he wished
+to do himself, and what he desired to see others doing; but the
+difficulties of technique were in his way. He had begun to write in
+childhood, but he had taken up design late in his youth, and he had
+undergone no discipline in it. At the present day, when every student
+has to pass a somewhat stringent examination in design, Rossetti, at
+eighteen, could not have entered the schools of the Royal Academy. He
+did so, however, yet without ever advancing to the Life School. The
+soul of art, at this early period, interested him far more than the
+body, especially such a substance as he found under the presidency of
+Sir Martin Shee and the keepership of George Jones. Let us not forget,
+meanwhile, that it is easy to sneer at the incompetence of mannered
+old artists, and yet hard to over-estimate the value of discipline in
+a school, however conventional. Rossetti was too impatient to learn to
+draw, and this he lived to regret. His immediate associates, the young
+men whom he began to lead and impress, were better draughtsmen than
+he. His first oil picture, I believe, was a portrait of his father,
+now in possession of the family. But, as far as can be now made out,
+he did not begin to paint seriously till about January, 1848, when he
+persuaded another Royal Academy student, W. Holman Hunt, to take a
+large room close to the paternal house in Charlotte street, and make
+it their studio. Here Mr. Scott visited them in the early spring of
+that year; he describes to me the large pictures they were struggling
+upon, Hunt, on his "Oath of Rienzi," and Rossetti, on his "Girlhood of
+Mary Virgin." The latter was evidently at present but poorly equipped;
+the painting was timid and boyish, pale in tone, and with no hint or
+promise of that radiant color which afterward became Rossetti's main
+characteristic. But the feeling was identical with that in his far
+more accomplished early poems. The very pulse and throb of mediæval
+adoration pervaded the whole conception of the picture, and Mr.
+Scott's first impression was that, in this marvellous poet and
+possible painter, the new Tractarian movement had found its expositor
+in art. Yet this surely was no such feeble or sentimental echo as had
+inspired the declared Tractarian poets of eight or nine years earlier;
+there was nothing here that recalled such a book as the "Cherwell
+Water Lily" of Father Faber. This contained the genuine fleshly
+mysticism, bodily presentment of a spiritual idea, and intimate
+knowledge of mediæval sentiment without which the new religious fervor
+had no intellectual basis. This strong instinct for the forms of the
+Catholic religion, combined with no attendance on the rites of that
+church, fostered by no study of ecclesiastical literature or
+association with teachers or proselytes, but original to himself and
+self-supported, was at that time without doubt the feature in
+Rossetti's intellectual character which demands our closest attention.
+Nor do I believe that this passion for the physical presentation of a
+mystical idea was ever entirely supplanted by those other views of
+life and art which came to occupy his maturer mind. In his latest
+poems--in "Rose Mary," for instance--I see this first impulse
+returning upon him with more than its early fascination. In his youth,
+however, the mysticism was very naïve and straightforward. It was
+fostered by one of the very few excursions which Rossetti ever took--a
+tour in Belgium in October, 1849. I am told that he and the
+painter-friend who accompanied him were so purely devoted to the
+mediæval aspect of all they saw, that, in walking through the
+galleries, they turned away their heads in approaching modern
+pictures, and carefully closed their eyes while they were passing
+Rubens's "Descent from the Cross." In Belgium, or as the result of his
+tour there, Rossetti wrote several curious poems, which were so harsh
+and forced that he omitted them from his collection when he first
+published his "Poems," in 1870.
+
+The effort in these early pieces is too marked. I remember once
+hearing Rossetti say that he did not mind what people called him, if
+only they would not call him "quaint." But the fact was that, if
+quaintness be defined as the inability to conceal the labor of an art,
+there is no doubt that both his poems and his designs occasionally
+deserved this epithet. He was so excessively sincere an artist, so
+determined not to permit anything like trickiness of effect or
+meaningless smoothness to conceal the direct statement of an idea,
+that his lack of initial discipline sometimes made itself felt in a
+curious angular hardness.
+
+And now it would be necessary, if I were attempting a complete study
+of Gabriel Rossetti's intellectual career, to diverge into a
+description of what has so much exercised popular curiosity, the
+pre-Raphaelite movement of 1848. But there is no reason why, in a few
+notes on character, I should repeat from hearsay what several of the
+seven brothers have reported from authoritative memory. It is
+admitted, by them and by all who have understood the movement, that
+Gabriel Rossetti was the founder and, in the Shakespearian sense,
+"begetter" of all that was done by this earnest band of young artists.
+One of them, Mr. Millais, was already distinguished; two others, Mr.
+Holman Hunt and Mr. Woolner, had at that time more training and
+technical power than he; but he was, nevertheless, the brain and soul
+of the enterprise. What these young men proposed was excellently
+propounded in the sonnet by "W. M. R.," which they prefixed to their
+little literary venture, the "Germ," in 1850. Plainly to think even a
+little thought, to express it in natural words which are native to the
+speaker, to paint even an insignificant object as it is, and not as
+the old masters or the new masters have said it should be painted, to
+persevere in looking at truth and at nature without the smallest
+prejudice for tradition, this was the whole mystery and cabal of the
+P. R. B. They called themselves "preraphaelite," because they found in
+the wings of Lippi's angels, and the columbines of Perugino's gardens
+that loving and exact study of minute things which gave to them a
+sense of sincerity, and which they missed in the breadth and ease of
+later work. They had no ambition to "splash as no one splashed before
+since great Caldasi Polidore;" but they did wish to draw a flower or a
+cloud so that it should be a portrait of that cloud or flower. In this
+ambition it would be curious to know, and I do not think that I have
+ever heard it stated, how far they were influenced by Mr. Ruskin and
+his "Modern Painters." I should not expect to find Rossetti influenced
+by any outside force in this any more than in other instances, but at
+all events Mr. Ruskin eagerly accepted the brotherhood as practical
+exponents of the theories he had pronounced. None of them, I think,
+knew him personally when he wrote the famous letter to the _Times_ in
+1851, defending Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt from the abuse of
+ignorant critics, who, he said, had failed to perceive the very
+principles on which these "two young men" were proceeding. Somebody
+wrote to him to explain that there were "three young men," and Mr.
+Ruskin wrote a note to Gabriel Rossetti, desiring to see his work, and
+thus the acquaintance of these two remarkable men commenced.
+
+Meanwhile, although the more vigorous members of the brotherhood had
+shown no special sympathy for Rossetti's religious mysticism, a
+feebler artist, himself one of the original seven, had taken it up
+with embarrassing effusion. This was the late James Collinson, whose
+principal picture, "St. Elizabeth of Hungary," finished in 1851,
+produced a sort of crisis in Rossetti's career. This painting
+out-mystified the mystic himself; it was simply maudlin and
+hysterical, though drawn with some feeling for grace, and in a very
+earnest spirit. Rossetti, with his strong good sense, recognized that
+it would be impossible ever to reach the public with art of this
+unmanly character, and from this time forth he began to abandon the
+practice of directly sacred art.
+
+For some little time after abandoning the directly sacred field in
+painting, Rossetti seems to have passed through a disconsolate and
+dubious period. I am told that he worked for many months over a large
+picture called "Kate the Queen," from some well-known words by
+Browning. He made no progress with this, seemed dissatisfied with his
+own media, felt the weight of his lack of training, and passed, in
+short, through one of those downcast moods, which Shakespeare has so
+marvellously described in "Tired with all these," and which are
+incident, sooner or later, to every man of genius. While his touch in
+poetry grew constantly more sure and masterly, his power as a
+draughtsman threatened to leave him altogether. He was to have drawn
+one of the frontispieces in the "Germ," but, although he toiled with a
+design, he could not make it "come right." At last a happy accident
+put him on the true track, and revealed his proper genius to himself.
+He began to make small drawings of poetical subjects in
+water-colors--most of those which I have seen are not more than twenty
+inches by twelve--over which he labored, and into which he poured his
+exquisite sense of color, inspired without doubt by the glass of
+mediæval church windows. He travelled so very little, that I do not
+know whether he ever saw the treasures of radiant jewel-work which
+fret the gloom of Chartres or of Bourges; but if he never saw them, he
+divined them, and these are the only pieces of color which in the
+least degree suggest the drawings of this, Rossetti's second period.
+As far as one can gather, his method was, first, to become
+interpenetrated with the sentiment of some ballad or passage of
+emotional poetry, then to meditate on the scene till he saw it clearly
+before him; then--and this seems to have always been the difficult and
+tedious part--to draw in the design, and then with triumphant ease to
+fill in the outlines with radiant color. He had an almost insuperable
+difficulty in keeping his composition within the confines of the paper
+upon which he worked, and at last was content to have a purely
+accidental limit to the design, no matter what limbs of the _dramatis
+personæ_ were sheered away by the frame. It would not be the act of a
+true friend to Rossetti's memory to pretend that these drawings, of
+which for the next ten or fifteen years he continued to produce a
+great number, were without faults of a nature which any coxcomb could
+perceive, or without eccentricities which an untrained eye might
+easily mistake for faults; but this does not in the least militate
+against the fact that in two great departments of the painter's
+faculty, in imaginative sentiment and in wealth of color, they have
+never been surpassed. They have rarely, indeed, been equalled in the
+history of painting. A Rossetti drawing of this class hung with
+specimens of other art, ancient or modern, simply destroys them. I do
+not mean that it is better or worse than they are, but that it kills
+them as the electric light puts out a glow-worm. No other man's color
+will bear these points of ruby-crimson, these expanses of deep
+turquoise-blue, these flagrant scarlets and thunderous purples. He
+paints the sleeve of a trumpeter; it is such an orange as the eye can
+scarce endure to look at. He paints the tiles of a chimney-corner;
+they are as green as the peacock's eyes in the sunshine.
+
+The world is seldom ready to receive any new thing. These drawings of
+Rossetti's were scarcely noticed even by those who are habitually on
+the watch for fresh developments in art. But when the painter next
+emerges into something like publicity we find him attended by a
+brilliant company of younger men, all more or less influenced by his
+teaching and attracted by his gifts. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
+had been a very ephemeral institution; in three years, or four at the
+most, it had ceased to exist; but its principles and the energy of its
+founder had left their mark on the whole world of art. In 1849
+Rossetti had exhibited his picture, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," at
+the Portland Gallery, an exhibition in rivalry of the Royal Academy,
+which existed but a very short time. As far as I can discover, he did
+not exhibit again in London until 1856, when he and his friends opened
+a collection of their pictures at 4 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. We
+would rather have seen that little gallery than see most of the
+show-exhibitions of Europe. In it the fine art of the Anglo-Saxon race
+was seen dawning again after its long and dark night. Rossetti himself
+was the principal exhibitor, but his two earliest colleagues, now
+famous painters, Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt, also contributed.
+And here were all the new talents whom Rossetti had attracted around
+him during the last seven years: Mr. Madox Brown, with his fine genius
+for history; Mr. J. D. Watson, with his strong mediæval affinities;
+Mr. Boyce, with his delicate portraiture of rustic scenes; Mr. Brett,
+the finest of our students of the sea; Mr. W. B. Scott himself;
+besides one or two others, Mr. Charles Collins, Mr. Campbell, Mr.
+Halliday, Mr. Martineau, whom death or adverse fortune removed before
+they had quite fulfilled their promise. Gabriel Rossetti contributed
+to this interesting and historic exhibition five or six of those
+marvellous drawings of which mention has just been made. "Dante's
+Dream," the famous vision of June 9, 1290, with its counterpart, "The
+Anniversary of the Dream," in 1291, were the most prominent of these.
+A "Mary Magdalene" was perhaps the most moving and exciting. This
+extremely original design showed the Magdalene pursued by her lovers,
+but turning away from them all to seek Jesus in the house of Simon the
+Pharisee. The architecture in this drawing was almost childish; the
+wall of Simon's house is not three inches thick, and there is not room
+for a grown-up person on the stairs that lead to it; but the tender
+imagination of the whole, the sweet persuasiveness of Christ, who
+looks out of a window, the passion of the awakened sinner, who tears
+the roses out of her hair, the curious novelty of treatment in the
+heads and draperies, all these combine to make it one of those works,
+the moral force and directness of which appeal to the heart at once.
+Perhaps the most brilliant piece of color at the Russell Place Gallery
+may have been Rossetti's "Blue Closet," a picture which either
+illustrated or, as I should rather suppose, suggested Mr. Morris's
+wonderful poem published two years later.
+
+The same year that displayed him to the public already surrounded by a
+brilliant phalanx of painter-friends, discovered him also, to the
+judicious, as a centre of poetic light and heat. The circumstances
+connected with Rossetti's visit to Oxford a little earlier than this
+are too recent, are fresh in the memories of too many living persons
+of distinction, to be discussed with propriety by one who was not
+present. But certain facts are public, and may be mentioned. The
+Oxford Union still shows around the interior of its cupola strange,
+shadowy frescoes, melting into nothingness, which are the work of six
+men, of whom Rossetti was the leader. These youths had enjoyed no
+practical training in that particularly artificial branch of art,
+mural painting, and yet it seems strange that Rossetti himself, at
+least, should not have understood that a vehicle, such as yolk of egg
+mixed with vinegar, was absolutely necessary to tempera, or that it
+was proper, in fresco-painting, to prepare the walls, and paint in the
+fresh wet mortar. They used no vehicle, they fixed their colors in no
+coat of plaster, but they threw their ineffectual dry paint on the
+naked brick. The result has been that their interesting boyish efforts
+are now decayed beyond any chance of restoration. It is impossible,
+however, to ascend the gallery of the Oxford Union and examine the
+ghostly frescoes that are fading there, without great interest and
+even emotion. Of the young men who painted there under Gabriel
+Rossetti's eye, all have become greatly distinguished. Mr. Edward
+Burne-Jones, Mr. William Morris, and Mr. Spencer Stanhope were
+undergraduates at Oxford. Mr. Valentine Prinsep and Mr. Arthur Hughes,
+I believe, were Royal Academy students who were invited down by
+Rossetti. Their work was naïve and queer to the last degree. It is
+perhaps not fair to say which one of them found so much difficulty in
+painting the legs of his figures that he drew an impenetrable covert
+of sunflowers right across his picture, and only showed the faces of
+his heroes and heroines between the golden disks.
+
+The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which also dates from the year
+1856, is a still more notable expression of budding genius than the
+dome of the Oxford Union. It was edited by Mr. Godfrey Lushington, all
+its articles were anonymous, and it contrived to exist through twelve
+consecutive monthly numbers. A complete set is now rare, and the
+periodical itself is much less known than befits such a receptacle of
+pure literature. It contains three or four of Rossetti's finest poems;
+a great many of those extraordinary pieces, steeped in mediæval
+coloring, which Mr. William Morris was to collect in 1858 into his
+bewitching volume, called "The Defence of Guenevere;" several
+delightful prose stories of life in the Middle Ages, also by Mr.
+Morris, which, like certain prose romances by Mr. Burne-Jones, have
+never been publicly claimed or reprinted by their author; and not a
+little else that was as new as it was notable. A little later Mr.
+William Morris's first book was dedicated "To my Friend Dante Gabriel
+Rossetti, Painter," and in 1860 Mr. Swinburne followed with a like
+inscription of his first-fruits, his tragic drama of "The
+Queen-Mother." Thus in the course of a little more than ten years,
+Rossetti had become the centre and sun of a galaxy of talent in poetry
+and painting, more brilliant perhaps than any which has ever
+acknowledged the beneficent sway of any one Englishman of genius.
+
+But all this while the world outside knew nothing of the matter. One
+by one the younger men stepped forward on the public stage and secured
+the plaudits of the discerning, and ascended the slow incline of
+general reputation. But Rossetti remained obstinately recluse, far
+preferring to be the priest and confessor of genius to acting himself
+a public part. To this determination several outward things engaged
+him still further. He married quite early in life; and his wife, who
+was herself an artist of rare, if somewhat wild and untrained talent,
+bore him a son who died at birth, and then shortly after died herself.
+During his brief married months Rossetti had collected the MSS. of his
+poems, and thought to publish them; but when he lost his wife, in a
+paroxysm of grief he placed the sheets of his poems in her coffin, and
+would hear no more a suggestion of publication. In 1861 he presented
+the world with a very learned and beautiful anthology of early Italian
+poetry, and proposed as early as that year to print his original
+poems. It was his scheme to name the little volume "Dante in Verona,
+and other Poems;" but it came to nothing. About 1867 the scheme of
+publication again took possession of him. I have been told that a
+sudden sentiment of middle age, the fact that he found himself in his
+fortieth year, led him to conquer his scruples, and finally arrange
+his pieces. But he was singularly fastidious; the arrangement would
+never please him; the cover must be cut in brass, the paper at the
+sides must bear a special design. These niceties were rarer twelve
+years ago than they are now, and the printers fatigued him with their
+persistent obstinacy. It was not till early in 1870 that the "Poems"
+in stately form first appeared, and were hailed with a shout of
+admiration which was practically universal.
+
+It was about Christmas in that same year, 1870, that he who writes
+these lines was first presented to Gabriel Rossetti. The impression on
+my mental eye is as fresh as if it had been made yesterday, instead of
+twelve years ago. He was a man of average height, commonly loosely
+clad in black, so as to give one something of the notion of an abbé;
+the head very full, and domed like that of Shakespeare, as it was then
+usual to say--to my thinking more like that of Chaucer--in any case a
+head surcharged with imagination and power, strongly Italian in color
+and cast. The eyes were exceedingly deep set, in cavernous sockets;
+they were large, and black, and full of a restless brilliance, a
+piercing quality which consoled the shy novice by not being
+stationary. Lastly, a voice of bell-like tone and sonority, a voice
+capable of expressing without effort every shade of emotion from rage
+and terror to the most sublime tenderness. I have never heard a voice
+so fitted for poetical effect, so purely imaginative, and yet, in its
+absence of rhetoric, so clear and various, as that of Gabriel
+Rossetti. I retain one special memory of his reading in his own
+studio the unfinished MS. of "Rose Mary," in 1873, which surpassed in
+this direction any pleasure which it has been my lot to enjoy; and on
+various occasions I have listened to his reading of sonnets, his own
+and those of others, with a sense that his intonation revealed a
+beauty in the form of that species of verse which it had never been
+seen to possess before. I have already spoken of his wonderful
+courtliness to a new acquaintance, his bewitching air of sympathy; on
+a closer intimacy this stately manner would break up into wild fits of
+mirth, and any sketch of Rossetti would be incomplete that did not
+describe his loud and infectious laughter. He lived very much apart
+from the every-day life of mankind, not ostentatiously, but from a
+genuine lack of interest in passing events. An old friend tells me
+that during the French Revolution he burst into Rossetti's studio with
+the incredible news, "Louis-Philippe has landed in England!" "Has he?"
+said Rossetti, calmly. "What has he come for?" That certain political
+events, in which he saw a great symbolic significance, could move him
+deeply, is easily proved by such sonnets as the noble "On the Refusal
+of Aid between Nations," and "Czar Alexander II." But such glances out
+of window into the living street were rare, and formed no
+characteristic part of his scheme of life.
+
+As a poet in these great years he possessed rare gifts of passionate
+utterance, and harmony of vision and expression. Mr. Swinburne has
+characterized these qualities in words which leave no later
+commentator the chance of distinguishing himself. But it would be
+totally unjust, even in so cursory and personal a sketch as this, to
+allow the impression to go undisputed that Rossetti preferred the
+external form to the inward substance of poetry. This charge was
+brought against him, as it has always been brought against earnest
+students of poetic art. I will rather quote a few words from a letter
+of Rossetti to me, written in 1873, when he was composing his own
+_magnum opus_ of "Rose Mary." I have always felt them to be very
+salutary, none the less because it is obvious that the writer did not
+at all times contrive, or perhaps desire, to make them true in his own
+work:
+
+"It seems to me that all poetry, to be really enduring, is bound to be
+as _amusing_ (however trivial the word may sound) as any other class
+of literature; and I do not think that enough amusement to keep it
+alive can ever be got out of incidents not amounting to events, or out
+of travelling experiences of an ordinary kind however agreeably,
+observantly, or even thoughtfully treated. I would eschew in writing
+all themes that are not so trenchantly individualized as to leave no
+margin for discursiveness."
+
+During the last eight years of his life, Rossetti's whole being was
+clouded by the terrible curse of an excitable temperament--sleeplessness.
+To overcome this enemy, which interfered with his powers of work and
+concentration of thought, he accepted the treacherous aid of the new
+drug, chloral, which was then vaunted as perfectly harmless in its
+effect upon the health. The doses of chloral became more and more
+necessary to him, and I am told that at last they became so frequent and
+excessive that no case has been recorded in the annals of medicine in
+which one patient has taken so much, or even half so much, chloral as
+Rossetti took. Under this unwholesome drug his constitution, originally
+a magnificent one, slipped unconsciously into decay, the more stealthily
+that the poison seemed to have no effect whatever on the powers of the
+victim's intellect. He painted until physical force failed him; he wrote
+brilliantly to the very last, and two sonnets dictated by him on his
+death-bed are described to me as being entirely worthy of his mature
+powers. There is something almost melancholy in such a proof of the
+superior vitality of the brain. If the mind had shared the weakness of
+the body, the insidious enemy might perhaps have been routed in time to
+secure the elastic rebound of both. But when the chloral was stoutly met
+at last, it was too late.
+
+So at the age of fifty-four we have lost a man whom we should have
+retained, in the nature of things, for twenty years longer in the
+plentitude of his powers, but for a mistake in hygiene--a medical
+experiment. His work of inspiring the young, of projecting his fiery
+originality along the veins of others, was perhaps completed; it is
+doubtful whether this can ever be continued with advantage through
+more than two generations. The prophet is apt at last to become a
+tyrant, and from this ill apotheosis Rossetti was spared. But there
+was no reason why he should not, for at least a score of years, have
+produced noble pictures and have written gorgeous poems, emphasizing a
+personal success which he would have extended, though he hardly could
+have raised it. Yet he was always a melancholy man; of late years he
+had become almost a solitary man. Like Charles of Austria, he had
+disbanded his body-guard, and had retired to the cloister. Perhaps a
+longer life would not have brought much enjoyment with it. But these
+are idle speculations, and we have rather to call to our remembrance
+the fact that one of the brightest and most distinguished of our race,
+a man whose very existence was a protest against narrowness of aim and
+feebleness of purpose, one of the great torch-bearers in the
+procession of English art, has been called from us in the prime of
+life, before the full significance of his genius had been properly
+felt. He was the contemporary of some mighty names older than his, yet
+there scarcely was to be found among them all a spirit more thoroughly
+original; and surely, when the paltry conflicts of passing taste are
+laid to rest forever, it will be found that this man has written his
+signature indelibly on one of the principal pages of the register of
+our intellectual history.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+GUSTAVE DORÉ[11]
+
+         [Footnote 11: Reprinted by permission, from the "Nation."]
+
+By KENYON COX
+
+(1832-1883)
+
+
+[Illustration: Gustave Doré.]
+
+It is now eleven years since Gustave Doré died. He was an officer of
+the Legion of Honor, had attained considerable wealth, and was
+probably more widely known than any other artist of his day. His name
+was a household word in two continents. Yet he died a disappointed and
+embittered man, and is proclaimed by his friends as a neglected and
+misunderstood genius. He was known the world over as the most
+astonishingly prolific illustrator of books that has ever lived; he
+wished to be known in France as a great painter and a great sculptor,
+and because the artists and critics of France never seriously
+recognized his claims to this glory, he seems to have become a victim
+of the mania of persecution, and his naturally sunny nature was
+over-clouded with moroseness and suspicion. Hailed by some as the
+emulator and equal of the great names of the Italian Renaissance, and
+considered a great moral force--a "preacher painter"--by others he has
+been denounced as "designer in chief to the devil," and described as a
+man wallowing in all foulness and horror, a sort of demon of frightful
+power. Both these extreme judgments are English. The late Blanchard
+Jerrold, an intimate friend and collaborator of the artist, takes the
+first view. Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Hamerton have taken the second. Doré's
+own countrymen have never accepted either. Just where, between them,
+the truth lies, as we see it, we shall endeavor to show in this
+article.
+
+The main facts of Doré's life may be dismissed very briefly. He was
+born with a caul on January 6, 1832, in the Rue Bleue at Strasbourg,
+near the Cathedral. About 1841 his father removed to Bourg, in the
+Department of Ain, where he was chief government engineer of the
+department. These two residences of the young artist are supposed to
+account for the mastery of Gothic architecture and of mountain scenery
+which his admirers find in his mature work. He showed very early in
+life a passion for drawing, and, as a small child, had always a pencil
+in his hand, which he begged to have "sharpened at both ends," that he
+might work longer without interruption. His father intended him for an
+engineer, but he was determined from the first to be an artist. He was
+of a gay and jovial disposition, given to pranks and practical jokes,
+and of an athletic temperament. Théophile Gautier afterward called him
+a "gamin de génie." In 1847, when he was fifteen years old, being in
+Paris with his parents, he called upon Phillippon, the publisher, and
+showed him some of his sketches. M. Phillippon looked at them, and
+sent a letter to Doré's parents, persuading them to allow the boy to
+remain in Paris, and promising them to begin using his work at once
+and to pay for it. Thus, without any study of art whatever, he began
+his career, and in a few years had produced a prodigious quantity of
+work, and was a celebrated man before he was twenty. No one knows how
+many drawings he made. He "lived like an Arab," worked early and late,
+and with astonishing rapidity made thousands of drawings for the comic
+papers, besides early beginning the publication of independent books.
+One estimate, which Mr. Jerrold thinks excessive, credits him with
+having published forty thousand drawings before he was forty! Mr.
+Jerrold himself reckons two hundred and sixty-six drawings done in one
+year. His "Labors of Hercules" was brought out in 1848, when he was
+sixteen, and before he was twenty-seven he had published his "Holy
+Russia," his "Wandering Jew," his illustrations to Balzac's "Contes
+Drôlatiques," to Rabelais, and many other authors. His best work was
+done at an age when most artists are painfully acquiring the rudiments
+of their art. We all know the books that followed.
+
+Meanwhile he was determined to be known as a great painter, and, while
+flooding the market with his countless illustrations, was working at
+great canvases of Biblical subjects, which, though the French would
+not accept them, were hugely admired in the Doré Gallery of London.
+Later he tried sculpture also, and his last work was a monument to
+Alexandre Dumas, which he made at his own expense, and presented to
+the city of Paris. He died in the beginning of the year 1883, worn out
+with excessive production--a great name, but an unsatisfied man.
+
+Mr. Jerrold has divided his book into two parts, dealing first with
+Doré the illustrator, and then with Doré the painter and sculptor. It
+is an eminently natural arrangement, and, in our effort to arrive at
+Doré's true position in art, we cannot do better than to follow it.
+
+Doré's earliest work was frankly that of a caricaturist. He had a
+quick eye, no training, and a certain extravagant imagination, and
+caricature was his inevitable field. He was, however, as Mr. Jerrold
+himself remarks, "a caricaturist who seldom raises a laugh." Not
+hearty fun, still less delicate humor, was his. In the higher
+qualities of caricature his contemporaries, Daumier and Gavarni, were
+vastly his superiors. An exuberance of grotesque fancy and a
+recklessness of exaggeration were his dominant notes. His earlier
+work, up to and including the Rabelais, is not really funny--to many
+minds it is even painful--but it is unmistakably caricature of a
+dashing, savage sort. To our mind it remains his best work, and that
+by which he is most likely to live. At least it is the work that
+formed him and fixed his characteristics, and an understanding of it
+is essential to any judgment of him. The qualities and the defects of
+his later work--that which is most praised and most blamed in his
+production--are inherent in the work of this period, and are best
+explained by a reference to the latter.
+
+Take, for instance, what has been denounced as his love of horrors and
+of foulness, his delight in blood and massacre. He is scored for this
+as if he were one of that modern French school, beginning, perhaps,
+with Regnault, who have revelled in the realistic presentation of
+executions and battles, and have sought to effect by sheer
+sensationalism what they could not by gentler means. It is surprising
+that his critics have not seen that Doré's battles are always, even to
+the end, the battles of a caricaturist. His decapitated trunks, cloven
+heads, smoking hearts, arms still fighting though severed from their
+bodies, are simply a debauch of grim humor. There is never the
+slightest attempt to realize carnage--only to convey, by the
+caricaturist's exaggeration, an idea of colossally impossible
+bloodthirstiness. One may not enjoy this kind of fun, but to take it
+seriously, as the emanation of a gloomy and diabolic genius, is
+absurd.
+
+The same test is equally destructive of much of the praise Doré has
+received. He is constantly spoken of, even by severe critics of his
+painting, as a great illustrator who identified himself with the minds
+of one great writer after another. But Doré identified himself with no
+one; he was always Doré. Even in these early drawings he cannot keep
+to the spirit of the text, though the subjects suited him much better
+than many he tried later. There is a great deal of broad gayety and
+"Gallic wit" in the "Contes Drôlatiques," but it was not broad enough
+for Doré, and he has converted its most human characters into
+impossible grotesques.
+
+Another thing for which Doré is praised is his wonderful memory. Mr.
+Jerrold repeats more than once Doré's phrase, "I have lots of
+collodion in my head," and recounts how he could scarcely be induced
+to make sketches from nature, but relied upon his memory. He also
+speaks of Doré's system of dividing and subdividing a subject, and
+noting the details in their places, so that he could reproduce the
+whole afterward. This question of work from memory is one of the most
+vital for an understanding of Doré, and one of general interest in all
+matters of art, and is worth attention. Of course, a man who made
+hundreds of drawings every year could not work much from nature, and
+came to rely upon his memory. But what is the nature of artistic
+memory, and how does it perform its task? We think the truth is, that
+the artist who habitually works from memory, fills in his details, not
+from memory of the object, but from memory of the way he has formerly
+drawn similar objects. He reverts to a series of formulæ that he has
+gradually accumulated. This man must have a cloak. This is the way a
+cloak is done. A hand? Nothing can be easier; the hand formula is
+ready. The stock in trade of the professional illustrator and
+caricaturist is made up of a thousand such formulæ--methods of
+expression that convey the idea readily enough to the spectator, but
+have little relation to fact. So it is that Doré never learned, in the
+true sense, to draw. He had made for himself a sort of artistic
+shorthand, which enabled him to convey his superabundant ideas quickly
+and certainly to his public, but his drawing is what is called
+mannered in the extreme. It is not representation of nature at all,
+but pure formula and chic. He is said to be a master of drapery, but
+he never drew a single fold correctly. He is said to show great
+knowledge of Gothic architecture, but he never drew well a single
+column or finial. In his later years he studied anatomy with great
+perseverance, and advocated the necessity of dissection, saying, "Il
+faut fourrer la main dedans" (You must stick your hand in it); but the
+manner was formed, and he never drew a leg with a bone in it.
+
+With this equipment he illustrated Don Quixote, Dante, the Bible. Is
+it strange that he shows no sympathy with the grand simplicity of
+Dante, or the subtle humor of Cervantes, and that we can only be
+thankful that he never completed his projected illustrations to
+Shakespeare? Doré, the illustrator, was fecund beyond precedent,
+possessed a certain strange drollery, had a wonderful flow of ideas,
+but was superficial, theatrical, and mannered, and as far from
+expressing real horror as from expressing real fun. What shall we say
+of Doré the painter and sculptor?
+
+Mr. Jerrold reports a discussion between Doré and Théophile Gautier,
+in which the roles of artist and man of letters are strangely
+reversed. "Gautier and Doré," he says, "disagreed fundamentally on the
+aims and methods of art. Gautier loved correctness, perfect form--the
+technique, in short, of art; whereas Doré contended that art which
+said nothing, which conveyed no idea, albeit perfect in form and
+color, missed the highest quality and raison d'être of art." What is
+plain from this is, that Gautier was an artist and cared first of all
+for art, while Doré was never an artist, properly speaking, at all,
+and never understood the artist's passion for perfection. To Doré,
+what was necessary was to express himself anyhow--who cared if the
+style was defective, the drawing bad, the color crude? The idea was
+the thing. His admirers can defend him only on this ground, and they
+adopt of necessity the Philistine point of view. The artists of Doré's
+time and country were very clear in their opinion. "The painters,"
+says Mr. Jerrold, "said he could not paint."
+
+The sculptors admitted that he had ideas in his groups, but he was not
+sculpturesque. His friends protest against this judgment, and
+attribute it, _ad nauseam_, to "malevolence" and "envy." What if his
+technique was less brilliant than that of Hals, they say; what if his
+shadows are less transparent than those of Rembrandt (and they will
+make no meaner comparison)? He is "teeming with noble thoughts," and
+these will put his work "on a level with the masterpieces of the
+Italian masters of the sixteenth century." It is the conception, the
+creation--not the perfect painting of legs and arms and heads, the
+harmonious grouping, the happy and delicate combination of color--by
+which the observer is held spell bound. All these qualities, which
+his admirers grudgingly admit that Doré had not, are classed as "mere
+dexterity," and are not considered worth a second thought.
+
+This is the true literary gospel of art, but it is one that no artist,
+and no critic who has any true feeling of art, has ever accepted or
+will ever accept. Thoughts, ideas, conceptions, may enhance the value
+of a work of art, provided it is first of all a piece of beautiful art
+in itself, but they have never preserved, and never will preserve from
+oblivion bad painting or bad sculpture. The style is the artist, if
+not the man; and of the two, beautiful painting with no idea at all
+(granting, for the sake of argument, that it exists), will ever be
+infinitely more valuable to the world than the lame expression of the
+noblest thoughts. What may be the real value of Doré's thoughts is
+therefore a question with which we have no concern. As painter and
+sculptor, his lack of education and his great technical
+imperfections--his bad drawing, false light and shade, and crude
+color--relegate him forever to a rank far below mediocrity. Such
+reputation as he has is the result of the admiration of those
+altogether ignorant of art, but possessed of enough literary ability
+to trumpet abroad their praises of "great conceptions," and will as
+surely fade away to nothing as the reputation of such simple painters
+as Van Der Meer or Chardin will continue to grow, while painting as an
+art is loved and understood.
+
+
+
+
+COMPOSERS
+
+
+
+
+HANDEL
+
+By C. E. BOURNE
+
+(1685-1759)
+
+
+George Frederick Handel, of whom Haydn once reverently said, "He is
+the master of us all," was born at Halle, in Lower Saxony, on February
+23, 1685. His father was a surgeon, and sixty-three years of age at
+the time of his birth--a terribly severe old man, who, almost before
+his son was born, had determined that he should be a lawyer. The
+little child knew nothing of the fate before him, he only found that
+he was never allowed to go near a musical instrument, much as he
+wanted to hear its sweet sounds, and the obstinate father even took
+him away from the public day-school for the simple reason that the
+musical gamut was taught there in addition to ordinary reading,
+writing, and arithmetic.
+
+But love always "finds out the way," and his mother or nurse managed
+to procure for him the forbidden delights; a small clavichord, or dumb
+spinet, with the strings covered with strips of cloth to deaden the
+sound, was found for the child, and this he used to keep hidden in the
+garret, creeping away to play it in the night-time, when everyone was
+asleep, or whenever his father was away from home doctoring his
+patients.
+
+[Illustration: Handel.]
+
+But, at last, when George Frederick was seven years of age, the old
+man was compelled to change his views. It happened in this way. He set
+out one day on a visit to the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels,
+where another son by a former marriage was a page. George Frederick
+had been teasing his father to let him go with him to see his elder
+brother, whom he had not yet met, but this was refused. When old
+Handel started by the stagecoach the next morning, the persistent
+little fellow was on the watch; he began running after it, and at
+length the father was constrained to stop the coach and take the boy
+in. So, though at the expense of a severe scolding, the child had his
+way and was allowed to go on to Saxe-Weissenfels. When there, the
+chapel, with the beautiful organ, was the great attraction, and George
+Frederick, as indomitable then as he was in after-life, found his way
+into the organ loft, and when the regular service was over, contrived
+to take the organist's place, and began a performance of his own; and
+strange to say, though he had not had the slightest training, a melody
+with chords and the correct harmonies was heard. The duke had not left
+the chapel, and noticing the difference in style from that of the
+ordinary organist, inquired as to the player, and when the little boy
+was brought to him he soon discovered, by the questions he put, the
+great passion for music which possessed the child. The duke, a
+sensible man, told the father it would be wrong to oppose the
+inclination of a boy who already displayed such extraordinary genius;
+and old Handel, either convinced, or at any rate submitting to the
+duke's advice, promised to procure for his son regular musical
+instruments. Handel never afterward forgot the debt of gratitude he
+owed to the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels for this intercession.
+
+On his return to Halle he became the pupil of Zachau, the organist of
+the cathedral there. This man was an excellent teacher and a sound
+musician. Before the pupil was nine years old his instructor used to
+set him to write fugues and motets as exercises, and before long the
+boy was allowed to play the organ at the cathedral services on Sunday,
+whenever the elder musician was inclined to linger over his breakfast
+or to take a holiday. At last, when young Handel was nine years old,
+the master honestly confessed that his pupil knew more music than he
+himself did, and advised that he should be sent to Berlin for a course
+of further study there. Thither he accordingly went in the year 1696.
+
+In Berlin the boy of eleven years was soon recognized as a prodigy.
+There he met two Italian composers of established reputation,
+Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti, both of whom he was to encounter in
+after-life, though under very different circumstances, in London.
+Bononcini, who was of a sour and jealous disposition, soon conceived
+a dislike for the gifted little fellow, and attempted to injure him by
+composing a piece for the harpsichord full of the most extraordinary
+difficulties, and then asking him to play it at sight. The boy,
+however, at once executed it without a mistake, and thus the malicious
+schemer was foiled by his own device. Attilio was of a different
+disposition; he praised the young musician to the skies, and was never
+weary of sitting by his side at the organ or harpsichord, and hearing
+him improvise for hours. The Elector of Brandenburg also conceived a
+great admiration for the boy's talents, and offered to send him to
+Italy. On old Handel being consulted, however, he pleaded that he was
+now an old man, and wished his son to remain near him. In consequence
+of this, probably much to the boy's disappointment, he was brought
+back to Halle, and there set to work again under his old master,
+Zachau.
+
+Soon after this return his father died, in 1697, leaving hardly
+anything for his family, and young Handel had now to seriously bestir
+himself to make a living. With this object he went to Hamburg, where
+he obtained a place as second violin in the Opera-house. Soon after
+arriving there, the post of organist at Lübeck became vacant, and
+Handel was a candidate for it. But a peculiar condition was attached
+to the acceptance of the office; the new organist must marry the
+daughter of the old one! And, as Handel either did not approve of the
+lady, or of matrimony generally (and in fact he never was married), he
+promptly retired from the competition. At first, no one suspected the
+youth's talents, for he amused himself by pretending to be an
+ignoramus, until one day the accompanyist on the harpsichord (then the
+most important instrument in an orchestra) was absent, and young
+Handel took his place, astonishing everybody by his masterly touch.
+Probably this discovery aroused the jealousy of some of his
+brother-artists, for soon afterward a duel took place between him and
+Matheson, a clever composer and singer, who one night, in the midst of
+a quarrel on leaving the theatre, gave him a box on the ear; swords
+were drawn, and the duel took place there and then under the portico
+of the theatre. Fortunately Matheson's weapon was shivered by coming
+in contact with a metal button on his opponent's coat. Explanations
+were then offered, and the two adversaries became friends--indeed,
+close friends--afterward. "Almira, Queen of Castile," Handel's first
+opera, was brought out in Hamburg in 1705, and was followed by two
+others, "Nero," and "Daphne," all received with great favor, and
+frequently performed.
+
+[Illustration: Handel's River-Concert for George I.]
+
+But the young musician determined to visit Italy as soon as possible,
+and after staying in Hamburg three years, and having, besides the
+money he sent his mother, saved two hundred ducats for travelling
+expenses, he was able to set off on the journey, then one of the great
+events in a musician's lifetime. He visited Florence, Venice, Rome,
+and Naples, in almost every city writing operas, which we are told
+were produced with the most brilliant success. At Venice an opera was
+sought for from him, and in three weeks he had written "Agrippina."
+When produced, the people received it with frantic enthusiasm, the
+theatre resounding with shouts of "Viva il caro Sassone!" (Long live
+the dear Saxon!) The following story illustrates the extraordinary
+fame he so quickly acquired in Italy. He arrived at Venice during
+the middle of the carnival, and was taken to a masked ball, and there
+played the harpsichord, still keeping on his mask. Domenico Scarlatti,
+the most famous harpsichord player of his age, on hearing him,
+exclaimed, "Why, it's the devil, or else the Saxon whom everyone is
+talking about!" In 1709 he returned to Hanover, and was appointed by
+the Elector George of Brunswick, afterward King George I., of England,
+his Court Capellmeister.
+
+Handel's wanderings next led him to England, where he was treated with
+so much honor that he showed no great hurry to return to Hanover, and,
+in fact, he remained in England and coolly ignored his engagement as
+Capellmeister. But an awkward piece of retribution was at hand. The
+Elector of Hanover, on the death of Queen Anne, came to England as the
+new king, and Handel, his delinquent Capellmeister, could hardly
+expect to receive any share of the royal favor in future. With the
+help of a friend of his, Baron Kilmanseck, he determined, however, to
+make an attempt to conciliate the king, and accordingly he wrote
+twenty-five short concerted pieces of music, and made arrangements for
+these to be performed by musicians in a boat following the royal barge
+on the Thames, one day when the king went on an excursion up the river
+for a picnic. The king recognized the composer at once by his style,
+and spoke in terms of approbation of the music, and the news was
+quickly conveyed by his friend to the anxious musician. This is the
+story of the origin of the famous "Water Music." Soon afterward the
+king allowed Handel to appear before him to play the harpsichord
+accompaniments to some sonatas executed by Geminiani, a celebrated
+Italian violinist, and finally peace was made between them, Handel
+being appointed music-master to the royal children, and receiving an
+additional pension of £200. In 1726 a private Act of Parliament was
+passed, making George Frederick Handel a naturalized Englishman.
+
+In the year 1720 a number of noblemen formed themselves into a company
+for the purpose of reviving Italian opera in London, at the Haymarket
+Theatre, and subscribed a capital of £50,000. The king himself
+subscribed £1,000, and allowed the society to take the name of the
+Royal Academy of Music, and at first everything seemed to promise the
+most brilliant success. Handel was appointed director of the music.
+Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti, his old acquaintances in Berlin, were
+also attracted by this new operatic venture to London, and their
+arrival was followed by a competition of a very novel character. The
+libretto of a new opera, "Muzio Scævola," was divided between the
+three composers. Attilio was to put the first act to music, Bononcini
+the second, and Handel the third. We need hardly wonder that the
+victory is said to have rested with the last and youngest of the trio,
+although at this time the cabals against him, which afterward were to
+do him such grievous harm, had already commenced.
+
+Handel still clung to the operatic speculation; and when he had to
+leave the Haymarket Theatre, which was given up to another Italian
+company with the famous Farinelli, from Lincoln's Inn Fields,
+undauntedly he changed to the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, and there
+commenced again. More operas were produced, with the one unvarying
+tale of fiasco, and at last, in 1737, having lost the whole of his
+hardly earned money, Handel was compelled to close the theatre, and,
+worse than all, to suspend payment for a time. Happily he now turned
+his thoughts to oratorio. "Saul" and "Israel in Egypt" were composed
+in quick succession; the last gigantic work being written in the
+almost incredibly short space of twenty-seven days. How great it is
+everyone now knows, but, at the time the colossal choruses were
+actually considered a great deal too heavy and monotonous; and Handel,
+always quick in resource, at the second performance introduced a
+number of operatic songs to make them go down better, and after the
+third performance the piece was withdrawn altogether. Fortunately,
+opinions have changed since then. These works were followed by his
+fine setting of Dryden's "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day," and Milton's
+"L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso;" but it cannot be said that his
+pecuniary affairs were materially improved by their production.
+
+The first performance of his greatest oratorio, the "Messiah," took
+place at Neale's Music Hall, in Dublin, on April 18, 1742, at mid-day,
+and, apropos of the absurdities of fashion, it may be noticed that the
+announcements contained the following request: "That ladies who honor
+this performance with their presence, will be pleased to come without
+hoops, as it will greatly increase the charity by making room for more
+company." The work was gloriously successful, and £400 were obtained
+the first day for the Dublin charities. Handel seems always to have
+had a special feeling with regard to this masterpiece of his--as if it
+were too sacred to be merely used for making money by, like his other
+works. He very frequently assisted at its performance for the benefit
+of the Foundling Hospital, and he left the score as a precious gift to
+the governor of that institution. This work alone brought no less a
+sum than £10,299 to the funds of the hospital. In this connection a
+fine saying of his may be repeated. Lord Kinnoul had complimented him
+on the noble "entertainment" which by the "Messiah" he had lately
+given the town. "My Lord," said Handel, "I should be sorry if I only
+entertained them--I wish to make them better." And when someone
+questioned him on his feelings when composing the "Hallelujah Chorus,"
+he replied in his peculiar English, "I did think I did see all heaven
+before me, and the great God himself." What a fine saying that was of
+poor old George III., in describing the "pastoral symphony" in this
+oratorio--"I could see the stars shining through it!"
+
+The now constant custom of the audience to rise and remain standing
+during the performance of this chorus, is said to have originated in
+the following manner: On the first production of the work in London,
+"the audience were exceedingly struck and affected by the music in
+general; but when that chorus struck up, 'For the Lord God Omnipotent'
+in the 'Hallelujah,' they were so transported that they all together,
+with the king (who happened to be present), started up and remained
+standing till the chorus ended." "This anecdote I had from Lord
+Kinnoul." So says Dr. Beattie, the once famous poet, in one of his
+letters.
+
+The "Messiah" was commenced on August 22, 1741, finished on September
+12th, and the orchestration filled up two days afterward--the whole
+work thus being completed in twenty-three days. Handel was fifty-six
+years old at the time.
+
+The next ten years of the life of the "Goliath of Music," as he has
+been called, are marked by some of the most splendid achievements of
+his genius. "Samson," the "Dettingen Te Deum," "Joseph," "Belshazzar,"
+"The Occasional Oratorio," "Judas Maccabeus," "Joshua," "Solomon,"
+and, "Theodora," being composed by him during this time, when, already
+an old man, it might have been thought that he would have taken some
+repose after the labors of so toilsome and troubled a life. But,
+oak-like, he was one of those who mature late; like Milton, his
+greatest works were those of his old age.
+
+But a terrible misfortune was approaching--his eyesight was failing.
+The "drop serene," of which Milton speaks so pathetically, had fallen
+on his eyes, and at the time when, in February, 1752, he was composing
+his last work, "Jephtha" (the one containing "Deeper and Deeper
+Still," and "Waft her, Angels"), the effort in tracing the lines is,
+in the original MS., very painfully apparent. Soon afterward he
+submitted to three operations, but they were in vain, and henceforth
+all was to be dark to him. His sole remaining work was now to
+improvise on the organ, and to play at performances of his oratorios.
+There is a pathetic story told of an incident that occurred on one
+occasion, when "Samson" was given. While the magnificent air,
+
+  Total eclipse! no sun, no moon!
+  All dark, amidst the blaze of noon.
+  O glorious light! no cheering ray
+  To glad my eyes with welcome day.
+  Why thus deprived thy prime decree?
+  Sun, moon, and stars are dark to me--
+
+was being sung by Beard, the tenor, the blind old man, seated at the
+organ, was seen to tremble and grow pale, and then, when he was led
+forward to the audience to receive their applause, tears were in the
+eyes of nearly everyone present at the sight. It was like the scene
+that is described in Beethoven's life on the occasion of that
+composer's appearance, when almost totally deaf, to conduct his great
+Choral Symphony at Vienna.
+
+One night, on returning home from a performance of the "Messiah" at
+Covent Garden, Handel was seized with sudden weakness and retired
+hurriedly to bed, from which he was never to rise again. He prayed
+that he might breathe his last on Good Friday, "in hope of meeting his
+God, his sweet Lord and Saviour on the day of his resurrection." And
+strangely enough his wish was granted, for on Good Friday, April 13,
+1759, he quietly passed away from this life, being then seventy-four
+years of age. His remains were laid in Poets' Corner in Westminster
+Abbey, and the place is marked by a statue by Roubilliac, representing
+him leaning over a table covered with musical instruments, his hand
+holding a pen, and before him is laid the "Messiah," open at the
+words, "I know that my Redeemer liveth."
+
+
+
+
+MOZART
+
+By C. E. BOURNE
+
+(1756-1791)
+
+
+[Illustration: Mozart.]
+
+Leopold Mozart was a violinist in the band of Archbishop Sigismund,
+the reigning Prince of Salzburg, and it was probably in compliment to
+his master that he bestowed on the youngest of his seven children the
+name of Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Sigismundus. Born
+on January 27, 1756, this child was destined to make the name of
+Mozart famous wherever music is known; and surely no more beautiful
+life--beautiful in itself and in the works of immortal beauty which in
+its short course were produced--has ever been lived by anyone of those
+to whom the crown of inspired singers and an enduring monument in the
+temple of art has been given. "Look around," was the epitaph on a
+great architect. "Listen," is the most fitting tribute to the
+wonderful genius of a Mozart.
+
+Infant prodigies very often turn out to be nobodies in after-life. But
+Mozart was an exception; and though he might well have been called
+"the marvellous boy," his latest works--and he died at the early age
+of thirty-five--were undoubtedly his grandest and most perfect. He
+began very early to compose. One of these first attempts was a
+concerto so difficult that no one could play it; but the child
+undauntedly said, "Why, that's the very reason why it is called a
+concerto; people must practise it before they can play it perfectly."
+
+Wolfgang and his sister, Nannerl, as he used to call her, had been
+taken by their father, in 1762, to Vienna, where the children played
+the piano before the Empress Maria Theresa and her husband. Little
+Wolfgang was here, as everywhere, perfectly at his ease, with a
+simplicity and childish grace that won every heart. When he had been
+playing for some time, he jumped without ceremony on the lap of the
+empress, and kissed her heartily for being so good to him. Little
+Marie Antoinette, her daughter, afterward the ill-fated wife of Louis
+XVI., and then about the same age as Wolfgang, he treated in almost
+the same way. He had slipped on the polished floor, to which he was
+unaccustomed, and the little princess had hurried forward to raise him
+up, on which he promptly said, "You are good; I will marry you." The
+empress asked why he wished this, to which he answered, "Out of
+gratitude; she was kind, while her sister took no notice of me" (she
+had not come forward to help him). After returning to Salzburg,
+Leopold Mozart, in the spring of 1763, took his children on a more
+lengthy tour to Munich, Paris, London, and The Hague, and everywhere
+their playing, especially Wolfgang's performances on the organ, which
+he had now learned, were listened to with delight and astonishment. At
+Heidelberg the priest of the Church of the Holy Ghost engraved on the
+organ the boy's name and the date of his visit, in remembrance of
+"this wonder of God," as he called the child. At London, old Mozart
+says, they were received, on April 27th, by King George III. and Queen
+Caroline, at the palace, and remained from six to nine o'clock. The
+king placed before the boy compositions of Bach and Handel, all of
+which he played at sight perfectly; he had also the honor of
+accompanying the queen in a song. "On leaving the palace," the careful
+father says, "we received a present of 24 guineas."
+
+A great delight was now before him, for his father had resolved on a
+journey to Italy, then far more than now the land of music. How much
+this visit did for the young maestro it is impossible to say; he has
+not, like Mendelssohn, left us an "Italian Symphony," recording the
+impressions which that sunny spot of classic beauty had made upon him,
+but there can be little doubt of the great influence it had on the
+whole of his after-life. There are some significant words which he
+wrote eight years later to his father from Paris: "You must faithfully
+promise to let me see Italy again in order to refresh my life. I do
+entreat of you to confer this happiness upon me." In Mantua, Milan,
+Bologna (where he had the good fortune to meet the learned Padre
+Martini, one of the soundest musicians of his age, and for whom he
+ever afterward maintained a warm attachment), Florence, Rome, and
+Naples, the young genius was received everywhere with enthusiasm by
+the crowds who came to hear him. In Naples the superstitious people
+believed that there was magic in his playing, and pointed to a ring on
+his left hand as the cause of his wonderful dexterity; and it was only
+when he had taken this off, and gone on playing just the same, that
+they had to acknowledge it was simply the perfection of art.
+
+There is something sad in contrasting these brilliant early days with
+the anxious times that came later on, when the great Mozart was
+compelled to wait in the ante-chambers of the great, dine with their
+lacqueys, give lessons to stupid young countesses, and write begging
+letters to his friends; yet, in reality, those later days, when "Don
+Giovanni," "Die Zauberflöte," and the "Requiem," were composed, were
+the truly brilliant ones. And it may be that the very greatness came,
+in some measure, from the sorrow and pain; that Mozart, like so many
+others of the world's great singers, "learnt in suffering what he
+taught in song."
+
+On his return to Munich, after composing a comic opera in the Italian
+style, "La Finta Giardiniera," which had a great success, young
+Mozart, who had been very shabbily treated by Archbishop
+Hieronymus--of whose spiteful conduct we shall hear more
+hereafter--the successor of Sigismund, determined to resign his
+situation in the court band, and to set out on his travels again,
+giving concerts from place to place, and everywhere looking out for
+some suitable appointment that might afford him a permanent income.
+This time his father was refused permission to travel, and, as on his
+exertions depended the support of the whole family, he remained
+behind, while Frau Mozart, the mother, accompanied young Wolfgang. In
+1777, now a young man of twenty-one, he set out upon his second great
+artistic tour, buoyant with hope, and with all the beautiful audacity
+of young genius determined to conquer the world. This time it was not
+the infant prodigy whom men listened to, but the matured musician and
+the composer of melodies sweeter than men had ever listened to before.
+But the tale is changed now. True, there are triumphs to be spoken of,
+flattery from the great, and presents sent in recompense for his
+marvellous playing (he tells one day of his chagrin in receiving from
+a certain prince a gold watch, instead of money that he sorely
+wanted--and, besides, he had five watches already!); but rebuffs,
+intrigues, and all sorts of petty machinations against him, make the
+tale a sadder one; and so it continued to be to the end.
+
+From Munich--where it had been hoped that the elector would have given
+him an appointment at court, but he was only told to go to Italy and
+become famous, "it was too early yet to think about becoming a
+Capellmeister"--he went to Augsburg, spending some pleasant days there
+in the society of a cousin, Marianne, nicknamed by him Bäsle, a merry,
+open-hearted girl of nineteen.
+
+Thence, he went on to Mannheim, a town that is memorable as the place
+where he first met the Webers, and made the acquaintance of Herr
+Cannabich, the director of the music at the elector's court, and one
+who proved a stanch friend through everything to the young composer.
+Cannabich had a daughter named Rosa, a girl of thirteen, exceedingly
+pretty and clever, and Wolfgang appears to have admired her very much,
+and perhaps for a time to have flirted and been in love with her. He
+wrote her a sonata, and was delighted with the way in which she played
+it; the andante, he said, he had composed to represent her, and when
+it was finished he vowed she was just what the andante was. But this
+little love affair, if it existed, soon was forgotten in a more
+serious one with Aloysia Weber. Her father was a theatre copyist in
+poor circumstances. There were a number of children, and she was a
+beautiful girl of fifteen, with a magnificent voice. She was cousin,
+by the way, to Weber, afterward composer of the "Freischütz." Mozart
+was so charmed with her voice that he undertook to give her lessons,
+and we soon hear of him composing airs for her and meditating a
+concert tour in Italy in company with her, and her father and sister.
+In writing of it to his own father he sets out the advantages to be
+gained by co-partnership, and very prosaically says: "Should we stay
+long anywhere, the eldest daughter [Josepha, afterward Frau Hofer, for
+whom Mozart wrote the part of Astrafiammente in the "Zauberflöte"]
+would be of the greatest use to us; for we could have our own ménage,
+as she understands cooking." But papa Mozart decidedly objected. "Your
+proposal to travel about with Herr Weber--N. B., two daughters--has
+driven me nearly wild," and he straightway orders his son off to
+Paris, whither, with a parting present of a pair of mittens knitted
+for him by Mlle. Weber, he reluctantly sets out in company with his
+mother.
+
+His stay in Paris during the next year was not very eventful, and a
+symphony produced at the Concerts Spirituels seems to have been his
+most successful work at this time. It was clever and lively, full of
+striking effects, and was most warmly applauded. He says: "The moment
+the symphony was over I went off in my joy to the Palais Royal, where
+I took a good ice, told my beads, as I had vowed, and went home, where
+I am happiest and always shall be happiest." A great sorrow came to
+him here in the death of his mother. Owing to the great expense of
+living in Paris, they had been compelled to live together in a small,
+dark room, so cramped for space that there was not even room for the
+indispensable piano. Here she was taken ill, and though for fourteen
+days Wolfgang most devotedly attended to her wants, she died in his
+arms. The letters in which he breaks the news to his father and sister
+are full of the most beautiful tenderness and forgetfulness of his own
+grief in solicitude for theirs. Things did not indeed prosper with him
+in Paris; he tried to give lessons, but the ladies whom he taught paid
+him very shabbily, and the labor of getting from one part of the city
+to another to teach was so great that he found it difficult to give
+the time he wished to composition.
+
+Music in Paris, just then, was at a low ebb. Vapidly pretty Italian
+operas were in fashion, and Piccinni was the favorite composer. It was
+some years afterward that the great contest between the Piccinnists
+and Gluckists culminated in the victory of the latter, though
+"Alceste," had already been produced, and "Iphigenia" was soon to
+follow. Mozart was a fervent admirer of Gluck, and the music of the
+older master had evidently an important influence on that of the
+younger and more gifted composer.
+
+Once more his thoughts were turned to Salzburg, for two of the leading
+musicians there having died, the Archbishop Hieronymus offered their
+posts to the Mozarts, father and son, at a salary of a thousand
+florins for the two. The father anxiously entreated his son to return
+and accept this offer, mentioning as a further bait, that Aloysia
+Weber would probably be engaged to sing in Salzburg. Much as Wolfgang
+hated Salzburg, or rather the people living there, his love for his
+father and sister prevailed over his aversion; and though with no
+pleasure at all in the prospect of seeing the hateful archbishop
+again, he set out from Paris, travelling to Salzburg in very leisurely
+fashion via Strasbourg, Mannheim, and Munich. At Strasbourg he was
+induced to give several concerts, but they were not pecuniary
+successes, and he did not make by any one more than three louis d'or.
+But how the artist peeps out in every line of the letters in which he
+describes these! After saying how few were present, and how cold it
+was, he proceeds: "But I soon warmed myself, to show the Strasbourg
+gentlemen how little I cared, and played to them a long time for my
+own amusement, giving a concerto more than I had promised, and at the
+close extemporizing. It is now over, but at all events I gained honor
+and fame."
+
+At Munich a great shock awaited him. He visited the Webers, and being
+in mourning for his mother, wore, after the French fashion, a red coat
+with black buttons. When he appeared, Aloysia hardly seemed to
+recognize him, and her coldness was so marked, that Mozart quietly
+seated himself at the piano, and sang in a loud voice, "Ich lass das
+Mädchen gern das mich nicht will" (I gladly give up the girl who
+slights me). It was all over, and he had to bear the loss of the
+fickle girl as best he might. There is a significant line in one of
+his letters at this time to his father: "In my whole life I never
+wrote worse than I do to-day, but I really am unfit for anything; my
+heart is so full of tears." After two years' absence he returned home
+to Salzburg, where he was warmly welcomed back. Here he remained for a
+little while, and wrote his first serious opera, "Idomeneo," to the
+text of an Abbe Varesco, a Salzburger. This opera Beethoven thought
+the finest of all that Mozart wrote. It was brought out at Munich in
+January, 1781, and was brilliantly successful. In the March following,
+an order was received from the archbishop to follow him to Vienna,
+where he wished to appear with all the full pomp and brilliant retinue
+of a prince of the church; and as one of this retinue Mozart had to
+follow him, little thinking at the time that he should never return to
+Salzburg, but that Vienna henceforth was to be his home.
+
+In Vienna he found that he had to live in the archbishop's house, and
+was looked upon there as one of the ordinary servants. He says, "We
+dine at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, unluckily rather too early an
+hour for me. Our party consists of the two valets, the comptroller,
+Herr Zetti, the confectioner, the two cooks, Cecarilli, Brunetti (two
+singers), and my insignificant self. N. B.--The two valets sit at the
+head of the table. I have, at all events, the honor to be placed above
+the cooks; I almost believe I am back to Salzburg."
+
+Mozart was a true gentleman, with no foolish false pride, but with the
+honorable self-respect that every gentleman must possess, and it was
+very galling to him to have to suffer such odious treatment from the
+mean-spirited archbishop. Indeed, it was only for his father's sake
+that he submitted to the continued contumely and petty slights to
+which the archbishop delighted in subjecting him. At last the open
+rupture came. The archbishop called him a knave and dissolute fellow,
+and told him to be off; and when Mozart waited upon Count Arco, the
+principal official, to obtain the regular dismissal that was
+necessary, the fellow poured abuse upon him, and actually kicked him
+out of the room. Poor Mozart was in a state of violent excitement
+after this outrage, and for some days was so ill that he could not
+continue his ordinary work. But now at least he was free, and though
+his father, like a timid, prudent old man, bewailed the loss of the
+stipend which his son had been receiving, Mozart himself knew that the
+release was entirely for the best.
+
+In 1782 appeared "Die Entführung aus dem Serail," his first really
+important opera, full of beautiful airs, which at once became
+enormously popular with the Viennese. The Emperor Joseph II. knew very
+little about music, but, as frequently happens in such cases,
+considered that he possessed prodigious taste. On hearing it he said,
+"Much too fine for our ears, dear Mozart; and what a quantity of
+notes!"
+
+The bold reply to this was, "Just as many notes as are necessary,
+your Majesty."
+
+Much of the delight which Mozart felt in the success of the opera
+arose from the fact that it enabled him seriously to contemplate
+marriage. Aloysia Weber had been faithless to him, but there was
+another sister--with no special beauty save that of bright eyes, a
+comely figure, and a cheerful, amiable disposition--Constanze, whom he
+now hoped to make his wife. His father objected to all of the Weber
+family, and there was some difficulty in obtaining the paternal
+consent; but at last the marriage took place, on August 4, 1782. How
+truly he loved his wife from first to last, his letters abundantly
+show; her frequent illnesses were afterward a great and almost
+constant source of expense to him, but he never ceased to write to her
+with the passionate ardor of a young lover. He says: "I found that I
+never prayed so fervently, or confessed so piously, as by her side;
+she felt the same." And now for some time everything went smoothly in
+the modest little ménage in Vienna. Mozart had plenty of lessons to
+give, but none of the commissions for operas which he would have
+wished.
+
+Passing over a visit to Leipsic--where he studied with the keenest
+delight a number of the unpublished works of the great Sebastian
+Bach--and to Berlin, he returned to Vienna, and at once set to work
+upon some quartets which the King of Prussia had ordered from him.
+"Cosi fan tutte," a comic opera, with the beautifully flowing music
+that only Mozart could write, but with a stupid plot that has
+prevented its frequent repetition in later times; and the glorious
+"Zauberflöte," written to assist a theatrical manager, Schikaneder,
+were his next works. At this time a strange melancholy began to show
+itself in his letters--it may be that already his overwrought brain
+was conscious that the end was not far distant. Such lines as these,
+pathetic and sad in their simple and almost childlike expression,
+occur in a letter he wrote during a short absence from his wife, at
+Frankfort, in 1790: "I am as happy as a child at the thought of
+returning to you. If people could see into my heart I should almost
+feel ashamed--all there is cold, cold as ice. Were you with me, I
+should possibly take more pleasure in the kindness of those I meet
+here, but all seems to me so empty." On his return to Vienna pecuniary
+want was rather pressingly felt; his silver plate had to be pawned,
+and a perfidious friend, Stadler, made away with the tickets, and the
+silver was never redeemed. On one occasion Joseph Deiner, the landlord
+of the "Silberne Schlange," chanced to call upon him, and was
+surprised to find Mozart and his wife Constanze dancing round the
+room. The laughing explanation was that they had no firewood in the
+house, and so were trying to warm themselves with dancing. Deiner at
+once offered to send in firewood, Mozart promising to pay as soon as
+he could.
+
+That grand work, the "Zauberflöte," had just been completed when a
+strange commission was given him. One day a tall, haggard-looking man,
+dressed in gray, with a very sombre expression of countenance, called
+upon Mozart, bringing with him an anonymous letter. This letter
+contained an inquiry as to the sum for which he would write a mass for
+the dead, and in how short a time this could be completed. Mozart
+consulted his wife, and the sum of fifty ducats was mentioned. The
+stranger departed, and soon returned with the money, promising Mozart
+a further sum on completion, and also mentioned that he might as well
+spare the trouble of finding out who had given this commission, for it
+would be entirely useless. We now know that the commission had really
+been given by Count Walsegg, a foolish nobleman, whose wife had died,
+and who wanted, by transcribing Mozart's score, to pass it off as his
+own composition--and this he actually did after the composer's death.
+Poor Mozart, in the weak state of health in which he now was, with
+nerves unstrung and over-excited brain, was strangely impressed by
+this visit, and soon the fancy took firm possession of him that the
+messenger had arrived with a mandate from the unseen world, and that
+the "Requiem" he was to write was for himself. Not the less did he
+ardently set to work on it. Hardly, however, was it commenced than he
+was compelled to write another opera, "La Clemenza di Tito," for which
+a commission had been given him by the Bohemian Estates, for
+production on the occasion of the Emperor Leopold's coronation in
+their capital. This was accomplished in the short space of eighteen
+days, and though it does not contain the best music, yet the overture
+and several of the numbers are full of a piquant beauty and liveliness
+well suiting the festival of a people's rejoicing. But a far greater
+work, the "Zauberflöte," was produced in Vienna shortly afterward. It
+did not take very well at first, but subsequent performances went
+better.
+
+[Illustration: Mozart Singing his Requiem.]
+
+His labors in bringing out the "Zauberflöte" over, Mozart returned to
+the "Requiem" he had already commenced, but while writing he often had
+to sink back in his chair, being seized with short swoons. Too plainly
+was his strength exhausted, but he persisted in his solemn work. One
+bright November morning he was walking with Constanze in the Prater,
+and sadly pointing out to her the falling leaves, and speaking of
+death, with tears in his eyes, he added; "I well know I am writing
+this 'Requiem' for myself. My own feelings tell me that I shall not
+last long. No doubt some one has given me poison--I cannot get rid of
+this thought." With these gloomy fancies haunting his mind, he rapidly
+grew worse, and soon could not leave his room. The performances of the
+"Zauberflöte" were still going on, and extraordinarily successful. He
+took the greatest interest in hearing of them, and at night would take
+out his watch and note the time--"Now the first act is over, now is
+the time for the great Queen of Night." The day before his death he
+said to his wife, "Oh, that I could only once more hear my 'Flauto
+Magico!'" humming, in scarcely audible voice, the lively bird-catcher
+song. The same day, at two o'clock in the afternoon, he called his
+friends together, and asked for the score of his nearly completed
+"Requiem" to be laid on his bed. Benedict Schack sang the soprano; his
+brother-in-law, Hofer, the tenor; Gerl, the bass; and Mozart himself
+took the alto in a weak but delicately clear voice. They had got
+through the various parts till they came to the "Lacrymosa," when
+Mozart burst into tears, and laid the score aside. The next day
+(Sunday), he was worse, and said to Sophie, his sister-in-law, "I have
+the taste of death on my tongue, I smell the grave, and who can
+comfort my Constanze, if you don't stay here?" In her account of his
+last moments, she says: "I found Süssmayer sitting by Mozart's bed.
+The well-known 'Requiem' was lying on the coverlet, and Mozart was
+explaining to Süssmayer the mode in which he wished him to complete
+it after his death. He further requested his wife to keep his death
+secret until she had informed Albrechtsberger of it, 'for the
+situation of assistant organist at the Stephen Church ought to be his
+before God and the world.' The doctor came and ordered cold
+applications on Mozart's burning head.... The last movement of his
+lips was an endeavor to indicate where the kettledrums should be used
+in the 'Requiem.' I think I still hear the sound."
+
+
+
+
+HAYDN
+
+By C. E. BOURNE
+
+(1732-1809)
+
+
+[Illustration: Haydn.]
+
+No composer has ever given greater or purer pleasure by his
+compositions than is given by "papa" Haydn; there is an unceasing flow
+of cheerfulness and lively tone in his music, even in the most solemn
+pieces, as in his Masses, the predominant feeling is that of gladness;
+as he once said to Carpani: "At the thought of God my heart leaps for
+joy, and I cannot help my music doing the same." But it is not alone
+as the writer of graceful and beautiful music that Haydn has a claim
+on our remembrance; he has been truly called the "father of the
+symphony." Mozart once said: "It was from Haydn that I first learned
+the true way to compose quartettes;" and "The Creation," which must
+ever be counted one of the masterpieces of oratorio music, was his
+work.
+
+His family were of the people, his father being a master wheelwright
+at Rohrau, a small Austrian village on the borders of Lower Austria
+and Hungary and his mother having been employed as a cook in the
+castle of Count Harrach, the principal lord of the district. Joseph
+Haydn was born on March 31, 1732 the second child of his parents; and
+as ten brothers and sisters afterward came into the world, it can
+easily be understood that his lot was not a very luxurious one. His
+parents were simple, honest people of the laboring class, very
+ignorant, but, like most German peasants, with a certain love for and
+facility in music, not quite so common in this country. Haydn's father
+had a good voice, and could sing well, accompanying himself on the
+harp, though he did not know a single note of written music. Then
+there was the village schoolmaster, who could actually play the
+violin, and whom little Joseph watched with wondering eyes, extracting
+those marvellously sweet sounds from his wooden instrument, until,
+with the child's spirit of imitation, as his parents sang their
+"Volkslieder," the little fellow, perched on a stone bench, gravely
+handled two pieces of wood of his own as if they were bow and fiddle,
+keeping exact time, and flourishing the bow in the approved fashion of
+the schoolmaster. From this very little incident came an important
+change in his life; for a relation, Johann Mathias Frankh, of
+Hainburg, happened to be present on one occasion, and, thinking he saw
+an aptitude for music in the boy, offered to take him into his own
+school at Hainburg, where accordingly young Haydn went at the age of
+six years.
+
+There he remained for two years, making rapid progress in singing and
+in playing all sorts of instruments, among others the clavier, violin,
+organ, and drum. He said afterward, with the unaffected piety, far
+removed from cant, that was characteristic of him: "Almighty God, to
+whom I render thanks for all his unnumbered mercies, gave me such
+facility in music that, by the time I was six years old, I stood up
+like a man and sang masses in the church choir, and could play a
+little on the clavier and violin." Of Frankh, a very strict, but
+thorough and most painstaking teacher, he also said afterward: "I
+shall be grateful to that man as long as I live for keeping me so hard
+at work, though I used to get more flogging than food;" and in Haydn's
+will he remembered Frankh's family, leaving his daughter a sum of
+money and a portrait of Frankh himself, "my first instructor in
+music."
+
+For some years he seems to have lived a miserable, struggling life,
+giving lessons, playing the organ in churches, and studying when and
+where he could. He had a few pupils at the moderate remuneration of
+two florins a month, and he had contrived to obtain possession of an
+old worm-eaten clavier, on which he used diligently to practise in the
+garret in the Kohlmarkt, where he lived. A pitiable description is
+given of the lodging he then occupied. It was on the sixth story, in a
+room without stove or window. In winter his breath froze on his thin
+coverlet, and the water, that in the morning he had to fetch himself
+from the spring for washing, was frequently changed into a lump of ice
+before his arrival in that elevated region. Life was indeed hard; but
+he was constantly at work, and, having made a precious "find" on an
+old bookstall one day of Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum," in a very
+dilapidated condition, but very cheap, he was ardently preparing
+himself for the life--he now vowed should be his--of a composer.
+
+About this time Haydn received a commission from Felix Kurz, a comic
+actor of the Stadt-Theatre, to put a farce of his, "Der neue krumme
+Teufel," to music. This farce, of which the words still remain, though
+the music has been lost, was very successful, and was played in
+Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and a number of other towns. The well-known
+story of Haydn's "Tempest Music" is connected with this. In one part
+of this piece a terrible storm was supposed to be raging, and the
+accompanying music must of course be suitably descriptive; but the
+difficulty was that Haydn had never seen the sea: therefore had not
+the slightest notion of what a storm at sea was like. Kurz tries to
+describe the waves running mountains high, the pitching and tossing,
+the roll of thunder, and the howling of the wind; and Haydn produces
+all sorts of ugly, jerky, and noisy music, but none of it is in the
+remotest degree like a storm at sea, or anywhere else. At last, after
+Kurz had become hoarse with his nautical disquisitions, and Haydn's
+fingers were tired of scrambling all over the piano, the little
+musician in a rage crashed his hands down on the two extremes of the
+instrument, exclaiming: "Let's have done with this tempest!"
+
+"Why, that's it; that's the very thing!" shouted the clown, jumping up
+and embracing him; and with this crash and a run of semitones to the
+centre of the piano this troublesome tempest was most satisfactorily
+represented.
+
+When, many years afterward, Haydn was crossing the Straits of Dover to
+England, amid his sufferings he could not help laughing at the
+ludicrous recollections of this early experience of his.
+
+Things still went on improving, and Haydn, who was always lucky in the
+patrons he secured (at least according to the notion about patrons
+that then prevailed), was invited to the country-house of Herr von
+Fürnberg, a wealthy amateur, to stay there and compose quartettes for
+him--a style of music for which von Fürnberg had an especial liking.
+To his prompting it is that we owe the lovely series of quartettes
+which Haydn wrote--still as fresh and full of serene beauty as when
+first tried over by the virtuosi of Weinzirl. The next piece of good
+fortune was Haydn's appointment as director of the band and composer
+to Count Ferdinand Morzin at Lukaver near Pilsen; and here, in 1759,
+his first symphony was written. His salary was very small, only 200
+florins a year (or £20), with board and lodgings; but on the strength
+of it he unfortunately determined on the serious step of embarking in
+matrimony. A barber, named Keller, is said to have been very kind to
+him in the days of his poverty, and out of gratitude Haydn gave
+music-lessons to his daughters. One of them, the youngest, was very
+pretty, and Haydn fell in love with her. But she became a nun; and the
+father then prevailed upon Haydn to marry the elder one, who was three
+years older than he--a sour-tempered, bigoted, and abominably selfish
+woman, who contributed little to the happiness of his life, and was
+always bringing priests and friars to the house and worrying her
+good-tempered husband to compose masses and other church music for
+these men.
+
+Count Morzin was compelled to give up his band in 1761; but Haydn did
+not remain long without employment, as Prince Esterhazy, who had heard
+his symphonies at Morzin's house, engaged him to assist Werner, his
+Capellmeister. As director of Prince Esterhazy's band, Haydn was fated
+to remain for many years living at Esterház, the prince's
+country-seat, composing there nearly all his operas and songs, and
+many of his symphonies.
+
+In 1785 Haydn received a commission which showed the wide reputation
+he had then gained. The Chapter of Cadiz Cathedral requested him to
+write some instrumental music for performance on Good Friday. "The
+Seven Words of our Saviour on the Cross" was in consequence written by
+him.
+
+Several invitations had been sent from England for Haydn to pay a
+visit there; but it was only after Prince Esterhazy was dead that he
+was prevailed on by Salomon to cross the sea. A characteristic
+conversation between him and Mozart--which took place before he
+undertook this, in those days, really formidable journey--is recorded.
+
+"Papa," said Mozart, "you have no training for the great world, and
+you speak too few languages."
+
+Haydn replied: "My language is understood by all the world."
+
+He set out on December 15, 1790, and did not return to Vienna till
+July, 1792. In London, where he wrote and conducted a number of
+symphonies for Salomon, he was the "lion" of the season, being in
+constant request for conducting concerts and paying visits to the
+nobility. Of these symphonies Salomon once said to him: "I am strongly
+of opinion that you never will surpass this music."
+
+"I never mean to try," was the answer.
+
+But this must not be taken to mean that Haydn had given up striving
+after the truest perfection in his art, and it probably meant no more
+than that for the time he was satisfied with his work. Far more like
+the genuine expression of the feeling of the great artist was his
+utterance, just before he died, to Kalkbrenner: "I have only just
+learned in my old age how to use the wind-instruments; and now that I
+do understand them, I must leave the world."
+
+[Illustration: Haydn Composing his "Creation."]
+
+Great as the work accomplished in his youth and early manhood
+unquestionably was, it remained for his old age to accomplish his
+greatest work, and that by which he is best known--the oratorio of
+"The Creation." It is said that the first ideas for this came to him
+when, in crossing the English Channel, he encountered a terrific
+storm. Soon after his leaving London, where the words had been given
+him by Salomon, Haydn set about composing the music. "Never," he says,
+"was I so pious as when composing 'The Creation.' I knelt down every
+day and prayed God to strengthen me for my work." It was first
+produced on March 31, 1799, his 67th birthday, at the National
+Theatre, Vienna, and was at once accorded an extraordinary share of
+popular favor. There is a pathetic story of the last performance of
+the work, at which Haydn, in extreme old age, in 1808, was present,
+when Salieri conducted. He was carried in an arm-chair into the hall,
+and received there with the warmest greeting by the audience. At the
+sublime passage, "And there was light!" Haydn, quite overcome, raised
+his hand, pointing upward and saying, "It came from thence." Soon
+after this his agitation increased so much that it was thought better
+to take him home at the end of the first part. The people crowded
+round him to take leave, and Beethoven is said to have reverently
+kissed his hand and forehead. After composing "The Creation," Haydn
+was prevailed upon to write another work, of somewhat similar
+character, to words adapted from Thomson's poem, and entitled "The
+Seasons." This, though containing some fine descriptive music and
+several choruses of great beauty, is not at all equal to the earlier
+work, though at the time its success was quite as complete. But the
+exertion of writing two such great works, almost without rest between
+them, was too great, and he himself said: "'The Seasons' gave me the
+finishing stroke." The bombardment of Vienna by the French in 1809
+greatly disturbed the poor old man. He still retained some of his old
+humor, and during the thunder of the cannons called out to his
+servants: "Children, don't be frightened; no harm can happen to you
+while Haydn is by!" He was now no longer able to compose, and to his
+last unfinished quartette he added a few bars of "Der Greis," as a
+conclusion:
+
+  "Hin ist alle meine Kraft:
+  Alt und schwach bin ich.
+                --JOSEPH HAYDN."
+
+"Gone is all my strength: old and weak am I." And these lines he
+caused to be engraved, and sent on a card to the friends who visited
+him. The end was indeed now near. On May 26, 1809, he had his servants
+gathered round him for the last adieus; then, by his desire, he was
+carried to the piano, where he played three times over the "Emperor's
+Hymn," composed by him. Then he was taken to his bed, where five days
+afterward he died.
+
+
+
+
+BEETHOVEN
+
+By C. E. BOURNE
+
+(1770-1827)
+
+
+[Illustration: Beethoven.]
+
+In one of his letters to Frau von Streicher, at Baden, Beethoven
+writes: "When you visit the ancient ruins, do not forget that
+Beethoven has often lingered there; when you stray through the silent
+pine-forests, do not forget that Beethoven often wrote poetry there,
+or, as it is termed, composed." He was always fond of claiming the
+title "Ton-dichter, poet in music;" and surely of all the great
+geniuses who have walked the earth, to none can the glorious name of
+"poet" more truly be given than to Ludwig von Beethoven.
+
+He was born at Bonn, on December 17, 1770. His father, Johann von
+Beethoven, was a tenor singer in the Electoral Chapel of the
+Archbishop of Cologne, at Bonn, and his mother, Maria Magdalena, was a
+daughter of the head cook at the castle of Ehrenbreitstein. The
+Beethoven family originally came from Louvain, in Belgium; but the
+composer's grandfather had settled in Bonn, first as a singer, and
+afterward as Capellmeister to the court. Musicians were not held of
+much account in those days, and the marriage of a singer with the
+daughter of a cook was not at all considered a mésalliance. Johann was
+a sad drunken scapegrace, and his poor wife, in bringing up her family
+upon the small portion of his earnings which she could save from being
+squandered at the tavern, had a pitiably hard and long struggling life
+of it.
+
+Johann soon discovered the extraordinary musical endowments of his
+child and at once set to work to make a "prodigy" of him, as Handel,
+Bach, and Mozart had been before; for in this way the father hoped to
+secure a mine of wealth and lazy competence for himself. So the boy,
+when only a few years old, was kept for long weary hours practising
+the piano, and one of the earliest stories of his life is of the
+five-year-old little child made to stand on a bench before the piano
+laboring over the notes, while the tears flowed fast down his cheeks
+at the cold and aching pain, from which his hard taskmaster would not
+release him. Besides his father, a clever musician who lodged in the
+house, Pfeiffer, an oboist at the theatre, gave him lessons. Beethoven
+used afterward to say that he had learnt more from this Pfeiffer than
+from any one else; but he was too ready to abet the father in his
+tyranny, and many a time, when the two came reeling home late at night
+from drinking bouts at the tavern, they would arouse the little fellow
+from his sleep and set him to work at the piano till daybreak.
+
+His next instructor was Neefe, the organist of the Archbishop's
+private chapel, a really skilful and learned musician, who predicted
+that the boy would become a second Mozart. Under him Beethoven studied
+for several years, and in 1782, when he was hardly twelve years old,
+we find him acting as organist in Neefe's place during the absence of
+the latter on a journey. The next year three sonatas composed by young
+Beethoven, and dedicated to the Elector in fulsome language, which was
+probably his father's production, were printed. Soon afterward the boy
+obtained the appointment of assistant-organist to the Elector, with a
+salary of a hundred thalers, no inconsiderable addition to the
+resources of his poor mother, who, with her family of three children,
+Ludwig, Carl, and Johann, and the more and more frequent visits of her
+ne'er-do-well of a husband to the tavern, was often grievously hard
+put to it for money. Young Ludwig had little play time in his life,
+and little opportunity for education; but amid his hard work some
+indications of a mischievous boyish spirit are to be found.
+
+In the year 1791, the Elector, as head of the Teutonic Order, had to
+be present at a grand conclave at Mergentheim, and thither he resolved
+to take his musical and theatrical staff. Two ships were chartered to
+convey these gentlemen down the Rhine and Maine, and a very pleasant
+excursion, with all sorts of frolics and high revellings, they had of
+it. Lux, a celebrated actor, was chosen king of the expedition, and we
+find Beethoven figuring among the scullions.
+
+In the autumn of the year following, a visit was paid by Haydn to Bonn
+on his return from his second journey to London. The musicians of the
+town gave a breakfast at Godesberg in his honor, and here Beethoven
+summoned up courage to show the veteran musician a cantata which he
+had recently composed. This was warmly praised by Haydn, and probably
+about this time arrangements were made for Beethoven to be received
+as a pupil by the older master. It is in this period that we must
+place a well-known anecdote. The young musician, already famous in his
+own neighborhood, was composing, as his custom was, in the wood
+outside the city, when a funeral cortége passed him. The priest,
+seeing him, instantly checked the dirge which was being chanted, and
+the procession passed in solemn silence, "for fear of disturbing him."
+In the beginning of November, 1792, the young musician left Bonn for
+Vienna, and, as it happened, he never afterward returned to the
+familiar scenes of his birthplace.
+
+Beethoven was never a very easy man to get on with, and his
+intercourse with Haydn, who used to call him the "Great Mogul," does
+not seem to have been the most friendly. He was dissatisfied with the
+instruction given him, and suspicions were awakened in his mind that
+the elder musician was jealous of him, and did not wish him to
+improve. These thoughts were strengthened by the result of a chance
+meeting one day, as he was walking home with his portfolio under his
+arm, with Johann Schenk, a scientific and thoroughly accomplished
+musician. Beethoven complained to him of the little advance he was
+making in counterpoint, and that Haydn never corrected his exercises
+or taught him anything. Schenk asked to look through the portfolio,
+and see the last work that Haydn had revised, and on examining it he
+was astonished to find a number of mistakes that had not been pointed
+out. It is difficult to understand Haydn's conduct in this matter, for
+the perfidious treatment suspected by Beethoven is quite at variance
+with the ordinarily accepted character of the old man, and I cannot
+help fancying that the only foundation for Beethoven's suspicion was
+that Haydn did not quite understand the erratic genius of the youth
+till some time afterward. Beethoven dedicated his three pianoforte
+sonatas, Op. II., to Haydn, and when the latter suggested that he
+should add on the title page "Pupil of Haydn," the "Great Mogul"
+refused, bluntly saying "that he had never learnt anything from him."
+After Haydn, Albrechtsberger and Salieri were for a time his teachers,
+but Beethoven got on no better with them, and Albrechtsberger said,
+"Have nothing to do with him; he has learnt nothing, and will never do
+anything in decent style." Perhaps not in your pedant's style, O great
+contrapuntist!
+
+Beethoven cannot be said to have been unfortunate in his friends. He
+had many true and faithful ones throughout his life, and though he
+suffered from pecuniary troubles, caused by the conduct of his
+brothers, he was never in such a state of grinding poverty as some
+other artists, such as Schubert, have been--never compelled to waste
+precious years of his life in producing "pot-boilers"--working not for
+art so much as for mere food and shelter. In 1794 Prince Karl
+Lichnowski, who had been a pupil of Mozart, and who, as well as his
+wife Christiane, was _fanatico per la musica_, proposed that Beethoven
+should come and live at his palace. They had no children; a suite of
+rooms was placed at the musician's disposal; no terms were proposed;
+the offer was the most delicate and friendly imaginable, and was
+accepted by Beethoven in the spirit in which it was made. For ten
+years he resided with the Lichnowskis, and these were probably the
+years of purest happiness in the great composer's life, although early
+in their course the terrible affliction of deafness began to be felt
+by him. He at this time freely frequented the salons of the Viennese
+nobility, many of whom were accomplished virtuosi themselves, and were
+able to appreciate the great genius of the new-comer, rough and
+bearish as oftentimes he must have appeared to them--a great contrast
+to the courtly Haydn and Salieri, who might be seen sitting side by
+side on the sofa in some grandee's music-room, with their swords,
+wigs, ruffles, silk stockings, and snuff-boxes, while the
+insignificant-looking and meanly dressed Beethoven used to stand
+unnoticed in a corner. Here is a description of his appearance given
+by a Frau von Bernhard: "When he visited us, he generally put his head
+in at the door before entering, to see if there were any one present
+he did not like. He was short and insignificant-looking, with a red
+face covered with pock-marks. His hair was quite dark. His dress was
+very common, quite a contrast to the elegant attire customary in those
+days, especially in our circles.... He was very proud, and I have
+known him refuse to play, even when Countess Thun, the mother of
+Princess Lichnowski, had fallen on her knees before him as he lay on
+the sofa to beg him to. The Countess was a very eccentric person....
+At the Lichnowskis' I saw Haydn and Salieri, who were then very
+famous, while Beethoven excited no interest."
+
+It was in the year 1800 that Beethoven at last was compelled to
+acknowledge to himself the terrible calamity of almost total deafness
+that had befallen him. He writes to his friend Wegeler, "If I had not
+read somewhere that man must not of his own free will depart this
+life, I should long ere this have been no more and that through my own
+act.... What is to be the result of this the good God alone knows. I
+beg of you not to mention my state to any one, not even to Lorchen
+[Wegeler's wife]. But," he continues, "I live only in my music, and no
+sooner is one thing completed than another is begun. In fact, as at
+present, I am often engaged on three or four compositions at one
+time."
+
+[Illustration: An Anecdote about Beethoven.]
+
+But at first all was not gloom; for Beethoven was in love--not the
+love of fleeting fancy that, like other poets, he may have experienced
+before, but deeply, tragically, in love; and it seems that, for a time
+at least, this love was returned. The lady was the Countess Julia
+Guicciardi; but his dream did not last long, for in the year 1801 she
+married a Count Gallenberg. Hardly anything is known of this love
+affair of Beethoven's. A few letters full of passionate tenderness,
+and with a certain very pathetic simple trustfulness in her love
+running through them all--on which her marriage shortly afterward is a
+strange comment; the "Moonlight Sonata," vibrating, as it is
+throughout, with a lover's supremest ecstasy of devotion, these are
+the only records of that one blissful epoch in the poor composer's
+life; but how much it affected his after life, how it mingled in the
+dreams from which his loveliest creations of later years arose, it is
+impossible now to say. In a letter to Wegeler, dated November 16,
+1801, he says, "You can hardly realize what a miserable, desolate life
+mine has been for the last two years; my defective hearing everywhere
+pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear a
+misanthrope; and yet no one in reality is less so! This change [to a
+happier life] has been brought about by a lovely and fascinating
+girl who loves me and whom I love. After the lapse of two years I
+have again enjoyed some blissful moments, and now for the first time I
+feel that marriage can bestow happiness; but alas! she is not in the
+same rank of life as myself.... You shall see me as happy as I am
+destined to be here below, but not unhappy. No, that I could not bear.
+I will grasp Fate by the throat; it shall not utterly crush me. Oh, it
+is so glorious to live one's life a thousand times!" No misanthropy
+this, surely; he could not always speak the speech of common men, or
+care for the tawdry bravery of titles or fine clothes in which they
+strutted, but what a heart there was in the man, what a wondrous
+insight into all the beauty of the world, visible and invisible,
+around him! The most glorious lovesong ever composed, "Adelaide," was
+written by him; but Julia Guicciardi preferred a Count Gallenberg,
+keeper of the royal archives in Vienna, and Beethoven, to the end of
+his days, went on his way alone.
+
+It was at this time that he composed his oratorio, "The Mount of
+Olives," which can hardly be reckoned among his finest works; and his
+one opera--but such an opera--"Fidelio." The greater part of these
+works was composed during his stay, in the summer months, at
+Hetzendorf, a pretty, secluded little village near Schönbrunn. He
+spent his days wandering alone through the quiet, shady alleys of the
+imperial park there, and his favorite seat was between two boughs of a
+venerable oak, at a height of about two feet from the ground. For some
+time he had apartments at a residence of Baron Pronay's, near this
+village; but he suddenly left, "because the baron would persist in
+making him profound bows every time that he met him." Like a true
+poet, he delighted in the country. "No man on earth," he writes,
+"loves the country more. Woods, trees, and rock give the response
+which man requires. Every tree seems to say, 'Holy, holy.'"
+
+In 1804 the magnificent "Eroica" symphony was completed. This had
+originally been commenced in honor of Napoleon Bonaparte, then First
+Consul, who, Beethoven--throughout his life an ardent Republican--then
+believed was about to bring liberty to all the nations of Europe. When
+the news of the empire came the dream departed, and Beethoven, in a
+passionate rage, tore the title page of the symphony in two, and, with
+a torrent of imprecations against the tyrant, stamped on the torn
+fragments.
+
+"My hero--a tyrant!" he shrieked, as he trampled on the poor page. On
+this page the inscription had been simply, "Bonaparte--Luigi v.
+Beethoven". For some years he refused to publish the work, and, when
+at last this was done, the inscription read as follows: "Sinfonia
+Eroica per festigiari il sovvenire d'un grand' uomo" (Heroic symphony,
+to celebrate the memory of a great man). When Napoleon died, in 1821,
+Beethoven said, "Seventeen years before I composed the music for this
+occasion;" and surely no grander music than that of the "Funeral
+March" was ever composed for the obsequies of a fallen hero. This is
+not the place to enter into a description of the marvellous succession
+of colossal works--symphonies, concertos, sonatas, trios, quartets,
+etc., culminating in the "Choral Symphony," his ninth, and
+last--which, through those long years of a silent life, imprisoned
+within himself, the great master put forth. His deafness prevented his
+appearing in public to conduct, although, with the natural desire of a
+composer to be present at the production of his own work, he long
+struggled to take his part in the first performances of symphonies and
+concertos.
+
+When the great choral symphony was first performed he attempted to
+conduct, but in reality another conductor was stationed near him to
+give the right time to the band. After the majestic instrumental
+movements had been played came the final one, concluding with
+Schiller's "Hymn to Joy." The chorus breaks forth, thundering out in
+concert with all the instruments. At the words "Seid umschlunger,
+Millionen," the audience could no longer restrain their excited
+delight, and burst into tremendous applause, drowning the voices of
+singers and the sounds of strings and brass. The last notes are heard,
+but still Beethoven stands there absorbed in thought--he does not know
+that the music is ended. This was the first time that the people
+realized the full deprivation of hearing from which he suffered.
+Fraulein Unger, the soprano, gently takes his arm and turns him round
+to front the acclaiming multitude. There are few in that crowd who,
+while they cheer, do not feel the tears stealing down their cheeks at
+the sight of the poor lonely man who, from the prison-house of his
+affliction, has brought to them the gladness of thought so divine.
+Unmoved, he bowed his acknowledgment, and quietly left the building.
+
+His later years were embittered with troubles about his nephew Carl, a
+youth to whom he was fondly attached, but who shamefully repaid the
+love of the desolate old man. Letters like the following, to the
+teacher in whose house the boy lived, show the constant thought and
+affection given to this boy: "Your estimable lady is politely
+requested to let the undersigned know as soon as possible (that I may
+not be obliged to keep it all in my head) how many pairs of stockings,
+trousers, shoes, and drawers are required, and how many yards of
+kerseymere to make a pair of black trousers for my tall nephew."
+
+His death was the result of a cold which produced inflammation of the
+lungs. On the morning of March 24, 1827, he took the sacrament and
+when the clergyman was gone and his friends stood round his bed, he
+muttered. "_Plaudite amici, comedia finita est._" He then fell into an
+agony so intense that he could no longer articulate, and thus
+continued until the evening of the 26th. A violent thunder-storm
+arose; one of his friends, watching by his bedside when the thunder
+was rolling and a vivid flash of lightning lit up the room, saw him
+suddenly open his eyes, lift his right hand upward for some
+seconds--as if in defiance of the powers of evil--with clenched fist
+and a stern, solemn expression on his face; and then he sank back and
+died.
+
+
+
+
+PAGANINI
+
+(1784-1840)
+
+
+[Illustration: Paganini.]
+
+Nicolo Paganini, whose European fame as a violinist entitles him to a
+notice here, was born at Genoa in 1784. His father, a commission-broker,
+played on the mandolin; but fully aware of the inferiority of an
+instrument so limited in power, he put a violin into his son's hands,
+and initiated him in the principles of music. The child succeeded so
+well under parental tuition, that at eight years of age he played three
+times a week in the church, as well as in the public saloons. At the
+same period he composed a sonata. In his ninth year he was placed under
+the instruction of Costa, first violoncellist of Genoa; then had lessons
+of Rolla, a famous performer and composer; and finally studied
+counterpoint at Parma under Ghiretti and the celebrated maestro Paer. He
+now took an engagement at Lucca, where he chiefly associated with
+persons who at the gaming-table stripped him of his gains as quickly as
+he acquired them. He there received the appointment of director of
+orchestra to the court, at which the Princess Elisa Bacciochi, sister of
+Napoleon I., presided, and thither invited, to the full extent of her
+means, superior talent of every kind. In 1813 he performed at Milan;
+five years after, at Turin; and subsequently at Florence and Naples. In
+1828 he visited Vienna, where a very popular violinist and composer,
+Mayseder, asked him how he produced such new effects. His reply was
+characteristic of a selfish mind: "_Chacun a ses secrets_" In that
+capital, it is affirmed, he was imprisoned, being accused of having
+murdered his wife. He challenged proofs of his ever having been married,
+which could not be produced. Then he was charged with having poignarded
+his mistress. This he also publicly refuted. The fact is that he knew
+better how to make money than friends, and he raised up enemies wherever
+his thirst for gold led him. Avarice was his master-passion; and, second
+to this, gross sensuality.
+
+The year 1831 found Paganini in Paris, in which excitable capital he
+produced a sensation not inferior to that created by the visit of
+Rossini. Even this renowned composer was so carried away, either by
+the actual genius of the violinist or by the current of popular
+enthusiasm, that he is said to have wept on hearing Paganini for the
+first time. He arrived in England in 1831, and immediately announced a
+concert at the Italian Opera House, at a price which, if acceded to,
+would have yielded £3,391 per night; but the attempt was too
+audacious, and he was compelled to abate his demands, though he
+succeeded in drawing audiences fifteen nights in that season at the
+ordinary high prices of the King's Theatre. He also gave concerts in
+other parts of London, and performed at benefits, always taking at
+these a large proportion of the proceeds. He visited most of the great
+towns, where his good fortune still attended him. He was asked to play
+at the Commemoration Festival at Oxford, in 1834, and demanded 1,000
+guineas for his assistance at three concerts. His terms were of course
+rejected.
+
+Paganini died at Nice, in 1840, of a diseased larynx ("phthisie
+laryngée"). By his will, dated 1837, he gave his two sisters legacies
+of 60,000 and 70,000 francs; his mother a pension of 1,200; the mother
+of his son Achillino (a Jewess of Milan) a similar pension; and the
+rest of his fortune, amounting to 4,000,000 francs, devolved on his
+son. These and other facts before related, we give on the authority of
+the "Biographie Universelle."
+
+Paganini certainly was a man of genius and a great performer, but
+sacrificed his art to his avarice. His mastery over the violin was
+almost marvellous, though he made an ignoble use of his power by
+employing it to captivate the mob of pretended amateurs by feats
+little better than sleight-of-hand. His performance on a single
+string, and the perfection of his harmonics, were very extraordinary;
+but why, as was asked at the time, be confined to one string when
+there are four at command that would answer every musical purpose so
+much better? His tone was pure, though not strong, his strings having
+been of smaller diameter than usual, to enable him to strain them at
+pleasure; for he tuned his instrument most capriciously. He could be a
+very expressive player; we have heard him produce effects deeply
+pathetic. His arpeggios evinced his knowledge of harmony, and some of
+his compositions exhibit many original and beautiful traits.
+
+[Illustration: Paganini in Prison.]
+
+
+
+
+MENDELSSOHN
+
+By C. E. BOURNE
+
+(1809-1847)
+
+
+Mendelssohn's lot in life was strikingly different from that of all
+the musicians of whom I have hitherto written; he never knew, like
+Schubert, what grinding poverty was, or suffered the long worries that
+Mozart had to endure for lack of money. His father was a Jewish banker
+in Berlin, the son of Moses Mendelssohn, a philosopher whose writings
+had already made the name celebrated throughout Europe. The composer's
+father used to say, with a very natural pride, after his own son had
+grown up, "Formerly I was the son of my father, and now I am the
+father of my son!"
+
+Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was born on February 3, 1809. His
+parents were neither of them trained musicians, though both
+appreciated and loved music, and it was from his mother that young
+Felix received his first music-lessons. When he had made some advance,
+Ludwig Berger became his tutor for the piano, and Zelter, a very
+learned and severe theorist, for counterpoint. At the age of nine
+years Felix had attained such proficiency that we find him taking the
+pianoforte part in a trio at a public concert of a Herr Gugel's, and
+when twelve years old he began to compose, and actually wrote a trio,
+some sonatas, a cantata, and several organ pieces. His home life was
+in the highest degree favorable to his musical development. On
+alternate Sundays musical performances were regularly given with a
+small orchestra in the large dining-room, Felix or his sister Fanny,
+who also possessed remarkable musical gifts, taking the pianoforte
+part, and new compositions by Felix were always included in the
+programme. Many friends, musicians and others, used to be present,
+Zelter regularly among their number, and the pieces were always freely
+commented on, Felix receiving then, as indeed he did all his life, the
+criticisms expressed, with the utmost good-natured readiness.
+
+[Illustration: Mendelssohn.]
+
+In 1824 Moscheles, at that time a celebrated pianist, and residing in
+London, visited Berlin, and was asked to give Felix music-lessons.
+This is the testimony of Moscheles, an excellent and kind-hearted man,
+and a thoroughly skilled musician, after spending nearly every day for
+six weeks with the family: "It is a family such as I have never known
+before; Felix, a mature artist, and yet but fifteen; Fanny,
+extraordinarily gifted, playing Bach's fugues by heart and with
+astonishing correctness--in fact, a thorough musician. The parents
+give me the impression of people of the highest cultivation;" and on
+the subject of lessons he says: "Felix has no need of lessons; if he
+wishes to take a hint from me as to anything new, he can easily do
+so." But it is very pleasant to find Mendelssohn afterward referring
+to these lessons as having urged him on to enthusiasm, and, in the
+days in London when his own fame had far outstripped that of the older
+musician, acknowledging himself as "Moscheles's pupil." The elder
+Mendelssohn was by no means carried away by the applause which the
+boy's playing and compositions had gained, and in 1825 he took his son
+to Paris to obtain Cherubini's opinion as to his musical abilities,
+with a view to the choice of a profession; for he had by no means made
+up his mind that Felix should spend his whole life as a musician.
+However, the surly old Florentine, who was not always civil or
+appreciative of budding genius (_teste_ Berlioz), gave a decidedly
+favorable judgment on the compositions submitted to him, and urged
+the father to devote his son to a musical career. And, indeed, on
+listening to the pieces which were dated this year, especially a
+beautiful quartet in B minor, an octet for strings, the music to an
+opera in two acts, "Camacho's Wedding," and numerous pianoforte
+pieces, it is difficult to realize that the composer was then only
+sixteen years of age, or that anyone could question the artistic
+vocation that claimed him. But the next year a work was written, the
+score of which is marked "Berlin, August 6, 1826," when it must be
+remembered that he was seventeen years of age, which of itself was
+sufficient to rank him among the immortals--the overture to the
+"Midsummer Night's Dream." Full of lovely imaginings, with a wonderful
+fairy grace all its own, and a bewitching beauty, revealing not only
+the soul of the true poet, but also the musician profoundly skilled in
+all the art of orchestral effect, it is hard to believe that it is the
+work of a boy under twenty, written in the bright summer days of 1826,
+in his father's garden at Berlin.
+
+Passing over the intermediate years with a simple reference to the
+"Meeresstille," "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," which was then
+composed, and a fine performance of Bach's "Passion Music," for which
+he had been long drilling the members of the Berlin Singakademie, the
+next event is a visit to England in 1829, where he was received with
+extraordinary warmth, playing at the Philharmonic Concerts, conducting
+his C minor Symphony, which he dedicated to the Philharmonic Society,
+they in their turn electing him one of their honorary members; going
+to dinners, balls, and the House of Commons, and enjoying himself most
+hugely. His letters from England at this time are brimming over with
+fun and graphic description; there is one especially amusing, in which
+he describes himself with two friends going home from a late dinner at
+the German Ambassador's, and on the way buying three German sausages,
+going down a quiet street to devour them, with all the while joyous
+laughter and snatches of part songs. There is also a little incident
+of this time showing the wonderful memory he possessed. After a
+concert on "Midsummer Night," when the "Midsummer Night's Dream" had
+very appropriately been played, it was found that the score had been
+lost in a hackney-coach as the party were returning to Mr. Attwood's.
+"Never mind," said Mendelssohn, "I will make another," which he did,
+and on comparison with the separate parts not a single difference was
+found in it.
+
+At the beginning of December he was at home again, and that winter he
+wrote the "Reformation Symphony," intended to be produced at the
+tercentenary festival of the "Augsburg Confession" in the following
+June. This symphony, with which Mendelssohn was not entirely
+satisfied, was only once performed during his lifetime, but since his
+death it has frequently been performed, and though not one of his most
+perfect works, is recognized as a noble monument in honor of a great
+event. The next spring he again set out on his travels, this time
+southward to Italy.
+
+In 1833 Mendelssohn accepted an official post offered him by the
+authorities of Düsseldorf, by which the entire musical arrangements of
+the town, church, theatre, and singing societies were put under his
+care. Immermann, the celebrated poet, being associated with him in the
+direction of the theatre. Things, however, did not go on very smoothly
+there. Mendelssohn found all the many worries of theatrical
+management--the engagement of singers and musicians, the dissensions
+to be arranged, the many tastes to be conciliated--too irksome, and he
+did not long retain this appointment; but the life among his friends
+at Düsseldorf was most delightful, and the letters written at this
+time are exceedingly lively and gay. It was here that he received the
+commission from the Cæcilia-Verein of Frankfort for, and commenced,
+his grand oratorio "St. Paul." The words for this, as also for the
+"Elijah" and "Hymn of Praise" afterward, he selected himself with the
+help of his friend Schubung, and they are entirely from the Bible--as
+he said, "The Bible is always the best of all." Circumstances
+prevented the oratorio being then produced at Frankfort, and the first
+public performance took place at the Lower Rhine Festival at
+Düsseldorf, in May, 1836.
+
+But his visits to Frankfort had a very important result in another
+way. Mendelssohn there met Mademoiselle Cécile Jeanrenaud, the
+daughter of a pastor of the French Reformed Church, and, though he had
+frequently indulged in the admiration of beautiful and clever
+women--which is allowable, and indeed an absolute necessity for a
+poet!--now for the first time he fell furiously in plain unmistakable
+and downright love. But it is more characteristic of the staid Teuton
+than the impulsive musician, that before plighting his troth to her he
+went away for a month's bathing at Scheveningen, in Holland, for the
+purpose of testing the strength of his affection by this absence. On
+his return, finding his amatory pulse still beating satisfactorily, he
+proposed to the young lady, and, as it must be presumed that she had
+already made up her own mind without any testing, he was accepted. On
+March 28, 1837, they were married, and the wedded life that then began
+was one of pure, unclouded happiness to the very end. Cécile
+Mendelssohn was a beautiful, gentle-hearted, and loving wife, just the
+one to give a weary and nervous artist in the home-life, with herself
+and the children near him, the blessed solace of rest and calm that he
+so needed. It is thus that Edward Devrient, the great German actor,
+and one of Mendelssohn's most intimate friends, describes her: "Cécile
+was one of those sweet womanly natures whose gentle simplicity, whose
+mere presence, soothed and pleased. She was slight, with features of
+striking beauty and delicacy; her hair was between brown and gold, but
+the transcendent lustre of her great blue eyes, and the brilliant
+roses of her cheeks, were sad harbingers of early death. She spoke
+little, and never with animation, in a low, soft voice. Shakespeare's
+words, "My gracious silence," applied to her no less than to the wife
+of Coriolanus."
+
+After giving up his official position at Düsseldorf, in 1835,
+Mendelssohn was invited to become the conductor of the now famous
+Gewandhaus concerts at Leipsic, a post which he gladly accepted, and
+which, retained by him for many years, was to be one of the greatest
+delights of his artistic life. Not only was he loved and appreciated
+in Leipsic--far more than in Berlin, his own city--but he had here an
+opportunity of assisting many composers and _virtuosi_, who otherwise
+would have sought in vain for a hearing. Thus, after Liszt, when
+visiting the town, had been first of all received with great coldness,
+owing to the usual prices of admission to the concerts having been
+raised, Mendelssohn set everything straight by having a soirée in his
+honor at the Gewandhaus, where there were three hundred and fifty
+people, orchestra, chorus, punch, pastry, Meeresstille Psalm, Bach's
+Triple Concerto, choruses from St. Paul, Fantasia on Lucia, the Erl
+King, the Devil and his Grandmother, the latter probably a mild
+satirical reference to Liszt's stormy and often incoherent playing. It
+is also pleasant to find how cordially Mendelssohn received Berlioz
+there, as told in the "Memoirs" of the latter, spending ungrudgingly
+long days in aiding in rehearsals for his "Romeo et Juliette," though
+Mendelssohn never sympathized much with Berlioz's eccentric muse.
+
+The "Lobgesang," or "Hymn of Praise," a "symphonie-cantata," as he
+called it, was his next great work, composed in 1840, together with
+other music, at the request of the Leipsic Town-Council, for a
+festival held in that town in commemoration of the invention of
+printing, on June 25th. None who have heard this work can forget the
+first impression produced when the grand instrumental movements with
+which it commences are merged in the majestic chorus, "All men, all
+things, praise ye the Lord," or the intensely dramatic effect of the
+repeated tenor cry, "Watchman, will the night soon pass?" answered at
+last by the clear soprano message of glad tidings, "The night is
+departing, the day is at hand!" This "watchman" episode was added some
+time afterward, and, as he told a friend, was suggested to the
+composer during the weary hours of a long sleepless night, when the
+words, "Will the night soon pass?" again and again seemed to be
+repeated to him. But a greater work even than this was now in
+progress; the "Elijah" had been begun.
+
+In 1841 began a troublesome and harassing connection with Berlin, a
+city where, except in his home life, Mendelssohn never seems to have
+been very fortunate. At the urgent entreaty of the king, he went to
+reside there as head of the new Musical Academy. But disagreements
+arose, and he did not long take an active part in the management. The
+king, however, was very anxious to retain his services, and a sort of
+general office seems to have been created for him, the duties of which
+were to supply music for any dramatic works which the king took it
+into his head to have so embellished. And, though it is to this that
+we owe the noble "Antigone," "Oedipus," "Athalie," "Midsummer Night's
+Dream," and other music, this work to dictation was very worrying, and
+one cannot think without impatience of the annoyances to which he was
+subjected. The king could not understand why he shrank from writing
+music to the choruses of Æschylus's "Eumenides." Other composers would
+do it by the yard, why not he?
+
+Passing rapidly over the intervening years filled with busy work, both
+in composition and as one of the principals of a newly started
+Conservatorium in Leipsic, we come to 1846, when his great work
+"Elijah" was at last completed and performed. On August 26th, at the
+Birmingham Festival, the performance went splendidly. Staudigl took
+the part of the prophet, and a young tenor, Lockey, sang the air,
+"Then shall the righteous," in the last part, as Mendelssohn says, "so
+very beautifully, that I was obliged to collect myself to prevent my
+being overcome, and to enable me to beat time steadily." Rarely,
+indeed, has a composer so truly realized his own conception as
+Mendelssohn did in the great tone-picture which he drew of the Prophet
+of Carmel and the wilderness.
+
+"I figured to myself," he says, "Elijah as a grand, mighty prophet,
+such as might again reappear in our own day, energetic and zealous,
+stern, wrathful, and gloomy, a striking contrast to the court
+myrmidons and popular rabble--in fact, in opposition to the whole
+world, and yet borne on angel's wings!" Nothing can be finer than
+this, with that exquisite touch in the last words, "_in opposition to
+the whole world, and yet borne on angel's wings_."
+
+After returning to Germany he was soon busily employed in recasting
+some portions of "Elijah" with which he was not satisfied; he had also
+another oratorio on even a grander scale, "Christus," already
+commenced; and at last, after all his life-long seeking in vain for a
+good libretto for an opera, he had begun to set one written by Geibel,
+the German poet, "Loreley," to music. But his friends now noticed how
+worn and weary he used oftentimes to look, and how strangely irritable
+he frequently was, and there can hardly be a doubt that some form of
+the cerebral disease from which his father and several of his
+relations had died, was already, deep-seated and obscure, disquieting
+him. The sudden announcement of the death of his sister, Fanny Hensel,
+herself a musical genius, to whom he was very fondly attached, on his
+return to Frankfort from his last visit to England in May, 1847,
+terribly affected him. He fell to the ground with a loud shriek, and
+it was long before he recovered consciousness.
+
+Indeed, it may be said that he never really recovered from this shock.
+In the summer he went with his wife and children, and in company with
+his brother Paul and his family, on a tour in Switzerland, where he
+hoped that complete idleness as regards music, life in the open air,
+sketching, and intercourse with chosen friends, might once more give
+strength to his enfeebled nerves. And for a time the beauty of the
+mountains and the lakes seemed to bring him rest, and again he began
+to work at his oratorio "Christus;" but still his friends continued
+anxious about him. He looked broken down and aged, a constant
+agitation seemed to possess him, and the least thing would often
+strangely affect and upset him.
+
+In September he returned to Leipsic; he was then more cheerful, and
+able to talk about music and to write, although he could not resume
+the conductorship of the Gewandhaus concerts. He again had projects in
+view. Jenny Lind was to sing in his "Elijah," at Vienna, whither he
+would go and conduct, and he was about to publish some new songs. One
+day in October he went to call upon his friend, Madame Frege, a gifted
+lady who, he said, sang his songs better than anyone else, to consult
+her about some new songs. She sang them over to him several times, and
+then, as it was getting dark, she went out of the room for a few
+minutes to order lights. When she returned he was lying on the sofa,
+shivering with cold, and in agonizing pain. Leeches were applied, and
+he partially recovered; but another attack followed, and this was the
+last.
+
+
+
+
+FRANZ LISZT
+
+By Rev. HUGH R. HAWEIS, M.A.
+
+(1811-1886)
+
+
+[Illustration: Liszt.]
+
+Franz Liszt was born in 1811. He had the hot Hungarian blood of his
+father, the fervid German spirit of his mother, and he inherited the
+lofty independence, with none of the class prejudices, of the old
+Hungarian nobility from which he sprang. Liszt's father, Adam, earned
+a modest livelihood as agent and accountant in the house of Count
+Esterhazy. In that great musical family, inseparably associated with
+the names of Haydn and Schubert, Adam Liszt had frequent opportunities
+of meeting distinguished musicians. The prince's private band had
+risen to public fame under the instruction of the venerable Haydn
+himself. The Liszts, father and son, often went to Eisenstadt, where
+the count lived; there they rubbed elbows with Cherubini and Hummel, a
+pupil of Mozart.
+
+Franz took to music from his earliest childhood. When about five years
+old he was asked what he would like to do. "Learn the piano," said the
+little fellow. Soon afterward his father asked him what he would like
+to be; the child pointed to a print of Beethoven hanging on the wall,
+and said, "Like him." Long before his feet could reach the pedals or
+his fingers stretch an octave, the boy spent all his spare time
+strumming, making what he called "clangs," chords and modulations. He
+mastered scales and exercises without difficulty.
+
+Czerny at once took to Liszt, but refused to take anything for his
+instruction. Salieri was also fascinated, and instructed him in
+harmony; and fortunate it was that Liszt began his course under two
+strict mentors. He soon began to resent Czerny's method--thought he
+knew better and needed not those dry studies of Clementi and that
+irksome fingering by rule--he could finger anything in a half-a-dozen
+different ways. There was a moment when it seemed that master and
+pupil would have to part, but timely concessions to genius paved the
+way to dutiful submission, and years afterward the great master
+dedicated to the rigid disciplinarian of his boyhood his "Vingt-quatre
+Grandes Études" in affectionate remembrance.
+
+Such a light as Liszt's could not be long hid; all Vienna, in 1822,
+was talking of the wonderful boy. "_Est deus in nobis_," wrote the
+papers, profanely. The "little Hercules," the "young giant," the boy
+"virtuoso from the clouds," were among the epithets coined to
+celebrate his marvellous renderings of Hummel's "Concerto in A," and a
+free "Fantasia" of his own. The Vienna Concert Hall was crowded to
+hear him, and the other illustrious artists--then, as indeed they have
+been ever since forced to do wherever Liszt appeared--effaced
+themselves with as good a grace as they could.
+
+It is a remarkable tribute to the generous nature as well as to the
+consummate ability of Liszt, that, while opposing partisans have
+fought bitterly over him--Thalbergites, Herzites, Mendelssohnites
+_versus_ Lisztites--yet few of the great artists who have, one after
+another, had to yield to him in popularity have denied to him their
+admiration, while most of them have given him their friendship.
+
+Liszt early wooed, and early won Vienna. He spoke ever of his dear
+Viennese, and their resounding city. A concert tour on his way to
+Paris brought him before the critical public of Stuttgart and Munich.
+Hummel, an old man, and Moscheles, then in his prime, heard him and
+declared that his playing was equal to theirs. But Liszt was bent upon
+completing his studies in the celebrated school of the French capital,
+and at the feet of the old musical dictator, Cherubini. The Erards,
+who were destined to owe so much to Liszt, and to whom Liszt
+throughout his career owed so much, at once provided him with a
+magnificent piano; but Cherubini put in force a certain by-law of the
+Conservatoire excluding foreigners, and excluded Franz Liszt.
+
+This was a bitter pill to the eager student. He hardly knew how little
+he required such patronage. In a very short time "_le petit Liszt_"
+was the great Paris sensation. The old _noblesse_ tried to spoil him
+with flattery, the Duchesse de Berri drugged him with bonbons, the
+Duke of Orleans called him the "little Mozart." He gave private
+concerts, at which Herz, Moscheles, Lafont, and De Beriot, assisted.
+Rossini would sit by his side at the piano, and applaud. He was a
+"miracle." The company never tired of extolling his "nerve, fougue et
+originalité," while the ladies who petted and caressed him after each
+performance, were delighted at his simple and graceful carriage, the
+elegance of his language, and the perfect breeding and propriety of
+his demeanor.
+
+He was only twelve when he played for the first time at the Italian
+Opera, and one of those singular incidents which remind one of
+Paganini's triumphs occurred. At the close of a _bravura cadenza_, the
+band forgot to come in, so absorbed were the musicians in watching the
+young prodigy. Their failure was worth a dozen successes to Liszt. The
+ball of the marvellous was fairly set rolling. Gall, the inventor of
+phrenology, took a cast of the little Liszt's skull; Talma, the
+tragedian, embraced him openly with effusion; and the misanthropic
+Marquis de Noailles became his mentor, and initiated him into the art
+of painting.
+
+In 1824 Liszt, then thirteen years old, came with his father to
+England; his mother returned to Austria. He went down to Windsor to
+see George IV., who was delighted with him, and Liszt, speaking of him
+to me, said: "I was very young at the time, but I remember the king
+very well--a fine, pompous-looking gentleman." George IV. went to
+Drury Lane on purpose to hear the boy, and commanded an encore. Liszt
+was also heard in the theatre at Manchester, and in several private
+houses.
+
+On his return to France, people noticed a change in him. He was now
+fourteen, grave, serious, often pre-occupied, already a little tired
+of praise, and excessively tired of being called "le petit Liszt." His
+vision began to take a wider sweep. The relation between art and
+religion exercised him. His mind was naturally devout. Thomas à Kempis
+was his constant companion. "Rejoice in nothing but a good deed;"
+"Through labor to rest, through combat to victory;" "The glory which
+men give and take is transitory," these and like phrases were already
+deeply engraven on the fleshly tablets of his heart. Amid all his
+glowing triumphs he was developing a curious disinclination to appear
+in public; he seemed to yearn for solitude and meditation.
+
+In 1827 he again hurried to England for a short time, but his father's
+sudden illness drove them to Boulogne, where, in his forty-seventh
+year, died Adam Liszt, leaving the young Franz for the first time in
+his life, at the early age of sixteen, unprotected and alone. Rousing
+himself from the bodily prostration and torpor of grief into which he
+had been thrown by the death of his father, Franz, with admirable
+energy and that high sense of honor which always distinguished him,
+began to set his house in order. He called in all his debts, sold his
+magnificent grand "Erard," and left Boulogne for Paris with a heavy
+heart and a light pocket, but not owing a sou.
+
+He sent for his mother, and for the next twelve years, 1828-1840, the
+two lived together, chiefly in Paris. There, as a child, he had been a
+nine days' wonder, but the solidity of his reputation was now destined
+to go hand in hand with his stormy and interrupted mental and moral
+development. Such a plant could not come to maturity all at once. No
+drawing-room or concert-room success satisfied a heart for which the
+world of human emotion seemed too small, and an intellect piercing
+with intuitive intelligence into the "clear-obscure" depths of
+religion and philosophy.
+
+But Franz was young, and Franz was poor, and his mother had to be
+supported. She was his first care. Systematically, he labored to put
+by a sum which would assure her of a competency, and often with his
+tender genial smile he would remind her of his own childish words,
+"God will help me to repay you for all that you have done for me."
+Still he labored, often woefully against the grain. "Poverty," he
+writes, "that old mediator between man and evil, tore me from my
+solitude devoted to meditation, and placed me before a public on whom
+not only my own but my own mother's existence depended. Young and
+over-strained, I suffered painfully under the contact with external
+things which my vocation as a musician brought with it, and which
+wounded me all the more intensely that my heart at this time was
+filled entirely with the mystical feelings of love and religion."
+
+[Illustration: Franz Liszt.]
+
+Of course the gifted young pianist's connection grew rapidly. He got
+his twenty francs a lesson at the best houses; he was naturally a
+welcome guest, and from the first seemed to have the run of high
+Parisian society. His life was feverish, his activity irregular, his
+health far from strong; but the vulgar temptations of the gay capital
+seemed to have little attraction for his noble nature. His heart
+remained unspoiled. He was most generous to those who could not
+afford to pay for his lessons, most pitiful to the poor, most
+dutiful and affectionate to his mother. Coming home late from some
+grand entertainment, he would sit outside on the staircase till
+morning, sooner than awaken, or perhaps alarm, her by letting himself
+in. But in losing his father he seemed to have lost a certain method
+and order. His meals were irregular, so were his lessons; more so were
+the hours devoted to sleep.
+
+At this time he was hardly twenty; we are not surprised anon to hear
+in his own words, of "a female form chaste, and pure as the alabaster
+of holy vessel," but he adds: "Such was the sacrifice which I offered
+with tears to the God of Christians!"
+
+I will explain. Mlle. Caroline St. Cricq was just seventeen, lithe,
+slender, and of "angelic" beauty, with a complexion like a lily
+flushed with roses, open, "impressionable to beauty, to the world, to
+religion, to God." The countess, her mother, appears to have been a
+charming woman, very partial to Liszt, whom she engaged to instruct
+Mademoiselle in music. The lessons went not by time, but by
+inclination. The young man's eloquence, varied knowledge, ardent love
+of literature, and flashing genius won both the mother and daughter.
+Not one of them seemed to suspect the whirlpool of grief and death to
+which they were hurrying. The countess fell ill and died, but not
+before she had recommended Liszt to the Count St. Cricq as a possible
+suitor for the hand of Mademoiselle.
+
+The haughty diplomat, St. Cricq, at once put his foot down. The
+funeral over, Liszt's movements were watched. They were innocent
+enough. He was already an _enfant de la maison_, but one night he
+lingered reading aloud some favorite author to Mademoiselle a little
+too late. He was reported by the servants, and received his polite
+dismissal as music master. In an interview with the count his own
+pride was deeply wounded. "Difference of rank!" said the count. That
+was quite enough for Liszt. He rose, pale as death, with quivering
+lip, but uttered not a word. As a man of honor he had but one course.
+He and Caroline parted forever. She contracted later an uncongenial
+marriage; he seems to have turned with intense ardor to religion. His
+good mother used to complain to those who came to inquire for him that
+he was all day long in church, and had ceased to occupy himself, as he
+should, with music.
+
+It was toward the close of 1831 that Liszt met Chopin in Paris. From
+the first, these two men, so different, became fast friends. Chopin's
+delicate, retiring soul found a singular delight in Liszt's strong and
+imposing personality. Liszt's exquisite perception enabled him
+perfectly to live in the strange dreamland of Chopin's fancies, while
+his own vigor inspired Chopin with nerve to conceive those mighty
+Polonaises that he could never properly play himself, and which he so
+gladly committed to the keeping of his prodigious friend. Liszt
+undertook the task of interpreting Chopin to the mixed crowds which he
+revelled in subduing, but from which his fastidious and delicately
+strung friend shrank with something like aversion.
+
+From Chopin, Liszt and all the world after him got that _tempo
+rubato_, that playing with the duration of notes without breaking the
+time, and those arabesque ornaments which are woven like fine
+embroidery all about the pages of Chopin's nocturnes, and lift what in
+others are mere casual flourishes into the dignity of interpretative
+phrases and poetic commentaries on the text.
+
+People were fond of comparing the two young men who so often appeared
+in the same salons together--Liszt with his finely shaped, long, oval
+head and _profil d'ivoire_, set proudly on his shoulders, his stiff
+hair of dark blonde thrown back from the forehead without a parting,
+and cut in a straight line, his _aplomb_, his magnificent and courtly
+bearing, his ready tongue, his flashing wit and fine irony, his genial
+_bonhomie_ and irresistibly winning smile; and Chopin, also, with dark
+blonde hair, but soft as silk, parted on one side, to use Liszt's own
+words, "An angel of fair countenance, with brown eyes from which
+intellect beamed rather than burned; a gentle, refined smile, slightly
+aquiline nose; a delicious, clear, almost diaphanous complexion, all
+bearing witness to the harmony of a soul which required no commentary
+beyond itself."
+
+Nothing can be more generous or more true than Liszt's recognition of
+Chopin's independent support. "To our endeavors," he says, "to our
+struggles, just then so much needing certainty, he lent us the support
+of a calm, unshakable conviction, equally armed against apathy and
+cajolery." There was only one picture on the walls of Chopin's room;
+it hung just above his piano. It was a head of Liszt.
+
+It is no part of my present scheme to describe the battle which
+romanticism in music waged against the prevalent conventionalities. We
+know the general outcome of the struggle culminating, after the most
+prodigious artistic convulsions, in the musical supremacy of Richard
+Wagner, who certainly marks firmly and broadly enough the greatest
+stride in musical development made since Beethoven.
+
+In 1842 Liszt visited Weimar, Berlin, and then went to Paris; he was
+meditating a tour in Russia. Pressing invitations reached him from St.
+Petersburg and Moscow. The most fabulous accounts of his virtuosity
+had raised expectation to its highest pitch. He was as legendary even
+among the common people as Paganini. His first concert at St.
+Petersburg realized the then unheard-of sum of £2,000. The roads were
+crowded to see him pass, and the corridors and approaches to the Grand
+Opera blocked to catch a glimpse of him. The same scenes were repeated
+at Moscow, where he gave six concerts without exhausting the popular
+excitement.
+
+On his return to Weimar he accepted the post of Capellmeister to the
+Grand Duke. It provided him with that settled abode, and above all
+with an orchestra, which he now felt so indispensable to meet his
+growing passion for orchestral composition. But the time of rest had
+not yet come.
+
+In 1844 and 1845 he was received in Spain and Portugal with incredible
+enthusiasm, after which he returned to Bonn to assist at the
+inauguration of Beethoven's statue. With boundless liberality, he had
+subscribed more money than all the princes and people of Germany put
+together, to make the statue worthy of the occasion and the occasion
+worthy of the statue.
+
+The golden river which poured into him from all the capitals of
+Europe now freely found a new vent in boundless generosity. Hospitals,
+poor and needy, patriotic celebrations, the dignity and interests of
+art, were all subsidized from his private purse. His transcendent
+virtuosity was only equalled by his splendid munificence; but he
+found--what others have so often experienced--that great personal
+gifts and prodigious _éclat_ cannot possibly escape the poison of envy
+and detraction. He was attacked by calumny; his gifts denied and
+ridiculed; his munificence ascribed to vainglory, and his charity to
+pride and ostentation; yet none will ever know the extent of his
+private charities, and no one who knows anything of Liszt can be
+ignorant of the simple, unaffected goodness of heart which prompted
+them.
+
+Still he was wounded by ingratitude and abuse. It seemed to check and
+paralyze for the moment his generous nature. Fétis saw him at Coblenz
+soon after the Bonn festival, at which he had expended such vast sums.
+He was sitting alone, dejected and out of health. He said he was sick
+of everything, tired of life, and nearly ruined. But that mood never
+lasted long with Liszt; he soon arose and shook himself like a lion.
+His detractors slunk away into their holes, and he walked forth
+victorious to refill his empty purse and reap new laurels.
+
+His career was interrupted by the stormy events of 1848. He settled
+down for a time at Weimar, and it was then that he began to take that
+warm interest in Richard Wagner which ended in the closest and most
+enduring of friendships.
+
+He labored incessantly to get a hearing for the "Lohengrin" and
+"Tannhäuser." He forced Wagner's compositions on the band, on the
+grand-duke; he breasted public opposition and fought nobly for the
+eccentric and obscure person who was chiefly known as a political
+outlaw and an inventor of extravagant compositions which it was
+impossible to play or sing, and odiously unpleasant to listen to. But
+years of faithful service, mainly the service and immense _prestige_
+and authority of Liszt, procured Wagner a hearing, and paved the way
+for his glorious triumphs at Bayreuth in 1876, 1882, and 1883.
+
+I have preferred to confine myself in this article to the personality of
+Liszt, and have made no allusion to his orchestral works and oratorio
+compositions. The "Symphonic Poems" speak for themselves--magnificent
+renderings of the inner life of spontaneous emotion--but subject-matter
+which calls for a special article can find no place at the fag-end of
+this, and at all times it is better to hear music than to describe it.
+As it would be impossible to describe Liszt's orchestration intelligibly
+to those who have not heard it, and unnecessary to those who have, I
+will simply leave it alone.
+
+I saw Liszt but six times, and then only between the years 1876 and
+1881. I heard him play upon two occasions only, and then he played
+certain pieces of Chopin at my request and a new composition by
+himself. I have heard Mme Schumann, Bülow, Rubenstein, Menter, and
+Esipoff, but I can understand that saying of Tausig, himself one of
+the greatest masters of _technique_ whom Germany has ever produced:
+"No mortal can measure himself with Liszt. He dwells alone upon a
+solitary height."
+
+
+
+
+RICHARD WAGNER
+
+By FRANKLIN PETERSON, Mus. Bac.
+
+(1813-1883)
+
+
+[Illustration: Wagner.]
+
+Richard Wagner's personality has been so overshadowed by and almost
+merged in the great controversy which his schemes of reform in opera
+raised, that his life and character are often now sorely
+misjudged--just as his music long was--by those who have not the time,
+the inclination, or the ability to understand the facts and the
+issues. Before briefly stating then the theories he propounded and
+their development, as shown in successive music dramas, it will be
+well to summarize the story of a life (1813-83) during which he was
+called to endure so much vicissitude, trial and temptation, suffering
+and defeat.
+
+Born in Leipsic, on May 22, 1813, the youngest of nine children,
+Wilhelm Richard was only five months old when his father died. His
+mother's second marriage entailed a removal to Dresden, where, at the
+Kreuzschule, young Wagner received an excellent liberal education. At
+the age of thirteen the bent of his taste, as well as his diligence,
+was shown by his translation (out of school hours) of the first twelve
+books of the "Odyssey." In the following year his passion for poetry
+found expression in a grand tragedy. "It was a mixture," he says, "of
+Hamlet and Lear. Forty-two persons died in the course of the play,
+and, for want of more characters, I had to make some of them reappear
+as ghosts in the last act." Weber, who was then conductor of the
+Dresden opera, seems to have attracted the boy both by his personality
+and by his music; but it was Beethoven's music which gave him his real
+inspiration. From 1830 to 1833 many compositions after standard models
+are evidence of hard and systematic work and in 1833 he began his long
+career as an operatic composer with "Die Feen" which, however, never
+reached the dignity of performance till 1888--five years after
+Wagner's death. After some time spent in very unremunerative routine
+work in Heidelberg, Königsberg, and Riga (where in 1836 he married),
+he resolved, in 1839, to try his fortune in Paris with "Rienzi," a new
+opera, written on the lines of the Paris Grand Opera and with all its
+great resources in view. From the month's terrific storm in the North
+Sea, through which the vessel struggled to its haven, till the spring
+of 1842, when Wagner left Paris with "Rienzi" unperformed, heartsick
+with hope deferred, his lot was a hard and bitter one. Berlioz, in
+similar straits, supported himself by singing in the chorus of a
+second-rate theatre. Wagner was refused even that humble post. In 1842
+"Rienzi" was accepted at Dresden, and its signal success led to his
+appointment as Capellmeister there (January, 1843). In the following
+year the "Flying Dutchman" was not so enthusiastically received, but
+it has since easily distanced the earlier work in popular favor. The
+story was suggested to his mind during the stormy voyage from Riga;
+and it is a remarkable fact that the wonderful tone-picture of
+Norway's storm-beaten shore was painted by one who, till that voyage,
+had never set eyes on the sea. In 1845 his new opera, "Tannhäuser,"
+proved at first a comparative failure. The subject, one which had been
+proposed to Weber in 1814, attracted Wagner while he was in Paris, and
+during his studies for the libretto he found also the first
+suggestions of "Lohengrin" and "Parsifal." The temporary failure of
+the opera led him to the consideration and self-examination which
+resulted in the elaborate exposition of his ideal (in "Opera and
+Drama," and many other essays). "I saw a single possibility before
+me," he writes, "to induce the public to understand and participate in
+my aims as an artist." "Lohengrin" was finished early in 1848, and
+also the poem of "Siegfried's Tod," the result of Wagner's studies in
+the old Nibelungen Lied; but a too warm sympathy with some of the aims
+of the revolutionary party (which reigned for two short days behind
+the street barricades in Dresden, May, 1849) rendered his absence from
+Saxony advisable, and a few days later news reached him in Weimar that
+a warrant was issued for his arrest. With a passport procured by Liszt
+he fled across the frontier, and for nearly twelve years the
+bitterness of exile was added to the hardships of poverty. It is this
+period which is mainly responsible for Wagner's polemical writings, so
+biting in their sarcasm, and often unfair in their attacks. He was a
+good hater; one of the most fiendish pamphlets in existence is the
+"Capitulation" (1871), in which Wagner, safe from poverty (thanks to
+the kindness of Liszt and the munificence of Ludwig II., of Bavaria),
+and nearing the summit of his ambition, but remembering only his
+misfortunes and his slights, gloated in public over the horrors which
+were making a hell of the fairest city on earth. There is excuse at
+least, if not justification, to be found for his attacks on Meyerbeer
+and others; there are considerations to be taken into account while
+one reads with humiliation and pity the correspondence between Wagner
+and his benefactor, Liszt; but it is sad that an affectionate, humane,
+intensely human, to say nothing of an artistic, nature, could so
+blaspheme against the first principles of humanity.
+
+In 1852 the poem of the "Nibelungen Ring Trilogy" was finished. In
+1854 "Rheingold" (the introduction of "Vorabend") was ready, and "Die
+Walküre" (Part I.) in 1856. But "tired," as he said, "of heaping one
+silent score upon another," he left "Siegfried" unfinished, and turned
+to the story of "Tristan." The poem was completed in 1857, and the
+music two years later. At last, in 1861, he received permission to
+return to Germany, and in Vienna he had the first opportunity of
+hearing his own "Lohengrin." For three years the struggle with fortune
+seems to have been harder than ever before, and Wagner, in broken
+health, had practically determined to give up the unequal contest,
+when an invitation was sent him by Ludwig II., the young King of
+Bavaria--"Come here and finish your work." Here at last was salvation
+for Wagner, and the rest of his life was comparatively smooth. In 1865
+"Tristan und Isolde" was performed at Munich, and was followed three
+years later by a comic opera, "Die Meistersinger," the first sketches
+of which date from 1845. "Siegfried" ("Nibelungen Ring," Part II.) was
+completed in 1869, and in the following year Wagner married Cosima,
+the daughter of Liszt, and formerly the wife of Von Bülow. His first
+wife, from whom he had been separated in 1861, died at Dresden in
+1866.
+
+A theatre built somewhere off the main lines of traffic, and specially
+constructed for the performance of Wagner's later works, must have
+seemed the most impracticable and visionary of proposals in 1870; and
+yet, chiefly through the unwearying exertions of Carl Tausig (and, after
+his death, of the various Wagner societies), the foundation-stone of the
+Baireuth Theatre was laid in 1872, and in 1876, two years after the
+completion of the "Götterdämmerung" ("Nibelungen Ring," Part III.), it
+became an accomplished fact. The first work given was the entire
+"Trilogy;" and in July, 1882, Wagner's long and stormy career was
+magnificently crowned there by the first performance of "Parsifal." A
+few weeks later his health showed signs of giving way, and he resolved
+to spend the winter at Venice. There he died suddenly, February 13,
+1883, and was buried in the garden of his own house, Wahnfried, at
+Baireuth.[12]
+
+         [Footnote 12: Our illustration represents him at Wahnfried in
+         company with his wife Cosima, her father Franz Liszt, who was
+         his lifelong friend, and Herr von Wolzogen.]
+
+Wagner's life and his individuality are of unusual importance in
+rightly estimating his work, because, unlike the other great masters,
+he not only devoted all his genius to one branch of music--the
+opera--but he gradually evolved a theory and an ideal which he
+consciously formulated and adopted, and perseveringly followed. It may
+be asked whether Wagner's premises were sound and his conclusions
+right; and also whether his genius was great enough to be the worthy
+champion of a cause involving such revolutions. Unless Wagner's
+operas, considered solely as music, are not only more advanced in
+style, but worthy in themselves to stand at least on a level with the
+greatest efforts of his predecessors, no amount of proof that these
+were wrong and he right will give his name the place his admirers
+claim for it. It is now universally acknowledged that Wagner can only
+be compared with the greatest names in music. His instrumentation has
+the advantage in being the inheritor of the enormous development of
+the orchestra from Haydn to Berlioz, his harmony is as daring and
+original as Bach's, and his melody is as beautiful as it is different
+from Beethoven's or Mozart's. (These names are used not in order to
+institute profitless comparisons, but as convenient standards;
+therefore even a qualification of the statement will not invalidate
+the case.)
+
+[Illustration: Wagner and his Friends.]
+
+His aim (stated very generally) was to reform the whole structure of
+opera, using the last or "Beethoven" development of instrumental music
+as a basis, and freeing it from the fetters which conventionality had
+imposed, in the shape of set forms, accepted arrangements, and
+traditional concessions to a style of singing now happily almost
+extinct. The one canon was to be dramatic fitness. In this "Art Work
+of the Future," as he called it, the interest of the drama is to
+depend not entirely on the music, but also on the poem and on the
+acting and staging as well. It will be seen that Wagner's theory is
+not new. All or most of it is contained in the theories of Gluck and
+others, who at various periods in the development of opera consciously
+strove after an ideal music drama. But the times were not ripe, and
+therefore such music could not exert its proper influence. The twin
+arts of music and poetry, dissociated by the rapid advance of
+literature and the slow development of music, pursued their several
+paths alone. The attempt to reunite them in the end of the sixteenth
+century was futile, and only led to opera which never needed, and
+therefore did not employ, great poetry. In Germany music was developed
+along instrumental lines until the school arrived at its culmination
+in Beethoven; and when an opera composer stopped to think on the
+eternal verities, the result must always have been such a prophecy of
+Wagner's work as we find in Mozart's letters:
+
+"_October, 1781._--Verse indeed is indispensable for music, but rhyme
+is bad in its very nature.... It would be by far the best if a good
+composer, understanding the theatre and knowing how to produce a
+piece, and a clever poet, could be united in one...."
+
+Other but comparatively unimportant features in the Wagner music drama
+are, _e.g._, the use of the _Leitmotiv_, or leading motive--found
+occasionally in Gluck, Mozart, Weber, etc., but here first adopted
+with a definite purpose, and the contention for mythological rather
+than historical subjects--now largely admitted. But all Wagner's
+principles would have been useless without the energy and perseverance
+which directed his work, the loving study which stored his memory with
+all the great works of his predecessors, and, above all, the genius
+which commands the admiration of the musical world.
+
+Wagner's works show a remarkable and progressive development. "Rienzi"
+is quite in the grand opera style of Meyerbeer, Spontini, etc. The
+"Flying Dutchman" is a deliberate departure from that style, and in
+romantic opera strikes out for itself a new line, which, followed
+still further in "Tannhäuser," reaches its stage of perfection in
+"Lohengrin." From this time dates the music drama, of which "Tristan"
+is the most uncompromising type, and by virtue of wonderful
+orchestration, and the intense pathos of the beautifully written poem,
+the most fascinating of all. The "Trilogy" ("Walküre," "Siegfried,"
+"Götterdämmerung," with the "Rheingold" as introduction) is a very
+unequal work. It is full of Wagner's most inspired writing and most
+marvellous orchestration; but it is too long and too diffuse. The plot
+also is strangely confused and uninteresting, and fails alike as a
+story and as a vehicle of theories, morals, or religion. "Parsifal,"
+with its sacred allegory, its lofty nobility of tone, and its pure
+mysticism, stands on a platform by itself, and is almost above
+criticism, or praise, or blame. The libretto alone might have won
+Wagner immortality, so original is it and perfect in intention; and
+the music seems to be no longer a mere accessory to the effect, but
+the very essence and fragrance of the great conception.
+
+
+
+
+GIUSEPPE VERDI
+
+(BORN 1813)
+
+
+[Illustration: Verdi.]
+
+Giuseppe Verdi, the last and most widely successful of the school of
+Italian opera proper, was born at Roncole, near Busseto, October 9,
+1813. At ten years he was organist of the small church in his native
+village, the salary being raised after a year from £1 8_s._ 10_d._ to
+£1 12_s._ per annum. At the age of sixteen he was provided with funds
+to prosecute his studies at the Conservatorium at Milan; but at the
+entrance examination he showed so little evidence of musical talent
+that the authorities declined to enroll him. Nothing daunted, he
+pursued his studies with ardor under Lavigna, from 1831 to 1833, when,
+according to agreement, he returned to Busseto to take the place of
+his old teacher Provesi, now deceased.
+
+After five unhappy years in a town where he was little appreciated,
+Verdi returned to Milan. His first opera, "Oberto," is chiefly
+indebted to Bellini, and the next, "Un Giorno di Regno" (which
+fulfilled its own title, as it was only once performed), has been
+styled "Un Bazar de Reminiscences." Poor Verdi had just lost his wife
+and two children within a few days of each other, so it is hardly to
+be wondered at that a comic opera was not a very congenial work, nor
+successfully accomplished.
+
+"Nabucodonosor" (1842) was his first hit, and in the next year "I
+Lombardi" was even more successful--partly owing to the revolutionary
+feeling which in no small degree was to help him to his future high
+position. Indeed, his name was a useful acrostic to the revolutionary
+party, who shouted "Viva Verdi," when they meant "Viva Vittorio
+Emanuele Re D' Italia." "Ernani," produced at Venice in 1844, also
+scored a success, owing to the republican sentiment in the libretto,
+which was adapted from Victor Hugo's "Hernani." Many works followed in
+quick succession, each arousing the enthusiasm of the audiences,
+chiefly when an opportunity was afforded them of expressing their
+feelings against the Austrian rule. Only with his sixteenth opera did
+Verdi win the supremacy when there were no longer any living
+competitors; and "Rigoletto" (1851), "Il Trovatore," and "La
+Traviata" (1853) must be called the best, as they are the last of the
+Italian opera school. "I Vespri Siciliani" (1855) and "Simon
+Boccanegra" (1857) were not so successful as "Un Ballo in Maschera"
+(1859); and none of them, any more than "La Forza del Destino" (1862)
+or "Don Carlos" (1867), added anything to the fame of the composer of
+"Il Trovatore."
+
+Only now begins the interest which the student of musical history
+finds in Verdi's life. Hitherto he had proved a good man, struggling
+with adversity and poverty, a successful composer ambitious to succeed
+to the vacant throne of Italian opera. But the keen insight into
+dramatic necessity which had gradually developed and had given such
+force to otherwise unimportant scenes in earlier operas, also showed
+him the insufficiency of the means hitherto at the disposal of Italian
+composers, and from time to time he had tried to learn the lessons
+taught in the French Grand Opera School, but with poor success. Now a
+longer interval seemed to promise a more careful, a more ambitious
+work, and when "Aïda" was produced at Cairo (1871), it was at once
+acknowledged that a revolution had taken place in Verdi's mind and
+method, which might produce still greater results. The influence of
+Wagner and the music-drama is distinctly to be felt.
+
+But Verdi was apparently not yet satisfied. For sixteen years the
+successful composer maintained absolute silence in opera, when
+whispers of a great music-drama roused the expectation of musical
+Europe to an extraordinary pitch; nor were the highest expectations
+disappointed when "Otello" was produced at Milan in 1887. The
+surrender of Italian opera was complete, and Verdi took his right
+place at the head of the vigorous new school which has arisen in
+Italy, and which promises to regain for the "Land of Song" some of her
+ancient preeminence in music. A comic opera by Verdi, "Falstaff," was
+announced in 1892: it has well sustained his previous reputation.
+
+
+
+
+DRAMATIC AND LYRIC ARTISTS
+
+
+
+
+DAVID GARRICK
+
+By SAMUEL ARCHER
+
+(1716-1779)
+
+
+This celebrated actor was the son of Peter Garrick, who had a
+captain's commission in the army, but who generally resided at
+Lichfield. He was born at Hereford, when his father was on a
+recruiting party there, and was baptized in the Church of All-Saints,
+in that city, on February 20, 1716. Young Garrick received part of
+his education at the grammar school there, but he did not apply
+himself to his books with much assiduity. He had conceived a very
+early passion for theatrical representation, from which nothing could
+turn him aside. When he was a little more than eleven years of age, he
+formed the project of getting a play acted by young gentlemen and
+ladies. After he had made some trial of his own and his companions'
+abilities, and prevailed upon the parents to give their consent, he
+pitched upon the "Recruiting Officer," for the play. He assembled his
+little company in a large room, the destined place of representation.
+There we may suppose our young boy distributed the several characters
+according to the merits of the performer. He prevailed on one of his
+sisters to play the part of the chambermaid. Sergeant Kite, a
+character of busy intrigue and bold humor, he chose for himself.
+
+[Illustration: Garrick.]
+
+The play was acted in a manner so far above the expectation of the
+audience, that it gave general satisfaction, and was much applauded.
+The ease, vivacity, and humor of Kite are still remembered with
+pleasure at Lichfield. The first stage attempt of our English Roscius
+was in 1727.
+
+Not long after, he was invited to Lisbon by an uncle, who was a
+considerable wine merchant in that city, but his stay there was very
+short, for he returned to Lichfield the year following. It is imagined
+that the gay disposition of the young gentleman was not very suitable
+to the old man's temper, which was, perhaps, too grave and austere to
+relish the vivacities of his nephew.
+
+However, during his short stay at Lisbon, young Garrick made himself
+agreeable to all who knew him, particularly to the English merchants
+who resided there, with whom he often dined. After dinner they usually
+diverted themselves by placing him upon the table, and calling upon
+him to repeat verses and speeches from plays, which he did with great
+readiness, and much to the satisfaction of the hearers. Some
+Portuguese young gentlemen of the highest rank, who were of his own
+age, were also much delighted with his conversation.
+
+He afterward returned to Lichfield, and in 1737 came up to town in
+company with Samuel Johnson, who was to make so conspicuous a figure
+in the literary world, and of whose life we have already given an
+account.
+
+Soon after his arrival in London, Garrick entered himself at Lincoln's
+Inn, and he also put himself under the tuition of Mr. Colson, an
+eminent mathematician at Rochester. But as he applied himself little
+to the study of the law, his proficiency in mathematics and philosophy
+was not extensive. His mind was theatrically led, and nothing could
+divert his thoughts from the study of that to which his genius so
+powerfully prompted him. He had £1,000 left him by his uncle at
+Lisbon, and he engaged for a short time in the wine trade, in
+partnership with his brother, Mr. Peter Garrick; they hired vaults in
+Durham Yard, for the purpose of carrying on the business. The union
+between the brothers was of no long date. Peter was calm, sedate, and
+methodical; David was gay, volatile, impetuous, and perhaps not so
+confined to regularity as his partner could have wished. To prevent
+the continuance of fruitless and daily altercation, by the
+interposition of friends the partnership was amicably dissolved. And
+now Garrick prepared himself in earnest for that employment which he
+so ardently loved, and in which nature designed he should eminently
+excel.
+
+He was frequently in the company of the most eminent actors; he got
+himself introduced to the managers of the theatres, and tried his
+talent in the recitation of some particular and favorite portions of
+plays. Now and then he indulged himself in the practice of mimicry, a
+talent which, however inferior, is never willingly resigned by him who
+excels in it. Sometimes he wrote criticisms upon the action and
+elocution of the players, and published them in the prints. These
+sudden effusions of his mind generally comprehended judicious
+observations and shrewd remarks, unmixed with that illiberality which
+often disgraces the instructions of stage critics.
+
+Garrick's diffidence withheld him from trying his strength at first
+upon a London theatre. He thought the hazard was too great, and
+embraced the advantage of commencing his noviciate in acting with a
+company of players then ready to set out for Ipswich, under the
+direction of Mr. William Gifford and Mr. Dunstall, in the summer of
+1741.
+
+The first effort of his theatrical talents was exerted as Aboan, in
+the play of "Oroonoko," a part in which his features could not be
+easily discerned. Under the disguise of a black countenance, he hoped
+to escape being known, should it be his misfortune not to please.
+Though Aboan is not a first-rate character, yet the scenes of pathetic
+persuasion and affecting distress in which that character is involved,
+will always command the attention of the audience when represented by
+a judicious actor. Our young player's applause was equal to his most
+sanguine desires. Under the assumed name of Lyddal, he not only acted
+a variety of characters in plays, particularly Chamont, in the
+"Orphan;" Captain Brazen, in the "Recruiting Officer;" and Sir Harry
+Wildair; but he likewise gave such delight to the audience, that they
+gratified him with constant and loud proofs of their approbation. The
+town of Ipswich will long boast of having first seen and encouraged so
+great a genius as Garrick.
+
+His first appearance as an actor in London, was on October 19, 1741,
+when he performed the part of Richard III., at the playhouse in
+Goodman's Fields. His easy and familiar, yet forcible, style in
+speaking and acting, at first threw the critics into some hesitation
+concerning the novelty, as well as propriety, of his manner. They had
+been long accustomed to an elevation of the voice, with a sudden
+mechanical depression of its tones, calculated to excite admiration,
+and to intrap applause. To the just modulation of the words, and
+concurring expression of the features from the genuine works of
+nature, they had been strangers, at least for some time. But after he
+had gone through a variety of scenes, in which he gave evident proofs
+of consummate art and perfect knowledge of character, their doubts
+were turned into surprise and astonishment, from which they relieved
+themselves by loud and reiterated applause. They were more especially
+charmed when the actor, after having thrown aside the hypocrite and
+politician, assumed the warrior and the hero. When news was brought to
+Richard that the Duke of Buckingham was taken, Garrick's look and
+action, when he pronounced the words
+
+  "----Off with his head!
+   So much for Buckingham!"
+
+were so magnificent and important, from his visible enjoyment of the
+incident, that several loud shouts of approbation proclaimed the
+triumph of the actor and satisfaction of the audience. Richard's dream
+before the battle, and his death, were accompanied with the loudest
+gratulations of applause.
+
+Such was the universal approbation which followed our young actor,
+that the more established theatres of Drury Lane and Covent Garden
+were deserted. Garrick drew after him the inhabitants of the most
+polite parts of the town: Goodman's Fields were full of the splendor
+of St. James' and Grosvenor Square; the coaches of the nobility filled
+up the space from Temple Bar to Whitechapel. He had so perfectly
+convinced the public of his superior accomplishments in acting, that
+not to admire him would not only have argued an absence of taste, but
+the grossest stupidity. Those who had seen and been delighted with the
+most admired of the old actors, confessed that he had excelled the
+ablest of them in the variety of the exhibitions, and equalled them
+all in their must applauded characters.
+
+Alexander Pope was persuaded by Lord Orrery to see him in the first
+dawn of his fame. That great man, who had often seen and admired
+Betterton, was struck with the propriety and beauty of Mr. Garrick's
+action; and as a convincing proof that he had a good opinion of his
+merit, he told Lord Orrery that he was afraid the young man would be
+spoiled, for he would have no competitor.
+
+Mr. Garrick shone forth like a theatrical Newton; he threw new light
+on elocution and action; he banished ranting, bombast, and grimace;
+and restored nature, ease, simplicity, and genuine humor.
+
+In 1742 he entered into stated agreements with Fleetwood, patentee of
+Drury Lane, for the annual income of £500. His fame continued to
+increase at the royal theatre, and soon became so extended that a
+deputation was sent from Ireland, to invite him to act in Dublin
+during the months of June, July, and August, upon very profitable
+conditions. These he embraced, and crossed the seas to the metropolis
+of Ireland in June, 1742, accompanied by Mrs. Woffington.
+
+[Illustration: Garrick as Richard III.]
+
+His success at Dublin exceeded all imagination, though much was
+expected from him; he was caressed by all ranks of people as a prodigy
+of theatrical accomplishment. During the hottest days in the year the
+play-house was crowded with persons of fashion and rank, who were
+never tired with seeing and applauding the various essays of his
+skill.
+
+The excessive heat became prejudicial to the frequenters of the
+theatre; and the epidemical distemper, which seized and carried off
+great numbers, was nicknamed the _Garrick fever_. Satisfied with the
+emoluments arising from the summer campaign, and delighted with the
+generous encouragement and kind countenance which the nobility and
+gentry of Ireland had given him, and of which he always spoke in the
+strongest terms of acknowledgment and gratitude, he set out for
+London, to renew his labors and to receive the applause of the most
+critical, as well as most candid, audience in Europe.
+
+Such an actor as Garrick, whose name when announced in the play-bill
+operated like a charm and drew multitudes to the theatre, of
+consequence considerably augmented the profits of the patentee. But at
+the time when all without doors was apparently gay and splendid, and
+the theatre of Drury Lane seemed to be in the most flourishing
+condition, by the strange and absurd conduct of the manager the whole
+fabric was absolutely running into certain destruction.
+
+His behavior brought on a revolt of the principal actors, with Mr.
+Garrick and Mr. Macklin at their head, and for some time they seceded
+from the theatre. They endeavored to procure a patent for a new
+theatre, but without success; and Garrick at length accommodated his
+dispute with the manager, Mr. Fleetwood, by engaging to play again for
+a salary of six or seven hundred pounds.
+
+In 1744, Garrick made a second voyage to Dublin, and became
+joint-manager of the theatre there with Mr. Sheridan. They met with
+great success; and Garrick returned again to London, in May, 1746,
+having considerably added to his stock of money. In 1747 he became
+joint-patentee of Drury Lane Theatre with Mr. Lacy. Mr. Garrick and
+Mr. Lacy divided the business of the theatre in such a manner as not
+to encroach upon each other's province. Mr. Lacy took upon himself the
+care of the wardrobe, the scenes, and the economy of the household;
+while Garrick regulated the more important business of treating with
+authors, hiring actors, distributing parts in plays, superintending of
+rehearsals, etc. Besides the profits accruing from his half-share, he
+was allowed an income of £500 for his acting, and some particular
+emoluments for altering plays, farces, etc.
+
+In 1749, Mr. Garrick was married to Mademoiselle Violetti, a young
+lady who (as Mr. Davies says), to great elegance of form and many
+polite accomplishments, joined the more amiable virtues of the mind.
+In 1763, 1764, and 1765, he made a journey to France and Italy,
+accompanied by Mrs. Garrick, who, from the day of her marriage till
+the death of her husband, was never separated from him for twenty-four
+hours. During his stay abroad his company was desired by many
+foreigners of high birth and great merit. He was sometimes invited to
+give the company a taste of that art in which he was known so greatly
+to excel. Such a request he very readily consented to, for indeed his
+compliance cost him nothing. He could, without the least preparation,
+transform himself into any character tragic or comic, and seize
+instantaneously upon any passion of the human mind. He could make a
+sudden transition from violent rage, and even madness, to the extremes
+of levity and humor, and go through the whole circle of theatric
+evolution with the most surprising velocity.
+
+On the death of Mr. Lacy, joint patentee of Drury Lane with Mr.
+Garrick, in 1773, the whole management of that theatre devolved on Mr.
+Garrick. But in 1776, being about sixty years of age, he sold his
+share of the patent, and formed a resolution of quitting the stage. He
+was, however, determined, before he left the theatre, to give the
+public proofs of his abilities to delight them as highly as he had
+ever done in the flower and vigor of his life. To this end he
+presented them with some of the most capital and trying characters of
+Shakespeare; with Hamlet, Richard, and Lear, besides other parts which
+were less fatiguing. Hamlet and Lear were repeated; Richard he acted
+once only, and by the king's command. His Majesty was much surprised
+to see him, at an age so advanced, run about the field of battle with
+so much fire, force, and agility.
+
+He finished his dramatic race with one of his favorite parts, with
+Felix, in "The Wonder a Woman Keeps a Secret." When the play was
+ended, Mr. Garrick advanced toward the audience, with much palpitation
+of mind, and visible emotion in his countenance. No premeditation
+whatever could prepare him for this affecting scene. He bowed--he
+paused--the spectators were all attention. After a short struggle of
+nature, he recovered from the shock he had felt, and addressed his
+auditors in the following words:
+
+"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: It has been customary with persons under my
+circumstances to address you in a farewell epilogue. I had the same
+intention, and turned my thoughts that way; but indeed, I found myself
+then as incapable of writing such an epilogue, as I should be now of
+speaking it.
+
+"The jingle of rhyme and the language of fiction would but ill suit my
+present feelings. This is to me a very awful moment; it is no less
+than parting forever with those from whom I have received the greatest
+kindness and favors, and upon the spot where that kindness and those
+favors were enjoyed." [Here he was unable to proceed till he was
+relieved by a shower of tears.]
+
+"Whatever may be the changes of my future life, the deepest impression
+of your kindness will always remain here" (putting his hand on his
+breast) "fixed and unalterable. I will very readily agree to my
+successors having more skill and ability for their station than I
+have; but I defy them all to take more sincere, and more uninterrupted
+pains for your favor, or to be more truly sensible of it, than is your
+humble servant."
+
+After a profound obeisance, he retired, amid the tears and
+acclamations of a most crowded and brilliant audience.
+
+He died on Wednesday morning, January 20, 1779, at eight o'clock,
+without a groan. The disease was pronounced to be a palsy in the
+kidneys. On Monday, February 1st, the body of David Garrick was
+conveyed from his own house in the Adelphi, and most magnificently
+interred in Westminster Abbey, under the monument of his beloved
+Shakespeare. He was attended to the grave by persons of the first
+rank; by men illustrious for genius, and famous for science; by those
+who loved him living, and lamented his death.
+
+
+
+
+EDWIN FORREST[13]
+
+         [Footnote 13: Reprinted by permission of The Cassell
+         Publishing Company, from "Actors and Actresses of Great
+         Britain and the United States."]
+
+By LAWRENCE BARRETT
+
+(1806-1872)
+
+
+[Illustration: Edwin Forrest.]
+
+Edwin Forrest was born in the city of Philadelphia, March 9, 1806, his
+father, a Scotchman, having emigrated to America during the last year
+of the preceding century. The boy, like many others of his profession,
+was designed for the ministry, and before the age of eleven the future
+Channing had attracted admiring listeners by the music of his voice
+and the aptness of his mimicry. His memory was remarkable, and he
+would recite whole passages of his preceptor's sermons. Perched upon a
+chair or stool, and crowned with the proud approval of family and
+friends, the young mimic filled the hearts of his listeners with
+fervent hopes of his coming success in the fold of their beloved
+church. These hopes were destined to be met with disappointment. The
+bias of the future leader of the American stage was only faintly
+outlined as yet; his hour of development was still to come.
+
+He must have learned early the road to the theatre, permitted to go by
+the family, or going, perhaps, without the knowledge or consent of his
+seniors in the overworked household; for, before he had passed his
+tenth year, our young sermonizer was a member of a Thespian club, and
+before he was eleven he had made his appearance at one of the regular
+theatres in a female character, but with most disastrous results. He
+soon outgrew the ignominy of his first failure, however, and again and
+again sought to overcome its disgrace by a fresh appearance. To his
+appeals the irate manager lent a deaf ear. The sacred portal that
+leads to the enchanted ground of the stage was closed against young
+Forrest, the warden being instructed not to let the importunate boy
+pass the door. At last, in desperation, he resolved to storm the
+citadel, to beat down the faithful guard and to carry war into the
+enemy's camp. One night he dashed past the astonished guardian of the
+stage entrance just as the curtain fell upon one of the acts of a
+play. He emerged before the footlights, eluding all pursuit, dressed
+as a harlequin, and, before the audience had recovered from its
+astonishment at this scene not set down in the bills, the baffled, but
+not subdued, aspirant had delivered the lines of an epilogue in rhyme
+with so much effect that, before he could be seized by the astounded
+stage-manager and hurled from the theatre, he had attracted public
+notice, successfully won his surprised audience, and not only secured
+immunity from punishment for his temerity, but actually gained that
+respect in the manager's estimation which he had so long and so vainly
+striven to acquire.
+
+At last Forrest was promised an appearance at the Walnut Street house,
+then one of the leading theatres of the country. He selected Young
+Norval in Home's tragedy of "Douglas," and on November 27, 1820, the
+future master of the American stage, then fourteen years of age--a boy
+in years, a man in character--announced as "A Young Gentleman of this
+City," surrounded by a group of veteran actors who had for many years
+shared the favor of the public, began a career which was as auspicious
+at its opening as it was splendid in its maturity. At his entrance he
+won the vast audience at once by the grace of his figure and the
+modest bearing that was natural to him. Something of that magnetism
+which he exercised so effectively in late years now attracted all who
+heard him, and made friends even before he spoke.
+
+He was allowed to reappear as Frederick in "Lovers' Vows," repeating
+his first success; and on January 8, 1821, he benefited as Octavian in
+the "Mountaineers," a play associated with the early glories of Edmund
+Kean. In this year, also, he made his first and only venture as a
+manager, boldly taking the Prune Street Theatre, Philadelphia, and
+giving a successful performance of "Richard III.," which not only
+pleased the audience, but brought him a few dollars of profit. He made
+many attempts to secure a regular engagement in one of the Western
+circuits, where experience could be gained; and at last, after many
+denials, he was employed by Collins and Jones to play leading juvenile
+parts in their theatres in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Lexington.
+Thus, at the age of sixteen or eighteen, Edwin Forrest enrolled
+himself as a regular member of a theatrical company, and broke loose
+from trade forever.
+
+Of his professional progress here we have but poor accounts. He seems
+to have been very popular, and to have had an experience larger than
+he had heretofore enjoyed. He played with the elder Conway, and was
+affected by the grandeur of that actor's Othello, a study which served
+Forrest well when in late years he inherited the character.
+
+Jane Placide, who inspired the first love of Edwin Forrest, was an
+actress who combined talent, beauty, and goodness. Her character would
+have softened the asperities of his, and led him by a calmer path to
+those grand elevations toward which Providence had directed his
+footsteps. Baffled in love, however, and believing Caldwell to be his
+rival and enemy, he challenged him; but was rebuked by the silent
+contempt of his manager, whom the impulsive and disappointed lover
+"posted."
+
+The hard novitiate of Edwin Forrest was now drawing near its close.
+Securing a stock engagement with Charles Gilfert, manager of the
+Albany Theatre, he opened there in the early fall, and played for the
+first time with Edmund Kean, then on his second visit to America. The
+meeting with this extraordinary man and the attention he received from
+him were foremost among the directing influences of Forrest's life. To
+his last hour he never wearied of singing the praises of Kean, whose
+genius filled the English-speaking world with admiration. Two men more
+unlike in mind and body can scarcely be imagined. Until now Forrest
+had seen no actor who represented in perfection the impassioned school
+of which Kean was the master. He could not have known Cooke, even in
+the decline of that great tragedian's power, and the little giant was
+indeed a revelation. He played Iago to Kean's Othello, Titus to his
+Brutus, and Richmond to his Richard III.
+
+In the interval which preceded the opening of the Bowery Theatre, New
+York, Forrest appeared at the Park for the benefit of Woodhull,
+playing Othello. He made a pronounced success, his old manager sitting
+in front, profanely exclaiming, "By God, the boy has made a hit!" This
+was a great event, as the Park was then the leading theatre of
+America, and its actors were the most famous and exclusive.
+
+He opened at the Bowery Theatre in November, 1826, as Othello, and
+made a brilliant impression. His salary was raised from $28 to $40 per
+week. From this success may be traced the first absolute hold made by
+Edwin Forrest upon the attention of cultivated auditors and
+intelligent critics. The Bowery was then a very different theatre from
+what it afterward became, when the newsboys took forcible possession
+of its pit and the fire-laddies were the arbiters of public taste in
+its neighborhood.
+
+An instance of Forrest's moral integrity may be told here. He had been
+approached by a rival manager, after his first success, and urged to
+secede from the Bowery and join the other house at a much larger
+salary. He scornfully refused to break his word, although his own
+interests he knew must suffer. His popularity at this time was so
+great that, when his contract for the season had expired, he was
+instantly engaged for eight nights, at a salary of two hundred dollars
+a night.
+
+The success which had greeted Forrest on his first appearance in New
+York, was renewed in every city in the land. Fortune attended fame,
+and filled his pockets, as the breath of adulation filled his heart.
+He had paid the last penny of debt left by his father, and had seen a
+firm shelter raised over the head of his living family. With a
+patriotic feeling for all things American, Forrest, about this time,
+formed a plan for the encouragement or development of an American
+drama, which resulted in heavy money losses to himself, but produced
+such contributions to our stage literature as the "Gladiator," "Jack
+Cade," and "Metamora."[14] After five years of constant labor he felt
+that he had earned the right to a holiday, and he formed his plans
+for a two years' absence in Europe. A farewell banquet was tendered
+him by the citizens of New York, and a medal was struck in honor of
+the occasion. Bryant, Halleck, Leggett, Ingraham and other
+distinguished men were present. This was an honor which had never
+before been paid to an American actor.
+
+         [Footnote 14: Of Forrest's performance of Metamora, in the
+         play of that name, W. R. Alger says, "Never did an actor more
+         thoroughly identify and merge himself with his part than
+         Forrest did in 'Metamora.' He was completely transformed from
+         what he appeared in other characters, and seemed Indian in
+         every particular, all through and all over, from the crown of
+         his head to the sole of his foot."]
+
+He had been absent about two years when he landed in New York in
+September, 1836. On his appearance at the Walnut Street Theatre,
+Philadelphia, he was received with unprecedented enthusiasm. He gave
+six performances only, on this occasion, and each saw a repetition of
+the scene at the beginning of the engagement. The receipts were the
+largest ever known in that house.
+
+On September 19, 1836, Forrest embarked once more for the mother
+country, this time with serious purpose. After a speedy and uneventful
+passage he reached England, and at once set about the preliminary
+business of his British engagement, which began October 17, 1836. He
+was the first really great American actor who had appeared in London
+as a rival of the English tragedians; for Cooper was born in England,
+though always regarded as belonging to the younger country. His
+opening part was Spartacus in the "Gladiator." The play was condemned,
+the actor applauded. In Othello, in Lear, and in Macbeth, he achieved
+instant success. He began his engagement October 17th and closed
+December 19th, having acted Macbeth seven times, Othello nine, and
+King Lear eight. A dinner at the Garrick Club was offered and
+accepted. Here he sat down with Charles Kemble and Macready; Sergeant
+Talfourd was in the chair.
+
+It was during this engagement he met his future wife, Miss Catherine
+Sinclair. In the latter part of June, 1837, the marriage took place in
+St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden. Mr. and Mrs. Forrest soon after
+embarked for America. The tragedian resumed his American engagements
+November 15, 1837, at the old Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia.
+Presented to his friends, his wife at once made a deep and lasting
+impression. Her native delicacy of mind and refinement of manners
+enchanted those who hoped for some such influence to be exerted in
+softening the rough vigor and democratic downrightness of the man.
+Domestic discord came too soon, however, and in an evil hour for
+himself, in an evil hour for his art and for the struggling drama in
+America, Edwin Forrest threw open the doors of his home to the
+scrutiny of the world, and appealed to the courts to remove the
+skeleton which was hidden in his closet. With the proceedings of that
+trial, which resulted in divorce, alimony, and separation, this memoir
+has nothing to do.
+
+[Illustration: Forrest as Metamora.]
+
+Edwin Forrest, leaving the court-room a defeated man, was instantly
+raised to a popularity with the masses beyond anything even he had
+before experienced. He began an engagement soon after at the Broadway
+Theatre, opening as Damon. The house was crowded to suffocation. The
+engagement of sixty nights was unparalleled in the history of the
+American drama for length and profit. But despite the flattering
+applause of the multitude, life never again had for him the smiling
+aspect it had so often worn before. The applause which filled his
+ears, the wealth which flowed in upon him could not improve that
+temper which had never been amiable, and all the hard stories of his
+life belong to this period.
+
+On September 20, 1852, he reappeared at the Broadway Theatre, New
+York. In February, 1853, "Macbeth" was produced in grand style, with
+new scenery and appointments. The tragedy was played on twenty
+consecutive nights, then by far the longest run of any Shakespearean
+play in America. The cast was very strong. It included Conway, Duff,
+Davenport, Pope, Davidge, Barry, and Madame Ponisi.
+
+On September 17, 1860, after an absence of nearly four years, Edwin
+Forrest appeared again on the stage. He was engaged by James Nixon,
+and began his contract of one hundred nights at Niblo's Garden, New
+York, in the character of Hamlet. The long retirement only increased
+the curious interest which centred round his historic name. Upon his
+opening night the seats were sold at auction. His success in
+Philadelphia rivalled that of New York. In Boston the vast auditorium
+of the grandest theatre in America was found too small to contain the
+crowds he drew.
+
+Severe attacks of gout were beginning to tell upon that herculean
+form, sapping and undermining it; and in 1865, while playing Damon at
+the Holiday Street Theatre, in Baltimore, the weather being very cold
+and the theatre open to draughts, he was seized with a sudden illness,
+which was followed by very serious results. Suffering the most intense
+agony, he was able to get to the end of the part; but when his robes
+were laid aside and physicians summoned, it was found to his horror
+that he had suffered a partial paralysis of the sciatic nerve. In an
+instant the sturdy gait, the proud tread of the herculean actor was
+forever gone; for he never regained complete control of his limb, a
+perceptible hobble being the legacy of the dreadful visitation. His
+right hand was almost powerless, and he could not hold his sword.
+
+In 1866 he went to California, urged by the manager in San Francisco.
+His last engagement in New York took place in February, 1871. He
+played Lear and Richelieu, his two greatest parts. On the night of
+March 25, 1872, Forrest opened in "Lear" at the Globe Theatre, Boston.
+"Lear" was played six nights. During the second week he was announced
+for Richelieu and Virginius; but he caught a violent cold on Sunday,
+and labored sorely on Monday evening through the part of Richelieu. On
+Tuesday he repeated the performance, against the advice of friends and
+physicians. Rare bursts of his old power lighted up the play, but he
+labored piteously on against his illness and threatened pneumonia.
+When stimulants were offered he rejected them, declaring "that if he
+died to-night, he should still be his old royal self."
+
+Announced for Virginius the following evening, he was unable to
+appear. A severe attack of pneumonia developed itself. He was carried
+to his hotel, and his last engagement was brought to an abrupt and
+melancholy end. As soon as he was able to move, he left Boston for his
+home in Philadelphia, resting on his way only a day in New York. As
+the summer passed away, the desire for work grew stronger and
+stronger, and he decided to re-enter public life, but simply as a
+reader of the great plays in which he had as an actor been so
+successful. The result was a disappointment. On December 11, 1872, he
+wrote to Oakes his last letter, saying sadly, but fondly: "God bless
+you ever, my dear and much-beloved friend."
+
+When the morning of December 12th came, his servant, hearing no sound
+in his chamber at his general hour of rising, became alarmed, opened
+his master's door, and found there, cold in death upon his bed, the
+form of the great tragedian. His arms were crossed upon his bosom, and
+he seemed to be at rest. The stroke had come suddenly. With little
+warning, and without pain, he had passed away.
+
+The dead man's will was found to contain several bequests to old
+friends and servants, and an elaborate scheme by which his fortune, in
+the hands of trustees, was to be applied to the erection and support
+of a retreat for aged actors, to be called "The Edwin Forrest Home."
+The idea had been long in his mind, and careful directions were drawn
+up for its practical working; but the trustees found themselves
+powerless to realize fully the hopes and wishes of the testator. A
+settlement had to be made to the divorced wife, who acted liberally
+toward the estate; but the amount withdrawn seriously crippled it, as
+it was deprived at once of a large sum of ready money. Other legal
+difficulties arose. And thus the great ambition of the tragedian to be
+a benefactor to his profession was destined to come almost to naught.
+Of this happily little he recks now. He has parted with all the cares
+of life, and has at last found rest.
+
+Forrest's greatest Shakespearean parts were Lear, Othello, and
+Coriolanus. The first grew mellow and rich as the actor grew in years,
+while it still retained much of its earlier force. His Othello
+suffered with the decline of his faculties, although his clear
+conception of all he did was apparent to the end in the acting of
+every one of his parts. Coriolanus died with him, the last of all the
+Romans. He was greatest, however, in such parts as Virginius, William
+Tell, and Spartacus. Here his mannerisms of gait and utterance were
+less noticeable than in his Shakespearean characters, or were
+overlooked in the rugged massiveness of the creation. Hamlet, Richard,
+and Macbeth were out of his temperament, and added nothing to his
+fame; but Richelieu is said to have been one of his noblest and most
+impressive performances. He was in all things marked and distinctive.
+His obtrusive personality often destroyed the harmony of the portrait
+he was painting; but in his inspired moments, which were many, his
+touches were sublime. He passed over quiet scenes with little
+elaboration, and dwelt strongly upon the grand features of the
+characters he represented. His Lear, in the great scenes, rose to a
+majestic height, but fell in places almost to mediocrity. His art was
+unequal to his natural gifts. He was totally unlike his great
+contemporary and rival, Macready, whose attention to detail gave to
+every performance the harmony of perfect work.
+
+This memoir may fitly close with an illustrative anecdote of the great
+actor. Toward the end of his professional career he was playing an
+engagement at St. Louis. He was very feeble in health, and his
+lameness was a source of great anxiety to him. Sitting at a late
+supper in his hotel one evening, after a performance of "King Lear,"
+with his friend J. B. McCullough, of the _Globe-Democrat_, that
+gentleman remarked to him: "Mr. Forrest, I never in my life saw you
+play Lear so well as you did to-night." Whereupon the veteran almost
+indignantly replied, rising slowly and laboriously from his chair to
+his full height: "Play Lear! What do you mean, sir? I do not play
+Lear! I play Hamlet, Richard, Shylock, Virginius, if you please, but
+by God, sir, I _am_ Lear!"
+
+Nor was this wholly imaginative. Ingratitude of the basest kind had
+rent his soul. Old friends were gone from him; new friends were but
+half-hearted. His hearthstone was desolate. The public, to whom he had
+given his best years, was becoming impatient of his infirmities. The
+royalty of his powers he saw by degrees torn from his decaying form.
+Other kings had arisen on the stage, to whom his old subjects now
+showed a reverence once all his own. The mockery of his diadem only
+remained. A wreck of the once proud man who had despised all weakness,
+and had ruled his kingdom with imperial sway, he now stood alone.
+Broken in health and in spirit, deserted, forgotten, unkinged, he
+might well exclaim, "_I am Lear!_"
+
+
+
+
+CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN
+
+By DUTTON COOK
+
+(1816-1876)
+
+
+[Illustration: Charlotte Cushman.]
+
+The Pilgrim Fathers figure in American pedigrees almost as frequently
+and persistently as Norman William and his followers appear at the
+trunk of our family-trees. Certainly, the Mayflower must have carried
+very many heads of houses across the Atlantic. It was not in the
+Mayflower, however, but in the Fortune, a smaller vessel, of
+fifty-five tons, that Robert Cushman, Nonconformist, the founder of
+the Cushman family in America, sailed from England, for the better
+enjoyment of liberty of conscience and freedom of religion. In the
+seventh generation from Robert Cushman appeared Elkanah Cushman, who
+took to wife Mary Eliza, daughter of Erasmus Babbit, Jr., lawyer,
+musician, and captain in the army. Of this marriage was born Charlotte
+Saunders Cushman, in Richmond Street, Boston, July 23, 1816, and other
+children.
+
+Charlotte Cushman says of herself: "I was born a tom-boy." She had a
+passion for climbing trees and for breaking open dolls' heads. She
+could not make dolls' clothes, but she could manufacture their
+furniture--could do anything with tools. "I was very destructive to
+toys and clothes, tyrannical to brothers and sister, but very social,
+and a great favorite with other children. Imitation was a prevailing
+trait." The first play she ever saw was "Coriolanus," with Macready in
+the leading part; her second play was "The Gamester." She became noted
+in her school for her skill in reading aloud. Her competitors
+grumbled: "No wonder she can read; she goes to the theatre!" Until
+then she had been shy and reserved, not to say stupid, about reading
+aloud in school, afraid of the sound of her own voice, and unwilling
+to trust it; but acquaintance with the theatre loosened her tongue, as
+she describes it, and gave opportunity and expression to a faculty
+which became the ruling passion of her life. At home, as a child, she
+took part in an operetta founded upon the story of "Bluebeard," and
+played Selim, the lover, with great applause, in a large attic chamber
+of her father's house before an enthusiastic audience of young people.
+
+Elkanah Cushman had been for some years a successful merchant, a
+member of the firm of Topliffe & Cushman, Long Wharf, Boston. But
+failure befell him, "attributable," writes Charlotte Cushman's
+biographer, Miss Stebbins, "to the infidelity of those whom he trusted
+as supercargoes." The family removed from Boston to Charlestown.
+Charlotte was placed at a public school, remaining there until she was
+thirteen only. Elkanah Cushman died, leaving his widow and five
+children with very slender means. Mrs. Cushman opened a boarding-house
+in Boston, and struggled hard to ward off further misfortune. It was
+discovered that Charlotte possessed a noble voice of almost two
+registers, "a full contralto and almost a full soprano; but the low
+voice was the natural one." The fortunes of the family seemed to rest
+upon the due cultivation of Charlotte's voice and upon her future as a
+singer. "My mother," she writes, "at great self-sacrifice gave me what
+opportunities for instruction she could obtain for me; and then my
+father's friend, Mr. R. D. Shepherd, of Shepherdstown, Va., gave me
+two years of the best culture that could be obtained in Boston at that
+time, under John Paddon, an English organist and teacher of singing."
+When the English singer, Mrs. Wood--better known, perhaps, as Miss
+Paton--visited Boston in 1835 or 1836, she needed the support of a
+contralto voice. Charlotte Cushman was sent for, and rehearsed duets
+with Mrs. Wood. The young beginner was advised to prepare herself for
+the operatic stage; she was assured that such a voice would "lead her
+to any height of fortune she coveted." She became the articled pupil
+of Mr. Maeder, the husband of Clara Fisher, actress and vocalist, and
+the musical director of Mr. and Mrs. Wood. Instructed by Maeder, Miss
+Cushman undertook the parts of the Countess in "The Marriage of
+Figaro" and Lucy Bertram in the opera of "Guy Mannering." These were
+her first appearances upon the stage.
+
+Mrs. Maeder's voice was a contralto; it became necessary, therefore,
+to assign soprano parts to Miss Cushman. Undue stress was thus laid
+upon her upper notes. She was very young, and she felt the change of
+climate when she went on with the Maeders to New Orleans. It is
+likely that her powers as a singer had been tried too soon and too
+severely; her operatic career was brought to a sudden close. Her voice
+failed her; her upper notes departed, never to return; she was left
+with a weakened and limited contralto register. Alarmed and wretched,
+she sought counsel of Mr. Caldwell, the manager of the chief New
+Orleans theatre. "You ought to be an actress, and not a singer," he
+said, and advised her to take lessons of Mr. Barton, his leading
+tragedian. Her articles of apprenticeship to Maeder were cancelled.
+Soon she was ready to appear as Lady Macbeth on the occasion of
+Barton's benefit.
+
+The season ended, she sailed for Philadelphia on her way to New York.
+Presently she had entered into a three years' engagement with Mr.
+Hamblin, the manager of the Bowery Theatre, at a salary of twenty-five
+dollars a week for the first year, thirty-five for the second year,
+and forty-five for the third. Mr. Hamblin had received excellent
+accounts of the actress from his friend, Mr. Barton, of New Orleans,
+and had heard her rehearse scenes from "Macbeth," "Jane Shore,"
+"Venice Preserved," "The Stranger," etc. To enable her to obtain a
+suitable wardrobe, he became security for her with his tradespeople,
+deducting five dollars a week from her salary until the debt was
+satisfied. All promised well; independence seemed secure at last. Mrs.
+Cushman was sent for from Boston; she gave up her boarding-house and
+hastened to her daughter. Miss Cushman writes: "I got a situation for
+my eldest brother in a store in New York. I left my only sister in
+charge of a half-sister in Boston, and I took my youngest brother with
+me." But rheumatic fever seized the actress; she was able to act for a
+few nights only, and her dream of good fortune came to a disastrous
+close. "The Bowery Theatre was burned to the ground, with all my
+wardrobe, all my debt upon it, and my three years' contract ending in
+smoke." Grievously distressed, but not disheartened, with her family
+dependent upon her exertions, she accepted an engagement at the
+principal theatre in Albany, where she remained five months, acting
+all the leading characters. In September, 1837, she entered into an
+engagement, which endured for three years, with the manager of the
+Park Theatre, New York. She was required to fulfil the duties of
+"walking lady" and "general utility" at a salary of twenty dollars a
+week.
+
+During this period of her career she performed very many characters,
+and toiled assiduously at her profession. It was then the custom to
+afford the public a great variety of performances, to change the plays
+nightly, and to present two and sometimes three plays upon the same
+evening. The actors were forever busy studying new parts, and, when
+they were not performing, they were rehearsing. "It was a time of hard
+work," writes Miss Stebbins, "of ceaseless activity, and of hard-won
+and scantily accorded appreciation." Miss Cushman had no choice of
+parts; she was not the chief actress of the company; she sustained
+without question all the characters the management assigned to her.
+Her appearance as Meg Merrilies (she acquired subsequently great favor
+by her performance of this character) was due to an incident--the
+illness of Mrs. Chippendale, the actress who usually supported the
+part. It was in the year 1840; the veteran Braham was to appear as
+Henry Bertram. A Meg Merrilies had to be improvised. The obscure
+"utility" actress was called upon to take Mrs. Chippendale's place.
+She might read the part if she could not commit it to memory but
+personate Meg Merrilies after some sort she must. She had never
+especially noticed the part; but as she stood at the side scene, book
+in hand, awaiting her moment of entrance, her ear caught the dialogue
+going on upon the stage between two of the gypsies, "conveying the
+impression that Meg was no longer to be feared or respected--that she
+was no longer in her right mind." This furnished her with a clew to
+the character, and led her to present it upon the stage as the weird
+and startling figure which afterward became so famous. Of course, the
+first performance was but a sketch of her later portrayals of Meg
+Merrilies, yet she made a profound impression. "I had not thought that
+I had done anything remarkable," she wrote, "and when a knock came at
+my dressing-room door, and I heard Braham's voice, my first thought
+was, 'Now what have I done? He is surely displeased with me about
+something.' Imagine my gratification, when Mr. Braham said, 'Miss
+Cushman, I have come to thank you for the most veritable sensation I
+have experienced for a long time. I give you my word, when I saw you
+in that first scene I felt a cold chill run all over me. Where have
+you learned to do anything like that?'"
+
+During her visits to England, Miss Cushman personated Meg Merrilies
+more often than any other character. In America she was also famous
+for her performance of Nancy, in a melodrama founded upon "Oliver
+Twist;" but this part she did not bring with her across the Atlantic.
+She had first played Nancy during her "general utility" days at the
+Park Theatre, when the energy and pathos of her acting powerfully
+affected her audience, and the tradition of her success in the part
+long "lingered in the memory of managers, and caused them, ever and
+anon, as their business interests prompted, to bring great pressure to
+bear upon her for a reproduction of it." Mr. George Vandenhoff
+describes Nancy as Miss Cushman's "greatest part; fearfully natural,
+dreadfully intense, horribly real."
+
+In the winter of 1842 Miss Cushman undertook the management of the
+Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, which was then in rather a fallen
+state. Under her energetic rule, however, the establishment recovered
+its popularity. "She displayed at that day," writes Mr. George
+Vandenhoff--who "starred at the Walnut Street Theatre for six nights
+to small audiences"--"a rude, strong, uncultivated talent. It was not
+till after she had seen and acted with Mr. Macready--which she did the
+next season--that she really brought artistic study and finish to her
+performances." Macready arrived in New York in the autumn of 1843. He
+notes: "The Miss Cushman, who acted Lady Macbeth, interested me much.
+She has to learn her art, but she showed mind and sympathy with me--a
+novelty so refreshing to me on the stage." She discerned the
+opportunity for study and improvement presented by Macready's visit,
+and underwent the fatigue of acting on alternate nights in
+Philadelphia and New York during the term of his engagement at the
+Park Theatre. Her own success was very great. She wrote to her mother
+of her great reception: of her being called out after the play; of the
+"hats and handkerchiefs waved to me; flowers sent to me," etc. In
+October, 1844, she sailed for England in the packet-ship Garrick. She
+had little money with her. A farewell benefit taken in Boston, her
+native city, had not proved very productive, and she had been obliged
+"to make arrangements for the maintenance of her family during her
+absence." And with characteristic prudence she left behind her a
+certain sum, to be in readiness for her, in case failure in England
+should drive her promptly back to America.
+
+No engagement in London had been offered her; but she received, upon
+her arrival, a letter from Macready, proposing that she should join a
+company then being formed to give representations in Paris. She
+thought it prudent to decline this proposal, however, so as to avoid
+entering into anything like rivalry with Miss Helen Faucit, the
+leading actress of the troupe. She visited Paris for a few days, but
+only to sit with the audience of the best French theatres. She
+returned to her dull lodgings in Covent Garden, "awaiting her
+destiny." She was fond, in after years, of referring to the struggles
+and poverty, the hopes and the despair, of her first sojourn in
+London. Her means were nearly exhausted. Sally, the dresser, used to
+relate: "Miss Cushman lived on a mutton-chop a day, and I always
+bought the baker's dozen of muffins for the sake of the extra one, and
+we ate them all, no matter how stale they were, and we never suffered
+from want of appetite in those days." She found herself reduced to her
+last sovereign, when Mr. Maddox, the manager of the Princess's
+Theatre, came to her with a proposal. The watchful Sally reported that
+he had been walking up and down the street for some time early in the
+morning, too early for a visit. "He is anxious," said Miss Cushman. "I
+can make my own terms." He wished her to appear with Forrest, the
+American tragedian, then visiting the London stage for the second and
+last time. She stipulated that she should have her opportunity first,
+and "alone." If successful, she was willing to appear in support of
+Forrest. So it was agreed.
+
+Her first appearance upon the English stage was made on February 14,
+1845; she assumed the character of Bianca, in Dean Milman's rather
+dull tragedy of "Fazio." Her triumph was indisputable. Her intensity
+and vehemence completely carried away the house. As the pit rose at
+Kean's Shylock, so it rose at Charlotte Cushman's Bianca. She wrote to
+her mother in America: "All my success put together, since I have been
+upon the stage, would not come near my success in London." The critics
+described, as the crowning effort of her performance, the energy and
+pathos and abandonment of her appeal to Aldabella, when the wife
+sacrifices her pride, and sinks, "huddled into a heap," at the feet of
+her rival, imploring her to save the life of Fazio. Miss Cushman,
+speaking of her first performance in London, was wont to relate how
+she was so completely overcome, not only by the excitement of the
+scene, but by the nervous agitation of the occasion, that she lost for
+the moment her self-command, and was especially grateful for the
+long-continued applause which gave her time to recover herself. When
+she slowly rose at last and faced the house again, the spectacle of
+its enthusiasm thrilled and impressed her in a manner she could never
+forget. The audience were standing; some had mounted on the benches;
+there was wild waving of hats and handkerchiefs, a storm of cheering,
+great showering of bouquets.
+
+Her second character in London was Lady Macbeth, to the Macbeth of
+Edwin Forrest; but the American actor failed to please, and the
+audience gave free expression to their discontent. Greatly disgusted,
+Forrest withdrew, deluding himself with the belief that he was the
+victim of a conspiracy. Miss Cushman's success knew no abatement. She
+played a round of parts, assisted by James Wallack, Leigh Murray, and
+Mrs. Stirling, appearing now as Rosalind, now as Juliana in "The
+Honeymoon," as Mrs. Haller, as Beatrice, as Julia in "The Hunchback."
+Her second season was even more successful than her first. After a
+long provincial tour she appeared in December, 1845, as Romeo at the
+Haymarket Theatre, then under the management of Mr. Webster, her
+sister Susan assuming the character of Juliet. She had sent for her
+family to share her prosperity, and had established them in a
+furnished house at Bayswater.
+
+Her success as Romeo was very great. The tragedy was played for eighty
+nights. Her performance won applause even from those most opposed to
+the representation of Shakespeare's hero by a woman. For a time her
+intense earnestness of speech and manner, the passion of her
+interviews with Juliet, the fury of her combat with Tybalt, the
+despair of her closing scenes, bore down all opposition, silenced
+criticism, and excited her audience to an extraordinary degree. She
+appeared afterward, but not in London, as Hamlet, following an
+unfortunate example set by Mrs. Siddons; and as Ion in Talfourd's
+tragedy of that name.
+
+In America, toward the close of her career, she even ventured to
+appear as Cardinal Wolsey, obtaining great applause by her exertions
+in the character, and the skill and force of her impersonation. But
+histrionic feats of this kind trespass against good taste, do violence
+to the intentions of the dramatists, and are, in truth, departures
+from the purpose of playing. Miss Cushman had for excuse--in the first
+instance, at any rate--her anxiety to forward the professional
+interests of her sister, who, in truth, had little qualification for
+the stage, apart from her good looks and her graces of manner. The
+sisters had played together in Philadelphia in "The Genoese"--a drama
+written by a young American--when, to give support and encouragement
+to Susan in her personation of the heroine, Charlotte undertook the
+part of her lover. Their success prompted them to appear in "Romeo and
+Juliet." Other plays, in which both could appear, were afterward
+selected--such, for instance, as "Twelfth Night," in which Charlotte
+played Viola to the Olivia of Susan--so that the engagement of one
+might compel the engagement of the other. Susan, however, quitted the
+stage in 1847, to become the wife of Dr. Sheridan Muspratt, of
+Liverpool.
+
+[Illustration: Charlotte Cushman as Mrs. Haller.]
+
+Charlotte Cushman called few new plays into being. Dramas, entitled
+"Infatuation," by James Kenny, in 1845, and "Duchess Elinour," by the
+late H. F. Chorley, in 1854, were produced for her, but were summarily
+condemned by the audience, being scarcely permitted indeed a second
+performance in either case. Otherwise, she did not add to her
+repertory. For many years she led the life of a "star," fulfilling
+brief engagements here and there, appearing now for a term in London,
+and now travelling through the provinces, playing some half a dozen
+characters over and over again. Of these Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine
+and Meg Merrilies were perhaps the most frequently demanded. Her fame
+and fortune she always dated from the immediate recognition she
+obtained upon her first performance in London. But she made frequent
+visits to America; indeed, she crossed the Atlantic "upward of sixteen
+times," says her biographer. In 1854 she took a house in Bolton Row,
+Mayfair, "where for some years she dispensed the most charming and
+genial hospitality," and, notably, entertained Ristori on her first
+visit to England in 1856. Several winters she passed in Rome,
+occupying apartments in the Via Gregoriana, where she cordially
+received a host of friends and visitors of all nations. In 1859 she
+was called to England by her sister's fatal illness; in 1866 she was
+again summoned to England to attend the death-bed of her mother. In
+1860 she was playing in all the chief cities of America. Three years
+later she again visited America, her chief object being to act for the
+benefit of the Sanitary Commission, and aid the sick and wounded
+victims of the civil war. During the late years of her life she
+appeared before the public more as a dramatic reader than as an
+actress. There were long intervals between her theatrical engagements;
+she seemed to quit her profession only to return to it after an
+interval with renewed appetite, and she incurred reproaches because of
+the frequency of her farewells, and the doubt that prevailed as to
+whether her "last appearances" were really to be the "very last." It
+was not until 1874, however, that she took final leave of the New York
+stage, amid extraordinary enthusiasm, with many poetic and other
+ceremonies. She was the subject of addresses in prose and verse. Mr.
+Bryant, after an eloquent speech, tendered her a laurel wreath bound
+with white ribbon resting upon a purple velvet cushion, with a
+suitable inscription embroidered in golden letters; a torchbearers'
+procession escorted her from the theatre to her hotel; she was
+serenaded at midnight, and in her honor Fifth Avenue blazed with
+fireworks. After this came farewells to Philadelphia, Boston and other
+cities, and to these succeeded readings all over the country. It is to
+be said, however, that incessant work had become a necessity with her,
+not because of its pecuniary results, but as a means of obtaining
+mental relief or comparative forgetfulness for a season. During the
+last five or six years of her life she was afflicted with an incurable
+and agonizing malady. Under most painful conditions she toiled
+unceasingly, moving rapidly from place to place, and passing days and
+nights in railway journeys. In a letter to a friend, she writes: "I do
+get so dreadfully depressed about myself, and all things seem so
+hopeless to me at those times, that I pray God to take me quickly at
+any moment, so that I may not torture those I love by letting them see
+my pain. But when the dark hour passes, and I try to forget by
+constant occupation that I have such a load near my heart, then it is
+not so bad." She died almost painlessly at last on February 18, 1876.
+
+Charlotte Cushman may assuredly be accounted an actress of genius in
+right of her originality, her vivid power of depicting emotion, the
+vehemence and intensity of her histrionic manner. Her best successes
+were obtained in tragedy, although she possessed a keen sense of
+humor, and could deliver the witty speeches of Rosalind or of Beatrice
+with excellent point and effect. Her Meg Merrilies will probably be
+remembered as her most impressive achievement. It was really, as she
+played it, a character of her own invention; but, in truth, it taxed
+her intellectual resources far less than her Bianca, her Queen
+Katherine, or her Lady Macbeth. Her physical peculiarities no doubt
+limited the range of her efforts, hindered her advance as an actress,
+or urged her toward exceptional impersonations. Her performances
+lacked femininity, to use Coleridge's word; but in power to stir an
+audience, to touch their sympathies, to kindle their enthusiasm, and
+to compel their applause, she takes rank among the finest players. It
+only remains to add that Miss Stebbins' fervid and affecting biography
+of her friend admirably demonstrates that the woman was not less
+estimable than the actress; that Charlotte Cushman was of noble
+character, intellectual, large and tenderhearted, of exemplary conduct
+in every respect. The simple, direct earnestness of her manner upon
+the mimic scene, characterized her proceedings in real life. She was
+at once the slave and the benefactress of her family; she was
+devotedly fond of children; she was of liberal and generous nature;
+she was happiest when conferring kindness upon others; her career
+abounded in self-sacrifice. She pretended to few accomplishments, to
+little cultivation of a literary sort; but she could write, as Miss
+Stebbins proves, excellent letters, now grave, now gay, now
+reflective, now descriptive, always interesting, and altogether
+remarkable for sound sense and for force and skill of expression. Her
+death was regarded in America almost as a national catastrophe. As
+Miss Stebbins writes, "The press of the entire country bore witness to
+her greatness, and laid their tributes upon her tomb."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following letter of good counsel from Miss Cushman to young Mr.
+Barton is reprinted, by permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
+from the "Life and Letters of Charlotte Cushman."
+
+"I think if you have to wait for a while it will do you no harm. You
+seem to me quite frantic for immediate work; but teach yourself quiet
+and repose in the time you are waiting. With half your strength I
+could bear to wait and labor with myself to conquer _fretting_. The
+greatest power in the world is shown in conquest over self. More life
+will be worked out of you by fretting than all the stage-playing in
+the world. God bless you, my poor child. You have indeed trouble
+enough; but you have a strong and earnest spirit, and you have the
+true religion of labor in your heart. Therefore I have no fears for
+you let what will come. Let me hear from you at your leisure, and be
+sure you have no warmer friend than I am and wish to be."
+
+
+
+
+RACHEL
+
+By DUTTON COOK
+
+(1821-1858)
+
+
+[Illustration: Rachel.]
+
+It is told that Rachel Felix was born on March 24, 1821, at Munf, near
+the town of Aarau, in the Canton of Aargau, Switzerland; the
+burgomaster of the district simply noting in his books that upon the
+day stated, at the little village inn, the wife of a poor pedler had
+given birth to a female child. The entry included no mention of
+family, name, or religion, and otherwise the event was not registered
+in any civil or religious record. The father and mother were Abraham
+Felix, a Jew, born in Metz, but of German origin, and Esther Haya, his
+wife. They had wandered about the continent during many years, seeking
+a living and scarcely finding it. Several children were born to them
+by the wayside, as it were, on their journeyings hither and thither:
+Sarah in Germany, Rebecca in Lyons, Dinah in Paris, Rachel in
+Switzerland; and there were other infants who did not long survive
+their birth, succumbing to the austerities of the state of life to
+which they had been called. For a time, perhaps because of their
+numerous progeny, M. and Madame Felix settled in Lyons. Madame Felix
+opened a small shop and dealt in second-hand clothes; M. Felix gave
+lessons in German to the very few pupils he could obtain. About 1830
+the family moved to Paris. They were still miserably poor. The
+children Sarah and Rachel, usually carrying a smaller child in their
+arms or wheeling it with them in a wooden cart, were sent into the
+streets to earn money by singing at the doors of cafes and estaminets.
+A musical amateur, one M. Morin, noticed the girls, questioned them,
+interested himself about them, and finally obtained their admission
+into the Government School of Sacred Music in the Rue Vaugirard.
+Rachel's voice did not promise much, however; as she confessed, she
+could not sing--she could only recite. She had received but the
+scantiest and meanest education; she read with difficulty; she was
+teaching herself writing by copying the manuscript of others.
+Presently she was studying elocution under M. St. Aulaire, an old
+actor retired from the Français, who took pains with the child,
+instructing her gratuitously and calling her "ma petite diablesse."
+The performances of M. St. Aulaire's pupil were occasionally witnessed
+by the established players, among them Monval of the Gymnase and
+Samson of the Comédie. Monval approved and encouraged the young
+actress, and upon the recommendation of Samson she entered the classes
+of the Conservatoire, over which he presided, with Michelot and
+Provost as his co-professors.
+
+At the Conservatoire Rachel made little progress. All her efforts
+failed to win the good opinion of her preceptors. In despair she
+resolved to abandon altogether the institution, its classes and
+performances. She felt herself neglected, aggrieved, insulted.
+"Tartuffe" had been announced for representation by the pupils; she
+had been assigned the mute part of Flipote, the serving-maid, who
+simply appears upon the scene in the first act that her ears may be
+soundly boxed by Madame Pernelle. To this humiliation she would not
+submit. She hurried to her old friend, St. Aulaire, who consulted
+Monval, who commended her to his manager, M. Poirson. She entered into
+an engagement to serve the Gymnase for a term of three years upon a
+salary of 3,000 francs. M. Poirson was quick to perceive that she was
+not as so many other beginners were; that there was something new and
+startling about the young actress. He obtained for her first
+appearance, from M. Paul Duport, a little melodrama in two acts. It
+was called "La Vendéenne," and owed its more striking scenes to "The
+Heart of Midlothian." After the manner of Jeanie Deans, Géneviève, the
+heroine of the play, footsore and travel-stained, seeks the presence
+of the Empress Josephine to implore the pardon of a Vendéan peasant
+condemned to death for following George Cadoudal. "La Vendéenne,"
+produced on April 24, 1837, and received with great applause, was
+played on sixty successive nights, but not to very crowded audiences.
+The press scarcely noticed the new actress. The critic of the _Journal
+des Débats_, however, while rashly affirming that Rachel was not a
+phenomenon and would never be extolled as a wonder, carefully noted
+certain of the merits and characteristics of her performance. "She was
+an unskilled child, but she possessed heart, soul, intellect. There
+was something bold, abrupt, uncouth about her aspect, gait, and
+manner. She was dressed simply and truthfully in the coarse woollen
+gown of a peasant-girl; her hands were red; her voice was harsh and
+untrained, but powerful; she acted without effort or exaggeration; she
+did not scream or gesticulate unduly; she seemed to perceive
+intuitively the feeling she was required to express, and could
+interest the audience greatly, moving them to tears. She was not
+pretty, but she pleased," etc. Bouffé, who witnessed this
+representation, observed: "What an odd little girl! Assuredly there is
+something in her. But her place is not here." So judged Samson also,
+becoming more and more aware of the merits of his former pupil. She
+was transferred to the Français to play the leading characters in
+tragedy, at a salary of 4,000 francs a year. M. Poirson did not
+hesitate to cancel her agreement with him. Indeed, he had been
+troubled with thinking how he could employ his new actress. She was
+not an _ingénue_ of the ordinary type; she could not be classed among
+soubrettes. There were no parts suited to her in the light comedies of
+Scribe and his compeers, which constituted the chief repertory of the
+Gymnase.
+
+It was on June 12, 1838, that Rachel, as Camille, in "Horace," made
+her first appearance upon the stage of the Théâtre Français. The
+receipts were but seven hundred and fifty francs; it was an
+unfashionable period of the year; Paris was out of town; the weather
+was most sultry. There were many Jews in the house, it was said,
+resolute to support the daughter of Israel, and her success was
+unequivocal; nevertheless, a large share of the applause of the night
+was confessedly carried off by the veteran Joanny, who played Horace.
+On June 16th Rachel made her second appearance, personating Emilie in
+the "Cinna," of Corneille. The receipts fell to five hundred and fifty
+francs. She repeated her performance of Camille on the 23d; the
+receipts were only three hundred francs! the poorest house, perhaps,
+she ever played to in Paris. She afterward appeared as Hermione in
+"Andromaque," Aménaide in "Tancrède," Eriphile in "Iphigénie," Monime
+in "Mithridate," and Roxane in "Bajazet," the receipts now gradually
+rising, until, in October, when she played Hermione for the tenth
+time, six thousand francs were taken at the doors, an equal amount
+being received in November, when, for the sixth time, she appeared as
+Camille. Paris was now at her feet. In 1839, called upon to play two
+or three times per week, she essayed but one new part, Esther, in
+Racine's tragedy of that name. The public was quite content that she
+should assume again and again the characters in which she had already
+triumphed. In 1840 she added to her list of impersonations Laodie and
+Pauline in Corneille's "Nicomède" and "Polyeucte," and Marie Stuart in
+Lebrun's tragedy. In 1841 she played no new parts. In 1842 she first
+appeared as Chimène in "Le Cid," as Ariane, and as Frédégonde in a
+wretched tragedy by Le Mercier.
+
+Rachel had saved the Théâtre Français, had given back to the stage the
+masterpieces of the French classical drama. It was very well for
+Thackeray to write from Paris in 1839 that the actress had "only
+galvanized the corpse, not revivified.... Racine will never come to
+life again and cause audiences to weep as of yore." He predicted:
+"Ancient French tragedy, red-heeled, patched, and beperiwigged, lies
+in the grave, and it is only the ghost of it that the fair Jewess has
+raised." But it was something more than a galvanized animation that
+Rachel had imparted to the old drama of France. During her career of
+twenty years, her performances of Racine and Corneille filled the
+coffers of the Français, and it may be traced to her influence and
+example that the classic plays still keep their place upon the stage
+and stir the ambition of the players. But now the committee of the
+Français had to reckon with their leading actress, and pay the price
+of the prosperity she had brought them. They cancelled her engagement
+and offered her terms such as seemed to them liberal beyond all
+precedent. But the more they offered, so much the more was demanded.
+In the first instance, the actress being a minor, negotiations were
+carried on with her father, the committee denouncing in the bitterest
+terms the avarice and rapacity of M. Felix. But when Rachel became
+competent to deal on her own behalf, she proved herself every whit as
+exacting as her sire. She became a _sociétaire_ in 1843, entitled to
+one of the twenty-four shares into which the profits of the
+institution were divided. She was rewarded, moreover, with a salary of
+forty-two thousand francs per annum; and it was estimated that by her
+performances during her _congé_ of three or four months every year she
+earned a further annual income of thirty thousand francs. She met with
+extraordinary success upon her provincial tours; enormous profits
+resulted from her repeated visits to Holland and Belgium, Germany,
+Russia, and England. But, from first to last, Rachel's connection with
+the Français was an incessant quarrel. She was capricious, ungrateful,
+unscrupulous, extortionate. She struggled to evade her duties, to do
+as little as she possibly could in return for the large sums she
+received from the committee. She pretended to be too ill to play in
+Paris, the while she was always well enough to hurry away and obtain
+great rewards by her performances in the provinces. She wore herself
+out by her endless wanderings hither and thither, her continuous
+efforts upon the scene. She denied herself all rest, or slept in a
+travelling carriage to save time in her passage from one country
+theatre to another. Her company complained that they fell asleep as
+they acted, her engagements denying them proper opportunities of
+repose. The newspapers at one time set forth the acrimonious letters
+she had interchanged with the committee of the Français. Finally she
+tended her resignation of the position she occupied as _sociétaire_;
+the committee took legal proceedings to compel her to return to her
+duties; some concessions were made on either side, however, and a
+reconciliation was patched up.
+
+The new tragedies, "Judith" and "Cléopatre," written for the actress
+by Madame de Girardin, failed to please, nor did success attend the
+production of M. Romand's "Catherine II.," M. Soumet's "Jeanne d'Arc,"
+in which, to the indignation of the critics, the heroine was seen at
+last surrounded by real flames! or "Le Vieux de la Montagne" of M.
+Latour de St. Ybars. With better fortune Rachel appeared in the same
+author's "Virginie," and in the "Lucrèce" of Ponsard. Voltaire's
+"Oreste" was revived for her in 1845 that she might play Electre. She
+personated Racine's "Athalie" in 1847, assuming long white locks,
+painting furrows on her face, and disguising herself beyond
+recognition, in her determination to seem completely the character she
+had undertaken. In 1848 she played Agrippine in the "Britannicus" of
+Racine, and dressed in plain white muslin, and clasping the
+tri-colored flag to her heart, she delivered the "Marseillaise" to
+please the Revolutionists, lending the air strange meaning and passion
+by the intensity of her manner, as she half chanted, half recited the
+words, her voice now shrill and harsh, now deep, hollow, and
+reverberating--her enraptured auditors likening it in effect to
+distant thunder.
+
+To the dramatists who sought to supply her with new parts, Rachel was
+the occasion of much chagrin and perplexity. After accepting Scribe's
+"Adrienne Lecouvreur" she rejected it absolutely only to resume it
+eagerly, however, when she learned that the leading character was to
+be undertaken by Mademoiselle Rose Chéri. His "Chandelier" having met
+with success, Rachel applied to De Musset for a play. She was offered,
+it seems, "Les Caprices de Marianne," but meantime the poet's
+"Bettine" failed, and the actress distrustfully turned away from him.
+An undertaking to appear in the "Medea" of Legouvé landed her in a
+protracted lawsuit. The courts condemned her in damages to the amount
+of two hundred francs for every day she delayed playing the part of
+Medea after the date fixed upon by the management for the commencement
+of the rehearsals of the tragedy. She paid nothing, however, for the
+management failed to fix any such date. M. Legouvé was only avenged in
+the success his play obtained, in a translated form, at the hands of
+Madame Ristori. In lieu of "Medea" Rachel produced "Rosemonde," a
+tragedy by M. Latour de St. Ybars, which failed completely. Other
+plays written for her were the "Valéria" of MM. Lacroix and Maquet, in
+which she personated two characters--the Empress Messalina and her
+half sister, Lysisca, a courtesan; the "Diane," of M. Augier, an
+imitation of Victor Hugo's "Marion Delorme;" "Lady Tartuffe," a comedy
+by Madame de Girardin; and "La Czarine," by M. Scribe. She appeared
+also in certain of the characters originally contrived for
+Mademoiselle Mais, such as La Tisbe in Victor Hugo's "Angelo," and the
+heroines of Dumas's "Mademoiselle de Belle Isle" and of "Louise de
+Lignerolles" by MM. Legouvé and Dinaux.
+
+The classical drama of France has not found much favor in England and
+America. We are all, perhaps, apt to think with Thackeray
+disrespectfully of the "old tragedies--well-nigh dead, and full time
+too--in which half a dozen characters appear and shout sonorous
+Alexandrines for half a dozen hours;" or we are disposed to agree with
+Mr. Matthew Arnold, that their drama, being fundamentally insufficient
+both in substance and in form, the French, with all their gifts, have
+not, as we have, an adequate form for poetry of the highest class.
+Those who remember Rachel, however, can testify that she breathed the
+most ardent life into the frigid remains of Racine and Corneille,
+relumed them with Promethean heat, and showed them to be instinct with
+the truest and intensest passion--When she occupied the scene, there
+could be no thought of the old artificial times of hair powder and
+rouge, periwigs and patches, in connection with the characters she
+represented. Phèdre and Hermione, Pauline and Camille, interpreted by
+her genius, became as real and natural, warm and palpitating, as
+Constance or Lady Macbeth could have been when played by Mrs. Siddons,
+or as Juliet when impersonated by Miss O'Neill. Before Rachel came, it
+had been thought that the new romantic drama of MM. Hugo and Dumas,
+because of its greater truth to nature, had given the _coup de grâce_
+to the old classic plays; but the public, at her bidding, turned
+gladly from the spasms and the rant of "Angelo" and "Angèle," "Antony"
+and "Hernani," to the old-world stories, the formal tragedies of the
+seventeenth century poet-dramatists of France. The actress fairly
+witched her public. There was something of magic in her very presence
+upon the scene.
+
+None could fail to be impressed by the aspect of the slight, pallid
+woman who seemed to gain height by reason of her slenderness, who
+moved toward her audience with such simple natural majesty, who wore
+and conducted her fluent classical draperies with such admirable and
+perfect grace. It was as though she had lived always so attired in
+tunic, peplum, and pallium--had known no other dress--not that she was
+of modern times playing at antiquity, she was the muse of Greek
+tragedy in person. The physical traditions of her race found
+expression or incarnation in her. Her face was of refined Judaical
+character--the thin nose slightly curved, the lower lip a trifle full,
+but the mouth exquisitely shaped, and the teeth small, white, and
+even. The profuse black-brown hair was smoothed and braided from the
+broad, low, white, somewhat over-hanging brow, beneath which in shadow
+the keen black eyes flashed out their lightnings, or glowed luridly
+like coals at a red heat. Her gestures were remarkable for their
+dignity and appropriateness; the long, slight arms lent themselves
+surprisingly to gracefulness; the beautifully formed hands, with the
+thin tapering fingers and the pink filbert nails, seemed always
+tremblingly on the alert to add significance or accent to her
+speeches. But there was eloquence in her very silence and complete
+repose. She could relate a whole history by her changes of facial
+expression. She possessed special powers of self-control; she was
+under subjection to both art and nature when she seemed to abandon
+herself the most absolutely to the whirlwind of her passion. There
+were no undue excesses of posture, movement, or tone. Her attitudes,
+it was once said, were those of "a Pythoness cast in bronze." Her
+voice thrilled and awed at its first note: it was so strangely deep,
+so solemnly melodious, until, stirred by passion as it were, it became
+thick and husky in certain of its tones; but it was always audible,
+articulate, and telling, whether sunk to a whisper or raised
+clamorously. Her declamation was superb, if, as critics reported,
+there had been decline in this matter during those later years of her
+life, to which my own acquaintance with Rachel's acting is confined. I
+saw her first at the Français in 1849, and I was present at her last
+performance at the St. James' Theatre in 1853, having in the interval
+witnessed her assumption of certain of her most admired characters.
+And it may be true, too, that, like Kean, she was more and more
+disposed, as the years passed, to make "points," to slur over the less
+important scenes, and reserve herself for a grand outburst or a
+vehement climax, sacrificing thus many of the subtler graces,
+refinements, and graduations of elocution, for which she had once been
+famous. To English ears, it was hardly an offence that she broke up
+the sing-song of the rhymed tirades of the old plays and gave them a
+more natural sound, regardless of the traditional methods of speech of
+Clairon, Le Kain, and others of the great French players of the past.
+
+[Illustration: Rachel as the Muse of Greek Tragedy.]
+
+Less success than had been looked for attended Rachel's invasion of
+the repertory of Mlle. Mars, an actress so idolized by the Parisians
+that her sixty years and great portliness of form were not thought
+hindrances to her personation of the youthful heroines of modern
+comedy and drama. But Rachel's fittest occupation and her greatest
+triumphs were found in the classical poetic plays. She, perhaps,
+intellectualized too much the creations of Hugo, Dumas, and Scribe;
+gave them excess of majesty. Her histrionic style was too exalted an
+ideal for the conventional characters of the drama of her own time; it
+was even said of her that she could not speak its prose properly or
+tolerably. She disliked the hair-powder necessary to Adrienne
+Lecouvreur and Gabrielle de Belle Isle, although her beauty, for all
+its severity, did not lose picturesqueness in the costumes of the time
+of Louis XV. As Gabrielle she was more girlish and gentle, pathetic,
+and tender, than was her wont, while the signal fervor of her speech
+addressed to Richelieu, beginning, "Vous mentez, Monsieur le Duc,"
+stirred the audience to the most excited applause.
+
+Rachel was seen upon the stage for the last time at Charleston on
+December 17, 1856. She played Adrienne Lecouvreur. She had been
+tempted to America by the prospect of extravagant profits. It had been
+dinned into her ears that Jenny Lind, by thirty-eight performances in
+America, had realized seventeen hundred thousand francs. Why might not
+she, Rachel, receive as much? And then, she was eager to quit Paris.
+There had been strange worship there of Madame Ristori, even in the
+rejected part of Medea. But already Rachel's health was in a
+deplorable state. Her constitution, never very strong, had suffered
+severely from the cruel fatigues, the incessant exertions, she had
+undergone. It may be, too, that the deprivations and sufferings of her
+childhood now made themselves felt as over-due claims that could be no
+longer denied or deferred. She forced herself to play, in fulfilment
+of her engagement, but she was languid, weak, emaciated; she coughed
+incessantly, her strength was gone; she was dying slowly but certainly
+of phthisis. And she appeared before an audience that applauded her,
+it is true, but cared nothing for Racine and Corneille, knew little of
+the French language, and were urgent that she should sing the
+"Marseillaise" as she had sung it in 1848! It was forgotten, or it was
+not known in America, that the actress had long since renounced
+revolutionary sentiments to espouse the cause of the Second Empire.
+She performed all her more important characters, however, at New York,
+Philadelphia, and Boston. Nor was the undertaking commercially
+disappointing, if it did not wholly satisfy expectation. She returned
+to France possessed of nearly three hundred thousand francs as her
+share of the profits of her forty-two performances in the United
+States; but she returned to die. The winter of 1856 she passed at
+Cairo. She returned to France in the spring of 1857, but her
+physicians forbade her to remain long in Paris. In September she moved
+again to the South, finding her last retreat in the villa Sardou, at
+Cannet, a little village in the environs of Cannes. She lingered to
+January 3, 1858. The Théâtre Français closed its doors when news
+arrived of her death, and again on the day of her funeral. The body
+was embalmed and brought to Paris for interment in the cemetery of
+Père la Chaise, the obsequies being performed in accordance with the
+Jewish rites. The most eminent of the authors and actors of France
+were present, and funeral orations were delivered by MM. Jules Janin,
+Bataille, and Auguste Maquet. Victor Hugo was in exile; or, as Janin
+announced, the author of "Angelo" would not have withheld the tribute
+of his eulogy upon the sad occasion.
+
+
+
+
+EDWIN BOOTH[15]
+
+         [Footnote 15: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(1833-1893)
+
+
+[Illustration: Edwin Booth.]
+
+The great actor who has lately left the world furnished, in his own
+remarkable character and shining career, a striking exception to the
+popular tradition that men of genius are the fathers of ordinary sons.
+The father of Edwin Booth was in his time one of the glories of the
+English and American stage; but, even in his case the strict rule
+wavered, for his father, though not a genius, was yet a man of
+exceptional character; one who marked out a clear path for himself in
+the world, and walked in it to the end.
+
+How far back the line of the family can be traced, or what was its
+origin, we do not know; but it has lately been said that the family
+was of Hebrew extraction, and came into England from Spain, where it
+had been known by the Spanish name, Cabana. The branch of the family
+that left Spain to live in England translated the name into the
+language of their new home, and from "Cabana," a shepherd's cabin,
+made the English equivalent, Booth.
+
+However it may have been in this case, it was quite in the order of
+things that this change of name should be made. It has been done
+everywhere in Europe since very early times, and is doing to-day in
+this country by new comers from all parts of the old world.
+
+The first of the Booths we read of in England was a silversmith,
+living in Bloomsbury, London, in the latter half of the last century.
+He had a son, Richard, who was bred to the law, but who was so imbued
+with the republican ideas rife at the time that he actually came to
+America to fight in the cause of Independence! He was taken prisoner,
+and carried back to England, where, not without some struggles, he
+again applied himself to the practice of the law, and in time made a
+fortune. He did not, however, forget America, and we are told that he
+had, hanging in his house, a portrait of Washington, which he expected
+all his visitors to salute.
+
+One of the ways in which the republicans of that time showed where
+their sympathies lay, was in naming their children after the heroes of
+Greece and Rome; and accordingly we find Richard Booth calling his
+eldest son, Junius Brutus Booth, after the Roman patriot. This son was
+born in London, in 1796. His father was a man of scholarly tastes, and
+gave the boy a classical education, but it was long before he showed a
+marked inclination for any particular walk in life. He tried his hand
+at painting, sculpture, and poetry; and for a while studied law with
+his father. But, when the time came to choose, he gave his voice for
+the navy, and would have joined the brig Boxer, then fitting out for
+Nova Scotia. But, as war threatened between England and America, he
+was induced, by the strong persuasions of his father, not to run the
+risk of being forced to fight against America. He then decided to go
+upon the stage, and, in spite of his father's remonstrances, carried
+out his purpose. After some unimportant essays he at last succeeded in
+attracting public attention, and before long showed such unmistakable
+ability in dealing with difficult parts, that the public, till that
+time undivided in its enthusiasm for Kean, awoke to the fact that a
+dangerous rival threatened the security of their idol's throne. In the
+midst of his successes, however, Booth married and left England with
+his wife for a honeymoon trip to the West Indies. He had intended to
+return at once to England, but he was persuaded to prolong his journey
+and to visit New York. After playing a successful engagement there he
+went to Richmond, where he was no less prosperous. He next visited New
+Orleans and acquired such facility in speaking French that he played
+parts in French plays more than acceptably, and distinguished himself
+by acting Orestes in Racine's "Andromaque," to the delight of the
+French-speaking population. His accent is said to have been remarkable
+for its purity. Returning to New York, he acted Othello to Forrest's
+Iago; but, in the midst of his successes, the death of two of his
+children produced a temporary insanity, and this was made worse by the
+news of the death of his favorite son, Henry Byron, in London, of
+small-pox. This grievous loss was, however, to be made up to him by
+his son, Edwin, in whom he was to find the counterpart of himself,
+softened, refined, ennobled, while between father and son was to grow
+a strong attachment, a bond of mutual affection to last as long as
+life should endure.
+
+Edwin Thomas Booth was born at Bel Air, Maryland, November 12, 1833.
+He was named Edwin, after his father's friend, Edwin Forrest, and
+Thomas, after Thomas Flynn, the actor, whom the elder Booth had known
+intimately in London. His son dropped the name of Thomas, later in
+life, and was only known to the public by the name of Edwin Booth.
+Owing to his father's wandering life Edwin had few advantages of
+education, but he made the most of his opportunities, and indeed was a
+student of good letters all his life, turning the light of all he
+learned from books and experience upon his art. His youth is described
+as reticent, and marked by a strong individuality, with a deep
+sympathy for his father, early manifested; his father, a much
+enduring, suffering man, strongly in need of sympathy, knowing to
+repay it, too, in kind.
+
+Edwin Booth made his first appearance on the stage in 1849 at the
+Boston Museum in the youthful part of Tressil, in Colley Cibber's
+version of Shakespeare's "Richard III." It had been against his
+father's wishes that he had adopted the stage as a profession; but,
+as his father had done in a like case before him he persevered, and
+soon had the satisfaction of convincing his parent that he had decided
+wisely. He did not at once come to New York after his success in
+Boston, but went to Providence and to Philadelphia, acting Cassio in
+"Othello," and Wilford in the "Iron Chest," a part he soon made his
+own and in which he made his first appearance in New York, playing at
+the National Theatre in Chatham Street, in 1850. The next year he
+played Richard III. for the first time, taking the part unexpectedly
+to fill the place of his father, who was suddenly ill. In 1852 he went
+out with his father to San Francisco, where his brother, Junius Brutus
+Booth, Jr., was the manager of a theatre; and the father and his two
+sons acted together. At Sacramento, we are told that the incident
+occurred which led Edwin Booth to think of acting Hamlet, a part which
+was to become as closely associated with his name as that of Richard
+III. was with his father. He was dressed for the part of Jaffier in
+Otway's play, "Venice Preserved," when some one said to him "You look
+like Hamlet, why not play it?" It was, however, some time before he
+ventured to assume the part. In October, 1852, the father and son
+parted, not to meet again. The elder Booth went to New Orleans, and
+after playing for a week took passage in a steamboat on the
+Mississippi, and catching a severe cold succumbed after a few days'
+illness and died. For a while after his father's death Edwin suffered
+greatly from poverty and from the hardships of his precarious life,
+unsustained as he now was by the affection and encouragement of a
+father who, with all his faults, and in all the misfortunes brought on
+by serious ill-health and some aberrations that were the effect of
+ill-health had always been an affectionate and true friend. But a
+talent such as Edwin Booth possessed, united to a high character, and
+to a dauntless spirit, could not long be hid, and in a short time his
+name began to be heard of as that of one destined to great ends. In
+1854 he went to Australia as a member of Laura Keene's company. He had
+made a deep impression in California, acting such parts as Richard
+III., Shylock, Macbeth, and Hamlet, and on returning there from
+Australia that first impression was greatly strengthened. On leaving
+San Francisco he received various testimonials showing the high esteem
+in which his acting was held by the educated part of the community;
+but throughout Edwin Booth's career, the interest he excited in the
+vast audiences that followed him was by no means confined to the
+self-styled "best people." Though he never "played to the gallery,"
+the heart of the gallery was as much with him as the heart of the
+boxes, and he knew the value of its rapt silence as well as of its
+stormy voices.
+
+In Boston, in 1857, he played Sir Giles Overreach, in Massinger's "A
+New Way to Pay Old Debts," and the profound impression he made in it
+confirmed him in his purpose to devote himself to tragic acting. The
+story of an actor's life is seldom eventful, and Mr. Booth's history,
+after his first assured success, is the record of a long line of
+triumphs without a failure. The most remarkable of these triumphs was
+at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, where he acted Hamlet to
+large and ever-increasing audiences for over one hundred successive
+nights, that is, from November 21, 1864, to March 24, 1865. On this
+occasion a gold medal was presented to the actor by friends and
+admirers in New York; the list of subscribers including the names of
+many well-known citizens. The Winter Garden Theatre was managed by
+Booth and his brother-in-law, the clever actor, J. S. Clarke, until
+Booth bought out Clarke and assumed the entire management himself. In
+1865 the terrible tragedy occurred which blighted Booth's whole
+after-life, and for a time drove him from the stage. He did not act
+again until 1866; in 1867 the theatre was destroyed by fire, and in
+1868 the corner-stone of a new building, to be known as Booth's
+Theatre, was laid, and in a short time New York was in possession, for
+the first time, of a thoroughly appointed, comfortable, and handsome
+theatre. This building was made famous by a number of Shakespearian
+revivals that for beauty, magnificence, and scenic poetry have, we
+believe, never been equalled. We doubt if "Hamlet," "Julius Cæsar," or
+"Romeo and Juliet," have ever been presented with more satisfying
+completeness to the eye and to the imagination than in this theatre by
+Mr. Booth and his company. Although the theatre was in existence for
+thirteen years, from 1868 to 1882, when it was finally closed, Mr.
+Booth's management lasted only about half that time. The speculation
+was not a fortunate one for the actor; the expenses ate up all the
+profits, and Mr. Booth was bankrupted by his venture. He paid all his
+debts, however, and went bravely to work to build up a new fortune. He
+made a tour of the South, which was one long ovation, and in a season
+of eight weeks in San Francisco he took in $96,000.
+
+In 1880 he went to England and remained there two years. In 1882 he
+visited Germany, acting in both countries with great success, and in
+1883 he returned home and made a tour of America, repeating everywhere
+his old triumphs, and winning golden opinions from all classes of his
+countrymen.
+
+Edwin Booth died in New York, June 7, 1893, at the Players' Club,
+where he had lived for the last few years of his life. This was a
+building erected by his own munificence, fitted up with luxurious
+completeness, and presented to a society of his professional brethren
+for the use and behoof of his fellow-artists, reserving for himself
+only the modest apartment where he chose to live, in sympathetic touch
+with those who still pursued the noble art he had relinquished.
+
+Mr. Booth was twice married. By his first wife, Miss Mary Devlin, who
+died in 1863, he had one child, a daughter; by the second, Miss
+McVicker, he had no children. She died in 1881.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH JEFFERSON[16]
+
+         [Footnote 16: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(BORN 1829)
+
+
+[Illustration: Joseph Jefferson.]
+
+Joseph Jefferson, distinguished, among his other brilliant successes
+as an actor, as the creator for this generation of the character of
+Rip Van Winkle in the play dramatized from the story in Washington
+Irving's "Sketch Book," was the third of his name in a family of
+actors. The first of the three was born at Plymouth, England, in 1774.
+He was the son of Thomas Jefferson, a comedian of merit, the
+contemporary and friend of Garrick, and came to this country in 1795,
+making his first appearance in New York on February 10, 1796, in the
+part of Squire Richard in "The Provoked Husband." Dunlap says that,
+young as he was, he was already an artist, and that among the men of
+the company he held the first place. He lived in this country for
+thirty-six years, admired as an actor and respected as a man. He died
+at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1832.
+
+Joseph Jefferson, the second, was born in Philadelphia in 1804. He
+inherited the laughing blue eyes and sunny disposition of his father,
+but he had not his talent as an actor; he is said to have been best in
+old men's parts. His taste, however, led him to scene-painting rather
+than to acting; yet his skill in either direction was not enough to
+win success, and, in spite of well-meant efforts, he lived and died a
+poor man: ill luck pursuing him to the end of his days, when he was
+carried off by yellow fever at Mobile in 1842, just as his
+unprosperous skies were brightening a little. His son bears
+affectionate witness to the upright character of the man and to his
+indomitable cheerfulness in the most adverse circumstances. He spared
+no pains in bringing up his children in good ways, and he was
+earnestly seconded by his wife, a heroic figure in her humble sphere,
+whose tact and courage not seldom saved the family bark when it was
+drifting in shoal water. Mrs. Jefferson came of French parents, and
+was a Mrs. Burke, a widow with one child, a son, when she married Mr.
+Jefferson. Her son tells us that she had been one of the most
+attractive stars in America, the leading prima donna of the country;
+but she bore her changed fortune, as the wife of an unsuccessful actor
+and manager, with no less dignity on the stage of real life, where no
+applause was to be had but what came from those who loved her as
+mother, wife, and friend.
+
+This, then, was the family circle in which our Joseph Jefferson
+passed his earliest years, the formative period of his life. There
+were the kind-hearted, easy-going father, the practical, energetic
+mother, a sister, and the half-brother, Charles Burke, whose
+after-reputation as an actor lives in the pages of Jefferson's
+autobiography enshrined in words of warm but judicious appreciation.
+"Although only a half-brother," says Jefferson, "he seemed like a
+father to me, and there was a deep and strange affection between us."
+Nor must mention be forgotten of one other member of the family: Mary,
+his foster-mother, as Jefferson affectionately calls her, "a faithful,
+loving, truthful friend, rather than a servant, with no ambition or
+thought for herself, living only for us, and totally unconscious of
+her own existence."
+
+Joseph Jefferson, the third of the name, and in whom the talent of his
+grandfather was to reappear enriched with added graces of his own, was
+born in Philadelphia in 1829. He tells us that his earliest
+recollections are connected with a theatre in Washington. This was a
+rickety, old, frame-building adjoining the house in which his father
+lived as manager, the door at the end of the hall-way opening directly
+upon the stage; and as a toddling little chap in a short frock he was
+allowed full run of the place. Thus "behind the scenes" was his first
+playground; and here, "in this huge and dusty toy-shop made for
+children of a larger growth," he got his first experience. He was
+early accustomed to face an audience; for, being the son of the
+manager and almost living in the theatre, he was always pressed into
+the service whenever a small child was wanted, and "often went on the
+stage in long clothes as a property infant in groups of happy
+peasantry." His first dim recollection of such a public appearance is
+as the "child," in Kotzebue's play, "Pizarro," who is carried across
+the bridge by Rolla. His next appearance was in a new entertainment,
+called "Living Statues," where he struck attitudes as "Ajax Defying
+the Lightning," or "The Dying Gladiator." At four years of age he made
+a hit by accompanying T. D. Rice, the original "Jim Crow," as a
+miniature copy of that once famous character, and the first money he
+earned was the sum of $24 thrown upon the stage in silver from pit and
+gallery, to reward his childish dancing and singing on that occasion.
+
+Thus early wedded to the stage, Jefferson followed the fortunes of his
+family, and led with them a wandering life for many years, growing, by
+slow degrees and constant, varied practice, to the perfection of his
+prime. In 1838 his father led the flock to Chicago, just then grown
+from an Indian village to a thriving place of two thousand
+inhabitants, where he was to join his brother in the management of a
+new theatre, then building. Jefferson's account of the journey is a
+striking picture, at once amusing and pathetic, of the changes that
+have been wrought by fifty years. The real privations and hardships of
+the trip are veiled in the actor's story by his quiet humor and his
+disposition to see everything in a cheerful light. Always quizzing his
+own youthful follies, he cannot conceal from us by any mischievous
+anecdotes his essential goodness of nature, his merry helpfulness, his
+unselfish devotion to the welfare of the others, or the pluck with
+which he met the accidents of this itinerant life. From Chicago, where
+their success was not brilliant, the family went by stage to
+Springfield, where, by a singular chance, they were rescued from the
+danger that threatened them in the closing of the theatre by a
+municipal law trumped up in the interest of religious revivalists, by
+the adroitness of a young lawyer, who proved to be none other than
+Abraham Lincoln. In Memphis, when bad business had closed the theatre,
+young Jefferson's pluck and ready wit saved the family purse from
+absolute collapse. A city ordinance had been passed, requiring that
+all carts, drays, and public vehicles should be numbered; and the boy,
+hearing of this, called at the mayor's office, and, explaining the
+situation that had obliged his father to exchange acting for
+sign-painting, applied in his name for the contract for painting the
+numbers--and obtained it! The new industry furnished father and son
+with a month's work, and some jobs at sign-painting helped still
+further to make life easier.
+
+From Memphis the family went to Mobile, where they hoped to rest after
+their long wanderings, and where it was also hoped the children,
+Joseph and his sister, might be put to school. But the yellow fever
+was raging in Mobile, and they had been in the city only a fortnight
+when Mr. Jefferson was attacked by the disease and died. In Mobile,
+too, the good Mary died, and Mrs. Jefferson was left alone to care for
+herself and her children as she could. She had no longer a heart for
+acting, and she decided to open a boarding-house for actors, while
+Joseph and his sister earned a small stipend by variety work in the
+theatre.
+
+More years of hardship followed--the trio of mother and children
+wandering over the country, south and west: in Mississippi and Mexico,
+seeing life in all its phases of ill luck and disappointment, with
+faint gleams of success here and there, but meeting all with a spirit
+of such cheerful bravery as makes the darkest experience yield a
+pleasure in the telling. Surely, it might soften the heart of the
+sourest enemy of the stage to read the spirit in which this family met
+the long-continued crosses of their professional life.
+
+[Illustration: Joe Jefferson as Bob Acres.]
+
+Joseph Jefferson tells the story of his career so modestly, that it is
+hard to discover just when it was that success first began to turn a
+smiling face upon his efforts. Yet it would seem as if, for himself,
+the day broke when he created the part of Asa Trenchard in "Our
+American Cousin." He says that up to 1858, when he acted that part, he
+had been always more or less a "legitimate" actor, that is, one who
+has his place with others in a stock company, and never thinks of
+himself as an individual and single attraction--a star, as it is
+called. While engaged with this part, it suddenly occurred to him that
+in acting Asa Trenchard he had, for the first time in his life on the
+stage, spoken a pathetic speech; up to that time all with him had been
+pure comedy. Now he had found a part in which he could move his
+audience to tears as well as smiles. This was to him a delightful
+discovery, and he looked about for a new part in which he could repeat
+the experiment. One day in summer, as he lay in the loft of a barn
+reading in a book he well calls delightful, Pierre Irving's "Life and
+Letters of Washington Irving," he learned that the great writer had
+seen him act the part of Goldfinch, in Holcroft's "Road to Ruin," and
+that he reminded him of his grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, "in look,
+gesture, size, and make." Naturally pleased to find himself
+remembered and written of by such a man, he lay musing on the
+compliment, when the "Sketch Book" and the story of Rip van Winkle
+came suddenly into his mind. "There was to me," he writes, "magic in
+the sound of the name as I repeated it. Why was not this the very
+character I wanted? An American story by an American author was surely
+just the thing suited to an American actor."
+
+There had been three or four plays founded on this story, but
+Jefferson says that none of them were good. His father and his
+half-brother had acted the part before him, but nothing that he
+remembered gave him any hope that he could make a good play out of
+existing material. He therefore went to work to construct a play for
+himself, and his story of how he did it, told in two pages of his
+book, and with the most unconscious air in the world, reveals the
+whole secret of Jefferson's acting: its humor and pathos subtly
+mingled, its deep humanity, its pure poetry--the assemblage of
+qualities, in fine, that make it the most perfect as well as the most
+original product of the American stage.
+
+Yet the play, even in the form he gave it, did not satisfy him, nor
+did it make the impression in America that he desired. It was not
+until five years later that Dion Boucicault, in London, remade it for
+Jefferson; and it was in that city it first saw the light in its new
+form, September 5, 1865. It was at once successful, and had a run of
+one hundred and seventy-five nights.
+
+With his Asa Trenchard and his Rip van Winkle will ever be associated
+in the loving memory of play-goers his Bob Acres in Sheridan's
+"Rivals," thought by many to be his capital part--a personification
+where all the foibles of the would-be man-of-the-world: his
+self-conceit, his brag, his cowardice, are transformed into virtues
+and captivate our hearts, dissolved in the brimming humor which yet
+never overflows the just measure, so degenerating into farce.
+
+Between the two productions of Rip van Winkle in New York and in
+London, Jefferson had had many strange experiences. His wife died in
+1861, and he broke up his household in New York, and leaving three of
+his children at school in that city, he left home with his eldest son
+and went to California. After acting in San Francisco, he sailed for
+Australia, where he was warmly received; thence went to the other
+British colonies in that region, touched on his return at Lima and
+Callao and Panama, at which place he took a sailing-packet for London,
+and after his great success in that city returned to America in 1866.
+In 1867 he married, in Chicago, Miss Sarah Warren, and since that time
+his life has flowed on in an even stream, happy in all its relations,
+private and public, crowned with honors, not of a gaudy or brilliant
+kind, but solid and enduring. His art is henceforth part and parcel of
+the rich treasure of the American stage.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+ADELINA PATTI
+
+By FREDERICK F. BUFFEN
+
+(BORN 1843)
+
+
+[Illustration: Adelina Patti.]
+
+A consensus of opinion places this distinguished artiste at the head
+of all her compeers, for it may be truly said that she is the
+brightest star which has dazzled the musical firmament during the past
+half century, and, is still in the very zenith of her noonday
+splendor.
+
+Regardful of the transcendent beauty of her voice, enhanced as this is
+by her other natural and attractive attributes, one might almost
+believe that nightingales have surrounded the cradle presided over by
+Euterpe, for never has bird sung so sweetly as the gifted subject of
+my memoir, and while the Fates smiled on the birth of their favorite,
+destined to become the unrivalled Queen of Song throughout the
+civilized world, fanciful natures might conceive a poetical vision,
+and behold Melpomene with her sad, grave eyes breathing into her the
+spirit of tragedy, and Thalia, with her laughing smile, welcoming a
+gifted disciple by whose genius her fire was to be rekindled in the
+far future.
+
+In the year 1861 there arrived in England a young singer who,
+accompanied by her brother-in-law, took apartments in Norfolk Street,
+Strand. The young lady, then only seventeen, sought Mr. Frederick Gye,
+who was the lessee of the Royal Italian Opera, for his permission to
+sing at his theatre, volunteering to do so _for nothing_. The offer
+was at first absolutely declined, but subsequently the young artiste
+succeeded, and made her first appearance on May 14, 1861, as Amina in
+Bellini's opera of "La Sonnambula." Unheralded by any previous notice,
+she was then totally unknown to the English public. Not a syllable had
+reached that country of her antecedents or fame. I remember being
+present on the occasion when this youthful cantatrice tripped lightly
+on to the centre of the stage. Not a single hand was raised to greet
+her, nor a sound of welcome extended to encourage the young artiste.
+The audience of Covent Garden, usually reserved, except to
+old-established favorites, seemed wrapped in more than their
+conventional coldness on that particular evening. Ere long, however,
+indeed before she had finished the opening aria, a change manifested
+itself in the feelings of all present. The _habitués_ looked round in
+astonishment, and people near me almost held their breath in
+amazement. The second act followed, and to surprise quickly succeeded
+delight, for when in the third act she threw all her vocal and
+dramatic power into the melodious wailing of "_Ah non credea_," with
+its brilliant sequel, "_Ah non giunge_," the enthusiasm of the
+audience forgot all restriction, and burst into a spontaneous shout
+of applause, the pent-up fervor of the assembly exploding in a ringing
+cheer of acclamation rarely heard within the walls of the Royal
+Italian Opera House. The heroine of the evening was Adelina Patti, who
+thenceforward became the idol of the musical world. When I left the
+theatre that evening, I became conscious that a course of fascination
+had commenced of a most unwonted nature; one that neither time nor
+change has modified, but which three decades have served only to
+enhance and intensify.
+
+At the conclusion of the performance, Mr. Gye went on to the stage
+full of the excitement which prevailed in the theatre, and he
+immediately concluded an engagement with Mlle. Patti on the terms
+which had been previously agreed between them; these being that Mlle.
+Patti was to receive at the rate of _£_150 a month for three years,
+appearing twice each week during the season, or at the rate of about
+_£_17 for each performance. Mr. Gye also offered her the sum of _£_200
+if she would consent to sing exclusively at Covent Garden.
+
+Patti repeated her performance of Amina eight times during the season,
+and subsequently confirmed her success by her assumption of Lucia,
+Violetta, Zerlina, Martha, and Rosina.
+
+Having met with such unprecedented success throughout the London
+season, Mlle. Patti was offered an engagement to sing at the Italian
+Opera in Paris, where unusual curiosity was awakened concerning her.
+Everyone is aware that the Parisians do not admit an artist to be a
+celebrity until they have themselves acknowledged it. At Paris, after
+the first act, the sensation was indescribable, musicians, ministers,
+poets, and fashionable beauties all concurring in the general chorus
+of acclamation; while the genial Auber, the composer of so many
+delightful operas, and one of the greatest authorities, by his
+experience and judgment, on all musical matters, was so enchanted that
+he declared she had made him young again, and for several days he
+could scarcely talk on any other subject but Adelina Patti and opera.
+The conquest she had achieved with the English public was thus
+triumphantly ratified by the exacting and critical members of musical
+society in Paris.
+
+Adèle Juan Maria Patti, according to her own statement, which she
+related to the Queen Isabella of Spain, was born at Madrid, on
+February 19, 1843, and is the youngest daughter of two famous Italian
+singers, Signor Salvatore Patti and Signora Patti-Barili. The signor
+having placed her two sisters--Amalia, who subsequently married
+Maurice Strakosch, the well-known impresario, and Carlotta, also a
+vocalist of remarkable powers--in a boarding-school at Milan, went to
+New York with his wife and daughter, where they remained until Adelina
+reached sixteen.
+
+Adelina Patti had barely reached the age of three years when she was
+heard humming and singing the airs her mother sang.
+
+The child's voice was naturally so flexible that executive
+difficulties were always easy to her, and, before she had attained her
+ninth year she could execute a prolonged shake with fluency. Her
+father not being prosperous at the time, it became a necessity for
+him to look for support to his little Adelina, who had shown such
+remarkable promise; and, accordingly, she began to take singing
+lessons--not, as is stated in Grove's "Dictionary of Musicians," from
+Maurice Strakosch, but from a French lady, subsequently studying with
+her step-brother, Ettore Barili, who was a famous baritone singer; but
+nature had been so prodigal of her gifts to the child that she never
+undertook a serious course of study, but, as she herself says, her
+real master was "le bon Dieu." At a very early age she would sing and
+play the part of Norma, and knew the whole of the words and music of
+Rosina, the heroine of Rossini's immortal "Il Barbiere di Seviglia."
+She sang at various concerts in different cities, until she reached
+the age of twelve and a half, when her career was temporarily
+interrupted, for Maurice Strakosch, observing the ruinous effect the
+continuous strain upon her delicate voice was working, insisted upon
+her discontinuing singing altogether, which advice she happily
+followed. After this interval of two years' silence, and having
+emerged from the wonder-child to the young artiste, she recommenced
+her studies under M. Strakosch, and very soon afterward was engaged to
+sing on a regular stage. Strakosch travelled with her and Gottschalk,
+the pianist, through the United States, during the tour giving a
+number of concerts with varying financial results; ultimately
+returning to New York in 1859, where she appeared at a concert of
+which _The New York Herald_ of November 28th gives the following
+notice: "One of the most remarkable events in the operatic history of
+the metropolis, or even of the world, has taken place during the last
+week at the Academy of Music. Mlle. Patti sang the mad scene from
+Lucia in such a superb manner as to stir up the audience to the
+heartiest demonstrations of delight. The success of this artiste,
+educated and reared among us, has made everybody talk of her." In the
+following year, Strakosch considered the time had arrived for her to
+appear in Europe. He accordingly brought his young protégée to
+England, with the result I have already attempted to describe.
+
+After singing in London and Paris, Patti was engaged to appear at
+Berlin, Brussels, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, at which latter city
+enthusiasm reached its climax, when on one occasion she was called
+before the curtain no fewer than forty times. One who was with her
+there during her last visit, writes: "Having been witness of Adelina's
+many triumphs and of outbursts of enthusiasm bordering upon madness, I
+did not think that greater demonstrations were possible. I was
+profoundly mistaken, however, for the St. Petersburg public far
+surpassed anything I have seen before. On Adelina's nights
+extraordinary profits were made. Places for the gallery were sold for
+ten roubles each, while stalls were quickly disposed of for a hundred
+roubles each. The emperor and empress, with the whole court, took part
+in the brilliant reception accorded to Patti, and flowers to the
+amount of six thousand roubles were thrown at her."
+
+That she has been literally worshipped from infancy upward is only a
+natural consequence of her unsurpassable gifts, and nowhere has this
+feeling manifested itself to such an extent as in Paris, and by none
+more so than by the four famous composers, Auber, Meyerbeer, Rossini,
+and Gounod. Auber, after hearing her sing Norina, in Donizetti's "Don
+Pasquale," offered her a bouquet of roses from Normandy, and in answer
+to her questions about her diamonds, said, "The diamonds you wear are
+beautiful indeed, but those you place in our ears are a thousand times
+better." Patti was the pet of the gifted composer of "Guillaume Tell,"
+and no one was ever more welcome at Rossini's beautiful villa at
+Passy, well known as the centre of a great musical and artistic
+circle. The genial Italian died in November, 1868, and Patti paid her
+last tribute of respect to his memory by taking part in the
+performance of his immortal "Stabat Mater," which was given on the
+occasion of Rossini's burial service.
+
+Gounod, always enthusiastic in his remarks upon her, said, "that until
+he heard Patti, all the Marguerites were Northern maidens, but Patti
+was the only Southern Gretchen, and that from her all future singers
+could learn what to do and avoid."
+
+Although it is not the custom to bestow titles or honorific
+distinctions upon artists of the fair sex, yet, in lieu of these, to
+such an extent have presents been showered upon Adelina Patti, that
+the jewels which she has been presented with from time to time are
+said to be of the enormous value of _£_100,000. In the year 1885, when
+she appeared in New York as Violetta, the diamonds she wore on that
+occasion were estimated to be worth _£_60,000. One of the handsomest
+lockets in her possession is a present from Her Majesty, Queen
+Victoria, and a splendid solitaire ring which she is in the habit of
+wearing was given to her by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Of no less
+than twenty-three valuable bracelets, one of the most costly is that
+presented by the committee of the Birmingham festival. A magnificent
+comb, set with twenty-three large diamonds, is the gift of the Empress
+Eugénie. The emperors of Germany, Austria, and Russia have vied with
+each other in sending her jewels of the rarest value.
+
+When singing in Italy, King Victor Emmanuel each night visited the
+opera for the purpose of hearing her; and at Florence, where the
+enthusiastic Italians applauded to the very echo, Mario, prince of
+Italian tenors, leaned from his box to crown her with a laurel wreath.
+A similar honor was bestowed upon her by the Duke of Alba at Madrid,
+who presented her with a laurel crown. At the opera house in that city
+numbers of bouquets and poems were to be seen whirling through the air
+attached to the necks of birds. Queen Isabella of Spain, gave a large
+amethyst brooch surrounded by forty enormous pearls, and the Jockey
+Club of Paris presented her with twelve laurel crowns. The citizens of
+San Francisco, upon the occasion of her last visit, presented her with
+a five-pointed star formed of thirty large brilliants, and from the
+Queen of Portugal she received a massive locket containing Her
+Majesty's portrait, enriched by an enormous oriental pearl encrusted
+in brilliants; and even at the present time scarcely a day passes
+without the "Diva" receiving some acknowledgment in recognition of her
+transcendent powers.
+
+Adelina Patti's first husband was Henri, Marquis de Caux, an equerry
+to the Empress Eugénie, from whom she was separated and subsequently
+divorced; and, on June 10, 1886, she married Ernesto Nicolini, the
+famous tenor singer.
+
+In appearance, Patti is still youthful, and really seems destined to
+rival the celebrated French beauty, Ninon de l'Enclos, who was so
+beautiful at sixty that the grandsons of the men who loved her in her
+youth adored her with equal ardor. Patti's figure is still slim and
+rounded, and not a wrinkle as yet is to be seen on her cheeks, or a
+line about her eyes, which are as clear and bright as ever, and which,
+when she speaks to you, look you straight in the face with her old
+winning smile.
+
+During her career Patti has earned upward of half a million sterling,
+and the enormous sums paid to her at the present time more than double
+the amounts which Jenny Lind received, and which in that day were
+regarded as fabulous.
+
+On a natural plateau, surrounded by picturesque vales, and situated in
+the heart of the very wildest and most romantic part of South Wales,
+between Brecon and Swansea, and at the base of the Rock of the Night,
+stands the Castle of Craig-y-nos. This is the nightingale's nest. The
+princely fortune which Patti has accumulated has enabled her so to
+beautify and enlarge her home, that it now contains all the luxuries
+which Science and Art have enabled Fortune's favorites to enjoy; and
+so crowded is it with curios and valuables that it may best be
+described as "the home of all Art yields or Nature can decree."
+
+Here, in picturesque seclusion, surrounded by a unique splendor
+created by her own exertions, lives this gifted and beautiful
+songstress. She is the "Lady Bountiful" of the entire district,
+extending many miles around the castle, over which she presides with
+such hospitable grace. The number of grateful hearts she has won in
+the Welsh country by her active benevolence is almost as great as is
+the legion of enthusiastic admirers she has enlisted by the wonderful
+beauty of her voice and the series of artistic triumphs, which have
+been absolutely without parallel during the present century.
+
+
+
+
+SARAH BERNHARDT
+
+By H. S. EDWARDS
+
+(BORN 1844)
+
+
+A little girl, as Sarcey relates, once presented herself at the Paris
+Conservatoire in order to pass the examination for admission. All she
+knew was the fable of the "Two Pigeons," but she had no sooner recited
+the lines--
+
+  "Deux pigeons s'aimaient d'amour tendre,
+   L'un d'eux, s'ennuyant au logis"--
+
+than Auber stopped her with a gesture. "Enough," he said. "Come here,
+my child." The little girl, who was pale and thin, but whose eyes
+gleamed with intelligence, approached him with an air of assurance.
+"Your name is Sarah?" he said.
+
+"Yes, sir." was the reply.
+
+"You are a Jewess?"
+
+"Yes, sir, by birth; but I have been baptized."
+
+"She has been baptized," said Auber, turning to his colleagues. "It
+would have been a pity if such a pretty child had not. She said her
+fable of the 'Two Pigeons' very well. She must be admitted."
+
+[Illustration: Sarah Bernhardt.]
+
+Thus Sarah Bernhardt, for it was she, entered the Conservatoire. She
+was a Jewess of French and Dutch parentage, and was born at Paris in
+1844. Her father, after having her baptized, had placed her in a
+convent; but she had already secretly determined to become an actress.
+In her course of study at the Conservatoire she so distinguished
+herself that she received a prize which entitled her to a _début_ at
+the Théâtre Français. She selected the part of Iphigénie, in which she
+appeared on August 11, 1862; and at least one newspaper drew special
+attention to her performance, describing her as "pretty and elegant,"
+and particularly praising her perfect enunciation. She afterward
+played other parts at the Théâtre Français, but soon transferred
+herself from that house to the Gymnase, though not until she had made
+herself notorious by having, as was alleged, slapped the face of a
+sister-actress in a fit of temper.
+
+The director of the Gymnase did not take too serious a view of his new
+actress, who turned up late at rehearsals, and sometimes did not turn
+up at all. Nor did her acting make any great impression at the
+Gymnase, where, it is true, she was only permitted to appear on
+Sundays. At this theatre she lost no time in exhibiting that
+independence and caprice to which, as much as to her talent, she owes
+her celebrity. The day after the first representation of a piece by
+Labiche, "Un Mari qui Lance sa Femme," in which she had undertaken an
+important part, she stealthily quitted Paris, addressing to the author
+a letter in which she begged him to forgive her.
+
+After a tour in Spain, Sarah returned to Paris, and appeared at the
+Odéon. Here she created a certain number of characters, in such plays
+as "Les Arrêts," "Le Drame de la Rue de la Paix," and "Le Bâtard," but
+chiefly distinguished herself in "Ruy Blas," and in a translation of
+"King Lear." Already she had riveted the attention of the public and
+the press, who saw that a brilliant future lay before her.
+
+At the end of 1872 she appeared at the Comédie Française, and with
+such distinction that she was retained, first as a pensionnaire, at a
+salary of six thousand francs, and afterward as a _sociétaire_. Her
+successes were rapid and dazzling, and whether she appeared in modern
+comedy, in classic tragedy, or as the creator of characters in
+entirely new plays, the theatre was always crowded. Her melodious
+voice and pure enunciation, her singularly varied accents, her
+pathos, her ardent bursts of passion, were such that her audience, as
+they hung upon her lips, forgot the caprices and eccentricities by
+which she was already characterized in private life. It seemed,
+however, that Sarah's ambition was to gain personal notoriety even
+more than theatrical fame; and by her performances of one kind or
+another outside the theatre make herself the talk of society. She
+affected to paint, to chisel, and to write; sent pictures to the
+Salon, published eccentric books, and exhibited busts. She would
+receive her friends palette in hand, and in the dress of a male
+artist. She had a luxurious coffin made for her, covered with velvet,
+in which she loved to recline; and she more than once went up in a
+balloon.
+
+Her caprice, whether in private or public, was altogether unrestrained.
+In 1880 Émile Augier's admirable comedy, "L'Aventurière," was revived at
+the Comédie Française, and the author confided the part of Clorinde to
+Sarah Bernhardt. After the first representation, however, she was so
+enraged by an uncomplimentary newspaper criticism that she sent in her
+resignation to M. Émile Perrin, director of the theatre, quitted Paris,
+and went to England, where she gave a series of representations, and,
+appearing there for the first time, caused a veritable sensation in
+London society. Meanwhile, M. Perrin instituted against her, in the name
+of the Comédie Française, a lawsuit for breach of contract, with damages
+laid at three hundred thousand francs. It was at this juncture that
+Sarah accepted the offers of an enterprising manager for a tour in
+America, where she achieved no less phenomenal successes than in Europe.
+
+A sensational account of this American tour was afterward published by
+one of her associates, Mlle. Marie Colombier, under the title of
+"Sarah Bernhardt en Amérique." This was followed by a second volume
+from the same pen, entitled "Sarah Barnum." The latter book, as its
+title suggests, was not intended as a compliment; and Sarah Bernhardt
+brought an action against the writer, by which she was compelled to
+expunge from her scandalous volume all that was offensive.
+
+The rest of Sarah's career is too recent to be traced in detail. Nor
+can the life of an actress of our own time be dealt with so freely as
+that of a Sophie Arnould or an Adrienne Lecouvreur.
+
+From America Sarah returned to Paris, where she revived all her old
+successes, and where, in 1888, at the Odéon, she produced a one-act
+comedy from her own pen, entitled "L'Aveu," which met with a somewhat
+frigid reception. She has appeared in several of Shakespeare's plays
+with great success, but her most ambitious and perhaps most admirable
+productions of late years have been her Cleopatra, first produced in
+Paris in 1890, and her Joan of Arc.
+
+Among her numerous eccentricities, Mlle. Bernhardt once got married;
+London, by reason of the facilities it affords for this species of
+recreation, being chosen as the scene of the espousals. The hero of
+the matrimonial comedy, which was soon followed by a separation, to
+which, after many adventures on the part of both husband and wife, a
+reconciliation succeeded, was M. Damala, a Greek gentleman, possessed
+of considerable histrionic talent, who died in 1880.
+
+
+
+
+AMONG THE SPECIAL CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS WORK ARE:
+
+[Illustration: Signatures of the authors.]
+
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+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 of 8, by Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+<!--
+
+body {font-size: 1em; text-align: justify; margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%;}
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8), by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8)
+       A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more
+              than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Charles F. Horne
+
+Release Date: July 8, 2009 [EBook #29352]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT MEN AND FAMOUS WOMEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sigal Alon, Christine P. Travers and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<p class="tn">Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected, all
+other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's spelling has
+been maintained.</p>
+
+<a id="img001" name="img001"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img001.jpg" width="300" height="513" alt="" title="">
+<p>Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra.</p>
+</div>
+
+<h1>GREAT MEN AND FAMOUS WOMEN</h1>
+
+<p class="noindent center italic">A Series of Pen and Pencil Sketches of</p>
+
+<p class="center noindent">THE LIVES OF MORE THAN 200
+  OF THE MOST PROMINENT PERSONAGES IN HISTORY.</p>
+
+<p class="center noindent">VOL. VIII.</p>
+
+<p class="p4 noindent center"><span class="smaller">Copyright, 1894, by SELMAR HESS</span><br>
+<span class="smcap">Edited By Charles F. Horne</span></p>
+
+<p class="p4 center noindent smaller"><span class="smcap">New-York: Selmar Hess Publisher</span><br>
+Copyright, 1894, by <span class="smcap">Selmar Hess</span>.</p>
+
+<a id="toc" name="toc"></a>
+
+<h2><span class="pagenum"><a id="pageiii" name="pageiii"></a>(p. iii)</span> CONTENTS OF VOLUME VIII.</h2>
+
+<ul>
+<li>SUBJECT <span class="ralign85">AUTHOR</span> <span class="ralign95">PAGE</span></li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>MICHAEL ANGELO,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Anna Jameson</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page214">214</a></span></li>
+
+<li>BEETHOVEN,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>C. E. Bourne</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page319">319</a></span></li>
+
+<li>SARAH BERNHARDT,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>H. S. Edwards</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page382">382</a></span></li>
+
+<li>ROSA BONHEUR,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Clarence Cook</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page276">276</a></span></li>
+
+<li>EDWIN BOOTH,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Clarence Cook</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page370">370</a></span></li>
+
+<li>CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Dutton Cook</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page355">355</a></span></li>
+
+<li><i>Letter from Miss Cushman to a young friend on the subject of "Self-conquest,"</i>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page362">362</a></span></li>
+
+<li>LEONARDO DA VINCI,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Anna Jameson</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page209">209</a></span></li>
+
+<li>GUSTAVE DORÉ,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Kenyon Cox</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page298">298</a></span></li>
+
+<li>ALBERT DÜRER,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>W. J. Holland</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page231">231</a></span></li>
+
+<li>EDWIN FORREST,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Lawrence Barrett</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page349">349</a></span></li>
+
+<li>DAVID GARRICK,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Samuel Archer</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page343">343</a></span></li>
+
+<li>GÉRÔME,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Clarence Cook</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page281">281</a></span></li>
+
+<li>HANDEL,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>C. E. Bourne</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page302">302</a></span></li>
+
+<li>HAYDN,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>C. E. Bourne</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page315">315</a></span></li>
+
+<li>WILLIAM HOGARTH,
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page247">247</a></span></li>
+
+<li>JOSEPH JEFFERSON,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Clarence Cook</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page374">374</a></span></li>
+
+<li>FRANZ LISZT,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Rev. Hugh R. Haweis, M.A.</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page332">332</a></span></li>
+
+<li>MEISSONIER,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Clarence Cook</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page272">272</a></span></li>
+
+<li>MENDELSSOHN,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>C. F. Bourne</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page326">326</a></span></li>
+
+<li>JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Clarence Cook</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page265">265</a></span></li>
+
+<li>MOZART,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>C. E. Bourne</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page308">308</a></span></li>
+
+<li>PAGANINI,
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page325">325</a></span></li>
+
+<li>ADELINA PATTI,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Frederick F. Buffen</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page378">378</a></span></li>
+
+<li>PHIDIAS,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Clarence Cook</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page203">203</a></span></li>
+
+<li>RACHEL,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Dutton Cook</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page363">363</a></span></li>
+
+<li>RAPHAEL,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Mrs. Lee</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page221">221</a></span></li>
+
+<li>REMBRANDT,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Elizabeth Robins Pennell</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page240">240</a></span></li>
+
+<li>SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Samuel Archer</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page250">250</a></span></li>
+
+<li>DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Edmund Gosse</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page287">287</a></span></li>
+
+<li>RUBENS,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Mrs. Lee</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page236">236</a></span></li>
+
+<li>THORWALDSEN,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Hans Christian Andersen</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page258">258</a></span></li>
+
+<li>TITIAN,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Giorgio Vasari</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page226">226</a></span></li>
+
+<li>GIUSEPPE VERDI,
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page342">342</a></span></li>
+
+<li>RICHARD WAGNER,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Franklin Peterson, Mus. Bac.</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page338">338</a></span></li>
+
+<li>BENJAMIN WEST,
+<span class="ralign85"><i>Martha J. Lamb</i>,</span>
+<span class="ralign95"><a href="#page254">254</a></span></li>
+</ul>
+
+
+<h2><span class="pagenum"><a id="pagev" name="pagev"></a>(p. v)</span> LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<p class="center noindent">VOLUME VIII.</p>
+
+<p class="p2 noindent center">PHOTOGRAVURES</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" summary="Illustration list">
+<colgroup>
+    <col width="60%">
+
+    <col width="30%">
+    <col width="10%">
+</colgroup>
+<tr>
+<td>ILLUSTRATION</td>
+<td class="right">ARTIST</td>
+<td class="right">To face<br>page</td>
+
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>SARAH BERNHARDT AS CLEOPATRA,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Georges Clairin</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img001"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>MICHAEL ANGELO AND VITTORIA COLONNA,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Hermann Schneider</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img005">220</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>ALBERT DÜRER VISITS HANS SACHS,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Richard Gross</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img012">234</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>MARIE DE MEDICI AT THE HOUSE OF RUBENS,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Florent Willems</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img015">240</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>CONNOISSEURS AT REMBRANDT'S STUDIO,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Adolphe-Alexandre Lesrel</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img016">244</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>MEISSONIER'S ATELIER,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Georges Bretegnier</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img025">272</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>MOZART SINGING HIS REQUIEM,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Thomas W. Shields</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img034">314</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>AN ANECDOTE ABOUT BEETHOVEN,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Paul Leyendecker</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img038">322</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>FRANZ LISZT,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Fortuné-Joseph-Seraphin Layraud</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img043">334</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>WAGNER AND HIS FRIENDS,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Wilhelm Beckmann</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img045">340</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>RACHEL AS THE MUSE OF GREEK TRAGEDY,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Jean Léon Gérôme</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img054">368</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>JOE JEFFERSON AS BOB ACRES,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>From life</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img057">376</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="p2 noindent center">WOOD-ENGRAVINGS AND TYPOGRAVURES</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" summary="Illustration list">
+<colgroup>
+    <col width="60%">
+    <col width="30%">
+    <col width="10%">
+</colgroup>
+
+<tr>
+<td>RAPHAEL INTRODUCED TO DA VINCI,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Brune Pagès</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img003">212</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>LEO X. AT RAPHAEL'S BIER,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Pietro Michis</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img007">224</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>A FÊTE AT THE HOUSE OF TITIAN,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>F. Kraus</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img009">228</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>ALBERT DÜRER'S WEDDING,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>A. Bodenmüller</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img011">232</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>HOGARTH SKETCHING THE HIGHWAY OF QUEENBOROUGH,</td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img018">248</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>BENJAMIN WEST, PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Sir Thomas Lawrence</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img021">258</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>ROSA BONHEUR,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>E. Dubufe</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img027">278</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>HANDEL'S RIVER-CONCERT FOR GEORGE I.,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>A. Hamman</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img032">304</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>HAYDN COMPOSING HIS "CREATION,"</td>
+<td class="right"><i>A. Hamman</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img036">318</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>PAGANINI IN PRISON,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Louis Boulanger</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img040">326</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>GARRICK AS RICHARD III.,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>William Hogarth</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img048">346</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>FORREST AS METAMORA,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>From Photograph</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img050">352</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN AS MRS. HALLER,</td>
+<td class="right"><i>Watkins</i></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#img052">360</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<h2><span class="pagenum"><a id="page203" name="page203"></a>(p. 203)</span> PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS</h2>
+
+<h3>PHIDIAS<a id="footnotetag1" name="footnotetag1"></a><a href="#footnote1" title="Go to footnote 1"><span class="smaller">[1]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Clarence Cook</span><br>
+
+(ABOUT 500-432 <span class="smcap">B.C.</span>)</h3>
+
+
+<p>Phidias, one of the greatest sculptors the world has seen, and whose
+name has become, as it were, the synonym of his art, was born at Athens
+about 500 <span class="smcap">B.C.</span> He belonged to a family of artists, none of whom indeed
+were distinguished in their profession, but their varied occupations
+furnished the atmosphere in which such a talent as that of Phidias could
+best be fostered and brought to maturity. His father was Charmides, who
+is believed to have been an artist, because the Greeks, in their
+inscriptions, did not associate the name of the father with that of the
+son unless both were of the same calling. A brother of Phidias,
+Pan&oelig;nos, was a painter, and is mentioned among those artists, twenty
+or more in number, who in conjunction with Polygnotus, one of the chief
+painters of his day, were employed in the decoration of the P&oelig;cile or
+Painted Portico, one of the many beautiful buildings erected by Cimon.
+The P&oelig;cile was simply a long platform, with a roof supported by a row
+of columns on one side and by a wall on the other. It was called "the
+painted," because the wall at the back was covered with a series of
+large historical pictures containing many figures, and recording some of
+the chief events of the time, together with others relating to an
+earlier and more shadowy epoch. The subject of the painting, executed,
+at least in part, by the brother of Phidias, was the Battle of Marathon,
+in which great event it is thought he may himself have taken part.</p>
+
+<p>The boyhood of Phidias fell in a time of national revival, when under
+the influence of an ennobling political excitement, all the arts were
+quickened to a fresh, original, and splendid growth. The contest between
+the Greeks and Persians, which had begun with the Ionian revolt, was in
+full activity at the time of his birth. He was ten years old when the
+battle of Marathon was fought, and when he was twenty, four of the most
+striking events in the history of Greece were crowded into a single
+year; the battle of Thermopylæ, the victory at Salamis, and the twin
+glories of Platæa and Mycale. His early youth, therefore, was nourished
+by the inspiring influences that come from the victorious struggle of a
+people to maintain their national life. He was by no means the only
+sculptor of his time whom fame remembers, but he alone, rejecting
+trivial themes, consecrated his talent to the nobler subjects of his
+country's religious <span class="pagenum"><a id="page204" name="page204"></a>(p. 204)</span> life and the ideal conception of her
+protecting gods. No doubt, Phidias, like all who are born with the
+artistic temperament, would be interested from childhood in the progress
+of the splendid works with which Athens was enriching herself under the
+rule of Cimon. But his interest must have been greatly increased by the
+fact that his brother Pan&oelig;nos was actively engaged in the decoration
+of one of those buildings. It would be natural that he should be often
+drawn to the place where his brother was at work, and that the sight of
+so many artists, most of them young men, filled with the generous ardor
+of youth, and inspired by the nature of their task, should have stirred
+in him an answering enthusiasm. It gives us a thrill of pleasure to read
+in the list of these youths the name of the great tragic poet,
+Euripides, who began life as a painter, and in whose plays we find more
+than one reference to the art. It cannot be thought unreasonable to
+suppose that two such intelligences as these must have had an attraction
+for one another, and that, as in the case of Dante and Giotto, the great
+poet and the great artist would be drawn together by a likeness in their
+taste and aims.</p>
+
+<p>Phidias studied his art first at Athens, with a native sculptor, Hegias,
+of whom we know nothing except from books. Later, he went to Argos, and
+there put himself under the instruction of Ageladas, a worker chiefly in
+bronze, and very famous in his time, of whom, however, nothing remains
+but the memory of a few of his more notable works. For us, his own works
+forgotten, he remains in honor as the teacher of Myron, of Polycletus,
+and of Phidias, the three chief sculptors of the next generation to his
+own. On leaving the workshop of Ageladas, Phidias executed several
+statues that brought him prominently before the public. For Delphi, he
+made a group of thirteen figures in bronze, to celebrate the battle of
+Marathon and apotheosize the heroes of Attica. In this group, Miltiades
+was placed in the centre, between Athena, the tutelary goddess of
+Athens, and Apollo, the guardian of Delphi; while on each side were five
+Athenian heroes, Theseus and Codrus with others, arranged in a
+semicircle. This important work was paid for by Athens out of her share
+in the spoils of Marathon. Another important commission executed by
+Phidias was a statue of Athena made for her temple at Platæa, and paid
+for with the eighty talents raised by the contributions of the other
+Grecian states as a reward for the splendid services of the Platæans at
+Marathon, where they played somewhat the same part as the Prussians at
+the battle of Waterloo. The head, hands, and feet of this statue were of
+marble, but the drapery was of gold; so arranged, probably, as in the
+case of the great statue of Athena designed later by Phidias for the
+Parthenon, as to be removable from the marble core at pleasure. Phidias
+made so many statues of the virgin goddess Athena, that his name became
+associated with hers, as at a later day that of Raphael was with the
+Virgin Mary. In the first period of his artistic career, moved perhaps
+by his patriotic gratitude for her intervention in behalf of his native
+state, he had represented the goddess as a warlike divinity, as here at
+Platæa; but in his later conceptions, as in a statue made for the
+Athenians of Lemnos, Athena appeared invested with milder attributes,
+and with a graceful and winning type of beauty.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page205" name="page205"></a>(p. 205)</span> In their invasion of Attica the Persians had destroyed the city
+of Athens, and the people, who had fled to all quarters of the peninsula
+to seek refuge from the enemy, returned after the victory at Salamis and
+the flight of the Persians, to find their homes a heap of ruins. The
+dwelling-houses of the Greeks were everywhere, even in their largest
+cities, built of mean materials: walls of stubble overlaid with stucco
+and gayly painted. It was not long, therefore, before Athens resumed
+something of her old appearance, with such improvements as always follow
+the rebuilding of a city. The most important change effected was that
+brought about in the character of the great plateau, the fortified rock
+of the Acropolis. Here, as in many Greek cities, the temples of the gods
+had been erected, and about them, as about the cathedrals of the Middle
+Ages, there had grown up a swarm of houses and other buildings built by
+generations of people who sought there at once the protection of the
+stockade which enclosed the almost inaccessible site, and the still
+further safeguard of the presence of the divinities in their temples.
+The destructive hand of the Persian invaders had swept this platform
+clear of all these multiplied incumbrances, and in the rebuilding of the
+city it was determined to reserve the Acropolis for military and
+religious uses alone.</p>
+
+<p>The work of improvement was begun by Cimon, who, however, confined his
+attention chiefly to the lower city that clustered about the base of the
+Acropolis. Here, among other structures, he built the temple of Theseus
+and the Painted Portico, and he also erected, near the summit of the
+Acropolis, on the western side, the little gem-like temple of the
+Wingless Victory, Nike Apteros, in commemoration of the success of the
+Athenian arms at the battle of the Eurymedon. It was from Cimon that
+Phidias received his first commission for work upon the Acropolis, where
+later he was to build such a lasting monument to his own fame and to the
+fame of his native land. The commission given him by Cimon was to erect
+a bronze statue of Athena which was to stand on the citadel, at once a
+symbol of the power of Athens and a tribute to the protecting goddess of
+the city. The work upon the statue was probably begun under Cimon, but
+according to Ottfried Müller it was not completed at the death of
+Phidias. It stood in the open air, and nearly opposite the Colonnade at
+the entrance of the great flight of marble steps that led from the plain
+to the summit of the Acropolis, and was the first object to meet the eye
+on passing through the gateway. It represented the goddess, armed, and
+in a warlike attitude, from which it derived its name, Athena Promachos:
+Athena, the leader of the battle. With its pedestal it stood about
+seventy feet high, towering above the roof of the Parthenon, the gilded
+point of the brazen spear held by the goddess flashing back the sun to
+the ships as in approaching Athens they rounded the promontory of
+Sunium. We read that the statue was still standing so late as 395 <span class="smcap">A.D.</span>,
+and it is said that its towering height and threatening aspect caused a
+panic terror in Alaric and his horde of barbarians when they climbed the
+Acropolis to plunder its temple of its treasure.</p>
+
+<p>But it was under the rule of Pericles that Phidias was to find at Athens
+his richest employment. Pericles had determined, probably by the advice
+of Phidias, <span class="pagenum"><a id="page206" name="page206"></a>(p. 206)</span> to make the Acropolis the seat and centre of the
+new and splendid city that was to arise under his administration. The
+first great undertaking was the building of a temple to Athena
+Parthenos, Athena the Virgin, a design believed to have been suggested
+to Pericles by Phidias. The plans were intrusted to Ictinus, an
+Athenian, one of the best architects of the day; but the general control
+and superintendence of the work were given to Phidias. As the building
+rose to completion, workmen in all branches of the arts flocked to
+Athens from every part of Greece and were given full employment by
+Phidias in the decoration and furnishing of the temple.</p>
+
+<p>The taste of Phidias controlled the whole scheme of decoration applied
+to the building, into which color entered, no doubt, to a much greater
+extent than was formerly believed. Even after time and the destructive
+hand of man have done their worst, there still remain sufficient traces
+of color to prove that the sculpture, and the whole upper part of the
+temple, were painted in bright but harmonious colors, and that metal
+ornaments and accessories accented the whole scheme with glittering
+points of light reflected from their shining surfaces.</p>
+
+<p>The sculptures with which the Parthenon was adorned by Phidias, and
+which were executed under his immediate superintendence, consisted of
+two great groups that filled the eastern and western pediments; of
+groups of two figures each in the ninety-two metopes or panels above the
+outer row of columns; and, finally, the famous frieze that ran
+completely round the temple itself, just below the ceiling of the
+colonnade, and at a height of about thirty-nine feet from the floor.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of the group that filled the eastern pediment, the one above
+the entrance door of the temple, was the birth of Athena. Just how the
+event was represented we do not know because quite half the group,
+including the principal figures, disappeared very early in our era, and
+no description of them remains in any ancient or modern writer. The
+group in the western pediment represented the contest between Athena and
+Poseidon for the dominion over Attica. According to the legend, the
+strife between the two divinities took place in an assembly of the gods
+on the Acropolis, who were to determine which of the two contestants
+should be the protector of the city. To prove his power, Poseidon struck
+the rock with his trident, and a salt spring leaped forth, as if the sea
+itself had obeyed the call of its lord. Athena struck the ground, and an
+olive-tree sprang up, the emblem of peace and of the victories of
+commerce, and the assembly awarded the prize to her. The goddess having
+thus received the sovereignty of Athens, it was but natural that a day
+should be set apart for her special honor, and a festival instituted to
+commemorate the great event. This was the greater Panathenaia, or All
+Athenians Day, which was celebrated every fourth year in honor of the
+goddess, and which, as its name implies, was taken part in by all the
+people of the city. It occurred in the early summer and lasted five
+days. On the fifth day, it closed with a procession which went through
+all the chief streets of the city and wound its way up the Great
+Stairway to the Acropolis, bearing the <i>peplos</i> or embroidered robe
+woven by young virgin ladies of Athens, chosen from the highest
+families, and known for their skill in this <span class="pagenum"><a id="page207" name="page207"></a>(p. 207)</span> kind of work. After
+the <i>peplos</i> had been consecrated in the temple it was placed with due
+solemnities upon the ancient and venerable figure of the goddess, made
+of olive-wood, and said to have descended from heaven. From its subject,
+which thus celebrates the Panathenaic procession, the frieze is often
+called the Panathenaic frieze.</p>
+
+<p>It is carved from Pentelic marble, of which material the marble building
+is constructed. Its original length, running as it did around the entire
+building, was 522.80 feet, of which about 410 feet remain. Of this
+portion, 249 feet are in the British Museum in slabs and fragments; the
+remainder is chiefly in the Louvre, with scattered fragments in other
+places. As a connected subject this was the most extensive piece of
+sculpture ever made in Greece. From all that can be gathered from the
+study of the fragments that remain, the design of the frieze was of the
+utmost simplicity and characterized by the union of perfect taste and
+clear purpose that marks all the work of the great sculptor. The subject
+begins in the frieze at the western end of the temple, where we watch
+the assembling of the procession. It then proceeds along the northern
+and southern sides of the building, in what we are to suppose one
+continuous line, moving toward the east, since all the faces are turned
+that way; and at the eastern end, directly over the main entrance to the
+building, the two parts of the procession meet, in the presence of the
+magistrates and of the divinities who had places of worship in Athens.</p>
+
+<p>Of the grace, the skill in arrangement, the variety of invention, the
+happy union of movement and repose shown in this work, not only
+artists&mdash;men best fitted to judge its merits from a technical point of
+view&mdash;but the cultivated portion of the public, and a large and
+ever-increasing circle of every-day people, have by common consent
+agreed in praise. By the multiplication of casts, to be found now in all
+our principal museums, we are enabled to study and to enjoy the long
+procession even better than it could have been enjoyed in its original
+place, where it must have been seen at a great disadvantage in spite of
+the skill shown by Phidias in adapting it to its site; for, as the
+frieze stood thirty-nine feet from the floor, and as the width of the
+portico between the wall and the columns was only nine feet, it was seen
+at a very sharp angle, and owing to the projection of the roof beyond
+the wall of the temple the frieze received only reflected light from the
+marble pavement below.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from the marble sculptures on the exterior of the Parthenon, the
+two most famous works of Phidias were the statues of Athena, made for
+the interior of the Parthenon, and of Zeus for the temple of the god at
+Olympia in Elis. Both these statues were of the sort called
+<i>Chryselephantine</i>, from the Greek <i>chrousous</i>, golden, and
+<i>elephantinos</i>, of ivory; that is, they were constructed of plates of
+gold and ivory, laid upon a core of wood or stone. The style was not
+new, though its invention was at one time ascribed to Phidias. It came
+from the East, but it was now employed for the first time in Greece in a
+work of national importance.</p>
+
+<p>In the Athena, the face, neck, arms, hands, and feet were made of
+ivory, and the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page208" name="page208"></a>(p. 208)</span> drapery and ornaments, the helmet, the shield,
+and the sandals of gold, which as in the case of the statue made for
+Platæa, was removable at pleasure. The height of the statue, including
+the pedestal, was nearly forty feet. The goddess stood erect, clothed
+with a tunic reaching to the ankles, and showing her richly sandalled
+feet. She had the ægis on her breast, her head was covered with a
+helmet, and her shield, richly embossed with the Battle of the Amazons,
+rested on the ground at her side. In one hand she held a spear, and in
+the other, an image of Victory six feet high.</p>
+
+<p>A still more splendid work, and one which raised the fame of Phidias to
+the highest point, was the statue of the Olympian Zeus, made for the
+Eleans. In this statue, Phidias essayed to embody the Homeric ideal of
+the supreme divinity of the people of Greece sitting on his throne as a
+monarch, and in an attitude of majestic repose. The throne, made of
+cedar-wood, was covered with plates of gold, and enriched with ivory,
+ebony, and precious stones. It rested on a platform twelve feet high,
+made of costly marble and carved with the images of the gods who formed
+the council of Zeus on Olympus. The feet of the god rested on a
+footstool supported by lions, and with the combat of Theseus and the
+Amazons in a bas-relief on the front and sides. In one hand Zeus held
+the sceptre, and in the other a winged Victory. His head was crowned
+with a laurel wreath; his mantle, falling from one shoulder, left his
+breast bare and covered the lower part of his person with its ample
+folds of pure gold enamelled with flowers. The whole height of the
+statue with the pedestal was about fifty feet; by its very disproportion
+to the size of the temple it was made to appear still larger than it
+really was. This statue was reckoned one of the wonders of the world. In
+it the Greeks seemed to behold Zeus face to face. To see it was a cure
+for all earthly woes, and to die without having seen it was reckoned a
+great calamity.</p>
+
+<p>The downfall of Pericles, due to the jealousies of his rivals, carried
+with it the ruin of Phidias, his close friend, to whom he had entrusted
+such great undertakings. An indictment was brought against the sculptor,
+charging him with appropriating to himself a portion of the gold given
+him for the adornment of the statue of Athena; and according to some
+authorities Pericles himself was included in the charge. The gold had,
+however, been attached to the statue in such a manner that it could be
+taken off and weighed, and in the proof, the charge had to be abandoned.
+But Phidias did not escape so easily. He was accused of sacrilege in
+having introduced portraits of himself and Pericles on the shield of the
+goddess, where, says Plutarch, in the bas-relief of the Battle of the
+Amazons, he carved his own portrait as a bald old man lifting a stone
+with both hands, and also introduced an excellent likeness of Pericles
+fighting with an Amazon.</p>
+
+<p>Phidias died in prison before the trial came off, and his name must be
+added to the long list of those whom an ungrateful world has rewarded
+for their services with ignominy and death.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<a id="sig001" name="sig001"></a>
+<div class="right">
+<img src="images/sig001.jpg" width="250" height="59" alt="Signature of the author." title="">
+</div>
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page209" name="page209"></a>(p. 209)</span> LEONARDO DA VINCI<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Anna Jameson</span><br>
+
+(1452-1519)</h3>
+
+
+<a id="img002" name="img002"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img002.jpg" width="200" height="283" alt="Leonardo Da Vinci." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Leonardo da Vinci seems to present in his own person a <i>résumé</i> of all
+the characteristics of the age in which he lived. He was <i>the</i> miracle
+of that age of miracles. Ardent and versatile as youth; patient and
+persevering as age; a most profound and original thinker; the greatest
+mathematician and most ingenious mechanic of his time; architect,
+chemist, engineer, musician, poet, painter&mdash;we are not only astounded by
+the variety of his natural gifts and acquired knowledge, but by the
+practical direction of his amazing powers. The extracts which have been
+published from MSS. now existing in his own handwriting show him to have
+anticipated by the force of his own intellect some of the greatest
+discoveries made since his time. "These fragments," says Mr. Hallam,
+"are, according to our common estimate of the age in which he lived,
+more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to a single mind
+than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any established basis. The
+discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Castelli, and other names
+illustrious; the system of Copernicus, the very theories of recent
+geologists, are anticipated by Da Vinci within the compass of a few
+pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most
+conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the awe
+of preternatural knowledge. In an age of so much dogmatism he first laid
+down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and observation must
+be the guides to just theory in the investigation of nature. If any
+doubt could be harbored, not as to the right of Leonardo da Vinci to
+stand as the first name of the fifteenth century, which is beyond all
+doubt, but as to his originality in so many discoveries, which probably
+no one man, especially in such circumstances, has ever made, it must be
+by an hypothesis not very untenable, that some parts of physical science
+had already attained a height which mere books do not record."</p>
+
+<p>It seems at first sight almost incomprehensible that, thus endowed as a
+philosopher, mechanic, inventor, discoverer, the fame of Leonardo should
+now rest on the works he has left as a painter. We cannot, within these
+limits, attempt to explain why and how it is that as the man of science
+he has been naturally and necessarily left behind by the onward march
+of intellectual progress, while as the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page210" name="page210"></a>(p. 210)</span> poet-painter he still
+survives as a presence and a power. We must proceed at once to give some
+account of him in the character in which he exists to us and for
+us&mdash;that of the great artist.</p>
+
+<p>Leonardo was born at Vinci, near Florence, in the Lower Val d'Arno, on
+the borders of the territory of Pistoia. His father, Piero da Vinci, was
+an advocate of Florence&mdash;not rich, but in independent circumstances, and
+possessed of estates in land. The singular talents of his son induced
+Piero to give him, from an early age, the advantage of the best
+instructors. As a child he distinguished himself by his proficiency in
+arithmetic and mathematics. Music he studied early, as a science as well
+as an art. He invented a species of lyre for himself, and sung his own
+poetical compositions to his own music, both being frequently
+extemporaneous. But his favorite pursuit was the art of design in all
+its branches; he modelled in clay or wax, or attempted to draw every
+object which struck his fancy. His father sent him to study under Andrea
+Verrocchio, famous as a sculptor, chaser in metal, and painter. Andrea,
+who was an excellent and correct designer, but a bad and hard colorist,
+was soon after engaged to paint a picture of the baptism of our Saviour.
+He employed Leonardo, then a youth, to execute one of the angels; this
+he did with so much softness and richness of color, that it far
+surpassed the rest of the picture; and Verrocchio from that time threw
+away his palette, and confined himself wholly to his works in sculpture
+and design, "enraged," says Vessari, "that a child should thus excel
+him."</p>
+
+<p>The youth of Leonardo thus passed away in the pursuit of science and of
+art; sometimes he was deeply engaged in astronomical calculations and
+investigations; sometimes ardent in the study of natural history,
+botany, and anatomy; sometimes intent on new effects of color, light,
+shadow, or expression in representing objects animate or inanimate.
+Versatile, yet persevering, he varied his pursuits, but he never
+abandoned any. He was quite a young man when he conceived and
+demonstrated the practicability of two magnificent projects: one was to
+lift the whole of the church of San Giovanni, by means of immense
+levers, some feet higher than it now stands, and thus supply the
+deficient elevation; the other project was to form the Arno into a
+navigable canal as far as Pisa, which would have added greatly to the
+commercial advantages of Florence.</p>
+
+<p>It happened about this time that a peasant on the estate of Piero da
+Vinci brought him a circular piece of wood, cut horizontally from the
+trunk of a very large old fig-tree, which had been lately felled, and
+begged to have something painted on it as an ornament for his cottage.
+The man being an especial favorite, Piero desired his son Leonardo to
+gratify his request; and Leonardo, inspired by that wildness of fancy
+which was one of his characteristics, took the panel into his own room,
+and resolved to astonish his father by a most unlooked-for proof of his
+art. He determined to compose something which should have an effect
+similar to that of the Medusa on the shield of Perseus, and almost
+petrify beholders. Aided by his recent studies in natural history, he
+collected together from the neighboring swamps and the river-mud all
+kinds of hideous reptiles, as adders, <span class="pagenum"><a id="page211" name="page211"></a>(p. 211)</span> lizards, toads, serpents:
+insects, as moths, locusts, and other crawling and flying obscene and
+obnoxious things; and out of these he composed a sort of monster or
+chimera, which he represented as about to issue from the shield, with
+eyes flashing fire, and of an aspect so fearful and abominable that it
+seemed to infect the very air around. When finished, he led his father
+into the room in which it was placed, and the terror and horror of Piero
+proved the success of his attempt. This production, afterward known as
+the "Rotello del Fico," from the material on which it was painted, was
+sold by Piero secretly for one hundred ducats to a merchant, who carried
+it to Milan, and sold it to the duke for three hundred. To the poor
+peasant, thus cheated of his "Rotello," Piero gave a wooden shield, on
+which was painted a heart transfixed by a dart, a device better suited
+to his taste and comprehension. In the subsequent troubles of Milan,
+Leonardo's picture disappeared, and was probably destroyed as an object
+of horror by those who did not understand its value as a work of art.</p>
+
+<p>During this first period of his life, which was wholly passed in
+Florence and its neighborhood, Leonardo painted several other pictures
+of a very different character, and designed some beautiful cartoons of
+sacred and mythological subjects, which showed that his sense of the
+beautiful, the elevated, and the graceful was not less a part of his
+mind than that eccentricity and almost perversion of fancy which made
+him delight in sketching ugly, exaggerated caricatures, and representing
+the deformed and the terrible.</p>
+
+<p>Leonardo da Vinci was now about thirty years old, in the prime of his
+life and talents. His taste for pleasure and expense was, however, equal
+to his genius and indefatigable industry; and anxious to secure a
+certain provision for the future, as well as a wider field for the
+exercise of his various talents, he accepted the invitation of Ludovico
+Sforza il Moro, then regent, afterward Duke of Milan, to reside in his
+court, and to execute a colossal equestrian statue of his ancestor,
+Francesco Sforza. Here begins the second period of his artistic career,
+which includes his sojourn at Milan, that is from 1483 to 1499.</p>
+
+<p>Vasari says that Leonardo was invited to the court of Milan for the Duke
+Ludovico's amusement, "as a musician and performer on the lyre, and as
+the greatest singer and <i>improvisatore</i> of his time;" but this is
+improbable. Leonardo, in his long letter to that prince, in which he
+recites his own qualifications for employment, dwells chiefly on his
+skill in engineering and fortification; and sums up his pretensions as
+an artist in these few brief words: "I understand the different modes of
+sculpture in marble, bronze, and terra-cotta. In painting, also, I may
+esteem myself equal to anyone, let him be who he may." Of his musical
+talents he makes no mention whatever, though undoubtedly these, as well
+as his other social accomplishments, his handsome person, his winning
+address, his wit and eloquence, recommended him to the notice of the
+prince, by whom he was greatly beloved, and in whose service he remained
+for about seventeen years. It is not necessary, nor would it be possible
+here, to give a particular account of all the works in which Leonardo
+was engaged for his patron, nor of the great political events in which
+he was involved, more by his position than <span class="pagenum"><a id="page212" name="page212"></a>(p. 212)</span> by his inclination;
+for instance, the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France, and the
+subsequent invasion of Milan by Louis XII., which ended in the
+destruction of the Duke Ludovico. The greatest work of all, and by far
+the grandest picture which, up to that time, had been executed in Italy,
+was the "Last Supper," painted on the wall of the refectory, or
+dining-room, of the Dominican convent of the Madonna delle Grazie. It
+occupied Leonardo about two years, from 1496 to 1498.</p>
+
+<p>The moment selected by the painter is described in the 26th chapter of
+St. Matthew, 21st and 22d verses: "And as they did eat, he said, Verily,
+I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me: and they were exceeding
+sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I?"
+The knowledge of character displayed in the heads of the different
+apostles is even more wonderful than the skilful arrangement of the
+figures and the amazing beauty of the workmanship. The space occupied by
+the picture is a wall twenty-eight feet in length and the figures are
+larger than life.</p>
+
+<p>Of this magnificent creation of art, only the mouldering remains are now
+visible. It has been so often repaired that almost every vestige of the
+original painting is annihilated; but from the multiplicity of
+descriptions, engravings, and copies that exist, no picture is more
+universally known and celebrated. Perhaps the best judgment we can now
+form of its merits is from the fine copy executed by one of Leonardo's
+best pupils, Marco Uggione, for the Certosa at Pavia, and now in London,
+in the collection of the Royal Academy. Eleven other copies, by various
+pupils of Leonardo, painted either during his lifetime or within a few
+years after his death, while the picture was in perfect preservation,
+exist in different churches and collections.</p>
+
+<p>While engaged on the Cenacolo, Leonardo painted the portrait of Lucrezia
+Crivelli, now in the Louvre (No. 483). It has been engraved under the
+title of <i>La Belle Ferronnière</i>, but later researches leave us no doubt
+that it represents Lucrezia Crivelli, a beautiful favorite of Ludovico
+Sforza, and was painted at Milan in 1497. It is, as a work of art, of
+such extraordinary perfection that all critical admiration is lost in
+wonder.</p>
+
+<p>Of the grand equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, Leonardo never
+finished more than the model in clay, which was considered a
+masterpiece. Some years afterward (in 1499), when Milan was invaded by
+the French, it was used as a target by the Gascon bowmen, and completely
+destroyed. The profound anatomical studies which Leonardo made for this
+work still exist.</p>
+
+<a id="img003" name="img003"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img003.jpg" width="600" height="450" alt="" title="">
+<p>Raphael Introduced to Da Vinci.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the year 1500, the French being in possession of Milan, his patron
+Ludovico in captivity, and the affairs of the state in utter confusion,
+Leonardo returned to his native Florence, where he hoped to re-establish
+his broken fortunes, and to find employment. Here begins the third
+period of his artistic life, from 1500 to 1513, that is, from his
+forty-eighth to his sixtieth year. He found the Medici family in exile,
+but was received by Pietro Soderini (who governed the city as
+"<i>Gonfaloniêre perpetuo</i>") with great distinction, and a pension was
+assigned to him as painter in the service of the republic. One of his
+first works <span class="pagenum"><a id="page213" name="page213"></a>(p. 213)</span> after his return to Florence was the famous
+portrait of Madonna Lisa del Giocondo, called in French <i>La Joconde</i>,
+and now in the Louvre (484), which after the death of Leonardo was
+purchased by Francis I. for 4,000 gold crowns, equal to 45,000 francs or
+£1,800, an enormous sum in those days; yet who ever thought it too much?</p>
+
+<p>Then began the rivalry between Leonardo and Michael Angelo, which lasted
+during the remainder of Leonardo's life. The difference of age (for
+Michael Angelo was twenty-two years younger) ought to have prevented all
+unseemly jealousy; but Michael Angelo was haughty and impatient of all
+superiority, or even equality; Leonardo, sensitive, capricious, and
+naturally disinclined to admit the pretensions of a rival, to whom he
+could say, and <i>did</i> say, "I was famous before you were born!" With all
+their admiration of each other's genius, their mutual frailties
+prevented any real good-will on either side.</p>
+
+<p>Leonardo, during his stay at Florence, painted the portrait of Ginevra
+Benci, the reigning beauty of her time. We find that in 1502 he was
+engaged by Cæsar Borgia to visit and report on the fortifications of his
+territories, and in this office he was employed for two years. In 1503
+he formed a plan for turning the course of the Arno, and in the
+following year he lost his father. In 1505 he modelled the group which
+we now see over the northern door of the San Giovanni, at Florence. In
+1514 he was invited to Rome by Leo X., but more in his character of
+philosopher, mechanic, and alchemist, than as a painter. Here Raphael
+was at the height of his fame, and engaged in his greatest works, the
+frescos of the Vatican. The younger artist was introduced to the elder;
+and two pictures which Leonardo painted while at Rome&mdash;the "Madonna of
+St. Onofrio," and the "Holy Family," painted for Filiberta of Savoy, the
+pope's sister-in-law (which is now at St. Petersburg)&mdash;show that even
+this veteran in art felt the irresistible influence of the genius of his
+young rival. They are both <i>Raffaelesque</i> in the subject and treatment.</p>
+
+<p>It appears that Leonardo was ill-satisfied with his sojourn at Rome. He
+had long been accustomed to hold the first rank as an artist wherever he
+resided; whereas at Rome he found himself only one among many who, if
+they acknowledged his greatness, affected to consider his day as past.
+He was conscious that many of the improvements in the arts which were
+now brought into use, and which enabled the painters of the day to
+produce such extraordinary effects, were invented or introduced by
+himself. If he could no longer assert that measureless superiority over
+all others which he had done in his younger days, it was because he
+himself had opened to them new paths to excellence. The arrival of his
+old competitor, Michael Angelo, and some slight on the part of Leo X.,
+who was annoyed by his speculative and dilatory habits in executing the
+works intrusted to him, all added to his irritation and disgust. He left
+Rome, and set out for Pavia, where the French king, Francis I., then
+held his court. He was received by the young monarch with every mark of
+respect, loaded with favors, and a pension of 700 gold crowns settled on
+him for life. At the famous conference between Francis I. and Leo X.,
+at Bologna, Leonardo attended his new patron, and was <span class="pagenum"><a id="page214" name="page214"></a>(p. 214)</span> of
+essential service to him on that occasion. In the following year, 1516,
+he returned with Francis I. to France, and was attached to the French
+court as principal painter. It appears, however, that during his
+residence in France he did not paint a single picture. His health had
+begun to decline from the time he left Italy; and feeling his end
+approach, he prepared himself for it by religious meditation, by acts of
+charity, and by a most conscientious distribution by will of all his
+worldly possessions to his relatives and friends. At length, after
+protracted suffering, this great and most extraordinary man died at
+Cloux, near Amboise, May 2, 1519, being then in his sixty-seventh year.
+It is to be regretted that we cannot wholly credit the beautiful story
+of his dying in the arms of Francis I., who, as it is said, had come to
+visit him on his death-bed. It would indeed have been, as Fuseli
+expressed it, "an honor to the king, by which destiny would have atoned
+to that monarch for his future disaster at Pavia."<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+<h3>MICHAEL ANGELO<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Anna Jameson</span><br>
+
+(1474-1564)</h3>
+
+
+<a id="img004" name="img004"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img004.jpg" width="200" height="300" alt="Michael Angelo." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>We have spoken of Leonardo da Vinci. Michael Angelo, the other great
+luminary of art, was twenty-two years younger, but the more severe and
+reflective cast of his mind rendered their difference of age far less in
+effect than in reality. It is usual to compare Michael Angelo with
+Raphael, but he is more aptly compared with Leonardo da Vinci. All the
+great artists of that time, even Raphael himself, were influenced more
+or less by these two extraordinary men, but they exercised no influence
+on each other. They started from opposite points; they pursued
+throughout their whole existence, and in all they planned and achieved,
+a course as different as their respective characters.</p>
+
+<p>Michael Angelo Buonarroti was born at Setignano, near Florence, in the
+year 1474. He was descended from a family once noble&mdash;even among the
+noblest of the feudal lords of Northern Italy&mdash;the Counts of Canossa;
+but that branch of it represented by his father, Luigi Leonardo
+Buonarroti Simoni, had for some generations become poorer and poorer,
+until the last descendant was thankful to accept an office in the law,
+and had been nominated magistrate or mayor (<i>Podesta</i>) of Chiusi. In
+this situation he had limited his ambition to the prospect of seeing
+his eldest son a notary or advocate <span class="pagenum"><a id="page215" name="page215"></a>(p. 215)</span> in his native city. The
+young Michael Angelo showed the utmost distaste for the studies allotted
+to him, and was continually escaping from his home and from his desk to
+haunt the ateliers of the painters, particularly that of Ghirlandajo who
+was then at the height of his reputation.</p>
+
+<p>The father of Michael Angelo, who found his family increase too rapidly
+for his means, had destined some of his sons for commerce (it will be
+recollected that in Genoa and Florence the most powerful nobles were
+merchants or manufacturers), and others for civil or diplomatic
+employments; but the fine arts, as being at that time productive of
+little honor or emolument, he held in no esteem, and treated these
+tastes of his eldest son sometimes with contempt and sometimes even with
+harshness. Michael Angelo, however, had formed some friendships among
+the young painters, and particularly with Francesco Granacci, one of the
+best pupils of Ghirlandajo; he contrived to borrow models and drawings,
+and studied them in secret with such persevering assiduity and
+consequent improvement, that Ghirlandajo, captivated by his genius,
+undertook to plead his cause to his father, and at length prevailed over
+the old man's family pride and prejudices. At the age of fourteen
+Michael Angelo was received into the studio of Ghirlandajo as a regular
+pupil, and bound to him for three years; and such was the precocious
+talent of the boy, that, instead of being paid for his instruction,
+Ghirlandajo undertook to pay the father, Leonardo Buonarroti, for the
+first, second, and third years, six, eight, and twelve golden florins,
+as payment for the advantage he expected to derive from the labor of the
+son. Thus was the vocation of the young artist decided for life.</p>
+
+<p>At that time Lorenzo the Magnificent reigned over Florence. He had
+formed in his palace and gardens a collection of antique marbles, busts,
+statues, fragments, which he had converted into an academy for the use
+of young artists, placing at the head of it as director a sculptor of
+some eminence, named Bertoldo. Michael Angelo was one of the first who,
+through the recommendation of Ghirlandajo, was received into this new
+academy, afterward so famous and so memorable in the history of art. The
+young man, then not quite sixteen, had hitherto occupied himself chiefly
+in drawing; but now, fired by the beauties he beheld around him, and by
+the example and success of a fellow-pupil, Torregiano, he set himself to
+model in clay, and at length to copy in marble what was before him; but,
+as was natural in a character and genius so steeped in individuality,
+his copies became not so much imitations of form as original embodyings
+of the leading idea. For example: his first attempt in marble, when he
+was about fifteen, was a copy of an antique mask of an old laughing
+Faun; he treated this in a manner so different from the original, and so
+spirited as to excite the astonishment of Lorenzo de Medici, who
+criticised it, however, saying, "Thou shouldst have remembered that old
+folks do not retain all their teeth; some of them are always wanting."
+The boy struck the teeth out, giving it at once the most grotesque
+expression; and Lorenzo, infinitely amused, sent for his father and
+offered to attach his son to his own particular service, and to
+undertake the entire care of his education. The father consented, on
+condition of receiving for himself an office <span class="pagenum"><a id="page216" name="page216"></a>(p. 216)</span> under the
+government, and thenceforth Michael Angelo was lodged in the palace of
+the Medici and treated by Lorenzo as his son.</p>
+
+<p>Michael Angelo continued his studies under the auspices of Lorenzo; but
+just as he had reached his eighteenth year he lost his generous patron,
+his second father, and was thenceforth thrown on his own resources. It
+is true that the son of Lorenzo, Piero de Medici, continued to extend
+his favor to the young artist, but with so little comprehension of his
+genius and character, that on one occasion, during the severe winter of
+1494, he set him to form a statue of snow for the amusement of his
+guests.</p>
+
+<p>Michael Angelo, while he yielded, perforce, to the caprices of his
+protector, turned the energies of his mind to a new study&mdash;that of
+anatomy&mdash;and pursued it with all that fervor which belonged to his
+character. His attention was at the same time directed to literature, by
+the counsels and conversations of a very celebrated scholar and poet
+then residing in the court of Piero&mdash;Angelo Poliziano; and he pursued at
+the same time the cultivation of his mind and the practice of his art.
+Engrossed by his own studies, he was scarcely aware of what was passing
+around him, nor of the popular intrigues which were preparing the ruin
+of the Medici; suddenly this powerful family were flung from sovereignty
+to temporary disgrace and exile; and Michael Angelo, as one of their
+retainers, was obliged to fly from Florence, and took refuge in the city
+of Bologna. During the year he spent there he found a friend, who
+employed him on some works of sculpture; and on his return to Florence
+he executed a Cupid in marble, of such beauty that it found its way into
+the cabinet of the Duchess of Mantua as a real antique. On the discovery
+that the author of this beautiful statue was a young man of
+two-and-twenty, the Cardinal San Giorgio invited him to Rome, and for
+some time lodged him in his palace. Here Michael Angelo, surrounded and
+inspired by the grand remains of antiquity, pursued his studies with
+unceasing energy; he produced a statue of Bacchus, which added to his
+reputation; and in 1500, at the age of five-and-twenty, he produced the
+famous group of the dead Christ on the knees of his Virgin Mother
+(called the "Pietà"), which is now in the church of St. Peter's, at
+Rome; this last being frequently copied and imitated, obtained him so
+much applause and reputation, that he was recalled to Florence, to
+undertake several public works, and we find him once more established in
+his native city in the year 1502.</p>
+
+<p>In 1506 Michael Angelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II., who,
+while living, had conceived the idea of erecting a most splendid
+monument to perpetuate his memory. For this work, which was never
+completed, Michael Angelo executed the famous statue of Moses, seated,
+grasping his flowing beard with one hand, and with the other sustaining
+the tables of the Law. While employed on this tomb, the pope commanded
+him to undertake also the decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine
+Chapel. Pope Sixtus IV. had, in the year 1473, erected this famous
+chapel, and summoned the best painters of that time, Signorelli, Cosimo
+Roselli, Perugino, and Ghirlandajo, to decorate the interior; but down
+to the year 1508 the ceiling remained without any ornament; and Michael
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page217" name="page217"></a>(p. 217)</span> Angelo was called upon to cover this enormous vault, a space of
+one hundred and fifty feet in length by fifty in breadth, with a series
+of subjects representing the most important events connected, either
+literally or typically, with the fall and redemption of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>No part of Michael Angelo's long life is so interesting, so full of
+characteristic incident, as the history of his intercourse with Pope
+Julius II., which began in 1505, and ended only with the death of the
+pope in 1513.</p>
+
+<p>Michael Angelo had at all times a lofty idea of his own dignity as an
+artist, and never would stoop either to flatter a patron or to
+conciliate a rival. Julius II., though now seventy-four, was as
+impatient of contradiction as fiery in temper, as full of magnificent
+and ambitious projects as if he had been in the prime of life; in his
+service was the famous architect, Bramante, who beheld with jealousy and
+alarm the increasing fame of Michael Angelo, and his influence with the
+pontiff, and set himself by indirect means to lessen both. He insinuated
+to Julius that it was ominous to erect his own mausoleum during his
+lifetime, and the pope gradually fell off in his attentions to Michael
+Angelo, and neglected to supply him with the necessary funds for
+carrying on the work. On one occasion, Michael Angelo, finding it
+difficult to obtain access to the pope, sent a message to him to this
+effect, "that henceforth, if his Holiness desired to see him, he should
+send to seek him elsewhere;" and the same night, leaving orders with his
+servants to dispose of his property, he departed for Florence. The pope
+despatched five couriers after him with threats, persuasions,
+promises&mdash;but in vain. He wrote to the Gonfaloniere Soderini, then at
+the head of the government of Florence, commanding him, on pain of his
+extreme displeasure, to send Michael Angelo back to him; but the
+inflexible artist absolutely refused; three months were spent in vain
+negotiations. Soderini, at length, fearing the pope's anger, prevailed
+on Michael Angelo to return, and sent with him his relation, Cardinal
+Soderini, to make up the quarrel between the high contending powers.</p>
+
+<p>On his return to Rome, Michael Angelo wished to have resumed his work on
+the mausoleum; but the pope had resolved on the completion of the
+Sistine Chapel; he commanded Michael Angelo to undertake the decoration
+of the vaulted ceiling; and the artist was obliged, though reluctantly,
+to obey. At this time the frescos which Raphael and his pupils were
+painting in the chambers of the Vatican had excited the admiration of
+all Rome. Michael Angelo, who had never exercised himself in the
+mechanical part of the art of fresco, invited from Florence several
+painters of eminence, to execute his designs under his own
+superintendence; but they could not reach the grandeur of his
+conceptions, which became enfeebled under their hands, and one morning,
+in a mood of impatience, he destroyed all that they had done, closed the
+doors of the chapel against them, and would not thenceforth admit them
+to his presence. He then shut himself up, and proceeded with incredible
+perseverance and energy to accomplish his task alone; he even prepared
+his colors with his own hands. He began with the end toward the door,
+and in the two compartments first painted (though not first in the
+series), the "Deluge," and the "Vineyard of Noah;" he <span class="pagenum"><a id="page218" name="page218"></a>(p. 218)</span> made the
+figures too numerous and too small to produce their full effect from
+below, a fault which he corrected in those executed subsequently. When
+almost half the work was completed, the pope insisted on viewing what
+was done, and the astonishment and admiration it excited rendered him
+more and more eager to have the whole completed at once. The progress,
+however, was not rapid enough to suit the impatient temper of the
+pontiff. On one occasion he demanded of the artist <i>when</i> he meant to
+finish it; to which Michael Angelo replied calmly, "When I can." "When
+thou canst!" exclaimed the fiery old pope, "thou hast a mind that I
+should have thee thrown from the scaffold!" At length, on the day of All
+Saints, 1512, the ceiling was uncovered to public view. Michael Angelo
+had employed on the painting only, without reckoning the time spent in
+preparing the cartoons, twenty-two months, and he received in payment
+three thousand crowns.</p>
+
+<p>The collection of engravings after Michael Angelo in the British Museum
+is very imperfect, but it contains some fine old prints from the
+Prophets which should be studied by those who wish to understand the
+true merit of this great master, of whom Sir Joshua Reynolds said that,
+"to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his
+perfections, would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious
+man!"</p>
+
+<p>When the Sistine Chapel was completed Michael Angelo was in his
+thirty-ninth year; fifty years of a glorious though troubled career were
+still before him.</p>
+
+<p>Pope Julius II. died in 1513, and was succeeded by Leo X., the son of
+Lorenzo the Magnificent. As a Florentine and his father's son, we might
+naturally have expected that he would have gloried in patronizing and
+employing Michael Angelo; but such was not the case. There was something
+in the stern, unbending character, and retired and abstemious habits of
+Michael Angelo, repulsive to the temper of Leo, who preferred the
+graceful and amiable Raphael, then in the prime of his life and genius;
+hence arose the memorable rivalry between Michael Angelo and Raphael,
+which on the part of the latter was merely generous emulation, while it
+must be confessed that something like scorn mingled with the feelings of
+Michael Angelo. The pontificate of Leo X., an interval of ten years, was
+the least productive period of his life. In the year 1519, when the
+Signoria of Florence was negotiating with Ravenna for the restoration of
+the remains of Dante, he petitioned the pope that he might be allowed to
+execute, at his own labor and expense, a monument to the "Divine Poet."
+He was sent to Florence to superintend the building of the church of San
+Lorenzo and the completion of Santa Croce; but he differed with the pope
+on the choice of the marble, quarrelled with the officials, and scarcely
+anything was accomplished. Clement VII., another Medici, was elected
+pope in 1523. He had conceived the idea of consecrating a chapel in the
+church of San Lorenzo, to receive the tombs of his ancestors and
+relations, and which should be adorned with all the splendor of art.
+Michael Angelo planned and built the chapel, and for its interior
+decoration designed and executed six of his greatest works in sculpture.</p>
+
+<p>While Michael Angelo was engaged in these works his progress was
+interrupted <span class="pagenum"><a id="page219" name="page219"></a>(p. 219)</span> by events which threw all Italy into commotion.
+Rome was taken and sacked by the Constable de Bourbon in 1527. The
+Medici were once more expelled from Florence; and Michael Angelo, in the
+midst of these strange vicissitudes, was employed by the republic to
+fortify his native city against his former patrons. Great as an
+engineer, as in every other department of art and science, he defended
+Florence for nine months. At length the city was given up by treachery,
+and, fearing the vengeance of the conquerors, Michael Angelo fled and
+concealed himself; but Clement VII. was too sensible of his merit to
+allow him to remain long in disgrace and exile. He was pardoned, and
+continued ever afterward in high favor with the pope, who employed him
+on the sculptures in the chapel of San Lorenzo during the remainder of
+his pontificate.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1531 he had completed the statues of "Night and Morning,"
+and Clement, who heard of his incessant labors, sent him a brief
+commanding him, <i>on pain of excommunication</i>, to take care of his
+health, and not to accept of any other work but that which his Holiness
+had assigned him.</p>
+
+<p>Clement VII. was succeeded by Pope Paul III., of the Farnese family, in
+1534. This pope, though nearly seventy when he was elected, was as
+anxious to immortalize his name by great undertakings as any of his
+predecessors had been. His first wish was to complete the decoration of
+the interior of the Sistine Chapel, left unfinished by Julius II. and
+Leo X. He summoned Michael Angelo, who endeavored to excuse himself,
+pleading other engagements; but the pope would listen to no excuses
+which interfered with his sovereign power to dissolve all other
+obligations; and thus the artist found himself, after an interval of
+twenty years, most reluctantly forced to abandon sculpture for painting;
+and, as Vasari expresses it, he consented to serve Pope Paul only
+because he <i>could</i> not do otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>The same Pope Paul III. had in the meantime constructed a beautiful
+chapel, which was called after his name the chapel <i>Paolina</i>, and
+dedicated to St. Peter and St Paul. Michael Angelo was called upon to
+design the decorations. He painted on one side the "Conversion of St.
+Paul," and on the other the "Crucifixion of St. Peter," which were
+completed in 1549. But these fine paintings&mdash;of which existing old
+engravings give a better idea than the blackened and faded remains of
+the original frescos&mdash;were from the first ill-disposed as to the
+locality, and badly lighted, and at present they excite little interest
+compared with the more famous works in the Sistine.</p>
+
+<p>With the frescos in the Pauline Chapel ends Michael Angelo's career as a
+painter. He had been appointed chief architect of St. Peter's, in 1547,
+by Paul III. He was then in his seventy-second year, and during the
+remainder of his life, a period of sixteen years, we find him wholly
+devoted to architecture. His vast and daring genius finding ample scope
+in the completion of St. Peter's, he has left behind him in his capacity
+of architect yet greater marvels than he has achieved as painter and
+sculptor. Who that has seen the cupola of St. Peter's soaring into the
+skies, but will think almost with awe of the universal and majestic
+intellect of the man who reared it?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page220" name="page220"></a>(p. 220)</span> It appears, from the evidence of contemporary writers, that in
+the last years of his life the acknowledged worth and genius of Michael
+Angelo, his widespread fame, and his unblemished integrity, combined
+with his venerable age and the haughtiness and reserve of his deportment
+to invest him with a sort of princely dignity. It is recorded that, when
+he waited on Pope Julius III., to receive his commands, the pontiff rose
+on his approach, seated him, in spite of his excuses, on his right hand,
+and while a crowd of cardinals, prelates, and ambassadors, were standing
+round at humble distance, carried on the conference as equal with equal.
+When the Grand Duke Cosmo was in Rome, in 1560, he visited Michael
+Angelo, uncovered in his presence, and stood with his hat in his hand
+while speaking to him; but from the time when he made himself the tyrant
+of Florence he never could persuade Michael Angelo to visit, even for a
+day, his native city.</p>
+
+<p>The arrogance imputed to Michael Angelo seems rather to have arisen from
+a contempt for others than from any overweening opinion of himself. He
+was too proud to be vain. He had placed his standard of perfection so
+high, that to the latest hour of his life he considered himself as
+striving after that ideal excellence which had been revealed to him, but
+to which he conceived that others were blind or indifferent. In allusion
+to his own imperfections, he made a drawing, since become famous, which
+represents an aged man in a go-cart, and underneath the words "<i>Ancora
+impara</i>" (still learning).</p>
+
+<p>He continued to labor unremittingly, and with the same resolute energy
+of mind and purpose, till the gradual decay of his strength warned him
+of his approaching end. He did not suffer from any particular malady,
+and his mind was strong and clear to the last. He died at Rome, on
+February 18, 1564, in the ninetieth year of his age. A few days before
+his death he dictated his will in these few simple words: "I bequeath my
+soul to God, my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest
+relations." His nephew, Leonardo Buonarroti, who was his principal heir,
+by the orders of the Grand Duke Cosmo had his remains secretly conveyed
+out of Rome and brought to Florence; they were with due honors deposited
+in the church of Santa Croce, under a costly monument, on which we may
+see his noble bust surrounded by three very commonplace and ill-executed
+statues, representing the arts in which he excelled&mdash;Painting,
+Sculpture, and Architecture. They might have added <i>Poetry</i>, for Michael
+Angelo was so fine a poet that his productions would have given him
+fame, though he had never peopled the Sistine with his giant creations,
+nor "suspended the Pantheon in the air." The object to whom his poems
+are chiefly addressed, Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, was the
+widow of the celebrated commander who overcame Francis I. at the battle
+of Pavia; herself a poetess, and one of the most celebrated women of her
+time for beauty, talents, virtue, and piety. She died in 1547.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<a id="img005" name="img005"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img005.jpg" width="400" height="583" alt="" title="">
+<p>Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page221" name="page221"></a>(p. 221)</span> RAPHAEL<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Mrs. Lee</span><br>
+
+(1483-1520)</h3>
+
+
+<a id="img006" name="img006"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img006.jpg" width="200" height="272" alt="Raphael." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>The solemn and silent season of Lent had passed away; and, on the second
+evening of the joyful Easter, a house was seen brightly illuminated in
+one of the streets of Urbino. It was evident that a festival was held
+there on some happy occasion. The sound of music was heard, and guest
+after guest entered the mansion. No one, however, was more cordially
+welcomed than Pietro Perugino, the fellow-student of Leonardo da Vinci,
+at the school of the good old Andrea Verocchio.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment, general gayety was suspended in honor of the guest. He was
+considered at that time one of the greatest painters of the age; and the
+host, Giovanni di Sanzio, though himself only ranking in the second or
+third order of limners, knew well how to prize the rare talents of his
+visitor.</p>
+
+<p>The wife of Giovanni came forward, leading her son Raphael. Perugino had
+the eye of an artist: he gazed upon the mother and son with enthusiastic
+feeling; the striking resemblance they bore to each other, so
+exquisitely modulated by years and sex, was indeed a study for this
+minute copyist of nature.</p>
+
+<p>"Benvenuto, Messer Perugino," said the hostess, with her soft musical
+voice and graceful Italian accent, and she placed the hand of her boy in
+that of the artist. Gently he laid the other on the head of the youthful
+Raphael, and in a solemn and tender manner pronounced a benediction.</p>
+
+<p>"Your blessing is well timed, my honored friend," said Giovanni, "our
+festival is given to celebrate the birthday of our son."</p>
+
+<p>"Is this his birthday?" inquired Perugino.</p>
+
+<p>"Not so," replied the father, "he was born on April 7th, the evening of
+<i>Good Friday</i>, and it well befits us to be gay on the joyful Easter that
+succeeds it."</p>
+
+<p>"My friend," said Perugino, "if thou wilt entrust thy boy to my care, I
+will take him as my pupil."</p>
+
+<p>The father acceded with delight to this proposal. When the mother became
+acquainted with the arrangement, and found that her son was to quit his
+paternal dwelling at the early age of twelve, and reside wholly with
+Perugino, she could not restrain her tears. With hers the young
+Raphael's mingled, though ever and anon a bright smile darted like a
+sunbeam across his face.</p>
+
+<p>He remained with Perugino several years. Raphael was made for affection,
+and fondly did his heart cling to his instructor. For a time he was
+content to <span class="pagenum"><a id="page222" name="page222"></a>(p. 222)</span> follow his manner; but at length he began to dwell
+upon his own beau ideal; he grew impatient of imitation, and felt that
+his style was deficient in freshness and originality. He longed to pass
+the narrow bounds to which his invention had been confined.</p>
+
+<p>With the approbation of Perugino and the consent of his parents, he
+repaired to Siena; here he was solicited to adorn the public library
+with fresco, and painted there with great success. But while he was
+busily engaged, his friend, Pinturrichio, one day entered. After looking
+at his friend's work very attentively, "Bravo!" he exclaimed, "thou hast
+done well, my Raphael&mdash;but I have just returned from Florence&mdash;oh, would
+that thou couldst behold the works of Leonardo da Vinci! Such horses!
+they paw the ground and shake the foam from their manes. Oh, my poor
+Raphael! thou hast never seen nature; thou art wasting time on these
+cartoons. Perugino is a good man and a good painter, I will not deny
+that&mdash;but Leonardo's horses!"</p>
+
+<p>Raphael threw aside his pencil and hastily rose.</p>
+
+<p>"Where now?" asked his friend; "whither art thou going so hastily?"</p>
+
+<p>"To Florence," exclaimed Raphael.</p>
+
+<p>"And what carries you so suddenly?"</p>
+
+<p>"The horses of Leonardo," replied the young artist, sportively;
+"seriously, however, the desire of excellence implanted in my soul."</p>
+
+<p>When he arrived at Florence he was charmed with the appearance of the
+city; but his whole mind was absorbed in the works of Leonardo da Vinci
+and of Michael Angelo, the rival artists of the age. As his stay was to
+be short, he did not enter upon laborious occupation. His mornings were
+passed in the reveries of his art; his evenings in the gay and
+fascinating society of Florence, where the fame of Perugino's beloved
+pupil had already reached. The frescos at Siena were spoken of; and the
+beautiful countenance and graceful deportment of Raphael won him the
+friendship of distinguished men. Taddeo Taddei, the learned friend of
+Cardinal Bembo, solicited him to reside in his house; he consented, and
+in return for the courtesy painted for him two pictures, in what is
+called his first style, that of Perugino.</p>
+
+<p>One evening he retired to his couch at a late hour. He had been the hero
+of a <i>fête</i>, and love and beauty had heedlessly scattered their flowers
+in the path of the living Adonis. In vain he sought a few hours of
+slumber. He had quaffed the juice of the grape, emptying goblet after
+goblet, till his beating pulse and throbbing temples refused to be
+quieted. He started from his couch and approached the lattice; the
+heavens had changed their aspect, the still serenity of the evening had
+passed away, and the clouds were hurrying over the pale and watery moon.
+Nothing was heard but the low sighing of the wind, and now and then a
+sudden gust swept through the lattice, and threatened to extinguish the
+taper which was burning dimly on the table. A slight noise made him turn
+his eyes, and he perceived a note that the wind had displaced. He
+hastily took it up. It was Perugino's handwriting. He cut the silken
+cord that fastened it, and read:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page223" name="page223"></a>(p. 223)</span> "On me, my beloved Raffaello, devolves the task of informing
+you of the events which have taken place at Urbino. May this letter find
+you prepared for all the changes of life; a wise man will never suffer
+himself to be taken by surprise; this is true philosophy, and the <i>only
+philosophy</i> that can serve us! An epidemic has prevailed at Urbino, and
+has entered your paternal dwelling. Need I say more? Come to me, my son,
+at Perugia, for I am the only parent that remains to you. Pietro
+Perugino."</p>
+
+<p>As he hastily arose, a crucifix which his mother had suspended to his
+neck at parting, fell from his bosom. Even the symbols of religion are
+sacred where the living principle has been early implanted in the heart.
+He pressed it to his lips: "Ah!" thought he, "what is the <i>philosophy</i>
+of Perugino, compared to the <i>faith</i> of which this is the emblem?" His
+thoughts went back to infancy and childhood, and his grief and remorse
+grew less intense. He dwelt on the deep and enduring love of his parents
+till he felt assured death could not extinguish it, and that he should
+see them again in a brighter sphere.</p>
+
+<p>When morning came it found Raphael calm and composed; the lines of grief
+and thought were deeply marked on his youthful face; but the whirlwind
+and the storm had passed. He took leave of his friends, and hastened to
+Perugino, who received him with the fondness of a parent.</p>
+
+<p>Here he remained some time, and at length collected sufficient
+resolution to return to Urbino, and once more enter the mansion of his
+desolated home.</p>
+
+<p>It was necessary for him to reside at his native place for a number of
+months. During that time he painted several fine pictures. His heart,
+however, yearned for Florence, and he returned to it once more with the
+determination of making it his home. With far different sensations did
+he a second time enter the city of beauty. The freshness of his gayety
+was blighted; lessons of earthly disappointment were ever present to his
+mind, and he returned to it with the resolute purpose of devoting
+himself to serious occupation.</p>
+
+<p>How well he fulfilled this resolution all Italy can bear witness. From
+this time he adopted what has been called his <i>second manner</i>. He
+painted for the Duke of Urbino the beautiful picture of the Saviour at
+sunrise, with the morning light cast over a face resplendent with
+divinity; the flowers glittering with dew, the two disciples beyond,
+still buried in slumber, at the time when the Saviour turns his eyes
+upon them with that tender and sorrowful exclamation, "Could ye not
+watch one hour?"</p>
+
+<p>Raphael enriched the city of Florence with his works. When asked what
+had suggested some of the beautiful combinations of his paintings, he
+said, "They came to me in my sleep." At other times he called them
+"visions;" and then again said they were the result of "una certa idea
+che mi viene alla mente." It was this power of drawing from the deep
+wells of his own mind that gave such character, originality, and
+freshness to his works. He found that power <i>within</i> which so many seek,
+and seek in vain, <i>without</i>.</p>
+
+<p>At the age of twenty-five Raphael was summoned by the pope to paint the
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page224" name="page224"></a>(p. 224)</span> chambers of the Vatican. The famous frescos of the Vatican need
+neither enumeration nor description; the world is their judge and their
+eulogist.</p>
+
+<p>No artist ever consecrated his works more by his affections than
+Raphael. The same hallowed influence of the heart gave inexpressible
+charm to Correggio's, afterward. One of Raphael's friends said to him,
+in looking upon particular figures in his groups, "You have transmitted
+to posterity your own likeness."</p>
+
+<p>"See you nothing beyond that?" replied the artist.</p>
+
+<p>"I see," said the critic, "the deep-blue eye, and the long, fair hair
+parted on the forehead."</p>
+
+<p>"Observe," said Raphael, "the feminine softness of expression, the
+beautiful harmony of thought and feeling. When I take my pencil for high
+and noble purposes, the spirit of my mother hovers over me. It is her
+countenance, not my own, of which you trace the resemblance."</p>
+
+<p>This expression is always observable in his Madonnas. His portraits of
+the <i>Fornarina</i> are widely different. Raphael, in his last and most
+excellent style, united what was graceful and exquisite in Leonardo with
+the sublime and noble manner of Michael Angelo. It is the privilege and
+glory of genius to appropriate to itself whatever is noble and true. The
+region of thought is thus made a common ground for all, and one master
+mind becomes a reservoir for the present and future times.</p>
+
+<p>When Raphael was invited to Rome by Pope Julius II., Michael Angelo was
+at the height of his glory; his character tended to inspire awe rather
+than affection; he delighted in the majestic and the terrible. In
+boldness of conception and grandeur of design, he surpassed Leonardo,
+but never could reach the sweetness and gentleness of his figures. Even
+his children lose something of their infantine beauty, and look mature;
+his women are commanding and lofty; his men of gigantic proportions. His
+painting, like his sculpture, is remarkable for anatomical exactness,
+and perfect expression of the muscles. For this union of magnificence
+and sublimity, it was necessary to prepare the mind; the first view was
+almost harsh, and it was by degrees that his mighty works produced their
+designed effect. Raphael, while he felt all the greatness of the
+Florentine, conceived that there might be something more like
+nature&mdash;something that should be harmonious, sweet, and flowing&mdash;that
+should convey the idea of intellectual rather than of external majesty.
+Without yielding any of the correctness of science, he avoided
+harshness, and imitated antiquity in uniting grace and elegance with a
+strict observation of science and of the rules of art.</p>
+
+<p>It was with surprise that Michael Angelo beheld in the youthful Raphael
+a rival artist; nor did he receive this truth meekly; he treated him
+with coldness and distance. In the meantime Raphael went on with his
+works; he completed the frescos of the Vatican, and designed the
+cartoons. He also produced those exquisite paintings in oil which seem
+the perfection of human art.</p>
+
+<a id="img007" name="img007"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img007.jpg" width="600" height="387" alt="" title="">
+<p>Leo X. at Raphael's Bier.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Human affection is necessary to awaken the sympathy of human beings; and
+Raphael, in learning how to portray it, had found the way to the heart.
+In mere grandeur of invention he was surpassed by Michael Angelo.
+Titian excelled him <span class="pagenum"><a id="page225" name="page225"></a>(p. 225)</span> in coloring, and Correggio in the
+beautiful gradation of tone; but Raphael knew how to paint the soul; in
+this he stood alone. This was the great secret of a power which seemed
+to operate like magic. In his paintings there is something which makes
+music on the chords of every heart; for they are the expression of a
+mind attuned to nature, and find answering sympathies in the universal
+soul.</p>
+
+<p>While Michael Angelo was exalted with the Epic grandeur of his own
+Dante, Raphael presented the most finished scenes of dramatic life, and
+might be compared to the immortal Shakespeare&mdash;scenes of spiritual
+beauty, of devotion, and of pastoral simplicity, yet uniting a classic
+elegance which the poet does not possess. Buonarroti was the wonder of
+Italy, and Raphael became its idol.</p>
+
+<p>Julius was so much enchanted with his paintings in the halls of the
+Vatican, that he ordered the frescos of former artists to be destroyed.
+Among them were some of Perugino's, but Raphael would not suffer these
+to be removed for his own; he viewed them as the relics of a beloved and
+honored friend, and they were consecrated by tender and grateful
+feelings.</p>
+
+<p>Raphael collected from every part of the world medallions of intaglios
+and antiques to assist him in his designs. He loved splendor and
+conviviality, and gave offence thereby to the rigid and austere. It was
+said that he had a prospect of changing the graceful beretta for a
+cardinal's hat; but this idea might have arisen from the delay which
+existed in his marriage with Cardinal Bibiano's niece, whose hand her
+uncle had offered to him. Peremptorily to reject this proposal of the
+cardinal without giving offence would have been impossible, and Raphael
+was too gentle in his own feelings voluntarily to injure another's; but
+he was not one to sacrifice his affections to ambition.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever were the struggles of his heart, they were early terminated.
+Amid the caresses of the great, the fond and devoted friendship of his
+equals, the enthusiastic love of his pupils, the adulation of his
+inferiors, while crowned with wealth, fame, and honor, and regarded as
+the equal of the hitherto greatest artist in the world, he was suddenly
+called away. He died on Good Friday, the day of his birth, at the age of
+thirty-seven, 1520.</p>
+
+<p>We are sometimes impressed with veneration when those who have even
+drunk the cup of life almost to its dregs resign it with resignation and
+Christian faith. But Raphael calmly and firmly resigned it when it was
+full to the brim.</p>
+
+<p>Leo X. and Cardinal Bibiano were by his bedside. The sublime picture of
+the "Transfiguration," the last and greatest which he painted, was
+placed opposite to him, by his own desire. How impressive must have been
+the scene! His dying eye turned from the crucifix he held in his hand to
+the glory of the beatified Saviour.</p>
+
+<p>His contemporaries speak of him as affectionate, disinterested, modest,
+and sincere; encouraging humble merit, and freely giving his advice and
+assistance where it was needed and deserved.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page226" name="page226"></a>(p. 226)</span> TITIAN<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Giorgio Vasari</span><a id="footnotetag2" name="footnotetag2"></a><a href="#footnote2" title="Go to footnote 2"><span class="smaller">[2]</span></a><br>
+
+1477-1576</h3>
+
+
+<a id="img008" name="img008"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img008.jpg" width="250" height="330" alt="Titian." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Titian was born in the year 1480, at Cadore, a small place distant about
+five miles from the foot of the Alps; he belonged to the family of the
+Vecelli, which is among the most noble of those parts. Giving early
+proof of much intelligence, he was sent at the age of ten to an uncle in
+Venice, an honorable citizen, who, seeing the boy to be much inclined to
+painting, placed him with the excellent painter, Gian Bellino, then very
+famous. Under his care, the youth soon proved himself to be endowed by
+nature with all the gifts of judgment and genius required for the art of
+painting. Now, Gian Bellino and the other masters of that country, not
+having the habit of studying the antique, were accustomed to copy only
+what they saw before them, and that in a dry, hard, labored manner,
+which Titian also acquired; but about the year 1507, Giorgione da Castel
+Franco, not being satisfied with that mode of proceeding, began to give
+to his works an unwonted softness and relief, painting them in a very
+beautiful manner; yet he by no means neglected to draw from the life, or
+to copy nature with his colors as closely as he could; and in doing the
+latter he shaded with colder or warmer tints as the living object might
+demand, but without first making a drawing; since he held that, to paint
+with the colors only, without any drawing on paper, was the best mode of
+proceeding, and most perfectly in accord with the true principles of
+design.</p>
+
+<p>Having seen the manner of Giorgione, Titian early resolved to abandon
+that of Gian Bellino, although well grounded therein. He now, therefore,
+devoted himself to this purpose, and in a short time so closely imitated
+Giorgione that his pictures were sometimes taken for those of that
+master, as will be related below. Increasing in age, judgment, and
+facility of hand, our young artist executed numerous works in fresco
+which cannot here be named individually, having been dispersed in
+various places; let it suffice to say, that they were such as to cause
+experienced <span class="pagenum"><a id="page227" name="page227"></a>(p. 227)</span> men to anticipate the excellence to which he
+afterward attained. At the time when Titian began to adopt the manner of
+Giorgione, being then not more than eighteen, he took the portrait of a
+gentleman of the Barberigo family, who was his friend, and this was
+considered very beautiful, the coloring being true and natural, and the
+hair so distinctly painted that each one could be counted as might also
+the stitches in a satin doublet, painted in the same work; it was so
+well and carefully done, that it would have been taken for a picture by
+Giorgione, if Titian had not written his name on the dark ground.</p>
+
+<p>Giorgione meanwhile had executed the façade of the German Exchange,
+when, by the intervention of Barberigo, Titian was appointed to paint
+certain stories in the same building and over the Merceria. After which
+he executed a picture with figures the size of life, which is now in the
+Hall of Messer Andrea Loredano, who dwells near San Marcuola; this work
+represents "Our Lady" in her flight into Egypt. She is in the midst of a
+great wood, and the landscape of this picture is well done; Titian
+having practised that branch of art, and keeping certain Germans, who
+were excellent masters therein, for several months together in his own
+house. Within the wood he depicted various animals, all painted from the
+life, and so natural as to seem almost alive. In the house of Messer
+Giovanni Danna, a Flemish gentleman and merchant, who was his gossip, he
+painted a portrait which appears to breathe, with an "Ecce Homo,"
+comprising numerous figures which, by Titian himself, as well as others,
+is considered to be a very good work. The same artist executed a picture
+of "Our Lady," with other figures the size of life, men and children
+being all taken from nature, and portraits of persons belonging to the
+Danna family.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1507, when the Emperor Maximilian was making war on the
+Venetians, Titian, as he relates himself, painted the "Angel Raphael,
+with Tobit and a Dog," in the Church of San Marziliano. There is a
+distant landscape in this picture, wherein San Giovanni Battista is seen
+at prayer in a wood; he is looking up to heaven, and his face is
+illumined by a light descending thence; some believe this picture to
+have been done before that on the "Exchange of the Germans," mentioned
+above, was commenced. Now, it chanced that certain gentlemen, not
+knowing that Giorgione no longer worked at this façade, and that Titian
+was doing it (nay, had already given that part over the Merceria to
+public view), met the former, and began as friends to rejoice with him,
+declaring that he was acquitting himself better on the side of the
+Merceria than he had done on that of the "Grand Canal;" which remark
+caused Giorgione so much vexation, that he would scarcely permit himself
+to be seen until the whole work was completed, and Titian had become
+generally known as the painter; nor did he thenceforward hold any
+intercourse with the latter and they were no longer friends.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1508, Titian published a wood-engraving of the "Triumph of
+Faith;" it comprised a vast number of figures: our first Parents, the
+Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Sybils, the Innocents, the Martyrs, the
+Apostles, and Our Saviour Christ borne in triumph by the four
+Evangelists, and the four Doctors, followed <span class="pagenum"><a id="page228" name="page228"></a>(p. 228)</span> by the holy
+Confessors; here Titian displayed much boldness, a fine manner, and
+improving facility. I remember that Fra Bastiano del Piombo, speaking on
+this subject, told me that if Titian had then gone to Rome, and seen the
+works of Michael Angelo, with those of Raphael and the ancients, he was
+convinced, the admirable facility of his coloring considered, that he
+would have produced works of the most astonishing perfection; seeing
+that, as he well deserved to be called the most perfect imitator of
+Nature of our times, as regards coloring, he might thus have rendered
+himself equal to the Urbinese or Buonarroto, as regarded the great
+foundation of all, design. At a later period Titian repaired to Vicenza,
+where he painted "The Judgment of Solomon," on the Loggetta wherein the
+courts of justice are held; a very beautiful work. Returning to Venice,
+he then depicted the façade of the Germain; at Padua he painted certain
+frescos in the Church of Sant' Antonio, the subjects taken from the life
+of that saint; and in the Church of Santo Spirito he executed a small
+picture of San Marco seated in the midst of other saints, whose faces
+are portraits painted in oil with the utmost care; this picture has been
+taken for a work of Giorgione.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the death of Giovan Bellino had caused a story in the hall of the
+Great Council to remain unfinished; it was that which represents
+Federigo Barbarossa kneeling before Pope Alessandro III., who plants his
+foot on the emperor's neck. This was now finished by Titian, who altered
+many parts of it, introducing portraits of his friends and others. For
+this he received from the senate an office in the Exchange of the
+Germans called the Senseria, which brought him in three hundred crowns
+yearly, and which those Signori usually give to the most eminent painter
+of their city, on condition that from time to time he shall take the
+portrait of their doge, or prince when such shall be created, at the
+price of eight crowns, which the doge himself pays, the portrait being
+then preserved in the Palace of San Marco, as a memorial of that doge.</p>
+
+<p>After the completion of these works, our artist painted, for the Church
+of San Rocco, a figure of Christ bearing his cross; the Saviour has a
+rope round his neck, and is dragged forward by a Jew; many have thought
+this a work of Giorgione. It has become an object of the utmost devotion
+in Venice, and has received more crowns as offerings than have been
+earned by Titian and Giorgione both, through the whole course of their
+lives. Now, Titian had taken the portrait of Bembo, then secretary to
+Pope Leo X., and was by him invited to Rome, that he might see the city,
+with Raffaello da Urbino and other distinguished persons; but the artist
+having delayed his journey until 1520, when the pope and Raffaello were
+both dead, put it off for that time altogether. For the Church of Santa
+Maria Maggiore he painted a picture of "St. John the Baptist in the
+wilderness;" there is an angel beside him that appears to be living; and
+a distant landscape, with trees on the bank of a river, which are very
+graceful. He took portraits of the Prince Grimani and Loredano, which
+were considered admirable; and not long afterward he painted the
+portrait of King Francis, who was then leaving Italy to return to
+France.</p>
+
+<a id="img009" name="img009"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img009.jpg" width="600" height="424" alt="" title="">
+<p>A Fête at the House of Titian.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In 1530, when the Emperor Charles V. was in Bologna, Titian, by the
+intervention <span class="pagenum"><a id="page229" name="page229"></a>(p. 229)</span> of Pietro Aretino, was invited to that city by
+the Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, and there he made a magnificent
+portrait of his majesty in full armor. This gave so much satisfaction
+that the artist received a present of a thousand crowns for the same.
+Out of these he had subsequently to give the half to Alfonso Lombardi,
+the sculptor, who had made a model of that monarch to be executed in
+marble.</p>
+
+<p>Having returned to Venice, Titian there found that many gentlemen had
+begun to favor Pordenone, commending exceedingly the works executed by
+that artist in the ceiling of the Hall of the Pregai, and elsewhere.
+They had also procured him the commission for a small picture in the
+Church of San Giovanni Elemosynario, which they intended him to paint in
+competition with one representing that saint in his episcopal habits,
+which had previously been executed there by Titian. But whatever care
+and pains Pordenone took, he could not equal nor even approach the work
+of the former. Titian was then appointed to paint a picture of the
+Annunciation for the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, at Murano; but
+those who gave the commission for the work, not wishing to pay so much
+as five hundred crowns, which Titian required as its price, he sent it,
+by the advice of Pietro Aretino, as a gift to Charles V., who being
+greatly delighted with the work, made him a present of two thousand
+crowns. The place which the picture was to have occupied at Murano was
+then filled by one from the hand of Pordenone.</p>
+
+<p>When the emperor, some time after this, returned with his army from
+Hungary, and was again at Bologna, holding a conference with Clement
+VII., he desired to have another portrait taken of him by Titian, who,
+before he departed from the city, also painted that of the Cardinal
+Ippolito de Medici in the Hungarian dress, with another of the same
+prelate fully armed, which is somewhat smaller than the first; these are
+both now in the Guardaroba of Duke Cosimo. He painted the portraits of
+Alfonso, Marquis of Davalos, and of Pietro Aretino, at the same period,
+and these things having made him known to Federigo Gonzaga, Duke of
+Mantua, he entered the service of the latter, and accompanied him to his
+states. At Mantua our artist made a portrait of the duke, which appears
+to breathe, and afterward executed that of his brother, the cardinal.
+These being finished, he painted twelve beautiful "Heads of the Twelve
+Cæsars," to decorate one of the rooms erected by Giulio Romano, and when
+they were done, Giulio painted a "Story from the Lives of the Emperors"
+beneath each head.</p>
+
+<p>The productions, but more especially the portraits, of Titian are so
+numerous that it would be almost impossible to make the record of them
+all. I will, therefore, speak of the principal only, and that without
+order of time, seeing that it does not much signify to tell which was
+painted earlier and which later. He took the portrait of Charles V.
+several times, as we have said, and was finally invited by that monarch
+to his court; there he painted him as he was in those last years; and so
+much was that most invincible emperor pleased with the manner of Titian,
+that once he had been portrayed by him, he would never permit himself
+to be taken by any other person. Each time that Titian painted the
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page230" name="page230"></a>(p. 230)</span> emperor he received a present of a thousand crowns of gold, and
+the artist was made a cavalier, or knight, by his majesty, with a
+revenue of two hundred crowns yearly, secured on the treasury of Naples,
+and attached to his title.</p>
+
+<p>When Titian painted Filippo, King of Spain, the son of Charles, he
+received another annuity of two hundred crowns; so that these four
+hundred, added to the three hundred from the German Exchange, make him a
+fixed income of seven hundred crowns, which he possesses without the
+necessity of exerting himself in any manner. Titian presented the
+portraits of Charles V. and his son Filippo to the Duke Cosimo, who has
+them now in his Guardaroba. He also took the portrait of Ferdinand, King
+of the Romans, who was afterward emperor, with those of his children,
+Maximilian, that is to say, now emperor, and his brother; he likewise
+painted the Queen Maria; and at the command of the Emperor Charles, he
+portrayed the Duke of Saxony, when the latter was in prison. But what a
+waste of time is this! when there has scarcely been a noble of high
+rank, scarcely a prince or lady of great name, whose portrait has not
+been taken by Titian, who in that branch of art is indeed an excellent
+painter.</p>
+
+<p>All these works, with many others which I omit to avoid prolixity, have
+been executed up to the present age of our artist, which is above
+seventy-six years. Titian has been always healthy and happy; he has been
+favored beyond the lot of most men, and has received from Heaven only
+favors and blessings. In his house he has entertained whatever princes,
+literati, or men of distinction have gone to or dwelt in Venice; for, to
+say nothing of his excellence in art, he has always distinguished
+himself by courtesy, hospitality, and rectitude.</p>
+
+<p>Titian has had some rivals in Venice, but not of any great ability,
+wherefore he has easily overcome them by the superiority of his art;
+while he has also rendered himself acceptable to the gentlemen of the
+city. He has gained a fair amount of wealth, his labors having always
+been well paid; and it would have been well if he had worked for his
+amusement alone during these latter years, that he might not have
+diminished the reputation gained in his best days by works of inferior
+merit, performed at a period of life when nature tends inevitably to
+decline, and consequent imperfection.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1566, when Vasari, the writer of the present history, was at
+Venice, he went to visit Titian, as one who was his friend, and found
+him, although then very old, still with the pencils in his hand and
+painting busily. Great pleasure had Vasari in beholding his works and in
+conversing with the master.</p>
+
+<p>It may be affirmed, then, that Titian, having adorned Venice, or rather
+all Italy, and other parts of the world, with excellent paintings, well
+merits to be loved and respected by artists, and in many things to be
+admired and imitated also, as one who has produced, and is producing,
+work of infinite merit; nay, such as must endure while the memory of
+illustrious men shall remain.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page231" name="page231"></a>(p. 231)</span> ALBERT DÜRER<a id="footnotetag3" name="footnotetag3"></a><a href="#footnote3" title="Go to footnote 3"><span class="smaller">[3]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">W. J. Holland, Chancellor of the Western University of Pennsylvania</span><br>
+
+(1471-1528)</h3>
+
+<a id="img010" name="img010"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img010.jpg" width="250" height="356" alt="Albert Dürer." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>It has been given to some men to be not only great in the domain of art
+by reason of that which they have themselves succeeded in producing, but
+by reason of that which they have inspired other men to produce. They
+have been not merely artists, but teachers, who by precept and example
+have moulded the whole current and drift of artistic thought in the ages
+and lands to which they have belonged. Among these lofty spirits, who
+live through the centuries not only in what their hands once fashioned,
+but still more in what they have inspired others to do, undoubtedly one
+of the greatest is Albert Dürer. Justly reckoned as the representative
+artist of Germany, he has the peculiar honor of having raised the craft
+of the engraver to its true position, as one of the fine arts. As a
+painter not unworthy to be classified with Titian and Raphael, his
+contemporaries upon Italian soil, he poured the wealth of his genius
+into woodcuts and copperplates, and taught men the practically
+measureless capacity of what before his day had been a rudimentary art.</p>
+
+<p>Dürer was born in Nuremberg on May 21, 1471. The family was of Hungarian
+origin, though the name is German, and is derived from Thürer, meaning a
+maker of doors. The ancestral calling of the family probably was that of
+the carpenter. Albert Dürer, the father of the great artist, was a
+goldsmith, and settled about 1460 in Nuremberg, where he served as an
+assistant to Hieronymus Holper, a master goldsmith, whose daughter,
+Barbara, he married in 1468. He was at the time forty years of age, and
+she fifteen. As the result of the union eighteen children were born into
+the world, of whom Albrecht was the second. The lad, as he grew up,
+became a great favorite with his father, who appeared to discern in him
+the promise of future ability. The feeling of attachment was
+reciprocated in the most filial manner, and there are extant two
+well-authenticated portraits of the father from the facile brush of the
+son, one in the Uffizi at Florence, the other in the possession of the
+Duke of Northumberland. It was the original intention of the father of
+the artist that he should follow the craft of the goldsmith, but after
+serving a period as an apprentice in his father's <span class="pagenum"><a id="page232" name="page232"></a>(p. 232)</span> shop, his
+strong predilection for the calling of the painter manifested itself to
+such a degree that the father reluctantly consented to allow the boy to
+follow his natural bent, and placed him under the tutelage of Michael
+Wohlgemuth, the principal painter of Nuremberg. Wohlgemuth was a
+representative artist of his time, who followed his calling after a
+mechanical fashion, having a large shop filled with apprentices who,
+under his direction and with his assistance, busied themselves in
+turning out for a small consideration altar-pieces and pictures of
+martyrdoms, which were in vogue as necessary parts of decoration in
+churches. Numerous examples of the work of Wohlgemuth and his
+contemporaries survive, attesting, by the wealth of crudities and
+unintended caricatures with which they abound, the comparatively low
+stage of development attained by the art of the painter in Germany at
+that day. According to Dürer, the period of his apprenticeship to
+Wohlgemuth was spent profitably, and resulted in large acquisitions of
+technical skill. The period of his preliminary training being ended, he
+set forth upon his "Wanderjahre," and travelled extensively. Just what
+points he visited cannot with certainty be determined. It is ascertained
+beyond doubt that he visited Colmar, where he was hospitably entertained
+by the family of Martin Schongauer, the greatest painter of his time on
+German soil, but who had died shortly before the visit of Dürer. He also
+visited Strasburg, and it is thought by many that he extended his
+journeyings as far as Venice. In 1494 he returned to Nuremberg, and in
+the month of July was married to Agnes Frey, the daughter of a
+prosperous merchant of the city. He was twenty-three years of age, and
+she somewhat younger. They lived together happily, though no children
+were born to them, and it has been proved that the reputation which has
+been given her, of being little better than a common scold, who
+imbittered his life by her termagancy, is the creation of the ill temper
+of one of the testy friends of Dürer, Willibald Pirkheimer, who, in the
+spirit of spitefulness, besmirched her character in a letter which
+unfortunately survives to this day, and in which he accuses her of
+having led her husband a mad and weary dance by her temper. The reason
+for this ebullition on the part of Pirkheimer appears to have been that,
+after Dürer's death, she refused to give him a pair of antlers which had
+belonged to her husband, and which Pirkheimer had set his heart upon
+having.</p>
+
+<a id="img011" name="img011"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img011.jpg" width="400" height="513" alt="" title="">
+<p>Albert Dürer's Wedding.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The first eleven years of the married life of Dürer were spent in
+Nuremberg, where he devoted himself with unremitting assiduity to the
+prosecution of his art. During these years his powers unfolded rapidly,
+and there are extant two notable pictures, which were undoubtedly
+produced at this time, the triptych in the Dresden Gallery, and an
+altar-piece which is in the palace of the Archbishop of Vienna, at Ober
+St. Veit. These compositions, while remarkable in many respects, still
+reveal the influence of his master, Wohlgemuth, and give evidence of
+having been in part executed with the assistance of apprentices. In
+fact, the peak-gabled house at the foot of the castle-mound in Nuremberg
+was a picture factory like that of Wohlgemuth, in which, however, work
+of a higher order than any hitherto produced in Germany was being turned
+out. We know the names of four or five of those who served as
+apprentices under Dürer at this time and <span class="pagenum"><a id="page233" name="page233"></a>(p. 233)</span> they are stars of
+lesser magnitude in the constellation of German art. But Dürer was not
+contented simply to employ his talents in the production of painted
+altar-pieces, and we find him turning out a number of engravings, the
+most noticeable among which are his sixteen great wood-cuts illustrating
+the Apocalypse, which were published in 1498. The theme was one which
+had peculiar fascinations for all classes at the time. The breaking up
+of all pre-existing systems, the wonderful stirrings of a new life which
+were beginning to be felt everywhere with the close of the Middle Age
+and the dawning of the Renaissance, had filled the minds of men with
+wonder, and caused them to turn to the writings of the Apocalyptic Seer
+with keenest interest. A recent critic, commenting upon his work as
+represented in these engravings, says: "The energy and undismayed
+simplicity of his imagination enable him, in this order of creations, to
+touch the highest point of human achievement. The four angels keeping
+back the winds that they blow not, the four riders, the loosing of the
+angels of the Euphrates to slay the third part of men&mdash;these and others
+are conceptions of such force, such grave or tempestuous grandeur, in
+the midst of grotesqueness, as the art of no other age or hand has
+produced."</p>
+
+<p>At this period Dürer was also engaged in experimenting upon the art of
+copper-plate engraving, in which he restricted himself mainly to
+reproducing copies of the works of other artists, among them those of
+Jacopo de Barbari, a painter of the Italian school, who was residing in
+Nuremberg, and who among other things gave the great artist instruction
+in plastic anatomy. The influence of his instructor is plain, when we
+compare engravings executed about 1504 with those published at a
+previous date, and especially when we examine his design of the Passion
+of our Lord painted in white upon a green ground, commonly known as "The
+Green Passion," which is treasured in the Albertina at Prague. He also
+during these twelve years finished seven of the twelve great wood-cuts
+illustrating the passion, and sixteen of the twenty cuts which compose
+the series known as "The Life of the Virgin." The activities of Dürer in
+Nuremberg were temporarily interrupted by a journey to Italy, which he
+undertook in the fall of the year 1505. What the immediate occasion for
+undertaking this journey may have been is not plain, though it seems
+most likely that one of his objects was to enable him to recuperate from
+the effects of a protracted illness, from which he had suffered during
+the summer of this year, and also incidentally to secure a market for
+his wares in Venice, the commercial relationships of which with
+Nuremberg were very close at this period. A German colony, composed
+largely of Nuremberg factors and merchants, was located at this time in
+Venice, and they had secured the privilege of dedicating a great
+painting in the church of St. Bartholomew. The commission for the
+execution of this painting was secured by Dürer. It represents the
+adoration of the Virgin, but has been commonly known under the name of
+"The Feast of the Rose Garlands." After having undergone many
+vicissitudes, it is preserved to-day in a highly mutilated condition in
+the monastery of Strachow, near Prague. Dürer's stay in Venice was
+signalized not only by the production of this painting, but of three or
+four <span class="pagenum"><a id="page234" name="page234"></a>(p. 234)</span> other notable works which still exist, and which reflect
+the great influence upon him of the Italian school of painting, with
+which he had attained familiarity. His stay in Venice lasted about a
+year. In the fall of 1506, he returned to Nuremberg, and there remained
+for the next fourteen years, engaged in the practice of his art. These
+years were years of success and prosperity. His name and fame had spread
+over the whole of Europe, and the greatest artists of the day were glad
+to do him homage. Raphael said of him, when contemplating some of his
+designs, "Truly this man would have surpassed us all, if he had the
+masterpieces of ancient art constantly before his eyes as we have." A
+friendly correspondence was maintained between the immortal Italian and
+his German contemporary, and in his own country, all men, from the
+emperor to the peasant, delighted to do honor to his genius, the
+products of which were found alike in church and palace, and through his
+printed designs in the homes of the humble poor.</p>
+
+<p>The proud old imperial city of Nuremberg had gathered within its
+battlemented walls a multitude of men who were distinguished not only
+for their commercial enterprise and wealth, but many of whom were the
+exponents of the literary and artistic culture of the time. Among the
+men with whom Dürer found congenial companionship were Adam Krafft, the
+sculptor; Veit Stoss, whose exquisite carvings in wood may reflect in
+some measure in the wild luxuriance of the imagination which they
+display, the restless, "dare-devil" spirit with which his biographers
+invest him; Peter Vischer, the bronze founder; and last but not least.
+Hans Sachs, the cobbler poet, whose quaint rhymes are a source of
+delight to this day, and were a mighty force in the great work of the
+Reformation, by which the fetters of mediæval traditions and
+ecclesiastical abuse were thrown off by the German people.</p>
+
+<p>Of the personal appearance of Dürer at this time, we are not left in
+ignorance. A portrait of himself from his own hands has been preserved
+and is well known. His features reveal refinement and great
+intellectuality, united with grace, and his attire shows that he was not
+oblivious to matters of personal adornment. After the fashion of the
+time, his hair was worn in long and graceful ringlets, which fell in
+heavy masses about his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>The first six years which followed his return from Venice were almost
+wholly given to painting, and his productions give evidence of the fact
+that he had dismissed from his employment the retinue of assistants and
+apprentices, whom he had employed in his earlier years. From this period
+date most of his great masterpieces, which are still preserved, among
+them the "Adam and Eve," in the Pitti Palace; the "Ten Thousand Martyrs
+of Nicomedia," in the Imperial Gallery, at Vienna; the "Adoration of the
+Trinity," at the Belvedere, in Vienna; and "The Assumption of the
+Virgin," the original of which was destroyed by fire more than three
+hundred years ago, but of which a good copy is preserved at Frankfort.
+To this period belong the portraits of Charlemagne and of the Emperor
+Sigismund, which are preserved in the National German Museum at
+Nuremberg.</p>
+
+<a id="img012" name="img012"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img012.jpg" width="400" height="537" alt="" title="">
+<p>Albert Dürer visits Hans Sachs.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But while prosecuting the work of the painter, he did not neglect the
+art of <span class="pagenum"><a id="page235" name="page235"></a>(p. 235)</span> the engraver, and in 1511, brought out in complete
+form his great book of woodcuts in folio, and began to develop that
+marvellous art of etching which is indissolubly connected with his name.
+Among the products of the etcher's needle which attest his activity in
+this direction are those masterpieces which have for centuries been at
+once the delight and the puzzle of artistic minds: the "Melancholia,"
+"The Knight and the Devil," and "St. Jerome in his Cell." The most
+reasonable explanation of these weird fancies is that they were intended
+to represent in allegorical style the three temperaments&mdash;the
+melancholic, the sanguine, and the phlegmatic. The Diet of Augsburg,
+which was convened in 1518, gave Dürer a passing opportunity to depict
+the lineaments of the Emperor Maximilian, who gave him several sittings,
+and who manifested great interest in the painter. The death of the
+emperor in the following year, the outbreak of an epidemic in Nuremberg,
+together with the coronation of Charles V. at Aix-la-Chapelle, led Dürer
+to undertake a journey to the Low Countries, in which he was accompanied
+by his faithful wife. He was present at the coronation and was one of
+the distinguished civilians whose appearance added dignity to the
+occasion. His diary, in which he recounts his experiences upon this
+journey, and which is accompanied by a multitude of wayside sketches, is
+still preserved, and contains, besides the dry entries of his current
+expenditures, most entertaining allusions to the distinguished people
+whom he met, and who received him with the utmost cordiality.
+Intermingled with these narrative details are outbursts of feeling,
+which are provoked by passing political and ecclesiastical events, in
+which he took a profound interest, though he never appears to have
+committed himself with positive openness to the party of reform. His
+sympathies are, however, clearly shown by his writings, as well as by
+his works of art, to have been with the Reformers, and he lived on terms
+of intimacy with Erasmus and Melancthon, of both of whom we have
+portraits from his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Dürer returned from the Netherlands in 1521, about the middle of July,
+and the remaining years of his life were spent in the prosecution of the
+art of the engraver, in painting, and in the effort to elucidate the
+sciences of perspective, geometry, and fortification, upon all of which
+he has left treatises.</p>
+
+<p>His labors, though they had not brought with them great wealth, had
+secured for him a competency, and the latter years of his life were
+devoted more and more to labors which, while dignified, did not tend to
+add greatly to his already magnificent reputation. These labors were
+prosecuted in spite of ever-failing health. While in the Netherlands he
+had contracted a malarial fever, the effects of which clung to him, in
+spite of the best treatment which could be secured, and left him the
+wreck of his former self. On April 6, 1528, death suddenly overtook him.
+There was not even time to summon his friends to his side before his
+spirit had fled. The city which had been his home from childhood was
+filled with mourning. They took up his remains and gently laid them to
+rest in the burial vault of his wife's family in the graveyard of the
+Church of St. John, where the setting sun pours its last glowing beams
+at evening over the low Franconian hill-tops. The vault has since been
+changed and the last resting-place of the remains <span class="pagenum"><a id="page236" name="page236"></a>(p. 236)</span> of the
+Raphael of the North is a lowly mound, reverently approached by all who
+visit the quaint imperial city, upon which is a slab, covered with a
+bronze tablet upon which are the words:</p>
+
+<p class="poem30">
+  Quicquid Alberti Dureri Mortale<br>
+  Fuit Sub Hoc Conditum Tumulo.<br>
+  Emigravit VIII Idus Aprilis, MDXXVIIL</p>
+
+<p class="poem20">
+  <span class="min03em">"</span><i>Emigravit</i> is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies;<br>
+  Dead he is not, but departed&mdash;for the artist never dies.<br>
+  Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair,<br>
+  That he once has trod its pavement, that he once has breathed its air!"
+<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<a id="sig002" name="sig002"></a>
+<div class="right">
+<img src="images/sig002.jpg" width="250" height="52" alt="Signature of the author." title="">
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>RUBENS<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Mrs. Lee</span><br>
+
+(1577-1640)</h3>
+
+
+<a id="img013" name="img013"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img013.jpg" width="250" height="330" alt="Rubens." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>"It is just one hundred and twenty years to-day," said a young artist to
+his friend, as he stood in the hall of St. Mark, at Venice,
+contemplating the noble works of Titian. "Time, the destroyer, has here
+stayed his hand; the colors are as vivid and as fresh as if they were
+laid on but yesterday. Would that my old friend and master, Otho Venius,
+was here! At least I will carry back to Antwerp that in my coloring
+which shall prove to him that I have not played truant to the art."</p>
+
+<p>"Just one hundred and twenty years," repeated he, "since Titian was
+born. Venice was then in its glory, but now it is all falling; its
+churches and palaces are crumbling to dust, its commerce interrupted.
+The republic continually harassed by the Porte, and obliged to call on
+foreign aid; depressed by her internal despotism, her council of ten,
+and state inquisitors; her decline, though gradual, is sure; yet the
+splendor of her arts remains, and the genius of Titian, her favorite
+son, is yet in the bloom and brilliancy of youth!"</p>
+
+<p>Such was the enthusiastic exclamation of Rubens, as he contemplated
+those <span class="pagenum"><a id="page237" name="page237"></a>(p. 237)</span> paintings which had brought him from Antwerp. How many
+gifted minds spoke to him from the noble works which were before him!
+The three Bellinis, the founders of the Venetian school; Giorgione,
+Titian, and Tintoretto. Then Paolo Veronese, who, though born at Verona,
+in 1537, adopted Venice as his home, and became the fellow-artist of
+Tintoretto, and the disciple of Titian. Pordenone, too, who viewed
+Titian as a rival and an enemy. Palma the young, and Palma the old, born
+in 1548, and the Bassanos, who died near 1627.</p>
+
+<p>All these were present to the eye of Rubens, their genius embodied on
+the canvas in the halls of St. Mark. "These," he exclaimed, "have formed
+the Venetian school, and these shall be my study!"</p>
+
+<p>From this time, the young artist might daily be seen with his sheets of
+white paper, and his pencil in his hand. A few strokes preserved the
+outline which his memory filled up; and by an intuitive glance, his
+genius understood and appropriated every signal beauty.</p>
+
+<p>In Venice he became acquainted with the Archduke Albert, who introduced
+him to the Duke of Mantua, whither he went for the purpose of studying
+the works of Julio Romano. From thence he proceeded to Rome; here
+Raphael was his model, and Michael Angelo his wonder. He devoted himself
+to painting with a fervor that belongs only to genius; and he soon
+proved that, whatever he gained by ancient study, the originality of his
+own conceptions would still remain and appear. To the vivid and splendid
+coloring of the Venetian school, he was perhaps more indebted than to
+any other model. The affectionate and constant intercourse, by letters,
+that subsisted between Rubens and his mother, made his long residence in
+Italy one of pleasure. At Rome he was employed to adorn, by his
+paintings, the Church of Santa Croce, and also the "Chiesa Nova."</p>
+
+<p>Rubens had been originally destined by his mother for one of the learned
+professions. His father was born at Antwerp, and held the honorable
+office of councillor of state. When the civil war broke out he repaired
+to Cologne, where his son, Peter Paul Rubens, was born. He died soon
+after his return to Antwerp, and left his property much diminished from
+losses occasioned by the civil war. The mother of Rubens put him early
+to the best schools, where he was initiated in learning and discovered a
+taste for belles-lettres; but all the intervals of necessary study were
+devoted to drawing. His mother perceiving it, determined to indulge his
+inclination, and placed him in the studio of Van Noort.</p>
+
+<p>The correct taste of the scholar soon led him to perceive that he could
+not adopt this artist's style, and he became the pupil of Otho Venius.
+Similarity of thought and feeling united them closely, and it was with
+true disinterestedness that the master urged his pupil to quit his
+confined circle and repair to Italy, the great school of art.</p>
+
+<p>Time flew rapidly with Rubens, while engaged in his beloved and
+honorable pursuit; he looked forward to the period when he might return
+to Antwerp and place his mother in her former affluence. Nearly seven
+years had passed since he took leave of her. Of late he thought her
+letters had been less cheerful; she spoke of her declining health, of
+her earnest hope that she might live to embrace <span class="pagenum"><a id="page238" name="page238"></a>(p. 238)</span> him once more.
+This hint was enough for his affectionate heart. He immediately broke
+off all his engagements and prepared to return. Everyone knows what
+impatience is created when one first begins to contemplate home, after a
+long absence, and the heart is turned toward it. "Seven years absent?"
+wrote Rubens to his mother, "how is it possible I have lived so long
+away from you? It is too long; henceforth I will devote myself to your
+happiness. Antwerp shall be my future residence. I have acquired a taste
+for horticulture; our little garden shall be enlarged and cultivated,
+and our home will be a paradise."</p>
+
+<p>What are human anticipations and projects! the day before he was to quit
+Rome he received a letter informing him that his mother was very ill,
+and begging him to return with all speed. With breathless haste he
+hurried back, without sleep or rest. When he reached the city he dared
+not make any inquiries. At length he stood before the paternal mansion;
+he saw the gloomy tiles and half-closed window-shutters. It was the fall
+of the trees. He observed people going in and out at the door; to speak
+was impossible. At length he rushed in and heard the appalling sentence,
+"Too late," a sentence that often strikes desolation to the human heart.
+His mother had expired that morning.</p>
+
+<p>While he was struggling with the bitterness of sorrow, he met with
+Elizabeth Brants. There was something in the tone of her voice which
+infused tranquillity into his mind, and affection came in a new form to
+assuage his loss. She was the "ladye of his love," and afterward his
+wife. He built a magnificent house at Antwerp, with a saloon in form of
+a rotunda, which he ornamented and enriched with antique statues, busts,
+vases, and pictures by the most celebrated painters. Thus surrounded by
+the gems of art, he devoted himself to the execution of works which were
+the pride of his native country, and caused honors and wealth to be
+heaped upon him.</p>
+
+<p>There were those found who could not endure the splendor of his success;
+these calumniated. There were others who tried to draw him into
+visionary speculations. A chemist offered him a share of his laboratory,
+to join in his search for the philosopher's stone. He carried the
+visionary to his painting-room, and said, "The offer comes too late. You
+see I have found out the art of making gold by my palette and pencils."</p>
+
+<p>Rubens was now at the height of prosperity and happiness, a dangerous
+eminence, and one on which few are permitted to rest. A second time his
+heart was pierced with sorrow: he lost his young wife, Elizabeth, a few
+years after their union. Deep as was his sorrow, he had yet resolution
+enough to feel the necessity of exertion. He left the place which
+constantly reminded him of domestic enjoyment, the memory of which
+contrasted so sadly with the present silence and solitude, and travelled
+for some time in Holland. After his return, he received a commission
+from Mary de Medici, of France, to adorn the palace of the Luxembourg.
+He executed for this purpose a number of paintings at Antwerp, and
+instructed several pupils in his art.</p>
+
+<p>At this time Rubens devoted himself wholly to painting, and scarcely
+allowed himself time for recreation. He considered it one of the most
+effectual <span class="pagenum"><a id="page239" name="page239"></a>(p. 239)</span> means of instruction, to allow his pupils to observe
+his method of using his paints. He therefore had them with him while
+he worked on his large pictures. Teniers, Snyders, Jordaens, and Vandyke
+were among his pupils&mdash;all names well known.</p>
+
+<p>When Rubens had executed the commission given him by Mary de Medici,
+wife of Henry IV., he repaired to Paris to arrange his pictures at the
+Luxembourg palace, and there painted two more, and likewise the
+galleries, representing passages of her life.</p>
+
+<p>Here he became acquainted with the Duke of Buckingham, as that nobleman
+was on his way to Madrid with Prince Charles. On his return to Antwerp,
+he was summoned to the presence of the Infanta Isabella, who had,
+through Buckingham, become interested in his character. She thought him
+worthy of a political mission to the court of Madrid, where he was most
+graciously received by Philip. While at Madrid he painted four pictures
+for the convent of the Carmelites, and a fine portrait of the king on
+horseback, with many other pictures; for these extraordinary productions
+he was richly rewarded, received the honor of knighthood, and was
+presented with the golden key.</p>
+
+<p>While in Spain, Don John, Duke of Braganza, who was afterward king of
+Portugal, sent and invited him to visit him at Villa Vitiosa, the place
+of his residence. Rubens, perhaps, might at this time have been a little
+dazzled with his uncommon elevation. He was now <i>Sir Paul</i> and
+celebrated all over Europe. It was proper he should make the visit as
+one person of high rank visits another. His preparations were great to
+appear in a becoming style, and not to shame his noble host. At length
+the morning arrived, and, attended by a numerous train of courteous
+friends and hired attendants, the long cavalcade began the journey. When
+not far distant from Villa Vitiosa, Rubens learned that Don John had
+sent an embassy to meet him. Such an honor had seldom been accorded to a
+private gentleman, and Rubens schooled himself to receive it with
+suitable humility and becoming dignity.</p>
+
+<p>He put up at a little distance from Villa Vitiosa, awaiting the arrival
+of the embassy; finally it came, in the form of a single gentleman, who
+civilly told him that the duke, his master, had been obliged to leave
+home on business that could not be dispensed with, and therefore must
+deny himself the pleasure of the visit; but as he had probably been at
+some extra expense in coming so far, he begged him to accept of fifty
+pistoles as a remuneration.</p>
+
+<p>Rubens refused the pistoles, and could not forbear adding that he had
+"brought two thousand along with him, which he had meant to spend at his
+court during the fifteen days he was to spend there."</p>
+
+<p>The truth was, that when Don John was informed that Rubens was coming in
+the style of a prince to see him, it was wholly foreign to his plan; he
+was a great lover of painting, and had wished to see him as an artist.
+He therefore determined to prevent the visit.</p>
+
+<p>The second marriage of Rubens, with Helena Forman, was, no less than the
+first, one of affection; she had great beauty, and became a model for
+his pencil. His favor with the great continued. Mary de Medici visited
+him at his own <span class="pagenum"><a id="page240" name="page240"></a>(p. 240)</span> home more than once; and the Infanta Isabella
+was so much satisfied with his mission in Spain, that she sent him to
+England, to sound the disposition of the government on the subject of a
+peace.</p>
+
+<p>Rubens disclosed in this embassy his diplomatic talents; he first
+appeared there in his character of artist, and insensibly won upon the
+confidence of Charles. The king requested him to paint the ceiling of
+the banqueting-house at Whitehall. While he was employed upon it,
+Charles frequently visited him and criticised the work. Rubens, very
+naturally introducing the subject, and finding, from the tenor of his
+conversation, that he was by no means averse to a peace with Spain, at
+length produced his credentials. The king received his mission most
+graciously, and Rubens returned to the Netherlands crowned with honors
+and success.</p>
+
+<p>He had passed his fiftieth year when his health began to fail, and he
+was attacked with a severe fit of the gout. Those who have witnessed the
+irritation attendant upon that disorder will appreciate the perfect
+harmony and gentleness that existed between Rubens and his wife. With
+untiring tenderness she devoted herself to him, and was ingenious in
+devising alleviations and comforts.</p>
+
+<p>The severe attacks of Rubens' disorder debilitated his frame, yet he
+continued painting at his easel almost to the last; and, amid suffering
+and sickness, never failed in giving the energy of intellect to his
+pictures. He died at the age of sixty-three, in the year 1640, leaving
+great wealth. The pomp and circumstance of funeral rite can only be of
+consequence as showing the estimation in which a departed citizen is
+held. Public funeral honors were awarded, and men of every rank were
+eager to manifest their respect to his memory. He was buried in the
+Church of St. James, at Antwerp, under the altar of his private chapel,
+which was decorated with one of his own noble pictures.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>REMBRANDT<a id="footnotetag4" name="footnotetag4"></a><a href="#footnote4" title="Go to footnote 4"><span class="smaller">[4]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Elizabeth Robins Pennell</span><br>
+
+(1606-1669)</h3>
+
+<a id="img014" name="img014"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img014.jpg" width="200" height="224" alt="Rembrandt." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>A heretic in art Rembrandt was to many of his Dutch contemporaries; to
+us, he is the master, supreme alike in genius and accomplishment.
+Because, as time went on, he broke completely from tradition and in his
+work gave full play to his originality, his pictures were looked at
+askance; because he chose to live his own life, indifferent to accepted
+conventions, he himself was misunderstood. It was his cruel fate to
+enjoy prosperity and popularity in his earlier years, only to meet with
+neglect in his old age. But this he felt probably less than other men;
+he was not a courtier, with Velasquez, nor vowed to worldly success,
+with Rubens. <span class="pagenum"><a id="page241" name="page241"></a>(p. 241)</span> His pleasure and his reward, he found in his
+work. So long as easel and canvas, brushes and paints were left to him,
+he demanded no greater happiness.</p>
+
+<a id="img015" name="img015"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img015.jpg" width="600" height="428" alt="" title="">
+<p>Marie De Medici at the House of Rubens.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In Leyden, a town already made famous by another master, Lucas van
+Leyden, Rembrandt was born in 1606; though this date has been disputed,
+some authorities suggesting 1607, others, 1608. His family were
+respectable, if not distinguished, burghers, his father, Harmen
+Gerritszoon, being a miller by trade, his mother, Neeltjen Willems of
+Zuitbroeck, the daughter of a baker. Not until early in the seventeenth
+century did permanent surnames become common among Dutchmen; hitherto
+children had been given their father's, in addition to their own
+Christian name; Rembrandt for many years was known as Rembrandt
+Harmenzoon, or the son of Harmen. But the miller, to be in the growing
+fashion, had called himself Van Ryn&mdash;of the Rhine&mdash;and thus, later on,
+Rembrandt also signed himself. Harmen was well-to-do; he owned houses in
+Leyden, and beyond the walls, gardens, and fields, and the mill where
+Rembrandt, because he once drew a mill, was supposed to have been born.
+But there was no reason for Neeltjen to move from a comfortable house in
+town into such rustic quarters, and it is more likely that Rembrandt's
+birthplace was the house pointed out in the Nordeinde Street. A
+commercial career had been chosen for his four older brothers. But
+Harmen, his means allowing the luxury, decided to make of his fifth son
+a man of letters and learning, and Rembrandt was sent to the University
+of Leyden. That letters, however, had small charm for him, was clear
+from the first. Better than his books he loved the engravings of
+Swanenburch, better still, the pictures of Lucas van Leyden, which he
+could look at to his heart's content on gala days, when the Town Hall,
+where they hung, was thrown open to the public. His hours of study were
+less profitable than his hours of recreation when he rambled in the
+country, through his father's estate, and, sometimes as far as the sea,
+a sketch-book, the chances are, for sole companion. Certainly, by the
+time he was fifteen, so strong were the proofs of his indifference to
+the classics and his love for art, that his father, sacrificing his own
+ambitions, allowed Rembrandt to leave the university for the studio of
+Van Swanenburch. From this day forth, his life's history is told in the
+single word&mdash;work; his indeed was the genius of industry.</p>
+
+<p>Van Swanenburch had studied in Italy; but his own painting, to judge by
+the few examples still in existence, was entirely commonplace. Three
+years were more than enough to be passed under his tuition. At the end
+of the third, Rembrandt went to Amsterdam, and there entered the studio
+of Lastman. His second master also had studied in Italy, and also was a
+painter of mediocre talent, popular in his own times&mdash;the Apelles of the
+day, he was called&mdash;but remembered now chiefly because of his relations
+to his pupil. From the first, <span class="pagenum"><a id="page242" name="page242"></a>(p. 242)</span> Rembrandt, even if obliged to
+paint the stock subjects of the day, was determined to treat them in his
+own way, and not to follow set forms that happened to be adopted in the
+schools. He used real men and women for models, and painted them as he
+saw them, not as he was bidden to look at them through his teacher's
+spectacles. In six months he had learned at least one thing, that
+Lastman had nothing more to teach him. The man of genius must ever be
+his own master, though he remain the hard-working student all his days.
+Back to Leyden and to his father's house, Rembrandt had not returned to
+lead a life of idleness. He worked tremendously in these early years.
+Even needed models he found in the members of his family; he has made
+the face of his mother as familiar as that of a friend; his own, with
+the heavy features, the thick, bushy hair, the small intelligent eyes,
+between them the vertical line, fast deepening on the fine forehead, he
+drew and etched and painted, again and again. More elaborate
+compositions he also undertook. As in his maturity, it was to the Bible
+he turned for suggestions: Saint Paul in prison, Samson and Delilah, the
+Presentation in the Temple&mdash;these were the themes then in vogue which he
+preferred, rendering them with the realism which distinguished his
+later, more famous Samsons and Abrahams and Christs, making them the
+motive for a fine arrangement of color, for a striking study of light
+and shadow. A pleasant picture one can fancy of his life at this period;
+he was with his own people, for whom his love was tender; busy with
+brush, pencil, and etching-needle; he was strengthening his powers of
+observation, developing and perfecting his style, occasionally producing
+work that won for him renown in Leyden; and, gradually, he gathered
+round him a small group of earnest fellow-workers, chief among them
+Lievens, Gerard Dou, and Van Vliet, the last two, though but slightly
+his juniors, looking up to him as master. These were the years of his
+true apprenticeship.</p>
+
+<p>Leyden, however, was not the best place for a young painter who had his
+fortunes to make. It was essentially a university town; interest was
+concentrated upon letters; art was but of secondary consideration. It
+was different in Amsterdam, the great commercial centre of Holland.
+There, all was life and activity and progress; there, was money to be
+spent, and the liberal patron willing to lavish it upon the artist.
+Holland just then was in the first flush of prosperity and patriotism,
+following upon her virtual independence from Spain. Not a citizen but
+glowed with self-respect at the thought of the victory he had, in one
+way or another, helped to win; the state, as represented by the good
+burghers, was supreme in every man's mind. It was natural that
+individuals and corporations alike should seek to immortalize their
+greatness by means of the painter's art, which, in Holland, had long
+since ceased to be a monopoly of the church. Hence the age became
+essentially one of portrait-painting. Many were the painters whose
+portraits had already achieved distinction. De Keyser was busy in
+Amsterdam; a far greater genius, Franz Hals, but fifteen years
+Rembrandt's senior, was creating his masterpieces in The Hague and
+Harlem. It was as inevitable that Rembrandt should turn to portraiture,
+as that he should find commissions <span class="pagenum"><a id="page243" name="page243"></a>(p. 243)</span> less numerous in Leyden than
+in Amsterdam. Often in the latter town his services were required; so
+often, indeed, that at last, about 1631, when he was just twenty-five,
+he settled there permanently and set up a studio of his own.</p>
+
+<p>Success was his from the start. Sitter after sitter sought him out in
+his house on the Bloemgracht; the most distinguished men in the town
+hastened to patronize him. His work was liked by the burghers whom he
+painted, its strength was felt by artists, whose canvases soon showed
+its influence. Admirers crowded to his studio. He had not been in
+Amsterdam a twelvemonth when, before he was yet twenty-six, he was
+entrusted with an order of more than usual importance. This was the
+portrait of Dr. Tulp and his class of surgeons: the famous "Lesson in
+Anatomy" now in the Gallery at The Hague. The subject at the time was
+very popular. Many artists, De Keyser among others, had already, in
+painting prominent surgeons, placed them around the subject they were
+dissecting; indeed, this was the arrangement insisted upon by the
+surgeons themselves, and, as there seems to have been no limit to their
+vanity, "Lessons in Anatomy" were almost as plentiful in Holland as
+"Madonnas" in Umbria. Rembrandt in his composition was simply adhering
+to accepted tradition. It is true that he instilled life into a group
+hitherto, on other painters' canvases, stiff and perfunctory; but,
+though the picture was a wonderful production for a man of his years, it
+is not to be ranked with his greatest work.</p>
+
+<p>Commissions now poured in still faster. It was at this time he painted
+several of his best known portraits: the "Master Shipbuilder and his
+Wife," at present in Buckingham Palace; that simply marvellous old woman
+at the National Gallery in London, made familiar to everyone by
+countless photographs and other reproductions; the man in ruff and woman
+in coif at the Brunswick Museum; and a score of others scarce less
+important. With increasing popularity, he was able to command his own
+prices, so that only a part of his time was it necessary for him to
+devote to the portraits which were his chief source of income. During
+the leisure he reserved, he painted biblical subjects, ever his delight,
+and made etchings and drawings, today the most prized treasures in the
+world's great galleries. As in Leyden, he drew about him students; a
+few, notably Ferdinand Bol and Christophe Paudiss, destined, in their
+turn, to gain name and fame. Indifferent to social claims and honors&mdash;an
+indifference the burghers, his patrons, found it hard to forgive, his
+one amusement was in collecting pictures and engravings, old stuffs and
+jewels, and every kind of <i>bric-à-brac</i>, until his house in Amsterdam
+was a veritable museum. This amusement later was to cost him dear.</p>
+
+<p>Four years after the "Lesson in Anatomy" was painted, when he was at the
+height of prosperity, in 1634, he married Saskia van Uylenborch, the
+Saskia of so many an etching and picture. She was of a good Frisian
+family, and brought with her a dowry of no mean proportions. Rembrandt's
+marriage made small changes in his way of living. Into the society, so
+ready to receive him, he never went, not even now that he had a wife to
+introduce. It bored him, and he was no toady to waste his time fawning
+upon possible patrons. "When I desire to rest <span class="pagenum"><a id="page244" name="page244"></a>(p. 244)</span> my spirit, I do
+not seek honors, but liberty," was his explanation. The companionship of
+artists he always welcomed; sometimes he visited the humbler burghers,
+whose ways were as simple as his own; sometimes he sought the humblest
+classes of all, because of their picturesqueness, and his contemporaries
+took him to task for his perverted taste for low company. The truth is
+that always he devoted himself solely and wholly to his art; the only
+difference, once he was married, was that, when he sat at his easel all
+day or over his copperplate, and sketchbook all evening, Saskia was with
+him. She shared all his interests, all his ambitions; she had no will
+but his. During his working hours, she was his model, obedient to his
+call. She never tired of posing for him, nor he of painting her now
+simply as Saskia, now as Delilah feasting with Samson, as Susanna
+surprised by the Elders, as the Jewish Betrothed at her toilet.
+Sometimes he represented her alone, sometimes with himself at her side;
+once, in the famous Dresden portrait, on his knee, as if to proclaim the
+love they bore for one another. And he, who could render faithfully the
+ways of the beggar, the austere black of the burgher, for himself and
+Saskia found no masquerading too gay or extravagant. In inventing
+costumes for their own portraits, he gave his exuberant fancy free play:
+in gorgeous embroidered robes, waving plumes, and priceless gems they
+arrayed themselves, until even the resources of his collection were
+exhausted: the same rich mantle, the same jewels appear, and reappear in
+picture after picture.</p>
+
+<p>Rembrandt's short married years were happy, though not without their
+sorrows. Of Saskia's five children, four died in infancy; the fifth,
+Titus, was not a year old when, in 1642, the end came for Saskia, and
+Rembrandt, who had just reached his thirty-seventh year, was left in his
+great house alone with an infant son and his pupils. Her confidence in
+him is shown by her will, in which the inheritance of Titus is left in
+the father's charge, though already Rembrandt's affairs must have given
+signs of coming complications.</p>
+
+<a id="img016" name="img016"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img016.jpg" width="600" height="369" alt="" title="">
+<p>Connoisseurs at Rembrandt's Studio.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Much of his best work remained to be done, but after Saskia's death his
+worldly fortunes and his popularity never again touched such high-water
+mark. The reason for this is not far to seek. During all these years,
+Rembrandt's powers had matured, his methods broadened, and his
+individuality strengthened. With each new canvas, his originality became
+more conspicuous. It was not only that the world of nature, and not
+imagination, supplied his models. Many of the Dutch painters now were no
+less realists than he. It was not only that he solved certain problems
+of <i>chiaro oscuro</i>, there were men, like Lievens, who were as eager as
+he in the study of light and shadow. But Rembrandt brought to his every
+experiment an independence that startled the average man. He painted
+well because he saw well. If no one else saw things as he did, the loss
+was theirs. But he paid for his keener vision; because he did not paint
+like other artists, his methods were mistrusted. To be misunderstood is
+the penalty of genius. The picture which, of all his work, is now the
+most famous, marks the turn in the tide of his affairs. Shortly before
+Saskia's death, he had been commissioned to paint a portrait group of
+Banning Cock and the military company <span class="pagenum"><a id="page245" name="page245"></a>(p. 245)</span> which he commanded.
+These portrait groups of the military corporations rivalled in
+popularity the "Lessons in Anatomy." Each member, or officer, paid to be
+included in the composition, and, as a rule, a stiff, formal picture,
+with each individual posed as for a photograph, was the result.
+Rembrandt, apparently, was in nowise restricted when he undertook the
+work for Banning Cock, and so, instead of the stupid, hackneyed
+arrangement, he made of the portrait of the company a picture of armed
+men marching forth to beating of drums and waving of banners, "The
+Night Watch," as it must ever be known&mdash;more accurately, "The Sortie of
+the Company of Banning Cock"&mdash;now in the Ryks Museum of Amsterdam. With
+the men for whom it was painted, it proved a failure. The grouping, the
+arrangement displeased them. Many of the company were left in deep
+shadow, which was not the privilege for which they had agreed to pay
+good money. Rembrandt was not the man to compromise. After this many
+burghers, who cared much for themselves and their own faces, and not in
+the least for art, were afraid to entrust their portraits to him lest
+their importance might be sacrificed to the painter's effects. Certain
+it is that six years later, in 1648, when the independence of Holland
+was formally recognized at the Congress of Westphalia, though Terburg
+and Van der Heist celebrated the event on canvas, Rembrandt's services
+were not secured. Good friends were left to him&mdash;men of intelligence who
+appreciated his strong individuality and the great originality of his
+work. Banning Cock himself was not among the discontented. A few leading
+citizens, like Dr. Tulp and the Burgomeister Six, were ever his devoted
+patrons. Artists still gathered about him; pupils still crowded to his
+studio; Nicolas Maes, De Gelder, Kneller among them. Many of his finest
+portraits&mdash;those of Hendrickje Stoffels, of his son, of himself in his
+old age, of the Burgomeister Six, above all, his masterpiece, "The
+Syndics of the Guild of Clothmakers," now in Amsterdam; many of his
+finest etchings, the little landscapes, the famous "Hundred Guilder
+Print," "Christ Healing the Sick," belong to this later period. There
+was no falling off, but rather an increase, in his powers, despite the
+clouds that darkened his years of middle age.</p>
+
+<p>Of these clouds, the darkest was due to his financial troubles.
+Rembrandt had made large sums of money; Saskia's dowry had been by no
+means small. But he also spent lavishly. He had absolutely no business
+capacity. Once he was accused of miserliness; that he would at times
+lunch on dry bread and a herring served as reproach against him; there
+was a story current that his pupils would drop bits of paper painted to
+look like money in order to see him stoop to pick them up. Both charges
+are too foolish to answer seriously. When he was at work, it mattered
+little to him what he ate, so that he was not disturbed; who would not
+stoop to pick up coins apparently scattered on the floor? The money he
+devoted to his collection is sufficient to show how small a fancy he had
+for hoarding; upon it a princely fortune had been squandered. To his own
+people in Leyden, when times were hard, he had not been slow to hold out
+a generous hand. It was because he was not enough of a miser, because
+he gave too little heed to business matters, that difficulties at length
+overwhelmed him. It <span class="pagenum"><a id="page246" name="page246"></a>(p. 246)</span> is too sad a story to tell in detail.
+Perhaps the beginning was when he bought a house for which he had not
+the ready money to pay, and borrowed a large sum for the purpose. More
+and more involved became his affairs. In time his creditors grew
+clamorous, and at length the blow fell when, in 1657, he was declared
+bankrupt. The collection of years, the embroidered mantles and
+draperies, the jewels with which Saskia had been so gayly decked, the
+plumes and furs and gorgeous robes in which he himself had masqueraded,
+the armor and plate, the engravings and pictures which had filled his
+house&mdash;all were sold. He, the master, had, at the age of fifty-one, to
+begin life anew as if he were still but the apprentice.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of his troubles and losses, Hendrickje Stoffels, whose
+portrait hangs in the Louvre, was the friend who cheered and comforted
+him. She had been his servant; afterward she lived with him as his wife,
+though legally they were not married. To Titus, as to her own children,
+she was ever a tender mother, and Titus, in return, seems to have loved
+her no less well. In the end, they together took Rembrandt's business
+interests into their own hands, the son, probably, using his inheritance
+in the enterprise. Renting a house in their own name, they became his
+print and picture dealers.</p>
+
+<p>But as time went on, Rembrandt's work brought lower and lower prices,
+and he, himself, the last two years of his life, was almost forgotten.
+Though he still lived in Amsterdam, the town from which he had so seldom
+journeyed, and then never far, he had fallen into such obscurity, that
+report now established him in Stockholm as painter to the King of
+Sweden, now in Hull, or Yarmouth. In his own family nothing but sorrow
+was in store for him. Hendrickje died, probably about 1664, and he was
+once more alone; and next he lost Titus, who then had been married but a
+few short months.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for Rembrandt, he did not long survive them. In 1669, at the
+age of sixty-two, his release came. He was buried in the West Church,
+quietly and simply. Thirteen florins his funeral cost, and even this
+small expense had to be met by his daughter-in-law. When an inventory of
+his possessions was taken, these were found to consist of nothing but
+his own wardrobe and his painter's tools.</p>
+
+<p>But better than a mere fortune, his work he left as an heirloom for all
+time; his drawings, not the least among them without the stamp of his
+genius; his prints, still unsurpassed, though it was he who first
+developed the possibilities of etching; his pictures, "painted with
+light," as Fromentin has said. His subjects he may have borrowed from
+the fashions and traditions of the time; certain mannerisms of technique
+and arrangement his pupils may have copied. But for all that, his work
+belongs to no special school or group; like all the world's great
+masterpieces, whether produced in Spain by a Velasquez, in Venice by a
+Titian, in England by a Whistler, it stands alone and supreme.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<a id="sig003" name="sig003"></a>
+<div class="right">
+<img src="images/sig003.jpg" width="300" height="60" alt="Signature of the author." title="">
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page247" name="page247"></a>(p. 247)</span> WILLIAM HOGARTH<br>
+
+(1697-1764)</h3>
+
+<a id="img017" name="img017"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img017.jpg" width="250" height="295" alt="William Hogarth." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>"I was born," says Hogarth, in his Memoirs of himself, "in the city of
+London, November 10, 1697. My father's pen, like that of many authors,
+did not enable him to do more than put me in a way of shifting for
+myself. As I had naturally a good eye and a fondness for drawing, shows
+of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant; and mimicry,
+common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early access to a
+neighboring painter drew my attention from play, and I was, at every
+possible opportunity, employed in making drawings. I picked up an
+acquaintance of the same turn, and soon learned to draw the alphabet
+with great correctness. My exercises when at school were more remarkable
+for the ornaments which adorned them than for the exercise itself. In
+the former I soon found that blockheads with better memories could much
+surpass me, but for the latter I was particularly distinguished."</p>
+
+<p>To this account of Hogarth's childhood we have only to add that his
+father, an enthusiastic and laborious scholar, who, like many of his
+craft, owed little to the favor of fortune, consulted these indications
+of talent as well as his means would allow, and bound his son apprentice
+to a silver-plate engraver. But Hogarth aspired after something higher
+than drawing ciphers and coats-of-arms; and before the expiration of his
+indentures he had made himself a good draughtsman, and obtained
+considerable knowledge of coloring. It was his ambition to become
+distinguished as an artist; and not content with being the mere copier
+of other men's productions, he sought to combine the functions of the
+painter with those of the engraver, and to gain the power of delineating
+his own ideas and the fruits of his acute observation. He has himself
+explained the nature of his views in a passage which is worth attention:</p>
+
+<p>"Many reasons led me to wish that I could find the shorter path&mdash;fix
+forms and characters in my mind&mdash;and instead of copying the lines, try
+to read the language, and, if possible, find the grammar of the art by
+bringing into one focus the various observations I have made, and then
+trying by my power on the canvas how far my plan enabled me to combine
+and apply them to practice. For this purpose I considered what various
+ways, and to what different purposes, the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page248" name="page248"></a>(p. 248)</span> memory might be
+applied, and fell upon one most suitable to my situation and idle
+disposition; laying it down first as an axiom, that he who could by any
+means acquire and retain in his memory perfect ideas of the subjects he
+meant to draw, would have as clear a knowledge of the figure as a man
+who can write freely hath of the twenty-five letters of the alphabet and
+their infinite combinations." Acting on these principles, he improved,
+by constant exercise, his natural powers of observation and
+recollection. We find him roaming through the country, now at Yarmouth
+and again at Queenborough, sketching everywhere. In his rambles among
+the motley scenes of London he was ever on the watch for striking
+features or incidents; and not trusting entirely to memory, he was
+accustomed, when any face struck him as being peculiarly grotesque or
+expressive, to sketch it on his thumb-nail, to be treasured up on paper
+at his return home.</p>
+
+<p>For some time after the expiration of his apprenticeship, Hogarth
+continued to practise the trade to which he was bred; and his
+shop-bills, coats-of-arms, engravings upon tankards, etc., have been
+collected with an eagerness quite disproportionate to their value. Soon
+he procured employment in furnishing frontispieces and designs for the
+booksellers. The most remarkable of these are the plates to an edition
+of "Hudibras," published in 1726; but even these are of no distinguished
+merit. About 1728 he began to seek employment as a portrait-painter.
+Most of his performances were small family pictures, containing several
+figures, which he calls "Conversation Pieces," from twelve to fifteen
+inches high. These for a time were very popular, and his practice was
+considerable, as his price was low. His life-size portraits are few; the
+most remarkable are that of Captain Coram, in the "Foundling Hospital,"
+and that of Garrick as King Richard III., which is reproduced in the
+present volume. But his practice as a portrait-painter was not
+lucrative, nor his popularity lasting. Although many of his likenesses
+were strong and characteristic, in the representation of beauty,
+elegance, and high-breeding he was little skilled. The nature of the
+artist was as uncourtly as his pencil. When Hogarth obtained employment
+and eminence of another sort through his wonderful prints, he abandoned
+portrait-painting, with a growl at the jealousy of his professional
+brethren; and the vanity and blindness of the public.</p>
+
+<p>March 25, 1729, Hogarth contracted a stolen marriage with the only
+daughter of the once fashionable painter, Sir James Thornhill. The
+father, for some time implacable, relented at last; and the
+reconciliation, it is said, was much forwarded by his admiration of the
+"Harlot's Progress," a series of six prints, commenced in 1731 and
+published in 1734. The novelty as well as merit of this series of prints
+won for them extraordinary popularity; and their success encouraged
+Hogarth to undertake a similar history of the "Rake's Progress," in
+eight prints, which appeared in 1735. The third, and perhaps the most
+popular, as it is the least objectionable of these pictorial novels,
+"Marriage à la Mode," was not engraved till 1745.</p>
+
+<a id="img018" name="img018"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img018.jpg" width="600" height="468" alt="" title="">
+<p>Hogarth sketching the Highway of Queenborough.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The merits of these prints were sufficiently intelligible to the public:
+their originality and boldness of design, the force and freedom of
+their execution, <span class="pagenum"><a id="page249" name="page249"></a>(p. 249)</span> rough as it is, won for them an extensive
+popularity and a rapid and continued sale. The "Harlot's Progress" was
+the most eminently successful, from its novelty rather than from its
+superior excellence. Twelve hundred subscribers' names were entered for
+it; it was dramatized in several forms; and we may note, in illustration
+of the difference of past and present manners, that fan-mounts were
+engraved containing miniature copies of the six plates. The merits of
+the pictures were less obvious to the few who could afford to spend
+large sums on works of art, and Hogarth, too proud to let them go for
+prices much below the value which he put upon them, waited for a long
+time, and waited in vain, for a purchaser. At last he determined to
+commit them to public sale; but instead of the common method of auction,
+he devised a new and complex plan with the intention of excluding
+picture-dealers, and obliging men of rank and wealth who wished to
+purchase to judge and bid for themselves. The scheme failed, as might
+have been expected. Nineteen of Hogarth's best pictures, the "Harlot's
+Progress," the "Rake's Progress," the "Four Times of the Day," and
+"Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn" produced only £427 7s., not
+averaging £22 10s. each. The "Harlot's Progress" was purchased by Mr.
+Beckford at the rate of fourteen guineas a picture; five of the series
+perished in the fire at Fonthill. The "Rake's Progress" averaged
+twenty-two guineas a picture; it has passed into the possession of Sir
+John Soane, at the advanced price of five hundred and seventy guineas.
+The same eminent architect became the proprietor of the four pictures of
+an "Election" for the sum of £1,732. "Marriage à la Mode" was disposed
+of in a similar way in 1750; and on the day of the sale one bidder
+appeared, who became master of the six pictures, together with their
+frames, for £115 10s. Mr. Angerstein purchased them, in 1797, for
+£1,381, and they now form a striking feature in the National Gallery.</p>
+
+<p>The satire of Hogarth was not often of a personal nature; but he knew
+his own power, and he sometimes exercised it. Two of his prints, "The
+Times," produced a memorable quarrel between himself, on one side, and
+Wilkes and Churchhill, on the other. The satire of the prints of "The
+Times," which were published in 1762, was directed, not against Wilkes
+himself, but his political friends, Pitt and Temple; nor is it so biting
+as to have required Wilkes, in defence of his party, to retaliate upon
+one with whom he had lived in familiar and friendly intercourse. He did
+so, however, in a number of the <i>North Briton</i>, containing not only
+abuse of the artist, but unjust and injurious mention of his wife.
+Hogarth was deeply wounded by this attack; he retorted by the well-known
+portrait of Wilkes with the cap of liberty, and he afterward represented
+Churchill as a bear. The quarrel was unworthy the talents either of the
+painter or poet. It is more to be regretted because its effects, as he
+himself intimates, were injurious to Hogarth's declining health. The
+summer of 1764 he spent at Chiswick, and the free air and exercise
+worked a partial renovation of his strength. The amendment, however, was
+but temporary, and he died suddenly, October 26th, the day after his
+return to his London residence in Leicester Square.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page250" name="page250"></a>(p. 250)</span> SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Samuel Archer</span><br>
+
+(1723-1792)</h3>
+
+<a id="img019" name="img019"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img019.jpg" width="200" height="264" alt="Sir Joshua Reynolds." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Sir Joshua Reynolds, the celebrated painter, was, on July 16, 1723, born
+at Plympton, a small town in Devonshire, England. His father was a
+minister of the parish, and also master of the grammar school; and being
+a man of learning and philanthropy, he was beloved and respected by all
+to whom he was known. Such a man, it will naturally be supposed, was
+assiduous in the cultivation of the minds of his children, among whom
+his son Joshua shone conspicuous, by displaying at a very early period a
+superiority of genius and the rudiments of a correct taste. Unlike other
+boys, who generally content themselves with giving a literal explanation
+of their author, regardless of his beauties or his faults, young
+Reynolds attended to both these, displaying a happy knowledge of what he
+read, and entering with ardor into the spirit of his author. He
+discovered likewise talents for composition, and a natural propensity to
+drawing, in which his friends and intimates thought him qualified to
+excel. Emulation was a distinguishing characteristic of his mind, which
+his father perceived with the delight natural to a parent; and designing
+him for the church, in which he hoped that his talents might raise him
+to eminence, he sent him to one of the universities.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after this period he grew passionately fond of painting; and by the
+perusal of Richardson's theory of that art was determined to make it his
+profession through life. At his own earnest request, therefore, he was
+removed to London; and about the year 1742 became a pupil to Mr. Hudson,
+who, though not himself an eminent painter, was preceptor to many who
+afterward excelled in the art. One of the first advices which he gave to
+Mr. Reynolds was to copy carefully Guercino's drawings. This was done
+with such skill, that many of the copies are said to be now preserved in
+the cabinets of the curious as the originals of that very great master.</p>
+
+<p>About the year 1749, Mr. Reynolds went to Italy under the auspices, and
+in the company, of the late Lord (then Commodore) Keppel, who was
+appointed to the command of the British squadron in the Mediterranean.
+In this garden of the world, this magic seat of arts, he failed not to
+visit the schools of the great masters, to study the productions of
+different ages, and to contemplate with unwearied attention the various
+beauties which are characteristic of each. His labor <span class="pagenum"><a id="page251" name="page251"></a>(p. 251)</span> here, as
+has been observed of another painter, was "the labor of love, not the
+task of the hireling;" and how much he profited by it is known to all
+Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Having remained about two years in Italy, and studied the language as
+well as the arts of the country with great success, he returned to
+England, improved by travel and refined by education. On the road to
+London from the port where he landed, he accidentally found in the inn
+where he lodged Johnson's life of Savage, and was so taken with the
+charms of composition, and the masterly delineation of character
+displayed in that work, that, having begun to read it while leaning his
+arm on the chimney-piece, he continued in that attitude, insensible of
+pain till he was hardly able to raise his hand to his head. The
+admiration of the work naturally led him to seek the acquaintance of its
+author, who continued one of his sincerest admirers and warmest friends
+till 1784, when they were separated by the stroke of death.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing that distinguished him after his return to his native
+country was a full-length portrait of Commodore Keppel; which in polite
+circles was spoken of in terms of the highest encomium, and testified to
+what a degree of eminence he had arrived in his profession. This was
+followed by a portrait of Lord Edgecombe, and a few others, which at
+once introduced him to the first business in portrait-painting; and that
+branch of the art he cultivated with such success as will forever
+establish his fame with all descriptions of refined society. Having
+painted some of the first-rate beauties of the age, the polite world
+flocked to see the graces and the charms of his pencil; and he soon
+became the most fashionable painter not only in England, but in all
+Europe. He has indeed preserved the resemblance of so many illustrious
+characters, that we feel the less regret at his having left behind him
+so few historical paintings; though what he has done in that way shows
+him to have been qualified to excel in both departments. The only
+landscape, perhaps, which he ever painted, except those beautiful and
+chaste ones which compose the backgrounds of many of his portraits, is
+"A View on the Thames from Richmond," which in 1784 was exhibited by the
+Society for Promoting Painting and Design in Liverpool.</p>
+
+<p>In 1764 Mr. Reynolds had the merit of being the first promoter of that
+club, which, having long existed without a name, became at last
+distinguished by the appellation of the <i>Literary Club</i>. Upon the
+foundation of the Royal Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and
+Architecture, he was appointed president; and his acknowledged
+excellence in his profession made the appointment acceptable to all the
+lovers of art. To add to the dignity of this new institution, his
+majesty conferred on the president the honor of knighthood; and Sir
+Joshua delivered his first discourse at the opening of the Academy, on
+January 2, 1769. The merit of that discourse has been universally
+admitted among painters; but it contains some directions, respecting the
+proper mode of prosecuting their studies, to which every student of
+every art would do well to pay attention. "I would chiefly recommend
+(says he) that an implicit obedience to the <i>rules of art</i>, as
+established by the practice of the great masters, should be exacted from
+the young students. That those models, which have passed through the
+approbation of <span class="pagenum"><a id="page252" name="page252"></a>(p. 252)</span> ages, should be considered by them as perfect
+and infallible guides, as subjects for their imitation, not their
+criticism. I am confident that this is the only efficacious method of
+making a progress in the arts; and that he who sets out with doubting
+will find life finished before he becomes master of the rudiments. For
+it may be laid down as a maxim, that he who begins by presuming on his
+own sense, has ended his studies as soon as he has commenced them. Every
+opportunity, therefore, should be taken to discountenance that false and
+vulgar opinion, that rules are the fetters of genius. They are fetters
+only to men of no genius; as that armor, which upon the strong becomes
+an ornament and a defence, upon the weak and misshapen turns into a
+load, and cripples the body which it was made to protect."</p>
+
+<p>Each succeeding year, on the distribution of the prizes, Sir Joshua
+delivered to the students a discourse of equal merit with this; and
+perhaps we do not hazard too much when we say, that from the whole
+collected, the lovers of belles-lettres and the fine arts will acquire
+juster notions of what is meant by taste in general, and better rules
+for acquiring a correct taste, than from the multitude of those volumes
+which have been professedly written on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>In the autumn of 1785 he went to Brussels, where he expended about
+£1,000 on the purchase of paintings which, having been taken from the
+different monasteries and religious houses in Flanders and Germany, were
+then exposed to sale by the command of the Emperor Joseph. Gainsborough
+and he had engaged to paint each other's portrait; and the canvas for
+both being actually stretched, Sir Joshua gave one sitting to his
+distinguished rival; but to the regret of every admirer of the art, the
+unexpected death of the latter prevented all further progress.</p>
+
+<p>In 1790 he was anxiously desirous to procure the vacant professorship of
+perspective in the academy for Mr. Bonomi, an Italian architect; but
+that artist not having been yet elected an associate, was, of course, no
+academician, and it became necessary to raise him to those positions, in
+order to qualify him for being a professor. Mr. Gilpin being his
+competitor for the associateship, the numbers on the ballot proved
+equal, when the president, on his casting vote, decided the election in
+favor of his friend, who was thereby advanced so far toward the
+professorship. Soon after this, an academic seat being vacant, Sir
+Joshua exerted all his influence to obtain it for Mr. Bonomi; but
+finding himself out-voted by a majority of two to one, he quitted the
+chair with great dissatisfaction, and next day sent to the secretary of
+the academy a formal resignation of the office, which for twenty-one
+years he had filled with honor to himself and to his country. His
+indignation, however, subsiding, he suffered himself to be prevailed
+upon to return to the chair, which, within a year and a half, he was
+again desirous to quit for a better reason.</p>
+
+<p>Finding a disease of languor, occasioned by an enlargement of the liver,
+to which he had for some time been subject, increase, and daily
+expecting a total loss of sight, he wrote a letter to the academy,
+intimating his intention to resign the office of president on account of
+bodily infirmities, which disabled him from executing the duties of it
+to his own satisfaction. The academy received <span class="pagenum"><a id="page253" name="page253"></a>(p. 253)</span> this intelligence
+with the respectful concern due to the talents and virtues of their
+president, and either then did enter, or designed to enter, into a
+resolution honorable to all parties, namely, that a deputation from the
+whole body of the academy should wait upon him, and inform him of their
+wish, that the authority and privileges of the office of president might
+be his during his life, declaring their willingness to permit the
+performance of any of its duties which might be irksome to him by a
+deputy.</p>
+
+<p>From this period Sir Joshua never painted more. The last effort of his
+pencil was the portrait of the honorable Charles James Fox, which was
+executed in his best style, and shows that his fancy, his imagination,
+and his other great powers in the art which he professed, remained
+unabated to the end of his life. When the last touches were given to
+this picture,</p>
+
+<p class="poem30">
+  "The hand of Reynolds fell, to rise no more."</p>
+
+<p>On Thursday, February 23, 1792, the world was deprived of this amiable
+man and excellent artist, at the age of sixty-eight years; a man than
+whom no one, according to Johnson, had passed through life with more
+observations of men and manners. The following character of him is said
+to be the production of Mr. Burke:</p>
+
+<p>"His illness was long, but borne with a mild and cheerful fortitude,
+without the least mixture of anything irritable or querulous, agreeably
+to the placid and even tenor of his whole life. He had, from the
+beginning of his malady, a distinct view of his dissolution, which he
+contemplated with that entire composure which nothing but the innocence,
+integrity, and usefulness of his life, and an unaffected submission to
+the will of Providence, could bestow. In this situation he had every
+consolation from family tenderness, which his tenderness to his family
+had always merited.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on very many accounts, one of the most
+memorable men of his time; he was the first Englishman who added the
+praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In
+taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in richness and
+harmony of coloring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned
+ages. In portrait he went beyond them; for he communicated to that
+branch of the art in which English artists are the most engaged, a
+variety, a fancy, and a dignity derived from the higher branches, which
+even those who professed them in a superior manner did not always
+preserve when they delineated individual nature. His portraits reminded
+the spectator of the invention of history and the amenity of landscape.
+In painting portraits he appears not to be raised upon that platform,
+but to descend to it from a higher sphere. His paintings illustrate his
+lessons, and his lessons seem to be derived from his paintings.</p>
+
+<p>"He possessed the theory as perfectly as the practice of his art. To be
+such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating philosopher.</p>
+
+<p>"In full happiness of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert
+in art, and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed
+by sovereign <span class="pagenum"><a id="page254" name="page254"></a>(p. 254)</span> powers, and celebrated by distinguished poets, his
+native humility, modesty, and candor never forsook him, even on surprise
+or provocation; nor was the least degree of arrogance or assumption
+visible to the most scrutinizing eye in any part of his conduct or
+discourse.</p>
+
+<p>"His talents of every kind&mdash;powerful from nature, and not meanly
+cultivated in letters&mdash;his social virtues in all the relations and all
+the habitudes of life, rendered him the centre of a very great and
+unparalleled variety of agreeable societies, which will be dissipated by
+his death. He had too much merit not to excite some jealousy, too much
+innocence to provoke any enmity. The loss of no man of his time can be
+felt with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow."<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>BENJAMIN WEST<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Martha J. Lamb</span><a id="footnotetag5" name="footnotetag5"></a><a href="#footnote5" title="Go to footnote 5"><span class="smaller">[5]</span></a><br>
+
+(1738-1820)</h3>
+
+<a id="img020" name="img020"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img020.jpg" width="200" height="266" alt="Benjamin West." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>In the wilds of the new world, a century and a half ago, there was,
+apparently, no spot less likely to produce a famous painter than the
+Quaker province of Pennsylvania. And yet, when George Washington was
+only six years old there was born, in the little town of Springfield,
+Chester County, a boy whose interesting and remarkable career from
+infancy to old age has provided one of the most instructive lessons for
+students in art that America affords.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Benjamin West's aptitude for picture-making in his infancy,
+while he was learning to walk and to talk, did not exceed that of hosts
+of other children, in like circumstances, in every generation since his
+time. But many curious things were remembered and told of this baby's
+performances after he had developed a decided talent for reproducing the
+beautiful objects that captivated his eye. It was in the summer of 1745,
+a few months before he was seven years old that his married sister came
+home for a visit, bringing with her an infant daughter. The next morning
+after her arrival, little Benjamin was left to keep the flies off the
+sleeping baby, while his mother and sister went to the garden for
+flowers. The baby smiled in its sleep, and the boy was captivated. He
+must catch that smile and keep it. He found some paper on the table,
+scrambled <span class="pagenum"><a id="page255" name="page255"></a>(p. 255)</span> for a pen, and with red and black ink made a hasty
+but striking picture of the little beauty. He heard his mother
+returning, and conscious of having been in mischief, tried to conceal
+his production; but she detected and captured it, and regarded it long
+and lovingly, exclaiming as her daughter entered, "He has really made a
+likeness of little Sally!" She then caught up the boy in her arms, and
+kissed instead of chiding him, and he&mdash;looking up encouraged&mdash;told her
+he could make the flowers, too, if she would permit. The awakening of
+genius in Benjamin West has been distinctly traced to this incident, as
+the time when he first discovered that he could imitate the forms of
+such objects as pleased his sense of sight. And the incident itself has
+been aptly styled "the birth of fine arts in the New World."</p>
+
+<p>The Quaker boy, in course of years, left the wilderness of America to
+become the president of the Royal Academy in London. His irreproachable
+character not less than his excellence as an artist, gave him commanding
+position among his contemporaries. From first to last he was
+distinguished for his indefatigable industry. The number of his pictures
+has been estimated, by a writer in <i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, at three
+thousand; and Dunlap says that a gallery capable of holding them would
+be four hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and forty feet high&mdash;or a
+wall a quarter of a mile long.</p>
+
+<p>The parents of Benjamin West were sincere and self-respecting, and in
+the language of the times, well-to-do. His mother's grandfather was the
+intimate and confidential friend of William Penn. The family of his
+father claimed direct descent from the Black Prince and Lord Delaware,
+of the time of King Edward III. Colonel James West was the friend and
+companion in arms of John Hampden. When Benjamin West was at work upon
+his great picture of the "Institution of the Garter," the King of
+England was delighted when the Duke of Buckingham assured him that West
+had an ancestral right to a place among the warriors and knights of his
+own painting. The Quaker associates of the parents of the artist, the
+patriarchs of Pennsylvania, regarded their asylum in America as the
+place for affectionate intercourse&mdash;free from all the military
+predilections and political jealousies of Europe. The result was a state
+of society more contented, peaceful, and pleasing than the world had
+ever before exhibited. At the time of the birth of Benjamin West the
+interior settlements in Pennsylvania had attained considerable wealth,
+and unlimited hospitality formed a part of the regular economy of the
+principal families. Those who resided near the highways were in the
+habit, after supper and the religious exercises of the evening, of
+making a large fire in the hallway, and spreading a table with
+refreshments for such travellers as might pass in the night, who were
+expected to step in and help themselves. This was conspicuously the case
+in Springfield. Other acts of liberality were performed by this
+community, to an extent that would have beggared the munificence of the
+old world. Poverty was not known in this region. But whether families
+traced their lineage to ancient and noble sources, or otherwise, their
+pride was so tempered with the meekness of their faith, that it lent a
+singular dignity to their benevolence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page256" name="page256"></a>(p. 256)</span> The Indians mingled freely with the people, and when they paid
+their annual visits to the plantations, raised their wigwams in the
+fields and orchards without asking permission, and were never molested.
+Shortly after Benjamin West's first efforts with pen and ink, a party of
+red men reached and encamped in Springfield. The boy-artist showed them
+his sketches of birds and flowers, which seemed to amuse them greatly.
+They at once proceeded to teach him how to prepare the red and yellow
+colors with which they decorated their ornaments. To these Mrs. West
+added blue, by contributing a piece of indigo. Thus the boy had three
+prismatic colors for his use. What could be more picturesque than the
+scene where the untutored Indian gave the future artist his first lesson
+in mixing paints! These wild men also taught him archery, that he might
+shoot birds for models if he wanted their bright plumage to copy.</p>
+
+<p>The neighbors were attracted by the boy's drawings, and finally a
+relative, Mr. Pennington, a prominent merchant of Philadelphia, came to
+pay the family a visit. He thought the boy's crude pictures were
+wonderful, as he was then only entering his eighth year. When he went
+home he immediately sent the little fellow a box of paints, with six
+engravings by Grevling. John Gait, who wrote from the artist's own
+statements, describes the effect of this gift upon the boy. In going to
+bed he placed the box so near his couch, that he could hug and caress it
+every time he wakened. Next morning he rose early, and taking his paints
+and canvas to the garret, began to work. He went to breakfast, and then
+stole back to his post under the roof, forgetting all about school. When
+dinnertime came he presented himself at table, as usual, but said
+nothing of his occupation. He had been absent from school some days
+before the master called on his parents to inquire what had become of
+him. This led to the discovery of his secret painting, for his mother
+proceeded to the garret and found the truant. She was, however, so
+astonished with the creation upon his canvas, that she took him in her
+arms and kissed him with transports of affection. He had made a
+composition of his own out of two of the engravings&mdash;which he had
+colored from his ideas of the proper tints to be used&mdash;and so perfect
+did the picture appear to Mrs. West that, although half the canvas
+remained to be covered, she would not suffer the child to add another
+touch with his brush. Sixty-seven years afterward, Mr. Gait saw this
+production in the exact state in which it was left, and Mr. West himself
+acknowledged that in subsequent efforts he had never been able to excel
+some of the touches of invention in this first picture.</p>
+
+<p>The first instruction in art which the artist received was from Mr.
+William Williams, a painter in Philadelphia. Young West's first attempt
+at portraiture was at Lancaster, where he painted "The Death of
+Socrates" for William Henry, a gunsmith. He was not yet sixteen, but
+other paintings followed which possessed so much genuine merit, that
+they have been preserved as treasures. One of these is in possession of
+General Meredith Reed, of Paris, France, a descendant of the signer.
+West returned to his home in Springfield, in 1754, to discuss the
+question of his future vocation. He had an inclination for military
+life, and volunteered as a recruit in the old French war; but military
+attractions vanished <span class="pagenum"><a id="page257" name="page257"></a>(p. 257)</span> among the hardships involved, and in 1756,
+when eighteen years old, he established himself in Philadelphia as a
+portrait-painter, his price being "five guineas a head." Two years later
+he went to New York, where he passed eleven months, and was liberally
+employed by the merchants and others. He painted the portrait of Bishop
+Provoost, those of Gerardus Duyekinck and his wife&mdash;full length&mdash;one of
+Mrs. Samuel Breese, and many others, which are in the families of
+descendants, and characteristic examples of his early work.</p>
+
+<p>In 1760 an opportunity offered for him to visit Rome, Italy. He carried
+letters to Cardinal Albani and other celebrities, and as he was very
+handsome and intelligent, and came from a far-away land about which hung
+the perpetual charm of tradition and romance, he soon became the lion of
+the day among the imaginative Italians. It was a novelty then for an
+American to appear in the Eternal City, and the very morning after his
+arrival a curious party followed his steps to observe his pursuit of
+art. He remained in Italy until 1763, and while there he painted, among
+others, his pictures of "Cimon and Iphigenia," and "Angelica and
+Medora." His portrait of Lord Grantham excited much interest, and that
+nobleman's introduction facilitated his visit to London, which proved so
+prolific in results. There was no great living historical painter in
+England just then; and at first there was no sale for West's pictures,
+as it was unfashionable to buy any but "old masters." But the young
+artist was undaunted, and presently attracted attention in high places.
+His picture of "Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus," painted
+for Dr. Drummond, Archbishop of York, secured him the favor of George
+III., and the commission from his majesty to paint the "Departure of
+Regulus from Rome." His untiring industry and gentlemanly habits were
+conspicuous, and may be regarded as among the great secrets of his
+continual advance and public recognition. His "Parting of Hector and
+Andromache," and "Return of the Prodigal Son," were among his notable
+productions of this period. His "Death of General Wolfe" has been, says
+Tuckerman, "truly declared to have created an era in English art, by the
+successful example it initiated of the abandonment of classic costume&mdash;a
+reform advocated by Reynolds, who glories in the popular innovation."
+His characters were clad in the dress of their time. Reynolds said to
+the Archbishop of York: "I foresee that this picture will not only
+become one of the most popular, but will occasion a revolution in art."
+It was purchased by Lord Grosvenor. Among the long list of paintings
+executed by order of the king were "The Death of Chevalier Bayard;"
+"Edward III. Embracing his Son on the Field of Battle at Cressy;" "The
+Installation of the Order of the Garter;" "The Black Prince Receiving
+the King of France and his Son Prisoners at Poictiers," and "Queen
+Philippa Interceding with Edward for the Burgesses of Calais." West was
+one of the founders, in 1768, of the Royal Academy, and succeeded Sir
+Joshua Reynolds as president of the institution in 1792, which post he
+held almost uninterruptedly until 1815.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1780 he proposed a series of pictures on the progress of
+revealed religion, of which there were thirty-six subjects in all, but
+he never executed but <span class="pagenum"><a id="page258" name="page258"></a>(p. 258)</span> twenty-eight of these, owing to the
+mental trouble which befell the king. He then commenced a new series of
+important works, of which "Christ Healing the Sick" was purchased by an
+institution in Great Britain for £3,000, and was subsequently copied for
+the Pennsylvania Hospital. "Penn's Treaty with the Indians" was painted
+for Granville Penn, the scene representing the founding of Pennsylvania.
+West wrote to one of his family that he had taken the liberty of
+introducing in this painting the likeness of his father and his brother
+Thomas. "That is the likeness of our brother," he says, "standing
+immediately behind Penn, leaning on his cane. I need not point out the
+picture of our father, as I believe you will find it in the print from
+memory." Tuckerman says that the work which, in the opinion of many
+critics, best illustrates the skill of West in composition, drawing,
+expression, and dramatic effect, is his "Death on the Pale Horse." His
+"Cupid," owned in Philadelphia, is one of his most effective pictures as
+to color.</p>
+
+<p>The full-length portrait of West, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A.,
+represents the great artist in his character as president of the Royal
+Academy, delivering a lecture on "coloring" to the students. Under his
+right hand may be noticed, standing on an easel, a copy of Raphael's
+cartoon of the "Death of Ananias." The picture of West's face has been
+considered a perfect likeness, but the figure somewhat too large and too
+tall in its effects. A copy of this portrait was made by Charles R.
+Leslie; and Washington Allston also painted a portrait of the artist.
+There exists, it is said, a portrait of West from his own hand, taken
+apparently at about the age of forty, three-quarter length, in Quaker
+costume.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<a id="img021" name="img021"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img021.jpg" width="400" height="608" alt="" title="">
+<p>Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>THORWALDSEN<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Hans Christian Andersen</span><br>
+
+(1770-1844)</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was in Copenhagen, on November 19, 1770, that a carver of figures for
+ships' heads, by name Gottskalk Thorwaldsen, was presented by his wife,
+Karen Grönlund, the daughter of a clergyman in Jutland, with a son, who
+at his baptism received the name of Bertel, or Albert.</p>
+
+<p>The father had come from Iceland, and lived in poor circumstances. They
+dwelt in <i>Lille Grönnegade</i> (Little Green Street), not far from the
+Academy of Arts. The moon has often peeped into their poor room; she has
+told us about it in "A Picture-book without Pictures":</p>
+
+<a id="img022" name="img022"></a>
+<div class="floatright">
+<img src="images/img022.jpg" width="200" height="280" alt="Thorwaldsen." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>"The father and mother slept, but their little son did not sleep; where
+the flowered cotton bed-curtains moved I saw the child peep out. I
+thought at first that he looked at the Bornholm clock, for it was finely
+painted with red and green, and there was a cuckoo on the top; it had
+heavy leaden weights, and the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page259" name="page259"></a>(p. 259)</span> pendulum with its shining brass
+plate went to and fro with a 'tick! tick!' But it was not that he looked
+at; no, it was his mother's spinning-wheel, which stood directly under
+the clock; this was the dearest piece of furniture in the whole house
+for the boy; but he dared not touch it, for if he did, he got a rap over
+the fingers. While his mother spun, he would sit for hours together
+looking at the buzzing spindle and the revolving wheel, and then he had
+his own thoughts. Oh! if he only durst spin that wheel! His father and
+mother slept; he looked at them, he looked at the wheel, and then by
+degrees a little naked foot was stuck out of bed, and then another naked
+foot, then there came two small legs, and, with a jump, he stood on the
+floor. He turned round once more, to see if his parents slept; yes, they
+did, and so he went softly, quite softly, only in his little shirt, up
+to the wheel, and began to spin. The cord flew off, and the wheel then
+ran much quicker. His mother awoke at the same moment; the curtains
+moved; she looked out and thought of the brownie, or another little
+spectral being. 'Have mercy on us!' said she, and in her fear she struck
+her husband in the side; he opened his eyes, rubbed them with his hands,
+and looked at the busy little fellow. 'It is Bertel, woman,' said he."</p>
+
+<p>What the moon relates we see here as the first picture in Thorwaldsen's
+life's gallery; for it is a reflection of the reality. Thorwaldsen has
+himself, when in familiar conversation at Nysöe, told the author almost
+word for word what he, in his "Picture-book," lets the moon say. It was
+one of his earliest remembrances, how he, in his little short shirt, sat
+in the moonlight and spun his mother's wheel, while she, dear soul, took
+him for a little spectre.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago there still lived an old ship-carpenter, who remembered
+the little, light-haired, blue-eyed boy, that came to his father in the
+carving-house at the dock-yard; he was to learn his father's trade; and
+as the latter felt how bad it was not to be able to draw, the boy, then
+eleven years of age, was sent to the drawing-school at the Academy of
+Arts, where he made rapid progress. Two years afterward, Bertel, or
+Albert, as we shall in future call him, was of great assistance to his
+father; nay, he even improved his work.</p>
+
+<p>See the hovering ships on the wharves! The Dannebrog waves, the workmen
+sit in circle under the shade at their frugal breakfasts; but foremost
+stands the principal figure in this picture: it is a boy who cuts with a
+bold hand the lifelike features in the wooden image for the beak-head of
+the vessel. It is the ship's guardian spirit, and, as the first image
+from the hand of Albert Thorwaldsen, it shall wander out into the wide
+world. The eternally swelling sea should baptize it with its waters, and
+hang its wreaths of wet plants around it.</p>
+
+<p>Our next picture advances a step forward. Unobserved among the other
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page260" name="page260"></a>(p. 260)</span> boys, he has now frequented the Academy's school for six years
+already, where, always taciturn and silent, he stood by his
+drawing-board. His answer was "yes" or "no," a nod or a shake of the
+head; but mildness shone from his features, and good-nature was in every
+expression. The picture shows us Albert as a candidate for confirmation.
+He is now seventeen years of age&mdash;not a very young age to ratify his
+baptismal compact; his place at the dean's house is the last among the
+poor boys, for his knowledge is not sufficient to place him higher.
+There had just at that time been an account in the newspapers, that the
+pupil Thorwaldsen had gained the Academy's smaller medal for a
+bas-relief representing a "Cupid Reposing." "Is it your brother that has
+gained the medal?" inquired the dean. "It is myself," said Albert, and
+the clergyman looked kindly on him, placed him first among all the boys,
+and from that time always called him Monsieur Thorwaldsen. Oh! how
+deeply did that "Monsieur" then sound in his mind! As he has often said
+since, it sounded far more powerfully than any title that kings could
+give him; he never afterward forgot it.</p>
+
+<p>In a small house in Aabeuraa&mdash;the street where Holberg lets his poor
+poets dwell&mdash;lived Albert Thorwaldsen with his parents, and divided his
+time between the study of art and assisting his father. The Academy's
+lesser gold was then the prize to be obtained for sculpture. Our artist
+was now twenty years of age; his friends knew his abilities better than
+himself, and they compelled him to enter on the task. The subject
+proposed was, "Heliodorus Driven out of the Temple."</p>
+
+<p>We are now in Charlottenburg; but the little chamber in which
+Thorwaldsen lately sat to make his sketch is empty, and he, chased by
+the demons of fear and distrust, hastens down the narrow back-stairs
+with the intention not to return. Nothing is accidental in the life of a
+great genius; an apparent insignificance is a God's guiding finger.
+Thorwaldsen was to complete his task. Who is it that stops him on the
+dark stairs? One of the professors just comes that way, speaks to him,
+questions, admonishes him. He returns, and in four hours the sketch is
+finished, and the gold medal won. This was on August 15, 1791.</p>
+
+<p>Count Ditlew de Reventlow, minister of state, saw the young artist's
+work, and became his protector; he placed his own name at the head of a
+subscription that enabled Thorwaldsen to devote his time to the study of
+his art. Two years afterward the large gold medal was to be contended
+for at the Academy, the successful candidate thereby gaining the right
+to a travelling <i>stipendium</i>. Thorwaldsen was again the first; but
+before he entered on his travels, it was deemed necessary to extend that
+knowledge which an indifferent education at school had left him in want
+of. He read, studied, and the Academy gave him its support;
+acknowledgment smiled on him, a greater and more spiritual sphere lay
+open to him.</p>
+
+<p>A portrait figure stands now before us; it is that of a Dane, the
+learned and severe Zoega, to whom the young artist is specially
+recommended, but who only sees in him a common talent; whose words are
+only those of censure, and whose eye sees only a servile imitation of
+the antique in his works. Strictly honest in his judgment, according to
+his own ideas, is this man, who should be Thorwaldsen's guide.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page261" name="page261"></a>(p. 261)</span> We let three years glide away after the arrival of Thorwaldsen,
+and ask Zoega what he now says of Albert, or, as the Italians call him,
+Alberto, and the severe man shakes his head and says: "There is much to
+blame, little to be satisfied with, and diligent he is not!" Yet he was
+diligent in a high degree; but genius is foreign to a foreign mind. "The
+snow had just then thawed from my eyes," he has himself often repeated.
+The drawings of the Danish painter Carstens formed one of those
+spiritual books that shed its holy baptism over that growing genius. The
+little <i>atelier</i> looked like a battle-field, for roundabout were broken
+statues. Genius formed them often in the midnight hours; despondency
+over their faults broke them in the day.</p>
+
+<p>The three years, for which he had received a <i>stipendium</i>, were as if
+they had flown away, and as yet he had produced nothing. The time for
+his return drew nigh. One work, however, he must complete, that it might
+not with justice be said in Denmark, "Thorwaldsen has quite wasted his
+time in Rome." Doubting his genius just when it embraced him most
+affectionately; not expecting a victory, while he already stood on its
+open road, he modelled "Jason who has Gained the Golden Fleece." It was
+this that Thorwaldsen would have gained in the kingdom of arts, and
+which he now thought he must resign. The figure stood there in clay,
+many eyes looked carelessly on it, and&mdash;he broke it to pieces!</p>
+
+<p>It was in April, 1801, that his return home was fixed, in company with
+Zoega. It was put off until the autumn. During this time "Jason"
+occupied all his thoughts. A new, a larger figure of the hero was
+formed, an immortal work; but it had not then been announced to the
+world, nor understood by it. "Here is something more than common!" was
+said by many. Even the man to whom all paid homage, the illustrious
+Canova, started, and exclaimed: "Quest' opera di quel giovane Danese è
+fatta in uno stilo nuovo, e grandioso!" Zoega smiled. "It is bravely
+done!" said he. The Danish songstress, Frederikke Brunn, was then in
+Rome and sang enthusiastically about Thorwaldsen's "Jason." She assisted
+the artist, so that he was enabled to get this figure cast in plaster;
+for he himself had no more money than was just sufficient for his
+expenses home.</p>
+
+<p>The last glass of wine had been already drunk as a farewell, the boxes
+packed, and the <i>vetturino's</i> carriage was before the door at daybreak;
+the boxes were fastened behind. Then came a fellow-traveller&mdash;the
+sculptor, Hagemann, who was returning to his native city, Berlin. His
+passport was not ready. Their departure must be put off until the next
+day; and Thorwaldsen promised, although the <i>vetturino</i> complained and
+abused him, to remain so long. He stayed&mdash;stayed to win an immortal name
+on earth, and cast a lustre over Denmark.</p>
+
+<p>Though forty years resident in Rome, rich and independent, he lived and
+worked with the thought of once returning home to Denmark, there to rest
+himself; unaccustomed to the great comforts of other rich artists in
+Rome, he lived a bachelor's life. Was his heart, then, no longer open to
+love since his first departure from Copenhagen? A thousand beautiful
+Cupids in marble will tell us how warmly that heart beat. Love belongs
+to life's mysteries.</p>
+
+<p>We know that Thorwaldsen left a daughter in Rome, whose birth he
+acknowledged; <span class="pagenum"><a id="page262" name="page262"></a>(p. 262)</span> we also know that more than one female of quality
+would willingly have given her hand to the great artist. The year before
+his first return to Denmark he lay ill at Naples, and was nursed by an
+English lady who felt the most ardent affection for him; and, from that
+feeling of gratitude which was awakened in him, he immediately consented
+to their union. When he had recovered and afterward returned to Rome,
+this promise preyed on his mind, he felt that he was not now formed to
+be a husband, acknowledged that gratitude was not love, and that they
+were not suited for each other; after a long combat with himself, he
+wrote and informed her of his determination. Thorwaldsen was never
+married.</p>
+
+<p>The following trait is as characteristic of his heart as of his whole
+personality. One day, while in Rome, there came a poor countryman to
+him, an artisan, who had long been ill. He came to say farewell, and to
+thank him for the money that he and others of his countrymen had
+subscribed together, with which he was to reach home.</p>
+
+<p>"But you will not walk the whole way?" said Thorwaldsen.</p>
+
+<p>"I am obliged to do so," replied the man.</p>
+
+<p>"But you are still too weak to walk&mdash;you cannot bear the fatigue, nor
+must you do it!" said he.</p>
+
+<p>The man assured him of the necessity of doing so.</p>
+
+<p>Thorwaldsen went and opened a drawer, took out a handful of <i>scudi</i> and
+gave them to him, saying, "See, now you will ride the whole way!"</p>
+
+<p>The man thanked him, but assured him that his gift would not be more
+than sufficient to carry him to Florence.</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" said Thorwaldsen, clapping him on the shoulder, as he went a
+second time to the drawer and took out another handful. The man was
+grateful in the highest degree, and was going. "Now you can ride the
+whole way home and be comfortable on the way," said he, as he followed
+the man to the door.</p>
+
+<p>"I am very glad," said the man. "God bless you for it! but to ride the
+whole way requires a little capital."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, tell me how great that must be," he asked, and looked
+earnestly at him. The man in a modest manner named the requisite sum,
+and Thorwaldsen went a third time to the drawer, counted out the sum,
+accompanied him to the door, pressed his hand, and repeated, "But now
+you will ride, for you have not strength to walk!"</p>
+
+<p>Our artist did not belong to the class of great talkers; it was only in
+a small circle that he could be brought to say anything, but then it was
+always with humor and gayety. A few energetic exclamations of his are
+preserved. A well-known sculptor, expressing himself one day with much
+self-feeling, entered into a dispute with Thorwaldsen, and set his own
+works over the latter's. "You may bind my hands behind me," said
+Thorwaldsen, "and I will bite the marble out with my teeth better than
+you can carve it."</p>
+
+<p>Thorwaldsen possessed specimens in plaster of all his works; these,
+together with the rich marble statues and bas-reliefs which he had
+collected of his own <span class="pagenum"><a id="page263" name="page263"></a>(p. 263)</span> accord, without orders, and the number of
+paintings that he every year bought of young artists, formed a treasure
+that he wished to have in his proper home, Copenhagen. Therefore, when
+the Danish government sent vessels of war to the Mediterranean, in order
+to fetch the works that were ready for the palace or the churches, he
+always sent a number of his own things with them. Denmark was to inherit
+these treasures of art; and, in order to see them collected in a place
+worthy of them, a zeal was awakened in the nation to build a museum for
+their reception. A committee of his Danish admirers and friends sent out
+a requisition to the people, that everyone might give their mite; many a
+poor servant-girl and many a peasant gave theirs, so that a good sum was
+soon collected. Frederick VI. gave ground for the building, and the
+erection thereof was committed to the architect, Bindesbol.</p>
+
+<p>Thorwaldsen, in 1838, had attained universal fame. The frigate Rota was
+dispatched to bring a cargo of his works to Copenhagen, and he was to
+arrive at the same time, perhaps to remain in Denmark. Close to Presto
+Bay, surrounded by wood-grown banks, lies Nysöe, the principal seat of
+the barony of Stampenborg, a place which, through Thorwaldsen, has
+become remarkable in Denmark. The open strand, the beautiful beech
+woods, even the little town seen through the orchards, at some few
+hundred paces from the mansion, make the place worthy of a visit on
+account of its truly Danish scenery. Here Thorwaldsen found his best
+home in Denmark; here he seemed to increase his fame, and here a series
+of his last beautiful bas-reliefs were produced.</p>
+
+<p>Baron Stampe was one of nature's noblest-minded men; his hospitality and
+his lady's daughterly affection for Thorwaldsen opened a home for him
+here, a comfortable and good one. A great energetic power in the
+baroness incited his activity; she attended him with a daughter's care,
+elicited from him every little wish, and executed it. Directly after his
+first visit to Nysöe, a short tour to Moen's chalk cliffs was arranged,
+and during the few days that were passed there, a little <i>atelier</i> was
+erected in the garden at Nysöe, close to the canal which half encircles
+the principal building; here, and in a corner room of the mansion, on
+the first floor facing the sea, most of Thorwaldsen's works, during the
+last years of his life, were executed: "Christ Bearing the Cross," "The
+Entry into Jerusalem," "Rebecca at the Well," his own portrait-statue,
+Oehlenschlæger's and Holberg's busts, etc. Baroness Stampe was in
+faithful attendance on him, lent him a helping hand, and read aloud for
+him from Holberg. Driving abroad, weekly concerts, and in the evenings
+his fondest play, "The Lottery," were what most easily excited him, and
+on these occasions he would say many amusing things. He has represented
+the Stampe family in two bas-reliefs: in the one, representing the
+mother, the two daughters, and the youngest son, is the artist himself;
+the other exhibits the father and the two eldest sons.</p>
+
+<p>All circles sought to attract Thorwaldsen; he was at every great
+festival, in every great society, and every evening in the theatre by
+the side of Oehlenschlæger. His greatness was allied to a mildness, a
+straightforwardness, that in the highest degree fascinated the stranger
+who approached him for the first <span class="pagenum"><a id="page264" name="page264"></a>(p. 264)</span> time. His <i>atelier</i> in
+Copenhagen was visited daily; he therefore felt himself more comfortable
+and undisturbed at Nysöe. Baron Stampe and his family accompanied him to
+Italy in 1841, when he again visited that country. The whole journey,
+which was by way of Berlin, Dresden, Frankfort, the Rhine towns, and
+Munich, was a continued triumphal procession. The winter was passed in
+Rome, and the Danes there had a home in which they found a welcome.</p>
+
+<p>The following year Thorwaldsen was again in Denmark, and at his favorite
+place, Nysöe. On Christmas eve he here formed his beautiful bas-relief,
+"Christmas Joys in Heaven," which Oehlenschlæger consecrated with a
+poem. The last birthday of his life was celebrated here; the performance
+of one of Holberg's vaudevilles was arranged, and strangers invited; yet
+the morning of that day was the homeliest, when only the family and the
+author of this memoir, who had written a merry song for the occasion,
+which was still wet on the paper, placed themselves outside the artist's
+door, each with a pair of tongs, a gong, or a bottle on which they
+rubbed a cork, as an accompaniment, and sung the song as a morning
+greeting. Thorwaldsen, in his morning gown, opened the door, laughing;
+he twirled his black Raphael's cap, took a pair of tongs himself, and
+accompanied us, while he danced round and joined the others in the loud
+"hurra!"</p>
+
+<p>A charming bas-relief, "The Genius of Poetry," was just completed; it
+was the same that Thorwaldsen, on the last day of his life, bequeathed
+to Oehlenschlæger, and said, "It may serve as a medal for you."</p>
+
+<p>On Sunday, March 24, 1844, a small party of friends were assembled at
+the residence of Baron Stampe, in Copenhagen. Thorwaldsen was there and
+was unusually lively, told stories, and spoke of a journey that he
+intended to make to Italy in the course of the summer. Cahn's tragedy of
+"Griseldis" was to be performed for the first time that evening at the
+theatre. Tragedy was not his favorite subject, but comedy, and
+particularly the comedies of Holberg; but it was something new that he
+was to see, and it had become a sort of habit with him to pass the
+evening in the theatre. About six o'clock, therefore, he went to the
+theatre alone. The overture had begun; on entering he shook hands with a
+few of his friends, took his usual seat, stood up again to allow one to
+pass him, sat down again, bent his head, and was no more! The music
+continued. Those nearest to him thought he was only in a swoon, and he
+was borne out; but he was numbered with the dead.</p>
+
+<p>The mournful intelligence of his death soon spread through the country
+and through all lands; funeral dirges were sung and funeral festivals
+were arranged in Berlin and Rome; in the Danish theatre, whence his soul
+took its flight to God there was a festival; the place where he sat was
+decorated with crape and laurel wreaths, and a poem by Heiberg was
+recited, in which his greatness and his death were alluded to.</p>
+
+<p>The day before Thorwaldsen's death the interior of his tomb was
+finished, for it was his wish that his remains might rest in the centre
+of the court-yard of the museum; it was then walled round, and he begged
+that there might be a marble edge around it, and a few rose-trees and
+flowers planted on it as his monument. <span class="pagenum"><a id="page265" name="page265"></a>(p. 265)</span> The whole building, with
+the rich treasures which he presented to his fatherland, will be his
+monument; his works are to be placed in the rooms of the square building
+that surrounds the open court-yard, and which, both internally and
+externally, are painted in the Pompeian style. His arrival in the roads
+of Copenhagen and landing at the custom-house form the subjects depicted
+in the compartments under the windows of one side of the museum. Through
+centuries to come will nations wander to Denmark; not allured by our
+charming green islands, with their fresh beech-woods alone&mdash;no, but to
+see these works and this tomb.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, one place more that the stranger will visit, the
+little spot at Nysöe where his <i>atelier</i> stands, and where the tree
+bends its branches over the canal to the solitary swan which he fed. The
+name of Thorwaldsen will be remembered in England by his statues of
+Jason and Byron; in Switzerland, by his "recumbent lion;" in Roeskilde,
+by his figure of Christian the Fourth. It will live in every breast in
+which a love of art is enkindled.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET<a id="footnotetag6" name="footnotetag6"></a><a href="#footnote6" title="Go to footnote 6"><span class="smaller">[6]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Clarence Cook</span><br>
+
+(1814-1875)</h3>
+
+<a id="img023" name="img023"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img023.jpg" width="250" height="237" alt="Jean-François Millet." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>We read that on one occasion, when a picture by some Dutch artist,
+representing peasants at their sports, was shown to Louis XIV., he
+angrily exclaimed, "Take away those vermin!" Such subjects had never
+been chosen by French artists, nor indeed had they been seen anywhere in
+Europe before the Dutch artists began to paint them in the seventeenth
+century. The Italian painters of the early and the later Renaissance,
+working almost exclusively for the churches, or for the palaces of
+pleasure-loving princes, did not consider the peasant or the laboring
+man, by himself, a proper subject for his art. If he were introduced at
+any time into picture or bas-relief, it was only as a necessary actor in
+some religious story, such as "The Adoration of the Shepherds," or in
+the representations of the months or the seasons, as in the Fountain of
+the Public Square at Perugia, where we see the peasant engaged in the
+labors of the farm or vineyard: cutting the wheat, gathering in the
+grapes, and treading out the wine, and, in the later season, dressing
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page266" name="page266"></a>(p. 266)</span> the hog he has been killing; for in those less sophisticated
+times, Art, no more than Poetry, despised the ruder side of rustic life.</p>
+
+<p>The German artists of the sixteenth century introduced peasants and
+peasant-life into their designs whenever the subject admitted. Albert
+Dürer was especially given to this, and it often gives a particular
+savor, sometimes a half-humorous expression, to his treatment of even
+religious subjects; as where, in his design, "The Repose in Egypt," he
+shows Joseph, the foster-father of Jesus, making a water-trough out of a
+huge log, and a bevy of cherub-urchins about him gathering up the chips.
+Mary, meanwhile, as the peasant mother, sits by, spinning and rocking
+the cradle of the Holy Child with her foot.</p>
+
+<p>But these examples only serve to make clearer the fact that in the
+earlier times there was no place found in art for the representation of
+the laboring man, whether in the field or in the shop, except as an
+illustration of some allegorical or religious theme. Nor in the Dutch
+pictures that Louis XIV. despised, and that our own time finds so
+valuable for their artistic qualities, was there anything outside of
+their beauty or richness of tone or color to redeem their coarseness and
+vulgarity. There was no poetry in the treatment, nor any sympathy with
+anything higher than the grossest guzzling, fighting, and horseplay. The
+great monarch, who, according to his lights, was a man of delicacy and
+refinement, was certainly right in contemning such subjects, and it is
+perhaps to his credit that he did not care enough for "Art for Art's
+sake" to excuse the brutality of the theme for the sake of the beauty of
+the painting.</p>
+
+<p>The next appearance of the peasant in art was of a very different sort,
+and represented a very different state of social feeling from the
+"peasants" of the Dutch painters. In the Salon of 1850 there appeared a
+picture called "The Sower" and representing a young peasant sowing
+grain. There was nothing in the subject to connect it particularly with
+any religious symbolism&mdash;not even with the Parable of the Sower who went
+forth to sow; nor with any series of personifications of the months.
+This was a simple peasant of the Norman coast, in his red blouse and
+blue trousers, his legs wrapped in straw, and his weather-beaten hat,
+full of holes. He marches with the rhythmic step made necessary by his
+task, over the downs that top the high cliffs, followed by a cloud of
+crows that pounce upon the grain as he sows it. At first sight there
+would seem to be nothing in this picture to call for particular notice;
+but the public, the artists, the critics, were with one accord strongly
+drawn to it. Something in the picture appealed to feelings deeper than
+mere curiosity, and an interest was excited such as did not naturally
+belong to a picture of a man sowing a field of grain. The secret was
+this: that a man born and bred in the midst of laboring people,
+struggling with the hard necessities of life&mdash;himself a laborer, and one
+who knew by experience all the lights and shades of the laborer's
+life&mdash;had painted this picture out of his own deep sympathy with his
+fellows, and to please himself by reproducing the most significant and
+poetical act in the life of the farmer.</p>
+
+<p>The painter of this picture, the first man of our time to give the
+laborer in the fields and on the farm a place in art, and to set people
+to thinking about him, <span class="pagenum"><a id="page267" name="page267"></a>(p. 267)</span> as a man, not merely as an illustration
+of some sacred text, or an image in a book of allegories, was
+Jean-François Millet, known as the peasant painter of peasants.</p>
+
+<p>He was born at Gruchy, a small hamlet on the coast of Normandy, where
+his family, well known in the region for several generations, lived by
+the labor of their hands, cultivating their fields and exercising the
+simple virtues of that pastoral life, without ambition and without
+desire for change. This content was a part of the religion of the
+country and must not be looked upon as arguing a low state of
+intelligence or of manners. Of their neighbors we have no account, but
+the Millet household contained many of the elements that go to sustain
+the intellectual no less than the spiritual life. If there was plain
+living, there was high thinking; there were books and of the best, and
+more than one member of the circle valued learning for its own sake.
+Millet owed much to his grandmother, a woman of great strength of
+character and of a deeply religious nature. As his godmother she gave
+him his name, calling him Jean, after his father, and François, after
+Saint Francis of Assisi. As is usual in Catholic countries, the boy was
+called after the name of his patron saint, and in the case of Millet,
+Saint Francis, the ardent lover of nature, the friend of the birds and
+of all the animate creation, was well chosen as the guardian of one who
+was to prove himself, all his life, the passionate lover of nature.</p>
+
+<p>The boyhood of Millet was passed at home. He had no schooling except
+some small instruction in Latin from the village priest and from a
+neighboring curate, but he made good use of what he learned. He worked
+on the farm with his father and his men, ploughing, harrowing, sowing,
+reaping, mowing, winnowing&mdash;in a word, sharing actively and contentedly
+in all the work that belongs to the farmer's life. And in the long
+winter evenings or in the few hours of rest that the day afforded, he
+would hungrily devour the books that were at hand&mdash;the "Lives of the
+Saints," the "Confessions of Saint Augustine," the "Life of Saint
+Jerome," and especially his letters, which he read and re-read all his
+life. These and the philosophers of Port Royal, with Bossuet, and
+Fénelon, with the Bible and Virgil, were his mental food. Virgil and the
+Bible he read always in the Latin; he was so familiar with them both
+that, when a man, his biographer, Sensier, says he never met a more
+eloquent translator of these two books. When the time came, therefore,
+for Millet to go up to Paris, he was not, as has been said by some
+writer, an ignorant peasant, but a well-taught man who had read much and
+digested what he had read, and knew good books from bad. The needs of
+his narrow life absorbed him so seriously that the seeds of art that lay
+hid in his nature found a way to the light with difficulty. But his
+master-passion was soon to assert itself, and, as in all such cases, in
+an unexpected manner.</p>
+
+<p>Millet's attempts at drawing had hitherto been confined to studies made
+in hours stolen from rest. He had copied the engravings found in an old
+family Bible, and he had drawn, from his window, the garden, the stable,
+the field running down to the edge of the high cliff, and with the sea
+in the horizon, and he <span class="pagenum"><a id="page268" name="page268"></a>(p. 268)</span> had sometimes tried his hand at
+sketching the cows and sheep in the pasture. But he was now to take a
+step in advance. Coming home one day from church, he walked behind an
+old man bent with age and feebleness, painfully making his way. The
+foreshortening and the movement of the man's figure struck the boy
+forcibly, and in a flash he discovered the secret of perspective and the
+mystery of planes. He ran quickly home, got a pencil and drew from
+memory a picture of the old man, so lively in its resemblance that as
+soon as his parents saw it, they recognized it and fell a-laughing. Talk
+with his boy revealed to the father his son's strong desire to be an
+artist; but before such a serious step could be taken, it was necessary
+to consult with some person better able to judge than any one in the
+Millet household. Cherbourg, the nearest large town, was the natural
+place where to seek advice; thither Millet and his father repaired, the
+boy with two drawings under his arm that he had made for the occasion,
+and these were submitted to the critical eye of Mouchel, an old pupil of
+David, who eked out the scanty living he got by painting by giving
+lessons in drawing. When the two drawings made by young Millet were
+shown him he refused to believe they were the work of the lad of
+fifteen. The very subjects chosen by the boy showed something out of the
+common. One was a sort of home idyl: two shepherds were in a little
+orchard close, one playing on the flute, the other listening; some sheep
+were browsing near. The men wore the blouse and wooden shoes of Millet's
+country; the orchard was one that belonged to his father. The other
+drawing showed a starry night. A man was coming from the house with
+loaves of bread in his hand which he gave to another man who eagerly
+received them. Underneath, in Latin, were the words from St. Luke:
+"Though he will not rise and give him because he is his friend, yet
+because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he
+needeth." A friend of Millet's, who saw these drawings thirty years
+after, said they were the work of a man who already knew the great
+significance of art, the effects it was capable of, and what were its
+resources.</p>
+
+<p>Mouchel consented to receive Millet as a pupil, but, as it proved, he
+could do little for him in the way of direct teaching. He left the boy
+free to follow his own devices. He said to him: "Do whatever you wish;
+choose whatever model you find in my studio that pleases you, and study
+in the Museum." This might not be the course to follow with every boy,
+but Mouchel had the artist's penetration and knew with whom he had to
+deal.</p>
+
+<p>The death of Millet's father interrupted his studies and he returned
+home for awhile to help his mother on the farm. But it was thought best
+that he should keep on with the work he had begun. The grandmother urged
+his return: "My François," she said, "we must accept the will of God.
+Thy father, my son, Jean-Louis, said that you were to be a painter; obey
+him, and go back to Cherbourg."</p>
+
+<p>Millet did not need persuasion from his family. Friends in Cherbourg
+urged him to come back, promised him commissions, and assured him a
+place in the studio of Langlois, a painter of a higher grade than
+Mouchel, who had recently set up his easel in the town. Once more
+established at Cherbourg Millet continued <span class="pagenum"><a id="page269" name="page269"></a>(p. 269)</span> his studies after the
+same easy fashion with Langlois as with his former master. Langlois, who
+was as much impressed by his pupil's talent as Mouchel had been and
+willing to serve him, made a personal appeal to the mayor and council,
+asking that Millet, as a promising young artist and one likely to do
+credit to the town, might be assisted in going to Paris to study under
+better advantages than he could enjoy at home.</p>
+
+<p>On the strength of this appeal, the council of Cherbourg agreed to allow
+Millet an annuity of four hundred francs, equal to eighty dollars. With
+this small sum, and the addition of two hundred francs given him at
+parting by his mother and grandmother, making one hundred and twenty
+dollars in all, Millet left his quiet life in Normandy behind him and
+set out for Paris, where, as his biographer, Sensier, says, he was to
+pass as a captive the richest years of his life.</p>
+
+<p>Millet was twenty-two years old when he went first to Paris and he
+remained there, with occasional visits to Gruchy and Cherbourg, for the
+next thirteen years. Paris was, from the first, more than distasteful to
+him. He was thoroughly unhappy there. Outside the Louvre and the studios
+of a few artist-friends, he found nothing that appealed to what was
+deepest in him. His first experiences were unusually bitter. The
+struggle with poverty was hard to bear, but perhaps a more serious
+drawback was his want of an aim in art, of a substantial reason, so to
+speak, for the profession he had chosen, leading him to one false move
+after another in search of a subject. Unformed and unrecognized in his
+mind lay the desire to express in art the life he had left behind him in
+Normandy; but it was long before he arrived at the knowledge of himself
+and of his true vocation. He seems to have had no one in Paris to guide
+or direct him, and he rather stumbled into the studio of Delaroche, than
+entered it deliberately. He made but a brief stay there, and although he
+won the respect of his master, who would willingly have retained him as
+pupil and assistant, he was conscious that he learned nothing from
+Delaroche; and accordingly, in company with another pupil, Marolles, who
+had taken a great liking to him, he left the studio without much
+ceremony; and the two friends improvised a studio and a lodging for
+themselves in a garret in a poor quarter of the city, and began their
+search for a means of pleasing the public. But the way was not opened to
+either of them; they could not sell what they painted, and they were
+reduced to serious straits. It was not the fault of the public. Marolles
+was but an indifferent painter at any time, and Millet would not have
+blamed the public for its indifference to subjects in which he himself
+took no real interest.</p>
+
+<p>Millet was at a loss what to do for bread. His mind ran back continually
+to his rural life at Gruchy. "What if I should paint men mowing or
+winnowing?" he said to Marolles; "their movements are picturesque!" "You
+could not sell them," replied his friend. "Well, then, what do you say
+to fauns and dryads?" "Who in Paris cares for fauns and dryads?" "What
+shall I do, then?" said Millet in despair. "What does the public like?"
+"It likes Boucher's Cupids, Watteau's Pastorals, nudities, anecdotes,
+and copies of the past." It was hard for Millet, but hunger drove him.
+He would not appeal to his <span class="pagenum"><a id="page270" name="page270"></a>(p. 270)</span> family, life was as difficult for
+them as for him. But before yielding he would make one more trial,
+painting something from his own fancy. He made a small picture
+representing "Charity"&mdash;a sad-faced woman cherishing three children in
+her arms. He carried it to the dealers: not one of them would buy it. He
+came back to Marolles. "Give me a subject," he said, "and I will paint
+it."</p>
+
+<p>To this time belong the pictures for which Millet has been much
+criticised by people who did not appreciate his position. Some of them
+recall Watteau, others Boucher, but they have a charm, a grace of their
+own; they are far from being copies of these men. Others were fanciful
+subjects to which Marolles gave names likely to attract the notice of
+picture-buyers in search of a subject. But all was in vain. The dealers
+were obstinate: the public unsympathetic. The highest price that was
+offered was never above twenty francs, or five dollars. Yet with this in
+his pocket, Millet deemed himself already on the high road to fortune,
+and saw the day not distant when he could paint at his pleasure the
+rustic subjects, memories of his home, that had always been in his mind.</p>
+
+<p>Several times in the course of this hard novitiate, Millet had escaped
+from Paris for a visit to his own country. At one time he had remained
+for a year at Cherbourg, where he painted portraits for such small sums
+as he could get, and here he and one of his sitters, a young girl of
+Cherbourg, falling in love with one another, were married. The marriage
+only added, as might have been foreseen, to Millet's troubles: his
+wife's health was always delicate; after her marriage it became worse,
+and she died four years after in Paris. Not long after her death Millet
+married again, and this proved a fortunate venture. His wife came with
+him to Paris, and the struggle with life began anew. The turning-point
+in the long period of Millet's uncertainties and disappointments with
+himself came in 1849, when the political troubles of the time, and the
+visit of the cholera, combined to drive him and his family from Paris.
+They took refuge at Barbizon, a small hamlet on the outskirts of the
+Forest of Fontainebleau, and here, in the place that was to be forever
+associated with his name and work, Millet passed, with few
+interruptions, the remaining years of his life.</p>
+
+<p>The phrase so often heard to-day, "The Barbizon School," is rather wider
+than a strict interpretation would warrant, since Millet and Rousseau
+were the only ones of the group who lived in the village. Corot was not
+acquainted with Millet. Decamps was never in Millet's house except as a
+rare visitor to his studio. Diaz lived in Paris. Jacque, the painter of
+sheep, was a friend of Millet, and for a time at least lived at Barbizon
+in the house where he lodged before he procured a home of his own. The
+artistic relationship between these artists is slight, except in the
+case of Rousseau and Diaz, and even there it is only occasionally to be
+detected. All these men, with Dupré, Courbet and Delacroix, were counted
+heretics in art by the Academy and the official critics, and as Millet
+was the most marked figure in the group and was greatly admired and
+respected by all who composed it, it was perhaps natural that they
+should be considered by the public as disciples of the peasant painter
+of Barbizon.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, at Barbizon, Millet lived for the remaining twenty-seven
+years of <span class="pagenum"><a id="page271" name="page271"></a>(p. 271)</span> his life, dividing his day between the labors of his
+farm in the morning hours, painting in his studio in the afternoon&mdash;he
+always preferred the half-light for painting&mdash;and in the evening
+enjoying the society of his wife and children and of such friends as
+might join the circle. Occasional visits to Paris, to the galleries, and
+to the studios of his artist-circle, kept him in touch with the world to
+which he belonged. His books, too, were his unfailing companions, though
+he never cared to stray far beyond the circle of his youthful
+friendships, Homer, and Virgil, and especially the Bible, which he
+looked upon as the book of painters, the inexhaustible source of the
+noblest and most touching subjects, capable of expression in the
+grandest forms.</p>
+
+<p>But it was in the rural life about him, the life in which he actively
+shared, that he found the world wherein he could pour all his thoughts,
+feelings, and experiences with the certainty of seeing them emerge in
+forms answering to his conception. It was not until he came to Barbizon
+that he began truly to live the artist-life as he understood it, where
+the work is a faithful reflection of the only things a man really cares
+for&mdash;the things he knows by heart. In the pictures painted at Barbizon,
+and in the multitude of slight sketches for subjects never painted, with
+finished drawings and pastels, Millet has composed a series of moral
+eclogues well worthy of a place with those of Virgil and Theocritus. All
+the world knows them; all the world loves them: the "Mother Feeding Her
+Children," "The Peasant Grafting," "The First Step," "Going to Work,"
+"The Sower," "The Gleaners," "The Sheep-Shearing," "The Angelus"&mdash;even
+to name them would carry us far beyond our limits. They made the fame of
+Millet while he still lived, although the pecuniary reward of his labors
+was not what they deserved nor what it would have been had he earlier
+found his true way or had his life been prolonged to the normal limit.
+He died in 1875 at the age of sixty-one. Since his death more than one
+of his pictures has been sold at a price exceeding all that he earned
+during his whole lifetime. Seen from the world's side, there was much in
+his life that was sad and discouraging, but from the spiritual side
+there was far more to cheer and uplift. His private life was honorable
+and happy, his friends were many and among the chosen ones of the time,
+and he had the happiness of seeing his work accepted and rated at
+something like its true worth before he left it.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="right">
+<img src="images/sig001.jpg" width="250" height="59" alt="Signature of the author." title="">
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page272" name="page272"></a>(p. 272)</span> MEISSONIER<a id="footnotetag7" name="footnotetag7"></a><a href="#footnote7" title="Go to footnote 7"><span class="smaller">[7]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Clarence Cook</span><br>
+
+(1813-1891)</h3>
+
+
+<a id="img024" name="img024"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img024.jpg" width="250" height="303" alt="Meissonier." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Among the many beautiful paintings collected in the Metropolitan Museum
+of Art of New York, there is one that always attracts a crowd, on the
+free-days and holidays when the general public finds admission. This is
+the picture called simply, "Friedland: 1807," and representing the
+soldiers of Napoleon saluting the emperor at the battle of Friedland. It
+was painted by Jean Louis Meissonier for the late A. T. Stewart, of New
+York, who paid for it what seemed a very large sum, $60,000; but when
+Mr. Stewart died, and his pictures were sold at auction, this painting
+brought the still larger sum of $66,000, showing that a great many
+people admired the work, and were willing to pay a good price for it.
+The picture was bought by Judge Hilton, of New York, and was presented
+by him to the Metropolitan Museum as a memorial of the long friendship
+that had existed between himself and Mr. Stewart. No doubt the facts of
+the high price paid for the picture, and that a gift of such value
+should be made to the Museum, have caused a great many people to look at
+the painting with more interest than they would, had the circumstances
+been less uncommon. But a great many more people find this picture
+interesting for its own sake; they are moved rather by the spirited way
+in which it tells its story, and find their curiosity excited by the
+studious accuracy shown by the artist in the painting of every detail.</p>
+
+<p>The scene of the action is a field that has been planted with grain
+which now lies trampled under the feet of men and horses. The
+turning-point in the battle has been reached, and in the joy of coming
+victory, the body-guard of the emperor, spurring their jaded horses to
+the hillock where he sits on his white charger surrounded by his mounted
+staff, salute him with loud cries as they rush madly by him. Napoleon,
+calm and self-possessed, returns the salute, but it is plain his
+thoughts are busier with the battle that is raging in the distance than
+with these demonstrations of his body-guard's loyalty. This picture was
+the favorite work of the artist; he calls it, "the life and joy of my
+studio," and he is said to have worked on it at intervals during fifteen
+years.</p>
+
+<a id="img025" name="img025"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img025.jpg" width="600" height="412" alt="" title="">
+<p>Meissonier's Atelier.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Somebody has said that "genius" means nothing but "taking pains." In
+that case, Meissonier must have been a man of genius, for, with
+whatever he painted, <span class="pagenum"><a id="page273" name="page273"></a>(p. 273)</span> were it small or great, he took infinite
+pains, never content until he had done everything in his power to show
+things exactly as they were. Thus, in the picture we have just been
+describing, we may be sure that we know, from looking at it, exactly how
+Napoleon was dressed on the day of Friedland, and also how each member
+of his military staff was dressed; not a button, nor a strap, nor any
+smallest detail but has been faithfully copied from the thing itself,
+while every head in the group is a trustworthy portrait. When it was not
+possible to get the actual dress worn by the person he was painting,
+Meissonier spared no pains nor money to obtain an exact copy. How it was
+in the case of the "Friedland," we do not know, but when he painted the
+"March to Paris," Meissonier borrowed from the Museum, in Paris, where
+relics of all the kings of France are kept (the <i>Musée des Souverains</i>),
+the famous "little gray riding-coat" worn by Napoleon at the battle of
+the Pyramids and in other engagements. This coat, Meissonier had copied
+by a tailor, with the minutest accuracy, and it was then worn by the
+model while he was painting the picture. The same pains were taken with
+the cuirassiers who are dashing across the front of the picture in the
+"Friedland." As will be seen on looking closely, one model served for
+all the men in the front rank, but as the uniform was the same it was
+only necessary to vary the attitude. The uniform and all the
+accoutrements were carefully reproduced by workmen from originals of the
+time, borrowed by Meissonier for the purpose, and the model was then
+mounted on a jointed wooden horse and made to take the attitude
+required: the action of the horse was as carefully studied from that of
+the living animal. By the time that Meissonier came to paint this
+picture, he was so famous an artist, and had gained such a place in the
+world, that he could have almost anything he asked for to aid him in his
+work. So, when, with the same desire for accuracy that he had shown in
+painting other parts of the picture, he came to paint the trampled
+grain, the Government, or so we are told, bought the use of a field of
+ripe grain and lent Meissonier the services of a company of cuirassiers
+who were set to dashing about in it until they had got it into proper
+condition. We can see that the cost of all this accuracy would, in the
+end, amount to a considerable sum, and when we reckon the time of an
+artist so distinguished as Meissonier, it is not so surprising as it may
+have appeared at first, that his picture should have brought so much
+money.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, Meissonier did not come all at once to fame and prosperity.
+The rewards he gained were such as are earned only by hard and constant
+labor. When he came to Paris about the year 1832, from Lyons, where he
+was born, he was about nineteen years old. His parents were in humble
+circumstances, and would seem to have been able to do nothing to advance
+the lad, who arrived in Paris with little money in his pocket, and with
+no friends at hand. He had, however, the materials out of which friends
+and money are made: health, a generous spirit, energy, and a clear
+purpose, and with these he went to work. We do not hear much about his
+early life in Paris. When he first appears in sight, he is working in
+the same studio with Daubigny, the landscape-painter, the two painting
+pictures for a dollar the square yard, religious pictures probably, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page274" name="page274"></a>(p. 274)</span> probably also copies, to be sent into the country and hung up
+in the parish churches. Although this may have seemed like hardship at
+the time, yet there is no doubt it was good practice, for among artists
+we are told it is an accepted doctrine that in order to paint on a small
+scale really well, you must be able to paint on a larger. And it is said
+that Meissonier was in the habit all his life of making life-size
+studies in order to keep his style from falling into pettiness. So,
+after all, the painting of these big pictures may have been a useful
+ordeal for the artist who for the next sixty years was to reap fame by
+painting small ones.</p>
+
+<p>While he was earning a scanty living by this hack-work, Meissonier found
+time to paint two pictures which he sent to the Salon of 1836. One of
+these attracted the attention of a clever artist, Tony Johannot, who
+introduced him to Léon Cogniet, with whom he studied for a time, but
+from whom he learned but little. The mechanism of his art he had pretty
+well mastered already, as was shown by the Salon accepting his early
+pictures, and the chief advantage he gained from his stay in Cogniet's
+studio was a wider acquaintance with the world of artists; for Cogniet
+was a favorite teacher, and had a great many pupils, not a few of whom
+became distinguished painters. But his style of painting was not one to
+attract Meissonier, who was ambitious to paint like the old Dutch
+artists, Terburg, Metzu, Mieris, and others, who have the charm that
+their pictures are finished with the most exquisite minuteness, and yet
+treated in such a large way that, after awhile, we forget the
+microscopic wonder of the performance and think only of the skill the
+artist has shown in painting character. Meissonier was the first artist
+to bring back into favor the Dutch school of painting of the seventeenth
+century. Louis XIV., who set the fashion in everything in his day, had
+set the fashion of despising the Dutch painters, and the French people
+had never unlearned the lesson. It was Meissonier who brought back the
+taste, and taught the public to admire these small panels where interest
+in the subject is for the most part lost in the exquisite beauty of the
+painting and where the Dutch painters of similar subjects are
+successfully met on their own ground and equalled in every respect
+except in the charm of color.</p>
+
+<p>There is an old saying: "Imitation is the sincerest mode of flattery;"
+and Meissonier's immediate success with the public was the signal for a
+bevy of imitators to try to win a like success by like methods. Some of
+these artists were very clever, but an imitator is but an imitator after
+all, and is more apt to call attention to his model than to himself. It
+must be admitted that Meissonier himself has suffered somewhat in the
+same way: the evident fact that his methods of painting were inspired by
+the study of the Dutch masters has led to his being called an imitator,
+and his pictures are often compared, and not to their advantage, with
+those of his models. Meissonier is, however, very much more than an
+imitator; he was inspired by the Dutch painters, but he soon found a way
+of his own, and he has put so much of himself into his work, that the
+charge of imitation long since ceased to be brought against him.</p>
+
+<p>While he was still not much known to the public, the Duke of Orleans
+bought of him, for six hundred francs, a picture that to-day is worth
+thirty thousand <span class="pagenum"><a id="page275" name="page275"></a>(p. 275)</span> francs. As is usual in such affairs, the
+purchase was made, not by the duke in person, but by an agent: in this
+case, it was his secretary, M. Adaline, who bought the picture from
+Meissonier, who as an acknowledgment of the service gave the secretary a
+water-color drawing which, to-day, like everything coming from the hand
+of Meissonier, would bring the owner a good round sum if offered for
+sale.</p>
+
+<p>In 1865, Meissonier's son Charles, himself a very good painter, went to
+a costume-ball dressed like a Fleming of the seventeenth century and
+looking as if he had stepped out of a picture by Terburg. The costume
+had been made with the greatest accuracy, and Meissonier was so pleased
+with his son's appearance that he made a study and sold it for two
+thousand francs. Twenty years after, in 1884, hearing that it was to be
+sold at auction, and desiring, out of affection for his son, to have the
+study back again, he asked his friend, M. Petit, to buy it for him, at
+whatever cost. A rich Parisian, M. Secretan, who had a collection of
+pictures since become famous&mdash;it was to him that Millet's "L'Angelus"
+belonged&mdash;and who had such an admiration for Meissonier and his work
+that he had paid no less than four hundred thousand francs for his
+picture "Les Cuirassiers," hearing from M. Petit of Meissonier's desire
+for the portrait of his son, bought the picture for twenty-five thousand
+francs and presented it to the artist. These stories are told only as
+illustrations of the growth of Meissonier's reputation and of the
+increased number of people who desire to have an example of his work.
+The rise in value of a small sketch of a single figure, from $500 to
+$5,000, in fifteen years, is no greater in proportion than has happened
+in the case of every one of Meissonier's pictures, drawings, studies,
+and even his slight sketches, on some of which originally he would have
+placed no value at all. Yet everything he left behind him, even
+unconsidered trifles, are found to be of value, and the sale of the
+contents of his studio just ended in Paris brought nearly five hundred
+thousand francs, although the collection contained not a single finished
+picture of importance, but was made up almost entirely of unfinished
+studies and of sketches.</p>
+
+<p>Meissonier's industry was constant and untiring. It is told of him that
+he rarely had the pencil or the brush out of his hand when in the house,
+and that when he called at a friend's house and was kept waiting he used
+the spare minutes in sketching upon the first piece of paper that he
+found at hand. One of his friends, who knew of this habit, collected in
+the course of many visits he received from the artist enough of these
+scraps to fill a small album; while it is told of another of his friends
+that he instructed his servant to put beside Meissonier's coffee-cup
+after dinner a number of bits of paper of the size of cigarette-papers
+but of better quality on which Meissonier in his absent way would fall
+to drawing as he chatted with his companions. After dinner these
+jottings remained as a valuable memorial of his visit. Perhaps if they
+were all collected, these slight affairs might bring enough at auction
+to pay for all the dinners to which the prudent host had invited the
+artist.</p>
+
+<p>The world of subjects included in Meissonier's art was a very narrow
+one, and <span class="pagenum"><a id="page276" name="page276"></a>(p. 276)</span> was not calculated to interest men and women in
+general. The nearest that he came to striking the popular note was in
+his Napoleon subjects, and beside the excellence of the painting, these
+pictures really make a valuable series of historical documents by reason
+of their accuracy. But the greater number of the pictures which he left
+behind him are chiefly interesting from the beautiful way in which they
+are painted: we accept the subject for the sake of the art. The world
+rewarded him for all this patient labor, this exquisite workmanship, by
+an immense fortune that enabled him to live in splendor, and to be
+generous without stint. From the humble lodgings of his youth in the Rue
+des Ecouffes, he passed, in time, to the palace in the Place Malsherbes
+where he spent the latter half of his long life in luxurious
+surroundings: pictures and statues, rich furniture, tapestries and armor
+and curiosities of art from every land. But the visitor, after passing
+through all this splendor, came upon the artist in a studio, ample and
+well lighted indeed, but furnished only for work, where, to the end of
+his life, he pursued his industrious calling with all the energy and
+ardor of youth. He died in 1891, and was buried by the government with
+all the honors that befitted one of her most illustrious citizens.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="right">
+<img src="images/sig001.jpg" width="250" height="59" alt="Signature of the author." title="">
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>ROSA BONHEUR<a id="footnotetag8" name="footnotetag8"></a><a href="#footnote8" title="Go to footnote 8"><span class="smaller">[8]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Clarence Cook</span><br>
+
+(BORN 1822)</h3>
+
+
+<p>A girl of something over ten, of sturdy build, with a dark complexion,
+deep blue eyes, and strong features crowned by a head of clustering
+curls, is sitting in the window of a plainly furnished room, high up in
+an apartment-house in Paris. In a cage at her side is a parrot, which,
+with its head on one side, is gravely calling out the letters of the
+alphabet, while the child as gravely repeats them, interrupting the
+lesson every now and then by a visit to the other side of the room,
+where a pet lamb greets its young mistress with a friendly bleat.</p>
+
+<p>This is our first glimpse of Rosalie, known now to all the world as Rosa
+Bonheur, the painter of "The Horse Fair" and of many another picture,
+which have earned for her the distinction of the best animal-painter of
+her time.</p>
+
+<p>Her father's family belonged to Bordeaux. Raymond Bonheur had gone up as
+a youth to Paris to study art. After the usual apprenticeship to
+privation which art exacts from her servants, he had become moderately
+successful, when the condition of his parents, now old and poorly-off,
+moved him to return to Bordeaux <span class="pagenum"><a id="page277" name="page277"></a>(p. 277)</span> and do what he could to make
+their life easier. As the chances for a professional artist were small,
+he adopted the modest employment of drawing-teacher. His skill soon
+brought him pupils; among them a young lady from Altona, between whom
+and her teacher a mutual interest sprang up which led to their marriage.
+Raymond Bonheur brought his wife home to his father's house, where she
+was welcomed as a daughter, and for the brief term of her life all went
+well. What the husband earned by his drawing-lessons, the wife
+supplemented by her lessons in music; but this happiness was not to
+last. The parents of Raymond Bonheur died, and then, after not more than
+twelve years of marriage, the wife died, leaving behind her four
+children, Rosalie, Francois-Auguste, Jules-Isidore, and Juliette.</p>
+
+<a id="img026" name="img026"></a>
+<div class="floatright">
+<img src="images/img026.jpg" width="250" height="320" alt="Rosa Bonheur." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Rosalie is the best known of these four children of Raymond Bonheur; but
+each of them has honorably connected his name with the art of modern
+France. Francois-Auguste has a reputation as an animal-painter almost
+equal to that of his sister Rosa. A fine picture painted by him, "Cattle
+in the Forest of Fontainebleau," was once the property of the late A. T.
+Stewart. His merit secured him the Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1867.
+He died in 1880. The other brother, Jules-Isidore, has gained
+distinction as a sculptor of animals; most of his work is on a small
+scale, but he has designed some large pieces that decorate his sister's
+château near Fontainebleau. Juliette Bonheur married a M. Peyrol, and
+joining her family-name to his, is known in the art-world as Mme. Peyrol
+Bonheur. It is thus she signs her pictures, mostly still-life and animal
+subjects, which have gained for her a good position among the minor
+artists of France.</p>
+
+<p>Rosa, the eldest of the family, born in 1822, was ten years old when her
+mother died. Not long after, Raymond Bonheur decided to leave Bordeaux
+and to return to Paris, where the chances for professional success were
+better than in a provincial town, and where there were greater
+opportunities for the education of his young children. The change proved
+very distasteful, however, to the little ones. Accustomed to the
+comparative freedom of the town in which they had been brought up, and
+where their family had been so long rooted that their circle of friends
+and relatives gave them playmates and companions in plenty, they found
+themselves very lonely in Paris, where they were reduced for a good part
+of the time to such amusement as they could find in the narrow quarters
+of their rooms on the sixth floor of an apartment-house. It is not the
+custom in Paris for the children, even of the poor, to make a
+playground of the street, and our <span class="pagenum"><a id="page278" name="page278"></a>(p. 278)</span> little ones had nobody to
+walk out with them but an old servant who had come with them from
+Bordeaux, and who was ill-fitted, for all her virtues, to take a
+mother's place to the children. She was honest and faithful, but like
+all of her class, she liked routine and order, and she could make no
+allowances for the restlessness of her bright-minded charge. Rosa was
+her especial torment; the black sheep of the brood. Household tasks she
+despised, and study, as it was pursued in the successive schools to
+which her despairing father sent her, had no charms for her. Her best
+playmates were animals; the horses and dogs she saw in the streets and
+which she fearlessly accosted; the sheep that found itself queerly
+lodged on the top floor of a city house; and the parrot which, as we
+have seen, was not only her playmate but her schoolmaster.</p>
+
+<p>There came a time when the charge of such a child, so averse to rules
+and so given to strange ways of passing her time, became too much for
+the old servant with her orthodox views of life, and she persuaded
+Rosa's father to put her as a day-scholar with the nuns at Chaillot, a
+small suburb of Paris. How it happened that she was allowed to go back
+and forth alone, between home and school, we do not know; but it is not
+to be wondered at if she were irregular in her hours; if, one day, she
+set the nuns wondering why she did not appear at school-opening, and
+another day put the old servant into a twitter because she did not come
+home in season. The truth was, she had found that there was something
+better in Paris than streets and shops and tall houses; she had
+discovered a wood there, a veritable forest, with trees, and pools of
+water, and birds, and wild flowers, and though this enchanted spot which
+citizens called the Bois de Boulogne&mdash;not then a formal park as it is
+to-day&mdash;was off the road to Chaillot, yet it was not so far that she
+need fear getting lost in going there or in coming back. No wonder,
+then, if, once this way discovered of escape from tiresome school
+duties, it was travelled so often by Rosalie, and that her school-work
+became in consequence so unsatisfactory that at length the patient nuns
+remonstrated. They advised Rosa's father, since she neither would nor
+could learn anything from books, that it would be better to put her to
+some useful trade by which she might earn her living; and the good
+sisters suggested&mdash;dressmaking! The wisdom of these ladies, who could
+not see that they were dealing with the last woman in the world to whom
+dressmaking could be interesting, was matched by that of the father, who
+showed himself so blind to the character of his daughter that he
+resolved to act at once upon the advice of the nuns; and without
+consulting the wishes of poor Rosalie he apprenticed her straightway to
+a Parisian dressmaker. The docile girl allowed the yoke to be slipped
+over her head without complaint, but the confinement wore upon her
+health and spirits, and after a short trial the experiment had to be
+abandoned. Her father yielded to her entreaties and took her home.</p>
+
+<a id="img027" name="img027"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img027.jpg" width="400" height="555" alt="" title="">
+<p>Rosa Bonheur.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The girl was long in coming to a knowledge of herself. Although she was
+to be, in time, a famous artist, the familiar legend of the biographers
+is wanting in her case; we read nothing about scribbled books or walls
+defaced by childish sketches, nor does she appear to have handled a
+pencil or a brush until she was <span class="pagenum"><a id="page279" name="page279"></a>(p. 279)</span> a girl well grown. Her
+father's means were not sufficient to give Rosa or his other children an
+education such as he could wish; but an expedient suggested itself in
+his perplexity over this latest experiment in providing for his eldest
+daughter: he proposed to the principal of a young ladies' school where
+he taught drawing, that his services should be accepted in payment of
+Rosa's education. The offer was accepted, and in the regular course of
+study Rosa became a member of her father's drawing-class. It was not
+long before she surpassed all her school-fellows in that department, and
+found herself for the first time in her life in possession of the key to
+that happiness which consists in knowing what we can do, and feeling the
+strength within us to do it. Some of the biographers of Rosa's life
+speak of unhappy days at this school: the richer girls made sport of the
+dress of the drawing-master's daughter, and of her independent, awkward
+ways. Her progress in drawing, too, was counterbalanced by her slowness
+in her other studies; in fact her new accomplishment was such a delight
+to her, that in her devotion to it she became less and less interested
+in her books; and as for dress&mdash;that it should be clean and suited both
+to her means and to the work she was doing, was all that concerned her,
+then or since!</p>
+
+<p>At the end of her first year in school, Rosa obtained her father's
+permission to give up her other studies and to enter his studio as pupil
+and assistant. From that time, though as yet she had not found the
+reason of her vocation, yet her true life had begun. She worked
+diligently under the direction of a master she loved, and her father, in
+his turn, delighted at the discovery of a talent so long hid, redoubled
+his efforts to advance his pupil and to make up for lost time.</p>
+
+<p>Rosa worked for some months at copying in the Louvre, but though she
+worked with such diligence and skill as to win the praise of the
+director, she came, after a time, to feel that the mere copying of the
+works of other men, however great, was not the goal she was striving
+after; so one day she took a sudden determination, left the Louvre,
+packed up her painting materials, and started off for one of the rural
+suburbs of Paris, where she sat herself down to sketch from nature. Her
+love of animals, hitherto an aimless pleasure, now took on a new phase
+as she saw her beloved cows and sheep in their place in nature giving
+life and animation to the landscape.</p>
+
+<p>In the winter season, when work out-of-doors was no longer pleasant or
+profitable, Rosa made what use she could of the few opportunities Paris
+had to offer for the study of animals. She spent what time she could
+spare from work at the horse-market; she visited the slaughter-houses,
+and the suburban fairs where cattle and horses, sheep and pigs compete
+for prizes, and in these places she filled her portfolios with sketches.</p>
+
+<p>In 1840 she sent her first picture to the Salon, and as it was accepted
+and well received, she continued to send her work every year; but, up to
+1849, her pictures were small, and had little more interest than belongs
+to simple studies from nature; 1849 was a memorable year to her, as it
+was to France. In this year her father died of cholera, just as he had
+been appointed director of the School of Design for Young Girls. Rosa
+was appointed to succeed him with the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page280" name="page280"></a>(p. 280)</span> title of Honorary
+Directress, and her sister Juliette was made a teacher in the school. In
+the same year she exhibited the picture that may be said to have made
+her reputation with the artists and amateurs, as well as with the
+general public. This was her "Oxen of Cantal," a picture that combined
+with no little feeling for landscape the most admirable painting of
+cattle in repose. Its high qualities were immediately recognized. Horace
+Vernet, in the name of the Provisional Government, presented her with a
+handsome vase of Sèvres porcelain, and the gold medal for painting. In
+1851, the jury selected for exhibition at the World's Fair in London
+another picture by Rosa, "Ploughing in the Nivernais," which made the
+artist's name known to England, where the national love of animals
+secured for her no end of praise and of substantial reward. In 1856 Rosa
+painted her most popular picture, "The Horse Fair," now in the
+Metropolitan Museum. This painting went from Paris to London, where it
+was bought for rising £1,500, and created such an interest in the
+artist's personality as would have turned the head of any ordinary
+woman; but Rosa Bonheur's whole life proves her no ordinary woman.</p>
+
+<p>For many years Mlle. Bonheur lived in Paris in a house surrounded by a
+large garden where she kept a number of animals, partly for the pleasure
+of their companionship, partly for the opportunity it gave her of
+studying their habits, and using them as models. She now resides in the
+Château By, near Fontainebleau, where she leads the same industrious
+life in her advancing years that she did in the beginning of her career.
+She rises early, and works at her painting all day, and often spends the
+evening in drawing: for she takes but little interest in what is called
+society, and cares only for the companionship of her intimate friends,
+which she can enjoy without disarranging her life, or neglecting the
+studies she loves. She dresses with great simplicity at all times, and
+even when she accepts invitations, makes no concessions to the caprices
+of fashion. In her student-days, when visiting the abattoirs, markets,
+and fairs, she accustomed herself to wear such a modification of man's
+dress as would permit her to move about among rough men without
+compromising her sex. But, beside that her dignity was always safe in
+her own keeping, she bears testimony to the good manners and the good
+dispositions of the men she came in contact with. Rosa Bonheur has
+always been an honor to art and an honor to her sex. At seventy-two she
+finds herself in the enjoyment of many things that go to make a happy
+life. She has a well-earned fame as an artist; an abundant fortune
+gained by her own industry and used as honorably as it has been gained;
+and she has troops of friends drawn to her by her solid worth of
+character.</p>
+
+<p>Of the great number of pictures Rosa Bonheur has painted, by far the
+most are of subjects found in France, but a few of the best were painted
+in Scotland. She has received many public honors in medals and
+decorations. In 1856, after painting the "Horse Fair," the Empress
+Eugénie visited her at her studio and bestowed upon her the Cross of the
+Legion of Honor, fastening the decoration to the artist's dress with her
+own hands. When the invading army of Prussia reached Paris, the Crown
+Prince gave orders that the studio of Rosa Bonheur <span class="pagenum"><a id="page281" name="page281"></a>(p. 281)</span> should be
+respected. But though she, no doubt, holds all these honors at their
+worth, yet she holds still more dear the art to which she owes, not only
+these, but all that has made her life a treasury of happy remembrances.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="right">
+<img src="images/sig001.jpg" width="250" height="59" alt="Signature of the author." title="">
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>GÉRÔME<a id="footnotetag9" name="footnotetag9"></a><a href="#footnote9" title="Go to footnote 9"><span class="smaller">[9]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Clarence Cook</span><br>
+
+(BORN 1824)</h3>
+
+
+<a id="img028" name="img028"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img028.jpg" width="200" height="212" alt="Gérôme." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>In the Paris Salon of 1847, a small picture appeared, representing a
+Greek boy and girl stirring up two game-cocks to fight. Although it was
+the work of an unknown painter, and had to contend with an unusually
+brilliant display of pictures, many of them by men already famous, yet
+it strongly attracted the general public, partly by the novelty of the
+subject, and partly by the careful and finished manner of the painting.
+It delighted the critics as well, and one of the most distinguished of
+them, Théophile Gautier, wrote: "A new Greek is born to us, and his name
+is Gérôme!"</p>
+
+<p>This picture, which was to prove the first leaf in a laurel-crown to be
+awarded the painter in his lifetime, and not, as is so often the case,
+by the tardy hand of Death, was the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a young
+man of twenty-three. He had been for six years under the teaching of
+Paul Delaroche, part of the time in Italy, but most of it in Paris. He
+was born at Vesoul, a small, dull town in the Department of Haute-Saône,
+in 1824. His father was a goldsmith, who, like most French fathers in
+his rank of life, had hoped to bring up his son to succeed him in his
+business. The boy did for a time, we believe, work in his father's shop,
+but he had a stronger natural bent for painting; something perhaps in
+the occupation fostered, or even created, this taste&mdash;for not a few
+distinguished painters have been apprenticed to the goldsmith's
+trade&mdash;and his father, like a wise man, instead of opposing his son's
+wishes, did what he could to further them. He bought him
+painting-materials; and instead of sending him to a "school of design,"
+or putting him under the tutelage of some third-rate drawing-master,
+such as is commonly found in country towns, he bought him a picture by
+Decamps, an artist since become famous, but then just in the dawn of his
+fame, and put it before his son as a model. Young Gérôme made a copy of
+this picture, and an artist from Paris, who happened to be passing
+through Vesoul, saw <span class="pagenum"><a id="page282" name="page282"></a>(p. 282)</span> it, and discerning the boy's talent, gave
+him a letter to Paul Delaroche, encouraging him to go to Paris and there
+to take up the study of art as a profession. At seventeen years of age,
+with his father's consent and $250 in his pocket, Gérôme went up to
+Paris, and presenting his letter to Delaroche, was well received by him,
+and entered the School of Fine Arts (École des Beaux-Arts) as his pupil.</p>
+
+<p>He had been with Delaroche three years and had proved himself one of the
+most loyal and diligent of his pupils, when an event occurred,
+insignificant in itself, but which was to have an important influence
+upon his life and give a new direction to his talent.</p>
+
+<p>French studios are not as a rule very orderly places. The young men who
+frequent them are left pretty much to themselves, with no one to govern
+them or to oversee them. The artist they are studying under makes, at
+the most, a brief daily visit, going the round of the easels, saying a
+word or two to each pupil, although it often happens that he says
+nothing, and then departs for his proper work, leaving his pupils to
+their own devices. The students are for the most part like young men
+everywhere, a turbulent set, full of animal spirits, which sometimes
+carry them beyond reasonable bounds. It was a boisterous outbreak of
+this sort, but far wilder than common, that occurred in the studio of
+Delaroche, and which brought about the crisis in Gérôme's life to which
+we have alluded. Fortunately for him, the incident took place while
+Gérôme was on a visit to his parents at Vesoul, so that he was in no way
+implicated in the affair. He came back to find the studio closed;
+Delaroche, deeply disturbed, had dismissed all his pupils and announced
+his intention to visit Italy. His studio was to be taken during his
+absence, by Gleyre, and he advised those of his pupils in whom he took a
+personal interest, to continue their studies under his successor. Gérôme
+was one of those to whom he gave this advice, but Gérôme was too much
+attached to his master to leave him for another, and bluntly announced
+his purpose of following him to Rome. A few of the other pupils of
+Delaroche were of the same mind, and they all set out for Italy
+together. Arrived in Rome, Gérôme, always a hard worker, threw himself
+energetically into his studies; drawing the ancient buildings, the
+Capitol, the Colosseum; sketching in the Forum and on the Campagna;
+copying the pictures and the statues, saturating his mind in the spirit
+of antique art, and schooling his hand in its forms, until he had laid
+up a rich store of material for use in future pictures. On his return to
+Paris he worked for a while in Gleyre's studio, but when Delaroche came
+back from Italy, Gérôme again joined him and renewed his old relation as
+pupil and assistant&mdash;working, among other tasks, on the painting of
+"Charlemagne Crossing the Alps," a commission given to Delaroche by the
+Government, for the <i>Grande Galerie des Batailles</i> at Versailles: a vast
+apartment lined with pictures of all the victories of the French from
+Soissons to Solferino.</p>
+
+<p>Such work as this, however, had little interest for Gérôme. His mind at
+this time was full of the Greeks and Romans; his enthusiasm for
+Napoleon, which later was to give birth to so many pictures, had not
+yet awakened; nor did he <span class="pagenum"><a id="page283" name="page283"></a>(p. 283)</span> care for the subjects from the
+histories of France and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries, that had provided his master, Delaroche, with so many tragic
+themes for his pencil: "The Death of the Duke of Guise," "The Children
+of Edward," the "Death of Queen Elizabeth," "The Execution of Lady Jane
+Grey," "Cromwell at the Coffin of Charles I.," and others of the same
+strain.</p>
+
+<p>Gérôme's visit to Italy had awakened in him a strong interest in the
+life of the antique world, and this would naturally be strengthened by
+all that he would hear and see of the growing interest of the public in
+the same subject: an interest kindled by the discoveries of
+archaeologists in classic soil: in Greece and Italy, in Assyria and
+Egypt. These discoveries had filled the museums and the cabinets of
+private collectors with beautiful and interesting fragments illustrating
+the external life of the past, and illuminating its poetry; and it is no
+wonder that some of the younger artists rejoiced in the new world of
+anecdote and story that opened so richly before them.</p>
+
+<p>However it came about&mdash;whether his own interest in the antique life
+communicated itself to his fellows, or whether they, all together,
+simply shared in the interest taken in the subject by the world about
+them&mdash;Gérôme and some of his companions in Delaroche's studio showed
+such a predilection for classic themes, that they were nicknamed by the
+critics "The New Greeks." Among Gérôme's fellow-pupils were two young
+men, Hamon and Aubert, who later gained no small applause by their
+playful and familiar way of treating classic themes. They are well known
+to us by engravings from their pictures, which are in all our shops.
+Hamon's "My Sister is not at home," and Aubert's various pretty fancies
+of nymphs and cupids, while they are not great works of art, are
+reasonably sure of a long life, due to their innocent freshness and
+simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>Delaroche's pupils were working all together in friendly competition for
+the grand Roman prize which was to give the fortunate one the right to
+four years' study in Rome at the expense of the state. Gérôme's studio
+was shared by his friends Picou and Hamon. Hamon, writing in later years
+about his youthful days, says: "Companions and rivals at the same time,
+we were all working together for the Grand Prix de Rome. Gérôme inspired
+us all with the love of hard work, and of hard work to the accompaniment
+of singing and laughing."</p>
+
+<p>But in the intervals of his hard work for the prize, Gérôme was also
+working on a picture which he hoped to have accepted for the Salon. This
+was the picture we spoke of in the beginning of this notice: "Two Young
+Greeks stirring-up Game-cocks to fight." When it was finished Gérôme
+showed it to his master with many misgivings; but Delaroche encouraged
+him to send it to the Salon. It was accepted, and as we have seen, won
+for Gérôme a great success with the public. The next year, 1848, he
+again exhibited, but the impression he made was less marked than on the
+first occasion. His former picture had a subject such as it was, of his
+own devising. The "Cock-fight" was not an illustration of any passage in
+Greek poetry, and in spite of its antique setting, it had a modern air,
+and to this, no doubt, its popularity was largely due. But in 1848 he
+essayed an illustration of the Greek poet, Anacreon, translating into
+picture the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page284" name="page284"></a>(p. 284)</span> poem that tells how, one winter evening, sitting by
+his fire, the old poet was surprised by a sound of weeping outside his
+door, and opening it, found Cupid wet and shivering and begging for a
+shelter from the cold. The man takes the pretty, dimpled mischief to his
+bosom, warms his feet and hands at the fire, dries his bow and arrows,
+and lets him sip wine from his cup. Then, when Cupid is refreshed and
+warmed, he tries his arrows, now here, now there, and at last aims one
+straight at his benefactor's heart, and laughing at the jest, flies out
+at the open door. Gérôme's picture was in three panels. The first showed
+the poet opening the door to the sobbing Cupid, with his bedraggled
+wings and dripping curls; in the next, the rosy ingrate wounds his
+benefactor; in the third, the poet sits disconsolate by his hearth,
+musing over the days when Love was his guest, if but for an hour. As the
+story was an old one, so many an artist before Gérôme had played with it
+as a subject for a picture. Jean-François Millet himself, another pupil
+of Delaroche, though earlier than Gérôme, had tried his hand at
+illustrating Anacreon's fable before he found his proper field of work
+in portraying the occupations of the men and women about him, the
+peasants among whom he was born and bred.</p>
+
+<p>Gérôme's picture did nothing to advance his fortunes with the public.
+1848 was a stormy time in France and in all Europe, and people were not
+in the mood to be amused with such trifles as Anacreon and his Cupid.
+The pictures in that year's Salon that drew the public in crowds about
+them were Couture's "The Romans of the Decline of the Empire," in which
+all Paris saw, or thought it saw, the handwriting-on-the-wall for the
+government of Louis-Philippe; and the "Shipwrecked Sailors in a Bark,"
+of Delacroix, a wild and stormy scene of terror that seemed to echo the
+prophecies of evil days at hand for France with which the time was rife.</p>
+
+<p>Gérôme's next picture, however, was to bring him once more before the
+public, and to carry his name beyond his native France even as far as
+America. Leaving for the nonce his chosen field of antiquity, where yet
+he was to distinguish himself, he looked for a subject in the Paris of
+his own day. "The Duel after the Masquerade" opens for us a corner of
+the Bois de Boulogne&mdash;the fashionable park on the outskirts of
+Paris&mdash;where in the still dawn of a winter's day, a group of men are met
+to witness a duel between two of their companions who have quarrelled at
+a masked ball. The ground is covered with a light fall of snow; the bare
+branches of the trees weave their network across the gray sky, and in
+the distance we see the carriages that have brought the disputants to
+the field. The duel is over. One of the men, dressed in the costume of
+Pierrot, the loose white trousers and slippers, the baggy white shirt,
+and white skull-cap, falls, mortally wounded, into the arms of his
+second: the pallor of coming death masked by the white-painted face. The
+other combatant, a Mohawk Indian (once a staple character at every
+masked-ball in Paris: curious survival of the popularity of Cooper's
+novels), is led wounded off the field by a friend dressed as Harlequin.
+Gérôme in this striking picture showed for the first time that talent
+as a story-teller to which he is so largely indebted for his
+reputation. Whatever <span class="pagenum"><a id="page285" name="page285"></a>(p. 285)</span> his subject may be, it is always set forth
+in the clearest manner, so that everyone may understand the story
+without the need of an interpreter.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving out of view the few pictures he painted illustrating passages in
+Napoleon's career, it may be said that Gérôme's taste led him away from
+scenes of modern life; for even his many oriental subjects so relate to
+forms of life belonging in reality to the past, that they make no
+exception to the statement. He did not therefore follow up "The Duel"
+with other comments on the follies of modern society&mdash;for in the temper
+of that time this picture, like Couture's "Roman Orgie" and Millet's
+"Man with the Hoe," was looked upon as a satire and a warning, and owed
+its popularity as much to this conviction on the part of the public as
+to its pictorial merits&mdash;but returned to antique times, and showed in
+his treatment of themes from that source an equal, if not a greater
+power to interest the public.</p>
+
+<p>Gérôme's two pictures, the "Ave Cæsar! Morituri te Salutant," "Hail,
+Cæsar! Those about to die, salute Thee," and "The Gladiators," are so
+universally known as to need no description. Whatever criticism may be
+made upon them, they will always remain interesting to the world at
+large; from their subject, from the way in which the discoveries of
+archæology are made familiar, and, not least, from the impression they
+make of the artist's own strong interest in what he had to say. In both
+pictures he succeeded in showing the Colosseum as no longer a ruin, but
+as, so to speak, a living place peopled by the swarm of the Roman
+populace, with the emperor and his court, and the College of the Vestal
+Virgins, and, for chief actors, the hapless wretches who are "butchered
+to make a Roman holiday." Another picture that greatly increased
+Gérôme's reputation, was his "Death of Julius Cæsar," though it must be
+confessed there was a touch of the stage in the arrangement of the
+scene, and in the action of the body of senators and conspirators
+leaving the hall with brandished swords and as if singing in chorus,
+that was absent from the pictures of the amphitheatre. There was also
+less material for the curiosity of the lovers of archæology; no such
+striking point, for instance, as the reproduction of the gladiators'
+helmets and armor recently discovered in Herculaneum; but the body of
+the dead Cæsar lying "even at the base of Pompey's statue" with his face
+muffled in his toga, was a masterly performance; some critic, moved by
+the grandeur of the lines, said it was not a mere piece of
+foreshortening, it was "a perspective." Gérôme made a life-size painting
+of the Cæsar in this picture. It is in the Corcoran Gallery at
+Washington.</p>
+
+<p>Gérôme painted several other pictures from classic subjects, but none of
+them had the interest for the general public of those we have described.
+In 1854 he exhibited a huge canvas, called "The Age of Augustus," a
+picture suggested, perhaps, by the "Hemicycle" of his master Delaroche,
+on which he himself had painted. It represented heroes, poets, sages, of
+the Augustan age, grouped about the cradle of the infant Christ; it
+procured for Gérôme the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor, and is now,
+as the artist himself jestingly says, "the 'greatest' picture in the
+Museum of Amiens." In the same year Gérôme went <span class="pagenum"><a id="page286" name="page286"></a>(p. 286)</span> to Egypt for
+the first time; since then he has more than once visited it, but it is
+doubtful if he could renew the pleasure of his youthful experience. "I
+set out," he says, "with my friends, I the fifth, all of us lightly
+furnished with money, but full of youthful enthusiasm. Life was then
+easy in Egypt; we lived at a very moderate rate; we hired a boat and
+lived four months upon the Nile, hunting, painting, fishing by turns,
+from Damietta to Philæ. We returned to Cairo and remained there four
+months longer in a house in the older part of the town, belonging to
+Soleman Pasha. As Frenchmen, he treated us with cordial hospitality.
+Happy period of youth, of freedom from care! Hope and the future opened
+bright before us; the sky was blue!"</p>
+
+<p>Gérôme's pictures of Eastern life make a gallery by themselves. A few of
+them are historic, such as his "Cleopatra visiting Cæsar," but the most
+of them are simply scenes and incidents drawn from the daily life of the
+modern inhabitants of Cairo and the desert, illustrating their manners
+and customs. The mere titles would fill up a large part of our space.
+Many of the best of them are owned in this country, and all have been
+reproduced by engraving or by photography.</p>
+
+<p>In another field Gérôme won great distinction, painting scenes from the
+history of France in the reign of Louis XIV.; subjects drawn from what
+may be called the high comedy of court-life, and treated by Gérôme with
+remarkable refinement and distinction. Among these pictures the best
+known are: "Molière Breakfasting with Louis XIV.," illustrating the
+story of the king's rebuke to his courtiers who affected to despise the
+man of genius; "Père Joseph," the priest who under the guise of humility
+and self-abnegation reduces the greatest nobles to the state of lackeys;
+"Louis XIV. Receiving the Great Condé," and "Collaboration," two poets
+of Louis XIV.'s time working together over a play. Among his
+accomplishments as an artist we must not forget the talent that Gérôme
+has shown as a sculptor. He has modelled several figures from his own
+pictures, with such admirable skill as to prove that he might easily
+have made sculpture a profession had he not chosen to devote himself to
+painting.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="right">
+<img src="images/sig001.jpg" width="250" height="59" alt="Signature of the author." title="">
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page287" name="page287"></a>(p. 287)</span> DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI<a id="footnotetag10" name="footnotetag10"></a><a href="#footnote10" title="Go to footnote 10"><span class="smaller">[10]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Edmund Gosse</span><br>
+
+(1828-1882)</h3>
+
+
+<a id="img029" name="img029"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img029.jpg" width="250" height="308" alt="Dante Gabriel Rossetti." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Those whose privilege it was to meet the late Mr. Gabriel Rossetti, at
+once in the plenitude of his powers and in the freshness of their own
+impressions, will not expect to be moved again through life by so
+magnetic a presence. In his dealings with those much younger than
+himself, his tact and influence were unequalled; he received a shy but
+ardent youth with such a noble courtesy, with so much sympathy yet with
+no condescension, with so grand an air and yet so warm a welcome, that
+his new acquaintance was enslaved at the first sentence. This seems to
+me to have been in a certain sense the key-note of the man. He was
+essentially a point of fire; not a peripatetic in any sense, not a
+person of wide circumference, but a nucleus of pure imagination that
+never stirred or shifted, but scintillated in all directions. The
+function of Gabriel Rossetti, or at least his most obvious function, was
+to sit in isolation, and to have vaguely glimmering spirits presented to
+him for complete illumination. He was the most prompt in suggestion, the
+most regal in giving, the most sympathetic in response, of the men I
+have known or seen; and this without a single touch of the prophetic
+manner, the air of such professional seers as Coleridge or Carlyle. What
+he had to give was not mystical or abstract; it was purely concrete. His
+mind was full of practical artistic schemes, only a few of which were
+suited to his own practice in painting or poetry; the rest were at the
+service of whoever would come in a friendly spirit and take them. I find
+among his letters to me, which I have just been reading once again, a
+paper of delightful suggestions about the cover of a book of verse; the
+next youth who waited upon him would perhaps be a painter, and would
+find that the great genius and master did not disdain the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page288" name="page288"></a>(p. 288)</span>
+discussion of picture-frames. This was but the undercurrent of his
+influence; as we shall see more and more every year as the central
+decades of this century become history, its main stream directed the two
+great arts of painting and poetry into new channels, and set a score of
+diverse talents in motion.</p>
+
+<p>But, as far as anything can be seen plainly about Rossetti at present,
+to me the fact of his immovability, his self-support, his curious
+reserve, seems to be the most interesting. He held in all things to the
+essential and not to the accidental; he preferred the dry grain of musk
+to a diluted flood of perfume. An Italian by birth and deeply moved by
+all things Italian, he never visited Italy; a lover of ritual and a
+sympathizer with all the mysteries of the Roman creed, he never joined
+the Catholic Church; a poet whose form and substance alike influenced
+almost all the men of his generation, he was more than forty years of
+age before he gave his verse to the public; a painter who considered the
+attitude of the past with more ardor and faith than almost any artist of
+his time, he never chose to visit the churches or galleries of Europe.
+It has been said, among the many absurd things which his death has
+provoked, that he shrank from publicity from timidity, or spurned it
+from ill-temper. One brilliant journalist has described him as sulking
+like Hector in his tent. It used to be Achilles who sulked when I was at
+school; but it certainly never was Gabriel Rossetti. Those who only knew
+him, after his constitution had passed under the yoke of the drug which
+killed him, cannot judge of his natural reserve from that artificial and
+morbid reserve which embittered the last years of his life. The former
+was not connected with any objection to new faces or dislike of cordial
+society, but with the indomitable characteristic of the man, which made
+him give out the treasures of the spirit, and never need to receive
+them. So far from disliking society, it is my impression that he craved
+it as a necessity, although he chose to select its constituents and
+narrow its range.</p>
+
+<p>He was born in 1828. The story of his parentage is well known, and has
+been told in full detail since his death. He was born in London and
+christened Gabriel Charles Rossetti; it was not, I am told, until he was
+of age to appreciate the value of the name that he took upon himself the
+cognomen which his father had borne, the Dante by which the world,
+though not his friends, have known him. Living with his father in
+Charlotte street, with two sisters and a brother no less ardently
+trained in letters than himself, he seems to have been turned to poetry,
+as he was afterward sustained in it, by the interior flame. The
+household has been described to me by one who saw it in 1847: the
+father, titular professor of Italian literature, but with no
+professional duties, seated the livelong day, with a shade over his
+eyes, writing devotional or patriotic poetry in his native tongue; the
+girls reading Dante aloud with their rich maiden voices; Gabriel buried
+here in his writing, or darting round the corner of the street to the
+studio where he painted. From this seclusion he wrote to the friend who
+has kindly helped me in preparing these notes, and whose memories of the
+poet extend over a longer period than those of any survivor not related
+to him.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. W. B. Scott, now so well known in more arts than one, had then but
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page289" name="page289"></a>(p. 289)</span> just published his first book, his mystical and transcendental
+poem of "The Year of the World." This seems to have fallen under
+Rossetti's notice, for on November 25, 1847, he wrote to the author, a
+perfect stranger to himself, a letter of warm sympathy and
+acknowledgment. Mr. Scott was living in Newcastle, and, instead of
+meeting, the young poets at first made acquaintance with each other by
+correspondence. Rossetti soon mentioned, of course, his own schemes and
+ambitions, and he sent, as a sample of his powers, his poems of "The
+Blessed Damozel," and "My Sister's Sleep," which he had written about
+eighteen months before.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Scott tells me that his first feeling on receiving these poems,
+written in English by an Italian boy of eighteen, was one of amazement.
+I cannot wonder at it. If the "Blessed Damozel," when it was published a
+quarter of a century later, seemed a masterpiece to those who had, in
+the meanwhile, read so much that was vaguely inspired by it, what must
+it have been in 1846? Certain pieces in Tennyson's "Poems," of 1842, and
+a few fragments of Browning's "Bells and Pomegranates" were the only
+English poems which can be supposed to have given it birth, even
+indirectly. In its interpretation of mystical thoughts by concrete
+images, in its mediæval fervor and consistence of fancy, in its peculiar
+metrical facility, it was distinctly new&mdash;original as few poems except
+those by the acknowledged masters of the craft can ever be.</p>
+
+<p class="poem30">
+<span class="min03em">"</span>The sun was gone now; the curled moon<br>
+<span class="add1em">Was like a little feather</span><br>
+  Fluttering far down the gulf; and now<br>
+<span class="add1em">She spoke through the clear weather.</span><br>
+  Her voice was like the voice the stars<br>
+<span class="add1em">Had when they sang together."</span></p>
+
+<p>This was a strange accent in 1846. Miss Barrett and Mr. Tennyson were
+then the most accepted poets. Mr. Browning spoke fluently and
+persistently, but only to a very little circle; Mr. Horne's "Orion" and
+Mr. Bailey's "Festus" were the recent outcomes of Keats and Goethe; the
+Spasmodic School, to be presently born of much unwise study of "Festus,"
+was still unknown; Mr. Clough, Mr. Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Patmore were
+quite unapparent, taking form and voice in solitude; and here was a new
+singer, utterly unlike them all, pouring out his first notes with the
+precision and independence of the new-fledged thrush in the woodland
+chorus.</p>
+
+<p>In painting, the process was somewhat different. In this art, no less
+than in poetry, Rossetti understood at once what it was that he wished
+to do himself, and what he desired to see others doing; but the
+difficulties of technique were in his way. He had begun to write in
+childhood, but he had taken up design late in his youth, and he had
+undergone no discipline in it. At the present day, when every student
+has to pass a somewhat stringent examination in design, Rossetti, at
+eighteen, could not have entered the schools of the Royal Academy. He
+did so, however, yet without ever advancing to the Life School. The soul
+of <span class="pagenum"><a id="page290" name="page290"></a>(p. 290)</span> art, at this early period, interested him far more than the
+body, especially such a substance as he found under the presidency of
+Sir Martin Shee and the keepership of George Jones. Let us not forget,
+meanwhile, that it is easy to sneer at the incompetence of mannered old
+artists, and yet hard to over-estimate the value of discipline in a
+school, however conventional. Rossetti was too impatient to learn to
+draw, and this he lived to regret. His immediate associates, the young
+men whom he began to lead and impress, were better draughtsmen than he.
+His first oil picture, I believe, was a portrait of his father, now in
+possession of the family. But, as far as can be now made out, he did not
+begin to paint seriously till about January, 1848, when he persuaded
+another Royal Academy student, W. Holman Hunt, to take a large room
+close to the paternal house in Charlotte street, and make it their
+studio. Here Mr. Scott visited them in the early spring of that year; he
+describes to me the large pictures they were struggling upon, Hunt, on
+his "Oath of Rienzi," and Rossetti, on his "Girlhood of Mary Virgin."
+The latter was evidently at present but poorly equipped; the painting
+was timid and boyish, pale in tone, and with no hint or promise of that
+radiant color which afterward became Rossetti's main characteristic. But
+the feeling was identical with that in his far more accomplished early
+poems. The very pulse and throb of mediæval adoration pervaded the whole
+conception of the picture, and Mr. Scott's first impression was that, in
+this marvellous poet and possible painter, the new Tractarian movement
+had found its expositor in art. Yet this surely was no such feeble or
+sentimental echo as had inspired the declared Tractarian poets of eight
+or nine years earlier; there was nothing here that recalled such a book
+as the "Cherwell Water Lily" of Father Faber. This contained the genuine
+fleshly mysticism, bodily presentment of a spiritual idea, and intimate
+knowledge of mediæval sentiment without which the new religious fervor
+had no intellectual basis. This strong instinct for the forms of the
+Catholic religion, combined with no attendance on the rites of that
+church, fostered by no study of ecclesiastical literature or association
+with teachers or proselytes, but original to himself and self-supported,
+was at that time without doubt the feature in Rossetti's intellectual
+character which demands our closest attention. Nor do I believe that
+this passion for the physical presentation of a mystical idea was ever
+entirely supplanted by those other views of life and art which came to
+occupy his maturer mind. In his latest poems&mdash;in "Rose Mary," for
+instance&mdash;I see this first impulse returning upon him with more than its
+early fascination. In his youth, however, the mysticism was very naïve
+and straightforward. It was fostered by one of the very few excursions
+which Rossetti ever took&mdash;a tour in Belgium in October, 1849. I am told
+that he and the painter-friend who accompanied him were so purely
+devoted to the mediæval aspect of all they saw, that, in walking through
+the galleries, they turned away their heads in approaching modern
+pictures, and carefully closed their eyes while they were passing
+Rubens's "Descent from the Cross." In Belgium, or as the result of his
+tour there, Rossetti wrote several curious poems, which were so harsh
+and forced that he omitted them from his collection when he first
+published his "Poems," in 1870.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page291" name="page291"></a>(p. 291)</span> The effort in these early pieces is too marked. I remember once
+hearing Rossetti say that he did not mind what people called him, if
+only they would not call him "quaint." But the fact was that, if
+quaintness be defined as the inability to conceal the labor of an art,
+there is no doubt that both his poems and his designs occasionally
+deserved this epithet. He was so excessively sincere an artist, so
+determined not to permit anything like trickiness of effect or
+meaningless smoothness to conceal the direct statement of an idea, that
+his lack of initial discipline sometimes made itself felt in a curious
+angular hardness.</p>
+
+<p>And now it would be necessary, if I were attempting a complete study of
+Gabriel Rossetti's intellectual career, to diverge into a description of
+what has so much exercised popular curiosity, the pre-Raphaelite
+movement of 1848. But there is no reason why, in a few notes on
+character, I should repeat from hearsay what several of the seven
+brothers have reported from authoritative memory. It is admitted, by
+them and by all who have understood the movement, that Gabriel Rossetti
+was the founder and, in the Shakespearian sense, "begetter" of all that
+was done by this earnest band of young artists. One of them, Mr.
+Millais, was already distinguished; two others, Mr. Holman Hunt and Mr.
+Woolner, had at that time more training and technical power than he; but
+he was, nevertheless, the brain and soul of the enterprise. What these
+young men proposed was excellently propounded in the sonnet by "W. M.
+R.," which they prefixed to their little literary venture, the "Germ,"
+in 1850. Plainly to think even a little thought, to express it in
+natural words which are native to the speaker, to paint even an
+insignificant object as it is, and not as the old masters or the new
+masters have said it should be painted, to persevere in looking at truth
+and at nature without the smallest prejudice for tradition, this was the
+whole mystery and cabal of the P. R. B. They called themselves
+"preraphaelite," because they found in the wings of Lippi's angels, and
+the columbines of Perugino's gardens that loving and exact study of
+minute things which gave to them a sense of sincerity, and which they
+missed in the breadth and ease of later work. They had no ambition to
+"splash as no one splashed before since great Caldasi Polidore;" but
+they did wish to draw a flower or a cloud so that it should be a
+portrait of that cloud or flower. In this ambition it would be curious
+to know, and I do not think that I have ever heard it stated, how far
+they were influenced by Mr. Ruskin and his "Modern Painters." I should
+not expect to find Rossetti influenced by any outside force in this any
+more than in other instances, but at all events Mr. Ruskin eagerly
+accepted the brotherhood as practical exponents of the theories he had
+pronounced. None of them, I think, knew him personally when he wrote the
+famous letter to the <i>Times</i> in 1851, defending Mr. Millais and Mr.
+Holman Hunt from the abuse of ignorant critics, who, he said, had failed
+to perceive the very principles on which these "two young men" were
+proceeding. Somebody wrote to him to explain that there were "three
+young men," and Mr. Ruskin wrote a note to Gabriel Rossetti, desiring to
+see his work, and thus the acquaintance of these two remarkable men
+commenced.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, although the more vigorous members of the brotherhood had
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page292" name="page292"></a>(p. 292)</span> shown no special sympathy for Rossetti's religious mysticism, a
+feebler artist, himself one of the original seven, had taken it up with
+embarrassing effusion. This was the late James Collinson, whose
+principal picture, "St. Elizabeth of Hungary," finished in 1851,
+produced a sort of crisis in Rossetti's career. This painting
+out-mystified the mystic himself; it was simply maudlin and hysterical,
+though drawn with some feeling for grace, and in a very earnest spirit.
+Rossetti, with his strong good sense, recognized that it would be
+impossible ever to reach the public with art of this unmanly character,
+and from this time forth he began to abandon the practice of directly
+sacred art.</p>
+
+<p>For some little time after abandoning the directly sacred field in
+painting, Rossetti seems to have passed through a disconsolate and
+dubious period. I am told that he worked for many months over a large
+picture called "Kate the Queen," from some well-known words by Browning.
+He made no progress with this, seemed dissatisfied with his own media,
+felt the weight of his lack of training, and passed, in short, through
+one of those downcast moods, which Shakespeare has so marvellously
+described in "Tired with all these," and which are incident, sooner or
+later, to every man of genius. While his touch in poetry grew constantly
+more sure and masterly, his power as a draughtsman threatened to leave
+him altogether. He was to have drawn one of the frontispieces in the
+"Germ," but, although he toiled with a design, he could not make it
+"come right." At last a happy accident put him on the true track, and
+revealed his proper genius to himself. He began to make small drawings
+of poetical subjects in water-colors&mdash;most of those which I have seen
+are not more than twenty inches by twelve&mdash;over which he labored, and
+into which he poured his exquisite sense of color, inspired without
+doubt by the glass of mediæval church windows. He travelled so very
+little, that I do not know whether he ever saw the treasures of radiant
+jewel-work which fret the gloom of Chartres or of Bourges; but if he
+never saw them, he divined them, and these are the only pieces of color
+which in the least degree suggest the drawings of this, Rossetti's
+second period. As far as one can gather, his method was, first, to
+become interpenetrated with the sentiment of some ballad or passage of
+emotional poetry, then to meditate on the scene till he saw it clearly
+before him; then&mdash;and this seems to have always been the difficult and
+tedious part&mdash;to draw in the design, and then with triumphant ease to
+fill in the outlines with radiant color. He had an almost insuperable
+difficulty in keeping his composition within the confines of the paper
+upon which he worked, and at last was content to have a purely
+accidental limit to the design, no matter what limbs of the <i>dramatis
+personæ</i> were sheered away by the frame. It would not be the act of a
+true friend to Rossetti's memory to pretend that these drawings, of
+which for the next ten or fifteen years he continued to produce a great
+number, were without faults of a nature which any coxcomb could
+perceive, or without eccentricities which an untrained eye might easily
+mistake for faults; but this does not in the least militate against the
+fact that in two great departments of the painter's faculty, in
+imaginative sentiment and in wealth of color, they have never been
+surpassed. They have rarely, indeed, been equalled <span class="pagenum"><a id="page293" name="page293"></a>(p. 293)</span> in the
+history of painting. A Rossetti drawing of this class hung with
+specimens of other art, ancient or modern, simply destroys them. I do
+not mean that it is better or worse than they are, but that it kills
+them as the electric light puts out a glow-worm. No other man's color
+will bear these points of ruby-crimson, these expanses of deep
+turquoise-blue, these flagrant scarlets and thunderous purples. He
+paints the sleeve of a trumpeter; it is such an orange as the eye can
+scarce endure to look at. He paints the tiles of a chimney-corner; they
+are as green as the peacock's eyes in the sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>The world is seldom ready to receive any new thing. These drawings of
+Rossetti's were scarcely noticed even by those who are habitually on the
+watch for fresh developments in art. But when the painter next emerges
+into something like publicity we find him attended by a brilliant
+company of younger men, all more or less influenced by his teaching and
+attracted by his gifts. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been a very
+ephemeral institution; in three years, or four at the most, it had
+ceased to exist; but its principles and the energy of its founder had
+left their mark on the whole world of art. In 1849 Rossetti had
+exhibited his picture, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," at the Portland
+Gallery, an exhibition in rivalry of the Royal Academy, which existed
+but a very short time. As far as I can discover, he did not exhibit
+again in London until 1856, when he and his friends opened a collection
+of their pictures at 4 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. We would rather
+have seen that little gallery than see most of the show-exhibitions of
+Europe. In it the fine art of the Anglo-Saxon race was seen dawning
+again after its long and dark night. Rossetti himself was the principal
+exhibitor, but his two earliest colleagues, now famous painters, Mr.
+Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt, also contributed. And here were all the new
+talents whom Rossetti had attracted around him during the last seven
+years: Mr. Madox Brown, with his fine genius for history; Mr. J. D.
+Watson, with his strong mediæval affinities; Mr. Boyce, with his
+delicate portraiture of rustic scenes; Mr. Brett, the finest of our
+students of the sea; Mr. W. B. Scott himself; besides one or two others,
+Mr. Charles Collins, Mr. Campbell, Mr. Halliday, Mr. Martineau, whom
+death or adverse fortune removed before they had quite fulfilled their
+promise. Gabriel Rossetti contributed to this interesting and historic
+exhibition five or six of those marvellous drawings of which mention has
+just been made. "Dante's Dream," the famous vision of June 9, 1290, with
+its counterpart, "The Anniversary of the Dream," in 1291, were the most
+prominent of these. A "Mary Magdalene" was perhaps the most moving and
+exciting. This extremely original design showed the Magdalene pursued by
+her lovers, but turning away from them all to seek Jesus in the house of
+Simon the Pharisee. The architecture in this drawing was almost
+childish; the wall of Simon's house is not three inches thick, and there
+is not room for a grown-up person on the stairs that lead to it; but the
+tender imagination of the whole, the sweet persuasiveness of Christ, who
+looks out of a window, the passion of the awakened sinner, who tears the
+roses out of her hair, the curious novelty of treatment in the heads
+and draperies, all these combine to make it one of those <span class="pagenum"><a id="page294" name="page294"></a>(p. 294)</span> works,
+the moral force and directness of which appeal to the heart at once.
+Perhaps the most brilliant piece of color at the Russell Place Gallery
+may have been Rossetti's "Blue Closet," a picture which either
+illustrated or, as I should rather suppose, suggested Mr. Morris's
+wonderful poem published two years later.</p>
+
+<p>The same year that displayed him to the public already surrounded by a
+brilliant phalanx of painter-friends, discovered him also, to the
+judicious, as a centre of poetic light and heat. The circumstances
+connected with Rossetti's visit to Oxford a little earlier than this are
+too recent, are fresh in the memories of too many living persons of
+distinction, to be discussed with propriety by one who was not present.
+But certain facts are public, and may be mentioned. The Oxford Union
+still shows around the interior of its cupola strange, shadowy frescoes,
+melting into nothingness, which are the work of six men, of whom
+Rossetti was the leader. These youths had enjoyed no practical training
+in that particularly artificial branch of art, mural painting, and yet
+it seems strange that Rossetti himself, at least, should not have
+understood that a vehicle, such as yolk of egg mixed with vinegar, was
+absolutely necessary to tempera, or that it was proper, in
+fresco-painting, to prepare the walls, and paint in the fresh wet
+mortar. They used no vehicle, they fixed their colors in no coat of
+plaster, but they threw their ineffectual dry paint on the naked brick.
+The result has been that their interesting boyish efforts are now
+decayed beyond any chance of restoration. It is impossible, however, to
+ascend the gallery of the Oxford Union and examine the ghostly frescoes
+that are fading there, without great interest and even emotion. Of the
+young men who painted there under Gabriel Rossetti's eye, all have
+become greatly distinguished. Mr. Edward Burne-Jones, Mr. William
+Morris, and Mr. Spencer Stanhope were undergraduates at Oxford. Mr.
+Valentine Prinsep and Mr. Arthur Hughes, I believe, were Royal Academy
+students who were invited down by Rossetti. Their work was naïve and
+queer to the last degree. It is perhaps not fair to say which one of
+them found so much difficulty in painting the legs of his figures that
+he drew an impenetrable covert of sunflowers right across his picture,
+and only showed the faces of his heroes and heroines between the golden
+disks.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Oxford and Cambridge Magazine</i>, which also dates from the year
+1856, is a still more notable expression of budding genius than the dome
+of the Oxford Union. It was edited by Mr. Godfrey Lushington, all its
+articles were anonymous, and it contrived to exist through twelve
+consecutive monthly numbers. A complete set is now rare, and the
+periodical itself is much less known than befits such a receptacle of
+pure literature. It contains three or four of Rossetti's finest poems; a
+great many of those extraordinary pieces, steeped in mediæval coloring,
+which Mr. William Morris was to collect in 1858 into his bewitching
+volume, called "The Defence of Guenevere;" several delightful prose
+stories of life in the Middle Ages, also by Mr. Morris, which, like
+certain prose romances by Mr. Burne-Jones, have never been publicly
+claimed or reprinted by their author; and not a little else that was as
+new as it was notable. A little later Mr. William Morris's first book
+was dedicated "To my Friend Dante Gabriel <span class="pagenum"><a id="page295" name="page295"></a>(p. 295)</span> Rossetti, Painter,"
+and in 1860 Mr. Swinburne followed with a like inscription of his
+first-fruits, his tragic drama of "The Queen-Mother." Thus in the course
+of a little more than ten years, Rossetti had become the centre and sun
+of a galaxy of talent in poetry and painting, more brilliant perhaps
+than any which has ever acknowledged the beneficent sway of any one
+Englishman of genius.</p>
+
+<p>But all this while the world outside knew nothing of the matter. One by
+one the younger men stepped forward on the public stage and secured the
+plaudits of the discerning, and ascended the slow incline of general
+reputation. But Rossetti remained obstinately recluse, far preferring to
+be the priest and confessor of genius to acting himself a public part.
+To this determination several outward things engaged him still further.
+He married quite early in life; and his wife, who was herself an artist
+of rare, if somewhat wild and untrained talent, bore him a son who died
+at birth, and then shortly after died herself. During his brief married
+months Rossetti had collected the MSS. of his poems, and thought to
+publish them; but when he lost his wife, in a paroxysm of grief he
+placed the sheets of his poems in her coffin, and would hear no more a
+suggestion of publication. In 1861 he presented the world with a very
+learned and beautiful anthology of early Italian poetry, and proposed as
+early as that year to print his original poems. It was his scheme to
+name the little volume "Dante in Verona, and other Poems;" but it came
+to nothing. About 1867 the scheme of publication again took possession
+of him. I have been told that a sudden sentiment of middle age, the fact
+that he found himself in his fortieth year, led him to conquer his
+scruples, and finally arrange his pieces. But he was singularly
+fastidious; the arrangement would never please him; the cover must be
+cut in brass, the paper at the sides must bear a special design. These
+niceties were rarer twelve years ago than they are now, and the printers
+fatigued him with their persistent obstinacy. It was not till early in
+1870 that the "Poems" in stately form first appeared, and were hailed
+with a shout of admiration which was practically universal.</p>
+
+<p>It was about Christmas in that same year, 1870, that he who writes these
+lines was first presented to Gabriel Rossetti. The impression on my
+mental eye is as fresh as if it had been made yesterday, instead of
+twelve years ago. He was a man of average height, commonly loosely clad
+in black, so as to give one something of the notion of an abbé; the head
+very full, and domed like that of Shakespeare, as it was then usual to
+say&mdash;to my thinking more like that of Chaucer&mdash;in any case a head
+surcharged with imagination and power, strongly Italian in color and
+cast. The eyes were exceedingly deep set, in cavernous sockets; they
+were large, and black, and full of a restless brilliance, a piercing
+quality which consoled the shy novice by not being stationary. Lastly, a
+voice of bell-like tone and sonority, a voice capable of expressing
+without effort every shade of emotion from rage and terror to the most
+sublime tenderness. I have never heard a voice so fitted for poetical
+effect, so purely imaginative, and yet, in its absence of rhetoric, so
+clear and various, as that of Gabriel Rossetti. I retain one special
+memory of his reading in his own studio the unfinished MS. of <span class="pagenum"><a id="page296" name="page296"></a>(p. 296)</span>
+"Rose Mary," in 1873, which surpassed in this direction any pleasure
+which it has been my lot to enjoy; and on various occasions I have
+listened to his reading of sonnets, his own and those of others, with a
+sense that his intonation revealed a beauty in the form of that species
+of verse which it had never been seen to possess before. I have already
+spoken of his wonderful courtliness to a new acquaintance, his
+bewitching air of sympathy; on a closer intimacy this stately manner
+would break up into wild fits of mirth, and any sketch of Rossetti would
+be incomplete that did not describe his loud and infectious laughter. He
+lived very much apart from the every-day life of mankind, not
+ostentatiously, but from a genuine lack of interest in passing events.
+An old friend tells me that during the French Revolution he burst into
+Rossetti's studio with the incredible news, "Louis-Philippe has landed
+in England!" "Has he?" said Rossetti, calmly. "What has he come for?"
+That certain political events, in which he saw a great symbolic
+significance, could move him deeply, is easily proved by such sonnets as
+the noble "On the Refusal of Aid between Nations," and "Czar Alexander
+II." But such glances out of window into the living street were rare,
+and formed no characteristic part of his scheme of life.</p>
+
+<p>As a poet in these great years he possessed rare gifts of passionate
+utterance, and harmony of vision and expression. Mr. Swinburne has
+characterized these qualities in words which leave no later commentator
+the chance of distinguishing himself. But it would be totally unjust,
+even in so cursory and personal a sketch as this, to allow the
+impression to go undisputed that Rossetti preferred the external form to
+the inward substance of poetry. This charge was brought against him, as
+it has always been brought against earnest students of poetic art. I
+will rather quote a few words from a letter of Rossetti to me, written
+in 1873, when he was composing his own <i>magnum opus</i> of "Rose Mary." I
+have always felt them to be very salutary, none the less because it is
+obvious that the writer did not at all times contrive, or perhaps
+desire, to make them true in his own work:</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me that all poetry, to be really enduring, is bound to be
+as <i>amusing</i> (however trivial the word may sound) as any other class of
+literature; and I do not think that enough amusement to keep it alive
+can ever be got out of incidents not amounting to events, or out of
+travelling experiences of an ordinary kind however agreeably,
+observantly, or even thoughtfully treated. I would eschew in writing all
+themes that are not so trenchantly individualized as to leave no margin
+for discursiveness."</p>
+
+<p>During the last eight years of his life, Rossetti's whole being was
+clouded by the terrible curse of an excitable
+temperament&mdash;sleeplessness. To overcome this enemy, which interfered
+with his powers of work and concentration of thought, he accepted the
+treacherous aid of the new drug, chloral, which was then vaunted as
+perfectly harmless in its effect upon the health. The doses of chloral
+became more and more necessary to him, and I am told that at last they
+became so frequent and excessive that no case has been recorded in the
+annals of medicine in which one patient has taken so much, or even half
+so much, chloral as Rossetti took. Under this unwholesome drug his
+constitution, originally a magnificent <span class="pagenum"><a id="page297" name="page297"></a>(p. 297)</span> one, slipped
+unconsciously into decay, the more stealthily that the poison seemed to
+have no effect whatever on the powers of the victim's intellect. He
+painted until physical force failed him; he wrote brilliantly to the
+very last, and two sonnets dictated by him on his death-bed are
+described to me as being entirely worthy of his mature powers. There is
+something almost melancholy in such a proof of the superior vitality of
+the brain. If the mind had shared the weakness of the body, the
+insidious enemy might perhaps have been routed in time to secure the
+elastic rebound of both. But when the chloral was stoutly met at last,
+it was too late.</p>
+
+<p>So at the age of fifty-four we have lost a man whom we should have
+retained, in the nature of things, for twenty years longer in the
+plentitude of his powers, but for a mistake in hygiene&mdash;a medical
+experiment. His work of inspiring the young, of projecting his fiery
+originality along the veins of others, was perhaps completed; it is
+doubtful whether this can ever be continued with advantage through more
+than two generations. The prophet is apt at last to become a tyrant, and
+from this ill apotheosis Rossetti was spared. But there was no reason
+why he should not, for at least a score of years, have produced noble
+pictures and have written gorgeous poems, emphasizing a personal success
+which he would have extended, though he hardly could have raised it. Yet
+he was always a melancholy man; of late years he had become almost a
+solitary man. Like Charles of Austria, he had disbanded his body-guard,
+and had retired to the cloister. Perhaps a longer life would not have
+brought much enjoyment with it. But these are idle speculations, and we
+have rather to call to our remembrance the fact that one of the
+brightest and most distinguished of our race, a man whose very existence
+was a protest against narrowness of aim and feebleness of purpose, one
+of the great torch-bearers in the procession of English art, has been
+called from us in the prime of life, before the full significance of his
+genius had been properly felt. He was the contemporary of some mighty
+names older than his, yet there scarcely was to be found among them all
+a spirit more thoroughly original; and surely, when the paltry conflicts
+of passing taste are laid to rest forever, it will be found that this
+man has written his signature indelibly on one of the principal pages of
+the register of our intellectual history.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<a id="sig004" name="sig004"></a>
+<div class="right">
+<img src="images/sig004.jpg" width="150" height="66" alt="Signature of the author." title="">
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page298" name="page298"></a>(p. 298)</span> GUSTAVE DORÉ<a id="footnotetag11" name="footnotetag11"></a><a href="#footnote11" title="Go to footnote 11"><span class="smaller">[11]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Kenyon Cox</span><br>
+
+(1832-1883)</h3>
+
+<a id="img030" name="img030"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img030.jpg" width="250" height="282" alt="Gustave Doré." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>It is now eleven years since Gustave Doré died. He was an officer of the
+Legion of Honor, had attained considerable wealth, and was probably more
+widely known than any other artist of his day. His name was a household
+word in two continents. Yet he died a disappointed and embittered man,
+and is proclaimed by his friends as a neglected and misunderstood
+genius. He was known the world over as the most astonishingly prolific
+illustrator of books that has ever lived; he wished to be known in
+France as a great painter and a great sculptor, and because the artists
+and critics of France never seriously recognized his claims to this
+glory, he seems to have become a victim of the mania of persecution, and
+his naturally sunny nature was over-clouded with moroseness and
+suspicion. Hailed by some as the emulator and equal of the great names
+of the Italian Renaissance, and considered a great moral force&mdash;a
+"preacher painter"&mdash;by others he has been denounced as "designer in
+chief to the devil," and described as a man wallowing in all foulness
+and horror, a sort of demon of frightful power. Both these extreme
+judgments are English. The late Blanchard Jerrold, an intimate friend
+and collaborator of the artist, takes the first view. Mr. Ruskin and Mr.
+Hamerton have taken the second. Doré's own countrymen have never
+accepted either. Just where, between them, the truth lies, as we see it,
+we shall endeavor to show in this article.</p>
+
+<p>The main facts of Doré's life may be dismissed very briefly. He was born
+with a caul on January 6, 1832, in the Rue Bleue at Strasbourg, near the
+Cathedral. About 1841 his father removed to Bourg, in the Department of
+Ain, where he was chief government engineer of the department. These two
+residences of the young artist are supposed to account for the mastery
+of Gothic <span class="pagenum"><a id="page299" name="page299"></a>(p. 299)</span> architecture and of mountain scenery which his
+admirers find in his mature work. He showed very early in life a passion
+for drawing, and, as a small child, had always a pencil in his hand,
+which he begged to have "sharpened at both ends," that he might work
+longer without interruption. His father intended him for an engineer,
+but he was determined from the first to be an artist. He was of a gay
+and jovial disposition, given to pranks and practical jokes, and of an
+athletic temperament. Théophile Gautier afterward called him a "gamin de
+génie." In 1847, when he was fifteen years old, being in Paris with his
+parents, he called upon Phillippon, the publisher, and showed him some
+of his sketches. M. Phillippon looked at them, and sent a letter to
+Doré's parents, persuading them to allow the boy to remain in Paris, and
+promising them to begin using his work at once and to pay for it. Thus,
+without any study of art whatever, he began his career, and in a few
+years had produced a prodigious quantity of work, and was a celebrated
+man before he was twenty. No one knows how many drawings he made. He
+"lived like an Arab," worked early and late, and with astonishing
+rapidity made thousands of drawings for the comic papers, besides early
+beginning the publication of independent books. One estimate, which Mr.
+Jerrold thinks excessive, credits him with having published forty
+thousand drawings before he was forty! Mr. Jerrold himself reckons two
+hundred and sixty-six drawings done in one year. His "Labors of
+Hercules" was brought out in 1848, when he was sixteen, and before he
+was twenty-seven he had published his "Holy Russia," his "Wandering
+Jew," his illustrations to Balzac's "Contes Drôlatiques," to Rabelais,
+and many other authors. His best work was done at an age when most
+artists are painfully acquiring the rudiments of their art. We all know
+the books that followed.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile he was determined to be known as a great painter, and, while
+flooding the market with his countless illustrations, was working at
+great canvases of Biblical subjects, which, though the French would not
+accept them, were hugely admired in the Doré Gallery of London. Later he
+tried sculpture also, and his last work was a monument to Alexandre
+Dumas, which he made at his own expense, and presented to the city of
+Paris. He died in the beginning of the year 1883, worn out with
+excessive production&mdash;a great name, but an unsatisfied man.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jerrold has divided his book into two parts, dealing first with Doré
+the illustrator, and then with Doré the painter and sculptor. It is an
+eminently natural arrangement, and, in our effort to arrive at Doré's
+true position in art, we cannot do better than to follow it.</p>
+
+<p>Doré's earliest work was frankly that of a caricaturist. He had a quick
+eye, no training, and a certain extravagant imagination, and caricature
+was his inevitable field. He was, however, as Mr. Jerrold himself
+remarks, "a caricaturist who seldom raises a laugh." Not hearty fun,
+still less delicate humor, was his. In the higher qualities of
+caricature his contemporaries, Daumier and Gavarni, were vastly his
+superiors. An exuberance of grotesque fancy and a recklessness of
+exaggeration were his dominant notes. His earlier work, up to and
+including <span class="pagenum"><a id="page300" name="page300"></a>(p. 300)</span> the Rabelais, is not really funny&mdash;to many minds it
+is even painful&mdash;but it is unmistakably caricature of a dashing, savage
+sort. To our mind it remains his best work, and that by which he is most
+likely to live. At least it is the work that formed him and fixed his
+characteristics, and an understanding of it is essential to any judgment
+of him. The qualities and the defects of his later work&mdash;that which is
+most praised and most blamed in his production&mdash;are inherent in the work
+of this period, and are best explained by a reference to the latter.</p>
+
+<p>Take, for instance, what has been denounced as his love of horrors and
+of foulness, his delight in blood and massacre. He is scored for this as
+if he were one of that modern French school, beginning, perhaps, with
+Regnault, who have revelled in the realistic presentation of executions
+and battles, and have sought to effect by sheer sensationalism what they
+could not by gentler means. It is surprising that his critics have not
+seen that Doré's battles are always, even to the end, the battles of a
+caricaturist. His decapitated trunks, cloven heads, smoking hearts, arms
+still fighting though severed from their bodies, are simply a debauch of
+grim humor. There is never the slightest attempt to realize
+carnage&mdash;only to convey, by the caricaturist's exaggeration, an idea of
+colossally impossible bloodthirstiness. One may not enjoy this kind of
+fun, but to take it seriously, as the emanation of a gloomy and diabolic
+genius, is absurd.</p>
+
+<p>The same test is equally destructive of much of the praise Doré has
+received. He is constantly spoken of, even by severe critics of his
+painting, as a great illustrator who identified himself with the minds
+of one great writer after another. But Doré identified himself with no
+one; he was always Doré. Even in these early drawings he cannot keep to
+the spirit of the text, though the subjects suited him much better than
+many he tried later. There is a great deal of broad gayety and "Gallic
+wit" in the "Contes Drôlatiques," but it was not broad enough for Doré,
+and he has converted its most human characters into impossible
+grotesques.</p>
+
+<p>Another thing for which Doré is praised is his wonderful memory. Mr.
+Jerrold repeats more than once Doré's phrase, "I have lots of collodion
+in my head," and recounts how he could scarcely be induced to make
+sketches from nature, but relied upon his memory. He also speaks of
+Doré's system of dividing and subdividing a subject, and noting the
+details in their places, so that he could reproduce the whole afterward.
+This question of work from memory is one of the most vital for an
+understanding of Doré, and one of general interest in all matters of
+art, and is worth attention. Of course, a man who made hundreds of
+drawings every year could not work much from nature, and came to rely
+upon his memory. But what is the nature of artistic memory, and how does
+it perform its task? We think the truth is, that the artist who
+habitually works from memory, fills in his details, not from memory of
+the object, but from memory of the way he has formerly drawn similar
+objects. He reverts to a series of formulæ that he has gradually
+accumulated. This man must have a cloak. This is the way a cloak is
+done. A hand? Nothing can be easier; the hand formula is ready. The
+stock in trade of the professional illustrator and caricaturist is
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page301" name="page301"></a>(p. 301)</span> made up of a thousand such formulæ&mdash;methods of expression that
+convey the idea readily enough to the spectator, but have little
+relation to fact. So it is that Doré never learned, in the true sense,
+to draw. He had made for himself a sort of artistic shorthand, which
+enabled him to convey his superabundant ideas quickly and certainly to
+his public, but his drawing is what is called mannered in the extreme.
+It is not representation of nature at all, but pure formula and chic. He
+is said to be a master of drapery, but he never drew a single fold
+correctly. He is said to show great knowledge of Gothic architecture,
+but he never drew well a single column or finial. In his later years he
+studied anatomy with great perseverance, and advocated the necessity of
+dissection, saying, "Il faut fourrer la main dedans" (You must stick
+your hand in it); but the manner was formed, and he never drew a leg
+with a bone in it.</p>
+
+<p>With this equipment he illustrated Don Quixote, Dante, the Bible. Is it
+strange that he shows no sympathy with the grand simplicity of Dante, or
+the subtle humor of Cervantes, and that we can only be thankful that he
+never completed his projected illustrations to Shakespeare? Doré, the
+illustrator, was fecund beyond precedent, possessed a certain strange
+drollery, had a wonderful flow of ideas, but was superficial,
+theatrical, and mannered, and as far from expressing real horror as from
+expressing real fun. What shall we say of Doré the painter and sculptor?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Jerrold reports a discussion between Doré and Théophile Gautier, in
+which the roles of artist and man of letters are strangely reversed.
+"Gautier and Doré," he says, "disagreed fundamentally on the aims and
+methods of art. Gautier loved correctness, perfect form&mdash;the technique,
+in short, of art; whereas Doré contended that art which said nothing,
+which conveyed no idea, albeit perfect in form and color, missed the
+highest quality and raison d'être of art." What is plain from this is,
+that Gautier was an artist and cared first of all for art, while Doré
+was never an artist, properly speaking, at all, and never understood the
+artist's passion for perfection. To Doré, what was necessary was to
+express himself anyhow&mdash;who cared if the style was defective, the
+drawing bad, the color crude? The idea was the thing. His admirers can
+defend him only on this ground, and they adopt of necessity the
+Philistine point of view. The artists of Doré's time and country were
+very clear in their opinion. "The painters," says Mr. Jerrold, "said he
+could not paint."</p>
+
+<p>The sculptors admitted that he had ideas in his groups, but he was not
+sculpturesque. His friends protest against this judgment, and attribute
+it, <i>ad nauseam</i>, to "malevolence" and "envy." What if his technique
+was less brilliant than that of Hals, they say; what if his shadows are
+less transparent than those of Rembrandt (and they will make no meaner
+comparison)? He is "teeming with noble thoughts," and these will put his
+work "on a level with the masterpieces of the Italian masters of the
+sixteenth century." It is the conception, the creation&mdash;not the perfect
+painting of legs and arms and heads, the harmonious grouping, the happy
+and delicate combination of color&mdash;by which the observer is held spell
+bound. All these qualities, which his admirers grudgingly admit that
+Doré had <span class="pagenum"><a id="page302" name="page302"></a>(p. 302)</span> not, are classed as "mere dexterity," and are not
+considered worth a second thought.</p>
+
+<p>This is the true literary gospel of art, but it is one that no artist,
+and no critic who has any true feeling of art, has ever accepted or will
+ever accept. Thoughts, ideas, conceptions, may enhance the value of a
+work of art, provided it is first of all a piece of beautiful art in
+itself, but they have never preserved, and never will preserve from
+oblivion bad painting or bad sculpture. The style is the artist, if not
+the man; and of the two, beautiful painting with no idea at all
+(granting, for the sake of argument, that it exists), will ever be
+infinitely more valuable to the world than the lame expression of the
+noblest thoughts. What may be the real value of Doré's thoughts is
+therefore a question with which we have no concern. As painter and
+sculptor, his lack of education and his great technical
+imperfections&mdash;his bad drawing, false light and shade, and crude
+color&mdash;relegate him forever to a rank far below mediocrity. Such
+reputation as he has is the result of the admiration of those altogether
+ignorant of art, but possessed of enough literary ability to trumpet
+abroad their praises of "great conceptions," and will as surely fade
+away to nothing as the reputation of such simple painters as Van Der
+Meer or Chardin will continue to grow, while painting as an art is loved
+and understood.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+<h2>COMPOSERS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>HANDEL<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">C. E. Bourne</span><br>
+
+(1685-1759)</h3>
+
+
+<p>George Frederick Handel, of whom Haydn once reverently said, "He is the
+master of us all," was born at Halle, in Lower Saxony, on February 23,
+1685. His father was a surgeon, and sixty-three years of age at the time
+of his birth&mdash;a terribly severe old man, who, almost before his son was
+born, had determined that he should be a lawyer. The little child knew
+nothing of the fate before him, he only found that he was never allowed
+to go near a musical instrument, much as he wanted to hear its sweet
+sounds, and the obstinate father even took him away from the public
+day-school for the simple reason that the musical gamut was taught there
+in addition to ordinary reading, writing, and arithmetic.</p>
+
+<p>But love always "finds out the way," and his mother or nurse managed to
+procure for him the forbidden delights; a small clavichord, or dumb
+spinet, with the strings covered with strips of cloth to deaden the
+sound, was found for the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page303" name="page303"></a>(p. 303)</span> child, and this he used to keep hidden
+in the garret, creeping away to play it in the night-time, when everyone
+was asleep, or whenever his father was away from home doctoring his
+patients.</p>
+
+<a id="img031" name="img031"></a>
+<div class="floatright">
+<img src="images/img031.jpg" width="200" height="263" alt="Handel." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>But, at last, when George Frederick was seven years of age, the old man
+was compelled to change his views. It happened in this way. He set out
+one day on a visit to the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels, where
+another son by a former marriage was a page. George Frederick had been
+teasing his father to let him go with him to see his elder brother, whom
+he had not yet met, but this was refused. When old Handel started by the
+stagecoach the next morning, the persistent little fellow was on the
+watch; he began running after it, and at length the father was
+constrained to stop the coach and take the boy in. So, though at the
+expense of a severe scolding, the child had his way and was allowed to
+go on to Saxe-Weissenfels. When there, the chapel, with the beautiful
+organ, was the great attraction, and George Frederick, as indomitable
+then as he was in after-life, found his way into the organ loft, and
+when the regular service was over, contrived to take the organist's
+place, and began a performance of his own; and strange to say, though he
+had not had the slightest training, a melody with chords and the correct
+harmonies was heard. The duke had not left the chapel, and noticing the
+difference in style from that of the ordinary organist, inquired as to
+the player, and when the little boy was brought to him he soon
+discovered, by the questions he put, the great passion for music which
+possessed the child. The duke, a sensible man, told the father it would
+be wrong to oppose the inclination of a boy who already displayed such
+extraordinary genius; and old Handel, either convinced, or at any rate
+submitting to the duke's advice, promised to procure for his son regular
+musical instruments. Handel never afterward forgot the debt of gratitude
+he owed to the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels for this intercession.</p>
+
+<p>On his return to Halle he became the pupil of Zachau, the organist of
+the cathedral there. This man was an excellent teacher and a sound
+musician. Before the pupil was nine years old his instructor used to set
+him to write fugues and motets as exercises, and before long the boy was
+allowed to play the organ at the cathedral services on Sunday, whenever
+the elder musician was inclined to linger over his breakfast or to take
+a holiday. At last, when young Handel was nine years old, the master
+honestly confessed that his pupil knew more music than he himself did,
+and advised that he should be sent to Berlin for a course of further
+study there. Thither he accordingly went in the year 1696.</p>
+
+<p>In Berlin the boy of eleven years was soon recognized as a prodigy.
+There he met two Italian composers of established reputation, Bononcini
+and Attilio Ariosti, both of whom he was to encounter in after-life,
+though under very different circumstances, in London. Bononcini, who was
+of a sour and jealous disposition, soon conceived a dislike for the
+gifted little fellow, and attempted to <span class="pagenum"><a id="page304" name="page304"></a>(p. 304)</span> injure him by composing
+a piece for the harpsichord full of the most extraordinary difficulties,
+and then asking him to play it at sight. The boy, however, at once
+executed it without a mistake, and thus the malicious schemer was foiled
+by his own device. Attilio was of a different disposition; he praised
+the young musician to the skies, and was never weary of sitting by his
+side at the organ or harpsichord, and hearing him improvise for hours.
+The Elector of Brandenburg also conceived a great admiration for the
+boy's talents, and offered to send him to Italy. On old Handel being
+consulted, however, he pleaded that he was now an old man, and wished
+his son to remain near him. In consequence of this, probably much to the
+boy's disappointment, he was brought back to Halle, and there set to
+work again under his old master, Zachau.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after this return his father died, in 1697, leaving hardly anything
+for his family, and young Handel had now to seriously bestir himself to
+make a living. With this object he went to Hamburg, where he obtained a
+place as second violin in the Opera-house. Soon after arriving there,
+the post of organist at Lübeck became vacant, and Handel was a candidate
+for it. But a peculiar condition was attached to the acceptance of the
+office; the new organist must marry the daughter of the old one! And, as
+Handel either did not approve of the lady, or of matrimony generally
+(and in fact he never was married), he promptly retired from the
+competition. At first, no one suspected the youth's talents, for he
+amused himself by pretending to be an ignoramus, until one day the
+accompanyist on the harpsichord (then the most important instrument in
+an orchestra) was absent, and young Handel took his place, astonishing
+everybody by his masterly touch. Probably this discovery aroused the
+jealousy of some of his brother-artists, for soon afterward a duel took
+place between him and Matheson, a clever composer and singer, who one
+night, in the midst of a quarrel on leaving the theatre, gave him a box
+on the ear; swords were drawn, and the duel took place there and then
+under the portico of the theatre. Fortunately Matheson's weapon was
+shivered by coming in contact with a metal button on his opponent's
+coat. Explanations were then offered, and the two adversaries became
+friends&mdash;indeed, close friends&mdash;afterward. "Almira, Queen of Castile,"
+Handel's first opera, was brought out in Hamburg in 1705, and was
+followed by two others, "Nero," and "Daphne," all received with great
+favor, and frequently performed.</p>
+
+<a id="img032" name="img032"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img032.jpg" width="600" height="401" alt="" title="">
+<p>Handel's River-Concert for George I.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But the young musician determined to visit Italy as soon as possible,
+and after staying in Hamburg three years, and having, besides the money
+he sent his mother, saved two hundred ducats for travelling expenses, he
+was able to set off on the journey, then one of the great events in a
+musician's lifetime. He visited Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples, in
+almost every city writing operas, which we are told were produced with
+the most brilliant success. At Venice an opera was sought for from him,
+and in three weeks he had written "Agrippina." When produced, the people
+received it with frantic enthusiasm, the theatre resounding with shouts
+of "Viva il caro Sassone!" (Long live the dear Saxon!) The following
+story illustrates the extraordinary fame he so quickly acquired in
+Italy. He <span class="pagenum"><a id="page305" name="page305"></a>(p. 305)</span> arrived at Venice during the middle of the
+carnival, and was taken to a masked ball, and there played the
+harpsichord, still keeping on his mask. Domenico Scarlatti, the most
+famous harpsichord player of his age, on hearing him, exclaimed, "Why,
+it's the devil, or else the Saxon whom everyone is talking about!" In
+1709 he returned to Hanover, and was appointed by the Elector George of
+Brunswick, afterward King George I., of England, his Court
+Capellmeister.</p>
+
+<p>Handel's wanderings next led him to England, where he was treated with
+so much honor that he showed no great hurry to return to Hanover, and,
+in fact, he remained in England and coolly ignored his engagement as
+Capellmeister. But an awkward piece of retribution was at hand. The
+Elector of Hanover, on the death of Queen Anne, came to England as the
+new king, and Handel, his delinquent Capellmeister, could hardly expect
+to receive any share of the royal favor in future. With the help of a
+friend of his, Baron Kilmanseck, he determined, however, to make an
+attempt to conciliate the king, and accordingly he wrote twenty-five
+short concerted pieces of music, and made arrangements for these to be
+performed by musicians in a boat following the royal barge on the
+Thames, one day when the king went on an excursion up the river for a
+picnic. The king recognized the composer at once by his style, and spoke
+in terms of approbation of the music, and the news was quickly conveyed
+by his friend to the anxious musician. This is the story of the origin
+of the famous "Water Music." Soon afterward the king allowed Handel to
+appear before him to play the harpsichord accompaniments to some sonatas
+executed by Geminiani, a celebrated Italian violinist, and finally peace
+was made between them, Handel being appointed music-master to the royal
+children, and receiving an additional pension of £200. In 1726 a private
+Act of Parliament was passed, making George Frederick Handel a
+naturalized Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1720 a number of noblemen formed themselves into a company
+for the purpose of reviving Italian opera in London, at the Haymarket
+Theatre, and subscribed a capital of £50,000. The king himself
+subscribed £1,000, and allowed the society to take the name of the Royal
+Academy of Music, and at first everything seemed to promise the most
+brilliant success. Handel was appointed director of the music. Bononcini
+and Attilio Ariosti, his old acquaintances in Berlin, were also
+attracted by this new operatic venture to London, and their arrival was
+followed by a competition of a very novel character. The libretto of a
+new opera, "Muzio Scævola," was divided between the three composers.
+Attilio was to put the first act to music, Bononcini the second, and
+Handel the third. We need hardly wonder that the victory is said to have
+rested with the last and youngest of the trio, although at this time the
+cabals against him, which afterward were to do him such grievous harm,
+had already commenced.</p>
+
+<p>Handel still clung to the operatic speculation; and when he had to leave
+the Haymarket Theatre, which was given up to another Italian company
+with the famous Farinelli, from Lincoln's Inn Fields, undauntedly he
+changed to the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, and there commenced again.
+More operas were produced, with the one unvarying tale of fiasco, and
+at last, in 1737, having lost the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page306" name="page306"></a>(p. 306)</span> whole of his hardly earned
+money, Handel was compelled to close the theatre, and, worse than all,
+to suspend payment for a time. Happily he now turned his thoughts to
+oratorio. "Saul" and "Israel in Egypt" were composed in quick
+succession; the last gigantic work being written in the almost
+incredibly short space of twenty-seven days. How great it is everyone
+now knows, but, at the time the colossal choruses were actually
+considered a great deal too heavy and monotonous; and Handel, always
+quick in resource, at the second performance introduced a number of
+operatic songs to make them go down better, and after the third
+performance the piece was withdrawn altogether. Fortunately, opinions
+have changed since then. These works were followed by his fine setting
+of Dryden's "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day," and Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il
+Penseroso;" but it cannot be said that his pecuniary affairs were
+materially improved by their production.</p>
+
+<p>The first performance of his greatest oratorio, the "Messiah," took
+place at Neale's Music Hall, in Dublin, on April 18, 1742, at mid-day,
+and, apropos of the absurdities of fashion, it may be noticed that the
+announcements contained the following request: "That ladies who honor
+this performance with their presence, will be pleased to come without
+hoops, as it will greatly increase the charity by making room for more
+company." The work was gloriously successful, and £400 were obtained the
+first day for the Dublin charities. Handel seems always to have had a
+special feeling with regard to this masterpiece of his&mdash;as if it were
+too sacred to be merely used for making money by, like his other works.
+He very frequently assisted at its performance for the benefit of the
+Foundling Hospital, and he left the score as a precious gift to the
+governor of that institution. This work alone brought no less a sum than
+£10,299 to the funds of the hospital. In this connection a fine saying
+of his may be repeated. Lord Kinnoul had complimented him on the noble
+"entertainment" which by the "Messiah" he had lately given the town. "My
+Lord," said Handel, "I should be sorry if I only entertained them&mdash;I
+wish to make them better." And when someone questioned him on his
+feelings when composing the "Hallelujah Chorus," he replied in his
+peculiar English, "I did think I did see all heaven before me, and the
+great God himself." What a fine saying that was of poor old George III.,
+in describing the "pastoral symphony" in this oratorio&mdash;"I could see the
+stars shining through it!"</p>
+
+<p>The now constant custom of the audience to rise and remain standing
+during the performance of this chorus, is said to have originated in the
+following manner: On the first production of the work in London, "the
+audience were exceedingly struck and affected by the music in general;
+but when that chorus struck up, 'For the Lord God Omnipotent' in the
+'Hallelujah,' they were so transported that they all together, with the
+king (who happened to be present), started up and remained standing till
+the chorus ended." "This anecdote I had from Lord Kinnoul." So says Dr.
+Beattie, the once famous poet, in one of his letters.</p>
+
+<p>The "Messiah" was commenced on August 22, 1741, finished on September
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page307" name="page307"></a>(p. 307)</span> 12th, and the orchestration filled up two days afterward&mdash;the
+whole work thus being completed in twenty-three days. Handel was
+fifty-six years old at the time.</p>
+
+<p>The next ten years of the life of the "Goliath of Music," as he has been
+called, are marked by some of the most splendid achievements of his
+genius. "Samson," the "Dettingen Te Deum," "Joseph," "Belshazzar," "The
+Occasional Oratorio," "Judas Maccabeus," "Joshua," "Solomon," and,
+"Theodora," being composed by him during this time, when, already an old
+man, it might have been thought that he would have taken some repose
+after the labors of so toilsome and troubled a life. But, oak-like, he
+was one of those who mature late; like Milton, his greatest works were
+those of his old age.</p>
+
+<p>But a terrible misfortune was approaching&mdash;his eyesight was failing. The
+"drop serene," of which Milton speaks so pathetically, had fallen on his
+eyes, and at the time when, in February, 1752, he was composing his last
+work, "Jephtha" (the one containing "Deeper and Deeper Still," and "Waft
+her, Angels"), the effort in tracing the lines is, in the original MS.,
+very painfully apparent. Soon afterward he submitted to three
+operations, but they were in vain, and henceforth all was to be dark to
+him. His sole remaining work was now to improvise on the organ, and to
+play at performances of his oratorios. There is a pathetic story told of
+an incident that occurred on one occasion, when "Samson" was given.
+While the magnificent air,</p>
+
+<p class="poem30">
+  Total eclipse! no sun, no moon!<br>
+  All dark, amidst the blaze of noon.<br>
+  O glorious light! no cheering ray<br>
+  To glad my eyes with welcome day.<br>
+  Why thus deprived thy prime decree?<br>
+  Sun, moon, and stars are dark to me&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">was being sung by Beard, the tenor, the blind old man, seated at the
+organ, was seen to tremble and grow pale, and then, when he was led
+forward to the audience to receive their applause, tears were in the
+eyes of nearly everyone present at the sight. It was like the scene that
+is described in Beethoven's life on the occasion of that composer's
+appearance, when almost totally deaf, to conduct his great Choral
+Symphony at Vienna.</p>
+
+<p>One night, on returning home from a performance of the "Messiah" at
+Covent Garden, Handel was seized with sudden weakness and retired
+hurriedly to bed, from which he was never to rise again. He prayed that
+he might breathe his last on Good Friday, "in hope of meeting his God,
+his sweet Lord and Saviour on the day of his resurrection." And
+strangely enough his wish was granted, for on Good Friday, April 13,
+1759, he quietly passed away from this life, being then seventy-four
+years of age. His remains were laid in Poets' Corner in Westminster
+Abbey, and the place is marked by a statue by Roubilliac, representing
+him leaning over a table covered with musical instruments, his hand
+holding a pen, and before him is laid the "Messiah," open at the words,
+"I know that my Redeemer liveth."<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page308" name="page308"></a>(p. 308)</span> MOZART<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">C. E. Bourne</span><br>
+
+(1756-1791)</h3>
+
+
+<a id="img033" name="img033"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img033.jpg" width="150" height="380" alt="Mozart." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Leopold Mozart was a violinist in the band of Archbishop Sigismund, the
+reigning Prince of Salzburg, and it was probably in compliment to his
+master that he bestowed on the youngest of his seven children the name
+of Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Sigismundus. Born on
+January 27, 1756, this child was destined to make the name of Mozart
+famous wherever music is known; and surely no more beautiful
+life&mdash;beautiful in itself and in the works of immortal beauty which in
+its short course were produced&mdash;has ever been lived by anyone of those
+to whom the crown of inspired singers and an enduring monument in the
+temple of art has been given. "Look around," was the epitaph on a great
+architect. "Listen," is the most fitting tribute to the wonderful genius
+of a Mozart.</p>
+
+<p>Infant prodigies very often turn out to be nobodies in after-life. But
+Mozart was an exception; and though he might well have been called "the
+marvellous boy," his latest works&mdash;and he died at the early age of
+thirty-five&mdash;were undoubtedly his grandest and most perfect. He began
+very early to compose. One of these first attempts was a concerto so
+difficult that no one could play it; but the child undauntedly said,
+"Why, that's the very reason why it is called a concerto; people must
+practise it before they can play it perfectly."</p>
+
+<p>Wolfgang and his sister, Nannerl, as he used to call her, had been taken
+by their father, in 1762, to Vienna, where the children played the piano
+before the Empress Maria Theresa and her husband. Little Wolfgang was
+here, as everywhere, perfectly at his ease, with a simplicity and
+childish grace that won every heart. When he had been playing for some
+time, he jumped without ceremony on the lap of the empress, and kissed
+her heartily for being so good to him. Little Marie Antoinette, her
+daughter, afterward the ill-fated wife of Louis XVI., and then about the
+same age as Wolfgang, he treated in almost the same way. He had slipped
+on the polished floor, to which he was unaccustomed, and the little
+princess had hurried forward to raise him up, on which he promptly said,
+"You are good; I will marry you." The empress asked why he wished this,
+to which he answered, "Out of gratitude; she was kind, while her sister
+took no notice of me" (she had not come forward to help him). After
+returning <span class="pagenum"><a id="page309" name="page309"></a>(p. 309)</span> to Salzburg, Leopold Mozart, in the spring of 1763,
+took his children on a more lengthy tour to Munich, Paris, London, and
+The Hague, and everywhere their playing, especially Wolfgang's
+performances on the organ, which he had now learned, were listened to
+with delight and astonishment. At Heidelberg the priest of the Church of
+the Holy Ghost engraved on the organ the boy's name and the date of his
+visit, in remembrance of "this wonder of God," as he called the child.
+At London, old Mozart says, they were received, on April 27th, by King
+George III. and Queen Caroline, at the palace, and remained from six to
+nine o'clock. The king placed before the boy compositions of Bach and
+Handel, all of which he played at sight perfectly; he had also the honor
+of accompanying the queen in a song. "On leaving the palace," the
+careful father says, "we received a present of 24 guineas."</p>
+
+<p>A great delight was now before him, for his father had resolved on a
+journey to Italy, then far more than now the land of music. How much
+this visit did for the young maestro it is impossible to say; he has
+not, like Mendelssohn, left us an "Italian Symphony," recording the
+impressions which that sunny spot of classic beauty had made upon him,
+but there can be little doubt of the great influence it had on the whole
+of his after-life. There are some significant words which he wrote eight
+years later to his father from Paris: "You must faithfully promise to
+let me see Italy again in order to refresh my life. I do entreat of you
+to confer this happiness upon me." In Mantua, Milan, Bologna (where he
+had the good fortune to meet the learned Padre Martini, one of the
+soundest musicians of his age, and for whom he ever afterward maintained
+a warm attachment), Florence, Rome, and Naples, the young genius was
+received everywhere with enthusiasm by the crowds who came to hear him.
+In Naples the superstitious people believed that there was magic in his
+playing, and pointed to a ring on his left hand as the cause of his
+wonderful dexterity; and it was only when he had taken this off, and
+gone on playing just the same, that they had to acknowledge it was
+simply the perfection of art.</p>
+
+<p>There is something sad in contrasting these brilliant early days with
+the anxious times that came later on, when the great Mozart was
+compelled to wait in the ante-chambers of the great, dine with their
+lacqueys, give lessons to stupid young countesses, and write begging
+letters to his friends; yet, in reality, those later days, when "Don
+Giovanni," "Die Zauberflöte," and the "Requiem," were composed, were the
+truly brilliant ones. And it may be that the very greatness came, in
+some measure, from the sorrow and pain; that Mozart, like so many others
+of the world's great singers, "learnt in suffering what he taught in
+song."</p>
+
+<p>On his return to Munich, after composing a comic opera in the Italian
+style, "La Finta Giardiniera," which had a great success, young Mozart,
+who had been very shabbily treated by Archbishop Hieronymus&mdash;of whose
+spiteful conduct we shall hear more hereafter&mdash;the successor of
+Sigismund, determined to resign his situation in the court band, and to
+set out on his travels again, giving concerts from place to place, and
+everywhere looking out for some suitable appointment that might afford
+him a permanent income. This time his father was refused <span class="pagenum"><a id="page310" name="page310"></a>(p. 310)</span>
+permission to travel, and, as on his exertions depended the support of
+the whole family, he remained behind, while Frau Mozart, the mother,
+accompanied young Wolfgang. In 1777, now a young man of twenty-one, he
+set out upon his second great artistic tour, buoyant with hope, and with
+all the beautiful audacity of young genius determined to conquer the
+world. This time it was not the infant prodigy whom men listened to, but
+the matured musician and the composer of melodies sweeter than men had
+ever listened to before. But the tale is changed now. True, there are
+triumphs to be spoken of, flattery from the great, and presents sent in
+recompense for his marvellous playing (he tells one day of his chagrin
+in receiving from a certain prince a gold watch, instead of money that
+he sorely wanted&mdash;and, besides, he had five watches already!); but
+rebuffs, intrigues, and all sorts of petty machinations against him,
+make the tale a sadder one; and so it continued to be to the end.</p>
+
+<p>From Munich&mdash;where it had been hoped that the elector would have given
+him an appointment at court, but he was only told to go to Italy and
+become famous, "it was too early yet to think about becoming a
+Capellmeister"&mdash;he went to Augsburg, spending some pleasant days there
+in the society of a cousin, Marianne, nicknamed by him Bäsle, a merry,
+open-hearted girl of nineteen.</p>
+
+<p>Thence, he went on to Mannheim, a town that is memorable as the place
+where he first met the Webers, and made the acquaintance of Herr
+Cannabich, the director of the music at the elector's court, and one who
+proved a stanch friend through everything to the young composer.
+Cannabich had a daughter named Rosa, a girl of thirteen, exceedingly
+pretty and clever, and Wolfgang appears to have admired her very much,
+and perhaps for a time to have flirted and been in love with her. He
+wrote her a sonata, and was delighted with the way in which she played
+it; the andante, he said, he had composed to represent her, and when it
+was finished he vowed she was just what the andante was. But this little
+love affair, if it existed, soon was forgotten in a more serious one
+with Aloysia Weber. Her father was a theatre copyist in poor
+circumstances. There were a number of children, and she was a beautiful
+girl of fifteen, with a magnificent voice. She was cousin, by the way,
+to Weber, afterward composer of the "Freischütz." Mozart was so charmed
+with her voice that he undertook to give her lessons, and we soon hear
+of him composing airs for her and meditating a concert tour in Italy in
+company with her, and her father and sister. In writing of it to his own
+father he sets out the advantages to be gained by co-partnership, and
+very prosaically says: "Should we stay long anywhere, the eldest
+daughter [Josepha, afterward Frau Hofer, for whom Mozart wrote the part
+of Astrafiammente in the "Zauberflöte"] would be of the greatest use to
+us; for we could have our own ménage, as she understands cooking." But
+papa Mozart decidedly objected. "Your proposal to travel about with Herr
+Weber&mdash;N. B., two daughters&mdash;has driven me nearly wild," and he
+straightway orders his son off to Paris, whither, with a parting present
+of a pair of mittens knitted for him by Mlle. Weber, he reluctantly sets
+out in company with his mother.</p>
+
+<p>His stay in Paris during the next year was not very eventful, and a
+symphony <span class="pagenum"><a id="page311" name="page311"></a>(p. 311)</span> produced at the Concerts Spirituels seems to have been
+his most successful work at this time. It was clever and lively, full of
+striking effects, and was most warmly applauded. He says: "The moment
+the symphony was over I went off in my joy to the Palais Royal, where I
+took a good ice, told my beads, as I had vowed, and went home, where I
+am happiest and always shall be happiest." A great sorrow came to him
+here in the death of his mother. Owing to the great expense of living in
+Paris, they had been compelled to live together in a small, dark room,
+so cramped for space that there was not even room for the indispensable
+piano. Here she was taken ill, and though for fourteen days Wolfgang
+most devotedly attended to her wants, she died in his arms. The letters
+in which he breaks the news to his father and sister are full of the
+most beautiful tenderness and forgetfulness of his own grief in
+solicitude for theirs. Things did not indeed prosper with him in Paris;
+he tried to give lessons, but the ladies whom he taught paid him very
+shabbily, and the labor of getting from one part of the city to another
+to teach was so great that he found it difficult to give the time he
+wished to composition.</p>
+
+<p>Music in Paris, just then, was at a low ebb. Vapidly pretty Italian
+operas were in fashion, and Piccinni was the favorite composer. It was
+some years afterward that the great contest between the Piccinnists and
+Gluckists culminated in the victory of the latter, though "Alceste," had
+already been produced, and "Iphigenia" was soon to follow. Mozart was a
+fervent admirer of Gluck, and the music of the older master had
+evidently an important influence on that of the younger and more gifted
+composer.</p>
+
+<p>Once more his thoughts were turned to Salzburg, for two of the leading
+musicians there having died, the Archbishop Hieronymus offered their
+posts to the Mozarts, father and son, at a salary of a thousand florins
+for the two. The father anxiously entreated his son to return and accept
+this offer, mentioning as a further bait, that Aloysia Weber would
+probably be engaged to sing in Salzburg. Much as Wolfgang hated
+Salzburg, or rather the people living there, his love for his father and
+sister prevailed over his aversion; and though with no pleasure at all
+in the prospect of seeing the hateful archbishop again, he set out from
+Paris, travelling to Salzburg in very leisurely fashion via Strasbourg,
+Mannheim, and Munich. At Strasbourg he was induced to give several
+concerts, but they were not pecuniary successes, and he did not make by
+any one more than three louis d'or. But how the artist peeps out in
+every line of the letters in which he describes these! After saying how
+few were present, and how cold it was, he proceeds: "But I soon warmed
+myself, to show the Strasbourg gentlemen how little I cared, and played
+to them a long time for my own amusement, giving a concerto more than I
+had promised, and at the close extemporizing. It is now over, but at all
+events I gained honor and fame."</p>
+
+<p>At Munich a great shock awaited him. He visited the Webers, and being in
+mourning for his mother, wore, after the French fashion, a red coat with
+black buttons. When he appeared, Aloysia hardly seemed to recognize him,
+and her coldness was so marked, that Mozart quietly seated himself at
+the piano, and <span class="pagenum"><a id="page312" name="page312"></a>(p. 312)</span> sang in a loud voice, "Ich lass das Mädchen gern
+das mich nicht will" (I gladly give up the girl who slights me). It was
+all over, and he had to bear the loss of the fickle girl as best he
+might. There is a significant line in one of his letters at this time to
+his father: "In my whole life I never wrote worse than I do to-day, but
+I really am unfit for anything; my heart is so full of tears." After two
+years' absence he returned home to Salzburg, where he was warmly
+welcomed back. Here he remained for a little while, and wrote his first
+serious opera, "Idomeneo," to the text of an Abbe Varesco, a Salzburger.
+This opera Beethoven thought the finest of all that Mozart wrote. It was
+brought out at Munich in January, 1781, and was brilliantly successful.
+In the March following, an order was received from the archbishop to
+follow him to Vienna, where he wished to appear with all the full pomp
+and brilliant retinue of a prince of the church; and as one of this
+retinue Mozart had to follow him, little thinking at the time that he
+should never return to Salzburg, but that Vienna henceforth was to be
+his home.</p>
+
+<p>In Vienna he found that he had to live in the archbishop's house, and
+was looked upon there as one of the ordinary servants. He says, "We dine
+at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, unluckily rather too early an hour
+for me. Our party consists of the two valets, the comptroller, Herr
+Zetti, the confectioner, the two cooks, Cecarilli, Brunetti (two
+singers), and my insignificant self. N. B.&mdash;The two valets sit at the
+head of the table. I have, at all events, the honor to be placed above
+the cooks; I almost believe I am back to Salzburg."</p>
+
+<p>Mozart was a true gentleman, with no foolish false pride, but with the
+honorable self-respect that every gentleman must possess, and it was
+very galling to him to have to suffer such odious treatment from the
+mean-spirited archbishop. Indeed, it was only for his father's sake that
+he submitted to the continued contumely and petty slights to which the
+archbishop delighted in subjecting him. At last the open rupture came.
+The archbishop called him a knave and dissolute fellow, and told him to
+be off; and when Mozart waited upon Count Arco, the principal official,
+to obtain the regular dismissal that was necessary, the fellow poured
+abuse upon him, and actually kicked him out of the room. Poor Mozart was
+in a state of violent excitement after this outrage, and for some days
+was so ill that he could not continue his ordinary work. But now at
+least he was free, and though his father, like a timid, prudent old man,
+bewailed the loss of the stipend which his son had been receiving,
+Mozart himself knew that the release was entirely for the best.</p>
+
+<p>In 1782 appeared "Die Entführung aus dem Serail," his first really
+important opera, full of beautiful airs, which at once became enormously
+popular with the Viennese. The Emperor Joseph II. knew very little about
+music, but, as frequently happens in such cases, considered that he
+possessed prodigious taste. On hearing it he said, "Much too fine for
+our ears, dear Mozart; and what a quantity of notes!"</p>
+
+<p>The bold reply to this was, "Just as many notes as are necessary, your
+Majesty."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page313" name="page313"></a>(p. 313)</span> Much of the delight which Mozart felt in the success of the
+opera arose from the fact that it enabled him seriously to contemplate
+marriage. Aloysia Weber had been faithless to him, but there was another
+sister&mdash;with no special beauty save that of bright eyes, a comely
+figure, and a cheerful, amiable disposition&mdash;Constanze, whom he now
+hoped to make his wife. His father objected to all of the Weber family,
+and there was some difficulty in obtaining the paternal consent; but at
+last the marriage took place, on August 4, 1782. How truly he loved his
+wife from first to last, his letters abundantly show; her frequent
+illnesses were afterward a great and almost constant source of expense
+to him, but he never ceased to write to her with the passionate ardor of
+a young lover. He says: "I found that I never prayed so fervently, or
+confessed so piously, as by her side; she felt the same." And now for
+some time everything went smoothly in the modest little ménage in
+Vienna. Mozart had plenty of lessons to give, but none of the
+commissions for operas which he would have wished.</p>
+
+<p>Passing over a visit to Leipsic&mdash;where he studied with the keenest
+delight a number of the unpublished works of the great Sebastian
+Bach&mdash;and to Berlin, he returned to Vienna, and at once set to work upon
+some quartets which the King of Prussia had ordered from him. "Cosi fan
+tutte," a comic opera, with the beautifully flowing music that only
+Mozart could write, but with a stupid plot that has prevented its
+frequent repetition in later times; and the glorious "Zauberflöte,"
+written to assist a theatrical manager, Schikaneder, were his next
+works. At this time a strange melancholy began to show itself in his
+letters&mdash;it may be that already his overwrought brain was conscious that
+the end was not far distant. Such lines as these, pathetic and sad in
+their simple and almost childlike expression, occur in a letter he wrote
+during a short absence from his wife, at Frankfort, in 1790: "I am as
+happy as a child at the thought of returning to you. If people could see
+into my heart I should almost feel ashamed&mdash;all there is cold, cold as
+ice. Were you with me, I should possibly take more pleasure in the
+kindness of those I meet here, but all seems to me so empty." On his
+return to Vienna pecuniary want was rather pressingly felt; his silver
+plate had to be pawned, and a perfidious friend, Stadler, made away with
+the tickets, and the silver was never redeemed. On one occasion Joseph
+Deiner, the landlord of the "Silberne Schlange," chanced to call upon
+him, and was surprised to find Mozart and his wife Constanze dancing
+round the room. The laughing explanation was that they had no firewood
+in the house, and so were trying to warm themselves with dancing. Deiner
+at once offered to send in firewood, Mozart promising to pay as soon as
+he could.</p>
+
+<p>That grand work, the "Zauberflöte," had just been completed when a
+strange commission was given him. One day a tall, haggard-looking man,
+dressed in gray, with a very sombre expression of countenance, called
+upon Mozart, bringing with him an anonymous letter. This letter
+contained an inquiry as to the sum for which he would write a mass for
+the dead, and in how short a time this could be completed. Mozart
+consulted his wife, and the sum of fifty ducats was mentioned. The
+stranger departed, and soon returned with the money, promising Mozart a
+further sum on completion, and also mentioned that he might as <span class="pagenum"><a id="page314" name="page314"></a>(p. 314)</span>
+well spare the trouble of finding out who had given this commission, for
+it would be entirely useless. We now know that the commission had really
+been given by Count Walsegg, a foolish nobleman, whose wife had died,
+and who wanted, by transcribing Mozart's score, to pass it off as his
+own composition&mdash;and this he actually did after the composer's death.
+Poor Mozart, in the weak state of health in which he now was, with
+nerves unstrung and over-excited brain, was strangely impressed by this
+visit, and soon the fancy took firm possession of him that the messenger
+had arrived with a mandate from the unseen world, and that the "Requiem"
+he was to write was for himself. Not the less did he ardently set to
+work on it. Hardly, however, was it commenced than he was compelled to
+write another opera, "La Clemenza di Tito," for which a commission had
+been given him by the Bohemian Estates, for production on the occasion
+of the Emperor Leopold's coronation in their capital. This was
+accomplished in the short space of eighteen days, and though it does not
+contain the best music, yet the overture and several of the numbers are
+full of a piquant beauty and liveliness well suiting the festival of a
+people's rejoicing. But a far greater work, the "Zauberflöte," was
+produced in Vienna shortly afterward. It did not take very well at
+first, but subsequent performances went better.</p>
+
+<a id="img034" name="img034"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img034.jpg" width="600" height="425" alt="" title="">
+<p>Mozart singing his Requiem.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>His labors in bringing out the "Zauberflöte" over, Mozart returned to
+the "Requiem" he had already commenced, but while writing he often had
+to sink back in his chair, being seized with short swoons. Too plainly
+was his strength exhausted, but he persisted in his solemn work. One
+bright November morning he was walking with Constanze in the Prater, and
+sadly pointing out to her the falling leaves, and speaking of death,
+with tears in his eyes, he added; "I well know I am writing this
+'Requiem' for myself. My own feelings tell me that I shall not last
+long. No doubt some one has given me poison&mdash;I cannot get rid of this
+thought." With these gloomy fancies haunting his mind, he rapidly grew
+worse, and soon could not leave his room. The performances of the
+"Zauberflöte" were still going on, and extraordinarily successful. He
+took the greatest interest in hearing of them, and at night would take
+out his watch and note the time&mdash;"Now the first act is over, now is the
+time for the great Queen of Night." The day before his death he said to
+his wife, "Oh, that I could only once more hear my 'Flauto Magico!'"
+humming, in scarcely audible voice, the lively bird-catcher song. The
+same day, at two o'clock in the afternoon, he called his friends
+together, and asked for the score of his nearly completed "Requiem" to
+be laid on his bed. Benedict Schack sang the soprano; his
+brother-in-law, Hofer, the tenor; Gerl, the bass; and Mozart himself
+took the alto in a weak but delicately clear voice. They had got through
+the various parts till they came to the "Lacrymosa," when Mozart burst
+into tears, and laid the score aside. The next day (Sunday), he was
+worse, and said to Sophie, his sister-in-law, "I have the taste of death
+on my tongue, I smell the grave, and who can comfort my Constanze, if
+you don't stay here?" In her account of his last moments, she says: "I
+found Süssmayer sitting by Mozart's bed. The well-known 'Requiem' was
+lying on the coverlet, and Mozart was explaining to Süssmayer the
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page315" name="page315"></a>(p. 315)</span> mode in which he wished him to complete it after his death.
+He further requested his wife to keep his death secret until she had
+informed Albrechtsberger of it, 'for the situation of assistant organist
+at the Stephen Church ought to be his before God and the world.' The
+doctor came and ordered cold applications on Mozart's burning head....
+The last movement of his lips was an endeavor to indicate where the
+kettledrums should be used in the 'Requiem.' I think I still hear the
+sound."<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+<h3>HAYDN<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">C. E. Bourne</span><br>
+
+(1732-1809)</h3>
+
+<a id="img035" name="img035"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img035.jpg" width="200" height="276" alt="Haydn." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>No composer has ever given greater or purer pleasure by his compositions
+than is given by "papa" Haydn; there is an unceasing flow of
+cheerfulness and lively tone in his music, even in the most solemn
+pieces, as in his Masses, the predominant feeling is that of gladness;
+as he once said to Carpani: "At the thought of God my heart leaps for
+joy, and I cannot help my music doing the same." But it is not alone as
+the writer of graceful and beautiful music that Haydn has a claim on our
+remembrance; he has been truly called the "father of the symphony."
+Mozart once said: "It was from Haydn that I first learned the true way
+to compose quartettes;" and "The Creation," which must ever be counted
+one of the masterpieces of oratorio music, was his work.</p>
+
+<p>His family were of the people, his father being a master wheelwright at
+Rohrau, a small Austrian village on the borders of Lower Austria and
+Hungary and his mother having been employed as a cook in the castle of
+Count Harrach, the principal lord of the district. Joseph Haydn was born
+on March 31, 1732 the second child of his parents; and as ten brothers
+and sisters afterward came into the world, it can easily be understood
+that his lot was not a very luxurious one. His parents were simple,
+honest people of the laboring class, very ignorant, but, like most
+German peasants, with a certain love for and facility in music, not
+quite so common in this country. Haydn's father had a good voice, and
+could sing well, accompanying himself on the harp, though he did not
+know a single note of written music. Then there was the village
+schoolmaster, who could actually play the violin, and whom little
+Joseph watched with wondering eyes, extracting <span class="pagenum"><a id="page316" name="page316"></a>(p. 316)</span> those
+marvellously sweet sounds from his wooden instrument, until, with the
+child's spirit of imitation, as his parents sang their "Volkslieder,"
+the little fellow, perched on a stone bench, gravely handled two pieces
+of wood of his own as if they were bow and fiddle, keeping exact time,
+and flourishing the bow in the approved fashion of the schoolmaster.
+From this very little incident came an important change in his life; for
+a relation, Johann Mathias Frankh, of Hainburg, happened to be present
+on one occasion, and, thinking he saw an aptitude for music in the boy,
+offered to take him into his own school at Hainburg, where accordingly
+young Haydn went at the age of six years.</p>
+
+<p>There he remained for two years, making rapid progress in singing and in
+playing all sorts of instruments, among others the clavier, violin,
+organ, and drum. He said afterward, with the unaffected piety, far
+removed from cant, that was characteristic of him: "Almighty God, to
+whom I render thanks for all his unnumbered mercies, gave me such
+facility in music that, by the time I was six years old, I stood up like
+a man and sang masses in the church choir, and could play a little on
+the clavier and violin." Of Frankh, a very strict, but thorough and most
+painstaking teacher, he also said afterward: "I shall be grateful to
+that man as long as I live for keeping me so hard at work, though I used
+to get more flogging than food;" and in Haydn's will he remembered
+Frankh's family, leaving his daughter a sum of money and a portrait of
+Frankh himself, "my first instructor in music."</p>
+
+<p>For some years he seems to have lived a miserable, struggling life,
+giving lessons, playing the organ in churches, and studying when and
+where he could. He had a few pupils at the moderate remuneration of two
+florins a month, and he had contrived to obtain possession of an old
+worm-eaten clavier, on which he used diligently to practise in the
+garret in the Kohlmarkt, where he lived. A pitiable description is given
+of the lodging he then occupied. It was on the sixth story, in a room
+without stove or window. In winter his breath froze on his thin
+coverlet, and the water, that in the morning he had to fetch himself
+from the spring for washing, was frequently changed into a lump of ice
+before his arrival in that elevated region. Life was indeed hard; but he
+was constantly at work, and, having made a precious "find" on an old
+bookstall one day of Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum," in a very dilapidated
+condition, but very cheap, he was ardently preparing himself for the
+life&mdash;he now vowed should be his&mdash;of a composer.</p>
+
+<p>About this time Haydn received a commission from Felix Kurz, a comic
+actor of the Stadt-Theatre, to put a farce of his, "Der neue krumme
+Teufel," to music. This farce, of which the words still remain, though
+the music has been lost, was very successful, and was played in Vienna,
+Prague, Berlin, and a number of other towns. The well-known story of
+Haydn's "Tempest Music" is connected with this. In one part of this
+piece a terrible storm was supposed to be raging, and the accompanying
+music must of course be suitably descriptive; but the difficulty was
+that Haydn had never seen the sea: therefore had not the slightest
+notion of what a storm at sea was like. Kurz tries to describe the
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page317" name="page317"></a>(p. 317)</span> waves running mountains high, the pitching and tossing, the
+roll of thunder, and the howling of the wind; and Haydn produces all
+sorts of ugly, jerky, and noisy music, but none of it is in the remotest
+degree like a storm at sea, or anywhere else. At last, after Kurz had
+become hoarse with his nautical disquisitions, and Haydn's fingers were
+tired of scrambling all over the piano, the little musician in a rage
+crashed his hands down on the two extremes of the instrument,
+exclaiming: "Let's have done with this tempest!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that's it; that's the very thing!" shouted the clown, jumping up
+and embracing him; and with this crash and a run of semitones to the
+centre of the piano this troublesome tempest was most satisfactorily
+represented.</p>
+
+<p>When, many years afterward, Haydn was crossing the Straits of Dover to
+England, amid his sufferings he could not help laughing at the ludicrous
+recollections of this early experience of his.</p>
+
+<p>Things still went on improving, and Haydn, who was always lucky in the
+patrons he secured (at least according to the notion about patrons that
+then prevailed), was invited to the country-house of Herr von Fürnberg,
+a wealthy amateur, to stay there and compose quartettes for him&mdash;a style
+of music for which von Fürnberg had an especial liking. To his prompting
+it is that we owe the lovely series of quartettes which Haydn
+wrote&mdash;still as fresh and full of serene beauty as when first tried over
+by the virtuosi of Weinzirl. The next piece of good fortune was Haydn's
+appointment as director of the band and composer to Count Ferdinand
+Morzin at Lukaver near Pilsen; and here, in 1759, his first symphony was
+written. His salary was very small, only 200 florins a year (or £20),
+with board and lodgings; but on the strength of it he unfortunately
+determined on the serious step of embarking in matrimony. A barber,
+named Keller, is said to have been very kind to him in the days of his
+poverty, and out of gratitude Haydn gave music-lessons to his daughters.
+One of them, the youngest, was very pretty, and Haydn fell in love with
+her. But she became a nun; and the father then prevailed upon Haydn to
+marry the elder one, who was three years older than he&mdash;a sour-tempered,
+bigoted, and abominably selfish woman, who contributed little to the
+happiness of his life, and was always bringing priests and friars to the
+house and worrying her good-tempered husband to compose masses and other
+church music for these men.</p>
+
+<p>Count Morzin was compelled to give up his band in 1761; but Haydn did
+not remain long without employment, as Prince Esterhazy, who had heard
+his symphonies at Morzin's house, engaged him to assist Werner, his
+Capellmeister. As director of Prince Esterhazy's band, Haydn was fated
+to remain for many years living at Esterház, the prince's country-seat,
+composing there nearly all his operas and songs, and many of his
+symphonies.</p>
+
+<p>In 1785 Haydn received a commission which showed the wide reputation he
+had then gained. The Chapter of Cadiz Cathedral requested him to write
+some instrumental music for performance on Good Friday. "The Seven Words
+of our Saviour on the Cross" was in consequence written by him.</p>
+
+<p>Several invitations had been sent from England for Haydn to pay a visit
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page318" name="page318"></a>(p. 318)</span> there; but it was only after Prince Esterhazy was dead that he
+was prevailed on by Salomon to cross the sea. A characteristic
+conversation between him and Mozart&mdash;which took place before he
+undertook this, in those days, really formidable journey&mdash;is recorded.</p>
+
+<p>"Papa," said Mozart, "you have no training for the great world, and you
+speak too few languages."</p>
+
+<p>Haydn replied: "My language is understood by all the world."</p>
+
+<p>He set out on December 15, 1790, and did not return to Vienna till July,
+1792. In London, where he wrote and conducted a number of symphonies for
+Salomon, he was the "lion" of the season, being in constant request for
+conducting concerts and paying visits to the nobility. Of these
+symphonies Salomon once said to him: "I am strongly of opinion that you
+never will surpass this music."</p>
+
+<p>"I never mean to try," was the answer.</p>
+
+<p>But this must not be taken to mean that Haydn had given up striving
+after the truest perfection in his art, and it probably meant no more
+than that for the time he was satisfied with his work. Far more like the
+genuine expression of the feeling of the great artist was his utterance,
+just before he died, to Kalkbrenner: "I have only just learned in my old
+age how to use the wind-instruments; and now that I do understand them,
+I must leave the world."</p>
+
+<a id="img036" name="img036"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img036.jpg" width="600" height="420" alt="" title="">
+<p>Haydn composing his "Creation."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Great as the work accomplished in his youth and early manhood
+unquestionably was, it remained for his old age to accomplish his
+greatest work, and that by which he is best known&mdash;the oratorio of "The
+Creation." It is said that the first ideas for this came to him when, in
+crossing the English Channel, he encountered a terrific storm. Soon
+after his leaving London, where the words had been given him by Salomon,
+Haydn set about composing the music. "Never," he says, "was I so pious
+as when composing 'The Creation.' I knelt down every day and prayed God
+to strengthen me for my work." It was first produced on March 31, 1799,
+his 67th birthday, at the National Theatre, Vienna, and was at once
+accorded an extraordinary share of popular favor. There is a pathetic
+story of the last performance of the work, at which Haydn, in extreme
+old age, in 1808, was present, when Salieri conducted. He was carried in
+an arm-chair into the hall, and received there with the warmest greeting
+by the audience. At the sublime passage, "And there was light!" Haydn,
+quite overcome, raised his hand, pointing upward and saying, "It came
+from thence." Soon after this his agitation increased so much that it
+was thought better to take him home at the end of the first part. The
+people crowded round him to take leave, and Beethoven is said to have
+reverently kissed his hand and forehead. After composing "The Creation,"
+Haydn was prevailed upon to write another work, of somewhat similar
+character, to words adapted from Thomson's poem, and entitled "The
+Seasons." This, though containing some fine descriptive music and
+several choruses of great beauty, is not at all equal to the earlier
+work, though at the time its success was quite as complete. But the
+exertion of writing two such great works, almost without rest between
+them, was too great, and he himself <span class="pagenum"><a id="page319" name="page319"></a>(p. 319)</span> said: "'The Seasons' gave
+me the finishing stroke." The bombardment of Vienna by the French in
+1809 greatly disturbed the poor old man. He still retained some of his
+old humor, and during the thunder of the cannons called out to his
+servants: "Children, don't be frightened; no harm can happen to you
+while Haydn is by!" He was now no longer able to compose, and to his
+last unfinished quartette he added a few bars of "Der Greis," as a
+conclusion:</p>
+
+<p class="poem30">
+<span class="min03em">"</span>Hin ist alle meine Kraft:<br>
+  Alt und schwach bin ich.</p>
+
+<p class="poem50">&mdash;<span class="smcap">Joseph Haydn</span>."</p>
+
+<p>"Gone is all my strength: old and weak am I." And these lines he caused
+to be engraved, and sent on a card to the friends who visited him. The
+end was indeed now near. On May 26, 1809, he had his servants gathered
+round him for the last adieus; then, by his desire, he was carried to
+the piano, where he played three times over the "Emperor's Hymn,"
+composed by him. Then he was taken to his bed, where five days afterward
+he died.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>BEETHOVEN<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">C. E. Bourne</span><br>
+
+(1770-1827)</h3>
+
+<a id="img037" name="img037"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img037.jpg" width="200" height="257" alt="Beethoven." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>In one of his letters to Frau von Streicher, at Baden, Beethoven writes:
+"When you visit the ancient ruins, do not forget that Beethoven has
+often lingered there; when you stray through the silent pine-forests, do
+not forget that Beethoven often wrote poetry there, or, as it is termed,
+composed." He was always fond of claiming the title "Ton-dichter, poet
+in music;" and surely of all the great geniuses who have walked the
+earth, to none can the glorious name of "poet" more truly be given than
+to Ludwig von Beethoven.</p>
+
+<p>He was born at Bonn, on December 17, 1770. His father, Johann von
+Beethoven, was a tenor singer in the Electoral Chapel of the Archbishop
+of Cologne, at Bonn, and his mother, Maria Magdalena, was a daughter of
+the head cook at the castle of Ehrenbreitstein. The Beethoven family
+originally came from Louvain, in Belgium; but the composer's grandfather
+had settled in Bonn, first as a singer, and afterward as Capellmeister
+to the court. Musicians were not held of much account in those days,
+and the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page320" name="page320"></a>(p. 320)</span> marriage of a singer with the daughter of a cook was
+not at all considered a mésalliance. Johann was a sad drunken
+scapegrace, and his poor wife, in bringing up her family upon the small
+portion of his earnings which she could save from being squandered at
+the tavern, had a pitiably hard and long struggling life of it.</p>
+
+<p>Johann soon discovered the extraordinary musical endowments of his child
+and at once set to work to make a "prodigy" of him, as Handel, Bach, and
+Mozart had been before; for in this way the father hoped to secure a
+mine of wealth and lazy competence for himself. So the boy, when only a
+few years old, was kept for long weary hours practising the piano, and
+one of the earliest stories of his life is of the five-year-old little
+child made to stand on a bench before the piano laboring over the notes,
+while the tears flowed fast down his cheeks at the cold and aching pain,
+from which his hard taskmaster would not release him. Besides his
+father, a clever musician who lodged in the house, Pfeiffer, an oboist
+at the theatre, gave him lessons. Beethoven used afterward to say that
+he had learnt more from this Pfeiffer than from any one else; but he was
+too ready to abet the father in his tyranny, and many a time, when the
+two came reeling home late at night from drinking bouts at the tavern,
+they would arouse the little fellow from his sleep and set him to work
+at the piano till daybreak.</p>
+
+<p>His next instructor was Neefe, the organist of the Archbishop's private
+chapel, a really skilful and learned musician, who predicted that the
+boy would become a second Mozart. Under him Beethoven studied for
+several years, and in 1782, when he was hardly twelve years old, we find
+him acting as organist in Neefe's place during the absence of the latter
+on a journey. The next year three sonatas composed by young Beethoven,
+and dedicated to the Elector in fulsome language, which was probably his
+father's production, were printed. Soon afterward the boy obtained the
+appointment of assistant-organist to the Elector, with a salary of a
+hundred thalers, no inconsiderable addition to the resources of his poor
+mother, who, with her family of three children, Ludwig, Carl, and
+Johann, and the more and more frequent visits of her ne'er-do-well of a
+husband to the tavern, was often grievously hard put to it for money.
+Young Ludwig had little play time in his life, and little opportunity
+for education; but amid his hard work some indications of a mischievous
+boyish spirit are to be found.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1791, the Elector, as head of the Teutonic Order, had to be
+present at a grand conclave at Mergentheim, and thither he resolved to
+take his musical and theatrical staff. Two ships were chartered to
+convey these gentlemen down the Rhine and Maine, and a very pleasant
+excursion, with all sorts of frolics and high revellings, they had of
+it. Lux, a celebrated actor, was chosen king of the expedition, and we
+find Beethoven figuring among the scullions.</p>
+
+<p>In the autumn of the year following, a visit was paid by Haydn to Bonn
+on his return from his second journey to London. The musicians of the
+town gave a breakfast at Godesberg in his honor, and here Beethoven
+summoned up courage to show the veteran musician a cantata which he had
+recently composed. This was warmly praised by Haydn, and probably about
+this time arrangements were made for Beethoven to be received as a
+pupil by the older master. It is <span class="pagenum"><a id="page321" name="page321"></a>(p. 321)</span> in this period that we must
+place a well-known anecdote. The young musician, already famous in his
+own neighborhood, was composing, as his custom was, in the wood outside
+the city, when a funeral cortége passed him. The priest, seeing him,
+instantly checked the dirge which was being chanted, and the procession
+passed in solemn silence, "for fear of disturbing him." In the beginning
+of November, 1792, the young musician left Bonn for Vienna, and, as it
+happened, he never afterward returned to the familiar scenes of his
+birthplace.</p>
+
+<p>Beethoven was never a very easy man to get on with, and his intercourse
+with Haydn, who used to call him the "Great Mogul," does not seem to
+have been the most friendly. He was dissatisfied with the instruction
+given him, and suspicions were awakened in his mind that the elder
+musician was jealous of him, and did not wish him to improve. These
+thoughts were strengthened by the result of a chance meeting one day, as
+he was walking home with his portfolio under his arm, with Johann
+Schenk, a scientific and thoroughly accomplished musician. Beethoven
+complained to him of the little advance he was making in counterpoint,
+and that Haydn never corrected his exercises or taught him anything.
+Schenk asked to look through the portfolio, and see the last work that
+Haydn had revised, and on examining it he was astonished to find a
+number of mistakes that had not been pointed out. It is difficult to
+understand Haydn's conduct in this matter, for the perfidious treatment
+suspected by Beethoven is quite at variance with the ordinarily accepted
+character of the old man, and I cannot help fancying that the only
+foundation for Beethoven's suspicion was that Haydn did not quite
+understand the erratic genius of the youth till some time afterward.
+Beethoven dedicated his three pianoforte sonatas, Op. II., to Haydn, and
+when the latter suggested that he should add on the title page "Pupil of
+Haydn," the "Great Mogul" refused, bluntly saying "that he had never
+learnt anything from him." After Haydn, Albrechtsberger and Salieri were
+for a time his teachers, but Beethoven got on no better with them, and
+Albrechtsberger said, "Have nothing to do with him; he has learnt
+nothing, and will never do anything in decent style." Perhaps not in
+your pedant's style, O great contrapuntist!</p>
+
+<p>Beethoven cannot be said to have been unfortunate in his friends. He had
+many true and faithful ones throughout his life, and though he suffered
+from pecuniary troubles, caused by the conduct of his brothers, he was
+never in such a state of grinding poverty as some other artists, such as
+Schubert, have been&mdash;never compelled to waste precious years of his life
+in producing "pot-boilers"&mdash;working not for art so much as for mere food
+and shelter. In 1794 Prince Karl Lichnowski, who had been a pupil of
+Mozart, and who, as well as his wife Christiane, was <i>fanatico per la
+musica</i>, proposed that Beethoven should come and live at his palace.
+They had no children; a suite of rooms was placed at the musician's
+disposal; no terms were proposed; the offer was the most delicate and
+friendly imaginable, and was accepted by Beethoven in the spirit in
+which it was made. For ten years he resided with the Lichnowskis, and
+these were probably the years of purest happiness in the great
+composer's life, although early in their <span class="pagenum"><a id="page322" name="page322"></a>(p. 322)</span> course the terrible
+affliction of deafness began to be felt by him. He at this time freely
+frequented the salons of the Viennese nobility, many of whom were
+accomplished virtuosi themselves, and were able to appreciate the great
+genius of the new-comer, rough and bearish as oftentimes he must have
+appeared to them&mdash;a great contrast to the courtly Haydn and Salieri, who
+might be seen sitting side by side on the sofa in some grandee's
+music-room, with their swords, wigs, ruffles, silk stockings, and
+snuff-boxes, while the insignificant-looking and meanly dressed
+Beethoven used to stand unnoticed in a corner. Here is a description of
+his appearance given by a Frau von Bernhard: "When he visited us, he
+generally put his head in at the door before entering, to see if there
+were any one present he did not like. He was short and
+insignificant-looking, with a red face covered with pock-marks. His hair
+was quite dark. His dress was very common, quite a contrast to the
+elegant attire customary in those days, especially in our circles.... He
+was very proud, and I have known him refuse to play, even when Countess
+Thun, the mother of Princess Lichnowski, had fallen on her knees before
+him as he lay on the sofa to beg him to. The Countess was a very
+eccentric person.... At the Lichnowskis' I saw Haydn and Salieri, who
+were then very famous, while Beethoven excited no interest."</p>
+
+<p>It was in the year 1800 that Beethoven at last was compelled to
+acknowledge to himself the terrible calamity of almost total deafness
+that had befallen him. He writes to his friend Wegeler, "If I had not
+read somewhere that man must not of his own free will depart this life,
+I should long ere this have been no more and that through my own act....
+What is to be the result of this the good God alone knows. I beg of you
+not to mention my state to any one, not even to Lorchen [Wegeler's
+wife]. But," he continues, "I live only in my music, and no sooner is
+one thing completed than another is begun. In fact, as at present, I am
+often engaged on three or four compositions at one time."</p>
+
+<a id="img038" name="img038"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img038.jpg" width="600" height="420" alt="" title="">
+<p>An Anecdote about Beethoven.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But at first all was not gloom; for Beethoven was in love&mdash;not the love
+of fleeting fancy that, like other poets, he may have experienced
+before, but deeply, tragically, in love; and it seems that, for a time
+at least, this love was returned. The lady was the Countess Julia
+Guicciardi; but his dream did not last long, for in the year 1801 she
+married a Count Gallenberg. Hardly anything is known of this love affair
+of Beethoven's. A few letters full of passionate tenderness, and with a
+certain very pathetic simple trustfulness in her love running through
+them all&mdash;on which her marriage shortly afterward is a strange comment;
+the "Moonlight Sonata," vibrating, as it is throughout, with a lover's
+supremest ecstasy of devotion, these are the only records of that one
+blissful epoch in the poor composer's life; but how much it affected his
+after life, how it mingled in the dreams from which his loveliest
+creations of later years arose, it is impossible now to say. In a letter
+to Wegeler, dated November 16, 1801, he says, "You can hardly realize
+what a miserable, desolate life mine has been for the last two years; my
+defective hearing everywhere pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly
+from every one, and appear a misanthrope; and yet no one in reality is
+less so! This change [to a happier life] has been brought about by a
+lovely and fascinating <span class="pagenum"><a id="page323" name="page323"></a>(p. 323)</span> girl who loves me and whom I love.
+After the lapse of two years I have again enjoyed some blissful moments,
+and now for the first time I feel that marriage can bestow happiness;
+but alas! she is not in the same rank of life as myself.... You shall
+see me as happy as I am destined to be here below, but not unhappy. No,
+that I could not bear. I will grasp Fate by the throat; it shall not
+utterly crush me. Oh, it is so glorious to live one's life a thousand
+times!" No misanthropy this, surely; he could not always speak the
+speech of common men, or care for the tawdry bravery of titles or fine
+clothes in which they strutted, but what a heart there was in the man,
+what a wondrous insight into all the beauty of the world, visible and
+invisible, around him! The most glorious lovesong ever composed,
+"Adelaide," was written by him; but Julia Guicciardi preferred a Count
+Gallenberg, keeper of the royal archives in Vienna, and Beethoven, to
+the end of his days, went on his way alone.</p>
+
+<p>It was at this time that he composed his oratorio, "The Mount of
+Olives," which can hardly be reckoned among his finest works; and his
+one opera&mdash;but such an opera&mdash;"Fidelio." The greater part of these works
+was composed during his stay, in the summer months, at Hetzendorf, a
+pretty, secluded little village near Schönbrunn. He spent his days
+wandering alone through the quiet, shady alleys of the imperial park
+there, and his favorite seat was between two boughs of a venerable oak,
+at a height of about two feet from the ground. For some time he had
+apartments at a residence of Baron Pronay's, near this village; but he
+suddenly left, "because the baron would persist in making him profound
+bows every time that he met him." Like a true poet, he delighted in the
+country. "No man on earth," he writes, "loves the country more. Woods,
+trees, and rock give the response which man requires. Every tree seems
+to say, 'Holy, holy.'"</p>
+
+<p>In 1804 the magnificent "Eroica" symphony was completed. This had
+originally been commenced in honor of Napoleon Bonaparte, then First
+Consul, who, Beethoven&mdash;throughout his life an ardent Republican&mdash;then
+believed was about to bring liberty to all the nations of Europe. When
+the news of the empire came the dream departed, and Beethoven, in a
+passionate rage, tore the title page of the symphony in two, and, with a
+torrent of imprecations against the tyrant, stamped on the torn
+fragments.</p>
+
+<p>"My hero&mdash;a tyrant!" he shrieked, as he trampled on the poor page. On
+this page the inscription had been simply, "Bonaparte&mdash;Luigi v.
+Beethoven". For some years he refused to publish the work, and, when at
+last this was done, the inscription read as follows: "Sinfonia Eroica
+per festigiari il sovvenire d'un grand' uomo" (Heroic symphony, to
+celebrate the memory of a great man). When Napoleon died, in 1821,
+Beethoven said, "Seventeen years before I composed the music for this
+occasion;" and surely no grander music than that of the "Funeral March"
+was ever composed for the obsequies of a fallen hero. This is not the
+place to enter into a description of the marvellous succession of
+colossal works&mdash;symphonies, concertos, sonatas, trios, quartets, etc.,
+culminating in the "Choral Symphony," his ninth, and last&mdash;which,
+through those long years of a <span class="pagenum"><a id="page324" name="page324"></a>(p. 324)</span> silent life, imprisoned within
+himself, the great master put forth. His deafness prevented his
+appearing in public to conduct, although, with the natural desire of a
+composer to be present at the production of his own work, he long
+struggled to take his part in the first performances of symphonies and
+concertos.</p>
+
+<p>When the great choral symphony was first performed he attempted to
+conduct, but in reality another conductor was stationed near him to give
+the right time to the band. After the majestic instrumental movements
+had been played came the final one, concluding with Schiller's "Hymn to
+Joy." The chorus breaks forth, thundering out in concert with all the
+instruments. At the words "Seid umschlunger, Millionen," the audience
+could no longer restrain their excited delight, and burst into
+tremendous applause, drowning the voices of singers and the sounds of
+strings and brass. The last notes are heard, but still Beethoven stands
+there absorbed in thought&mdash;he does not know that the music is ended.
+This was the first time that the people realized the full deprivation of
+hearing from which he suffered. Fraulein Unger, the soprano, gently
+takes his arm and turns him round to front the acclaiming multitude.
+There are few in that crowd who, while they cheer, do not feel the tears
+stealing down their cheeks at the sight of the poor lonely man who, from
+the prison-house of his affliction, has brought to them the gladness of
+thought so divine. Unmoved, he bowed his acknowledgment, and quietly
+left the building.</p>
+
+<p>His later years were embittered with troubles about his nephew Carl, a
+youth to whom he was fondly attached, but who shamefully repaid the love
+of the desolate old man. Letters like the following, to the teacher in
+whose house the boy lived, show the constant thought and affection given
+to this boy: "Your estimable lady is politely requested to let the
+undersigned know as soon as possible (that I may not be obliged to keep
+it all in my head) how many pairs of stockings, trousers, shoes, and
+drawers are required, and how many yards of kerseymere to make a pair of
+black trousers for my tall nephew."</p>
+
+<p>His death was the result of a cold which produced inflammation of the
+lungs. On the morning of March 24, 1827, he took the sacrament and when
+the clergyman was gone and his friends stood round his bed, he muttered.
+"<i>Plaudite amici, comedia finita est.</i>" He then fell into an agony so
+intense that he could no longer articulate, and thus continued until the
+evening of the 26th. A violent thunder-storm arose; one of his friends,
+watching by his bedside when the thunder was rolling and a vivid flash
+of lightning lit up the room, saw him suddenly open his eyes, lift his
+right hand upward for some seconds&mdash;as if in defiance of the powers of
+evil&mdash;with clenched fist and a stern, solemn expression on his face;
+and then he sank back and died.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page325" name="page325"></a>(p. 325)</span> PAGANINI<br>
+
+(1784-1840)</h3>
+
+<a id="img039" name="img039"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img039.jpg" width="200" height="262" alt="Paganini." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Nicolo Paganini, whose European fame as a violinist entitles him to a
+notice here, was born at Genoa in 1784. His father, a commission-broker,
+played on the mandolin; but fully aware of the inferiority of an
+instrument so limited in power, he put a violin into his son's hands,
+and initiated him in the principles of music. The child succeeded so
+well under parental tuition, that at eight years of age he played three
+times a week in the church, as well as in the public saloons. At the
+same period he composed a sonata. In his ninth year he was placed under
+the instruction of Costa, first violoncellist of Genoa; then had lessons
+of Rolla, a famous performer and composer; and finally studied
+counterpoint at Parma under Ghiretti and the celebrated maestro Paer. He
+now took an engagement at Lucca, where he chiefly associated with
+persons who at the gaming-table stripped him of his gains as quickly as
+he acquired them. He there received the appointment of director of
+orchestra to the court, at which the Princess Elisa Bacciochi, sister of
+Napoleon I., presided, and thither invited, to the full extent of her
+means, superior talent of every kind. In 1813 he performed at Milan;
+five years after, at Turin; and subsequently at Florence and Naples. In
+1828 he visited Vienna, where a very popular violinist and composer,
+Mayseder, asked him how he produced such new effects. His reply was
+characteristic of a selfish mind: "<i>Chacun a ses secrets</i>" In that
+capital, it is affirmed, he was imprisoned, being accused of having
+murdered his wife. He challenged proofs of his ever having been married,
+which could not be produced. Then he was charged with having poignarded
+his mistress. This he also publicly refuted. The fact is that he knew
+better how to make money than friends, and he raised up enemies wherever
+his thirst for gold led him. Avarice was his master-passion; and, second
+to this, gross sensuality.</p>
+
+<p>The year 1831 found Paganini in Paris, in which excitable capital he
+produced a sensation not inferior to that created by the visit of
+Rossini. Even this renowned composer was so carried away, either by the
+actual genius of the violinist or by the current of popular enthusiasm,
+that he is said to have wept on hearing Paganini for the first time. He
+arrived in England in 1831, and immediately announced a concert at the
+Italian Opera House, at a price which, if acceded to, would have yielded
+£3,391 per night; but the attempt was too audacious, and he was
+compelled to abate his demands, though he succeeded in <span class="pagenum"><a id="page326" name="page326"></a>(p. 326)</span> drawing
+audiences fifteen nights in that season at the ordinary high prices of
+the King's Theatre. He also gave concerts in other parts of London, and
+performed at benefits, always taking at these a large proportion of the
+proceeds. He visited most of the great towns, where his good fortune
+still attended him. He was asked to play at the Commemoration Festival
+at Oxford, in 1834, and demanded 1,000 guineas for his assistance at
+three concerts. His terms were of course rejected.</p>
+
+<p>Paganini died at Nice, in 1840, of a diseased larynx ("phthisie
+laryngée"). By his will, dated 1837, he gave his two sisters legacies of
+60,000 and 70,000 francs; his mother a pension of 1,200; the mother of
+his son Achillino (a Jewess of Milan) a similar pension; and the rest of
+his fortune, amounting to 4,000,000 francs, devolved on his son. These
+and other facts before related, we give on the authority of the
+"Biographie Universelle."</p>
+
+<p>Paganini certainly was a man of genius and a great performer, but
+sacrificed his art to his avarice. His mastery over the violin was
+almost marvellous, though he made an ignoble use of his power by
+employing it to captivate the mob of pretended amateurs by feats little
+better than sleight-of-hand. His performance on a single string, and the
+perfection of his harmonics, were very extraordinary; but why, as was
+asked at the time, be confined to one string when there are four at
+command that would answer every musical purpose so much better? His tone
+was pure, though not strong, his strings having been of smaller diameter
+than usual, to enable him to strain them at pleasure; for he tuned his
+instrument most capriciously. He could be a very expressive player; we
+have heard him produce effects deeply pathetic. His arpeggios evinced
+his knowledge of harmony, and some of his compositions exhibit many
+original and beautiful traits.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<a id="img040" name="img040"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img040.jpg" width="400" height="500" alt="" title="">
+<p>Paganini in Prison</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>MENDELSSOHN<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">C. E. Bourne</span><br>
+
+(1809-1847)</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mendelssohn's lot in life was strikingly different from that of all the
+musicians of whom I have hitherto written; he never knew, like Schubert,
+what grinding poverty was, or suffered the long worries that Mozart had
+to endure for lack of money. His father was a Jewish banker in Berlin,
+the son of Moses Mendelssohn, a philosopher whose writings had already
+made the name celebrated throughout Europe. The composer's father used
+to say, with a very natural pride, after his own son had grown up,
+"Formerly I was the son of my father, and now I am the father of my
+son!"</p>
+
+<p>Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was born on February 3, 1809. His parents
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page327" name="page327"></a>(p. 327)</span> were neither of them trained musicians, though both
+appreciated and loved music, and it was from his mother that young Felix
+received his first music-lessons. When he had made some advance, Ludwig
+Berger became his tutor for the piano, and Zelter, a very learned and
+severe theorist, for counterpoint. At the age of nine years Felix had
+attained such proficiency that we find him taking the pianoforte part in
+a trio at a public concert of a Herr Gugel's, and when twelve years old
+he began to compose, and actually wrote a trio, some sonatas, a cantata,
+and several organ pieces. His home life was in the highest degree
+favorable to his musical development. On alternate Sundays musical
+performances were regularly given with a small orchestra in the large
+dining-room, Felix or his sister Fanny, who also possessed remarkable
+musical gifts, taking the pianoforte part, and new compositions by Felix
+were always included in the programme. Many friends, musicians and
+others, used to be present, Zelter regularly among their number, and the
+pieces were always freely commented on, Felix receiving then, as indeed
+he did all his life, the criticisms expressed, with the utmost
+good-natured readiness.</p>
+
+<a id="img041" name="img041"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img041.jpg" width="200" height="233" alt="Mendelssohn." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>In 1824 Moscheles, at that time a celebrated pianist, and residing in
+London, visited Berlin, and was asked to give Felix music-lessons. This
+is the testimony of Moscheles, an excellent and kind-hearted man, and a
+thoroughly skilled musician, after spending nearly every day for six
+weeks with the family: "It is a family such as I have never known
+before; Felix, a mature artist, and yet but fifteen; Fanny,
+extraordinarily gifted, playing Bach's fugues by heart and with
+astonishing correctness&mdash;in fact, a thorough musician. The parents give
+me the impression of people of the highest cultivation;" and on the
+subject of lessons he says: "Felix has no need of lessons; if he wishes
+to take a hint from me as to anything new, he can easily do so." But it
+is very pleasant to find Mendelssohn afterward referring to these
+lessons as having urged him on to enthusiasm, and, in the days in London
+when his own fame had far outstripped that of the older musician,
+acknowledging himself as "Moscheles's pupil." The elder Mendelssohn was
+by no means carried away by the applause which the boy's playing and
+compositions had gained, and in 1825 he took his son to Paris to obtain
+Cherubini's opinion as to his musical abilities, with a view to the
+choice of a profession; for he had by no means made up his mind that
+Felix should spend his whole life as a musician. However, the surly old
+Florentine, who was not always civil or appreciative of budding genius
+(<i>teste</i> Berlioz), gave a decidedly favorable judgment on the
+compositions submitted to him, and urged the father to <span class="pagenum"><a id="page328" name="page328"></a>(p. 328)</span> devote
+his son to a musical career. And, indeed, on listening to the pieces
+which were dated this year, especially a beautiful quartet in B minor,
+an octet for strings, the music to an opera in two acts, "Camacho's
+Wedding," and numerous pianoforte pieces, it is difficult to realize
+that the composer was then only sixteen years of age, or that anyone
+could question the artistic vocation that claimed him. But the next year
+a work was written, the score of which is marked "Berlin, August 6,
+1826," when it must be remembered that he was seventeen years of age,
+which of itself was sufficient to rank him among the immortals&mdash;the
+overture to the "Midsummer Night's Dream." Full of lovely imaginings,
+with a wonderful fairy grace all its own, and a bewitching beauty,
+revealing not only the soul of the true poet, but also the musician
+profoundly skilled in all the art of orchestral effect, it is hard to
+believe that it is the work of a boy under twenty, written in the bright
+summer days of 1826, in his father's garden at Berlin.</p>
+
+<p>Passing over the intermediate years with a simple reference to the
+"Meeresstille," "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," which was then
+composed, and a fine performance of Bach's "Passion Music," for which he
+had been long drilling the members of the Berlin Singakademie, the next
+event is a visit to England in 1829, where he was received with
+extraordinary warmth, playing at the Philharmonic Concerts, conducting
+his C minor Symphony, which he dedicated to the Philharmonic Society,
+they in their turn electing him one of their honorary members; going to
+dinners, balls, and the House of Commons, and enjoying himself most
+hugely. His letters from England at this time are brimming over with fun
+and graphic description; there is one especially amusing, in which he
+describes himself with two friends going home from a late dinner at the
+German Ambassador's, and on the way buying three German sausages, going
+down a quiet street to devour them, with all the while joyous laughter
+and snatches of part songs. There is also a little incident of this time
+showing the wonderful memory he possessed. After a concert on "Midsummer
+Night," when the "Midsummer Night's Dream" had very appropriately been
+played, it was found that the score had been lost in a hackney-coach as
+the party were returning to Mr. Attwood's. "Never mind," said
+Mendelssohn, "I will make another," which he did, and on comparison with
+the separate parts not a single difference was found in it.</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of December he was at home again, and that winter he
+wrote the "Reformation Symphony," intended to be produced at the
+tercentenary festival of the "Augsburg Confession" in the following
+June. This symphony, with which Mendelssohn was not entirely satisfied,
+was only once performed during his lifetime, but since his death it has
+frequently been performed, and though not one of his most perfect works,
+is recognized as a noble monument in honor of a great event. The next
+spring he again set out on his travels, this time southward to Italy.</p>
+
+<p>In 1833 Mendelssohn accepted an official post offered him by the
+authorities of Düsseldorf, by which the entire musical arrangements of
+the town, church, theatre, and singing societies were put under his
+care. Immermann, the celebrated <span class="pagenum"><a id="page329" name="page329"></a>(p. 329)</span> poet, being associated with him
+in the direction of the theatre. Things, however, did not go on very
+smoothly there. Mendelssohn found all the many worries of theatrical
+management&mdash;the engagement of singers and musicians, the dissensions to
+be arranged, the many tastes to be conciliated&mdash;too irksome, and he did
+not long retain this appointment; but the life among his friends at
+Düsseldorf was most delightful, and the letters written at this time are
+exceedingly lively and gay. It was here that he received the commission
+from the Cæcilia-Verein of Frankfort for, and commenced, his grand
+oratorio "St. Paul." The words for this, as also for the "Elijah" and
+"Hymn of Praise" afterward, he selected himself with the help of his
+friend Schubung, and they are entirely from the Bible&mdash;as he said, "The
+Bible is always the best of all." Circumstances prevented the oratorio
+being then produced at Frankfort, and the first public performance took
+place at the Lower Rhine Festival at Düsseldorf, in May, 1836.</p>
+
+<p>But his visits to Frankfort had a very important result in another way.
+Mendelssohn there met Mademoiselle Cécile Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a
+pastor of the French Reformed Church, and, though he had frequently
+indulged in the admiration of beautiful and clever women&mdash;which is
+allowable, and indeed an absolute necessity for a poet!&mdash;now for the
+first time he fell furiously in plain unmistakable and downright love.
+But it is more characteristic of the staid Teuton than the impulsive
+musician, that before plighting his troth to her he went away for a
+month's bathing at Scheveningen, in Holland, for the purpose of testing
+the strength of his affection by this absence. On his return, finding
+his amatory pulse still beating satisfactorily, he proposed to the young
+lady, and, as it must be presumed that she had already made up her own
+mind without any testing, he was accepted. On March 28, 1837, they were
+married, and the wedded life that then began was one of pure, unclouded
+happiness to the very end. Cécile Mendelssohn was a beautiful,
+gentle-hearted, and loving wife, just the one to give a weary and
+nervous artist in the home-life, with herself and the children near him,
+the blessed solace of rest and calm that he so needed. It is thus that
+Edward Devrient, the great German actor, and one of Mendelssohn's most
+intimate friends, describes her: "Cécile was one of those sweet womanly
+natures whose gentle simplicity, whose mere presence, soothed and
+pleased. She was slight, with features of striking beauty and delicacy;
+her hair was between brown and gold, but the transcendent lustre of her
+great blue eyes, and the brilliant roses of her cheeks, were sad
+harbingers of early death. She spoke little, and never with animation,
+in a low, soft voice. Shakespeare's words, "My gracious silence,"
+applied to her no less than to the wife of Coriolanus."</p>
+
+<p>After giving up his official position at Düsseldorf, in 1835,
+Mendelssohn was invited to become the conductor of the now famous
+Gewandhaus concerts at Leipsic, a post which he gladly accepted, and
+which, retained by him for many years, was to be one of the greatest
+delights of his artistic life. Not only was he loved and appreciated in
+Leipsic&mdash;far more than in Berlin, his own city&mdash;but he had here an
+opportunity of assisting many composers and <i>virtuosi</i>, who otherwise
+would have sought in vain for a hearing. Thus, after Liszt, when
+visiting the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page330" name="page330"></a>(p. 330)</span> town, had been first of all received with great
+coldness, owing to the usual prices of admission to the concerts having
+been raised, Mendelssohn set everything straight by having a soirée in
+his honor at the Gewandhaus, where there were three hundred and fifty
+people, orchestra, chorus, punch, pastry, Meeresstille Psalm, Bach's
+Triple Concerto, choruses from St. Paul, Fantasia on Lucia, the Erl
+King, the Devil and his Grandmother, the latter probably a mild
+satirical reference to Liszt's stormy and often incoherent playing. It
+is also pleasant to find how cordially Mendelssohn received Berlioz
+there, as told in the "Memoirs" of the latter, spending ungrudgingly
+long days in aiding in rehearsals for his "Romeo et Juliette," though
+Mendelssohn never sympathized much with Berlioz's eccentric muse.</p>
+
+<p>The "Lobgesang," or "Hymn of Praise," a "symphonie-cantata," as he
+called it, was his next great work, composed in 1840, together with
+other music, at the request of the Leipsic Town-Council, for a festival
+held in that town in commemoration of the invention of printing, on June
+25th. None who have heard this work can forget the first impression
+produced when the grand instrumental movements with which it commences
+are merged in the majestic chorus, "All men, all things, praise ye the
+Lord," or the intensely dramatic effect of the repeated tenor cry,
+"Watchman, will the night soon pass?" answered at last by the clear
+soprano message of glad tidings, "The night is departing, the day is at
+hand!" This "watchman" episode was added some time afterward, and, as he
+told a friend, was suggested to the composer during the weary hours of a
+long sleepless night, when the words, "Will the night soon pass?" again
+and again seemed to be repeated to him. But a greater work even than
+this was now in progress; the "Elijah" had been begun.</p>
+
+<p>In 1841 began a troublesome and harassing connection with Berlin, a city
+where, except in his home life, Mendelssohn never seems to have been
+very fortunate. At the urgent entreaty of the king, he went to reside
+there as head of the new Musical Academy. But disagreements arose, and
+he did not long take an active part in the management. The king,
+however, was very anxious to retain his services, and a sort of general
+office seems to have been created for him, the duties of which were to
+supply music for any dramatic works which the king took it into his head
+to have so embellished. And, though it is to this that we owe the noble
+"Antigone," "&OElig;dipus," "Athalie," "Midsummer Night's Dream," and other
+music, this work to dictation was very worrying, and one cannot think
+without impatience of the annoyances to which he was subjected. The king
+could not understand why he shrank from writing music to the choruses of
+Æschylus's "Eumenides." Other composers would do it by the yard, why not
+he?</p>
+
+<p>Passing rapidly over the intervening years filled with busy work, both
+in composition and as one of the principals of a newly started
+Conservatorium in Leipsic, we come to 1846, when his great work "Elijah"
+was at last completed and performed. On August 26th, at the Birmingham
+Festival, the performance went splendidly. Staudigl took the part of the
+prophet, and a young tenor, Lockey, sang the air, "Then shall the
+righteous," in the last part, as Mendelssohn <span class="pagenum"><a id="page331" name="page331"></a>(p. 331)</span> says, "so very
+beautifully, that I was obliged to collect myself to prevent my being
+overcome, and to enable me to beat time steadily." Rarely, indeed, has a
+composer so truly realized his own conception as Mendelssohn did in the
+great tone-picture which he drew of the Prophet of Carmel and the
+wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>"I figured to myself," he says, "Elijah as a grand, mighty prophet, such
+as might again reappear in our own day, energetic and zealous, stern,
+wrathful, and gloomy, a striking contrast to the court myrmidons and
+popular rabble&mdash;in fact, in opposition to the whole world, and yet borne
+on angel's wings!" Nothing can be finer than this, with that exquisite
+touch in the last words, "<i>in opposition to the whole world, and yet
+borne on angel's wings</i>."</p>
+
+<p>After returning to Germany he was soon busily employed in recasting some
+portions of "Elijah" with which he was not satisfied; he had also
+another oratorio on even a grander scale, "Christus," already commenced;
+and at last, after all his life-long seeking in vain for a good libretto
+for an opera, he had begun to set one written by Geibel, the German
+poet, "Loreley," to music. But his friends now noticed how worn and
+weary he used oftentimes to look, and how strangely irritable he
+frequently was, and there can hardly be a doubt that some form of the
+cerebral disease from which his father and several of his relations had
+died, was already, deep-seated and obscure, disquieting him. The sudden
+announcement of the death of his sister, Fanny Hensel, herself a musical
+genius, to whom he was very fondly attached, on his return to Frankfort
+from his last visit to England in May, 1847, terribly affected him. He
+fell to the ground with a loud shriek, and it was long before he
+recovered consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, it may be said that he never really recovered from this shock.
+In the summer he went with his wife and children, and in company with
+his brother Paul and his family, on a tour in Switzerland, where he
+hoped that complete idleness as regards music, life in the open air,
+sketching, and intercourse with chosen friends, might once more give
+strength to his enfeebled nerves. And for a time the beauty of the
+mountains and the lakes seemed to bring him rest, and again he began to
+work at his oratorio "Christus;" but still his friends continued anxious
+about him. He looked broken down and aged, a constant agitation seemed
+to possess him, and the least thing would often strangely affect and
+upset him.</p>
+
+<p>In September he returned to Leipsic; he was then more cheerful, and able
+to talk about music and to write, although he could not resume the
+conductorship of the Gewandhaus concerts. He again had projects in view.
+Jenny Lind was to sing in his "Elijah," at Vienna, whither he would go
+and conduct, and he was about to publish some new songs. One day in
+October he went to call upon his friend, Madame Frege, a gifted lady
+who, he said, sang his songs better than anyone else, to consult her
+about some new songs. She sang them over to him several times, and then,
+as it was getting dark, she went out of the room for a few minutes to
+order lights. When she returned he was lying on the sofa, shivering with
+cold, and in agonizing pain. Leeches were applied, and he partially
+recovered; but another attack followed, and this was the last.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page332" name="page332"></a>(p. 332)</span> FRANZ LISZT<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Rev. Hugh R. Haweis, M.A.</span><br>
+
+(1811-1886)</h3>
+
+<a id="img042" name="img042"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img042.jpg" width="200" height="219" alt="Liszt." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Franz Liszt was born in 1811. He had the hot Hungarian blood of his
+father, the fervid German spirit of his mother, and he inherited the
+lofty independence, with none of the class prejudices, of the old
+Hungarian nobility from which he sprang. Liszt's father, Adam, earned a
+modest livelihood as agent and accountant in the house of Count
+Esterhazy. In that great musical family, inseparably associated with the
+names of Haydn and Schubert, Adam Liszt had frequent opportunities of
+meeting distinguished musicians. The prince's private band had risen to
+public fame under the instruction of the venerable Haydn himself. The
+Liszts, father and son, often went to Eisenstadt, where the count lived;
+there they rubbed elbows with Cherubini and Hummel, a pupil of Mozart.</p>
+
+<p>Franz took to music from his earliest childhood. When about five years
+old he was asked what he would like to do. "Learn the piano," said the
+little fellow. Soon afterward his father asked him what he would like to
+be; the child pointed to a print of Beethoven hanging on the wall, and
+said, "Like him." Long before his feet could reach the pedals or his
+fingers stretch an octave, the boy spent all his spare time strumming,
+making what he called "clangs," chords and modulations. He mastered
+scales and exercises without difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>Czerny at once took to Liszt, but refused to take anything for his
+instruction. Salieri was also fascinated, and instructed him in harmony;
+and fortunate it was that Liszt began his course under two strict
+mentors. He soon began to resent Czerny's method&mdash;thought he knew better
+and needed not those dry studies of Clementi and that irksome fingering
+by rule&mdash;he could finger anything in a half-a-dozen different ways.
+There was a moment when it seemed that master and pupil would have to
+part, but timely concessions to genius paved the way to dutiful
+submission, and years afterward the great master dedicated to the rigid
+disciplinarian of his boyhood his "Vingt-quatre Grandes Études" in
+affectionate remembrance.</p>
+
+<p>Such a light as Liszt's could not be long hid; all Vienna, in 1822, was
+talking of the wonderful boy. "<i>Est deus in nobis</i>," wrote the papers,
+profanely. The "little Hercules," the "young giant," the boy "virtuoso
+from the clouds," were among the epithets coined to celebrate his
+marvellous renderings of Hummel's "Concerto in A," and a free "Fantasia"
+of his own. The Vienna Concert Hall was crowded to hear him, and the
+other illustrious artists&mdash;then, as <span class="pagenum"><a id="page333" name="page333"></a>(p. 333)</span> indeed they have been ever
+since forced to do wherever Liszt appeared&mdash;effaced themselves with as
+good a grace as they could.</p>
+
+<p>It is a remarkable tribute to the generous nature as well as to the
+consummate ability of Liszt, that, while opposing partisans have fought
+bitterly over him&mdash;Thalbergites, Herzites, Mendelssohnites <i>versus</i>
+Lisztites&mdash;yet few of the great artists who have, one after another, had
+to yield to him in popularity have denied to him their admiration, while
+most of them have given him their friendship.</p>
+
+<p>Liszt early wooed, and early won Vienna. He spoke ever of his dear
+Viennese, and their resounding city. A concert tour on his way to Paris
+brought him before the critical public of Stuttgart and Munich. Hummel,
+an old man, and Moscheles, then in his prime, heard him and declared
+that his playing was equal to theirs. But Liszt was bent upon completing
+his studies in the celebrated school of the French capital, and at the
+feet of the old musical dictator, Cherubini. The Erards, who were
+destined to owe so much to Liszt, and to whom Liszt throughout his
+career owed so much, at once provided him with a magnificent piano; but
+Cherubini put in force a certain by-law of the Conservatoire excluding
+foreigners, and excluded Franz Liszt.</p>
+
+<p>This was a bitter pill to the eager student. He hardly knew how little
+he required such patronage. In a very short time "<i>le petit Liszt</i>" was
+the great Paris sensation. The old <i>noblesse</i> tried to spoil him with
+flattery, the Duchesse de Berri drugged him with bonbons, the Duke of
+Orleans called him the "little Mozart." He gave private concerts, at
+which Herz, Moscheles, Lafont, and De Beriot, assisted. Rossini would
+sit by his side at the piano, and applaud. He was a "miracle." The
+company never tired of extolling his "nerve, fougue et originalité,"
+while the ladies who petted and caressed him after each performance,
+were delighted at his simple and graceful carriage, the elegance of his
+language, and the perfect breeding and propriety of his demeanor.</p>
+
+<p>He was only twelve when he played for the first time at the Italian
+Opera, and one of those singular incidents which remind one of
+Paganini's triumphs occurred. At the close of a <i>bravura cadenza</i>, the
+band forgot to come in, so absorbed were the musicians in watching the
+young prodigy. Their failure was worth a dozen successes to Liszt. The
+ball of the marvellous was fairly set rolling. Gall, the inventor of
+phrenology, took a cast of the little Liszt's skull; Talma, the
+tragedian, embraced him openly with effusion; and the misanthropic
+Marquis de Noailles became his mentor, and initiated him into the art of
+painting.</p>
+
+<p>In 1824 Liszt, then thirteen years old, came with his father to England;
+his mother returned to Austria. He went down to Windsor to see George
+IV., who was delighted with him, and Liszt, speaking of him to me, said:
+"I was very young at the time, but I remember the king very well&mdash;a
+fine, pompous-looking gentleman." George IV. went to Drury Lane on
+purpose to hear the boy, and commanded an encore. Liszt was also heard
+in the theatre at Manchester, and in several private houses.</p>
+
+<p>On his return to France, people noticed a change in him. He was now
+fourteen, <span class="pagenum"><a id="page334" name="page334"></a>(p. 334)</span> grave, serious, often pre-occupied, already a little
+tired of praise, and excessively tired of being called "le petit Liszt."
+His vision began to take a wider sweep. The relation between art and
+religion exercised him. His mind was naturally devout. Thomas à Kempis
+was his constant companion. "Rejoice in nothing but a good deed;"
+"Through labor to rest, through combat to victory;" "The glory which men
+give and take is transitory," these and like phrases were already deeply
+engraven on the fleshly tablets of his heart. Amid all his glowing
+triumphs he was developing a curious disinclination to appear in public;
+he seemed to yearn for solitude and meditation.</p>
+
+<p>In 1827 he again hurried to England for a short time, but his father's
+sudden illness drove them to Boulogne, where, in his forty-seventh year,
+died Adam Liszt, leaving the young Franz for the first time in his life,
+at the early age of sixteen, unprotected and alone. Rousing himself from
+the bodily prostration and torpor of grief into which he had been thrown
+by the death of his father, Franz, with admirable energy and that high
+sense of honor which always distinguished him, began to set his house in
+order. He called in all his debts, sold his magnificent grand "Erard,"
+and left Boulogne for Paris with a heavy heart and a light pocket, but
+not owing a sou.</p>
+
+<p>He sent for his mother, and for the next twelve years, 1828-1840, the
+two lived together, chiefly in Paris. There, as a child, he had been a
+nine days' wonder, but the solidity of his reputation was now destined
+to go hand in hand with his stormy and interrupted mental and moral
+development. Such a plant could not come to maturity all at once. No
+drawing-room or concert-room success satisfied a heart for which the
+world of human emotion seemed too small, and an intellect piercing with
+intuitive intelligence into the "clear-obscure" depths of religion and
+philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>But Franz was young, and Franz was poor, and his mother had to be
+supported. She was his first care. Systematically, he labored to put by
+a sum which would assure her of a competency, and often with his tender
+genial smile he would remind her of his own childish words, "God will
+help me to repay you for all that you have done for me." Still he
+labored, often woefully against the grain. "Poverty," he writes, "that
+old mediator between man and evil, tore me from my solitude devoted to
+meditation, and placed me before a public on whom not only my own but my
+own mother's existence depended. Young and over-strained, I suffered
+painfully under the contact with external things which my vocation as a
+musician brought with it, and which wounded me all the more intensely
+that my heart at this time was filled entirely with the mystical
+feelings of love and religion."</p>
+
+<a id="img043" name="img043"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img043.jpg" width="300" height="544" alt="" title="">
+<p>Franz Liszt.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of course the gifted young pianist's connection grew rapidly. He got his
+twenty francs a lesson at the best houses; he was naturally a welcome
+guest, and from the first seemed to have the run of high Parisian
+society. His life was feverish, his activity irregular, his health far
+from strong; but the vulgar temptations of the gay capital seemed to
+have little attraction for his noble nature. His heart remained
+unspoiled. He was most generous to those who could not <span class="pagenum"><a id="page335" name="page335"></a>(p. 335)</span> afford
+to pay for his lessons, most pitiful to the poor, most dutiful and
+affectionate to his mother. Coming home late from some grand
+entertainment, he would sit outside on the staircase till morning,
+sooner than awaken, or perhaps alarm, her by letting himself in. But in
+losing his father he seemed to have lost a certain method and order. His
+meals were irregular, so were his lessons; more so were the hours
+devoted to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>At this time he was hardly twenty; we are not surprised anon to hear in
+his own words, of "a female form chaste, and pure as the alabaster of
+holy vessel," but he adds: "Such was the sacrifice which I offered with
+tears to the God of Christians!"</p>
+
+<p>I will explain. Mlle. Caroline St. Cricq was just seventeen, lithe,
+slender, and of "angelic" beauty, with a complexion like a lily flushed
+with roses, open, "impressionable to beauty, to the world, to religion,
+to God." The countess, her mother, appears to have been a charming
+woman, very partial to Liszt, whom she engaged to instruct Mademoiselle
+in music. The lessons went not by time, but by inclination. The young
+man's eloquence, varied knowledge, ardent love of literature, and
+flashing genius won both the mother and daughter. Not one of them seemed
+to suspect the whirlpool of grief and death to which they were hurrying.
+The countess fell ill and died, but not before she had recommended Liszt
+to the Count St. Cricq as a possible suitor for the hand of
+Mademoiselle.</p>
+
+<p>The haughty diplomat, St. Cricq, at once put his foot down. The funeral
+over, Liszt's movements were watched. They were innocent enough. He was
+already an <i>enfant de la maison</i>, but one night he lingered reading
+aloud some favorite author to Mademoiselle a little too late. He was
+reported by the servants, and received his polite dismissal as music
+master. In an interview with the count his own pride was deeply wounded.
+"Difference of rank!" said the count. That was quite enough for Liszt.
+He rose, pale as death, with quivering lip, but uttered not a word. As a
+man of honor he had but one course. He and Caroline parted forever. She
+contracted later an uncongenial marriage; he seems to have turned with
+intense ardor to religion. His good mother used to complain to those who
+came to inquire for him that he was all day long in church, and had
+ceased to occupy himself, as he should, with music.</p>
+
+<p>It was toward the close of 1831 that Liszt met Chopin in Paris. From the
+first, these two men, so different, became fast friends. Chopin's
+delicate, retiring soul found a singular delight in Liszt's strong and
+imposing personality. Liszt's exquisite perception enabled him perfectly
+to live in the strange dreamland of Chopin's fancies, while his own
+vigor inspired Chopin with nerve to conceive those mighty Polonaises
+that he could never properly play himself, and which he so gladly
+committed to the keeping of his prodigious friend. Liszt undertook the
+task of interpreting Chopin to the mixed crowds which he revelled in
+subduing, but from which his fastidious and delicately strung friend
+shrank with something like aversion.</p>
+
+<p>From Chopin, Liszt and all the world after him got that <i>tempo rubato</i>,
+that playing with the duration of notes without breaking the time, and
+those arabesque <span class="pagenum"><a id="page336" name="page336"></a>(p. 336)</span> ornaments which are woven like fine embroidery
+all about the pages of Chopin's nocturnes, and lift what in others are
+mere casual flourishes into the dignity of interpretative phrases and
+poetic commentaries on the text.</p>
+
+<p>People were fond of comparing the two young men who so often appeared in
+the same salons together&mdash;Liszt with his finely shaped, long, oval head
+and <i>profil d'ivoire</i>, set proudly on his shoulders, his stiff hair of
+dark blonde thrown back from the forehead without a parting, and cut in
+a straight line, his <i>aplomb</i>, his magnificent and courtly bearing, his
+ready tongue, his flashing wit and fine irony, his genial <i>bonhomie</i> and
+irresistibly winning smile; and Chopin, also, with dark blonde hair, but
+soft as silk, parted on one side, to use Liszt's own words, "An angel of
+fair countenance, with brown eyes from which intellect beamed rather
+than burned; a gentle, refined smile, slightly aquiline nose; a
+delicious, clear, almost diaphanous complexion, all bearing witness to
+the harmony of a soul which required no commentary beyond itself."</p>
+
+<p>Nothing can be more generous or more true than Liszt's recognition of
+Chopin's independent support. "To our endeavors," he says, "to our
+struggles, just then so much needing certainty, he lent us the support
+of a calm, unshakable conviction, equally armed against apathy and
+cajolery." There was only one picture on the walls of Chopin's room; it
+hung just above his piano. It was a head of Liszt.</p>
+
+<p>It is no part of my present scheme to describe the battle which
+romanticism in music waged against the prevalent conventionalities. We
+know the general outcome of the struggle culminating, after the most
+prodigious artistic convulsions, in the musical supremacy of Richard
+Wagner, who certainly marks firmly and broadly enough the greatest
+stride in musical development made since Beethoven.</p>
+
+<p>In 1842 Liszt visited Weimar, Berlin, and then went to Paris; he was
+meditating a tour in Russia. Pressing invitations reached him from St.
+Petersburg and Moscow. The most fabulous accounts of his virtuosity had
+raised expectation to its highest pitch. He was as legendary even among
+the common people as Paganini. His first concert at St. Petersburg
+realized the then unheard-of sum of £2,000. The roads were crowded to
+see him pass, and the corridors and approaches to the Grand Opera
+blocked to catch a glimpse of him. The same scenes were repeated at
+Moscow, where he gave six concerts without exhausting the popular
+excitement.</p>
+
+<p>On his return to Weimar he accepted the post of Capellmeister to the
+Grand Duke. It provided him with that settled abode, and above all with
+an orchestra, which he now felt so indispensable to meet his growing
+passion for orchestral composition. But the time of rest had not yet
+come.</p>
+
+<p>In 1844 and 1845 he was received in Spain and Portugal with incredible
+enthusiasm, after which he returned to Bonn to assist at the
+inauguration of Beethoven's statue. With boundless liberality, he had
+subscribed more money than all the princes and people of Germany put
+together, to make the statue worthy of the occasion and the occasion
+worthy of the statue.</p>
+
+<p>The golden river which poured into him from all the capitals of Europe
+now <span class="pagenum"><a id="page337" name="page337"></a>(p. 337)</span> freely found a new vent in boundless generosity. Hospitals,
+poor and needy, patriotic celebrations, the dignity and interests of
+art, were all subsidized from his private purse. His transcendent
+virtuosity was only equalled by his splendid munificence; but he
+found&mdash;what others have so often experienced&mdash;that great personal gifts
+and prodigious <i>éclat</i> cannot possibly escape the poison of envy and
+detraction. He was attacked by calumny; his gifts denied and ridiculed;
+his munificence ascribed to vainglory, and his charity to pride and
+ostentation; yet none will ever know the extent of his private
+charities, and no one who knows anything of Liszt can be ignorant of the
+simple, unaffected goodness of heart which prompted them.</p>
+
+<p>Still he was wounded by ingratitude and abuse. It seemed to check and
+paralyze for the moment his generous nature. Fétis saw him at Coblenz
+soon after the Bonn festival, at which he had expended such vast sums.
+He was sitting alone, dejected and out of health. He said he was sick of
+everything, tired of life, and nearly ruined. But that mood never lasted
+long with Liszt; he soon arose and shook himself like a lion. His
+detractors slunk away into their holes, and he walked forth victorious
+to refill his empty purse and reap new laurels.</p>
+
+<p>His career was interrupted by the stormy events of 1848. He settled down
+for a time at Weimar, and it was then that he began to take that warm
+interest in Richard Wagner which ended in the closest and most enduring
+of friendships.</p>
+
+<p>He labored incessantly to get a hearing for the "Lohengrin" and
+"Tannhäuser." He forced Wagner's compositions on the band, on the
+grand-duke; he breasted public opposition and fought nobly for the
+eccentric and obscure person who was chiefly known as a political outlaw
+and an inventor of extravagant compositions which it was impossible to
+play or sing, and odiously unpleasant to listen to. But years of
+faithful service, mainly the service and immense <i>prestige</i> and
+authority of Liszt, procured Wagner a hearing, and paved the way for his
+glorious triumphs at Bayreuth in 1876, 1882, and 1883.</p>
+
+<p>I have preferred to confine myself in this article to the personality of
+Liszt, and have made no allusion to his orchestral works and oratorio
+compositions. The "Symphonic Poems" speak for themselves&mdash;magnificent
+renderings of the inner life of spontaneous emotion&mdash;but subject-matter
+which calls for a special article can find no place at the fag-end of
+this, and at all times it is better to hear music than to describe it.
+As it would be impossible to describe Liszt's orchestration intelligibly
+to those who have not heard it, and unnecessary to those who have, I
+will simply leave it alone.</p>
+
+<p>I saw Liszt but six times, and then only between the years 1876 and
+1881. I heard him play upon two occasions only, and then he played
+certain pieces of Chopin at my request and a new composition by himself.
+I have heard Mme Schumann, Bülow, Rubenstein, Menter, and Esipoff, but I
+can understand that saying of Tausig, himself one of the greatest
+masters of <i>technique</i> whom Germany has ever produced: "No mortal can
+measure himself with Liszt. He dwells alone upon a solitary height."<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page338" name="page338"></a>(p. 338)</span> RICHARD WAGNER<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Franklin Peterson, Mus. Bac.</span><br>
+
+(1813-1883)</h3>
+
+<a id="img044" name="img044"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img044.jpg" width="200" height="271" alt="Wagner." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Richard Wagner's personality has been so overshadowed by and almost
+merged in the great controversy which his schemes of reform in opera
+raised, that his life and character are often now sorely misjudged&mdash;just
+as his music long was&mdash;by those who have not the time, the inclination,
+or the ability to understand the facts and the issues. Before briefly
+stating then the theories he propounded and their development, as shown
+in successive music dramas, it will be well to summarize the story of a
+life (1813-83) during which he was called to endure so much vicissitude,
+trial and temptation, suffering and defeat.</p>
+
+<p>Born in Leipsic, on May 22, 1813, the youngest of nine children, Wilhelm
+Richard was only five months old when his father died. His mother's
+second marriage entailed a removal to Dresden, where, at the
+Kreuzschule, young Wagner received an excellent liberal education. At
+the age of thirteen the bent of his taste, as well as his diligence, was
+shown by his translation (out of school hours) of the first twelve books
+of the "Odyssey." In the following year his passion for poetry found
+expression in a grand tragedy. "It was a mixture," he says, "of Hamlet
+and Lear. Forty-two persons died in the course of the play, and, for
+want of more characters, I had to make some of them reappear as ghosts
+in the last act." Weber, who was then conductor of the Dresden opera,
+seems to have attracted the boy both by his personality and by his
+music; but it was Beethoven's music which gave him his real inspiration.
+From 1830 to 1833 many compositions after standard models are evidence
+of hard and systematic work and in 1833 he began his long career as an
+operatic composer with "Die Feen" which, however, never reached the
+dignity of performance till 1888&mdash;five years after Wagner's death. After
+some time spent in very unremunerative routine work in Heidelberg,
+Königsberg, and Riga (where in 1836 he married), he resolved, in 1839,
+to try his fortune in Paris with "Rienzi," a new opera, written on the
+lines of the Paris Grand Opera and with all its great resources in view.
+From the month's terrific storm in the North Sea, through which the
+vessel struggled to its haven, till the spring of 1842, when Wagner left
+Paris with "Rienzi" unperformed, heartsick with hope deferred, his lot
+was a hard and bitter one. Berlioz, in similar straits, supported
+himself by singing in the chorus of a second-rate theatre. Wagner was
+refused even that humble post. In 1842 "Rienzi" was accepted at
+Dresden, and its signal success led to his appointment <span class="pagenum"><a id="page339" name="page339"></a>(p. 339)</span> as
+Capellmeister there (January, 1843). In the following year the "Flying
+Dutchman" was not so enthusiastically received, but it has since easily
+distanced the earlier work in popular favor. The story was suggested to
+his mind during the stormy voyage from Riga; and it is a remarkable fact
+that the wonderful tone-picture of Norway's storm-beaten shore was
+painted by one who, till that voyage, had never set eyes on the sea. In
+1845 his new opera, "Tannhäuser," proved at first a comparative failure.
+The subject, one which had been proposed to Weber in 1814, attracted
+Wagner while he was in Paris, and during his studies for the libretto he
+found also the first suggestions of "Lohengrin" and "Parsifal." The
+temporary failure of the opera led him to the consideration and
+self-examination which resulted in the elaborate exposition of his ideal
+(in "Opera and Drama," and many other essays). "I saw a single
+possibility before me," he writes, "to induce the public to understand
+and participate in my aims as an artist." "Lohengrin" was finished early
+in 1848, and also the poem of "Siegfried's Tod," the result of Wagner's
+studies in the old Nibelungen Lied; but a too warm sympathy with some of
+the aims of the revolutionary party (which reigned for two short days
+behind the street barricades in Dresden, May, 1849) rendered his absence
+from Saxony advisable, and a few days later news reached him in Weimar
+that a warrant was issued for his arrest. With a passport procured by
+Liszt he fled across the frontier, and for nearly twelve years the
+bitterness of exile was added to the hardships of poverty. It is this
+period which is mainly responsible for Wagner's polemical writings, so
+biting in their sarcasm, and often unfair in their attacks. He was a
+good hater; one of the most fiendish pamphlets in existence is the
+"Capitulation" (1871), in which Wagner, safe from poverty (thanks to the
+kindness of Liszt and the munificence of Ludwig II., of Bavaria), and
+nearing the summit of his ambition, but remembering only his misfortunes
+and his slights, gloated in public over the horrors which were making a
+hell of the fairest city on earth. There is excuse at least, if not
+justification, to be found for his attacks on Meyerbeer and others;
+there are considerations to be taken into account while one reads with
+humiliation and pity the correspondence between Wagner and his
+benefactor, Liszt; but it is sad that an affectionate, humane, intensely
+human, to say nothing of an artistic, nature, could so blaspheme against
+the first principles of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>In 1852 the poem of the "Nibelungen Ring Trilogy" was finished. In 1854
+"Rheingold" (the introduction of "Vorabend") was ready, and "Die
+Walküre" (Part I.) in 1856. But "tired," as he said, "of heaping one
+silent score upon another," he left "Siegfried" unfinished, and turned
+to the story of "Tristan." The poem was completed in 1857, and the music
+two years later. At last, in 1861, he received permission to return to
+Germany, and in Vienna he had the first opportunity of hearing his own
+"Lohengrin." For three years the struggle with fortune seems to have
+been harder than ever before, and Wagner, in broken health, had
+practically determined to give up the unequal contest, when an
+invitation was sent him by Ludwig II., the young King of Bavaria&mdash;"Come
+here and finish your work." Here at last was salvation for Wagner, and
+the rest of his life was <span class="pagenum"><a id="page340" name="page340"></a>(p. 340)</span> comparatively smooth. In 1865 "Tristan
+und Isolde" was performed at Munich, and was followed three years later
+by a comic opera, "Die Meistersinger," the first sketches of which date
+from 1845. "Siegfried" ("Nibelungen Ring," Part II.) was completed in
+1869, and in the following year Wagner married Cosima, the daughter of
+Liszt, and formerly the wife of Von Bülow. His first wife, from whom he
+had been separated in 1861, died at Dresden in 1866.</p>
+
+<p>A theatre built somewhere off the main lines of traffic, and specially
+constructed for the performance of Wagner's later works, must have
+seemed the most impracticable and visionary of proposals in 1870; and
+yet, chiefly through the unwearying exertions of Carl Tausig (and, after
+his death, of the various Wagner societies), the foundation-stone of the
+Baireuth Theatre was laid in 1872, and in 1876, two years after the
+completion of the "Götterdämmerung" ("Nibelungen Ring," Part III.), it
+became an accomplished fact. The first work given was the entire
+"Trilogy;" and in July, 1882, Wagner's long and stormy career was
+magnificently crowned there by the first performance of "Parsifal." A
+few weeks later his health showed signs of giving way, and he resolved
+to spend the winter at Venice. There he died suddenly, February 13,
+1883, and was buried in the garden of his own house, Wahnfried, at
+Baireuth.<a id="footnotetag12" name="footnotetag12"></a><a href="#footnote12" title="Go to footnote 12"><span class="smaller">[12]</span></a></p>
+
+<p>Wagner's life and his individuality are of unusual importance in rightly
+estimating his work, because, unlike the other great masters, he not
+only devoted all his genius to one branch of music&mdash;the opera&mdash;but he
+gradually evolved a theory and an ideal which he consciously formulated
+and adopted, and perseveringly followed. It may be asked whether
+Wagner's premises were sound and his conclusions right; and also whether
+his genius was great enough to be the worthy champion of a cause
+involving such revolutions. Unless Wagner's operas, considered solely as
+music, are not only more advanced in style, but worthy in themselves to
+stand at least on a level with the greatest efforts of his predecessors,
+no amount of proof that these were wrong and he right will give his name
+the place his admirers claim for it. It is now universally acknowledged
+that Wagner can only be compared with the greatest names in music. His
+instrumentation has the advantage in being the inheritor of the enormous
+development of the orchestra from Haydn to Berlioz, his harmony is as
+daring and original as Bach's, and his melody is as beautiful as it is
+different from Beethoven's or Mozart's. (These names are used not in
+order to institute profitless comparisons, but as convenient standards;
+therefore even a qualification of the statement will not invalidate the
+case.)</p>
+
+<a id="img045" name="img045"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img045.jpg" width="500" height="426" alt="" title="">
+<p>Wagner and his Friends.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>His aim (stated very generally) was to reform the whole structure of
+opera, using the last or "Beethoven" development of instrumental music
+as a basis, and freeing it from the fetters which conventionality had
+imposed, in the shape of set forms, accepted arrangements, and
+traditional concessions to a style of singing now happily almost
+extinct. The one canon was to be dramatic fitness. In this "Art Work of
+the Future," as he called it, the interest of the drama is to depend
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page341" name="page341"></a>(p. 341)</span> not entirely on the music, but also on the poem and on the
+acting and staging as well. It will be seen that Wagner's theory is not
+new. All or most of it is contained in the theories of Gluck and others,
+who at various periods in the development of opera consciously strove
+after an ideal music drama. But the times were not ripe, and therefore
+such music could not exert its proper influence. The twin arts of music
+and poetry, dissociated by the rapid advance of literature and the slow
+development of music, pursued their several paths alone. The attempt to
+reunite them in the end of the sixteenth century was futile, and only
+led to opera which never needed, and therefore did not employ, great
+poetry. In Germany music was developed along instrumental lines until
+the school arrived at its culmination in Beethoven; and when an opera
+composer stopped to think on the eternal verities, the result must
+always have been such a prophecy of Wagner's work as we find in Mozart's
+letters:</p>
+
+<p>"<i>October, 1781.</i>&mdash;Verse indeed is indispensable for music, but rhyme is
+bad in its very nature.... It would be by far the best if a good
+composer, understanding the theatre and knowing how to produce a piece,
+and a clever poet, could be united in one...."</p>
+
+<p>Other but comparatively unimportant features in the Wagner music drama
+are, <i>e.g.</i>, the use of the <i>Leitmotiv</i>, or leading motive&mdash;found
+occasionally in Gluck, Mozart, Weber, etc., but here first adopted with
+a definite purpose, and the contention for mythological rather than
+historical subjects&mdash;now largely admitted. But all Wagner's principles
+would have been useless without the energy and perseverance which
+directed his work, the loving study which stored his memory with all the
+great works of his predecessors, and, above all, the genius which
+commands the admiration of the musical world.</p>
+
+<p>Wagner's works show a remarkable and progressive development. "Rienzi"
+is quite in the grand opera style of Meyerbeer, Spontini, etc. The
+"Flying Dutchman" is a deliberate departure from that style, and in
+romantic opera strikes out for itself a new line, which, followed still
+further in "Tannhäuser," reaches its stage of perfection in "Lohengrin."
+From this time dates the music drama, of which "Tristan" is the most
+uncompromising type, and by virtue of wonderful orchestration, and the
+intense pathos of the beautifully written poem, the most fascinating of
+all. The "Trilogy" ("Walküre," "Siegfried," "Götterdämmerung," with the
+"Rheingold" as introduction) is a very unequal work. It is full of
+Wagner's most inspired writing and most marvellous orchestration; but it
+is too long and too diffuse. The plot also is strangely confused and
+uninteresting, and fails alike as a story and as a vehicle of theories,
+morals, or religion. "Parsifal," with its sacred allegory, its lofty
+nobility of tone, and its pure mysticism, stands on a platform by
+itself, and is almost above criticism, or praise, or blame. The libretto
+alone might have won Wagner immortality, so original is it and perfect
+in intention; and the music seems to be no longer a mere accessory to
+the effect, but the very essence and fragrance of the great conception.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page342" name="page342"></a>(p. 342)</span> GIUSEPPE VERDI<br>
+
+(BORN 1813)</h3>
+
+<a id="img046" name="img046"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img046.jpg" width="250" height="323" alt="Verdi." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Giuseppe Verdi, the last and most widely successful of the school of
+Italian opera proper, was born at Roncole, near Busseto, October 9,
+1813. At ten years he was organist of the small church in his native
+village, the salary being raised after a year from £1 8<i>s.</i> 10<i>d.</i> to £1
+12<i>s.</i> per annum. At the age of sixteen he was provided with funds to
+prosecute his studies at the Conservatorium at Milan; but at the
+entrance examination he showed so little evidence of musical talent that
+the authorities declined to enroll him. Nothing daunted, he pursued his
+studies with ardor under Lavigna, from 1831 to 1833, when, according to
+agreement, he returned to Busseto to take the place of his old teacher
+Provesi, now deceased.</p>
+
+<p>After five unhappy years in a town where he was little appreciated,
+Verdi returned to Milan. His first opera, "Oberto," is chiefly indebted
+to Bellini, and the next, "Un Giorno di Regno" (which fulfilled its own
+title, as it was only once performed), has been styled "Un Bazar de
+Reminiscences." Poor Verdi had just lost his wife and two children
+within a few days of each other, so it is hardly to be wondered at that
+a comic opera was not a very congenial work, nor successfully
+accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>"Nabucodonosor" (1842) was his first hit, and in the next year "I
+Lombardi" was even more successful&mdash;partly owing to the revolutionary
+feeling which in no small degree was to help him to his future high
+position. Indeed, his name was a useful acrostic to the revolutionary
+party, who shouted "Viva Verdi," when they meant "Viva Vittorio
+Emanuele Re D' Italia." "Ernani," produced at Venice in 1844, also
+scored a success, owing to the republican sentiment in the libretto,
+which was adapted from Victor Hugo's "Hernani." Many works followed in
+quick succession, each arousing the enthusiasm of the audiences, chiefly
+when an opportunity was afforded them of expressing their feelings
+against the Austrian rule. Only with his sixteenth opera did Verdi win
+the supremacy when there were no longer any living competitors; and
+"Rigoletto" (1851), "Il Trovatore," and "La Traviata" (1853) must be
+called the best, as they are the last of <span class="pagenum"><a id="page343" name="page343"></a>(p. 343)</span> the Italian opera
+school. "I Vespri Siciliani" (1855) and "Simon Boccanegra" (1857) were
+not so successful as "Un Ballo in Maschera" (1859); and none of them,
+any more than "La Forza del Destino" (1862) or "Don Carlos" (1867),
+added anything to the fame of the composer of "Il Trovatore."</p>
+
+<p>Only now begins the interest which the student of musical history finds
+in Verdi's life. Hitherto he had proved a good man, struggling with
+adversity and poverty, a successful composer ambitious to succeed to the
+vacant throne of Italian opera. But the keen insight into dramatic
+necessity which had gradually developed and had given such force to
+otherwise unimportant scenes in earlier operas, also showed him the
+insufficiency of the means hitherto at the disposal of Italian
+composers, and from time to time he had tried to learn the lessons
+taught in the French Grand Opera School, but with poor success. Now a
+longer interval seemed to promise a more careful, a more ambitious work,
+and when "Aïda" was produced at Cairo (1871), it was at once
+acknowledged that a revolution had taken place in Verdi's mind and
+method, which might produce still greater results. The influence of
+Wagner and the music-drama is distinctly to be felt.</p>
+
+<p>But Verdi was apparently not yet satisfied. For sixteen years the
+successful composer maintained absolute silence in opera, when whispers
+of a great music-drama roused the expectation of musical Europe to an
+extraordinary pitch; nor were the highest expectations disappointed when
+"Otello" was produced at Milan in 1887. The surrender of Italian opera
+was complete, and Verdi took his right place at the head of the vigorous
+new school which has arisen in Italy, and which promises to regain for
+the "Land of Song" some of her ancient preeminence in music. A comic
+opera by Verdi, "Falstaff," was announced in 1892: it has well sustained
+his previous reputation.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>DRAMATIC AND LYRIC ARTISTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>DAVID GARRICK<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Samuel Archer</span><br>
+
+(1716-1779)</h3>
+
+
+<p>This celebrated actor was the son of Peter Garrick, who had a captain's
+commission in the army, but who generally resided at Lichfield. He was
+born at Hereford, when his father was on a recruiting party there, and
+was baptized in the Church of All-Saints, in that city, on February 20,
+1716. Young Garrick received part of his education at the grammar
+school there, but he did not apply himself to his books with much
+assiduity. He had conceived a very early passion for theatrical <span class="pagenum"><a id="page344" name="page344"></a>(p. 344)</span>
+representation, from which nothing could turn him aside. When he was a
+little more than eleven years of age, he formed the project of getting a
+play acted by young gentlemen and ladies. After he had made some trial
+of his own and his companions' abilities, and prevailed upon the parents
+to give their consent, he pitched upon the "Recruiting Officer," for the
+play. He assembled his little company in a large room, the destined
+place of representation. There we may suppose our young boy distributed
+the several characters according to the merits of the performer. He
+prevailed on one of his sisters to play the part of the chambermaid.
+Sergeant Kite, a character of busy intrigue and bold humor, he chose for
+himself.</p>
+
+<a id="img047" name="img047"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img047.jpg" width="250" height="270" alt="Garrick." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>The play was acted in a manner so far above the expectation of the
+audience, that it gave general satisfaction, and was much applauded. The
+ease, vivacity, and humor of Kite are still remembered with pleasure at
+Lichfield. The first stage attempt of our English Roscius was in 1727.</p>
+
+<p>Not long after, he was invited to Lisbon by an uncle, who was a
+considerable wine merchant in that city, but his stay there was very
+short, for he returned to Lichfield the year following. It is imagined
+that the gay disposition of the young gentleman was not very suitable to
+the old man's temper, which was, perhaps, too grave and austere to
+relish the vivacities of his nephew.</p>
+
+<p>However, during his short stay at Lisbon, young Garrick made himself
+agreeable to all who knew him, particularly to the English merchants who
+resided there, with whom he often dined. After dinner they usually
+diverted themselves by placing him upon the table, and calling upon him
+to repeat verses and speeches from plays, which he did with great
+readiness, and much to the satisfaction of the hearers. Some Portuguese
+young gentlemen of the highest rank, who were of his own age, were also
+much delighted with his conversation.</p>
+
+<p>He afterward returned to Lichfield, and in 1737 came up to town in
+company with Samuel Johnson, who was to make so conspicuous a figure in
+the literary world, and of whose life we have already given an account.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after his arrival in London, Garrick entered himself at Lincoln's
+Inn, and he also put himself under the tuition of Mr. Colson, an eminent
+mathematician at Rochester. But as he applied himself little to the
+study of the law, his proficiency in mathematics and philosophy was not
+extensive. His mind was theatrically led, and nothing could divert his
+thoughts from the study of that to <span class="pagenum"><a id="page345" name="page345"></a>(p. 345)</span> which his genius so
+powerfully prompted him. He had £1,000 left him by his uncle at Lisbon,
+and he engaged for a short time in the wine trade, in partnership with
+his brother, Mr. Peter Garrick; they hired vaults in Durham Yard, for
+the purpose of carrying on the business. The union between the brothers
+was of no long date. Peter was calm, sedate, and methodical; David was
+gay, volatile, impetuous, and perhaps not so confined to regularity as
+his partner could have wished. To prevent the continuance of fruitless
+and daily altercation, by the interposition of friends the partnership
+was amicably dissolved. And now Garrick prepared himself in earnest for
+that employment which he so ardently loved, and in which nature designed
+he should eminently excel.</p>
+
+<p>He was frequently in the company of the most eminent actors; he got
+himself introduced to the managers of the theatres, and tried his talent
+in the recitation of some particular and favorite portions of plays. Now
+and then he indulged himself in the practice of mimicry, a talent which,
+however inferior, is never willingly resigned by him who excels in it.
+Sometimes he wrote criticisms upon the action and elocution of the
+players, and published them in the prints. These sudden effusions of his
+mind generally comprehended judicious observations and shrewd remarks,
+unmixed with that illiberality which often disgraces the instructions of
+stage critics.</p>
+
+<p>Garrick's diffidence withheld him from trying his strength at first upon
+a London theatre. He thought the hazard was too great, and embraced the
+advantage of commencing his noviciate in acting with a company of
+players then ready to set out for Ipswich, under the direction of Mr.
+William Gifford and Mr. Dunstall, in the summer of 1741.</p>
+
+<p>The first effort of his theatrical talents was exerted as Aboan, in the
+play of "Oroonoko," a part in which his features could not be easily
+discerned. Under the disguise of a black countenance, he hoped to escape
+being known, should it be his misfortune not to please. Though Aboan is
+not a first-rate character, yet the scenes of pathetic persuasion and
+affecting distress in which that character is involved, will always
+command the attention of the audience when represented by a judicious
+actor. Our young player's applause was equal to his most sanguine
+desires. Under the assumed name of Lyddal, he not only acted a variety
+of characters in plays, particularly Chamont, in the "Orphan;" Captain
+Brazen, in the "Recruiting Officer;" and Sir Harry Wildair; but he
+likewise gave such delight to the audience, that they gratified him with
+constant and loud proofs of their approbation. The town of Ipswich will
+long boast of having first seen and encouraged so great a genius as
+Garrick.</p>
+
+<p>His first appearance as an actor in London, was on October 19, 1741,
+when he performed the part of Richard III., at the playhouse in
+Goodman's Fields. His easy and familiar, yet forcible, style in speaking
+and acting, at first threw the critics into some hesitation concerning
+the novelty, as well as propriety, of his manner. They had been long
+accustomed to an elevation of the voice, with a sudden mechanical
+depression of its tones, calculated to excite admiration, and to intrap
+applause. To the just modulation of the words, and concurring <span class="pagenum"><a id="page346" name="page346"></a>(p. 346)</span>
+expression of the features from the genuine works of nature, they had
+been strangers, at least for some time. But after he had gone through a
+variety of scenes, in which he gave evident proofs of consummate art and
+perfect knowledge of character, their doubts were turned into surprise
+and astonishment, from which they relieved themselves by loud and
+reiterated applause. They were more especially charmed when the actor,
+after having thrown aside the hypocrite and politician, assumed the
+warrior and the hero. When news was brought to Richard that the Duke of
+Buckingham was taken, Garrick's look and action, when he pronounced the
+words</p>
+
+<p class="poem30">
+<span class="min03em">"</span>&mdash;&mdash;Off with his head!<br>
+  So much for Buckingham!"</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">were so magnificent and important, from his visible enjoyment of the
+incident, that several loud shouts of approbation proclaimed the triumph
+of the actor and satisfaction of the audience. Richard's dream before
+the battle, and his death, were accompanied with the loudest
+gratulations of applause.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the universal approbation which followed our young actor, that
+the more established theatres of Drury Lane and Covent Garden were
+deserted. Garrick drew after him the inhabitants of the most polite
+parts of the town: Goodman's Fields were full of the splendor of St.
+James' and Grosvenor Square; the coaches of the nobility filled up the
+space from Temple Bar to Whitechapel. He had so perfectly convinced the
+public of his superior accomplishments in acting, that not to admire him
+would not only have argued an absence of taste, but the grossest
+stupidity. Those who had seen and been delighted with the most admired
+of the old actors, confessed that he had excelled the ablest of them in
+the variety of the exhibitions, and equalled them all in their must
+applauded characters.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander Pope was persuaded by Lord Orrery to see him in the first dawn
+of his fame. That great man, who had often seen and admired Betterton,
+was struck with the propriety and beauty of Mr. Garrick's action; and as
+a convincing proof that he had a good opinion of his merit, he told Lord
+Orrery that he was afraid the young man would be spoiled, for he would
+have no competitor.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Garrick shone forth like a theatrical Newton; he threw new light on
+elocution and action; he banished ranting, bombast, and grimace; and
+restored nature, ease, simplicity, and genuine humor.</p>
+
+<p>In 1742 he entered into stated agreements with Fleetwood, patentee of
+Drury Lane, for the annual income of £500. His fame continued to
+increase at the royal theatre, and soon became so extended that a
+deputation was sent from Ireland, to invite him to act in Dublin during
+the months of June, July, and August, upon very profitable conditions.
+These he embraced, and crossed the seas to the metropolis of Ireland in
+June, 1742, accompanied by Mrs. Woffington.</p>
+
+<a id="img048" name="img048"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img048.jpg" width="600" height="459" alt="" title="">
+<p>Garrick as Richard III.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>His success at Dublin exceeded all imagination, though much was expected
+from him; he was caressed by all ranks of people as a prodigy of
+theatrical accomplishment. During the hottest days in the year the
+play-house was crowded <span class="pagenum"><a id="page347" name="page347"></a>(p. 347)</span> with persons of fashion and rank, who
+were never tired with seeing and applauding the various essays of his
+skill.</p>
+
+<p>The excessive heat became prejudicial to the frequenters of the theatre;
+and the epidemical distemper, which seized and carried off great
+numbers, was nicknamed the <i>Garrick fever</i>. Satisfied with the
+emoluments arising from the summer campaign, and delighted with the
+generous encouragement and kind countenance which the nobility and
+gentry of Ireland had given him, and of which he always spoke in the
+strongest terms of acknowledgment and gratitude, he set out for London,
+to renew his labors and to receive the applause of the most critical, as
+well as most candid, audience in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Such an actor as Garrick, whose name when announced in the play-bill
+operated like a charm and drew multitudes to the theatre, of consequence
+considerably augmented the profits of the patentee. But at the time when
+all without doors was apparently gay and splendid, and the theatre of
+Drury Lane seemed to be in the most flourishing condition, by the
+strange and absurd conduct of the manager the whole fabric was
+absolutely running into certain destruction.</p>
+
+<p>His behavior brought on a revolt of the principal actors, with Mr.
+Garrick and Mr. Macklin at their head, and for some time they seceded
+from the theatre. They endeavored to procure a patent for a new theatre,
+but without success; and Garrick at length accommodated his dispute with
+the manager, Mr. Fleetwood, by engaging to play again for a salary of
+six or seven hundred pounds.</p>
+
+<p>In 1744, Garrick made a second voyage to Dublin, and became
+joint-manager of the theatre there with Mr. Sheridan. They met with
+great success; and Garrick returned again to London, in May, 1746,
+having considerably added to his stock of money. In 1747 he became
+joint-patentee of Drury Lane Theatre with Mr. Lacy. Mr. Garrick and Mr.
+Lacy divided the business of the theatre in such a manner as not to
+encroach upon each other's province. Mr. Lacy took upon himself the care
+of the wardrobe, the scenes, and the economy of the household; while
+Garrick regulated the more important business of treating with authors,
+hiring actors, distributing parts in plays, superintending of
+rehearsals, etc. Besides the profits accruing from his half-share, he
+was allowed an income of £500 for his acting, and some particular
+emoluments for altering plays, farces, etc.</p>
+
+<p>In 1749, Mr. Garrick was married to Mademoiselle Violetti, a young lady
+who (as Mr. Davies says), to great elegance of form and many polite
+accomplishments, joined the more amiable virtues of the mind. In 1763,
+1764, and 1765, he made a journey to France and Italy, accompanied by
+Mrs. Garrick, who, from the day of her marriage till the death of her
+husband, was never separated from him for twenty-four hours. During his
+stay abroad his company was desired by many foreigners of high birth and
+great merit. He was sometimes invited to give the company a taste of
+that art in which he was known so greatly to excel. Such a request he
+very readily consented to, for indeed his compliance cost him nothing.
+He could, without the least preparation, transform himself into any
+character tragic or comic, and seize instantaneously upon any passion
+of the human mind. He could make a sudden transition from violent rage,
+and even <span class="pagenum"><a id="page348" name="page348"></a>(p. 348)</span> madness, to the extremes of levity and humor, and go
+through the whole circle of theatric evolution with the most surprising
+velocity.</p>
+
+<p>On the death of Mr. Lacy, joint patentee of Drury Lane with Mr. Garrick,
+in 1773, the whole management of that theatre devolved on Mr. Garrick.
+But in 1776, being about sixty years of age, he sold his share of the
+patent, and formed a resolution of quitting the stage. He was, however,
+determined, before he left the theatre, to give the public proofs of his
+abilities to delight them as highly as he had ever done in the flower
+and vigor of his life. To this end he presented them with some of the
+most capital and trying characters of Shakespeare; with Hamlet, Richard,
+and Lear, besides other parts which were less fatiguing. Hamlet and Lear
+were repeated; Richard he acted once only, and by the king's command.
+His Majesty was much surprised to see him, at an age so advanced, run
+about the field of battle with so much fire, force, and agility.</p>
+
+<p>He finished his dramatic race with one of his favorite parts, with
+Felix, in "The Wonder a Woman Keeps a Secret." When the play was ended,
+Mr. Garrick advanced toward the audience, with much palpitation of mind,
+and visible emotion in his countenance. No premeditation whatever could
+prepare him for this affecting scene. He bowed&mdash;he paused&mdash;the
+spectators were all attention. After a short struggle of nature, he
+recovered from the shock he had felt, and addressed his auditors in the
+following words:</p>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Ladies and Gentlemen</span>: It has been customary with persons under my
+circumstances to address you in a farewell epilogue. I had the same
+intention, and turned my thoughts that way; but indeed, I found myself
+then as incapable of writing such an epilogue, as I should be now of
+speaking it.</p>
+
+<p>"The jingle of rhyme and the language of fiction would but ill suit my
+present feelings. This is to me a very awful moment; it is no less than
+parting forever with those from whom I have received the greatest
+kindness and favors, and upon the spot where that kindness and those
+favors were enjoyed." [Here he was unable to proceed till he was
+relieved by a shower of tears.]</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever may be the changes of my future life, the deepest impression
+of your kindness will always remain here" (putting his hand on his
+breast) "fixed and unalterable. I will very readily agree to my
+successors having more skill and ability for their station than I have;
+but I defy them all to take more sincere, and more uninterrupted pains
+for your favor, or to be more truly sensible of it, than is your humble
+servant."</p>
+
+<p>After a profound obeisance, he retired, amid the tears and acclamations
+of a most crowded and brilliant audience.</p>
+
+<p>He died on Wednesday morning, January 20, 1779, at eight o'clock,
+without a groan. The disease was pronounced to be a palsy in the
+kidneys. On Monday, February 1st, the body of David Garrick was conveyed
+from his own house in the Adelphi, and most magnificently interred in
+Westminster Abbey, under the monument of his beloved Shakespeare. He was
+attended to the grave by persons of the first rank; by men illustrious
+for genius, and famous for science; by those who loved him living, and
+lamented his death.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page349" name="page349"></a>(p. 349)</span> EDWIN FORREST<a id="footnotetag13" name="footnotetag13"></a><a href="#footnote13" title="Go to footnote 13"><span class="smaller">[13]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Lawrence Barrett</span><br>
+
+(1806-1872)</h3>
+
+<a id="img049" name="img049"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img049.jpg" width="250" height="262" alt="Edwin Forrest." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Edwin Forrest was born in the city of Philadelphia, March 9, 1806, his
+father, a Scotchman, having emigrated to America during the last year of
+the preceding century. The boy, like many others of his profession, was
+designed for the ministry, and before the age of eleven the future
+Channing had attracted admiring listeners by the music of his voice and
+the aptness of his mimicry. His memory was remarkable, and he would
+recite whole passages of his preceptor's sermons. Perched upon a chair
+or stool, and crowned with the proud approval of family and friends, the
+young mimic filled the hearts of his listeners with fervent hopes of his
+coming success in the fold of their beloved church. These hopes were
+destined to be met with disappointment. The bias of the future leader of
+the American stage was only faintly outlined as yet; his hour of
+development was still to come.</p>
+
+<p>He must have learned early the road to the theatre, permitted to go by
+the family, or going, perhaps, without the knowledge or consent of his
+seniors in the overworked household; for, before he had passed his tenth
+year, our young sermonizer was a member of a Thespian club, and before
+he was eleven he had made his appearance at one of the regular theatres
+in a female character, but with most disastrous results. He soon outgrew
+the ignominy of his first failure, however, and again and again sought
+to overcome its disgrace by a fresh appearance. To his appeals the irate
+manager lent a deaf ear. The sacred portal that leads to the enchanted
+ground of the stage was closed against young Forrest, the warden being
+instructed not to let the importunate boy pass the door. At last, in
+desperation, he resolved to storm the citadel, to beat down the faithful
+guard and to carry war into the enemy's camp. One night he dashed past
+the astonished guardian of the stage entrance just as the curtain fell
+upon one of the acts of a play. He emerged before the footlights,
+eluding all pursuit, dressed as a harlequin, and, before the audience
+had recovered from its astonishment at this <span class="pagenum"><a id="page350" name="page350"></a>(p. 350)</span> scene not set down
+in the bills, the baffled, but not subdued, aspirant had delivered the
+lines of an epilogue in rhyme with so much effect that, before he could
+be seized by the astounded stage-manager and hurled from the theatre, he
+had attracted public notice, successfully won his surprised audience,
+and not only secured immunity from punishment for his temerity, but
+actually gained that respect in the manager's estimation which he had so
+long and so vainly striven to acquire.</p>
+
+<p>At last Forrest was promised an appearance at the Walnut Street house,
+then one of the leading theatres of the country. He selected Young
+Norval in Home's tragedy of "Douglas," and on November 27, 1820, the
+future master of the American stage, then fourteen years of age&mdash;a boy
+in years, a man in character&mdash;announced as "A Young Gentleman of this
+City," surrounded by a group of veteran actors who had for many years
+shared the favor of the public, began a career which was as auspicious
+at its opening as it was splendid in its maturity. At his entrance he
+won the vast audience at once by the grace of his figure and the modest
+bearing that was natural to him. Something of that magnetism which he
+exercised so effectively in late years now attracted all who heard him,
+and made friends even before he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>He was allowed to reappear as Frederick in "Lovers' Vows," repeating his
+first success; and on January 8, 1821, he benefited as Octavian in the
+"Mountaineers," a play associated with the early glories of Edmund Kean.
+In this year, also, he made his first and only venture as a manager,
+boldly taking the Prune Street Theatre, Philadelphia, and giving a
+successful performance of "Richard III.," which not only pleased the
+audience, but brought him a few dollars of profit. He made many attempts
+to secure a regular engagement in one of the Western circuits, where
+experience could be gained; and at last, after many denials, he was
+employed by Collins and Jones to play leading juvenile parts in their
+theatres in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Lexington. Thus, at the age of
+sixteen or eighteen, Edwin Forrest enrolled himself as a regular member
+of a theatrical company, and broke loose from trade forever.</p>
+
+<p>Of his professional progress here we have but poor accounts. He seems to
+have been very popular, and to have had an experience larger than he had
+heretofore enjoyed. He played with the elder Conway, and was affected by
+the grandeur of that actor's Othello, a study which served Forrest well
+when in late years he inherited the character.</p>
+
+<p>Jane Placide, who inspired the first love of Edwin Forrest, was an
+actress who combined talent, beauty, and goodness. Her character would
+have softened the asperities of his, and led him by a calmer path to
+those grand elevations toward which Providence had directed his
+footsteps. Baffled in love, however, and believing Caldwell to be his
+rival and enemy, he challenged him; but was rebuked by the silent
+contempt of his manager, whom the impulsive and disappointed lover
+"posted."</p>
+
+<p>The hard novitiate of Edwin Forrest was now drawing near its close.
+Securing a stock engagement with Charles Gilfert, manager of the Albany
+Theatre, he <span class="pagenum"><a id="page351" name="page351"></a>(p. 351)</span> opened there in the early fall, and played for the
+first time with Edmund Kean, then on his second visit to America. The
+meeting with this extraordinary man and the attention he received from
+him were foremost among the directing influences of Forrest's life. To
+his last hour he never wearied of singing the praises of Kean, whose
+genius filled the English-speaking world with admiration. Two men more
+unlike in mind and body can scarcely be imagined. Until now Forrest had
+seen no actor who represented in perfection the impassioned school of
+which Kean was the master. He could not have known Cooke, even in the
+decline of that great tragedian's power, and the little giant was indeed
+a revelation. He played Iago to Kean's Othello, Titus to his Brutus, and
+Richmond to his Richard III.</p>
+
+<p>In the interval which preceded the opening of the Bowery Theatre, New
+York, Forrest appeared at the Park for the benefit of Woodhull, playing
+Othello. He made a pronounced success, his old manager sitting in front,
+profanely exclaiming, "By God, the boy has made a hit!" This was a great
+event, as the Park was then the leading theatre of America, and its
+actors were the most famous and exclusive.</p>
+
+<p>He opened at the Bowery Theatre in November, 1826, as Othello, and made
+a brilliant impression. His salary was raised from $28 to $40 per week.
+From this success may be traced the first absolute hold made by Edwin
+Forrest upon the attention of cultivated auditors and intelligent
+critics. The Bowery was then a very different theatre from what it
+afterward became, when the newsboys took forcible possession of its pit
+and the fire-laddies were the arbiters of public taste in its
+neighborhood.</p>
+
+<p>An instance of Forrest's moral integrity may be told here. He had been
+approached by a rival manager, after his first success, and urged to
+secede from the Bowery and join the other house at a much larger salary.
+He scornfully refused to break his word, although his own interests he
+knew must suffer. His popularity at this time was so great that, when
+his contract for the season had expired, he was instantly engaged for
+eight nights, at a salary of two hundred dollars a night.</p>
+
+<p>The success which had greeted Forrest on his first appearance in New
+York, was renewed in every city in the land. Fortune attended fame, and
+filled his pockets, as the breath of adulation filled his heart. He had
+paid the last penny of debt left by his father, and had seen a firm
+shelter raised over the head of his living family. With a patriotic
+feeling for all things American, Forrest, about this time, formed a plan
+for the encouragement or development of an American drama, which
+resulted in heavy money losses to himself, but produced such
+contributions to our stage literature as the "Gladiator," "Jack Cade,"
+and "Metamora."<a id="footnotetag14" name="footnotetag14"></a><a href="#footnote14" title="Go to footnote 14"><span class="smaller">[14]</span></a> After five years of constant labor he felt that he
+had earned the right to a holiday, and he formed his plans for a two
+years' absence in Europe. A <span class="pagenum"><a id="page352" name="page352"></a>(p. 352)</span> farewell banquet was tendered him
+by the citizens of New York, and a medal was struck in honor of the
+occasion. Bryant, Halleck, Leggett, Ingraham and other distinguished men
+were present. This was an honor which had never before been paid to an
+American actor.</p>
+
+<p>He had been absent about two years when he landed in New York in
+September, 1836. On his appearance at the Walnut Street Theatre,
+Philadelphia, he was received with unprecedented enthusiasm. He gave six
+performances only, on this occasion, and each saw a repetition of the
+scene at the beginning of the engagement. The receipts were the largest
+ever known in that house.</p>
+
+<p>On September 19, 1836, Forrest embarked once more for the mother
+country, this time with serious purpose. After a speedy and uneventful
+passage he reached England, and at once set about the preliminary
+business of his British engagement, which began October 17, 1836. He was
+the first really great American actor who had appeared in London as a
+rival of the English tragedians; for Cooper was born in England, though
+always regarded as belonging to the younger country. His opening part
+was Spartacus in the "Gladiator." The play was condemned, the actor
+applauded. In Othello, in Lear, and in Macbeth, he achieved instant
+success. He began his engagement October 17th and closed December 19th,
+having acted Macbeth seven times, Othello nine, and King Lear eight. A
+dinner at the Garrick Club was offered and accepted. Here he sat down
+with Charles Kemble and Macready; Sergeant Talfourd was in the chair.</p>
+
+<p>It was during this engagement he met his future wife, Miss Catherine
+Sinclair. In the latter part of June, 1837, the marriage took place in
+St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden. Mr. and Mrs. Forrest soon after
+embarked for America. The tragedian resumed his American engagements
+November 15, 1837, at the old Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia.
+Presented to his friends, his wife at once made a deep and lasting
+impression. Her native delicacy of mind and refinement of manners
+enchanted those who hoped for some such influence to be exerted in
+softening the rough vigor and democratic downrightness of the man.
+Domestic discord came too soon, however, and in an evil hour for
+himself, in an evil hour for his art and for the struggling drama in
+America, Edwin Forrest threw open the doors of his home to the scrutiny
+of the world, and appealed to the courts to remove the skeleton which
+was hidden in his closet. With the proceedings of that trial, which
+resulted in divorce, alimony, and separation, this memoir has nothing to
+do.</p>
+
+<a id="img050" name="img050"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img050.jpg" width="300" height="469" alt="" title="">
+<p>Forrest as Metamora.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Edwin Forrest, leaving the court-room a defeated man, was instantly
+raised to a popularity with the masses beyond anything even he had
+before experienced. He began an engagement soon after at the Broadway
+Theatre, opening as Damon. The house was crowded to suffocation. The
+engagement of sixty nights was unparalleled in the history of the
+American drama for length and profit. But despite the flattering
+applause of the multitude, life never again had for him the smiling
+aspect it had so often worn before. The applause which filled his ears,
+the wealth which flowed in upon him could not improve that temper which
+had never been amiable, and all the hard stories of his life belong to
+this period.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page353" name="page353"></a>(p. 353)</span> On September 20, 1852, he reappeared at the Broadway Theatre,
+New York. In February, 1853, "Macbeth" was produced in grand style, with
+new scenery and appointments. The tragedy was played on twenty
+consecutive nights, then by far the longest run of any Shakespearean
+play in America. The cast was very strong. It included Conway, Duff,
+Davenport, Pope, Davidge, Barry, and Madame Ponisi.</p>
+
+<p>On September 17, 1860, after an absence of nearly four years, Edwin
+Forrest appeared again on the stage. He was engaged by James Nixon, and
+began his contract of one hundred nights at Niblo's Garden, New York, in
+the character of Hamlet. The long retirement only increased the curious
+interest which centred round his historic name. Upon his opening night
+the seats were sold at auction. His success in Philadelphia rivalled
+that of New York. In Boston the vast auditorium of the grandest theatre
+in America was found too small to contain the crowds he drew.</p>
+
+<p>Severe attacks of gout were beginning to tell upon that herculean form,
+sapping and undermining it; and in 1865, while playing Damon at the
+Holiday Street Theatre, in Baltimore, the weather being very cold and
+the theatre open to draughts, he was seized with a sudden illness, which
+was followed by very serious results. Suffering the most intense agony,
+he was able to get to the end of the part; but when his robes were laid
+aside and physicians summoned, it was found to his horror that he had
+suffered a partial paralysis of the sciatic nerve. In an instant the
+sturdy gait, the proud tread of the herculean actor was forever gone;
+for he never regained complete control of his limb, a perceptible hobble
+being the legacy of the dreadful visitation. His right hand was almost
+powerless, and he could not hold his sword.</p>
+
+<p>In 1866 he went to California, urged by the manager in San Francisco.
+His last engagement in New York took place in February, 1871. He played
+Lear and Richelieu, his two greatest parts. On the night of March 25,
+1872, Forrest opened in "Lear" at the Globe Theatre, Boston. "Lear" was
+played six nights. During the second week he was announced for Richelieu
+and Virginius; but he caught a violent cold on Sunday, and labored
+sorely on Monday evening through the part of Richelieu. On Tuesday he
+repeated the performance, against the advice of friends and physicians.
+Rare bursts of his old power lighted up the play, but he labored
+piteously on against his illness and threatened pneumonia. When
+stimulants were offered he rejected them, declaring "that if he died
+to-night, he should still be his old royal self."</p>
+
+<p>Announced for Virginius the following evening, he was unable to appear.
+A severe attack of pneumonia developed itself. He was carried to his
+hotel, and his last engagement was brought to an abrupt and melancholy
+end. As soon as he was able to move, he left Boston for his home in
+Philadelphia, resting on his way only a day in New York. As the summer
+passed away, the desire for work grew stronger and stronger, and he
+decided to re-enter public life, but simply as a reader of the great
+plays in which he had as an actor been so successful. The result was a
+disappointment. On December 11, 1872, he wrote to Oakes his <span class="pagenum"><a id="page354" name="page354"></a>(p. 354)</span>
+last letter, saying sadly, but fondly: "God bless you ever, my dear and
+much-beloved friend."</p>
+
+<p>When the morning of December 12th came, his servant, hearing no sound in
+his chamber at his general hour of rising, became alarmed, opened his
+master's door, and found there, cold in death upon his bed, the form of
+the great tragedian. His arms were crossed upon his bosom, and he seemed
+to be at rest. The stroke had come suddenly. With little warning, and
+without pain, he had passed away.</p>
+
+<p>The dead man's will was found to contain several bequests to old friends
+and servants, and an elaborate scheme by which his fortune, in the hands
+of trustees, was to be applied to the erection and support of a retreat
+for aged actors, to be called "The Edwin Forrest Home." The idea had
+been long in his mind, and careful directions were drawn up for its
+practical working; but the trustees found themselves powerless to
+realize fully the hopes and wishes of the testator. A settlement had to
+be made to the divorced wife, who acted liberally toward the estate; but
+the amount withdrawn seriously crippled it, as it was deprived at once
+of a large sum of ready money. Other legal difficulties arose. And thus
+the great ambition of the tragedian to be a benefactor to his profession
+was destined to come almost to naught. Of this happily little he recks
+now. He has parted with all the cares of life, and has at last found
+rest.</p>
+
+<p>Forrest's greatest Shakespearean parts were Lear, Othello, and
+Coriolanus. The first grew mellow and rich as the actor grew in years,
+while it still retained much of its earlier force. His Othello suffered
+with the decline of his faculties, although his clear conception of all
+he did was apparent to the end in the acting of every one of his parts.
+Coriolanus died with him, the last of all the Romans. He was greatest,
+however, in such parts as Virginius, William Tell, and Spartacus. Here
+his mannerisms of gait and utterance were less noticeable than in his
+Shakespearean characters, or were overlooked in the rugged massiveness
+of the creation. Hamlet, Richard, and Macbeth were out of his
+temperament, and added nothing to his fame; but Richelieu is said to
+have been one of his noblest and most impressive performances. He was in
+all things marked and distinctive. His obtrusive personality often
+destroyed the harmony of the portrait he was painting; but in his
+inspired moments, which were many, his touches were sublime. He passed
+over quiet scenes with little elaboration, and dwelt strongly upon the
+grand features of the characters he represented. His Lear, in the great
+scenes, rose to a majestic height, but fell in places almost to
+mediocrity. His art was unequal to his natural gifts. He was totally
+unlike his great contemporary and rival, Macready, whose attention to
+detail gave to every performance the harmony of perfect work.</p>
+
+<p>This memoir may fitly close with an illustrative anecdote of the great
+actor. Toward the end of his professional career he was playing an
+engagement at St. Louis. He was very feeble in health, and his lameness
+was a source of great anxiety to him. Sitting at a late supper in his
+hotel one evening, after a performance of "King Lear," with his friend
+J. B. McCullough, of the <i>Globe-Democrat</i>, <span class="pagenum"><a id="page355" name="page355"></a>(p. 355)</span> that gentleman
+remarked to him: "Mr. Forrest, I never in my life saw you play Lear so
+well as you did to-night." Whereupon the veteran almost indignantly
+replied, rising slowly and laboriously from his chair to his full
+height: "Play Lear! What do you mean, sir? I do not play Lear! I play
+Hamlet, Richard, Shylock, Virginius, if you please, but by God, sir, I
+<i>am</i> Lear!"</p>
+
+<p>Nor was this wholly imaginative. Ingratitude of the basest kind had rent
+his soul. Old friends were gone from him; new friends were but
+half-hearted. His hearthstone was desolate. The public, to whom he had
+given his best years, was becoming impatient of his infirmities. The
+royalty of his powers he saw by degrees torn from his decaying form.
+Other kings had arisen on the stage, to whom his old subjects now showed
+a reverence once all his own. The mockery of his diadem only remained. A
+wreck of the once proud man who had despised all weakness, and had ruled
+his kingdom with imperial sway, he now stood alone. Broken in health and
+in spirit, deserted, forgotten, unkinged, he might well exclaim, "<i>I am
+Lear!</i>"<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h3>CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Dutton Cook</span><br>
+
+(1816-1876)</h3>
+
+<a id="img051" name="img051"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img051.jpg" width="200" height="269" alt="Charlotte Cushman." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>The Pilgrim Fathers figure in American pedigrees almost as frequently
+and persistently as Norman William and his followers appear at the trunk
+of our family-trees. Certainly, the Mayflower must have carried very
+many heads of houses across the Atlantic. It was not in the Mayflower,
+however, but in the Fortune, a smaller vessel, of fifty-five tons, that
+Robert Cushman, Nonconformist, the founder of the Cushman family in
+America, sailed from England, for the better enjoyment of liberty of
+conscience and freedom of religion. In the seventh generation from
+Robert Cushman appeared Elkanah Cushman, who took to wife Mary Eliza,
+daughter of Erasmus Babbit, Jr., lawyer, musician, and captain in the
+army. Of this marriage was born Charlotte Saunders Cushman, in Richmond
+Street, Boston, July 23, 1816, and other children.</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte Cushman says of herself: "I was born a tom-boy." She had a
+passion for climbing trees and for breaking open dolls' heads. She
+could not <span class="pagenum"><a id="page356" name="page356"></a>(p. 356)</span> make dolls' clothes, but she could manufacture their
+furniture&mdash;could do anything with tools. "I was very destructive to toys
+and clothes, tyrannical to brothers and sister, but very social, and a
+great favorite with other children. Imitation was a prevailing trait."
+The first play she ever saw was "Coriolanus," with Macready in the
+leading part; her second play was "The Gamester." She became noted in
+her school for her skill in reading aloud. Her competitors grumbled: "No
+wonder she can read; she goes to the theatre!" Until then she had been
+shy and reserved, not to say stupid, about reading aloud in school,
+afraid of the sound of her own voice, and unwilling to trust it; but
+acquaintance with the theatre loosened her tongue, as she describes it,
+and gave opportunity and expression to a faculty which became the ruling
+passion of her life. At home, as a child, she took part in an operetta
+founded upon the story of "Bluebeard," and played Selim, the lover, with
+great applause, in a large attic chamber of her father's house before an
+enthusiastic audience of young people.</p>
+
+<p>Elkanah Cushman had been for some years a successful merchant, a member
+of the firm of Topliffe &amp; Cushman, Long Wharf, Boston. But failure
+befell him, "attributable," writes Charlotte Cushman's biographer, Miss
+Stebbins, "to the infidelity of those whom he trusted as supercargoes."
+The family removed from Boston to Charlestown. Charlotte was placed at a
+public school, remaining there until she was thirteen only. Elkanah
+Cushman died, leaving his widow and five children with very slender
+means. Mrs. Cushman opened a boarding-house in Boston, and struggled
+hard to ward off further misfortune. It was discovered that Charlotte
+possessed a noble voice of almost two registers, "a full contralto and
+almost a full soprano; but the low voice was the natural one." The
+fortunes of the family seemed to rest upon the due cultivation of
+Charlotte's voice and upon her future as a singer. "My mother," she
+writes, "at great self-sacrifice gave me what opportunities for
+instruction she could obtain for me; and then my father's friend, Mr. R.
+D. Shepherd, of Shepherdstown, Va., gave me two years of the best
+culture that could be obtained in Boston at that time, under John
+Paddon, an English organist and teacher of singing." When the English
+singer, Mrs. Wood&mdash;better known, perhaps, as Miss Paton&mdash;visited Boston
+in 1835 or 1836, she needed the support of a contralto voice. Charlotte
+Cushman was sent for, and rehearsed duets with Mrs. Wood. The young
+beginner was advised to prepare herself for the operatic stage; she was
+assured that such a voice would "lead her to any height of fortune she
+coveted." She became the articled pupil of Mr. Maeder, the husband of
+Clara Fisher, actress and vocalist, and the musical director of Mr. and
+Mrs. Wood. Instructed by Maeder, Miss Cushman undertook the parts of the
+Countess in "The Marriage of Figaro" and Lucy Bertram in the opera of
+"Guy Mannering." These were her first appearances upon the stage.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Maeder's voice was a contralto; it became necessary, therefore, to
+assign soprano parts to Miss Cushman. Undue stress was thus laid upon
+her upper notes. She was very young, and she felt the change of climate
+when she went on with the Maeders to New Orleans. It is likely that her
+powers as a singer <span class="pagenum"><a id="page357" name="page357"></a>(p. 357)</span> had been tried too soon and too severely;
+her operatic career was brought to a sudden close. Her voice failed her;
+her upper notes departed, never to return; she was left with a weakened
+and limited contralto register. Alarmed and wretched, she sought counsel
+of Mr. Caldwell, the manager of the chief New Orleans theatre. "You
+ought to be an actress, and not a singer," he said, and advised her to
+take lessons of Mr. Barton, his leading tragedian. Her articles of
+apprenticeship to Maeder were cancelled. Soon she was ready to appear as
+Lady Macbeth on the occasion of Barton's benefit.</p>
+
+<p>The season ended, she sailed for Philadelphia on her way to New York.
+Presently she had entered into a three years' engagement with Mr.
+Hamblin, the manager of the Bowery Theatre, at a salary of twenty-five
+dollars a week for the first year, thirty-five for the second year, and
+forty-five for the third. Mr. Hamblin had received excellent accounts of
+the actress from his friend, Mr. Barton, of New Orleans, and had heard
+her rehearse scenes from "Macbeth," "Jane Shore," "Venice Preserved,"
+"The Stranger," etc. To enable her to obtain a suitable wardrobe, he
+became security for her with his tradespeople, deducting five dollars a
+week from her salary until the debt was satisfied. All promised well;
+independence seemed secure at last. Mrs. Cushman was sent for from
+Boston; she gave up her boarding-house and hastened to her daughter.
+Miss Cushman writes: "I got a situation for my eldest brother in a store
+in New York. I left my only sister in charge of a half-sister in Boston,
+and I took my youngest brother with me." But rheumatic fever seized the
+actress; she was able to act for a few nights only, and her dream of
+good fortune came to a disastrous close. "The Bowery Theatre was burned
+to the ground, with all my wardrobe, all my debt upon it, and my three
+years' contract ending in smoke." Grievously distressed, but not
+disheartened, with her family dependent upon her exertions, she accepted
+an engagement at the principal theatre in Albany, where she remained
+five months, acting all the leading characters. In September, 1837, she
+entered into an engagement, which endured for three years, with the
+manager of the Park Theatre, New York. She was required to fulfil the
+duties of "walking lady" and "general utility" at a salary of twenty
+dollars a week.</p>
+
+<p>During this period of her career she performed very many characters, and
+toiled assiduously at her profession. It was then the custom to afford
+the public a great variety of performances, to change the plays nightly,
+and to present two and sometimes three plays upon the same evening. The
+actors were forever busy studying new parts, and, when they were not
+performing, they were rehearsing. "It was a time of hard work," writes
+Miss Stebbins, "of ceaseless activity, and of hard-won and scantily
+accorded appreciation." Miss Cushman had no choice of parts; she was not
+the chief actress of the company; she sustained without question all the
+characters the management assigned to her. Her appearance as Meg
+Merrilies (she acquired subsequently great favor by her performance of
+this character) was due to an incident&mdash;the illness of Mrs. Chippendale,
+the actress who usually supported the part. It was in the year 1840;
+the veteran Braham was to appear as Henry Bertram. A Meg Merrilies had
+to be <span class="pagenum"><a id="page358" name="page358"></a>(p. 358)</span> improvised. The obscure "utility" actress was called upon
+to take Mrs. Chippendale's place. She might read the part if she could
+not commit it to memory but personate Meg Merrilies after some sort she
+must. She had never especially noticed the part; but as she stood at the
+side scene, book in hand, awaiting her moment of entrance, her ear
+caught the dialogue going on upon the stage between two of the gypsies,
+"conveying the impression that Meg was no longer to be feared or
+respected&mdash;that she was no longer in her right mind." This furnished her
+with a clew to the character, and led her to present it upon the stage
+as the weird and startling figure which afterward became so famous. Of
+course, the first performance was but a sketch of her later portrayals
+of Meg Merrilies, yet she made a profound impression. "I had not thought
+that I had done anything remarkable," she wrote, "and when a knock came
+at my dressing-room door, and I heard Braham's voice, my first thought
+was, 'Now what have I done? He is surely displeased with me about
+something.' Imagine my gratification, when Mr. Braham said, 'Miss
+Cushman, I have come to thank you for the most veritable sensation I
+have experienced for a long time. I give you my word, when I saw you in
+that first scene I felt a cold chill run all over me. Where have you
+learned to do anything like that?'"</p>
+
+<p>During her visits to England, Miss Cushman personated Meg Merrilies more
+often than any other character. In America she was also famous for her
+performance of Nancy, in a melodrama founded upon "Oliver Twist;" but
+this part she did not bring with her across the Atlantic. She had first
+played Nancy during her "general utility" days at the Park Theatre, when
+the energy and pathos of her acting powerfully affected her audience,
+and the tradition of her success in the part long "lingered in the
+memory of managers, and caused them, ever and anon, as their business
+interests prompted, to bring great pressure to bear upon her for a
+reproduction of it." Mr. George Vandenhoff describes Nancy as Miss
+Cushman's "greatest part; fearfully natural, dreadfully intense,
+horribly real."</p>
+
+<p>In the winter of 1842 Miss Cushman undertook the management of the
+Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, which was then in rather a fallen
+state. Under her energetic rule, however, the establishment recovered
+its popularity. "She displayed at that day," writes Mr. George
+Vandenhoff&mdash;who "starred at the Walnut Street Theatre for six nights to
+small audiences"&mdash;"a rude, strong, uncultivated talent. It was not till
+after she had seen and acted with Mr. Macready&mdash;which she did the next
+season&mdash;that she really brought artistic study and finish to her
+performances." Macready arrived in New York in the autumn of 1843. He
+notes: "The Miss Cushman, who acted Lady Macbeth, interested me much.
+She has to learn her art, but she showed mind and sympathy with me&mdash;a
+novelty so refreshing to me on the stage." She discerned the opportunity
+for study and improvement presented by Macready's visit, and underwent
+the fatigue of acting on alternate nights in Philadelphia and New York
+during the term of his engagement at the Park Theatre. Her own success
+was very great. She wrote to her mother of her great reception: of her
+being called out after the play; of the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page359" name="page359"></a>(p. 359)</span> "hats and handkerchiefs
+waved to me; flowers sent to me," etc. In October, 1844, she sailed for
+England in the packet-ship Garrick. She had little money with her. A
+farewell benefit taken in Boston, her native city, had not proved very
+productive, and she had been obliged "to make arrangements for the
+maintenance of her family during her absence." And with characteristic
+prudence she left behind her a certain sum, to be in readiness for her,
+in case failure in England should drive her promptly back to America.</p>
+
+<p>No engagement in London had been offered her; but she received, upon her
+arrival, a letter from Macready, proposing that she should join a
+company then being formed to give representations in Paris. She thought
+it prudent to decline this proposal, however, so as to avoid entering
+into anything like rivalry with Miss Helen Faucit, the leading actress
+of the troupe. She visited Paris for a few days, but only to sit with
+the audience of the best French theatres. She returned to her dull
+lodgings in Covent Garden, "awaiting her destiny." She was fond, in
+after years, of referring to the struggles and poverty, the hopes and
+the despair, of her first sojourn in London. Her means were nearly
+exhausted. Sally, the dresser, used to relate: "Miss Cushman lived on a
+mutton-chop a day, and I always bought the baker's dozen of muffins for
+the sake of the extra one, and we ate them all, no matter how stale they
+were, and we never suffered from want of appetite in those days." She
+found herself reduced to her last sovereign, when Mr. Maddox, the
+manager of the Princess's Theatre, came to her with a proposal. The
+watchful Sally reported that he had been walking up and down the street
+for some time early in the morning, too early for a visit. "He is
+anxious," said Miss Cushman. "I can make my own terms." He wished her to
+appear with Forrest, the American tragedian, then visiting the London
+stage for the second and last time. She stipulated that she should have
+her opportunity first, and "alone." If successful, she was willing to
+appear in support of Forrest. So it was agreed.</p>
+
+<p>Her first appearance upon the English stage was made on February 14,
+1845; she assumed the character of Bianca, in Dean Milman's rather dull
+tragedy of "Fazio." Her triumph was indisputable. Her intensity and
+vehemence completely carried away the house. As the pit rose at Kean's
+Shylock, so it rose at Charlotte Cushman's Bianca. She wrote to her
+mother in America: "All my success put together, since I have been upon
+the stage, would not come near my success in London." The critics
+described, as the crowning effort of her performance, the energy and
+pathos and abandonment of her appeal to Aldabella, when the wife
+sacrifices her pride, and sinks, "huddled into a heap," at the feet of
+her rival, imploring her to save the life of Fazio. Miss Cushman,
+speaking of her first performance in London, was wont to relate how she
+was so completely overcome, not only by the excitement of the scene, but
+by the nervous agitation of the occasion, that she lost for the moment
+her self-command, and was especially grateful for the long-continued
+applause which gave her time to recover herself. When she slowly rose at
+last and faced the house again, the spectacle of its enthusiasm
+thrilled and impressed her in a manner she could never <span class="pagenum"><a id="page360" name="page360"></a>(p. 360)</span> forget.
+The audience were standing; some had mounted on the benches; there was
+wild waving of hats and handkerchiefs, a storm of cheering, great
+showering of bouquets.</p>
+
+<p>Her second character in London was Lady Macbeth, to the Macbeth of Edwin
+Forrest; but the American actor failed to please, and the audience gave
+free expression to their discontent. Greatly disgusted, Forrest
+withdrew, deluding himself with the belief that he was the victim of a
+conspiracy. Miss Cushman's success knew no abatement. She played a round
+of parts, assisted by James Wallack, Leigh Murray, and Mrs. Stirling,
+appearing now as Rosalind, now as Juliana in "The Honeymoon," as Mrs.
+Haller, as Beatrice, as Julia in "The Hunchback." Her second season was
+even more successful than her first. After a long provincial tour she
+appeared in December, 1845, as Romeo at the Haymarket Theatre, then
+under the management of Mr. Webster, her sister Susan assuming the
+character of Juliet. She had sent for her family to share her
+prosperity, and had established them in a furnished house at Bayswater.</p>
+
+<p>Her success as Romeo was very great. The tragedy was played for eighty
+nights. Her performance won applause even from those most opposed to the
+representation of Shakespeare's hero by a woman. For a time her intense
+earnestness of speech and manner, the passion of her interviews with
+Juliet, the fury of her combat with Tybalt, the despair of her closing
+scenes, bore down all opposition, silenced criticism, and excited her
+audience to an extraordinary degree. She appeared afterward, but not in
+London, as Hamlet, following an unfortunate example set by Mrs. Siddons;
+and as Ion in Talfourd's tragedy of that name.</p>
+
+<p>In America, toward the close of her career, she even ventured to appear
+as Cardinal Wolsey, obtaining great applause by her exertions in the
+character, and the skill and force of her impersonation. But histrionic
+feats of this kind trespass against good taste, do violence to the
+intentions of the dramatists, and are, in truth, departures from the
+purpose of playing. Miss Cushman had for excuse&mdash;in the first instance,
+at any rate&mdash;her anxiety to forward the professional interests of her
+sister, who, in truth, had little qualification for the stage, apart
+from her good looks and her graces of manner. The sisters had played
+together in Philadelphia in "The Genoese"&mdash;a drama written by a young
+American&mdash;when, to give support and encouragement to Susan in her
+personation of the heroine, Charlotte undertook the part of her lover.
+Their success prompted them to appear in "Romeo and Juliet." Other
+plays, in which both could appear, were afterward selected&mdash;such, for
+instance, as "Twelfth Night," in which Charlotte played Viola to the
+Olivia of Susan&mdash;so that the engagement of one might compel the
+engagement of the other. Susan, however, quitted the stage in 1847, to
+become the wife of Dr. Sheridan Muspratt, of Liverpool.</p>
+
+<a id="img052" name="img052"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img052.jpg" width="400" height="492" alt="" title="">
+<p>Charlotte Cushman as Mrs. Haller.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Charlotte Cushman called few new plays into being. Dramas, entitled
+"Infatuation," by James Kenny, in 1845, and "Duchess Elinour," by the
+late H. F. Chorley, in 1854, were produced for her, but were summarily
+condemned by the audience, being scarcely permitted indeed a second
+performance in either case. <span class="pagenum"><a id="page361" name="page361"></a>(p. 361)</span> Otherwise, she did not add to her
+repertory. For many years she led the life of a "star," fulfilling brief
+engagements here and there, appearing now for a term in London, and now
+travelling through the provinces, playing some half a dozen characters
+over and over again. Of these Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine and Meg
+Merrilies were perhaps the most frequently demanded. Her fame and
+fortune she always dated from the immediate recognition she obtained
+upon her first performance in London. But she made frequent visits to
+America; indeed, she crossed the Atlantic "upward of sixteen times,"
+says her biographer. In 1854 she took a house in Bolton Row, Mayfair,
+"where for some years she dispensed the most charming and genial
+hospitality," and, notably, entertained Ristori on her first visit to
+England in 1856. Several winters she passed in Rome, occupying
+apartments in the Via Gregoriana, where she cordially received a host of
+friends and visitors of all nations. In 1859 she was called to England
+by her sister's fatal illness; in 1866 she was again summoned to England
+to attend the death-bed of her mother. In 1860 she was playing in all
+the chief cities of America. Three years later she again visited
+America, her chief object being to act for the benefit of the Sanitary
+Commission, and aid the sick and wounded victims of the civil war.
+During the late years of her life she appeared before the public more as
+a dramatic reader than as an actress. There were long intervals between
+her theatrical engagements; she seemed to quit her profession only to
+return to it after an interval with renewed appetite, and she incurred
+reproaches because of the frequency of her farewells, and the doubt that
+prevailed as to whether her "last appearances" were really to be the
+"very last." It was not until 1874, however, that she took final leave
+of the New York stage, amid extraordinary enthusiasm, with many poetic
+and other ceremonies. She was the subject of addresses in prose and
+verse. Mr. Bryant, after an eloquent speech, tendered her a laurel
+wreath bound with white ribbon resting upon a purple velvet cushion,
+with a suitable inscription embroidered in golden letters; a
+torchbearers' procession escorted her from the theatre to her hotel; she
+was serenaded at midnight, and in her honor Fifth Avenue blazed with
+fireworks. After this came farewells to Philadelphia, Boston and other
+cities, and to these succeeded readings all over the country. It is to
+be said, however, that incessant work had become a necessity with her,
+not because of its pecuniary results, but as a means of obtaining mental
+relief or comparative forgetfulness for a season. During the last five
+or six years of her life she was afflicted with an incurable and
+agonizing malady. Under most painful conditions she toiled unceasingly,
+moving rapidly from place to place, and passing days and nights in
+railway journeys. In a letter to a friend, she writes: "I do get so
+dreadfully depressed about myself, and all things seem so hopeless to me
+at those times, that I pray God to take me quickly at any moment, so
+that I may not torture those I love by letting them see my pain. But
+when the dark hour passes, and I try to forget by constant occupation
+that I have such a load near my heart, then it is not so bad." She died
+almost painlessly at last on February 18, 1876.</p>
+
+<p>Charlotte Cushman may assuredly be accounted an actress of genius in
+right <span class="pagenum"><a id="page362" name="page362"></a>(p. 362)</span> of her originality, her vivid power of depicting
+emotion, the vehemence and intensity of her histrionic manner. Her best
+successes were obtained in tragedy, although she possessed a keen sense
+of humor, and could deliver the witty speeches of Rosalind or of
+Beatrice with excellent point and effect. Her Meg Merrilies will
+probably be remembered as her most impressive achievement. It was
+really, as she played it, a character of her own invention; but, in
+truth, it taxed her intellectual resources far less than her Bianca, her
+Queen Katherine, or her Lady Macbeth. Her physical peculiarities no
+doubt limited the range of her efforts, hindered her advance as an
+actress, or urged her toward exceptional impersonations. Her
+performances lacked femininity, to use Coleridge's word; but in power to
+stir an audience, to touch their sympathies, to kindle their enthusiasm,
+and to compel their applause, she takes rank among the finest players.
+It only remains to add that Miss Stebbins' fervid and affecting
+biography of her friend admirably demonstrates that the woman was not
+less estimable than the actress; that Charlotte Cushman was of noble
+character, intellectual, large and tenderhearted, of exemplary conduct
+in every respect. The simple, direct earnestness of her manner upon the
+mimic scene, characterized her proceedings in real life. She was at once
+the slave and the benefactress of her family; she was devotedly fond of
+children; she was of liberal and generous nature; she was happiest when
+conferring kindness upon others; her career abounded in self-sacrifice.
+She pretended to few accomplishments, to little cultivation of a
+literary sort; but she could write, as Miss Stebbins proves, excellent
+letters, now grave, now gay, now reflective, now descriptive, always
+interesting, and altogether remarkable for sound sense and for force and
+skill of expression. Her death was regarded in America almost as a
+national catastrophe. As Miss Stebbins writes, "The press of the entire
+country bore witness to her greatness, and laid their tributes upon her
+tomb."</p>
+
+<hr class="small">
+
+<p>The following letter of good counsel from Miss Cushman to young Mr.
+Barton is reprinted, by permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin &amp; Co.,
+from the "Life and Letters of Charlotte Cushman."</p>
+
+<p>"I think if you have to wait for a while it will do you no harm. You
+seem to me quite frantic for immediate work; but teach yourself quiet
+and repose in the time you are waiting. With half your strength I could
+bear to wait and labor with myself to conquer <i>fretting</i>. The greatest
+power in the world is shown in conquest over self. More life will be
+worked out of you by fretting than all the stage-playing in the world.
+God bless you, my poor child. You have indeed trouble enough; but you
+have a strong and earnest spirit, and you have the true religion of
+labor in your heart. Therefore I have no fears for you let what will
+come. Let me hear from you at your leisure, and be sure you have no
+warmer friend than I am and wish to be."<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page363" name="page363"></a>(p. 363)</span> RACHEL<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Dutton Cook</span><br>
+
+(1821-1858)</h3>
+
+<a id="img053" name="img053"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img053.jpg" width="250" height="313" alt="Rachel." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>It is told that Rachel Felix was born on March 24, 1821, at Munf, near
+the town of Aarau, in the Canton of Aargau, Switzerland; the burgomaster
+of the district simply noting in his books that upon the day stated, at
+the little village inn, the wife of a poor pedler had given birth to a
+female child. The entry included no mention of family, name, or
+religion, and otherwise the event was not registered in any civil or
+religious record. The father and mother were Abraham Felix, a Jew, born
+in Metz, but of German origin, and Esther Haya, his wife. They had
+wandered about the continent during many years, seeking a living and
+scarcely finding it. Several children were born to them by the wayside,
+as it were, on their journeyings hither and thither: Sarah in Germany,
+Rebecca in Lyons, Dinah in Paris, Rachel in Switzerland; and there were
+other infants who did not long survive their birth, succumbing to the
+austerities of the state of life to which they had been called. For a
+time, perhaps because of their numerous progeny, M. and Madame Felix
+settled in Lyons. Madame Felix opened a small shop and dealt in
+second-hand clothes; M. Felix gave lessons in German to the very few
+pupils he could obtain. About 1830 the family moved to Paris. They were
+still miserably poor. The children Sarah and Rachel, usually carrying a
+smaller child in their arms or wheeling it with them in a wooden cart,
+were sent into the streets to earn money by singing at the doors of
+cafes and estaminets. A musical amateur, one M. Morin, noticed the
+girls, questioned them, interested himself about them, and finally
+obtained their admission into the Government School of Sacred Music in
+the Rue Vaugirard. Rachel's voice did not promise much, however; as she
+confessed, she could not sing&mdash;she could only recite. She had received
+but the scantiest and meanest education; she read with difficulty; she
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page364" name="page364"></a>(p. 364)</span> was teaching herself writing by copying the manuscript of
+others. Presently she was studying elocution under M. St. Aulaire, an
+old actor retired from the Français, who took pains with the child,
+instructing her gratuitously and calling her "ma petite diablesse." The
+performances of M. St. Aulaire's pupil were occasionally witnessed by
+the established players, among them Monval of the Gymnase and Samson of
+the Comédie. Monval approved and encouraged the young actress, and upon
+the recommendation of Samson she entered the classes of the
+Conservatoire, over which he presided, with Michelot and Provost as his
+co-professors.</p>
+
+<p>At the Conservatoire Rachel made little progress. All her efforts failed
+to win the good opinion of her preceptors. In despair she resolved to
+abandon altogether the institution, its classes and performances. She
+felt herself neglected, aggrieved, insulted. "Tartuffe" had been
+announced for representation by the pupils; she had been assigned the
+mute part of Flipote, the serving-maid, who simply appears upon the
+scene in the first act that her ears may be soundly boxed by Madame
+Pernelle. To this humiliation she would not submit. She hurried to her
+old friend, St. Aulaire, who consulted Monval, who commended her to his
+manager, M. Poirson. She entered into an engagement to serve the Gymnase
+for a term of three years upon a salary of 3,000 francs. M. Poirson was
+quick to perceive that she was not as so many other beginners were; that
+there was something new and startling about the young actress. He
+obtained for her first appearance, from M. Paul Duport, a little
+melodrama in two acts. It was called "La Vendéenne," and owed its more
+striking scenes to "The Heart of Midlothian." After the manner of Jeanie
+Deans, Géneviève, the heroine of the play, footsore and travel-stained,
+seeks the presence of the Empress Josephine to implore the pardon of a
+Vendéan peasant condemned to death for following George Cadoudal. "La
+Vendéenne," produced on April 24, 1837, and received with great
+applause, was played on sixty successive nights, but not to very crowded
+audiences. The press scarcely noticed the new actress. The critic of the
+<i>Journal des Débats</i>, however, while rashly affirming that Rachel was
+not a phenomenon and would never be extolled as a wonder, carefully
+noted certain of the merits and characteristics of her performance. "She
+was an unskilled child, but she possessed heart, soul, intellect. There
+was something bold, abrupt, uncouth about her aspect, gait, and manner.
+She was dressed simply and truthfully in the coarse woollen gown of a
+peasant-girl; her hands were red; her voice was harsh and untrained, but
+powerful; she acted without effort or exaggeration; she did not scream
+or gesticulate unduly; she seemed to perceive intuitively the feeling
+she was required to express, and could interest the audience greatly,
+moving them to tears. She was not pretty, but she pleased," etc. Bouffé,
+who witnessed this representation, observed: "What an odd little girl!
+Assuredly there is something in her. But her place is not here." So
+judged Samson also, becoming more and more aware of the merits of his
+former pupil. She was transferred to the Français to play the leading
+characters in tragedy, at a salary of 4,000 francs a year. M. Poirson
+did not hesitate to cancel her agreement <span class="pagenum"><a id="page365" name="page365"></a>(p. 365)</span> with him. Indeed, he
+had been troubled with thinking how he could employ his new actress. She
+was not an <i>ingénue</i> of the ordinary type; she could not be classed
+among soubrettes. There were no parts suited to her in the light
+comedies of Scribe and his compeers, which constituted the chief
+repertory of the Gymnase.</p>
+
+<p>It was on June 12, 1838, that Rachel, as Camille, in "Horace," made her
+first appearance upon the stage of the Théâtre Français. The receipts
+were but seven hundred and fifty francs; it was an unfashionable period
+of the year; Paris was out of town; the weather was most sultry. There
+were many Jews in the house, it was said, resolute to support the
+daughter of Israel, and her success was unequivocal; nevertheless, a
+large share of the applause of the night was confessedly carried off by
+the veteran Joanny, who played Horace. On June 16th Rachel made her
+second appearance, personating Emilie in the "Cinna," of Corneille. The
+receipts fell to five hundred and fifty francs. She repeated her
+performance of Camille on the 23d; the receipts were only three hundred
+francs! the poorest house, perhaps, she ever played to in Paris. She
+afterward appeared as Hermione in "Andromaque," Aménaide in "Tancrède,"
+Eriphile in "Iphigénie," Monime in "Mithridate," and Roxane in
+"Bajazet," the receipts now gradually rising, until, in October, when
+she played Hermione for the tenth time, six thousand francs were taken
+at the doors, an equal amount being received in November, when, for the
+sixth time, she appeared as Camille. Paris was now at her feet. In 1839,
+called upon to play two or three times per week, she essayed but one new
+part, Esther, in Racine's tragedy of that name. The public was quite
+content that she should assume again and again the characters in which
+she had already triumphed. In 1840 she added to her list of
+impersonations Laodie and Pauline in Corneille's "Nicomède" and
+"Polyeucte," and Marie Stuart in Lebrun's tragedy. In 1841 she played no
+new parts. In 1842 she first appeared as Chimène in "Le Cid," as Ariane,
+and as Frédégonde in a wretched tragedy by Le Mercier.</p>
+
+<p>Rachel had saved the Théâtre Français, had given back to the stage the
+masterpieces of the French classical drama. It was very well for
+Thackeray to write from Paris in 1839 that the actress had "only
+galvanized the corpse, not revivified.... Racine will never come to life
+again and cause audiences to weep as of yore." He predicted: "Ancient
+French tragedy, red-heeled, patched, and beperiwigged, lies in the
+grave, and it is only the ghost of it that the fair Jewess has raised."
+But it was something more than a galvanized animation that Rachel had
+imparted to the old drama of France. During her career of twenty years,
+her performances of Racine and Corneille filled the coffers of the
+Français, and it may be traced to her influence and example that the
+classic plays still keep their place upon the stage and stir the
+ambition of the players. But now the committee of the Français had to
+reckon with their leading actress, and pay the price of the prosperity
+she had brought them. They cancelled her engagement and offered her
+terms such as seemed to them liberal beyond all precedent. But the more
+they offered, so much the more was demanded. In the first instance, the
+actress being a minor, negotiations were carried on with her father, the
+committee <span class="pagenum"><a id="page366" name="page366"></a>(p. 366)</span> denouncing in the bitterest terms the avarice and
+rapacity of M. Felix. But when Rachel became competent to deal on her
+own behalf, she proved herself every whit as exacting as her sire. She
+became a <i>sociétaire</i> in 1843, entitled to one of the twenty-four shares
+into which the profits of the institution were divided. She was
+rewarded, moreover, with a salary of forty-two thousand francs per
+annum; and it was estimated that by her performances during her <i>congé</i>
+of three or four months every year she earned a further annual income of
+thirty thousand francs. She met with extraordinary success upon her
+provincial tours; enormous profits resulted from her repeated visits to
+Holland and Belgium, Germany, Russia, and England. But, from first to
+last, Rachel's connection with the Français was an incessant quarrel.
+She was capricious, ungrateful, unscrupulous, extortionate. She
+struggled to evade her duties, to do as little as she possibly could in
+return for the large sums she received from the committee. She pretended
+to be too ill to play in Paris, the while she was always well enough to
+hurry away and obtain great rewards by her performances in the
+provinces. She wore herself out by her endless wanderings hither and
+thither, her continuous efforts upon the scene. She denied herself all
+rest, or slept in a travelling carriage to save time in her passage from
+one country theatre to another. Her company complained that they fell
+asleep as they acted, her engagements denying them proper opportunities
+of repose. The newspapers at one time set forth the acrimonious letters
+she had interchanged with the committee of the Français. Finally she
+tended her resignation of the position she occupied as <i>sociétaire</i>; the
+committee took legal proceedings to compel her to return to her duties;
+some concessions were made on either side, however, and a reconciliation
+was patched up.</p>
+
+<p>The new tragedies, "Judith" and "Cléopatre," written for the actress by
+Madame de Girardin, failed to please, nor did success attend the
+production of M. Romand's "Catherine II.," M. Soumet's "Jeanne d'Arc,"
+in which, to the indignation of the critics, the heroine was seen at
+last surrounded by real flames! or "Le Vieux de la Montagne" of M.
+Latour de St. Ybars. With better fortune Rachel appeared in the same
+author's "Virginie," and in the "Lucrèce" of Ponsard. Voltaire's
+"Oreste" was revived for her in 1845 that she might play Electre. She
+personated Racine's "Athalie" in 1847, assuming long white locks,
+painting furrows on her face, and disguising herself beyond recognition,
+in her determination to seem completely the character she had
+undertaken. In 1848 she played Agrippine in the "Britannicus" of Racine,
+and dressed in plain white muslin, and clasping the tri-colored flag to
+her heart, she delivered the "Marseillaise" to please the
+Revolutionists, lending the air strange meaning and passion by the
+intensity of her manner, as she half chanted, half recited the words,
+her voice now shrill and harsh, now deep, hollow, and reverberating&mdash;her
+enraptured auditors likening it in effect to distant thunder.</p>
+
+<p>To the dramatists who sought to supply her with new parts, Rachel was
+the occasion of much chagrin and perplexity. After accepting Scribe's
+"Adrienne Lecouvreur" she rejected it absolutely only to resume it
+eagerly, however, when she learned that the leading character was to be
+undertaken by Mademoiselle <span class="pagenum"><a id="page367" name="page367"></a>(p. 367)</span> Rose Chéri. His "Chandelier" having
+met with success, Rachel applied to De Musset for a play. She was
+offered, it seems, "Les Caprices de Marianne," but meantime the poet's
+"Bettine" failed, and the actress distrustfully turned away from him. An
+undertaking to appear in the "Medea" of Legouvé landed her in a
+protracted lawsuit. The courts condemned her in damages to the amount of
+two hundred francs for every day she delayed playing the part of Medea
+after the date fixed upon by the management for the commencement of the
+rehearsals of the tragedy. She paid nothing, however, for the management
+failed to fix any such date. M. Legouvé was only avenged in the success
+his play obtained, in a translated form, at the hands of Madame Ristori.
+In lieu of "Medea" Rachel produced "Rosemonde," a tragedy by M. Latour
+de St. Ybars, which failed completely. Other plays written for her were
+the "Valéria" of MM. Lacroix and Maquet, in which she personated two
+characters&mdash;the Empress Messalina and her half sister, Lysisca, a
+courtesan; the "Diane," of M. Augier, an imitation of Victor Hugo's
+"Marion Delorme;" "Lady Tartuffe," a comedy by Madame de Girardin; and
+"La Czarine," by M. Scribe. She appeared also in certain of the
+characters originally contrived for Mademoiselle Mais, such as La Tisbe
+in Victor Hugo's "Angelo," and the heroines of Dumas's "Mademoiselle de
+Belle Isle" and of "Louise de Lignerolles" by MM. Legouvé and Dinaux.</p>
+
+<p>The classical drama of France has not found much favor in England and
+America. We are all, perhaps, apt to think with Thackeray
+disrespectfully of the "old tragedies&mdash;well-nigh dead, and full time
+too&mdash;in which half a dozen characters appear and shout sonorous
+Alexandrines for half a dozen hours;" or we are disposed to agree with
+Mr. Matthew Arnold, that their drama, being fundamentally insufficient
+both in substance and in form, the French, with all their gifts, have
+not, as we have, an adequate form for poetry of the highest class. Those
+who remember Rachel, however, can testify that she breathed the most
+ardent life into the frigid remains of Racine and Corneille, relumed
+them with Promethean heat, and showed them to be instinct with the
+truest and intensest passion&mdash;When she occupied the scene, there could
+be no thought of the old artificial times of hair powder and rouge,
+periwigs and patches, in connection with the characters she represented.
+Phèdre and Hermione, Pauline and Camille, interpreted by her genius,
+became as real and natural, warm and palpitating, as Constance or Lady
+Macbeth could have been when played by Mrs. Siddons, or as Juliet when
+impersonated by Miss O'Neill. Before Rachel came, it had been thought
+that the new romantic drama of MM. Hugo and Dumas, because of its
+greater truth to nature, had given the <i>coup de grâce</i> to the old
+classic plays; but the public, at her bidding, turned gladly from the
+spasms and the rant of "Angelo" and "Angèle," "Antony" and "Hernani," to
+the old-world stories, the formal tragedies of the seventeenth century
+poet-dramatists of France. The actress fairly witched her public. There
+was something of magic in her very presence upon the scene.</p>
+
+<p>None could fail to be impressed by the aspect of the slight, pallid
+woman who <span class="pagenum"><a id="page368" name="page368"></a>(p. 368)</span> seemed to gain height by reason of her slenderness,
+who moved toward her audience with such simple natural majesty, who wore
+and conducted her fluent classical draperies with such admirable and
+perfect grace. It was as though she had lived always so attired in
+tunic, peplum, and pallium&mdash;had known no other dress&mdash;not that she was
+of modern times playing at antiquity, she was the muse of Greek tragedy
+in person. The physical traditions of her race found expression or
+incarnation in her. Her face was of refined Judaical character&mdash;the thin
+nose slightly curved, the lower lip a trifle full, but the mouth
+exquisitely shaped, and the teeth small, white, and even. The profuse
+black-brown hair was smoothed and braided from the broad, low, white,
+somewhat over-hanging brow, beneath which in shadow the keen black eyes
+flashed out their lightnings, or glowed luridly like coals at a red
+heat. Her gestures were remarkable for their dignity and
+appropriateness; the long, slight arms lent themselves surprisingly to
+gracefulness; the beautifully formed hands, with the thin tapering
+fingers and the pink filbert nails, seemed always tremblingly on the
+alert to add significance or accent to her speeches. But there was
+eloquence in her very silence and complete repose. She could relate a
+whole history by her changes of facial expression. She possessed special
+powers of self-control; she was under subjection to both art and nature
+when she seemed to abandon herself the most absolutely to the whirlwind
+of her passion. There were no undue excesses of posture, movement, or
+tone. Her attitudes, it was once said, were those of "a Pythoness cast
+in bronze." Her voice thrilled and awed at its first note: it was so
+strangely deep, so solemnly melodious, until, stirred by passion as it
+were, it became thick and husky in certain of its tones; but it was
+always audible, articulate, and telling, whether sunk to a whisper or
+raised clamorously. Her declamation was superb, if, as critics reported,
+there had been decline in this matter during those later years of her
+life, to which my own acquaintance with Rachel's acting is confined. I
+saw her first at the Français in 1849, and I was present at her last
+performance at the St. James' Theatre in 1853, having in the interval
+witnessed her assumption of certain of her most admired characters. And
+it may be true, too, that, like Kean, she was more and more disposed, as
+the years passed, to make "points," to slur over the less important
+scenes, and reserve herself for a grand outburst or a vehement climax,
+sacrificing thus many of the subtler graces, refinements, and
+graduations of elocution, for which she had once been famous. To English
+ears, it was hardly an offence that she broke up the sing-song of the
+rhymed tirades of the old plays and gave them a more natural sound,
+regardless of the traditional methods of speech of Clairon, Le Kain, and
+others of the great French players of the past.</p>
+
+<a id="img054" name="img054"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img054.jpg" width="350" height="558" alt="" title="">
+<p>Rachel as the Muse of Greek Tragedy.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Less success than had been looked for attended Rachel's invasion of the
+repertory of Mlle. Mars, an actress so idolized by the Parisians that
+her sixty years and great portliness of form were not thought hindrances
+to her personation of the youthful heroines of modern comedy and drama.
+But Rachel's fittest occupation and her greatest triumphs were found in
+the classical poetic plays. She, perhaps, intellectualized too much the
+creations of Hugo, Dumas, and <span class="pagenum"><a id="page369" name="page369"></a>(p. 369)</span> Scribe; gave them excess of
+majesty. Her histrionic style was too exalted an ideal for the
+conventional characters of the drama of her own time; it was even said
+of her that she could not speak its prose properly or tolerably. She
+disliked the hair-powder necessary to Adrienne Lecouvreur and Gabrielle
+de Belle Isle, although her beauty, for all its severity, did not lose
+picturesqueness in the costumes of the time of Louis XV. As Gabrielle
+she was more girlish and gentle, pathetic, and tender, than was her
+wont, while the signal fervor of her speech addressed to Richelieu,
+beginning, "Vous mentez, Monsieur le Duc," stirred the audience to the
+most excited applause.</p>
+
+<p>Rachel was seen upon the stage for the last time at Charleston on
+December 17, 1856. She played Adrienne Lecouvreur. She had been tempted
+to America by the prospect of extravagant profits. It had been dinned
+into her ears that Jenny Lind, by thirty-eight performances in America,
+had realized seventeen hundred thousand francs. Why might not she,
+Rachel, receive as much? And then, she was eager to quit Paris. There
+had been strange worship there of Madame Ristori, even in the rejected
+part of Medea. But already Rachel's health was in a deplorable state.
+Her constitution, never very strong, had suffered severely from the
+cruel fatigues, the incessant exertions, she had undergone. It may be,
+too, that the deprivations and sufferings of her childhood now made
+themselves felt as over-due claims that could be no longer denied or
+deferred. She forced herself to play, in fulfilment of her engagement,
+but she was languid, weak, emaciated; she coughed incessantly, her
+strength was gone; she was dying slowly but certainly of phthisis. And
+she appeared before an audience that applauded her, it is true, but
+cared nothing for Racine and Corneille, knew little of the French
+language, and were urgent that she should sing the "Marseillaise" as she
+had sung it in 1848! It was forgotten, or it was not known in America,
+that the actress had long since renounced revolutionary sentiments to
+espouse the cause of the Second Empire. She performed all her more
+important characters, however, at New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.
+Nor was the undertaking commercially disappointing, if it did not wholly
+satisfy expectation. She returned to France possessed of nearly three
+hundred thousand francs as her share of the profits of her forty-two
+performances in the United States; but she returned to die. The winter
+of 1856 she passed at Cairo. She returned to France in the spring of
+1857, but her physicians forbade her to remain long in Paris. In
+September she moved again to the South, finding her last retreat in the
+villa Sardou, at Cannet, a little village in the environs of Cannes. She
+lingered to January 3, 1858. The Théâtre Français closed its doors when
+news arrived of her death, and again on the day of her funeral. The body
+was embalmed and brought to Paris for interment in the cemetery of Père
+la Chaise, the obsequies being performed in accordance with the Jewish
+rites. The most eminent of the authors and actors of France were
+present, and funeral orations were delivered by MM. Jules Janin,
+Bataille, and Auguste Maquet. Victor Hugo was in exile; or, as Janin
+announced, the author of "Angelo" would not have withheld the tribute
+of his eulogy upon the sad occasion.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page370" name="page370"></a>(p. 370)</span> EDWIN BOOTH<a id="footnotetag15" name="footnotetag15"></a><a href="#footnote15" title="Go to footnote 15"><span class="smaller">[15]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Clarence Cook</span><br>
+
+(1833-1893)</h3>
+
+<a id="img055" name="img055"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img055.jpg" width="200" height="273" alt="Edwin Booth." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>The great actor who has lately left the world furnished, in his own
+remarkable character and shining career, a striking exception to the
+popular tradition that men of genius are the fathers of ordinary sons.
+The father of Edwin Booth was in his time one of the glories of the
+English and American stage; but, even in his case the strict rule
+wavered, for his father, though not a genius, was yet a man of
+exceptional character; one who marked out a clear path for himself in
+the world, and walked in it to the end.</p>
+
+<p>How far back the line of the family can be traced, or what was its
+origin, we do not know; but it has lately been said that the family was
+of Hebrew extraction, and came into England from Spain, where it had
+been known by the Spanish name, Cabana. The branch of the family that
+left Spain to live in England translated the name into the language of
+their new home, and from "Cabana," a shepherd's cabin, made the English
+equivalent, Booth.</p>
+
+<p>However it may have been in this case, it was quite in the order of
+things that this change of name should be made. It has been done
+everywhere in Europe since very early times, and is doing to-day in this
+country by new comers from all parts of the old world.</p>
+
+<p>The first of the Booths we read of in England was a silversmith, living
+in Bloomsbury, London, in the latter half of the last century. He had a
+son, Richard, who was bred to the law, but who was so imbued with the
+republican ideas rife at the time that he actually came to America to
+fight in the cause of Independence! He was taken prisoner, and carried
+back to England, where, not without some struggles, he again applied
+himself to the practice of the law, and in time made a fortune. He did
+not, however, forget America, and we are told that he had, hanging in
+his house, a portrait of Washington, which he expected all his visitors
+to salute.</p>
+
+<p>One of the ways in which the republicans of that time showed where their
+sympathies lay, was in naming their children after the heroes of Greece
+and Rome; and accordingly we find Richard Booth calling his eldest son,
+Junius Brutus <span class="pagenum"><a id="page371" name="page371"></a>(p. 371)</span> Booth, after the Roman patriot. This son was born
+in London, in 1796. His father was a man of scholarly tastes, and gave
+the boy a classical education, but it was long before he showed a marked
+inclination for any particular walk in life. He tried his hand at
+painting, sculpture, and poetry; and for a while studied law with his
+father. But, when the time came to choose, he gave his voice for the
+navy, and would have joined the brig Boxer, then fitting out for Nova
+Scotia. But, as war threatened between England and America, he was
+induced, by the strong persuasions of his father, not to run the risk of
+being forced to fight against America. He then decided to go upon the
+stage, and, in spite of his father's remonstrances, carried out his
+purpose. After some unimportant essays he at last succeeded in
+attracting public attention, and before long showed such unmistakable
+ability in dealing with difficult parts, that the public, till that time
+undivided in its enthusiasm for Kean, awoke to the fact that a dangerous
+rival threatened the security of their idol's throne. In the midst of
+his successes, however, Booth married and left England with his wife for
+a honeymoon trip to the West Indies. He had intended to return at once
+to England, but he was persuaded to prolong his journey and to visit New
+York. After playing a successful engagement there he went to Richmond,
+where he was no less prosperous. He next visited New Orleans and
+acquired such facility in speaking French that he played parts in French
+plays more than acceptably, and distinguished himself by acting Orestes
+in Racine's "Andromaque," to the delight of the French-speaking
+population. His accent is said to have been remarkable for its purity.
+Returning to New York, he acted Othello to Forrest's Iago; but, in the
+midst of his successes, the death of two of his children produced a
+temporary insanity, and this was made worse by the news of the death of
+his favorite son, Henry Byron, in London, of small-pox. This grievous
+loss was, however, to be made up to him by his son, Edwin, in whom he
+was to find the counterpart of himself, softened, refined, ennobled,
+while between father and son was to grow a strong attachment, a bond of
+mutual affection to last as long as life should endure.</p>
+
+<p>Edwin Thomas Booth was born at Bel Air, Maryland, November 12, 1833. He
+was named Edwin, after his father's friend, Edwin Forrest, and Thomas,
+after Thomas Flynn, the actor, whom the elder Booth had known intimately
+in London. His son dropped the name of Thomas, later in life, and was
+only known to the public by the name of Edwin Booth. Owing to his
+father's wandering life Edwin had few advantages of education, but he
+made the most of his opportunities, and indeed was a student of good
+letters all his life, turning the light of all he learned from books and
+experience upon his art. His youth is described as reticent, and marked
+by a strong individuality, with a deep sympathy for his father, early
+manifested; his father, a much enduring, suffering man, strongly in need
+of sympathy, knowing to repay it, too, in kind.</p>
+
+<p>Edwin Booth made his first appearance on the stage in 1849 at the Boston
+Museum in the youthful part of Tressil, in Colley Cibber's version of
+Shakespeare's "Richard III." It had been against his father's wishes
+that he had adopted the stage as a profession; but, as his father had
+done in a like case before him <span class="pagenum"><a id="page372" name="page372"></a>(p. 372)</span> he persevered, and soon had the
+satisfaction of convincing his parent that he had decided wisely. He did
+not at once come to New York after his success in Boston, but went to
+Providence and to Philadelphia, acting Cassio in "Othello," and Wilford
+in the "Iron Chest," a part he soon made his own and in which he made
+his first appearance in New York, playing at the National Theatre in
+Chatham Street, in 1850. The next year he played Richard III. for the
+first time, taking the part unexpectedly to fill the place of his
+father, who was suddenly ill. In 1852 he went out with his father to San
+Francisco, where his brother, Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., was the manager
+of a theatre; and the father and his two sons acted together. At
+Sacramento, we are told that the incident occurred which led Edwin Booth
+to think of acting Hamlet, a part which was to become as closely
+associated with his name as that of Richard III. was with his father. He
+was dressed for the part of Jaffier in Otway's play, "Venice Preserved,"
+when some one said to him "You look like Hamlet, why not play it?" It
+was, however, some time before he ventured to assume the part. In
+October, 1852, the father and son parted, not to meet again. The elder
+Booth went to New Orleans, and after playing for a week took passage in
+a steamboat on the Mississippi, and catching a severe cold succumbed
+after a few days' illness and died. For a while after his father's death
+Edwin suffered greatly from poverty and from the hardships of his
+precarious life, unsustained as he now was by the affection and
+encouragement of a father who, with all his faults, and in all the
+misfortunes brought on by serious ill-health and some aberrations that
+were the effect of ill-health had always been an affectionate and true
+friend. But a talent such as Edwin Booth possessed, united to a high
+character, and to a dauntless spirit, could not long be hid, and in a
+short time his name began to be heard of as that of one destined to
+great ends. In 1854 he went to Australia as a member of Laura Keene's
+company. He had made a deep impression in California, acting such parts
+as Richard III., Shylock, Macbeth, and Hamlet, and on returning there
+from Australia that first impression was greatly strengthened. On
+leaving San Francisco he received various testimonials showing the high
+esteem in which his acting was held by the educated part of the
+community; but throughout Edwin Booth's career, the interest he excited
+in the vast audiences that followed him was by no means confined to the
+self-styled "best people." Though he never "played to the gallery," the
+heart of the gallery was as much with him as the heart of the boxes, and
+he knew the value of its rapt silence as well as of its stormy voices.</p>
+
+<p>In Boston, in 1857, he played Sir Giles Overreach, in Massinger's "A New
+Way to Pay Old Debts," and the profound impression he made in it
+confirmed him in his purpose to devote himself to tragic acting. The
+story of an actor's life is seldom eventful, and Mr. Booth's history,
+after his first assured success, is the record of a long line of
+triumphs without a failure. The most remarkable of these triumphs was at
+the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, where he acted Hamlet to large
+and ever-increasing audiences for over one hundred successive nights,
+that is, from November 21, 1864, to March 24, 1865. On this <span class="pagenum"><a id="page373" name="page373"></a>(p. 373)</span>
+occasion a gold medal was presented to the actor by friends and admirers
+in New York; the list of subscribers including the names of many
+well-known citizens. The Winter Garden Theatre was managed by Booth and
+his brother-in-law, the clever actor, J. S. Clarke, until Booth bought
+out Clarke and assumed the entire management himself. In 1865 the
+terrible tragedy occurred which blighted Booth's whole after-life, and
+for a time drove him from the stage. He did not act again until 1866; in
+1867 the theatre was destroyed by fire, and in 1868 the corner-stone of
+a new building, to be known as Booth's Theatre, was laid, and in a short
+time New York was in possession, for the first time, of a thoroughly
+appointed, comfortable, and handsome theatre. This building was made
+famous by a number of Shakespearian revivals that for beauty,
+magnificence, and scenic poetry have, we believe, never been equalled.
+We doubt if "Hamlet," "Julius Cæsar," or "Romeo and Juliet," have ever
+been presented with more satisfying completeness to the eye and to the
+imagination than in this theatre by Mr. Booth and his company. Although
+the theatre was in existence for thirteen years, from 1868 to 1882, when
+it was finally closed, Mr. Booth's management lasted only about half
+that time. The speculation was not a fortunate one for the actor; the
+expenses ate up all the profits, and Mr. Booth was bankrupted by his
+venture. He paid all his debts, however, and went bravely to work to
+build up a new fortune. He made a tour of the South, which was one long
+ovation, and in a season of eight weeks in San Francisco he took in
+$96,000.</p>
+
+<p>In 1880 he went to England and remained there two years. In 1882 he
+visited Germany, acting in both countries with great success, and in
+1883 he returned home and made a tour of America, repeating everywhere
+his old triumphs, and winning golden opinions from all classes of his
+countrymen.</p>
+
+<p>Edwin Booth died in New York, June 7, 1893, at the Players' Club, where
+he had lived for the last few years of his life. This was a building
+erected by his own munificence, fitted up with luxurious completeness,
+and presented to a society of his professional brethren for the use and
+behoof of his fellow-artists, reserving for himself only the modest
+apartment where he chose to live, in sympathetic touch with those who
+still pursued the noble art he had relinquished.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Booth was twice married. By his first wife, Miss Mary Devlin, who
+died in 1863, he had one child, a daughter; by the second, Miss
+McVicker, he had no children. She died in 1881.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="right">
+<img src="images/sig001.jpg" width="250" height="59" alt="Signature of the author." title="">
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page374" name="page374"></a>(p. 374)</span> JOSEPH JEFFERSON<a id="footnotetag16" name="footnotetag16"></a><a href="#footnote16" title="Go to footnote 16"><span class="smaller">[16]</span></a><br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Clarence Cook</span><br>
+
+(BORN 1829)</h3>
+
+<a id="img056" name="img056"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img056.jpg" width="200" height="245" alt="Joseph Jefferson." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Joseph Jefferson, distinguished, among his other brilliant successes as
+an actor, as the creator for this generation of the character of Rip Van
+Winkle in the play dramatized from the story in Washington Irving's
+"Sketch Book," was the third of his name in a family of actors. The
+first of the three was born at Plymouth, England, in 1774. He was the
+son of Thomas Jefferson, a comedian of merit, the contemporary and
+friend of Garrick, and came to this country in 1795, making his first
+appearance in New York on February 10, 1796, in the part of Squire
+Richard in "The Provoked Husband." Dunlap says that, young as he was, he
+was already an artist, and that among the men of the company he held the
+first place. He lived in this country for thirty-six years, admired as
+an actor and respected as a man. He died at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in
+1832.</p>
+
+<p>Joseph Jefferson, the second, was born in Philadelphia in 1804. He
+inherited the laughing blue eyes and sunny disposition of his father,
+but he had not his talent as an actor; he is said to have been best in
+old men's parts. His taste, however, led him to scene-painting rather
+than to acting; yet his skill in either direction was not enough to win
+success, and, in spite of well-meant efforts, he lived and died a poor
+man: ill luck pursuing him to the end of his days, when he was carried
+off by yellow fever at Mobile in 1842, just as his unprosperous skies
+were brightening a little. His son bears affectionate witness to the
+upright character of the man and to his indomitable cheerfulness in the
+most adverse circumstances. He spared no pains in bringing up his
+children in good ways, and he was earnestly seconded by his wife, a
+heroic figure in her humble sphere, whose tact and courage not seldom
+saved the family bark when it was drifting in shoal water. Mrs.
+Jefferson came of French parents, and was a Mrs. Burke, a widow with one
+child, a son, when she married Mr. Jefferson. Her son tells us that she
+had been one of the most attractive stars in America, the leading prima
+donna of the country; but she bore her changed fortune, as the wife of
+an unsuccessful actor and manager, with no less dignity on the stage of
+real life, where no applause was to be had but what came from those who
+loved her as mother, wife, and friend.</p>
+
+<p>This, then, was the family circle in which our Joseph Jefferson passed
+his <span class="pagenum"><a id="page375" name="page375"></a>(p. 375)</span> earliest years, the formative period of his life. There
+were the kind-hearted, easy-going father, the practical, energetic
+mother, a sister, and the half-brother, Charles Burke, whose
+after-reputation as an actor lives in the pages of Jefferson's
+autobiography enshrined in words of warm but judicious appreciation.
+"Although only a half-brother," says Jefferson, "he seemed like a father
+to me, and there was a deep and strange affection between us." Nor must
+mention be forgotten of one other member of the family: Mary, his
+foster-mother, as Jefferson affectionately calls her, "a faithful,
+loving, truthful friend, rather than a servant, with no ambition or
+thought for herself, living only for us, and totally unconscious of her
+own existence."</p>
+
+<p>Joseph Jefferson, the third of the name, and in whom the talent of his
+grandfather was to reappear enriched with added graces of his own, was
+born in Philadelphia in 1829. He tells us that his earliest
+recollections are connected with a theatre in Washington. This was a
+rickety, old, frame-building adjoining the house in which his father
+lived as manager, the door at the end of the hall-way opening directly
+upon the stage; and as a toddling little chap in a short frock he was
+allowed full run of the place. Thus "behind the scenes" was his first
+playground; and here, "in this huge and dusty toy-shop made for children
+of a larger growth," he got his first experience. He was early
+accustomed to face an audience; for, being the son of the manager and
+almost living in the theatre, he was always pressed into the service
+whenever a small child was wanted, and "often went on the stage in long
+clothes as a property infant in groups of happy peasantry." His first
+dim recollection of such a public appearance is as the "child," in
+Kotzebue's play, "Pizarro," who is carried across the bridge by Rolla.
+His next appearance was in a new entertainment, called "Living Statues,"
+where he struck attitudes as "Ajax Defying the Lightning," or "The Dying
+Gladiator." At four years of age he made a hit by accompanying T. D.
+Rice, the original "Jim Crow," as a miniature copy of that once famous
+character, and the first money he earned was the sum of $24 thrown upon
+the stage in silver from pit and gallery, to reward his childish dancing
+and singing on that occasion.</p>
+
+<p>Thus early wedded to the stage, Jefferson followed the fortunes of his
+family, and led with them a wandering life for many years, growing, by
+slow degrees and constant, varied practice, to the perfection of his
+prime. In 1838 his father led the flock to Chicago, just then grown from
+an Indian village to a thriving place of two thousand inhabitants, where
+he was to join his brother in the management of a new theatre, then
+building. Jefferson's account of the journey is a striking picture, at
+once amusing and pathetic, of the changes that have been wrought by
+fifty years. The real privations and hardships of the trip are veiled in
+the actor's story by his quiet humor and his disposition to see
+everything in a cheerful light. Always quizzing his own youthful
+follies, he cannot conceal from us by any mischievous anecdotes his
+essential goodness of nature, his merry helpfulness, his unselfish
+devotion to the welfare of the others, or the pluck with which he met
+the accidents of this itinerant life. From Chicago, where their success
+was not brilliant, the family went by stage to Springfield, where, by a
+singular <span class="pagenum"><a id="page376" name="page376"></a>(p. 376)</span> chance, they were rescued from the danger that
+threatened them in the closing of the theatre by a municipal law trumped
+up in the interest of religious revivalists, by the adroitness of a
+young lawyer, who proved to be none other than Abraham Lincoln. In
+Memphis, when bad business had closed the theatre, young Jefferson's
+pluck and ready wit saved the family purse from absolute collapse. A
+city ordinance had been passed, requiring that all carts, drays, and
+public vehicles should be numbered; and the boy, hearing of this, called
+at the mayor's office, and, explaining the situation that had obliged
+his father to exchange acting for sign-painting, applied in his name for
+the contract for painting the numbers&mdash;and obtained it! The new industry
+furnished father and son with a month's work, and some jobs at
+sign-painting helped still further to make life easier.</p>
+
+<p>From Memphis the family went to Mobile, where they hoped to rest after
+their long wanderings, and where it was also hoped the children, Joseph
+and his sister, might be put to school. But the yellow fever was raging
+in Mobile, and they had been in the city only a fortnight when Mr.
+Jefferson was attacked by the disease and died. In Mobile, too, the good
+Mary died, and Mrs. Jefferson was left alone to care for herself and her
+children as she could. She had no longer a heart for acting, and she
+decided to open a boarding-house for actors, while Joseph and his sister
+earned a small stipend by variety work in the theatre.</p>
+
+<p>More years of hardship followed&mdash;the trio of mother and children
+wandering over the country, south and west: in Mississippi and Mexico,
+seeing life in all its phases of ill luck and disappointment, with faint
+gleams of success here and there, but meeting all with a spirit of such
+cheerful bravery as makes the darkest experience yield a pleasure in the
+telling. Surely, it might soften the heart of the sourest enemy of the
+stage to read the spirit in which this family met the long-continued
+crosses of their professional life.</p>
+
+<a id="img057" name="img057"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img057.jpg" width="300" height="507" alt="" title="">
+<p>Joe Jefferson as Bob Acres.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Joseph Jefferson tells the story of his career so modestly, that it is
+hard to discover just when it was that success first began to turn a
+smiling face upon his efforts. Yet it would seem as if, for himself, the
+day broke when he created the part of Asa Trenchard in "Our American
+Cousin." He says that up to 1858, when he acted that part, he had been
+always more or less a "legitimate" actor, that is, one who has his place
+with others in a stock company, and never thinks of himself as an
+individual and single attraction&mdash;a star, as it is called. While engaged
+with this part, it suddenly occurred to him that in acting Asa Trenchard
+he had, for the first time in his life on the stage, spoken a pathetic
+speech; up to that time all with him had been pure comedy. Now he had
+found a part in which he could move his audience to tears as well as
+smiles. This was to him a delightful discovery, and he looked about for
+a new part in which he could repeat the experiment. One day in summer,
+as he lay in the loft of a barn reading in a book he well calls
+delightful, Pierre Irving's "Life and Letters of Washington Irving," he
+learned that the great writer had seen him act the part of Goldfinch, in
+Holcroft's "Road to Ruin," and that he reminded him of his grandfather,
+Joseph Jefferson, "in look, gesture, size, and make." Naturally pleased
+to find <span class="pagenum"><a id="page377" name="page377"></a>(p. 377)</span> himself remembered and written of by such a man, he
+lay musing on the compliment, when the "Sketch Book" and the story of
+Rip van Winkle came suddenly into his mind. "There was to me," he
+writes, "magic in the sound of the name as I repeated it. Why was not
+this the very character I wanted? An American story by an American
+author was surely just the thing suited to an American actor."</p>
+
+<p>There had been three or four plays founded on this story, but Jefferson
+says that none of them were good. His father and his half-brother had
+acted the part before him, but nothing that he remembered gave him any
+hope that he could make a good play out of existing material. He
+therefore went to work to construct a play for himself, and his story of
+how he did it, told in two pages of his book, and with the most
+unconscious air in the world, reveals the whole secret of Jefferson's
+acting: its humor and pathos subtly mingled, its deep humanity, its pure
+poetry&mdash;the assemblage of qualities, in fine, that make it the most
+perfect as well as the most original product of the American stage.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the play, even in the form he gave it, did not satisfy him, nor did
+it make the impression in America that he desired. It was not until five
+years later that Dion Boucicault, in London, remade it for Jefferson;
+and it was in that city it first saw the light in its new form,
+September 5, 1865. It was at once successful, and had a run of one
+hundred and seventy-five nights.</p>
+
+<p>With his Asa Trenchard and his Rip van Winkle will ever be associated in
+the loving memory of play-goers his Bob Acres in Sheridan's "Rivals,"
+thought by many to be his capital part&mdash;a personification where all the
+foibles of the would-be man-of-the-world: his self-conceit, his brag,
+his cowardice, are transformed into virtues and captivate our hearts,
+dissolved in the brimming humor which yet never overflows the just
+measure, so degenerating into farce.</p>
+
+<p>Between the two productions of Rip van Winkle in New York and in London,
+Jefferson had had many strange experiences. His wife died in 1861, and
+he broke up his household in New York, and leaving three of his children
+at school in that city, he left home with his eldest son and went to
+California. After acting in San Francisco, he sailed for Australia,
+where he was warmly received; thence went to the other British colonies
+in that region, touched on his return at Lima and Callao and Panama, at
+which place he took a sailing-packet for London, and after his great
+success in that city returned to America in 1866. In 1867 he married, in
+Chicago, Miss Sarah Warren, and since that time his life has flowed on
+in an even stream, happy in all its relations, private and public,
+crowned with honors, not of a gaudy or brilliant kind, but solid and
+enduring. His art is henceforth part and parcel of the rich treasure of
+the American stage.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+<div class="right">
+<img src="images/sig001.jpg" width="250" height="59" alt="Signature of the author." title="">
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page378" name="page378"></a>(p. 378)</span> ADELINA PATTI<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">Frederick F. Buffen</span><br>
+
+(BORN 1843)</h3>
+
+<a id="img058" name="img058"></a>
+<div class="floatleft">
+<img src="images/img058.jpg" width="200" height="263" alt="Adelina Patti." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>A consensus of opinion places this distinguished artiste at the head of
+all her compeers, for it may be truly said that she is the brightest
+star which has dazzled the musical firmament during the past half
+century, and, is still in the very zenith of her noonday splendor.</p>
+
+<p>Regardful of the transcendent beauty of her voice, enhanced as this is
+by her other natural and attractive attributes, one might almost believe
+that nightingales have surrounded the cradle presided over by Euterpe,
+for never has bird sung so sweetly as the gifted subject of my memoir,
+and while the Fates smiled on the birth of their favorite, destined to
+become the unrivalled Queen of Song throughout the civilized world,
+fanciful natures might conceive a poetical vision, and behold Melpomene
+with her sad, grave eyes breathing into her the spirit of tragedy, and
+Thalia, with her laughing smile, welcoming a gifted disciple by whose
+genius her fire was to be rekindled in the far future.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1861 there arrived in England a young singer who,
+accompanied by her brother-in-law, took apartments in Norfolk Street,
+Strand. The young lady, then only seventeen, sought Mr. Frederick Gye,
+who was the lessee of the Royal Italian Opera, for his permission to
+sing at his theatre, volunteering to do so <i>for nothing</i>. The offer was
+at first absolutely declined, but subsequently the young artiste
+succeeded, and made her first appearance on May 14, 1861, as Amina in
+Bellini's opera of "La Sonnambula." Unheralded by any previous notice,
+she was then totally unknown to the English public. Not a syllable had
+reached that country of her antecedents or fame. I remember being
+present on the occasion when this youthful cantatrice tripped lightly on
+to the centre of the stage. Not a single hand was raised to greet her,
+nor a sound of welcome extended to encourage the young artiste. The
+audience of Covent Garden, usually reserved, except to old-established
+favorites, seemed wrapped in more than their conventional coldness on
+that particular evening. Ere long, however, indeed before she had
+finished the opening aria, a change manifested itself in the feelings of
+all present. The <i>habitués</i> looked round in astonishment, and people
+near me almost held their breath in amazement. The second act followed,
+and to surprise quickly succeeded delight, for when in the third act she
+threw all her vocal and dramatic power into the melodious wailing of
+"<i>Ah non credea</i>," with its brilliant sequel, "<i>Ah non giunge</i>," the
+enthusiasm of the audience forgot all restriction, and burst into a
+spontaneous shout of applause, the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page379" name="page379"></a>(p. 379)</span> pent-up fervor of the
+assembly exploding in a ringing cheer of acclamation rarely heard within
+the walls of the Royal Italian Opera House. The heroine of the evening
+was Adelina Patti, who thenceforward became the idol of the musical
+world. When I left the theatre that evening, I became conscious that a
+course of fascination had commenced of a most unwonted nature; one that
+neither time nor change has modified, but which three decades have
+served only to enhance and intensify.</p>
+
+<p>At the conclusion of the performance, Mr. Gye went on to the stage full
+of the excitement which prevailed in the theatre, and he immediately
+concluded an engagement with Mlle. Patti on the terms which had been
+previously agreed between them; these being that Mlle. Patti was to
+receive at the rate of <i>£</i>150 a month for three years, appearing twice
+each week during the season, or at the rate of about <i>£</i>17 for each
+performance. Mr. Gye also offered her the sum of <i>£</i>200 if she would
+consent to sing exclusively at Covent Garden.</p>
+
+<p>Patti repeated her performance of Amina eight times during the season,
+and subsequently confirmed her success by her assumption of Lucia,
+Violetta, Zerlina, Martha, and Rosina.</p>
+
+<p>Having met with such unprecedented success throughout the London season,
+Mlle. Patti was offered an engagement to sing at the Italian Opera in
+Paris, where unusual curiosity was awakened concerning her. Everyone is
+aware that the Parisians do not admit an artist to be a celebrity until
+they have themselves acknowledged it. At Paris, after the first act, the
+sensation was indescribable, musicians, ministers, poets, and
+fashionable beauties all concurring in the general chorus of
+acclamation; while the genial Auber, the composer of so many delightful
+operas, and one of the greatest authorities, by his experience and
+judgment, on all musical matters, was so enchanted that he declared she
+had made him young again, and for several days he could scarcely talk on
+any other subject but Adelina Patti and opera. The conquest she had
+achieved with the English public was thus triumphantly ratified by the
+exacting and critical members of musical society in Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Adèle Juan Maria Patti, according to her own statement, which she
+related to the Queen Isabella of Spain, was born at Madrid, on February
+19, 1843, and is the youngest daughter of two famous Italian singers,
+Signor Salvatore Patti and Signora Patti-Barili. The signor having
+placed her two sisters&mdash;Amalia, who subsequently married Maurice
+Strakosch, the well-known impresario, and Carlotta, also a vocalist of
+remarkable powers&mdash;in a boarding-school at Milan, went to New York with
+his wife and daughter, where they remained until Adelina reached
+sixteen.</p>
+
+<p>Adelina Patti had barely reached the age of three years when she was
+heard humming and singing the airs her mother sang.</p>
+
+<p>The child's voice was naturally so flexible that executive difficulties
+were always easy to her, and, before she had attained her ninth year she
+could execute a prolonged shake with fluency. Her father not being
+prosperous at the time, it became a necessity for him to look for
+support to his little Adelina, who had shown <span class="pagenum"><a id="page380" name="page380"></a>(p. 380)</span> such remarkable
+promise; and, accordingly, she began to take singing lessons&mdash;not, as is
+stated in Grove's "Dictionary of Musicians," from Maurice Strakosch, but
+from a French lady, subsequently studying with her step-brother, Ettore
+Barili, who was a famous baritone singer; but nature had been so
+prodigal of her gifts to the child that she never undertook a serious
+course of study, but, as she herself says, her real master was "le bon
+Dieu." At a very early age she would sing and play the part of Norma,
+and knew the whole of the words and music of Rosina, the heroine of
+Rossini's immortal "Il Barbiere di Seviglia." She sang at various
+concerts in different cities, until she reached the age of twelve and a
+half, when her career was temporarily interrupted, for Maurice
+Strakosch, observing the ruinous effect the continuous strain upon her
+delicate voice was working, insisted upon her discontinuing singing
+altogether, which advice she happily followed. After this interval of
+two years' silence, and having emerged from the wonder-child to the
+young artiste, she recommenced her studies under M. Strakosch, and very
+soon afterward was engaged to sing on a regular stage. Strakosch
+travelled with her and Gottschalk, the pianist, through the United
+States, during the tour giving a number of concerts with varying
+financial results; ultimately returning to New York in 1859, where she
+appeared at a concert of which <i>The New York Herald</i> of November 28th
+gives the following notice: "One of the most remarkable events in the
+operatic history of the metropolis, or even of the world, has taken
+place during the last week at the Academy of Music. Mlle. Patti sang the
+mad scene from Lucia in such a superb manner as to stir up the audience
+to the heartiest demonstrations of delight. The success of this artiste,
+educated and reared among us, has made everybody talk of her." In the
+following year, Strakosch considered the time had arrived for her to
+appear in Europe. He accordingly brought his young protégée to England,
+with the result I have already attempted to describe.</p>
+
+<p>After singing in London and Paris, Patti was engaged to appear at
+Berlin, Brussels, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, at which latter city
+enthusiasm reached its climax, when on one occasion she was called
+before the curtain no fewer than forty times. One who was with her there
+during her last visit, writes: "Having been witness of Adelina's many
+triumphs and of outbursts of enthusiasm bordering upon madness, I did
+not think that greater demonstrations were possible. I was profoundly
+mistaken, however, for the St. Petersburg public far surpassed anything
+I have seen before. On Adelina's nights extraordinary profits were made.
+Places for the gallery were sold for ten roubles each, while stalls were
+quickly disposed of for a hundred roubles each. The emperor and empress,
+with the whole court, took part in the brilliant reception accorded to
+Patti, and flowers to the amount of six thousand roubles were thrown at
+her."</p>
+
+<p>That she has been literally worshipped from infancy upward is only a
+natural consequence of her unsurpassable gifts, and nowhere has this
+feeling manifested itself to such an extent as in Paris, and by none
+more so than by the four famous composers, Auber, Meyerbeer, Rossini,
+and Gounod. Auber, after hearing her sing Norina, in Donizetti's "Don
+Pasquale," offered her a bouquet of roses from <span class="pagenum"><a id="page381" name="page381"></a>(p. 381)</span> Normandy, and in
+answer to her questions about her diamonds, said, "The diamonds you wear
+are beautiful indeed, but those you place in our ears are a thousand
+times better." Patti was the pet of the gifted composer of "Guillaume
+Tell," and no one was ever more welcome at Rossini's beautiful villa at
+Passy, well known as the centre of a great musical and artistic circle.
+The genial Italian died in November, 1868, and Patti paid her last
+tribute of respect to his memory by taking part in the performance of
+his immortal "Stabat Mater," which was given on the occasion of
+Rossini's burial service.</p>
+
+<p>Gounod, always enthusiastic in his remarks upon her, said, "that until
+he heard Patti, all the Marguerites were Northern maidens, but Patti was
+the only Southern Gretchen, and that from her all future singers could
+learn what to do and avoid."</p>
+
+<p>Although it is not the custom to bestow titles or honorific distinctions
+upon artists of the fair sex, yet, in lieu of these, to such an extent
+have presents been showered upon Adelina Patti, that the jewels which
+she has been presented with from time to time are said to be of the
+enormous value of <i>£</i>100,000. In the year 1885, when she appeared in New
+York as Violetta, the diamonds she wore on that occasion were estimated
+to be worth <i>£</i>60,000. One of the handsomest lockets in her possession
+is a present from Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, and a splendid solitaire
+ring which she is in the habit of wearing was given to her by the
+Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Of no less than twenty-three valuable
+bracelets, one of the most costly is that presented by the committee of
+the Birmingham festival. A magnificent comb, set with twenty-three large
+diamonds, is the gift of the Empress Eugénie. The emperors of Germany,
+Austria, and Russia have vied with each other in sending her jewels of
+the rarest value.</p>
+
+<p>When singing in Italy, King Victor Emmanuel each night visited the opera
+for the purpose of hearing her; and at Florence, where the enthusiastic
+Italians applauded to the very echo, Mario, prince of Italian tenors,
+leaned from his box to crown her with a laurel wreath. A similar honor
+was bestowed upon her by the Duke of Alba at Madrid, who presented her
+with a laurel crown. At the opera house in that city numbers of bouquets
+and poems were to be seen whirling through the air attached to the necks
+of birds. Queen Isabella of Spain, gave a large amethyst brooch
+surrounded by forty enormous pearls, and the Jockey Club of Paris
+presented her with twelve laurel crowns. The citizens of San Francisco,
+upon the occasion of her last visit, presented her with a five-pointed
+star formed of thirty large brilliants, and from the Queen of Portugal
+she received a massive locket containing Her Majesty's portrait,
+enriched by an enormous oriental pearl encrusted in brilliants; and even
+at the present time scarcely a day passes without the "Diva" receiving
+some acknowledgment in recognition of her transcendent powers.</p>
+
+<p>Adelina Patti's first husband was Henri, Marquis de Caux, an equerry to
+the Empress Eugénie, from whom she was separated and subsequently
+divorced; and, on June 10, 1886, she married Ernesto Nicolini, the
+famous tenor singer.</p>
+
+<p>In appearance, Patti is still youthful, and really seems destined to
+rival the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page382" name="page382"></a>(p. 382)</span> celebrated French beauty, Ninon de l'Enclos, who was
+so beautiful at sixty that the grandsons of the men who loved her in her
+youth adored her with equal ardor. Patti's figure is still slim and
+rounded, and not a wrinkle as yet is to be seen on her cheeks, or a line
+about her eyes, which are as clear and bright as ever, and which, when
+she speaks to you, look you straight in the face with her old winning
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>During her career Patti has earned upward of half a million sterling,
+and the enormous sums paid to her at the present time more than double
+the amounts which Jenny Lind received, and which in that day were
+regarded as fabulous.</p>
+
+<p>On a natural plateau, surrounded by picturesque vales, and situated in
+the heart of the very wildest and most romantic part of South Wales,
+between Brecon and Swansea, and at the base of the Rock of the Night,
+stands the Castle of Craig-y-nos. This is the nightingale's nest. The
+princely fortune which Patti has accumulated has enabled her so to
+beautify and enlarge her home, that it now contains all the luxuries
+which Science and Art have enabled Fortune's favorites to enjoy; and so
+crowded is it with curios and valuables that it may best be described as
+"the home of all Art yields or Nature can decree."</p>
+
+<p>Here, in picturesque seclusion, surrounded by a unique splendor created
+by her own exertions, lives this gifted and beautiful songstress. She is
+the "Lady Bountiful" of the entire district, extending many miles around
+the castle, over which she presides with such hospitable grace. The
+number of grateful hearts she has won in the Welsh country by her active
+benevolence is almost as great as is the legion of enthusiastic admirers
+she has enlisted by the wonderful beauty of her voice and the series of
+artistic triumphs, which have been absolutely without parallel during
+the present century.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>SARAH BERNHARDT<br>
+
+By <span class="smcap">H. S. Edwards</span><br>
+
+(BORN 1844)</h3>
+
+<p>A little girl, as Sarcey relates, once presented herself at the Paris
+Conservatoire in order to pass the examination for admission. All she
+knew was the fable of the "Two Pigeons," but she had no sooner recited
+the lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem30">
+<span class="min03em">"</span>Deux pigeons s'aimaient d'amour tendre,<br>
+  L'un d'eux, s'ennuyant au logis"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">than Auber stopped her with a gesture. "Enough," he said. "Come here, my
+child." The little girl, who was pale and thin, but whose eyes gleamed
+with intelligence, approached him with an air of assurance. "Your name
+is Sarah?" he said.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page383" name="page383"></a>(p. 383)</span> "Yes, sir." was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a Jewess?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir, by birth; but I have been baptized."</p>
+
+<p>"She has been baptized," said Auber, turning to his colleagues. "It
+would have been a pity if such a pretty child had not. She said her
+fable of the 'Two Pigeons' very well. She must be admitted."</p>
+
+<a id="img059" name="img059"></a>
+<div class="floatright">
+<img src="images/img059.jpg" width="200" height="225" alt="Sarah Bernhardt." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p>Thus Sarah Bernhardt, for it was she, entered the Conservatoire. She was
+a Jewess of French and Dutch parentage, and was born at Paris in 1844.
+Her father, after having her baptized, had placed her in a convent; but
+she had already secretly determined to become an actress. In her course
+of study at the Conservatoire she so distinguished herself that she
+received a prize which entitled her to a <i>début</i> at the Théâtre
+Français. She selected the part of Iphigénie, in which she appeared on
+August 11, 1862; and at least one newspaper drew special attention to
+her performance, describing her as "pretty and elegant," and
+particularly praising her perfect enunciation. She afterward played
+other parts at the Théâtre Français, but soon transferred herself from
+that house to the Gymnase, though not until she had made herself
+notorious by having, as was alleged, slapped the face of a
+sister-actress in a fit of temper.</p>
+
+<p>The director of the Gymnase did not take too serious a view of his new
+actress, who turned up late at rehearsals, and sometimes did not turn up
+at all. Nor did her acting make any great impression at the Gymnase,
+where, it is true, she was only permitted to appear on Sundays. At this
+theatre she lost no time in exhibiting that independence and caprice to
+which, as much as to her talent, she owes her celebrity. The day after
+the first representation of a piece by Labiche, "Un Mari qui Lance sa
+Femme," in which she had undertaken an important part, she stealthily
+quitted Paris, addressing to the author a letter in which she begged him
+to forgive her.</p>
+
+<p>After a tour in Spain, Sarah returned to Paris, and appeared at the
+Odéon. Here she created a certain number of characters, in such plays as
+"Les Arrêts," "Le Drame de la Rue de la Paix," and "Le Bâtard," but
+chiefly distinguished herself in "Ruy Blas," and in a translation of
+"King Lear." Already she had riveted the attention of the public and the
+press, who saw that a brilliant future lay before her.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of 1872 she appeared at the Comédie Française, and with such
+distinction that she was retained, first as a pensionnaire, at a salary
+of six thousand francs, and afterward as a <i>sociétaire</i>. Her successes
+were rapid and dazzling, and whether she appeared in modern comedy, in
+classic tragedy, or as the creator of characters in entirely new plays,
+the theatre was always crowded. Her melodious voice and pure
+enunciation, her singularly varied accents, her pathos, her ardent
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="page384" name="page384"></a>(p. 384)</span> bursts of passion, were such that her audience, as they hung
+upon her lips, forgot the caprices and eccentricities by which she was
+already characterized in private life. It seemed, however, that Sarah's
+ambition was to gain personal notoriety even more than theatrical fame;
+and by her performances of one kind or another outside the theatre make
+herself the talk of society. She affected to paint, to chisel, and to
+write; sent pictures to the Salon, published eccentric books, and
+exhibited busts. She would receive her friends palette in hand, and in
+the dress of a male artist. She had a luxurious coffin made for her,
+covered with velvet, in which she loved to recline; and she more than
+once went up in a balloon.</p>
+
+<p>Her caprice, whether in private or public, was altogether unrestrained.
+In 1880 Émile Augier's admirable comedy, "L'Aventurière," was revived at
+the Comédie Française, and the author confided the part of Clorinde to
+Sarah Bernhardt. After the first representation, however, she was so
+enraged by an uncomplimentary newspaper criticism that she sent in her
+resignation to M. Émile Perrin, director of the theatre, quitted Paris,
+and went to England, where she gave a series of representations, and,
+appearing there for the first time, caused a veritable sensation in
+London society. Meanwhile, M. Perrin instituted against her, in the name
+of the Comédie Française, a lawsuit for breach of contract, with damages
+laid at three hundred thousand francs. It was at this juncture that
+Sarah accepted the offers of an enterprising manager for a tour in
+America, where she achieved no less phenomenal successes than in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>A sensational account of this American tour was afterward published by
+one of her associates, Mlle. Marie Colombier, under the title of "Sarah
+Bernhardt en Amérique." This was followed by a second volume from the
+same pen, entitled "Sarah Barnum." The latter book, as its title
+suggests, was not intended as a compliment; and Sarah Bernhardt brought
+an action against the writer, by which she was compelled to expunge from
+her scandalous volume all that was offensive.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of Sarah's career is too recent to be traced in detail. Nor can
+the life of an actress of our own time be dealt with so freely as that
+of a Sophie Arnould or an Adrienne Lecouvreur.</p>
+
+<p>From America Sarah returned to Paris, where she revived all her old
+successes, and where, in 1888, at the Odéon, she produced a one-act
+comedy from her own pen, entitled "L'Aveu," which met with a somewhat
+frigid reception. She has appeared in several of Shakespeare's plays
+with great success, but her most ambitious and perhaps most admirable
+productions of late years have been her Cleopatra, first produced in
+Paris in 1890, and her Joan of Arc.</p>
+
+<p>Among her numerous eccentricities, Mlle. Bernhardt once got married;
+London, by reason of the facilities it affords for this species of
+recreation, being chosen as the scene of the espousals. The hero of the
+matrimonial comedy, which was soon followed by a separation, to which,
+after many adventures on the part of both husband and wife, a
+reconciliation succeeded, was M. Damala, a Greek gentleman, possessed
+of considerable histrionic talent, who died in 1880.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3><span class="pagenum"><a id="page385" name="page385"></a>(p. 385)</span> AMONG THE SPECIAL CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS WORK ARE:</h3>
+
+<a id="img060" name="img060"></a>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/img060.jpg" width="600" height="566" alt="Signatures of the authors." title="">
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">TERMS OF PUBLICATION.</p>
+
+<p>The work, "Great Men and Famous Women," will be published in sixty-eight
+parts, at twenty-five cents each; it will be printed on paper made
+expressly for it: each part will contain three full-page engravings,
+making a total of more than two hundred in the entire work, of which
+sixty-eight will be photogravures by Messrs. Goupil &amp; Co., of Paris, and
+other eminent makers. There will be twenty-four pages of letterpress in
+each part.</p>
+
+<p>No subscriber's name is received for less than the entire set. And no
+order can be cancelled after acceptance. The Publisher guarantees to
+complete the work in sixty-eight parts.</p>
+
+<p>The parts are payable only as delivered, the carrier not being permitted
+to receive money in advance nor to leave parts on credit.</p>
+
+<p>Subscribers who remove, or who are not regularly supplied, will please
+address the Publisher by mail.<a href="#toc"><span class="small">[Back to Contents]</span></a></p>
+
+
+<p class="p4"><a id="footnote1" name="footnote1"></a>
+<b>Footnote 1:</b> Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.<a href="#footnotetag1"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote2" name="footnote2"></a>
+<b>Footnote 2:</b> Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary of Titian, and himself a
+painter of no mean rank, wrote a series of lives of the Italian artists,
+from which the following is extracted. There are several slight
+inaccuracies in his work Titian was born, not in 1480, but in 1477, and
+died in 1576. He was in coloring the greatest artist who ever lived.<a href="#footnotetag2"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote3" name="footnote3"></a>
+<b>Footnote 3:</b> Copyright, 1894, by Helmar Hess.<a href="#footnotetag3"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote4" name="footnote4"></a>
+<b>Footnote 4:</b> Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.<a href="#footnotetag4"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote5" name="footnote5"></a>
+<b>Footnote 5:</b> Reprinted by permission, from the Magazine of American
+History.<a href="#footnotetag5"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote6" name="footnote6"></a>
+<b>Footnote 6:</b> Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.<a href="#footnotetag6"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote7" name="footnote7"></a>
+<b>Footnote 7:</b> Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.<a href="#footnotetag7"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote8" name="footnote8"></a>
+<b>Footnote 8:</b> Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.<a href="#footnotetag8"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote9" name="footnote9"></a>
+<b>Footnote 9:</b> Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.<a href="#footnotetag9"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote10" name="footnote10"></a>
+<b>Footnote 10:</b> Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.<a href="#footnotetag10"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote11" name="footnote11"></a>
+<b>Footnote 11:</b> Reprinted by permission, from the "Nation."<a href="#footnotetag11"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote12" name="footnote12"></a>
+<b>Footnote 12:</b> Our illustration represents him at Wahnfried in company
+with his wife Cosima, her father Franz Liszt, who was his lifelong
+friend, and Herr von Wolzogen.<a href="#footnotetag12"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote13" name="footnote13"></a>
+<b>Footnote 13:</b> Reprinted by permission of The Cassell Publishing Company,
+from "Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States."<a href="#footnotetag13"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote14" name="footnote14"></a>
+<b>Footnote 14:</b> Of Forrest's performance of Metamora, in the play of that
+name, W. R. Alger says, "Never did an actor more thoroughly identify and
+merge himself with his part than Forrest did in 'Metamora.' He was
+completely transformed from what he appeared in other characters, and
+seemed Indian in every particular, all through and all over, from the
+crown of his head to the sole of his foot."<a href="#footnotetag14"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote15" name="footnote15"></a>
+<b>Footnote 15:</b> Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.<a href="#footnotetag15"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+<p><a id="footnote16" name="footnote16"></a>
+<b>Footnote 16:</b> Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.<a href="#footnotetag16"><span class="small">[Back to Main Text]</span></a></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of
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+Project Gutenberg's Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8), by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8)
+       A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more
+       than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Charles F. Horne
+
+Release Date: July 8, 2009 [EBook #29352]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT MEN AND FAMOUS WOMEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sigal Alon, Christine P. Travers and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected,
+all other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's
+spelling has been maintained.]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra.]
+
+
+
+
+GREAT MEN AND FAMOUS WOMEN
+
+
+_A Series of Pen and Pencil Sketches of_
+
+THE LIVES OF MORE THAN 200 OF THE MOST PROMINENT PERSONAGES IN HISTORY
+
+
+VOL. VIII.
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1894, BY SELMAR HESS
+
+edited by Charles F. Horne
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's arm.]
+
+New-York: Selmar Hess Publisher
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOLUME VIII.
+
+
+  SUBJECT                          AUTHOR                         PAGE
+
+  MICHAEL ANGELO,             _Anna Jameson_,                      214
+  BEETHOVEN,                  _C. E. Bourne_,                      319
+  SARAH BERNHARDT,            _H. S. Edwards_,                     382
+  ROSA BONHEUR,               _Clarence Cook_,                     276
+  EDWIN BOOTH,                _Clarence Cook_,                     370
+  CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN,          _Dutton Cook_,                       355
+  _Letter from Miss Cushman to a young friend on the subject
+     of "Self-conquest,"_                                          362
+  LEONARDO DA VINCI,          _Anna Jameson_,                      209
+  GUSTAVE DORE,               _Kenyon Cox_,                        298
+  ALBERT DUeRER,               _W. J. Holland_,                     231
+  EDWIN FORREST,              _Lawrence Barrett_,                  349
+  DAVID GARRICK,              _Samuel Archer_,                     343
+  GEROME,                     _Clarence Cook_,                     281
+  HANDEL,                     _C. E. Bourne_,                      302
+  HAYDN,                      _C. E. Bourne_,                      315
+  WILLIAM HOGARTH,                                                 247
+  JOSEPH JEFFERSON,           _Clarence Cook_,                     374
+  FRANZ LISZT,                _Rev. Hugh R. Haweis, M.A._,         332
+  MEISSONIER,                 _Clarence Cook_,                     272
+  MENDELSSOHN,                _C. F. Bourne_,                      326
+  JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET,       _Clarence Cook_,                     265
+  MOZART,                     _C. E. Bourne_,                      308
+  PAGANINI,                                                        325
+  ADELINA PATTI,              _Frederick F. Buffen_,               378
+  PHIDIAS,                    _Clarence Cook_,                     203
+  RACHEL,                     _Dutton Cook_,                       363
+  RAPHAEL,                    _Mrs. Lee_,                          221
+  REMBRANDT,                  _Elizabeth Robins Pennell_,          240
+  SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS,        _Samuel Archer_,                     250
+  DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI,     _Edmund Gosse_,                      287
+  RUBENS,                     _Mrs. Lee_,                          236
+  THORWALDSEN,                _Hans Christian Andersen_,           258
+  TITIAN,                     _Giorgio Vasari_,                    226
+  GIUSEPPE VERDI,                                                  342
+  RICHARD WAGNER,             _Franklin Peterson, Mus. Bac._,      338
+  BENJAMIN WEST,              _Martha J. Lamb_,                    254
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+VOLUME VIII.
+
+PHOTOGRAVURES
+
+  ILLUSTRATION                               ARTIST            TO FACE
+                                                                 PAGE
+
+  SARAH BERNHARDT AS CLEOPATRA,         _Georges Clairin_ _Frontispiece_
+  MICHAEL ANGELO AND VITTORIA COLONNA,  _Hermann Schneider_         220
+  ALBERT DUeRER VISITS HANS SACHS,       _Richard Gross_             234
+  MARIE DE MEDICI AT THE HOUSE OF
+    RUBENS,                             _Florent Willems_           240
+  CONNOISSEURS AT REMBRANDT'S STUDIO,   _Adolphe-Alexandre Lesrel_  244
+  MEISSONIER'S ATELIER,                 _Georges Bretegnier_        272
+  MOZART SINGING HIS REQUIEM,           _Thomas W. Shields_         314
+  AN ANECDOTE ABOUT BEETHOVEN,          _Paul Leyendecker_          322
+  FRANZ LISZT,                          _Fortune-Joseph-Seraphin
+                                           Layraud_                 334
+  WAGNER AND HIS FRIENDS,               _Wilhelm Beckmann_          340
+  RACHEL AS THE MUSE OF GREEK TRAGEDY,  _Jean Leon Gerome_          368
+  JOE JEFFERSON AS BOB ACRES,           _From life_                 376
+
+
+  WOOD-ENGRAVINGS AND TYPOGRAVURES
+
+  RAPHAEL INTRODUCED TO DA VINCI,       _Brune Pages_               212
+  LEO X. AT RAPHAEL'S BIER,             _Pietro Michis_             224
+  A FETE AT THE HOUSE OF TITIAN,        _F. Kraus_                  228
+  ALBERT DUeRER'S WEDDING,               _A. Bodenmueller_            232
+  HOGARTH SKETCHING THE HIGHWAY OF
+    QUEENBOROUGH,                                                   248
+  BENJAMIN WEST, PRESIDENT OF THE
+    ROYAL ACADEMY,                      _Sir Thomas Lawrence_       258
+  ROSA BONHEUR,                         _E. Dubufe_                 278
+  HANDEL'S RIVER-CONCERT FOR GEORGE I., _A. Hamman_                 304
+  HAYDN COMPOSING HIS "CREATION,"       _A. Hamman_                 318
+  PAGANINI IN PRISON,                   _Louis Boulanger_           326
+  GARRICK AS RICHARD III.,              _William Hogarth_           346
+  FORREST AS METAMORA,                  _From Photograph_           352
+  CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN AS MRS. HALLER,     _Watkins_                   360
+
+
+
+
+PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS
+
+
+
+
+PHIDIAS[1]
+
+         [Footnote 1: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(ABOUT 500-432 B.C.)
+
+
+Phidias, one of the greatest sculptors the world has seen, and whose
+name has become, as it were, the synonym of his art, was born at
+Athens about 500 B.C. He belonged to a family of artists, none of whom
+indeed were distinguished in their profession, but their varied
+occupations furnished the atmosphere in which such a talent as that of
+Phidias could best be fostered and brought to maturity. His father was
+Charmides, who is believed to have been an artist, because the Greeks,
+in their inscriptions, did not associate the name of the father with
+that of the son unless both were of the same calling. A brother of
+Phidias, Panoenos, was a painter, and is mentioned among those
+artists, twenty or more in number, who in conjunction with Polygnotus,
+one of the chief painters of his day, were employed in the decoration
+of the Poecile or Painted Portico, one of the many beautiful buildings
+erected by Cimon. The Poecile was simply a long platform, with a roof
+supported by a row of columns on one side and by a wall on the other.
+It was called "the painted," because the wall at the back was covered
+with a series of large historical pictures containing many figures,
+and recording some of the chief events of the time, together with
+others relating to an earlier and more shadowy epoch. The subject of
+the painting, executed, at least in part, by the brother of Phidias,
+was the Battle of Marathon, in which great event it is thought he may
+himself have taken part.
+
+The boyhood of Phidias fell in a time of national revival, when under
+the influence of an ennobling political excitement, all the arts were
+quickened to a fresh, original, and splendid growth. The contest
+between the Greeks and Persians, which had begun with the Ionian
+revolt, was in full activity at the time of his birth. He was ten
+years old when the battle of Marathon was fought, and when he was
+twenty, four of the most striking events in the history of Greece were
+crowded into a single year; the battle of Thermopylae, the victory at
+Salamis, and the twin glories of Plataea and Mycale. His early youth,
+therefore, was nourished by the inspiring influences that come from
+the victorious struggle of a people to maintain their national life.
+He was by no means the only sculptor of his time whom fame remembers,
+but he alone, rejecting trivial themes, consecrated his talent to the
+nobler subjects of his country's religious life and the ideal
+conception of her protecting gods. No doubt, Phidias, like all who are
+born with the artistic temperament, would be interested from childhood
+in the progress of the splendid works with which Athens was enriching
+herself under the rule of Cimon. But his interest must have been
+greatly increased by the fact that his brother Panoenos was actively
+engaged in the decoration of one of those buildings. It would be
+natural that he should be often drawn to the place where his brother
+was at work, and that the sight of so many artists, most of them young
+men, filled with the generous ardor of youth, and inspired by the
+nature of their task, should have stirred in him an answering
+enthusiasm. It gives us a thrill of pleasure to read in the list of
+these youths the name of the great tragic poet, Euripides, who began
+life as a painter, and in whose plays we find more than one reference
+to the art. It cannot be thought unreasonable to suppose that two such
+intelligences as these must have had an attraction for one another,
+and that, as in the case of Dante and Giotto, the great poet and the
+great artist would be drawn together by a likeness in their taste and
+aims.
+
+Phidias studied his art first at Athens, with a native sculptor,
+Hegias, of whom we know nothing except from books. Later, he went to
+Argos, and there put himself under the instruction of Ageladas, a
+worker chiefly in bronze, and very famous in his time, of whom,
+however, nothing remains but the memory of a few of his more notable
+works. For us, his own works forgotten, he remains in honor as the
+teacher of Myron, of Polycletus, and of Phidias, the three chief
+sculptors of the next generation to his own. On leaving the workshop
+of Ageladas, Phidias executed several statues that brought him
+prominently before the public. For Delphi, he made a group of thirteen
+figures in bronze, to celebrate the battle of Marathon and apotheosize
+the heroes of Attica. In this group, Miltiades was placed in the
+centre, between Athena, the tutelary goddess of Athens, and Apollo,
+the guardian of Delphi; while on each side were five Athenian heroes,
+Theseus and Codrus with others, arranged in a semicircle. This
+important work was paid for by Athens out of her share in the spoils
+of Marathon. Another important commission executed by Phidias was a
+statue of Athena made for her temple at Plataea, and paid for with the
+eighty talents raised by the contributions of the other Grecian states
+as a reward for the splendid services of the Plataeans at Marathon,
+where they played somewhat the same part as the Prussians at the
+battle of Waterloo. The head, hands, and feet of this statue were of
+marble, but the drapery was of gold; so arranged, probably, as in the
+case of the great statue of Athena designed later by Phidias for the
+Parthenon, as to be removable from the marble core at pleasure.
+Phidias made so many statues of the virgin goddess Athena, that his
+name became associated with hers, as at a later day that of Raphael
+was with the Virgin Mary. In the first period of his artistic career,
+moved perhaps by his patriotic gratitude for her intervention in
+behalf of his native state, he had represented the goddess as a
+warlike divinity, as here at Plataea; but in his later conceptions, as
+in a statue made for the Athenians of Lemnos, Athena appeared invested
+with milder attributes, and with a graceful and winning type of
+beauty.
+
+In their invasion of Attica the Persians had destroyed the city of
+Athens, and the people, who had fled to all quarters of the peninsula
+to seek refuge from the enemy, returned after the victory at Salamis
+and the flight of the Persians, to find their homes a heap of ruins.
+The dwelling-houses of the Greeks were everywhere, even in their
+largest cities, built of mean materials: walls of stubble overlaid
+with stucco and gayly painted. It was not long, therefore, before
+Athens resumed something of her old appearance, with such improvements
+as always follow the rebuilding of a city. The most important change
+effected was that brought about in the character of the great plateau,
+the fortified rock of the Acropolis. Here, as in many Greek cities,
+the temples of the gods had been erected, and about them, as about the
+cathedrals of the Middle Ages, there had grown up a swarm of houses
+and other buildings built by generations of people who sought there at
+once the protection of the stockade which enclosed the almost
+inaccessible site, and the still further safeguard of the presence of
+the divinities in their temples. The destructive hand of the Persian
+invaders had swept this platform clear of all these multiplied
+incumbrances, and in the rebuilding of the city it was determined to
+reserve the Acropolis for military and religious uses alone.
+
+The work of improvement was begun by Cimon, who, however, confined his
+attention chiefly to the lower city that clustered about the base of
+the Acropolis. Here, among other structures, he built the temple of
+Theseus and the Painted Portico, and he also erected, near the summit
+of the Acropolis, on the western side, the little gem-like temple of
+the Wingless Victory, Nike Apteros, in commemoration of the success of
+the Athenian arms at the battle of the Eurymedon. It was from Cimon
+that Phidias received his first commission for work upon the
+Acropolis, where later he was to build such a lasting monument to his
+own fame and to the fame of his native land. The commission given him
+by Cimon was to erect a bronze statue of Athena which was to stand on
+the citadel, at once a symbol of the power of Athens and a tribute to
+the protecting goddess of the city. The work upon the statue was
+probably begun under Cimon, but according to Ottfried Mueller it was
+not completed at the death of Phidias. It stood in the open air, and
+nearly opposite the Colonnade at the entrance of the great flight of
+marble steps that led from the plain to the summit of the Acropolis,
+and was the first object to meet the eye on passing through the
+gateway. It represented the goddess, armed, and in a warlike attitude,
+from which it derived its name, Athena Promachos: Athena, the leader
+of the battle. With its pedestal it stood about seventy feet high,
+towering above the roof of the Parthenon, the gilded point of the
+brazen spear held by the goddess flashing back the sun to the ships as
+in approaching Athens they rounded the promontory of Sunium. We read
+that the statue was still standing so late as 395 A.D., and it is said
+that its towering height and threatening aspect caused a panic terror
+in Alaric and his horde of barbarians when they climbed the Acropolis
+to plunder its temple of its treasure.
+
+But it was under the rule of Pericles that Phidias was to find at
+Athens his richest employment. Pericles had determined, probably by
+the advice of Phidias, to make the Acropolis the seat and centre of
+the new and splendid city that was to arise under his administration.
+The first great undertaking was the building of a temple to Athena
+Parthenos, Athena the Virgin, a design believed to have been suggested
+to Pericles by Phidias. The plans were intrusted to Ictinus, an
+Athenian, one of the best architects of the day; but the general
+control and superintendence of the work were given to Phidias. As the
+building rose to completion, workmen in all branches of the arts
+flocked to Athens from every part of Greece and were given full
+employment by Phidias in the decoration and furnishing of the temple.
+
+The taste of Phidias controlled the whole scheme of decoration applied
+to the building, into which color entered, no doubt, to a much greater
+extent than was formerly believed. Even after time and the destructive
+hand of man have done their worst, there still remain sufficient
+traces of color to prove that the sculpture, and the whole upper part
+of the temple, were painted in bright but harmonious colors, and that
+metal ornaments and accessories accented the whole scheme with
+glittering points of light reflected from their shining surfaces.
+
+The sculptures with which the Parthenon was adorned by Phidias, and
+which were executed under his immediate superintendence, consisted of
+two great groups that filled the eastern and western pediments; of
+groups of two figures each in the ninety-two metopes or panels above
+the outer row of columns; and, finally, the famous frieze that ran
+completely round the temple itself, just below the ceiling of the
+colonnade, and at a height of about thirty-nine feet from the floor.
+
+The subject of the group that filled the eastern pediment, the one
+above the entrance door of the temple, was the birth of Athena. Just
+how the event was represented we do not know because quite half the
+group, including the principal figures, disappeared very early in our
+era, and no description of them remains in any ancient or modern
+writer. The group in the western pediment represented the contest
+between Athena and Poseidon for the dominion over Attica. According to
+the legend, the strife between the two divinities took place in an
+assembly of the gods on the Acropolis, who were to determine which of
+the two contestants should be the protector of the city. To prove his
+power, Poseidon struck the rock with his trident, and a salt spring
+leaped forth, as if the sea itself had obeyed the call of its lord.
+Athena struck the ground, and an olive-tree sprang up, the emblem of
+peace and of the victories of commerce, and the assembly awarded the
+prize to her. The goddess having thus received the sovereignty of
+Athens, it was but natural that a day should be set apart for her
+special honor, and a festival instituted to commemorate the great
+event. This was the greater Panathenaia, or All Athenians Day, which
+was celebrated every fourth year in honor of the goddess, and which,
+as its name implies, was taken part in by all the people of the city.
+It occurred in the early summer and lasted five days. On the fifth
+day, it closed with a procession which went through all the chief
+streets of the city and wound its way up the Great Stairway to the
+Acropolis, bearing the _peplos_ or embroidered robe woven by young
+virgin ladies of Athens, chosen from the highest families, and known
+for their skill in this kind of work. After the _peplos_ had been
+consecrated in the temple it was placed with due solemnities upon the
+ancient and venerable figure of the goddess, made of olive-wood, and
+said to have descended from heaven. From its subject, which thus
+celebrates the Panathenaic procession, the frieze is often called the
+Panathenaic frieze.
+
+It is carved from Pentelic marble, of which material the marble
+building is constructed. Its original length, running as it did around
+the entire building, was 522.80 feet, of which about 410 feet remain.
+Of this portion, 249 feet are in the British Museum in slabs and
+fragments; the remainder is chiefly in the Louvre, with scattered
+fragments in other places. As a connected subject this was the most
+extensive piece of sculpture ever made in Greece. From all that can be
+gathered from the study of the fragments that remain, the design of
+the frieze was of the utmost simplicity and characterized by the union
+of perfect taste and clear purpose that marks all the work of the
+great sculptor. The subject begins in the frieze at the western end of
+the temple, where we watch the assembling of the procession. It then
+proceeds along the northern and southern sides of the building, in
+what we are to suppose one continuous line, moving toward the east,
+since all the faces are turned that way; and at the eastern end,
+directly over the main entrance to the building, the two parts of the
+procession meet, in the presence of the magistrates and of the
+divinities who had places of worship in Athens.
+
+Of the grace, the skill in arrangement, the variety of invention, the
+happy union of movement and repose shown in this work, not only
+artists--men best fitted to judge its merits from a technical point of
+view--but the cultivated portion of the public, and a large and
+ever-increasing circle of every-day people, have by common consent
+agreed in praise. By the multiplication of casts, to be found now in
+all our principal museums, we are enabled to study and to enjoy the
+long procession even better than it could have been enjoyed in its
+original place, where it must have been seen at a great disadvantage
+in spite of the skill shown by Phidias in adapting it to its site;
+for, as the frieze stood thirty-nine feet from the floor, and as the
+width of the portico between the wall and the columns was only nine
+feet, it was seen at a very sharp angle, and owing to the projection
+of the roof beyond the wall of the temple the frieze received only
+reflected light from the marble pavement below.
+
+Apart from the marble sculptures on the exterior of the Parthenon, the
+two most famous works of Phidias were the statues of Athena, made for
+the interior of the Parthenon, and of Zeus for the temple of the god
+at Olympia in Elis. Both these statues were of the sort called
+_Chryselephantine_, from the Greek _chrousous_, golden, and
+_elephantinos_, of ivory; that is, they were constructed of plates of
+gold and ivory, laid upon a core of wood or stone. The style was not
+new, though its invention was at one time ascribed to Phidias. It came
+from the East, but it was now employed for the first time in Greece in
+a work of national importance.
+
+In the Athena, the face, neck, arms, hands, and feet were made of
+ivory, and the drapery and ornaments, the helmet, the shield, and the
+sandals of gold, which as in the case of the statue made for Plataea,
+was removable at pleasure. The height of the statue, including the
+pedestal, was nearly forty feet. The goddess stood erect, clothed with
+a tunic reaching to the ankles, and showing her richly sandalled feet.
+She had the aegis on her breast, her head was covered with a helmet,
+and her shield, richly embossed with the Battle of the Amazons, rested
+on the ground at her side. In one hand she held a spear, and in the
+other, an image of Victory six feet high.
+
+A still more splendid work, and one which raised the fame of Phidias
+to the highest point, was the statue of the Olympian Zeus, made for
+the Eleans. In this statue, Phidias essayed to embody the Homeric
+ideal of the supreme divinity of the people of Greece sitting on his
+throne as a monarch, and in an attitude of majestic repose. The
+throne, made of cedar-wood, was covered with plates of gold, and
+enriched with ivory, ebony, and precious stones. It rested on a
+platform twelve feet high, made of costly marble and carved with the
+images of the gods who formed the council of Zeus on Olympus. The feet
+of the god rested on a footstool supported by lions, and with the
+combat of Theseus and the Amazons in a bas-relief on the front and
+sides. In one hand Zeus held the sceptre, and in the other a winged
+Victory. His head was crowned with a laurel wreath; his mantle,
+falling from one shoulder, left his breast bare and covered the lower
+part of his person with its ample folds of pure gold enamelled with
+flowers. The whole height of the statue with the pedestal was about
+fifty feet; by its very disproportion to the size of the temple it was
+made to appear still larger than it really was. This statue was
+reckoned one of the wonders of the world. In it the Greeks seemed to
+behold Zeus face to face. To see it was a cure for all earthly woes,
+and to die without having seen it was reckoned a great calamity.
+
+The downfall of Pericles, due to the jealousies of his rivals, carried
+with it the ruin of Phidias, his close friend, to whom he had
+entrusted such great undertakings. An indictment was brought against
+the sculptor, charging him with appropriating to himself a portion of
+the gold given him for the adornment of the statue of Athena; and
+according to some authorities Pericles himself was included in the
+charge. The gold had, however, been attached to the statue in such a
+manner that it could be taken off and weighed, and in the proof, the
+charge had to be abandoned. But Phidias did not escape so easily. He
+was accused of sacrilege in having introduced portraits of himself and
+Pericles on the shield of the goddess, where, says Plutarch, in the
+bas-relief of the Battle of the Amazons, he carved his own portrait as
+a bald old man lifting a stone with both hands, and also introduced an
+excellent likeness of Pericles fighting with an Amazon.
+
+Phidias died in prison before the trial came off, and his name must be
+added to the long list of those whom an ungrateful world has rewarded
+for their services with ignominy and death.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+LEONARDO DA VINCI
+
+By ANNA JAMESON
+
+(1452-1519)
+
+
+[Illustration: Leonardo Da Vinci.]
+
+Leonardo da Vinci seems to present in his own person a _resume_ of all
+the characteristics of the age in which he lived. He was _the_ miracle
+of that age of miracles. Ardent and versatile as youth; patient and
+persevering as age; a most profound and original thinker; the greatest
+mathematician and most ingenious mechanic of his time; architect,
+chemist, engineer, musician, poet, painter--we are not only astounded
+by the variety of his natural gifts and acquired knowledge, but by the
+practical direction of his amazing powers. The extracts which have
+been published from MSS. now existing in his own handwriting show him
+to have anticipated by the force of his own intellect some of the
+greatest discoveries made since his time. "These fragments," says Mr.
+Hallam, "are, according to our common estimate of the age in which he
+lived, more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to a single
+mind than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any established
+basis. The discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Castelli, and other
+names illustrious; the system of Copernicus, the very theories of
+recent geologists, are anticipated by Da Vinci within the compass of a
+few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most
+conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the
+awe of preternatural knowledge. In an age of so much dogmatism he
+first laid down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and
+observation must be the guides to just theory in the investigation of
+nature. If any doubt could be harbored, not as to the right of
+Leonardo da Vinci to stand as the first name of the fifteenth century,
+which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many
+discoveries, which probably no one man, especially in such
+circumstances, has ever made, it must be by an hypothesis not very
+untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a
+height which mere books do not record."
+
+It seems at first sight almost incomprehensible that, thus endowed as
+a philosopher, mechanic, inventor, discoverer, the fame of Leonardo
+should now rest on the works he has left as a painter. We cannot,
+within these limits, attempt to explain why and how it is that as the
+man of science he has been naturally and necessarily left behind by
+the onward march of intellectual progress, while as the poet-painter
+he still survives as a presence and a power. We must proceed at once
+to give some account of him in the character in which he exists to us
+and for us--that of the great artist.
+
+Leonardo was born at Vinci, near Florence, in the Lower Val d'Arno, on
+the borders of the territory of Pistoia. His father, Piero da Vinci,
+was an advocate of Florence--not rich, but in independent
+circumstances, and possessed of estates in land. The singular talents
+of his son induced Piero to give him, from an early age, the advantage
+of the best instructors. As a child he distinguished himself by his
+proficiency in arithmetic and mathematics. Music he studied early, as
+a science as well as an art. He invented a species of lyre for
+himself, and sung his own poetical compositions to his own music, both
+being frequently extemporaneous. But his favorite pursuit was the art
+of design in all its branches; he modelled in clay or wax, or
+attempted to draw every object which struck his fancy. His father sent
+him to study under Andrea Verrocchio, famous as a sculptor, chaser in
+metal, and painter. Andrea, who was an excellent and correct designer,
+but a bad and hard colorist, was soon after engaged to paint a picture
+of the baptism of our Saviour. He employed Leonardo, then a youth, to
+execute one of the angels; this he did with so much softness and
+richness of color, that it far surpassed the rest of the picture; and
+Verrocchio from that time threw away his palette, and confined himself
+wholly to his works in sculpture and design, "enraged," says Vessari,
+"that a child should thus excel him."
+
+The youth of Leonardo thus passed away in the pursuit of science and
+of art; sometimes he was deeply engaged in astronomical calculations
+and investigations; sometimes ardent in the study of natural history,
+botany, and anatomy; sometimes intent on new effects of color, light,
+shadow, or expression in representing objects animate or inanimate.
+Versatile, yet persevering, he varied his pursuits, but he never
+abandoned any. He was quite a young man when he conceived and
+demonstrated the practicability of two magnificent projects: one was
+to lift the whole of the church of San Giovanni, by means of immense
+levers, some feet higher than it now stands, and thus supply the
+deficient elevation; the other project was to form the Arno into a
+navigable canal as far as Pisa, which would have added greatly to the
+commercial advantages of Florence.
+
+It happened about this time that a peasant on the estate of Piero da
+Vinci brought him a circular piece of wood, cut horizontally from the
+trunk of a very large old fig-tree, which had been lately felled, and
+begged to have something painted on it as an ornament for his cottage.
+The man being an especial favorite, Piero desired his son Leonardo to
+gratify his request; and Leonardo, inspired by that wildness of fancy
+which was one of his characteristics, took the panel into his own
+room, and resolved to astonish his father by a most unlooked-for proof
+of his art. He determined to compose something which should have an
+effect similar to that of the Medusa on the shield of Perseus, and
+almost petrify beholders. Aided by his recent studies in natural
+history, he collected together from the neighboring swamps and the
+river-mud all kinds of hideous reptiles, as adders, lizards, toads,
+serpents: insects, as moths, locusts, and other crawling and flying
+obscene and obnoxious things; and out of these he composed a sort of
+monster or chimera, which he represented as about to issue from the
+shield, with eyes flashing fire, and of an aspect so fearful and
+abominable that it seemed to infect the very air around. When
+finished, he led his father into the room in which it was placed, and
+the terror and horror of Piero proved the success of his attempt. This
+production, afterward known as the "Rotello del Fico," from the
+material on which it was painted, was sold by Piero secretly for one
+hundred ducats to a merchant, who carried it to Milan, and sold it to
+the duke for three hundred. To the poor peasant, thus cheated of his
+"Rotello," Piero gave a wooden shield, on which was painted a heart
+transfixed by a dart, a device better suited to his taste and
+comprehension. In the subsequent troubles of Milan, Leonardo's picture
+disappeared, and was probably destroyed as an object of horror by
+those who did not understand its value as a work of art.
+
+During this first period of his life, which was wholly passed in
+Florence and its neighborhood, Leonardo painted several other pictures
+of a very different character, and designed some beautiful cartoons of
+sacred and mythological subjects, which showed that his sense of the
+beautiful, the elevated, and the graceful was not less a part of his
+mind than that eccentricity and almost perversion of fancy which made
+him delight in sketching ugly, exaggerated caricatures, and
+representing the deformed and the terrible.
+
+Leonardo da Vinci was now about thirty years old, in the prime of his
+life and talents. His taste for pleasure and expense was, however,
+equal to his genius and indefatigable industry; and anxious to secure
+a certain provision for the future, as well as a wider field for the
+exercise of his various talents, he accepted the invitation of
+Ludovico Sforza il Moro, then regent, afterward Duke of Milan, to
+reside in his court, and to execute a colossal equestrian statue of
+his ancestor, Francesco Sforza. Here begins the second period of his
+artistic career, which includes his sojourn at Milan, that is from
+1483 to 1499.
+
+Vasari says that Leonardo was invited to the court of Milan for the
+Duke Ludovico's amusement, "as a musician and performer on the lyre,
+and as the greatest singer and _improvisatore_ of his time;" but this
+is improbable. Leonardo, in his long letter to that prince, in which
+he recites his own qualifications for employment, dwells chiefly on
+his skill in engineering and fortification; and sums up his
+pretensions as an artist in these few brief words: "I understand the
+different modes of sculpture in marble, bronze, and terra-cotta. In
+painting, also, I may esteem myself equal to anyone, let him be who he
+may." Of his musical talents he makes no mention whatever, though
+undoubtedly these, as well as his other social accomplishments, his
+handsome person, his winning address, his wit and eloquence,
+recommended him to the notice of the prince, by whom he was greatly
+beloved, and in whose service he remained for about seventeen years.
+It is not necessary, nor would it be possible here, to give a
+particular account of all the works in which Leonardo was engaged for
+his patron, nor of the great political events in which he was
+involved, more by his position than by his inclination; for instance,
+the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France, and the subsequent
+invasion of Milan by Louis XII., which ended in the destruction of the
+Duke Ludovico. The greatest work of all, and by far the grandest
+picture which, up to that time, had been executed in Italy, was the
+"Last Supper," painted on the wall of the refectory, or dining-room,
+of the Dominican convent of the Madonna delle Grazie. It occupied
+Leonardo about two years, from 1496 to 1498.
+
+The moment selected by the painter is described in the 26th chapter of
+St. Matthew, 21st and 22d verses: "And as they did eat, he said,
+Verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me: and they were
+exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him,
+Lord, is it I?" The knowledge of character displayed in the heads of
+the different apostles is even more wonderful than the skilful
+arrangement of the figures and the amazing beauty of the workmanship.
+The space occupied by the picture is a wall twenty-eight feet in
+length and the figures are larger than life.
+
+Of this magnificent creation of art, only the mouldering remains are
+now visible. It has been so often repaired that almost every vestige
+of the original painting is annihilated; but from the multiplicity of
+descriptions, engravings, and copies that exist, no picture is more
+universally known and celebrated. Perhaps the best judgment we can now
+form of its merits is from the fine copy executed by one of Leonardo's
+best pupils, Marco Uggione, for the Certosa at Pavia, and now in
+London, in the collection of the Royal Academy. Eleven other copies,
+by various pupils of Leonardo, painted either during his lifetime or
+within a few years after his death, while the picture was in perfect
+preservation, exist in different churches and collections.
+
+While engaged on the Cenacolo, Leonardo painted the portrait of
+Lucrezia Crivelli, now in the Louvre (No. 483). It has been engraved
+under the title of _La Belle Ferronniere_, but later researches leave
+us no doubt that it represents Lucrezia Crivelli, a beautiful favorite
+of Ludovico Sforza, and was painted at Milan in 1497. It is, as a work
+of art, of such extraordinary perfection that all critical admiration
+is lost in wonder.
+
+Of the grand equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, Leonardo never
+finished more than the model in clay, which was considered a
+masterpiece. Some years afterward (in 1499), when Milan was invaded by
+the French, it was used as a target by the Gascon bowmen, and
+completely destroyed. The profound anatomical studies which Leonardo
+made for this work still exist.
+
+[Illustration: Raphael Introduced to Da Vinci.]
+
+In the year 1500, the French being in possession of Milan, his patron
+Ludovico in captivity, and the affairs of the state in utter
+confusion, Leonardo returned to his native Florence, where he hoped to
+re-establish his broken fortunes, and to find employment. Here begins
+the third period of his artistic life, from 1500 to 1513, that is,
+from his forty-eighth to his sixtieth year. He found the Medici family
+in exile, but was received by Pietro Soderini (who governed the city
+as "_Gonfaloniere perpetuo_") with great distinction, and a pension
+was assigned to him as painter in the service of the republic. One of
+his first works after his return to Florence was the famous portrait
+of Madonna Lisa del Giocondo, called in French _La Joconde_, and now
+in the Louvre (484), which after the death of Leonardo was purchased
+by Francis I. for 4,000 gold crowns, equal to 45,000 francs or L1,800,
+an enormous sum in those days; yet who ever thought it too much?
+
+Then began the rivalry between Leonardo and Michael Angelo, which
+lasted during the remainder of Leonardo's life. The difference of age
+(for Michael Angelo was twenty-two years younger) ought to have
+prevented all unseemly jealousy; but Michael Angelo was haughty and
+impatient of all superiority, or even equality; Leonardo, sensitive,
+capricious, and naturally disinclined to admit the pretensions of a
+rival, to whom he could say, and _did_ say, "I was famous before you
+were born!" With all their admiration of each other's genius, their
+mutual frailties prevented any real good-will on either side.
+
+Leonardo, during his stay at Florence, painted the portrait of Ginevra
+Benci, the reigning beauty of her time. We find that in 1502 he was
+engaged by Caesar Borgia to visit and report on the fortifications of
+his territories, and in this office he was employed for two years. In
+1503 he formed a plan for turning the course of the Arno, and in the
+following year he lost his father. In 1505 he modelled the group which
+we now see over the northern door of the San Giovanni, at Florence. In
+1514 he was invited to Rome by Leo X., but more in his character of
+philosopher, mechanic, and alchemist, than as a painter. Here Raphael
+was at the height of his fame, and engaged in his greatest works, the
+frescos of the Vatican. The younger artist was introduced to the
+elder; and two pictures which Leonardo painted while at Rome--the
+"Madonna of St. Onofrio," and the "Holy Family," painted for Filiberta
+of Savoy, the pope's sister-in-law (which is now at St.
+Petersburg)--show that even this veteran in art felt the irresistible
+influence of the genius of his young rival. They are both
+_Raffaelesque_ in the subject and treatment.
+
+It appears that Leonardo was ill-satisfied with his sojourn at Rome.
+He had long been accustomed to hold the first rank as an artist
+wherever he resided; whereas at Rome he found himself only one among
+many who, if they acknowledged his greatness, affected to consider his
+day as past. He was conscious that many of the improvements in the
+arts which were now brought into use, and which enabled the painters
+of the day to produce such extraordinary effects, were invented or
+introduced by himself. If he could no longer assert that measureless
+superiority over all others which he had done in his younger days, it
+was because he himself had opened to them new paths to excellence. The
+arrival of his old competitor, Michael Angelo, and some slight on the
+part of Leo X., who was annoyed by his speculative and dilatory habits
+in executing the works intrusted to him, all added to his irritation
+and disgust. He left Rome, and set out for Pavia, where the French
+king, Francis I., then held his court. He was received by the young
+monarch with every mark of respect, loaded with favors, and a pension
+of 700 gold crowns settled on him for life. At the famous conference
+between Francis I. and Leo X., at Bologna, Leonardo attended his new
+patron, and was of essential service to him on that occasion. In the
+following year, 1516, he returned with Francis I. to France, and was
+attached to the French court as principal painter. It appears,
+however, that during his residence in France he did not paint a single
+picture. His health had begun to decline from the time he left Italy;
+and feeling his end approach, he prepared himself for it by religious
+meditation, by acts of charity, and by a most conscientious
+distribution by will of all his worldly possessions to his relatives
+and friends. At length, after protracted suffering, this great and
+most extraordinary man died at Cloux, near Amboise, May 2, 1519, being
+then in his sixty-seventh year. It is to be regretted that we cannot
+wholly credit the beautiful story of his dying in the arms of Francis
+I., who, as it is said, had come to visit him on his death-bed. It
+would indeed have been, as Fuseli expressed it, "an honor to the king,
+by which destiny would have atoned to that monarch for his future
+disaster at Pavia."
+
+
+
+
+MICHAEL ANGELO
+
+By ANNA JAMESON
+
+(1474-1564)
+
+
+[Illustration: Michael Angelo.]
+
+We have spoken of Leonardo da Vinci. Michael Angelo, the other great
+luminary of art, was twenty-two years younger, but the more severe and
+reflective cast of his mind rendered their difference of age far less
+in effect than in reality. It is usual to compare Michael Angelo with
+Raphael, but he is more aptly compared with Leonardo da Vinci. All the
+great artists of that time, even Raphael himself, were influenced more
+or less by these two extraordinary men, but they exercised no
+influence on each other. They started from opposite points; they
+pursued throughout their whole existence, and in all they planned and
+achieved, a course as different as their respective characters.
+
+Michael Angelo Buonarroti was born at Setignano, near Florence, in the
+year 1474. He was descended from a family once noble--even among the
+noblest of the feudal lords of Northern Italy--the Counts of Canossa;
+but that branch of it represented by his father, Luigi Leonardo
+Buonarroti Simoni, had for some generations become poorer and poorer,
+until the last descendant was thankful to accept an office in the law,
+and had been nominated magistrate or mayor (_Podesta_) of Chiusi. In
+this situation he had limited his ambition to the prospect of seeing
+his eldest son a notary or advocate in his native city. The young
+Michael Angelo showed the utmost distaste for the studies allotted to
+him, and was continually escaping from his home and from his desk to
+haunt the ateliers of the painters, particularly that of Ghirlandajo
+who was then at the height of his reputation.
+
+The father of Michael Angelo, who found his family increase too
+rapidly for his means, had destined some of his sons for commerce (it
+will be recollected that in Genoa and Florence the most powerful
+nobles were merchants or manufacturers), and others for civil or
+diplomatic employments; but the fine arts, as being at that time
+productive of little honor or emolument, he held in no esteem, and
+treated these tastes of his eldest son sometimes with contempt and
+sometimes even with harshness. Michael Angelo, however, had formed
+some friendships among the young painters, and particularly with
+Francesco Granacci, one of the best pupils of Ghirlandajo; he
+contrived to borrow models and drawings, and studied them in secret
+with such persevering assiduity and consequent improvement, that
+Ghirlandajo, captivated by his genius, undertook to plead his cause to
+his father, and at length prevailed over the old man's family pride
+and prejudices. At the age of fourteen Michael Angelo was received
+into the studio of Ghirlandajo as a regular pupil, and bound to him
+for three years; and such was the precocious talent of the boy, that,
+instead of being paid for his instruction, Ghirlandajo undertook to
+pay the father, Leonardo Buonarroti, for the first, second, and third
+years, six, eight, and twelve golden florins, as payment for the
+advantage he expected to derive from the labor of the son. Thus was
+the vocation of the young artist decided for life.
+
+At that time Lorenzo the Magnificent reigned over Florence. He had
+formed in his palace and gardens a collection of antique marbles,
+busts, statues, fragments, which he had converted into an academy for
+the use of young artists, placing at the head of it as director a
+sculptor of some eminence, named Bertoldo. Michael Angelo was one of
+the first who, through the recommendation of Ghirlandajo, was received
+into this new academy, afterward so famous and so memorable in the
+history of art. The young man, then not quite sixteen, had hitherto
+occupied himself chiefly in drawing; but now, fired by the beauties he
+beheld around him, and by the example and success of a fellow-pupil,
+Torregiano, he set himself to model in clay, and at length to copy in
+marble what was before him; but, as was natural in a character and
+genius so steeped in individuality, his copies became not so much
+imitations of form as original embodyings of the leading idea. For
+example: his first attempt in marble, when he was about fifteen, was a
+copy of an antique mask of an old laughing Faun; he treated this in a
+manner so different from the original, and so spirited as to excite
+the astonishment of Lorenzo de Medici, who criticised it, however,
+saying, "Thou shouldst have remembered that old folks do not retain
+all their teeth; some of them are always wanting." The boy struck the
+teeth out, giving it at once the most grotesque expression; and
+Lorenzo, infinitely amused, sent for his father and offered to attach
+his son to his own particular service, and to undertake the entire
+care of his education. The father consented, on condition of
+receiving for himself an office under the government, and thenceforth
+Michael Angelo was lodged in the palace of the Medici and treated by
+Lorenzo as his son.
+
+Michael Angelo continued his studies under the auspices of Lorenzo;
+but just as he had reached his eighteenth year he lost his generous
+patron, his second father, and was thenceforth thrown on his own
+resources. It is true that the son of Lorenzo, Piero de Medici,
+continued to extend his favor to the young artist, but with so little
+comprehension of his genius and character, that on one occasion,
+during the severe winter of 1494, he set him to form a statue of snow
+for the amusement of his guests.
+
+Michael Angelo, while he yielded, perforce, to the caprices of his
+protector, turned the energies of his mind to a new study--that of
+anatomy--and pursued it with all that fervor which belonged to his
+character. His attention was at the same time directed to literature,
+by the counsels and conversations of a very celebrated scholar and
+poet then residing in the court of Piero--Angelo Poliziano; and he
+pursued at the same time the cultivation of his mind and the practice
+of his art. Engrossed by his own studies, he was scarcely aware of
+what was passing around him, nor of the popular intrigues which were
+preparing the ruin of the Medici; suddenly this powerful family were
+flung from sovereignty to temporary disgrace and exile; and Michael
+Angelo, as one of their retainers, was obliged to fly from Florence,
+and took refuge in the city of Bologna. During the year he spent there
+he found a friend, who employed him on some works of sculpture; and on
+his return to Florence he executed a Cupid in marble, of such beauty
+that it found its way into the cabinet of the Duchess of Mantua as a
+real antique. On the discovery that the author of this beautiful
+statue was a young man of two-and-twenty, the Cardinal San Giorgio
+invited him to Rome, and for some time lodged him in his palace. Here
+Michael Angelo, surrounded and inspired by the grand remains of
+antiquity, pursued his studies with unceasing energy; he produced a
+statue of Bacchus, which added to his reputation; and in 1500, at the
+age of five-and-twenty, he produced the famous group of the dead
+Christ on the knees of his Virgin Mother (called the "Pieta"), which
+is now in the church of St. Peter's, at Rome; this last being
+frequently copied and imitated, obtained him so much applause and
+reputation, that he was recalled to Florence, to undertake several
+public works, and we find him once more established in his native city
+in the year 1502.
+
+In 1506 Michael Angelo was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II., who,
+while living, had conceived the idea of erecting a most splendid
+monument to perpetuate his memory. For this work, which was never
+completed, Michael Angelo executed the famous statue of Moses, seated,
+grasping his flowing beard with one hand, and with the other
+sustaining the tables of the Law. While employed on this tomb, the
+pope commanded him to undertake also the decoration of the ceiling of
+the Sistine Chapel. Pope Sixtus IV. had, in the year 1473, erected
+this famous chapel, and summoned the best painters of that time,
+Signorelli, Cosimo Roselli, Perugino, and Ghirlandajo, to decorate the
+interior; but down to the year 1508 the ceiling remained without any
+ornament; and Michael Angelo was called upon to cover this enormous
+vault, a space of one hundred and fifty feet in length by fifty in
+breadth, with a series of subjects representing the most important
+events connected, either literally or typically, with the fall and
+redemption of mankind.
+
+No part of Michael Angelo's long life is so interesting, so full of
+characteristic incident, as the history of his intercourse with Pope
+Julius II., which began in 1505, and ended only with the death of the
+pope in 1513.
+
+Michael Angelo had at all times a lofty idea of his own dignity as an
+artist, and never would stoop either to flatter a patron or to
+conciliate a rival. Julius II., though now seventy-four, was as
+impatient of contradiction as fiery in temper, as full of magnificent
+and ambitious projects as if he had been in the prime of life; in his
+service was the famous architect, Bramante, who beheld with jealousy
+and alarm the increasing fame of Michael Angelo, and his influence
+with the pontiff, and set himself by indirect means to lessen both. He
+insinuated to Julius that it was ominous to erect his own mausoleum
+during his lifetime, and the pope gradually fell off in his attentions
+to Michael Angelo, and neglected to supply him with the necessary
+funds for carrying on the work. On one occasion, Michael Angelo,
+finding it difficult to obtain access to the pope, sent a message to
+him to this effect, "that henceforth, if his Holiness desired to see
+him, he should send to seek him elsewhere;" and the same night,
+leaving orders with his servants to dispose of his property, he
+departed for Florence. The pope despatched five couriers after him
+with threats, persuasions, promises--but in vain. He wrote to the
+Gonfaloniere Soderini, then at the head of the government of Florence,
+commanding him, on pain of his extreme displeasure, to send Michael
+Angelo back to him; but the inflexible artist absolutely refused;
+three months were spent in vain negotiations. Soderini, at length,
+fearing the pope's anger, prevailed on Michael Angelo to return, and
+sent with him his relation, Cardinal Soderini, to make up the quarrel
+between the high contending powers.
+
+On his return to Rome, Michael Angelo wished to have resumed his work
+on the mausoleum; but the pope had resolved on the completion of the
+Sistine Chapel; he commanded Michael Angelo to undertake the
+decoration of the vaulted ceiling; and the artist was obliged, though
+reluctantly, to obey. At this time the frescos which Raphael and his
+pupils were painting in the chambers of the Vatican had excited the
+admiration of all Rome. Michael Angelo, who had never exercised
+himself in the mechanical part of the art of fresco, invited from
+Florence several painters of eminence, to execute his designs under
+his own superintendence; but they could not reach the grandeur of his
+conceptions, which became enfeebled under their hands, and one
+morning, in a mood of impatience, he destroyed all that they had done,
+closed the doors of the chapel against them, and would not thenceforth
+admit them to his presence. He then shut himself up, and proceeded
+with incredible perseverance and energy to accomplish his task alone;
+he even prepared his colors with his own hands. He began with the end
+toward the door, and in the two compartments first painted (though
+not first in the series), the "Deluge," and the "Vineyard of Noah;" he
+made the figures too numerous and too small to produce their full
+effect from below, a fault which he corrected in those executed
+subsequently. When almost half the work was completed, the pope
+insisted on viewing what was done, and the astonishment and admiration
+it excited rendered him more and more eager to have the whole
+completed at once. The progress, however, was not rapid enough to suit
+the impatient temper of the pontiff. On one occasion he demanded of
+the artist _when_ he meant to finish it; to which Michael Angelo
+replied calmly, "When I can." "When thou canst!" exclaimed the fiery
+old pope, "thou hast a mind that I should have thee thrown from the
+scaffold!" At length, on the day of All Saints, 1512, the ceiling was
+uncovered to public view. Michael Angelo had employed on the painting
+only, without reckoning the time spent in preparing the cartoons,
+twenty-two months, and he received in payment three thousand crowns.
+
+The collection of engravings after Michael Angelo in the British
+Museum is very imperfect, but it contains some fine old prints from
+the Prophets which should be studied by those who wish to understand
+the true merit of this great master, of whom Sir Joshua Reynolds said
+that, "to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his
+perfections, would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious
+man!"
+
+When the Sistine Chapel was completed Michael Angelo was in his
+thirty-ninth year; fifty years of a glorious though troubled career
+were still before him.
+
+Pope Julius II. died in 1513, and was succeeded by Leo X., the son of
+Lorenzo the Magnificent. As a Florentine and his father's son, we
+might naturally have expected that he would have gloried in
+patronizing and employing Michael Angelo; but such was not the case.
+There was something in the stern, unbending character, and retired and
+abstemious habits of Michael Angelo, repulsive to the temper of Leo,
+who preferred the graceful and amiable Raphael, then in the prime of
+his life and genius; hence arose the memorable rivalry between Michael
+Angelo and Raphael, which on the part of the latter was merely
+generous emulation, while it must be confessed that something like
+scorn mingled with the feelings of Michael Angelo. The pontificate of
+Leo X., an interval of ten years, was the least productive period of
+his life. In the year 1519, when the Signoria of Florence was
+negotiating with Ravenna for the restoration of the remains of Dante,
+he petitioned the pope that he might be allowed to execute, at his own
+labor and expense, a monument to the "Divine Poet." He was sent to
+Florence to superintend the building of the church of San Lorenzo and
+the completion of Santa Croce; but he differed with the pope on the
+choice of the marble, quarrelled with the officials, and scarcely
+anything was accomplished. Clement VII., another Medici, was elected
+pope in 1523. He had conceived the idea of consecrating a chapel in
+the church of San Lorenzo, to receive the tombs of his ancestors and
+relations, and which should be adorned with all the splendor of art.
+Michael Angelo planned and built the chapel, and for its interior
+decoration designed and executed six of his greatest works in
+sculpture.
+
+While Michael Angelo was engaged in these works his progress was
+interrupted by events which threw all Italy into commotion. Rome was
+taken and sacked by the Constable de Bourbon in 1527. The Medici were
+once more expelled from Florence; and Michael Angelo, in the midst of
+these strange vicissitudes, was employed by the republic to fortify
+his native city against his former patrons. Great as an engineer, as
+in every other department of art and science, he defended Florence for
+nine months. At length the city was given up by treachery, and,
+fearing the vengeance of the conquerors, Michael Angelo fled and
+concealed himself; but Clement VII. was too sensible of his merit to
+allow him to remain long in disgrace and exile. He was pardoned, and
+continued ever afterward in high favor with the pope, who employed him
+on the sculptures in the chapel of San Lorenzo during the remainder of
+his pontificate.
+
+In the year 1531 he had completed the statues of "Night and Morning,"
+and Clement, who heard of his incessant labors, sent him a brief
+commanding him, _on pain of excommunication_, to take care of his
+health, and not to accept of any other work but that which his
+Holiness had assigned him.
+
+Clement VII. was succeeded by Pope Paul III., of the Farnese family,
+in 1534. This pope, though nearly seventy when he was elected, was as
+anxious to immortalize his name by great undertakings as any of his
+predecessors had been. His first wish was to complete the decoration
+of the interior of the Sistine Chapel, left unfinished by Julius II.
+and Leo X. He summoned Michael Angelo, who endeavored to excuse
+himself, pleading other engagements; but the pope would listen to no
+excuses which interfered with his sovereign power to dissolve all
+other obligations; and thus the artist found himself, after an
+interval of twenty years, most reluctantly forced to abandon sculpture
+for painting; and, as Vasari expresses it, he consented to serve Pope
+Paul only because he _could_ not do otherwise.
+
+The same Pope Paul III. had in the meantime constructed a beautiful
+chapel, which was called after his name the chapel _Paolina_, and
+dedicated to St. Peter and St Paul. Michael Angelo was called upon to
+design the decorations. He painted on one side the "Conversion of St.
+Paul," and on the other the "Crucifixion of St. Peter," which were
+completed in 1549. But these fine paintings--of which existing old
+engravings give a better idea than the blackened and faded remains of
+the original frescos--were from the first ill-disposed as to the
+locality, and badly lighted, and at present they excite little
+interest compared with the more famous works in the Sistine.
+
+With the frescos in the Pauline Chapel ends Michael Angelo's career as
+a painter. He had been appointed chief architect of St. Peter's, in
+1547, by Paul III. He was then in his seventy-second year, and during
+the remainder of his life, a period of sixteen years, we find him
+wholly devoted to architecture. His vast and daring genius finding
+ample scope in the completion of St. Peter's, he has left behind him
+in his capacity of architect yet greater marvels than he has achieved
+as painter and sculptor. Who that has seen the cupola of St. Peter's
+soaring into the skies, but will think almost with awe of the
+universal and majestic intellect of the man who reared it?
+
+It appears, from the evidence of contemporary writers, that in the
+last years of his life the acknowledged worth and genius of Michael
+Angelo, his widespread fame, and his unblemished integrity, combined
+with his venerable age and the haughtiness and reserve of his
+deportment to invest him with a sort of princely dignity. It is
+recorded that, when he waited on Pope Julius III., to receive his
+commands, the pontiff rose on his approach, seated him, in spite of
+his excuses, on his right hand, and while a crowd of cardinals,
+prelates, and ambassadors, were standing round at humble distance,
+carried on the conference as equal with equal. When the Grand Duke
+Cosmo was in Rome, in 1560, he visited Michael Angelo, uncovered in
+his presence, and stood with his hat in his hand while speaking to
+him; but from the time when he made himself the tyrant of Florence he
+never could persuade Michael Angelo to visit, even for a day, his
+native city.
+
+The arrogance imputed to Michael Angelo seems rather to have arisen
+from a contempt for others than from any overweening opinion of
+himself. He was too proud to be vain. He had placed his standard of
+perfection so high, that to the latest hour of his life he considered
+himself as striving after that ideal excellence which had been
+revealed to him, but to which he conceived that others were blind or
+indifferent. In allusion to his own imperfections, he made a drawing,
+since become famous, which represents an aged man in a go-cart, and
+underneath the words "_Ancora impara_" (still learning).
+
+He continued to labor unremittingly, and with the same resolute energy
+of mind and purpose, till the gradual decay of his strength warned him
+of his approaching end. He did not suffer from any particular malady,
+and his mind was strong and clear to the last. He died at Rome, on
+February 18, 1564, in the ninetieth year of his age. A few days before
+his death he dictated his will in these few simple words: "I bequeath
+my soul to God, my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest
+relations." His nephew, Leonardo Buonarroti, who was his principal
+heir, by the orders of the Grand Duke Cosmo had his remains secretly
+conveyed out of Rome and brought to Florence; they were with due
+honors deposited in the church of Santa Croce, under a costly
+monument, on which we may see his noble bust surrounded by three very
+commonplace and ill-executed statues, representing the arts in which
+he excelled--Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. They might have
+added _Poetry_, for Michael Angelo was so fine a poet that his
+productions would have given him fame, though he had never peopled the
+Sistine with his giant creations, nor "suspended the Pantheon in the
+air." The object to whom his poems are chiefly addressed, Vittoria
+Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, was the widow of the celebrated
+commander who overcame Francis I. at the battle of Pavia; herself a
+poetess, and one of the most celebrated women of her time for beauty,
+talents, virtue, and piety. She died in 1547.
+
+[Illustration: Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna.]
+
+
+
+
+RAPHAEL
+
+By Mrs. LEE
+
+(1483-1520)
+
+
+[Illustration: Raphael.]
+
+The solemn and silent season of Lent had passed away; and, on the
+second evening of the joyful Easter, a house was seen brightly
+illuminated in one of the streets of Urbino. It was evident that a
+festival was held there on some happy occasion. The sound of music was
+heard, and guest after guest entered the mansion. No one, however, was
+more cordially welcomed than Pietro Perugino, the fellow-student of
+Leonardo da Vinci, at the school of the good old Andrea Verocchio.
+
+For a moment, general gayety was suspended in honor of the guest. He
+was considered at that time one of the greatest painters of the age;
+and the host, Giovanni di Sanzio, though himself only ranking in the
+second or third order of limners, knew well how to prize the rare
+talents of his visitor.
+
+The wife of Giovanni came forward, leading her son Raphael. Perugino
+had the eye of an artist: he gazed upon the mother and son with
+enthusiastic feeling; the striking resemblance they bore to each
+other, so exquisitely modulated by years and sex, was indeed a study
+for this minute copyist of nature.
+
+"Benvenuto, Messer Perugino," said the hostess, with her soft musical
+voice and graceful Italian accent, and she placed the hand of her boy
+in that of the artist. Gently he laid the other on the head of the
+youthful Raphael, and in a solemn and tender manner pronounced a
+benediction.
+
+"Your blessing is well timed, my honored friend," said Giovanni, "our
+festival is given to celebrate the birthday of our son."
+
+"Is this his birthday?" inquired Perugino.
+
+"Not so," replied the father, "he was born on April 7th, the evening
+of _Good Friday_, and it well befits us to be gay on the joyful Easter
+that succeeds it."
+
+"My friend," said Perugino, "if thou wilt entrust thy boy to my care,
+I will take him as my pupil."
+
+The father acceded with delight to this proposal. When the mother
+became acquainted with the arrangement, and found that her son was to
+quit his paternal dwelling at the early age of twelve, and reside
+wholly with Perugino, she could not restrain her tears. With hers the
+young Raphael's mingled, though ever and anon a bright smile darted
+like a sunbeam across his face.
+
+He remained with Perugino several years. Raphael was made for
+affection, and fondly did his heart cling to his instructor. For a
+time he was content to follow his manner; but at length he began to
+dwell upon his own beau ideal; he grew impatient of imitation, and
+felt that his style was deficient in freshness and originality. He
+longed to pass the narrow bounds to which his invention had been
+confined.
+
+With the approbation of Perugino and the consent of his parents, he
+repaired to Siena; here he was solicited to adorn the public library
+with fresco, and painted there with great success. But while he was
+busily engaged, his friend, Pinturrichio, one day entered. After
+looking at his friend's work very attentively, "Bravo!" he exclaimed,
+"thou hast done well, my Raphael--but I have just returned from
+Florence--oh, would that thou couldst behold the works of Leonardo da
+Vinci! Such horses! they paw the ground and shake the foam from their
+manes. Oh, my poor Raphael! thou hast never seen nature; thou art
+wasting time on these cartoons. Perugino is a good man and a good
+painter, I will not deny that--but Leonardo's horses!"
+
+Raphael threw aside his pencil and hastily rose.
+
+"Where now?" asked his friend; "whither art thou going so hastily?"
+
+"To Florence," exclaimed Raphael.
+
+"And what carries you so suddenly?"
+
+"The horses of Leonardo," replied the young artist, sportively;
+"seriously, however, the desire of excellence implanted in my soul."
+
+When he arrived at Florence he was charmed with the appearance of the
+city; but his whole mind was absorbed in the works of Leonardo da
+Vinci and of Michael Angelo, the rival artists of the age. As his stay
+was to be short, he did not enter upon laborious occupation. His
+mornings were passed in the reveries of his art; his evenings in the
+gay and fascinating society of Florence, where the fame of Perugino's
+beloved pupil had already reached. The frescos at Siena were spoken
+of; and the beautiful countenance and graceful deportment of Raphael
+won him the friendship of distinguished men. Taddeo Taddei, the
+learned friend of Cardinal Bembo, solicited him to reside in his
+house; he consented, and in return for the courtesy painted for him
+two pictures, in what is called his first style, that of Perugino.
+
+One evening he retired to his couch at a late hour. He had been the
+hero of a _fete_, and love and beauty had heedlessly scattered their
+flowers in the path of the living Adonis. In vain he sought a few
+hours of slumber. He had quaffed the juice of the grape, emptying
+goblet after goblet, till his beating pulse and throbbing temples
+refused to be quieted. He started from his couch and approached the
+lattice; the heavens had changed their aspect, the still serenity of
+the evening had passed away, and the clouds were hurrying over the
+pale and watery moon. Nothing was heard but the low sighing of the
+wind, and now and then a sudden gust swept through the lattice, and
+threatened to extinguish the taper which was burning dimly on the
+table. A slight noise made him turn his eyes, and he perceived a note
+that the wind had displaced. He hastily took it up. It was Perugino's
+handwriting. He cut the silken cord that fastened it, and read:
+
+"On me, my beloved Raffaello, devolves the task of informing you of
+the events which have taken place at Urbino. May this letter find you
+prepared for all the changes of life; a wise man will never suffer
+himself to be taken by surprise; this is true philosophy, and the
+_only philosophy_ that can serve us! An epidemic has prevailed at
+Urbino, and has entered your paternal dwelling. Need I say more? Come
+to me, my son, at Perugia, for I am the only parent that remains to
+you. Pietro Perugino."
+
+As he hastily arose, a crucifix which his mother had suspended to his
+neck at parting, fell from his bosom. Even the symbols of religion are
+sacred where the living principle has been early implanted in the
+heart. He pressed it to his lips: "Ah!" thought he, "what is the
+_philosophy_ of Perugino, compared to the _faith_ of which this is the
+emblem?" His thoughts went back to infancy and childhood, and his
+grief and remorse grew less intense. He dwelt on the deep and enduring
+love of his parents till he felt assured death could not extinguish
+it, and that he should see them again in a brighter sphere.
+
+When morning came it found Raphael calm and composed; the lines of
+grief and thought were deeply marked on his youthful face; but the
+whirlwind and the storm had passed. He took leave of his friends, and
+hastened to Perugino, who received him with the fondness of a parent.
+
+Here he remained some time, and at length collected sufficient
+resolution to return to Urbino, and once more enter the mansion of his
+desolated home.
+
+It was necessary for him to reside at his native place for a number of
+months. During that time he painted several fine pictures. His heart,
+however, yearned for Florence, and he returned to it once more with
+the determination of making it his home. With far different sensations
+did he a second time enter the city of beauty. The freshness of his
+gayety was blighted; lessons of earthly disappointment were ever
+present to his mind, and he returned to it with the resolute purpose
+of devoting himself to serious occupation.
+
+How well he fulfilled this resolution all Italy can bear witness. From
+this time he adopted what has been called his _second manner_. He
+painted for the Duke of Urbino the beautiful picture of the Saviour at
+sunrise, with the morning light cast over a face resplendent with
+divinity; the flowers glittering with dew, the two disciples beyond,
+still buried in slumber, at the time when the Saviour turns his eyes
+upon them with that tender and sorrowful exclamation, "Could ye not
+watch one hour?"
+
+Raphael enriched the city of Florence with his works. When asked what
+had suggested some of the beautiful combinations of his paintings, he
+said, "They came to me in my sleep." At other times he called them
+"visions;" and then again said they were the result of "una certa idea
+che mi viene alla mente." It was this power of drawing from the deep
+wells of his own mind that gave such character, originality, and
+freshness to his works. He found that power _within_ which so many
+seek, and seek in vain, _without_.
+
+At the age of twenty-five Raphael was summoned by the pope to paint
+the chambers of the Vatican. The famous frescos of the Vatican need
+neither enumeration nor description; the world is their judge and
+their eulogist.
+
+No artist ever consecrated his works more by his affections than
+Raphael. The same hallowed influence of the heart gave inexpressible
+charm to Correggio's, afterward. One of Raphael's friends said to him,
+in looking upon particular figures in his groups, "You have
+transmitted to posterity your own likeness."
+
+"See you nothing beyond that?" replied the artist.
+
+"I see," said the critic, "the deep-blue eye, and the long, fair hair
+parted on the forehead."
+
+"Observe," said Raphael, "the feminine softness of expression, the
+beautiful harmony of thought and feeling. When I take my pencil for
+high and noble purposes, the spirit of my mother hovers over me. It is
+her countenance, not my own, of which you trace the resemblance."
+
+This expression is always observable in his Madonnas. His portraits of
+the _Fornarina_ are widely different. Raphael, in his last and most
+excellent style, united what was graceful and exquisite in Leonardo
+with the sublime and noble manner of Michael Angelo. It is the
+privilege and glory of genius to appropriate to itself whatever is
+noble and true. The region of thought is thus made a common ground for
+all, and one master mind becomes a reservoir for the present and
+future times.
+
+When Raphael was invited to Rome by Pope Julius II., Michael Angelo
+was at the height of his glory; his character tended to inspire awe
+rather than affection; he delighted in the majestic and the terrible.
+In boldness of conception and grandeur of design, he surpassed
+Leonardo, but never could reach the sweetness and gentleness of his
+figures. Even his children lose something of their infantine beauty,
+and look mature; his women are commanding and lofty; his men of
+gigantic proportions. His painting, like his sculpture, is remarkable
+for anatomical exactness, and perfect expression of the muscles. For
+this union of magnificence and sublimity, it was necessary to prepare
+the mind; the first view was almost harsh, and it was by degrees that
+his mighty works produced their designed effect. Raphael, while he
+felt all the greatness of the Florentine, conceived that there might
+be something more like nature--something that should be harmonious,
+sweet, and flowing--that should convey the idea of intellectual rather
+than of external majesty. Without yielding any of the correctness of
+science, he avoided harshness, and imitated antiquity in uniting grace
+and elegance with a strict observation of science and of the rules of
+art.
+
+It was with surprise that Michael Angelo beheld in the youthful
+Raphael a rival artist; nor did he receive this truth meekly; he
+treated him with coldness and distance. In the meantime Raphael went
+on with his works; he completed the frescos of the Vatican, and
+designed the cartoons. He also produced those exquisite paintings in
+oil which seem the perfection of human art.
+
+[Illustration: Leo X. at Raphael's Bier.]
+
+Human affection is necessary to awaken the sympathy of human beings;
+and Raphael, in learning how to portray it, had found the way to the
+heart. In mere grandeur of invention he was surpassed by Michael
+Angelo. Titian excelled him in coloring, and Correggio in the
+beautiful gradation of tone; but Raphael knew how to paint the soul;
+in this he stood alone. This was the great secret of a power which
+seemed to operate like magic. In his paintings there is something
+which makes music on the chords of every heart; for they are the
+expression of a mind attuned to nature, and find answering sympathies
+in the universal soul.
+
+While Michael Angelo was exalted with the Epic grandeur of his own
+Dante, Raphael presented the most finished scenes of dramatic life,
+and might be compared to the immortal Shakespeare--scenes of spiritual
+beauty, of devotion, and of pastoral simplicity, yet uniting a classic
+elegance which the poet does not possess. Buonarroti was the wonder of
+Italy, and Raphael became its idol.
+
+Julius was so much enchanted with his paintings in the halls of the
+Vatican, that he ordered the frescos of former artists to be
+destroyed. Among them were some of Perugino's, but Raphael would not
+suffer these to be removed for his own; he viewed them as the relics
+of a beloved and honored friend, and they were consecrated by tender
+and grateful feelings.
+
+Raphael collected from every part of the world medallions of intaglios
+and antiques to assist him in his designs. He loved splendor and
+conviviality, and gave offence thereby to the rigid and austere. It
+was said that he had a prospect of changing the graceful beretta for a
+cardinal's hat; but this idea might have arisen from the delay which
+existed in his marriage with Cardinal Bibiano's niece, whose hand her
+uncle had offered to him. Peremptorily to reject this proposal of the
+cardinal without giving offence would have been impossible, and
+Raphael was too gentle in his own feelings voluntarily to injure
+another's; but he was not one to sacrifice his affections to ambition.
+
+Whatever were the struggles of his heart, they were early terminated.
+Amid the caresses of the great, the fond and devoted friendship of his
+equals, the enthusiastic love of his pupils, the adulation of his
+inferiors, while crowned with wealth, fame, and honor, and regarded as
+the equal of the hitherto greatest artist in the world, he was
+suddenly called away. He died on Good Friday, the day of his birth, at
+the age of thirty-seven, 1520.
+
+We are sometimes impressed with veneration when those who have even
+drunk the cup of life almost to its dregs resign it with resignation
+and Christian faith. But Raphael calmly and firmly resigned it when it
+was full to the brim.
+
+Leo X. and Cardinal Bibiano were by his bedside. The sublime picture
+of the "Transfiguration," the last and greatest which he painted, was
+placed opposite to him, by his own desire. How impressive must have
+been the scene! His dying eye turned from the crucifix he held in his
+hand to the glory of the beatified Saviour.
+
+His contemporaries speak of him as affectionate, disinterested,
+modest, and sincere; encouraging humble merit, and freely giving his
+advice and assistance where it was needed and deserved.
+
+
+
+
+TITIAN
+
+By GIORGIO VASARI[2]
+
+         [Footnote 2: Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary of Titian, and
+         himself a painter of no mean rank, wrote a series of lives of
+         the Italian artists, from which the following is extracted.
+         There are several slight inaccuracies in his work Titian was
+         born, not in 1480, but in 1477, and died in 1576. He was in
+         coloring the greatest artist who ever lived.]
+
+1477-1576
+
+
+[Illustration: Titian.]
+
+Titian was born in the year 1480, at Cadore, a small place distant
+about five miles from the foot of the Alps; he belonged to the family
+of the Vecelli, which is among the most noble of those parts. Giving
+early proof of much intelligence, he was sent at the age of ten to an
+uncle in Venice, an honorable citizen, who, seeing the boy to be much
+inclined to painting, placed him with the excellent painter, Gian
+Bellino, then very famous. Under his care, the youth soon proved
+himself to be endowed by nature with all the gifts of judgment and
+genius required for the art of painting. Now, Gian Bellino and the
+other masters of that country, not having the habit of studying the
+antique, were accustomed to copy only what they saw before them, and
+that in a dry, hard, labored manner, which Titian also acquired; but
+about the year 1507, Giorgione da Castel Franco, not being satisfied
+with that mode of proceeding, began to give to his works an unwonted
+softness and relief, painting them in a very beautiful manner; yet he
+by no means neglected to draw from the life, or to copy nature with
+his colors as closely as he could; and in doing the latter he shaded
+with colder or warmer tints as the living object might demand, but
+without first making a drawing; since he held that, to paint with the
+colors only, without any drawing on paper, was the best mode of
+proceeding, and most perfectly in accord with the true principles of
+design.
+
+Having seen the manner of Giorgione, Titian early resolved to abandon
+that of Gian Bellino, although well grounded therein. He now,
+therefore, devoted himself to this purpose, and in a short time so
+closely imitated Giorgione that his pictures were sometimes taken for
+those of that master, as will be related below. Increasing in age,
+judgment, and facility of hand, our young artist executed numerous
+works in fresco which cannot here be named individually, having been
+dispersed in various places; let it suffice to say, that they were
+such as to cause experienced men to anticipate the excellence to which
+he afterward attained. At the time when Titian began to adopt the
+manner of Giorgione, being then not more than eighteen, he took the
+portrait of a gentleman of the Barberigo family, who was his friend,
+and this was considered very beautiful, the coloring being true and
+natural, and the hair so distinctly painted that each one could be
+counted as might also the stitches in a satin doublet, painted in the
+same work; it was so well and carefully done, that it would have been
+taken for a picture by Giorgione, if Titian had not written his name
+on the dark ground.
+
+Giorgione meanwhile had executed the facade of the German Exchange,
+when, by the intervention of Barberigo, Titian was appointed to paint
+certain stories in the same building and over the Merceria. After
+which he executed a picture with figures the size of life, which is
+now in the Hall of Messer Andrea Loredano, who dwells near San
+Marcuola; this work represents "Our Lady" in her flight into Egypt.
+She is in the midst of a great wood, and the landscape of this picture
+is well done; Titian having practised that branch of art, and keeping
+certain Germans, who were excellent masters therein, for several
+months together in his own house. Within the wood he depicted various
+animals, all painted from the life, and so natural as to seem almost
+alive. In the house of Messer Giovanni Danna, a Flemish gentleman and
+merchant, who was his gossip, he painted a portrait which appears to
+breathe, with an "Ecce Homo," comprising numerous figures which, by
+Titian himself, as well as others, is considered to be a very good
+work. The same artist executed a picture of "Our Lady," with other
+figures the size of life, men and children being all taken from
+nature, and portraits of persons belonging to the Danna family.
+
+In the year 1507, when the Emperor Maximilian was making war on the
+Venetians, Titian, as he relates himself, painted the "Angel Raphael,
+with Tobit and a Dog," in the Church of San Marziliano. There is a
+distant landscape in this picture, wherein San Giovanni Battista is
+seen at prayer in a wood; he is looking up to heaven, and his face is
+illumined by a light descending thence; some believe this picture to
+have been done before that on the "Exchange of the Germans," mentioned
+above, was commenced. Now, it chanced that certain gentlemen, not
+knowing that Giorgione no longer worked at this facade, and that
+Titian was doing it (nay, had already given that part over the
+Merceria to public view), met the former, and began as friends to
+rejoice with him, declaring that he was acquitting himself better on
+the side of the Merceria than he had done on that of the "Grand
+Canal;" which remark caused Giorgione so much vexation, that he would
+scarcely permit himself to be seen until the whole work was completed,
+and Titian had become generally known as the painter; nor did he
+thenceforward hold any intercourse with the latter and they were no
+longer friends.
+
+In the year 1508, Titian published a wood-engraving of the "Triumph of
+Faith;" it comprised a vast number of figures: our first Parents, the
+Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Sybils, the Innocents, the Martyrs, the
+Apostles, and Our Saviour Christ borne in triumph by the four
+Evangelists, and the four Doctors, followed by the holy Confessors;
+here Titian displayed much boldness, a fine manner, and improving
+facility. I remember that Fra Bastiano del Piombo, speaking on this
+subject, told me that if Titian had then gone to Rome, and seen the
+works of Michael Angelo, with those of Raphael and the ancients, he
+was convinced, the admirable facility of his coloring considered, that
+he would have produced works of the most astonishing perfection;
+seeing that, as he well deserved to be called the most perfect
+imitator of Nature of our times, as regards coloring, he might thus
+have rendered himself equal to the Urbinese or Buonarroto, as regarded
+the great foundation of all, design. At a later period Titian repaired
+to Vicenza, where he painted "The Judgment of Solomon," on the
+Loggetta wherein the courts of justice are held; a very beautiful
+work. Returning to Venice, he then depicted the facade of the Germain;
+at Padua he painted certain frescos in the Church of Sant' Antonio,
+the subjects taken from the life of that saint; and in the Church of
+Santo Spirito he executed a small picture of San Marco seated in the
+midst of other saints, whose faces are portraits painted in oil with
+the utmost care; this picture has been taken for a work of Giorgione.
+
+Now, the death of Giovan Bellino had caused a story in the hall of the
+Great Council to remain unfinished; it was that which represents
+Federigo Barbarossa kneeling before Pope Alessandro III., who plants
+his foot on the emperor's neck. This was now finished by Titian, who
+altered many parts of it, introducing portraits of his friends and
+others. For this he received from the senate an office in the Exchange
+of the Germans called the Senseria, which brought him in three hundred
+crowns yearly, and which those Signori usually give to the most
+eminent painter of their city, on condition that from time to time he
+shall take the portrait of their doge, or prince when such shall be
+created, at the price of eight crowns, which the doge himself pays,
+the portrait being then preserved in the Palace of San Marco, as a
+memorial of that doge.
+
+After the completion of these works, our artist painted, for the
+Church of San Rocco, a figure of Christ bearing his cross; the Saviour
+has a rope round his neck, and is dragged forward by a Jew; many have
+thought this a work of Giorgione. It has become an object of the
+utmost devotion in Venice, and has received more crowns as offerings
+than have been earned by Titian and Giorgione both, through the whole
+course of their lives. Now, Titian had taken the portrait of Bembo,
+then secretary to Pope Leo X., and was by him invited to Rome, that he
+might see the city, with Raffaello da Urbino and other distinguished
+persons; but the artist having delayed his journey until 1520, when
+the pope and Raffaello were both dead, put it off for that time
+altogether. For the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore he painted a
+picture of "St. John the Baptist in the wilderness;" there is an angel
+beside him that appears to be living; and a distant landscape, with
+trees on the bank of a river, which are very graceful. He took
+portraits of the Prince Grimani and Loredano, which were considered
+admirable; and not long afterward he painted the portrait of King
+Francis, who was then leaving Italy to return to France.
+
+[Illustration: A Fete at the House of Titian.]
+
+In 1530, when the Emperor Charles V. was in Bologna, Titian, by the
+intervention of Pietro Aretino, was invited to that city by the
+Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, and there he made a magnificent portrait
+of his majesty in full armor. This gave so much satisfaction that the
+artist received a present of a thousand crowns for the same. Out of
+these he had subsequently to give the half to Alfonso Lombardi, the
+sculptor, who had made a model of that monarch to be executed in
+marble.
+
+Having returned to Venice, Titian there found that many gentlemen had
+begun to favor Pordenone, commending exceedingly the works executed by
+that artist in the ceiling of the Hall of the Pregai, and elsewhere.
+They had also procured him the commission for a small picture in the
+Church of San Giovanni Elemosynario, which they intended him to paint
+in competition with one representing that saint in his episcopal
+habits, which had previously been executed there by Titian. But
+whatever care and pains Pordenone took, he could not equal nor even
+approach the work of the former. Titian was then appointed to paint a
+picture of the Annunciation for the Church of Santa Maria degli
+Angeli, at Murano; but those who gave the commission for the work, not
+wishing to pay so much as five hundred crowns, which Titian required
+as its price, he sent it, by the advice of Pietro Aretino, as a gift
+to Charles V., who being greatly delighted with the work, made him a
+present of two thousand crowns. The place which the picture was to
+have occupied at Murano was then filled by one from the hand of
+Pordenone.
+
+When the emperor, some time after this, returned with his army from
+Hungary, and was again at Bologna, holding a conference with Clement
+VII., he desired to have another portrait taken of him by Titian, who,
+before he departed from the city, also painted that of the Cardinal
+Ippolito de Medici in the Hungarian dress, with another of the same
+prelate fully armed, which is somewhat smaller than the first; these
+are both now in the Guardaroba of Duke Cosimo. He painted the
+portraits of Alfonso, Marquis of Davalos, and of Pietro Aretino, at
+the same period, and these things having made him known to Federigo
+Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, he entered the service of the latter, and
+accompanied him to his states. At Mantua our artist made a portrait of
+the duke, which appears to breathe, and afterward executed that of his
+brother, the cardinal. These being finished, he painted twelve
+beautiful "Heads of the Twelve Caesars," to decorate one of the rooms
+erected by Giulio Romano, and when they were done, Giulio painted a
+"Story from the Lives of the Emperors" beneath each head.
+
+The productions, but more especially the portraits, of Titian are so
+numerous that it would be almost impossible to make the record of them
+all. I will, therefore, speak of the principal only, and that without
+order of time, seeing that it does not much signify to tell which was
+painted earlier and which later. He took the portrait of Charles V.
+several times, as we have said, and was finally invited by that
+monarch to his court; there he painted him as he was in those last
+years; and so much was that most invincible emperor pleased with the
+manner of Titian, that once he had been portrayed by him, he would
+never permit himself to be taken by any other person. Each time that
+Titian painted the emperor he received a present of a thousand crowns
+of gold, and the artist was made a cavalier, or knight, by his
+majesty, with a revenue of two hundred crowns yearly, secured on the
+treasury of Naples, and attached to his title.
+
+When Titian painted Filippo, King of Spain, the son of Charles, he
+received another annuity of two hundred crowns; so that these four
+hundred, added to the three hundred from the German Exchange, make him
+a fixed income of seven hundred crowns, which he possesses without the
+necessity of exerting himself in any manner. Titian presented the
+portraits of Charles V. and his son Filippo to the Duke Cosimo, who
+has them now in his Guardaroba. He also took the portrait of
+Ferdinand, King of the Romans, who was afterward emperor, with those
+of his children, Maximilian, that is to say, now emperor, and his
+brother; he likewise painted the Queen Maria; and at the command of
+the Emperor Charles, he portrayed the Duke of Saxony, when the latter
+was in prison. But what a waste of time is this! when there has
+scarcely been a noble of high rank, scarcely a prince or lady of great
+name, whose portrait has not been taken by Titian, who in that branch
+of art is indeed an excellent painter.
+
+All these works, with many others which I omit to avoid prolixity,
+have been executed up to the present age of our artist, which is above
+seventy-six years. Titian has been always healthy and happy; he has
+been favored beyond the lot of most men, and has received from Heaven
+only favors and blessings. In his house he has entertained whatever
+princes, literati, or men of distinction have gone to or dwelt in
+Venice; for, to say nothing of his excellence in art, he has always
+distinguished himself by courtesy, hospitality, and rectitude.
+
+Titian has had some rivals in Venice, but not of any great ability,
+wherefore he has easily overcome them by the superiority of his art;
+while he has also rendered himself acceptable to the gentlemen of the
+city. He has gained a fair amount of wealth, his labors having always
+been well paid; and it would have been well if he had worked for his
+amusement alone during these latter years, that he might not have
+diminished the reputation gained in his best days by works of inferior
+merit, performed at a period of life when nature tends inevitably to
+decline, and consequent imperfection.
+
+In the year 1566, when Vasari, the writer of the present history, was
+at Venice, he went to visit Titian, as one who was his friend, and
+found him, although then very old, still with the pencils in his hand
+and painting busily. Great pleasure had Vasari in beholding his works
+and in conversing with the master.
+
+It may be affirmed, then, that Titian, having adorned Venice, or
+rather all Italy, and other parts of the world, with excellent
+paintings, well merits to be loved and respected by artists, and in
+many things to be admired and imitated also, as one who has produced,
+and is producing, work of infinite merit; nay, such as must endure
+while the memory of illustrious men shall remain.
+
+
+
+
+ALBERT DUeRER[3]
+
+         [Footnote 3: Copyright, 1894, by Helmar Hess.]
+
+By W. J. HOLLAND, Chancellor of the Western University of Pennsylvania
+
+(1471-1528)
+
+
+[Illustration: Albert Duerer.]
+
+It has been given to some men to be not only great in the domain of
+art by reason of that which they have themselves succeeded in
+producing, but by reason of that which they have inspired other men to
+produce. They have been not merely artists, but teachers, who by
+precept and example have moulded the whole current and drift of
+artistic thought in the ages and lands to which they have belonged.
+Among these lofty spirits, who live through the centuries not only in
+what their hands once fashioned, but still more in what they have
+inspired others to do, undoubtedly one of the greatest is Albert
+Duerer. Justly reckoned as the representative artist of Germany, he has
+the peculiar honor of having raised the craft of the engraver to its
+true position, as one of the fine arts. As a painter not unworthy to
+be classified with Titian and Raphael, his contemporaries upon Italian
+soil, he poured the wealth of his genius into woodcuts and
+copperplates, and taught men the practically measureless capacity of
+what before his day had been a rudimentary art.
+
+Duerer was born in Nuremberg on May 21, 1471. The family was of
+Hungarian origin, though the name is German, and is derived from
+Thuerer, meaning a maker of doors. The ancestral calling of the family
+probably was that of the carpenter. Albert Duerer, the father of the
+great artist, was a goldsmith, and settled about 1460 in Nuremberg,
+where he served as an assistant to Hieronymus Holper, a master
+goldsmith, whose daughter, Barbara, he married in 1468. He was at the
+time forty years of age, and she fifteen. As the result of the union
+eighteen children were born into the world, of whom Albrecht was the
+second. The lad, as he grew up, became a great favorite with his
+father, who appeared to discern in him the promise of future ability.
+The feeling of attachment was reciprocated in the most filial manner,
+and there are extant two well-authenticated portraits of the father
+from the facile brush of the son, one in the Uffizi at Florence, the
+other in the possession of the Duke of Northumberland. It was the
+original intention of the father of the artist that he should follow
+the craft of the goldsmith, but after serving a period as an
+apprentice in his father's shop, his strong predilection for the
+calling of the painter manifested itself to such a degree that the
+father reluctantly consented to allow the boy to follow his natural
+bent, and placed him under the tutelage of Michael Wohlgemuth, the
+principal painter of Nuremberg. Wohlgemuth was a representative artist
+of his time, who followed his calling after a mechanical fashion,
+having a large shop filled with apprentices who, under his direction
+and with his assistance, busied themselves in turning out for a small
+consideration altar-pieces and pictures of martyrdoms, which were in
+vogue as necessary parts of decoration in churches. Numerous examples
+of the work of Wohlgemuth and his contemporaries survive, attesting,
+by the wealth of crudities and unintended caricatures with which they
+abound, the comparatively low stage of development attained by the art
+of the painter in Germany at that day. According to Duerer, the period
+of his apprenticeship to Wohlgemuth was spent profitably, and resulted
+in large acquisitions of technical skill. The period of his
+preliminary training being ended, he set forth upon his "Wanderjahre,"
+and travelled extensively. Just what points he visited cannot with
+certainty be determined. It is ascertained beyond doubt that he
+visited Colmar, where he was hospitably entertained by the family of
+Martin Schongauer, the greatest painter of his time on German soil,
+but who had died shortly before the visit of Duerer. He also visited
+Strasburg, and it is thought by many that he extended his journeyings
+as far as Venice. In 1494 he returned to Nuremberg, and in the month
+of July was married to Agnes Frey, the daughter of a prosperous
+merchant of the city. He was twenty-three years of age, and she
+somewhat younger. They lived together happily, though no children were
+born to them, and it has been proved that the reputation which has
+been given her, of being little better than a common scold, who
+imbittered his life by her termagancy, is the creation of the ill
+temper of one of the testy friends of Duerer, Willibald Pirkheimer,
+who, in the spirit of spitefulness, besmirched her character in a
+letter which unfortunately survives to this day, and in which he
+accuses her of having led her husband a mad and weary dance by her
+temper. The reason for this ebullition on the part of Pirkheimer
+appears to have been that, after Duerer's death, she refused to give
+him a pair of antlers which had belonged to her husband, and which
+Pirkheimer had set his heart upon having.
+
+[Illustration: Albert Duerer's Wedding.]
+
+The first eleven years of the married life of Duerer were spent in
+Nuremberg, where he devoted himself with unremitting assiduity to the
+prosecution of his art. During these years his powers unfolded
+rapidly, and there are extant two notable pictures, which were
+undoubtedly produced at this time, the triptych in the Dresden
+Gallery, and an altar-piece which is in the palace of the Archbishop
+of Vienna, at Ober St. Veit. These compositions, while remarkable in
+many respects, still reveal the influence of his master, Wohlgemuth,
+and give evidence of having been in part executed with the assistance
+of apprentices. In fact, the peak-gabled house at the foot of the
+castle-mound in Nuremberg was a picture factory like that of
+Wohlgemuth, in which, however, work of a higher order than any
+hitherto produced in Germany was being turned out. We know the names
+of four or five of those who served as apprentices under Duerer at
+this time and they are stars of lesser magnitude in the
+constellation of German art. But Duerer was not contented simply to
+employ his talents in the production of painted altar-pieces, and we
+find him turning out a number of engravings, the most noticeable among
+which are his sixteen great wood-cuts illustrating the Apocalypse,
+which were published in 1498. The theme was one which had peculiar
+fascinations for all classes at the time. The breaking up of all
+pre-existing systems, the wonderful stirrings of a new life which were
+beginning to be felt everywhere with the close of the Middle Age and
+the dawning of the Renaissance, had filled the minds of men with
+wonder, and caused them to turn to the writings of the Apocalyptic
+Seer with keenest interest. A recent critic, commenting upon his work
+as represented in these engravings, says: "The energy and undismayed
+simplicity of his imagination enable him, in this order of creations,
+to touch the highest point of human achievement. The four angels
+keeping back the winds that they blow not, the four riders, the
+loosing of the angels of the Euphrates to slay the third part of
+men--these and others are conceptions of such force, such grave or
+tempestuous grandeur, in the midst of grotesqueness, as the art of no
+other age or hand has produced."
+
+At this period Duerer was also engaged in experimenting upon the art of
+copper-plate engraving, in which he restricted himself mainly to
+reproducing copies of the works of other artists, among them those of
+Jacopo de Barbari, a painter of the Italian school, who was residing
+in Nuremberg, and who among other things gave the great artist
+instruction in plastic anatomy. The influence of his instructor is
+plain, when we compare engravings executed about 1504 with those
+published at a previous date, and especially when we examine his
+design of the Passion of our Lord painted in white upon a green
+ground, commonly known as "The Green Passion," which is treasured in
+the Albertina at Prague. He also during these twelve years finished
+seven of the twelve great wood-cuts illustrating the passion, and
+sixteen of the twenty cuts which compose the series known as "The Life
+of the Virgin." The activities of Duerer in Nuremberg were temporarily
+interrupted by a journey to Italy, which he undertook in the fall of
+the year 1505. What the immediate occasion for undertaking this
+journey may have been is not plain, though it seems most likely that
+one of his objects was to enable him to recuperate from the effects of
+a protracted illness, from which he had suffered during the summer of
+this year, and also incidentally to secure a market for his wares in
+Venice, the commercial relationships of which with Nuremberg were very
+close at this period. A German colony, composed largely of Nuremberg
+factors and merchants, was located at this time in Venice, and they
+had secured the privilege of dedicating a great painting in the church
+of St. Bartholomew. The commission for the execution of this painting
+was secured by Duerer. It represents the adoration of the Virgin, but
+has been commonly known under the name of "The Feast of the Rose
+Garlands." After having undergone many vicissitudes, it is preserved
+to-day in a highly mutilated condition in the monastery of Strachow,
+near Prague. Duerer's stay in Venice was signalized not only by the
+production of this painting, but of three or four other notable works
+which still exist, and which reflect the great influence upon him of
+the Italian school of painting, with which he had attained
+familiarity. His stay in Venice lasted about a year. In the fall of
+1506, he returned to Nuremberg, and there remained for the next
+fourteen years, engaged in the practice of his art. These years were
+years of success and prosperity. His name and fame had spread over the
+whole of Europe, and the greatest artists of the day were glad to do
+him homage. Raphael said of him, when contemplating some of his
+designs, "Truly this man would have surpassed us all, if he had the
+masterpieces of ancient art constantly before his eyes as we have." A
+friendly correspondence was maintained between the immortal Italian
+and his German contemporary, and in his own country, all men, from the
+emperor to the peasant, delighted to do honor to his genius, the
+products of which were found alike in church and palace, and through
+his printed designs in the homes of the humble poor.
+
+The proud old imperial city of Nuremberg had gathered within its
+battlemented walls a multitude of men who were distinguished not only
+for their commercial enterprise and wealth, but many of whom were the
+exponents of the literary and artistic culture of the time. Among the
+men with whom Duerer found congenial companionship were Adam Krafft,
+the sculptor; Veit Stoss, whose exquisite carvings in wood may reflect
+in some measure in the wild luxuriance of the imagination which they
+display, the restless, "dare-devil" spirit with which his biographers
+invest him; Peter Vischer, the bronze founder; and last but not least.
+Hans Sachs, the cobbler poet, whose quaint rhymes are a source of
+delight to this day, and were a mighty force in the great work of the
+Reformation, by which the fetters of mediaeval traditions and
+ecclesiastical abuse were thrown off by the German people.
+
+Of the personal appearance of Duerer at this time, we are not left in
+ignorance. A portrait of himself from his own hands has been preserved
+and is well known. His features reveal refinement and great
+intellectuality, united with grace, and his attire shows that he was
+not oblivious to matters of personal adornment. After the fashion of
+the time, his hair was worn in long and graceful ringlets, which fell
+in heavy masses about his shoulders.
+
+The first six years which followed his return from Venice were almost
+wholly given to painting, and his productions give evidence of the
+fact that he had dismissed from his employment the retinue of
+assistants and apprentices, whom he had employed in his earlier years.
+From this period date most of his great masterpieces, which are still
+preserved, among them the "Adam and Eve," in the Pitti Palace; the
+"Ten Thousand Martyrs of Nicomedia," in the Imperial Gallery, at
+Vienna; the "Adoration of the Trinity," at the Belvedere, in Vienna;
+and "The Assumption of the Virgin," the original of which was
+destroyed by fire more than three hundred years ago, but of which a
+good copy is preserved at Frankfort. To this period belong the
+portraits of Charlemagne and of the Emperor Sigismund, which are
+preserved in the National German Museum at Nuremberg.
+
+[Illustration: Albert Duerer Visits Hans Sachs.]
+
+But while prosecuting the work of the painter, he did not neglect the
+art of the engraver, and in 1511, brought out in complete form his
+great book of woodcuts in folio, and began to develop that marvellous
+art of etching which is indissolubly connected with his name. Among
+the products of the etcher's needle which attest his activity in this
+direction are those masterpieces which have for centuries been at once
+the delight and the puzzle of artistic minds: the "Melancholia," "The
+Knight and the Devil," and "St. Jerome in his Cell." The most
+reasonable explanation of these weird fancies is that they were
+intended to represent in allegorical style the three temperaments--the
+melancholic, the sanguine, and the phlegmatic. The Diet of Augsburg,
+which was convened in 1518, gave Duerer a passing opportunity to depict
+the lineaments of the Emperor Maximilian, who gave him several
+sittings, and who manifested great interest in the painter. The death
+of the emperor in the following year, the outbreak of an epidemic in
+Nuremberg, together with the coronation of Charles V. at
+Aix-la-Chapelle, led Duerer to undertake a journey to the Low
+Countries, in which he was accompanied by his faithful wife. He was
+present at the coronation and was one of the distinguished civilians
+whose appearance added dignity to the occasion. His diary, in which he
+recounts his experiences upon this journey, and which is accompanied
+by a multitude of wayside sketches, is still preserved, and contains,
+besides the dry entries of his current expenditures, most entertaining
+allusions to the distinguished people whom he met, and who received
+him with the utmost cordiality. Intermingled with these narrative
+details are outbursts of feeling, which are provoked by passing
+political and ecclesiastical events, in which he took a profound
+interest, though he never appears to have committed himself with
+positive openness to the party of reform. His sympathies are, however,
+clearly shown by his writings, as well as by his works of art, to have
+been with the Reformers, and he lived on terms of intimacy with
+Erasmus and Melancthon, of both of whom we have portraits from his
+hand.
+
+Duerer returned from the Netherlands in 1521, about the middle of July,
+and the remaining years of his life were spent in the prosecution of
+the art of the engraver, in painting, and in the effort to elucidate
+the sciences of perspective, geometry, and fortification, upon all of
+which he has left treatises.
+
+His labors, though they had not brought with them great wealth, had
+secured for him a competency, and the latter years of his life were
+devoted more and more to labors which, while dignified, did not tend
+to add greatly to his already magnificent reputation. These labors
+were prosecuted in spite of ever-failing health. While in the
+Netherlands he had contracted a malarial fever, the effects of which
+clung to him, in spite of the best treatment which could be secured,
+and left him the wreck of his former self. On April 6, 1528, death
+suddenly overtook him. There was not even time to summon his friends
+to his side before his spirit had fled. The city which had been his
+home from childhood was filled with mourning. They took up his remains
+and gently laid them to rest in the burial vault of his wife's family
+in the graveyard of the Church of St. John, where the setting sun
+pours its last glowing beams at evening over the low Franconian
+hill-tops. The vault has since been changed and the last
+resting-place of the remains of the Raphael of the North is a lowly
+mound, reverently approached by all who visit the quaint imperial
+city, upon which is a slab, covered with a bronze tablet upon which
+are the words:
+
+      Quicquid Alberti Dureri Mortale
+      Fuit Sub Hoc Conditum Tumulo.
+      Emigravit VIII Idus Aprilis, MDXXVIIL
+
+
+  "_Emigravit_ is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies;
+  Dead he is not, but departed--for the artist never dies.
+  Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair,
+  That he once has trod its pavement, that he once has breathed its air!"
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+RUBENS
+
+By Mrs. LEE
+
+(1577-1640)
+
+
+[Illustration: Rubens.]
+
+"It is just one hundred and twenty years to-day," said a young artist
+to his friend, as he stood in the hall of St. Mark, at Venice,
+contemplating the noble works of Titian. "Time, the destroyer, has
+here stayed his hand; the colors are as vivid and as fresh as if they
+were laid on but yesterday. Would that my old friend and master, Otho
+Venius, was here! At least I will carry back to Antwerp that in my
+coloring which shall prove to him that I have not played truant to the
+art."
+
+"Just one hundred and twenty years," repeated he, "since Titian was
+born. Venice was then in its glory, but now it is all falling; its
+churches and palaces are crumbling to dust, its commerce interrupted.
+The republic continually harassed by the Porte, and obliged to call on
+foreign aid; depressed by her internal despotism, her council of ten,
+and state inquisitors; her decline, though gradual, is sure; yet the
+splendor of her arts remains, and the genius of Titian, her favorite
+son, is yet in the bloom and brilliancy of youth!"
+
+Such was the enthusiastic exclamation of Rubens, as he contemplated
+those paintings which had brought him from Antwerp. How many gifted
+minds spoke to him from the noble works which were before him! The
+three Bellinis, the founders of the Venetian school; Giorgione,
+Titian, and Tintoretto. Then Paolo Veronese, who, though born at
+Verona, in 1537, adopted Venice as his home, and became the
+fellow-artist of Tintoretto, and the disciple of Titian. Pordenone,
+too, who viewed Titian as a rival and an enemy. Palma the young, and
+Palma the old, born in 1548, and the Bassanos, who died near 1627.
+
+All these were present to the eye of Rubens, their genius embodied on
+the canvas in the halls of St. Mark. "These," he exclaimed, "have
+formed the Venetian school, and these shall be my study!"
+
+From this time, the young artist might daily be seen with his sheets
+of white paper, and his pencil in his hand. A few strokes preserved
+the outline which his memory filled up; and by an intuitive glance,
+his genius understood and appropriated every signal beauty.
+
+In Venice he became acquainted with the Archduke Albert, who
+introduced him to the Duke of Mantua, whither he went for the purpose
+of studying the works of Julio Romano. From thence he proceeded to
+Rome; here Raphael was his model, and Michael Angelo his wonder. He
+devoted himself to painting with a fervor that belongs only to genius;
+and he soon proved that, whatever he gained by ancient study, the
+originality of his own conceptions would still remain and appear. To
+the vivid and splendid coloring of the Venetian school, he was perhaps
+more indebted than to any other model. The affectionate and constant
+intercourse, by letters, that subsisted between Rubens and his mother,
+made his long residence in Italy one of pleasure. At Rome he was
+employed to adorn, by his paintings, the Church of Santa Croce, and
+also the "Chiesa Nova."
+
+Rubens had been originally destined by his mother for one of the
+learned professions. His father was born at Antwerp, and held the
+honorable office of councillor of state. When the civil war broke out
+he repaired to Cologne, where his son, Peter Paul Rubens, was born. He
+died soon after his return to Antwerp, and left his property much
+diminished from losses occasioned by the civil war. The mother of
+Rubens put him early to the best schools, where he was initiated in
+learning and discovered a taste for belles-lettres; but all the
+intervals of necessary study were devoted to drawing. His mother
+perceiving it, determined to indulge his inclination, and placed him
+in the studio of Van Noort.
+
+The correct taste of the scholar soon led him to perceive that he
+could not adopt this artist's style, and he became the pupil of Otho
+Venius. Similarity of thought and feeling united them closely, and it
+was with true disinterestedness that the master urged his pupil to
+quit his confined circle and repair to Italy, the great school of art.
+
+Time flew rapidly with Rubens, while engaged in his beloved and
+honorable pursuit; he looked forward to the period when he might
+return to Antwerp and place his mother in her former affluence. Nearly
+seven years had passed since he took leave of her. Of late he thought
+her letters had been less cheerful; she spoke of her declining
+health, of her earnest hope that she might live to embrace him once
+more. This hint was enough for his affectionate heart. He immediately
+broke off all his engagements and prepared to return. Everyone knows
+what impatience is created when one first begins to contemplate home,
+after a long absence, and the heart is turned toward it. "Seven years
+absent?" wrote Rubens to his mother, "how is it possible I have lived
+so long away from you? It is too long; henceforth I will devote myself
+to your happiness. Antwerp shall be my future residence. I have
+acquired a taste for horticulture; our little garden shall be enlarged
+and cultivated, and our home will be a paradise."
+
+What are human anticipations and projects! the day before he was to
+quit Rome he received a letter informing him that his mother was very
+ill, and begging him to return with all speed. With breathless haste
+he hurried back, without sleep or rest. When he reached the city he
+dared not make any inquiries. At length he stood before the paternal
+mansion; he saw the gloomy tiles and half-closed window-shutters. It
+was the fall of the trees. He observed people going in and out at the
+door; to speak was impossible. At length he rushed in and heard the
+appalling sentence, "Too late," a sentence that often strikes
+desolation to the human heart. His mother had expired that morning.
+
+While he was struggling with the bitterness of sorrow, he met with
+Elizabeth Brants. There was something in the tone of her voice which
+infused tranquillity into his mind, and affection came in a new form
+to assuage his loss. She was the "ladye of his love," and afterward
+his wife. He built a magnificent house at Antwerp, with a saloon in
+form of a rotunda, which he ornamented and enriched with antique
+statues, busts, vases, and pictures by the most celebrated painters.
+Thus surrounded by the gems of art, he devoted himself to the
+execution of works which were the pride of his native country, and
+caused honors and wealth to be heaped upon him.
+
+There were those found who could not endure the splendor of his
+success; these calumniated. There were others who tried to draw him
+into visionary speculations. A chemist offered him a share of his
+laboratory, to join in his search for the philosopher's stone. He
+carried the visionary to his painting-room, and said, "The offer comes
+too late. You see I have found out the art of making gold by my
+palette and pencils."
+
+Rubens was now at the height of prosperity and happiness, a dangerous
+eminence, and one on which few are permitted to rest. A second time
+his heart was pierced with sorrow: he lost his young wife, Elizabeth,
+a few years after their union. Deep as was his sorrow, he had yet
+resolution enough to feel the necessity of exertion. He left the place
+which constantly reminded him of domestic enjoyment, the memory of
+which contrasted so sadly with the present silence and solitude, and
+travelled for some time in Holland. After his return, he received a
+commission from Mary de Medici, of France, to adorn the palace of the
+Luxembourg. He executed for this purpose a number of paintings at
+Antwerp, and instructed several pupils in his art.
+
+At this time Rubens devoted himself wholly to painting, and scarcely
+allowed himself time for recreation. He considered it one of the most
+effectual means of instruction, to allow his pupils to observe his
+method of using his paints. He therefore had them with him while he
+worked on his large pictures. Teniers, Snyders, Jordaens, and Vandyke
+were among his pupils--all names well known.
+
+When Rubens had executed the commission given him by Mary de Medici,
+wife of Henry IV., he repaired to Paris to arrange his pictures at the
+Luxembourg palace, and there painted two more, and likewise the
+galleries, representing passages of her life.
+
+Here he became acquainted with the Duke of Buckingham, as that
+nobleman was on his way to Madrid with Prince Charles. On his return
+to Antwerp, he was summoned to the presence of the Infanta Isabella,
+who had, through Buckingham, become interested in his character. She
+thought him worthy of a political mission to the court of Madrid,
+where he was most graciously received by Philip. While at Madrid he
+painted four pictures for the convent of the Carmelites, and a fine
+portrait of the king on horseback, with many other pictures; for these
+extraordinary productions he was richly rewarded, received the honor
+of knighthood, and was presented with the golden key.
+
+While in Spain, Don John, Duke of Braganza, who was afterward king of
+Portugal, sent and invited him to visit him at Villa Vitiosa, the
+place of his residence. Rubens, perhaps, might at this time have been
+a little dazzled with his uncommon elevation. He was now _Sir Paul_
+and celebrated all over Europe. It was proper he should make the visit
+as one person of high rank visits another. His preparations were great
+to appear in a becoming style, and not to shame his noble host. At
+length the morning arrived, and, attended by a numerous train of
+courteous friends and hired attendants, the long cavalcade began the
+journey. When not far distant from Villa Vitiosa, Rubens learned that
+Don John had sent an embassy to meet him. Such an honor had seldom
+been accorded to a private gentleman, and Rubens schooled himself to
+receive it with suitable humility and becoming dignity.
+
+He put up at a little distance from Villa Vitiosa, awaiting the
+arrival of the embassy; finally it came, in the form of a single
+gentleman, who civilly told him that the duke, his master, had been
+obliged to leave home on business that could not be dispensed with,
+and therefore must deny himself the pleasure of the visit; but as he
+had probably been at some extra expense in coming so far, he begged
+him to accept of fifty pistoles as a remuneration.
+
+Rubens refused the pistoles, and could not forbear adding that he had
+"brought two thousand along with him, which he had meant to spend at
+his court during the fifteen days he was to spend there."
+
+The truth was, that when Don John was informed that Rubens was coming
+in the style of a prince to see him, it was wholly foreign to his
+plan; he was a great lover of painting, and had wished to see him as
+an artist. He therefore determined to prevent the visit.
+
+The second marriage of Rubens, with Helena Forman, was, no less than
+the first, one of affection; she had great beauty, and became a model
+for his pencil. His favor with the great continued. Mary de Medici
+visited him at his own home more than once; and the Infanta Isabella
+was so much satisfied with his mission in Spain, that she sent him to
+England, to sound the disposition of the government on the subject of
+a peace.
+
+Rubens disclosed in this embassy his diplomatic talents; he first
+appeared there in his character of artist, and insensibly won upon the
+confidence of Charles. The king requested him to paint the ceiling of
+the banqueting-house at Whitehall. While he was employed upon it,
+Charles frequently visited him and criticised the work. Rubens, very
+naturally introducing the subject, and finding, from the tenor of his
+conversation, that he was by no means averse to a peace with Spain, at
+length produced his credentials. The king received his mission most
+graciously, and Rubens returned to the Netherlands crowned with honors
+and success.
+
+He had passed his fiftieth year when his health began to fail, and he
+was attacked with a severe fit of the gout. Those who have witnessed
+the irritation attendant upon that disorder will appreciate the
+perfect harmony and gentleness that existed between Rubens and his
+wife. With untiring tenderness she devoted herself to him, and was
+ingenious in devising alleviations and comforts.
+
+The severe attacks of Rubens' disorder debilitated his frame, yet he
+continued painting at his easel almost to the last; and, amid
+suffering and sickness, never failed in giving the energy of intellect
+to his pictures. He died at the age of sixty-three, in the year 1640,
+leaving great wealth. The pomp and circumstance of funeral rite can
+only be of consequence as showing the estimation in which a departed
+citizen is held. Public funeral honors were awarded, and men of every
+rank were eager to manifest their respect to his memory. He was buried
+in the Church of St. James, at Antwerp, under the altar of his private
+chapel, which was decorated with one of his own noble pictures.
+
+
+
+
+REMBRANDT[4]
+
+         [Footnote 4: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+
+(1606-1669)
+
+
+[Illustration: Rembrandt.]
+
+A heretic in art Rembrandt was to many of his Dutch contemporaries; to
+us, he is the master, supreme alike in genius and accomplishment.
+Because, as time went on, he broke completely from tradition and in
+his work gave full play to his originality, his pictures were looked
+at askance; because he chose to live his own life, indifferent to
+accepted conventions, he himself was misunderstood. It was his cruel
+fate to enjoy prosperity and popularity in his earlier years, only to
+meet with neglect in his old age. But this he felt probably less than
+other men; he was not a courtier, with Velasquez, nor vowed to
+worldly success, with Rubens. His pleasure and his reward, he found
+in his work. So long as easel and canvas, brushes and paints were left
+to him, he demanded no greater happiness.
+
+[Illustration: Marie De Medici at the House of Rubens.]
+
+In Leyden, a town already made famous by another master, Lucas van
+Leyden, Rembrandt was born in 1606; though this date has been
+disputed, some authorities suggesting 1607, others, 1608. His family
+were respectable, if not distinguished, burghers, his father, Harmen
+Gerritszoon, being a miller by trade, his mother, Neeltjen Willems of
+Zuitbroeck, the daughter of a baker. Not until early in the
+seventeenth century did permanent surnames become common among
+Dutchmen; hitherto children had been given their father's, in addition
+to their own Christian name; Rembrandt for many years was known as
+Rembrandt Harmenzoon, or the son of Harmen. But the miller, to be in
+the growing fashion, had called himself Van Ryn--of the Rhine--and
+thus, later on, Rembrandt also signed himself. Harmen was well-to-do;
+he owned houses in Leyden, and beyond the walls, gardens, and fields,
+and the mill where Rembrandt, because he once drew a mill, was
+supposed to have been born. But there was no reason for Neeltjen to
+move from a comfortable house in town into such rustic quarters, and
+it is more likely that Rembrandt's birthplace was the house pointed
+out in the Nordeinde Street. A commercial career had been chosen for
+his four older brothers. But Harmen, his means allowing the luxury,
+decided to make of his fifth son a man of letters and learning, and
+Rembrandt was sent to the University of Leyden. That letters, however,
+had small charm for him, was clear from the first. Better than his
+books he loved the engravings of Swanenburch, better still, the
+pictures of Lucas van Leyden, which he could look at to his heart's
+content on gala days, when the Town Hall, where they hung, was thrown
+open to the public. His hours of study were less profitable than his
+hours of recreation when he rambled in the country, through his
+father's estate, and, sometimes as far as the sea, a sketch-book, the
+chances are, for sole companion. Certainly, by the time he was
+fifteen, so strong were the proofs of his indifference to the classics
+and his love for art, that his father, sacrificing his own ambitions,
+allowed Rembrandt to leave the university for the studio of Van
+Swanenburch. From this day forth, his life's history is told in the
+single word--work; his indeed was the genius of industry.
+
+Van Swanenburch had studied in Italy; but his own painting, to judge
+by the few examples still in existence, was entirely commonplace.
+Three years were more than enough to be passed under his tuition. At
+the end of the third, Rembrandt went to Amsterdam, and there entered
+the studio of Lastman. His second master also had studied in Italy,
+and also was a painter of mediocre talent, popular in his own
+times--the Apelles of the day, he was called--but remembered now
+chiefly because of his relations to his pupil. From the first,
+Rembrandt, even if obliged to paint the stock subjects of the day, was
+determined to treat them in his own way, and not to follow set forms
+that happened to be adopted in the schools. He used real men and women
+for models, and painted them as he saw them, not as he was bidden to
+look at them through his teacher's spectacles. In six months he had
+learned at least one thing, that Lastman had nothing more to teach
+him. The man of genius must ever be his own master, though he remain
+the hard-working student all his days. Back to Leyden and to his
+father's house, Rembrandt had not returned to lead a life of idleness.
+He worked tremendously in these early years. Even needed models he
+found in the members of his family; he has made the face of his mother
+as familiar as that of a friend; his own, with the heavy features, the
+thick, bushy hair, the small intelligent eyes, between them the
+vertical line, fast deepening on the fine forehead, he drew and etched
+and painted, again and again. More elaborate compositions he also
+undertook. As in his maturity, it was to the Bible he turned for
+suggestions: Saint Paul in prison, Samson and Delilah, the
+Presentation in the Temple--these were the themes then in vogue which
+he preferred, rendering them with the realism which distinguished his
+later, more famous Samsons and Abrahams and Christs, making them the
+motive for a fine arrangement of color, for a striking study of light
+and shadow. A pleasant picture one can fancy of his life at this
+period; he was with his own people, for whom his love was tender; busy
+with brush, pencil, and etching-needle; he was strengthening his
+powers of observation, developing and perfecting his style,
+occasionally producing work that won for him renown in Leyden; and,
+gradually, he gathered round him a small group of earnest
+fellow-workers, chief among them Lievens, Gerard Dou, and Van Vliet,
+the last two, though but slightly his juniors, looking up to him as
+master. These were the years of his true apprenticeship.
+
+Leyden, however, was not the best place for a young painter who had
+his fortunes to make. It was essentially a university town; interest
+was concentrated upon letters; art was but of secondary consideration.
+It was different in Amsterdam, the great commercial centre of Holland.
+There, all was life and activity and progress; there, was money to be
+spent, and the liberal patron willing to lavish it upon the artist.
+Holland just then was in the first flush of prosperity and patriotism,
+following upon her virtual independence from Spain. Not a citizen but
+glowed with self-respect at the thought of the victory he had, in one
+way or another, helped to win; the state, as represented by the good
+burghers, was supreme in every man's mind. It was natural that
+individuals and corporations alike should seek to immortalize their
+greatness by means of the painter's art, which, in Holland, had long
+since ceased to be a monopoly of the church. Hence the age became
+essentially one of portrait-painting. Many were the painters whose
+portraits had already achieved distinction. De Keyser was busy in
+Amsterdam; a far greater genius, Franz Hals, but fifteen years
+Rembrandt's senior, was creating his masterpieces in The Hague and
+Harlem. It was as inevitable that Rembrandt should turn to
+portraiture, as that he should find commissions less numerous in
+Leyden than in Amsterdam. Often in the latter town his services were
+required; so often, indeed, that at last, about 1631, when he was just
+twenty-five, he settled there permanently and set up a studio of his
+own.
+
+Success was his from the start. Sitter after sitter sought him out in
+his house on the Bloemgracht; the most distinguished men in the town
+hastened to patronize him. His work was liked by the burghers whom he
+painted, its strength was felt by artists, whose canvases soon showed
+its influence. Admirers crowded to his studio. He had not been in
+Amsterdam a twelvemonth when, before he was yet twenty-six, he was
+entrusted with an order of more than usual importance. This was the
+portrait of Dr. Tulp and his class of surgeons: the famous "Lesson in
+Anatomy" now in the Gallery at The Hague. The subject at the time was
+very popular. Many artists, De Keyser among others, had already, in
+painting prominent surgeons, placed them around the subject they were
+dissecting; indeed, this was the arrangement insisted upon by the
+surgeons themselves, and, as there seems to have been no limit to
+their vanity, "Lessons in Anatomy" were almost as plentiful in Holland
+as "Madonnas" in Umbria. Rembrandt in his composition was simply
+adhering to accepted tradition. It is true that he instilled life into
+a group hitherto, on other painters' canvases, stiff and perfunctory;
+but, though the picture was a wonderful production for a man of his
+years, it is not to be ranked with his greatest work.
+
+Commissions now poured in still faster. It was at this time he painted
+several of his best known portraits: the "Master Shipbuilder and his
+Wife," at present in Buckingham Palace; that simply marvellous old
+woman at the National Gallery in London, made familiar to everyone by
+countless photographs and other reproductions; the man in ruff and
+woman in coif at the Brunswick Museum; and a score of others scarce
+less important. With increasing popularity, he was able to command his
+own prices, so that only a part of his time was it necessary for him
+to devote to the portraits which were his chief source of income.
+During the leisure he reserved, he painted biblical subjects, ever his
+delight, and made etchings and drawings, today the most prized
+treasures in the world's great galleries. As in Leyden, he drew about
+him students; a few, notably Ferdinand Bol and Christophe Paudiss,
+destined, in their turn, to gain name and fame. Indifferent to social
+claims and honors--an indifference the burghers, his patrons, found it
+hard to forgive, his one amusement was in collecting pictures and
+engravings, old stuffs and jewels, and every kind of _bric-a-brac_,
+until his house in Amsterdam was a veritable museum. This amusement
+later was to cost him dear.
+
+Four years after the "Lesson in Anatomy" was painted, when he was at
+the height of prosperity, in 1634, he married Saskia van Uylenborch,
+the Saskia of so many an etching and picture. She was of a good
+Frisian family, and brought with her a dowry of no mean proportions.
+Rembrandt's marriage made small changes in his way of living. Into the
+society, so ready to receive him, he never went, not even now that he
+had a wife to introduce. It bored him, and he was no toady to waste
+his time fawning upon possible patrons. "When I desire to rest my
+spirit, I do not seek honors, but liberty," was his explanation. The
+companionship of artists he always welcomed; sometimes he visited the
+humbler burghers, whose ways were as simple as his own; sometimes he
+sought the humblest classes of all, because of their picturesqueness,
+and his contemporaries took him to task for his perverted taste for
+low company. The truth is that always he devoted himself solely and
+wholly to his art; the only difference, once he was married, was that,
+when he sat at his easel all day or over his copperplate, and
+sketchbook all evening, Saskia was with him. She shared all his
+interests, all his ambitions; she had no will but his. During his
+working hours, she was his model, obedient to his call. She never
+tired of posing for him, nor he of painting her now simply as Saskia,
+now as Delilah feasting with Samson, as Susanna surprised by the
+Elders, as the Jewish Betrothed at her toilet. Sometimes he
+represented her alone, sometimes with himself at her side; once, in
+the famous Dresden portrait, on his knee, as if to proclaim the love
+they bore for one another. And he, who could render faithfully the
+ways of the beggar, the austere black of the burgher, for himself and
+Saskia found no masquerading too gay or extravagant. In inventing
+costumes for their own portraits, he gave his exuberant fancy free
+play: in gorgeous embroidered robes, waving plumes, and priceless gems
+they arrayed themselves, until even the resources of his collection
+were exhausted: the same rich mantle, the same jewels appear, and
+reappear in picture after picture.
+
+Rembrandt's short married years were happy, though not without their
+sorrows. Of Saskia's five children, four died in infancy; the fifth,
+Titus, was not a year old when, in 1642, the end came for Saskia, and
+Rembrandt, who had just reached his thirty-seventh year, was left in
+his great house alone with an infant son and his pupils. Her
+confidence in him is shown by her will, in which the inheritance of
+Titus is left in the father's charge, though already Rembrandt's
+affairs must have given signs of coming complications.
+
+[Illustration: Connoisseurs at Rembrandt's Studio.]
+
+Much of his best work remained to be done, but after Saskia's death
+his worldly fortunes and his popularity never again touched such
+high-water mark. The reason for this is not far to seek. During all
+these years, Rembrandt's powers had matured, his methods broadened,
+and his individuality strengthened. With each new canvas, his
+originality became more conspicuous. It was not only that the world of
+nature, and not imagination, supplied his models. Many of the Dutch
+painters now were no less realists than he. It was not only that he
+solved certain problems of _chiaro oscuro_, there were men, like
+Lievens, who were as eager as he in the study of light and shadow. But
+Rembrandt brought to his every experiment an independence that
+startled the average man. He painted well because he saw well. If no
+one else saw things as he did, the loss was theirs. But he paid for
+his keener vision; because he did not paint like other artists, his
+methods were mistrusted. To be misunderstood is the penalty of genius.
+The picture which, of all his work, is now the most famous, marks the
+turn in the tide of his affairs. Shortly before Saskia's death, he had
+been commissioned to paint a portrait group of Banning Cock and the
+military company which he commanded. These portrait groups of the
+military corporations rivalled in popularity the "Lessons in Anatomy."
+Each member, or officer, paid to be included in the composition, and,
+as a rule, a stiff, formal picture, with each individual posed as for
+a photograph, was the result. Rembrandt, apparently, was in nowise
+restricted when he undertook the work for Banning Cock, and so,
+instead of the stupid, hackneyed arrangement, he made of the portrait
+of the company a picture of armed men marching forth to beating of
+drums and waving of banners, "The Night Watch," as it must ever be
+known--more accurately, "The Sortie of the Company of Banning
+Cock"--now in the Ryks Museum of Amsterdam. With the men for whom it
+was painted, it proved a failure. The grouping, the arrangement
+displeased them. Many of the company were left in deep shadow, which
+was not the privilege for which they had agreed to pay good money.
+Rembrandt was not the man to compromise. After this many burghers, who
+cared much for themselves and their own faces, and not in the least
+for art, were afraid to entrust their portraits to him lest their
+importance might be sacrificed to the painter's effects. Certain it is
+that six years later, in 1648, when the independence of Holland was
+formally recognized at the Congress of Westphalia, though Terburg and
+Van der Heist celebrated the event on canvas, Rembrandt's services
+were not secured. Good friends were left to him--men of intelligence
+who appreciated his strong individuality and the great originality of
+his work. Banning Cock himself was not among the discontented. A few
+leading citizens, like Dr. Tulp and the Burgomeister Six, were ever
+his devoted patrons. Artists still gathered about him; pupils still
+crowded to his studio; Nicolas Maes, De Gelder, Kneller among them.
+Many of his finest portraits--those of Hendrickje Stoffels, of his
+son, of himself in his old age, of the Burgomeister Six, above all,
+his masterpiece, "The Syndics of the Guild of Clothmakers," now in
+Amsterdam; many of his finest etchings, the little landscapes, the
+famous "Hundred Guilder Print," "Christ Healing the Sick," belong to
+this later period. There was no falling off, but rather an increase,
+in his powers, despite the clouds that darkened his years of middle
+age.
+
+Of these clouds, the darkest was due to his financial troubles.
+Rembrandt had made large sums of money; Saskia's dowry had been by no
+means small. But he also spent lavishly. He had absolutely no business
+capacity. Once he was accused of miserliness; that he would at times
+lunch on dry bread and a herring served as reproach against him; there
+was a story current that his pupils would drop bits of paper painted
+to look like money in order to see him stoop to pick them up. Both
+charges are too foolish to answer seriously. When he was at work, it
+mattered little to him what he ate, so that he was not disturbed; who
+would not stoop to pick up coins apparently scattered on the floor?
+The money he devoted to his collection is sufficient to show how small
+a fancy he had for hoarding; upon it a princely fortune had been
+squandered. To his own people in Leyden, when times were hard, he had
+not been slow to hold out a generous hand. It was because he was not
+enough of a miser, because he gave too little heed to business
+matters, that difficulties at length overwhelmed him. It is too sad a
+story to tell in detail. Perhaps the beginning was when he bought a
+house for which he had not the ready money to pay, and borrowed a
+large sum for the purpose. More and more involved became his affairs.
+In time his creditors grew clamorous, and at length the blow fell
+when, in 1657, he was declared bankrupt. The collection of years, the
+embroidered mantles and draperies, the jewels with which Saskia had
+been so gayly decked, the plumes and furs and gorgeous robes in which
+he himself had masqueraded, the armor and plate, the engravings and
+pictures which had filled his house--all were sold. He, the master,
+had, at the age of fifty-one, to begin life anew as if he were still
+but the apprentice.
+
+In the midst of his troubles and losses, Hendrickje Stoffels, whose
+portrait hangs in the Louvre, was the friend who cheered and comforted
+him. She had been his servant; afterward she lived with him as his
+wife, though legally they were not married. To Titus, as to her own
+children, she was ever a tender mother, and Titus, in return, seems to
+have loved her no less well. In the end, they together took
+Rembrandt's business interests into their own hands, the son,
+probably, using his inheritance in the enterprise. Renting a house in
+their own name, they became his print and picture dealers.
+
+But as time went on, Rembrandt's work brought lower and lower prices,
+and he, himself, the last two years of his life, was almost forgotten.
+Though he still lived in Amsterdam, the town from which he had so
+seldom journeyed, and then never far, he had fallen into such
+obscurity, that report now established him in Stockholm as painter to
+the King of Sweden, now in Hull, or Yarmouth. In his own family
+nothing but sorrow was in store for him. Hendrickje died, probably
+about 1664, and he was once more alone; and next he lost Titus, who
+then had been married but a few short months.
+
+Fortunately for Rembrandt, he did not long survive them. In 1669, at
+the age of sixty-two, his release came. He was buried in the West
+Church, quietly and simply. Thirteen florins his funeral cost, and
+even this small expense had to be met by his daughter-in-law. When an
+inventory of his possessions was taken, these were found to consist of
+nothing but his own wardrobe and his painter's tools.
+
+But better than a mere fortune, his work he left as an heirloom for
+all time; his drawings, not the least among them without the stamp of
+his genius; his prints, still unsurpassed, though it was he who first
+developed the possibilities of etching; his pictures, "painted with
+light," as Fromentin has said. His subjects he may have borrowed from
+the fashions and traditions of the time; certain mannerisms of
+technique and arrangement his pupils may have copied. But for all
+that, his work belongs to no special school or group; like all the
+world's great masterpieces, whether produced in Spain by a Velasquez,
+in Venice by a Titian, in England by a Whistler, it stands alone and
+supreme.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM HOGARTH
+
+(1697-1764)
+
+
+[Illustration: William Hogarth.]
+
+"I was born," says Hogarth, in his Memoirs of himself, "in the city of
+London, November 10, 1697. My father's pen, like that of many authors,
+did not enable him to do more than put me in a way of shifting for
+myself. As I had naturally a good eye and a fondness for drawing,
+shows of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant; and
+mimicry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early access
+to a neighboring painter drew my attention from play, and I was, at
+every possible opportunity, employed in making drawings. I picked up
+an acquaintance of the same turn, and soon learned to draw the
+alphabet with great correctness. My exercises when at school were more
+remarkable for the ornaments which adorned them than for the exercise
+itself. In the former I soon found that blockheads with better
+memories could much surpass me, but for the latter I was particularly
+distinguished."
+
+To this account of Hogarth's childhood we have only to add that his
+father, an enthusiastic and laborious scholar, who, like many of his
+craft, owed little to the favor of fortune, consulted these
+indications of talent as well as his means would allow, and bound his
+son apprentice to a silver-plate engraver. But Hogarth aspired after
+something higher than drawing ciphers and coats-of-arms; and before
+the expiration of his indentures he had made himself a good
+draughtsman, and obtained considerable knowledge of coloring. It was
+his ambition to become distinguished as an artist; and not content
+with being the mere copier of other men's productions, he sought to
+combine the functions of the painter with those of the engraver, and
+to gain the power of delineating his own ideas and the fruits of his
+acute observation. He has himself explained the nature of his views in
+a passage which is worth attention:
+
+"Many reasons led me to wish that I could find the shorter path--fix
+forms and characters in my mind--and instead of copying the lines, try
+to read the language, and, if possible, find the grammar of the art by
+bringing into one focus the various observations I have made, and then
+trying by my power on the canvas how far my plan enabled me to combine
+and apply them to practice. For this purpose I considered what
+various ways, and to what different purposes, the memory might be
+applied, and fell upon one most suitable to my situation and idle
+disposition; laying it down first as an axiom, that he who could by
+any means acquire and retain in his memory perfect ideas of the
+subjects he meant to draw, would have as clear a knowledge of the
+figure as a man who can write freely hath of the twenty-five letters
+of the alphabet and their infinite combinations." Acting on these
+principles, he improved, by constant exercise, his natural powers of
+observation and recollection. We find him roaming through the country,
+now at Yarmouth and again at Queenborough, sketching everywhere. In
+his rambles among the motley scenes of London he was ever on the watch
+for striking features or incidents; and not trusting entirely to
+memory, he was accustomed, when any face struck him as being
+peculiarly grotesque or expressive, to sketch it on his thumb-nail, to
+be treasured up on paper at his return home.
+
+For some time after the expiration of his apprenticeship, Hogarth
+continued to practise the trade to which he was bred; and his
+shop-bills, coats-of-arms, engravings upon tankards, etc., have been
+collected with an eagerness quite disproportionate to their value.
+Soon he procured employment in furnishing frontispieces and designs
+for the booksellers. The most remarkable of these are the plates to an
+edition of "Hudibras," published in 1726; but even these are of no
+distinguished merit. About 1728 he began to seek employment as a
+portrait-painter. Most of his performances were small family pictures,
+containing several figures, which he calls "Conversation Pieces," from
+twelve to fifteen inches high. These for a time were very popular, and
+his practice was considerable, as his price was low. His life-size
+portraits are few; the most remarkable are that of Captain Coram, in
+the "Foundling Hospital," and that of Garrick as King Richard III.,
+which is reproduced in the present volume. But his practice as a
+portrait-painter was not lucrative, nor his popularity lasting.
+Although many of his likenesses were strong and characteristic, in the
+representation of beauty, elegance, and high-breeding he was little
+skilled. The nature of the artist was as uncourtly as his pencil. When
+Hogarth obtained employment and eminence of another sort through his
+wonderful prints, he abandoned portrait-painting, with a growl at the
+jealousy of his professional brethren; and the vanity and blindness of
+the public.
+
+March 25, 1729, Hogarth contracted a stolen marriage with the only
+daughter of the once fashionable painter, Sir James Thornhill. The
+father, for some time implacable, relented at last; and the
+reconciliation, it is said, was much forwarded by his admiration of
+the "Harlot's Progress," a series of six prints, commenced in 1731 and
+published in 1734. The novelty as well as merit of this series of
+prints won for them extraordinary popularity; and their success
+encouraged Hogarth to undertake a similar history of the "Rake's
+Progress," in eight prints, which appeared in 1735. The third, and
+perhaps the most popular, as it is the least objectionable of these
+pictorial novels, "Marriage a la Mode," was not engraved till 1745.
+
+[Illustration: Hogarth Sketching the Highway of Queenborough.]
+
+The merits of these prints were sufficiently intelligible to the
+public: their originality and boldness of design, the force and
+freedom of their execution, rough as it is, won for them an
+extensive popularity and a rapid and continued sale. The "Harlot's
+Progress" was the most eminently successful, from its novelty rather
+than from its superior excellence. Twelve hundred subscribers' names
+were entered for it; it was dramatized in several forms; and we may
+note, in illustration of the difference of past and present manners,
+that fan-mounts were engraved containing miniature copies of the six
+plates. The merits of the pictures were less obvious to the few who
+could afford to spend large sums on works of art, and Hogarth, too
+proud to let them go for prices much below the value which he put upon
+them, waited for a long time, and waited in vain, for a purchaser. At
+last he determined to commit them to public sale; but instead of the
+common method of auction, he devised a new and complex plan with the
+intention of excluding picture-dealers, and obliging men of rank and
+wealth who wished to purchase to judge and bid for themselves. The
+scheme failed, as might have been expected. Nineteen of Hogarth's best
+pictures, the "Harlot's Progress," the "Rake's Progress," the "Four
+Times of the Day," and "Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn"
+produced only L427 7s., not averaging L22 10s. each. The "Harlot's
+Progress" was purchased by Mr. Beckford at the rate of fourteen
+guineas a picture; five of the series perished in the fire at
+Fonthill. The "Rake's Progress" averaged twenty-two guineas a picture;
+it has passed into the possession of Sir John Soane, at the advanced
+price of five hundred and seventy guineas. The same eminent architect
+became the proprietor of the four pictures of an "Election" for the
+sum of L1,732. "Marriage a la Mode" was disposed of in a similar way
+in 1750; and on the day of the sale one bidder appeared, who became
+master of the six pictures, together with their frames, for L115 10s.
+Mr. Angerstein purchased them, in 1797, for L1,381, and they now form
+a striking feature in the National Gallery.
+
+The satire of Hogarth was not often of a personal nature; but he knew
+his own power, and he sometimes exercised it. Two of his prints, "The
+Times," produced a memorable quarrel between himself, on one side, and
+Wilkes and Churchhill, on the other. The satire of the prints of "The
+Times," which were published in 1762, was directed, not against Wilkes
+himself, but his political friends, Pitt and Temple; nor is it so
+biting as to have required Wilkes, in defence of his party, to
+retaliate upon one with whom he had lived in familiar and friendly
+intercourse. He did so, however, in a number of the _North Briton_,
+containing not only abuse of the artist, but unjust and injurious
+mention of his wife. Hogarth was deeply wounded by this attack; he
+retorted by the well-known portrait of Wilkes with the cap of liberty,
+and he afterward represented Churchill as a bear. The quarrel was
+unworthy the talents either of the painter or poet. It is more to be
+regretted because its effects, as he himself intimates, were injurious
+to Hogarth's declining health. The summer of 1764 he spent at
+Chiswick, and the free air and exercise worked a partial renovation of
+his strength. The amendment, however, was but temporary, and he died
+suddenly, October 26th, the day after his return to his London
+residence in Leicester Square.
+
+
+
+
+SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS
+
+By SAMUEL ARCHER
+
+(1723-1792)
+
+
+[Illustration: Sir Joshua Reynolds.]
+
+Sir Joshua Reynolds, the celebrated painter, was, on July 16, 1723,
+born at Plympton, a small town in Devonshire, England. His father was
+a minister of the parish, and also master of the grammar school; and
+being a man of learning and philanthropy, he was beloved and respected
+by all to whom he was known. Such a man, it will naturally be
+supposed, was assiduous in the cultivation of the minds of his
+children, among whom his son Joshua shone conspicuous, by displaying
+at a very early period a superiority of genius and the rudiments of a
+correct taste. Unlike other boys, who generally content themselves
+with giving a literal explanation of their author, regardless of his
+beauties or his faults, young Reynolds attended to both these,
+displaying a happy knowledge of what he read, and entering with ardor
+into the spirit of his author. He discovered likewise talents for
+composition, and a natural propensity to drawing, in which his friends
+and intimates thought him qualified to excel. Emulation was a
+distinguishing characteristic of his mind, which his father perceived
+with the delight natural to a parent; and designing him for the
+church, in which he hoped that his talents might raise him to
+eminence, he sent him to one of the universities.
+
+Soon after this period he grew passionately fond of painting; and by
+the perusal of Richardson's theory of that art was determined to make
+it his profession through life. At his own earnest request, therefore,
+he was removed to London; and about the year 1742 became a pupil to
+Mr. Hudson, who, though not himself an eminent painter, was preceptor
+to many who afterward excelled in the art. One of the first advices
+which he gave to Mr. Reynolds was to copy carefully Guercino's
+drawings. This was done with such skill, that many of the copies are
+said to be now preserved in the cabinets of the curious as the
+originals of that very great master.
+
+About the year 1749, Mr. Reynolds went to Italy under the auspices,
+and in the company, of the late Lord (then Commodore) Keppel, who was
+appointed to the command of the British squadron in the Mediterranean.
+In this garden of the world, this magic seat of arts, he failed not to
+visit the schools of the great masters, to study the productions of
+different ages, and to contemplate with unwearied attention the
+various beauties which are characteristic of each. His labor here, as
+has been observed of another painter, was "the labor of love, not the
+task of the hireling;" and how much he profited by it is known to all
+Europe.
+
+Having remained about two years in Italy, and studied the language as
+well as the arts of the country with great success, he returned to
+England, improved by travel and refined by education. On the road to
+London from the port where he landed, he accidentally found in the inn
+where he lodged Johnson's life of Savage, and was so taken with the
+charms of composition, and the masterly delineation of character
+displayed in that work, that, having begun to read it while leaning
+his arm on the chimney-piece, he continued in that attitude,
+insensible of pain till he was hardly able to raise his hand to his
+head. The admiration of the work naturally led him to seek the
+acquaintance of its author, who continued one of his sincerest
+admirers and warmest friends till 1784, when they were separated by
+the stroke of death.
+
+The first thing that distinguished him after his return to his native
+country was a full-length portrait of Commodore Keppel; which in
+polite circles was spoken of in terms of the highest encomium, and
+testified to what a degree of eminence he had arrived in his
+profession. This was followed by a portrait of Lord Edgecombe, and a
+few others, which at once introduced him to the first business in
+portrait-painting; and that branch of the art he cultivated with such
+success as will forever establish his fame with all descriptions of
+refined society. Having painted some of the first-rate beauties of the
+age, the polite world flocked to see the graces and the charms of his
+pencil; and he soon became the most fashionable painter not only in
+England, but in all Europe. He has indeed preserved the resemblance of
+so many illustrious characters, that we feel the less regret at his
+having left behind him so few historical paintings; though what he has
+done in that way shows him to have been qualified to excel in both
+departments. The only landscape, perhaps, which he ever painted,
+except those beautiful and chaste ones which compose the backgrounds
+of many of his portraits, is "A View on the Thames from Richmond,"
+which in 1784 was exhibited by the Society for Promoting Painting and
+Design in Liverpool.
+
+In 1764 Mr. Reynolds had the merit of being the first promoter of that
+club, which, having long existed without a name, became at last
+distinguished by the appellation of the _Literary Club_. Upon the
+foundation of the Royal Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and
+Architecture, he was appointed president; and his acknowledged
+excellence in his profession made the appointment acceptable to all
+the lovers of art. To add to the dignity of this new institution, his
+majesty conferred on the president the honor of knighthood; and Sir
+Joshua delivered his first discourse at the opening of the Academy, on
+January 2, 1769. The merit of that discourse has been universally
+admitted among painters; but it contains some directions, respecting
+the proper mode of prosecuting their studies, to which every student
+of every art would do well to pay attention. "I would chiefly
+recommend (says he) that an implicit obedience to the _rules of art_,
+as established by the practice of the great masters, should be exacted
+from the young students. That those models, which have passed through
+the approbation of ages, should be considered by them as perfect and
+infallible guides, as subjects for their imitation, not their
+criticism. I am confident that this is the only efficacious method of
+making a progress in the arts; and that he who sets out with doubting
+will find life finished before he becomes master of the rudiments. For
+it may be laid down as a maxim, that he who begins by presuming on his
+own sense, has ended his studies as soon as he has commenced them.
+Every opportunity, therefore, should be taken to discountenance that
+false and vulgar opinion, that rules are the fetters of genius. They
+are fetters only to men of no genius; as that armor, which upon the
+strong becomes an ornament and a defence, upon the weak and misshapen
+turns into a load, and cripples the body which it was made to
+protect."
+
+Each succeeding year, on the distribution of the prizes, Sir Joshua
+delivered to the students a discourse of equal merit with this; and
+perhaps we do not hazard too much when we say, that from the whole
+collected, the lovers of belles-lettres and the fine arts will acquire
+juster notions of what is meant by taste in general, and better rules
+for acquiring a correct taste, than from the multitude of those
+volumes which have been professedly written on the subject.
+
+In the autumn of 1785 he went to Brussels, where he expended about
+L1,000 on the purchase of paintings which, having been taken from the
+different monasteries and religious houses in Flanders and Germany,
+were then exposed to sale by the command of the Emperor Joseph.
+Gainsborough and he had engaged to paint each other's portrait; and
+the canvas for both being actually stretched, Sir Joshua gave one
+sitting to his distinguished rival; but to the regret of every admirer
+of the art, the unexpected death of the latter prevented all further
+progress.
+
+In 1790 he was anxiously desirous to procure the vacant professorship
+of perspective in the academy for Mr. Bonomi, an Italian architect;
+but that artist not having been yet elected an associate, was, of
+course, no academician, and it became necessary to raise him to those
+positions, in order to qualify him for being a professor. Mr. Gilpin
+being his competitor for the associateship, the numbers on the ballot
+proved equal, when the president, on his casting vote, decided the
+election in favor of his friend, who was thereby advanced so far
+toward the professorship. Soon after this, an academic seat being
+vacant, Sir Joshua exerted all his influence to obtain it for Mr.
+Bonomi; but finding himself out-voted by a majority of two to one, he
+quitted the chair with great dissatisfaction, and next day sent to the
+secretary of the academy a formal resignation of the office, which for
+twenty-one years he had filled with honor to himself and to his
+country. His indignation, however, subsiding, he suffered himself to
+be prevailed upon to return to the chair, which, within a year and a
+half, he was again desirous to quit for a better reason.
+
+Finding a disease of languor, occasioned by an enlargement of the
+liver, to which he had for some time been subject, increase, and daily
+expecting a total loss of sight, he wrote a letter to the academy,
+intimating his intention to resign the office of president on account
+of bodily infirmities, which disabled him from executing the duties
+of it to his own satisfaction. The academy received this intelligence
+with the respectful concern due to the talents and virtues of their
+president, and either then did enter, or designed to enter, into a
+resolution honorable to all parties, namely, that a deputation from
+the whole body of the academy should wait upon him, and inform him of
+their wish, that the authority and privileges of the office of
+president might be his during his life, declaring their willingness to
+permit the performance of any of its duties which might be irksome to
+him by a deputy.
+
+From this period Sir Joshua never painted more. The last effort of his
+pencil was the portrait of the honorable Charles James Fox, which was
+executed in his best style, and shows that his fancy, his imagination,
+and his other great powers in the art which he professed, remained
+unabated to the end of his life. When the last touches were given to
+this picture,
+
+  "The hand of Reynolds fell, to rise no more."
+
+On Thursday, February 23, 1792, the world was deprived of this amiable
+man and excellent artist, at the age of sixty-eight years; a man than
+whom no one, according to Johnson, had passed through life with more
+observations of men and manners. The following character of him is
+said to be the production of Mr. Burke:
+
+"His illness was long, but borne with a mild and cheerful fortitude,
+without the least mixture of anything irritable or querulous,
+agreeably to the placid and even tenor of his whole life. He had, from
+the beginning of his malady, a distinct view of his dissolution, which
+he contemplated with that entire composure which nothing but the
+innocence, integrity, and usefulness of his life, and an unaffected
+submission to the will of Providence, could bestow. In this situation
+he had every consolation from family tenderness, which his tenderness
+to his family had always merited.
+
+"Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on very many accounts, one of the most
+memorable men of his time; he was the first Englishman who added the
+praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In
+taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in richness and
+harmony of coloring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned
+ages. In portrait he went beyond them; for he communicated to that
+branch of the art in which English artists are the most engaged, a
+variety, a fancy, and a dignity derived from the higher branches,
+which even those who professed them in a superior manner did not
+always preserve when they delineated individual nature. His portraits
+reminded the spectator of the invention of history and the amenity of
+landscape. In painting portraits he appears not to be raised upon that
+platform, but to descend to it from a higher sphere. His paintings
+illustrate his lessons, and his lessons seem to be derived from his
+paintings.
+
+"He possessed the theory as perfectly as the practice of his art. To
+be such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating philosopher.
+
+"In full happiness of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert
+in art, and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed
+by sovereign powers, and celebrated by distinguished poets, his native
+humility, modesty, and candor never forsook him, even on surprise or
+provocation; nor was the least degree of arrogance or assumption
+visible to the most scrutinizing eye in any part of his conduct or
+discourse.
+
+"His talents of every kind--powerful from nature, and not meanly
+cultivated in letters--his social virtues in all the relations and all
+the habitudes of life, rendered him the centre of a very great and
+unparalleled variety of agreeable societies, which will be dissipated
+by his death. He had too much merit not to excite some jealousy, too
+much innocence to provoke any enmity. The loss of no man of his time
+can be felt with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow."
+
+
+
+
+BENJAMIN WEST
+
+By MARTHA J. LAMB[5]
+
+         [Footnote 5: Reprinted by permission, from the Magazine of
+         American History.]
+
+(1738-1820)
+
+
+[Illustration: Benjamin West.]
+
+In the wilds of the new world, a century and a half ago, there was,
+apparently, no spot less likely to produce a famous painter than the
+Quaker province of Pennsylvania. And yet, when George Washington was
+only six years old there was born, in the little town of Springfield,
+Chester County, a boy whose interesting and remarkable career from
+infancy to old age has provided one of the most instructive lessons
+for students in art that America affords.
+
+Perhaps Benjamin West's aptitude for picture-making in his infancy,
+while he was learning to walk and to talk, did not exceed that of
+hosts of other children, in like circumstances, in every generation
+since his time. But many curious things were remembered and told of
+this baby's performances after he had developed a decided talent for
+reproducing the beautiful objects that captivated his eye. It was in
+the summer of 1745, a few months before he was seven years old that
+his married sister came home for a visit, bringing with her an infant
+daughter. The next morning after her arrival, little Benjamin was left
+to keep the flies off the sleeping baby, while his mother and sister
+went to the garden for flowers. The baby smiled in its sleep, and the
+boy was captivated. He must catch that smile and keep it. He found
+some paper on the table, scrambled for a pen, and with red and black
+ink made a hasty but striking picture of the little beauty. He heard
+his mother returning, and conscious of having been in mischief, tried
+to conceal his production; but she detected and captured it, and
+regarded it long and lovingly, exclaiming as her daughter entered, "He
+has really made a likeness of little Sally!" She then caught up the
+boy in her arms, and kissed instead of chiding him, and he--looking up
+encouraged--told her he could make the flowers, too, if she would
+permit. The awakening of genius in Benjamin West has been distinctly
+traced to this incident, as the time when he first discovered that he
+could imitate the forms of such objects as pleased his sense of sight.
+And the incident itself has been aptly styled "the birth of fine arts
+in the New World."
+
+The Quaker boy, in course of years, left the wilderness of America to
+become the president of the Royal Academy in London. His
+irreproachable character not less than his excellence as an artist,
+gave him commanding position among his contemporaries. From first to
+last he was distinguished for his indefatigable industry. The number
+of his pictures has been estimated, by a writer in _Blackwood's
+Magazine_, at three thousand; and Dunlap says that a gallery capable
+of holding them would be four hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and
+forty feet high--or a wall a quarter of a mile long.
+
+The parents of Benjamin West were sincere and self-respecting, and in
+the language of the times, well-to-do. His mother's grandfather was
+the intimate and confidential friend of William Penn. The family of
+his father claimed direct descent from the Black Prince and Lord
+Delaware, of the time of King Edward III. Colonel James West was the
+friend and companion in arms of John Hampden. When Benjamin West was at
+work upon his great picture of the "Institution of the Garter," the
+King of England was delighted when the Duke of Buckingham assured him
+that West had an ancestral right to a place among the warriors and
+knights of his own painting. The Quaker associates of the parents of
+the artist, the patriarchs of Pennsylvania, regarded their asylum in
+America as the place for affectionate intercourse--free from all the
+military predilections and political jealousies of Europe. The result
+was a state of society more contented, peaceful, and pleasing than the
+world had ever before exhibited. At the time of the birth of Benjamin
+West the interior settlements in Pennsylvania had attained
+considerable wealth, and unlimited hospitality formed a part of the
+regular economy of the principal families. Those who resided near the
+highways were in the habit, after supper and the religious exercises
+of the evening, of making a large fire in the hallway, and spreading a
+table with refreshments for such travellers as might pass in the
+night, who were expected to step in and help themselves. This was
+conspicuously the case in Springfield. Other acts of liberality were
+performed by this community, to an extent that would have beggared the
+munificence of the old world. Poverty was not known in this region.
+But whether families traced their lineage to ancient and noble
+sources, or otherwise, their pride was so tempered with the meekness
+of their faith, that it lent a singular dignity to their benevolence.
+
+The Indians mingled freely with the people, and when they paid their
+annual visits to the plantations, raised their wigwams in the fields
+and orchards without asking permission, and were never molested.
+Shortly after Benjamin West's first efforts with pen and ink, a party
+of red men reached and encamped in Springfield. The boy-artist showed
+them his sketches of birds and flowers, which seemed to amuse them
+greatly. They at once proceeded to teach him how to prepare the red
+and yellow colors with which they decorated their ornaments. To these
+Mrs. West added blue, by contributing a piece of indigo. Thus the boy
+had three prismatic colors for his use. What could be more picturesque
+than the scene where the untutored Indian gave the future artist his
+first lesson in mixing paints! These wild men also taught him archery,
+that he might shoot birds for models if he wanted their bright plumage
+to copy.
+
+The neighbors were attracted by the boy's drawings, and finally a
+relative, Mr. Pennington, a prominent merchant of Philadelphia, came
+to pay the family a visit. He thought the boy's crude pictures were
+wonderful, as he was then only entering his eighth year. When he went
+home he immediately sent the little fellow a box of paints, with six
+engravings by Grevling. John Gait, who wrote from the artist's own
+statements, describes the effect of this gift upon the boy. In going
+to bed he placed the box so near his couch, that he could hug and
+caress it every time he wakened. Next morning he rose early, and
+taking his paints and canvas to the garret, began to work. He went to
+breakfast, and then stole back to his post under the roof, forgetting
+all about school. When dinnertime came he presented himself at table,
+as usual, but said nothing of his occupation. He had been absent from
+school some days before the master called on his parents to inquire
+what had become of him. This led to the discovery of his secret
+painting, for his mother proceeded to the garret and found the truant.
+She was, however, so astonished with the creation upon his canvas,
+that she took him in her arms and kissed him with transports of
+affection. He had made a composition of his own out of two of the
+engravings--which he had colored from his ideas of the proper tints to
+be used--and so perfect did the picture appear to Mrs. West that,
+although half the canvas remained to be covered, she would not suffer
+the child to add another touch with his brush. Sixty-seven years
+afterward, Mr. Gait saw this production in the exact state in which it
+was left, and Mr. West himself acknowledged that in subsequent efforts
+he had never been able to excel some of the touches of invention in
+this first picture.
+
+The first instruction in art which the artist received was from Mr.
+William Williams, a painter in Philadelphia. Young West's first
+attempt at portraiture was at Lancaster, where he painted "The Death
+of Socrates" for William Henry, a gunsmith. He was not yet sixteen,
+but other paintings followed which possessed so much genuine merit,
+that they have been preserved as treasures. One of these is in
+possession of General Meredith Reed, of Paris, France, a descendant of
+the signer. West returned to his home in Springfield, in 1754, to
+discuss the question of his future vocation. He had an inclination for
+military life, and volunteered as a recruit in the old French war;
+but military attractions vanished among the hardships involved, and in
+1756, when eighteen years old, he established himself in Philadelphia
+as a portrait-painter, his price being "five guineas a head." Two
+years later he went to New York, where he passed eleven months, and
+was liberally employed by the merchants and others. He painted the
+portrait of Bishop Provoost, those of Gerardus Duyekinck and his
+wife--full length--one of Mrs. Samuel Breese, and many others, which
+are in the families of descendants, and characteristic examples of his
+early work.
+
+In 1760 an opportunity offered for him to visit Rome, Italy. He
+carried letters to Cardinal Albani and other celebrities, and as he
+was very handsome and intelligent, and came from a far-away land about
+which hung the perpetual charm of tradition and romance, he soon
+became the lion of the day among the imaginative Italians. It was a
+novelty then for an American to appear in the Eternal City, and the
+very morning after his arrival a curious party followed his steps to
+observe his pursuit of art. He remained in Italy until 1763, and while
+there he painted, among others, his pictures of "Cimon and Iphigenia,"
+and "Angelica and Medora." His portrait of Lord Grantham excited much
+interest, and that nobleman's introduction facilitated his visit to
+London, which proved so prolific in results. There was no great living
+historical painter in England just then; and at first there was no
+sale for West's pictures, as it was unfashionable to buy any but "old
+masters." But the young artist was undaunted, and presently attracted
+attention in high places. His picture of "Agrippina Landing with the
+Ashes of Germanicus," painted for Dr. Drummond, Archbishop of York,
+secured him the favor of George III., and the commission from his
+majesty to paint the "Departure of Regulus from Rome." His untiring
+industry and gentlemanly habits were conspicuous, and may be regarded
+as among the great secrets of his continual advance and public
+recognition. His "Parting of Hector and Andromache," and "Return of
+the Prodigal Son," were among his notable productions of this period.
+His "Death of General Wolfe" has been, says Tuckerman, "truly declared
+to have created an era in English art, by the successful example it
+initiated of the abandonment of classic costume--a reform advocated by
+Reynolds, who glories in the popular innovation." His characters were
+clad in the dress of their time. Reynolds said to the Archbishop of
+York: "I foresee that this picture will not only become one of the
+most popular, but will occasion a revolution in art." It was purchased
+by Lord Grosvenor. Among the long list of paintings executed by order
+of the king were "The Death of Chevalier Bayard;" "Edward III.
+Embracing his Son on the Field of Battle at Cressy;" "The Installation
+of the Order of the Garter;" "The Black Prince Receiving the King of
+France and his Son Prisoners at Poictiers," and "Queen Philippa
+Interceding with Edward for the Burgesses of Calais." West was one of
+the founders, in 1768, of the Royal Academy, and succeeded Sir Joshua
+Reynolds as president of the institution in 1792, which post he held
+almost uninterruptedly until 1815.
+
+In the year 1780 he proposed a series of pictures on the progress of
+revealed religion, of which there were thirty-six subjects in all,
+but he never executed but twenty-eight of these, owing to the mental
+trouble which befell the king. He then commenced a new series of
+important works, of which "Christ Healing the Sick" was purchased by
+an institution in Great Britain for L3,000, and was subsequently
+copied for the Pennsylvania Hospital. "Penn's Treaty with the Indians"
+was painted for Granville Penn, the scene representing the founding of
+Pennsylvania. West wrote to one of his family that he had taken the
+liberty of introducing in this painting the likeness of his father and
+his brother Thomas. "That is the likeness of our brother," he says,
+"standing immediately behind Penn, leaning on his cane. I need not
+point out the picture of our father, as I believe you will find it in
+the print from memory." Tuckerman says that the work which, in the
+opinion of many critics, best illustrates the skill of West in
+composition, drawing, expression, and dramatic effect, is his "Death
+on the Pale Horse." His "Cupid," owned in Philadelphia, is one of his
+most effective pictures as to color.
+
+The full-length portrait of West, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A.,
+represents the great artist in his character as president of the Royal
+Academy, delivering a lecture on "coloring" to the students. Under his
+right hand may be noticed, standing on an easel, a copy of Raphael's
+cartoon of the "Death of Ananias." The picture of West's face has been
+considered a perfect likeness, but the figure somewhat too large and
+too tall in its effects. A copy of this portrait was made by Charles
+R. Leslie; and Washington Allston also painted a portrait of the
+artist. There exists, it is said, a portrait of West from his own
+hand, taken apparently at about the age of forty, three-quarter
+length, in Quaker costume.
+
+[Illustration: Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy.]
+
+
+
+
+THORWALDSEN
+
+By HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
+
+(1770-1844)
+
+
+It was in Copenhagen, on November 19, 1770, that a carver of figures
+for ships' heads, by name Gottskalk Thorwaldsen, was presented by his
+wife, Karen Groenlund, the daughter of a clergyman in Jutland, with a
+son, who at his baptism received the name of Bertel, or Albert.
+
+The father had come from Iceland, and lived in poor circumstances.
+They dwelt in _Lille Groennegade_ (Little Green Street), not far from
+the Academy of Arts. The moon has often peeped into their poor room;
+she has told us about it in "A Picture-book without Pictures":
+
+[Illustration: Thorwaldsen.]
+
+"The father and mother slept, but their little son did not sleep;
+where the flowered cotton bed-curtains moved I saw the child peep out.
+I thought at first that he looked at the Bornholm clock, for it was
+finely painted with red and green, and there was a cuckoo on the top;
+it had heavy leaden weights, and the pendulum with its shining brass
+plate went to and fro with a 'tick! tick!' But it was not that he
+looked at; no, it was his mother's spinning-wheel, which stood
+directly under the clock; this was the dearest piece of furniture in
+the whole house for the boy; but he dared not touch it, for if he did,
+he got a rap over the fingers. While his mother spun, he would sit for
+hours together looking at the buzzing spindle and the revolving wheel,
+and then he had his own thoughts. Oh! if he only durst spin that
+wheel! His father and mother slept; he looked at them, he looked at
+the wheel, and then by degrees a little naked foot was stuck out of
+bed, and then another naked foot, then there came two small legs, and,
+with a jump, he stood on the floor. He turned round once more, to see
+if his parents slept; yes, they did, and so he went softly, quite
+softly, only in his little shirt, up to the wheel, and began to spin.
+The cord flew off, and the wheel then ran much quicker. His mother
+awoke at the same moment; the curtains moved; she looked out and
+thought of the brownie, or another little spectral being. 'Have mercy
+on us!' said she, and in her fear she struck her husband in the side;
+he opened his eyes, rubbed them with his hands, and looked at the busy
+little fellow. 'It is Bertel, woman,' said he."
+
+What the moon relates we see here as the first picture in
+Thorwaldsen's life's gallery; for it is a reflection of the reality.
+Thorwaldsen has himself, when in familiar conversation at Nysoee, told
+the author almost word for word what he, in his "Picture-book," lets
+the moon say. It was one of his earliest remembrances, how he, in his
+little short shirt, sat in the moonlight and spun his mother's wheel,
+while she, dear soul, took him for a little spectre.
+
+A few years ago there still lived an old ship-carpenter, who
+remembered the little, light-haired, blue-eyed boy, that came to his
+father in the carving-house at the dock-yard; he was to learn his
+father's trade; and as the latter felt how bad it was not to be able
+to draw, the boy, then eleven years of age, was sent to the
+drawing-school at the Academy of Arts, where he made rapid progress.
+Two years afterward, Bertel, or Albert, as we shall in future call
+him, was of great assistance to his father; nay, he even improved his
+work.
+
+See the hovering ships on the wharves! The Dannebrog waves, the
+workmen sit in circle under the shade at their frugal breakfasts; but
+foremost stands the principal figure in this picture: it is a boy who
+cuts with a bold hand the lifelike features in the wooden image for
+the beak-head of the vessel. It is the ship's guardian spirit, and, as
+the first image from the hand of Albert Thorwaldsen, it shall wander
+out into the wide world. The eternally swelling sea should baptize it
+with its waters, and hang its wreaths of wet plants around it.
+
+Our next picture advances a step forward. Unobserved among the other
+boys, he has now frequented the Academy's school for six years
+already, where, always taciturn and silent, he stood by his
+drawing-board. His answer was "yes" or "no," a nod or a shake of the
+head; but mildness shone from his features, and good-nature was in
+every expression. The picture shows us Albert as a candidate for
+confirmation. He is now seventeen years of age--not a very young age
+to ratify his baptismal compact; his place at the dean's house is the
+last among the poor boys, for his knowledge is not sufficient to place
+him higher. There had just at that time been an account in the
+newspapers, that the pupil Thorwaldsen had gained the Academy's
+smaller medal for a bas-relief representing a "Cupid Reposing." "Is it
+your brother that has gained the medal?" inquired the dean. "It is
+myself," said Albert, and the clergyman looked kindly on him, placed
+him first among all the boys, and from that time always called him
+Monsieur Thorwaldsen. Oh! how deeply did that "Monsieur" then sound in
+his mind! As he has often said since, it sounded far more powerfully
+than any title that kings could give him; he never afterward forgot
+it.
+
+In a small house in Aabeuraa--the street where Holberg lets his poor
+poets dwell--lived Albert Thorwaldsen with his parents, and divided
+his time between the study of art and assisting his father. The
+Academy's lesser gold was then the prize to be obtained for sculpture.
+Our artist was now twenty years of age; his friends knew his abilities
+better than himself, and they compelled him to enter on the task. The
+subject proposed was, "Heliodorus Driven out of the Temple."
+
+We are now in Charlottenburg; but the little chamber in which
+Thorwaldsen lately sat to make his sketch is empty, and he, chased by
+the demons of fear and distrust, hastens down the narrow back-stairs
+with the intention not to return. Nothing is accidental in the life of
+a great genius; an apparent insignificance is a God's guiding finger.
+Thorwaldsen was to complete his task. Who is it that stops him on the
+dark stairs? One of the professors just comes that way, speaks to him,
+questions, admonishes him. He returns, and in four hours the sketch is
+finished, and the gold medal won. This was on August 15, 1791.
+
+Count Ditlew de Reventlow, minister of state, saw the young artist's
+work, and became his protector; he placed his own name at the head of
+a subscription that enabled Thorwaldsen to devote his time to the
+study of his art. Two years afterward the large gold medal was to be
+contended for at the Academy, the successful candidate thereby gaining
+the right to a travelling _stipendium_. Thorwaldsen was again the
+first; but before he entered on his travels, it was deemed necessary
+to extend that knowledge which an indifferent education at school had
+left him in want of. He read, studied, and the Academy gave him its
+support; acknowledgment smiled on him, a greater and more spiritual
+sphere lay open to him.
+
+A portrait figure stands now before us; it is that of a Dane, the
+learned and severe Zoega, to whom the young artist is specially
+recommended, but who only sees in him a common talent; whose words are
+only those of censure, and whose eye sees only a servile imitation of
+the antique in his works. Strictly honest in his judgment, according
+to his own ideas, is this man, who should be Thorwaldsen's guide.
+
+We let three years glide away after the arrival of Thorwaldsen, and
+ask Zoega what he now says of Albert, or, as the Italians call him,
+Alberto, and the severe man shakes his head and says: "There is much
+to blame, little to be satisfied with, and diligent he is not!" Yet he
+was diligent in a high degree; but genius is foreign to a foreign
+mind. "The snow had just then thawed from my eyes," he has himself
+often repeated. The drawings of the Danish painter Carstens formed one
+of those spiritual books that shed its holy baptism over that growing
+genius. The little _atelier_ looked like a battle-field, for
+roundabout were broken statues. Genius formed them often in the
+midnight hours; despondency over their faults broke them in the day.
+
+The three years, for which he had received a _stipendium_, were as if
+they had flown away, and as yet he had produced nothing. The time for
+his return drew nigh. One work, however, he must complete, that it
+might not with justice be said in Denmark, "Thorwaldsen has quite
+wasted his time in Rome." Doubting his genius just when it embraced
+him most affectionately; not expecting a victory, while he already
+stood on its open road, he modelled "Jason who has Gained the Golden
+Fleece." It was this that Thorwaldsen would have gained in the kingdom
+of arts, and which he now thought he must resign. The figure stood
+there in clay, many eyes looked carelessly on it, and--he broke it to
+pieces!
+
+It was in April, 1801, that his return home was fixed, in company with
+Zoega. It was put off until the autumn. During this time "Jason"
+occupied all his thoughts. A new, a larger figure of the hero was
+formed, an immortal work; but it had not then been announced to the
+world, nor understood by it. "Here is something more than common!" was
+said by many. Even the man to whom all paid homage, the illustrious
+Canova, started, and exclaimed: "Quest' opera di quel giovane Danese e
+fatta in uno stilo nuovo, e grandioso!" Zoega smiled. "It is bravely
+done!" said he. The Danish songstress, Frederikke Brunn, was then in
+Rome and sang enthusiastically about Thorwaldsen's "Jason." She
+assisted the artist, so that he was enabled to get this figure cast in
+plaster; for he himself had no more money than was just sufficient for
+his expenses home.
+
+The last glass of wine had been already drunk as a farewell, the boxes
+packed, and the _vetturino's_ carriage was before the door at daybreak;
+the boxes were fastened behind. Then came a fellow-traveller--the
+sculptor, Hagemann, who was returning to his native city, Berlin. His
+passport was not ready. Their departure must be put off until the next
+day; and Thorwaldsen promised, although the _vetturino_ complained and
+abused him, to remain so long. He stayed--stayed to win an immortal name
+on earth, and cast a lustre over Denmark.
+
+Though forty years resident in Rome, rich and independent, he lived
+and worked with the thought of once returning home to Denmark, there
+to rest himself; unaccustomed to the great comforts of other rich
+artists in Rome, he lived a bachelor's life. Was his heart, then, no
+longer open to love since his first departure from Copenhagen? A
+thousand beautiful Cupids in marble will tell us how warmly that heart
+beat. Love belongs to life's mysteries.
+
+We know that Thorwaldsen left a daughter in Rome, whose birth he
+acknowledged; we also know that more than one female of quality would
+willingly have given her hand to the great artist. The year before his
+first return to Denmark he lay ill at Naples, and was nursed by an
+English lady who felt the most ardent affection for him; and, from
+that feeling of gratitude which was awakened in him, he immediately
+consented to their union. When he had recovered and afterward returned
+to Rome, this promise preyed on his mind, he felt that he was not now
+formed to be a husband, acknowledged that gratitude was not love, and
+that they were not suited for each other; after a long combat with
+himself, he wrote and informed her of his determination. Thorwaldsen
+was never married.
+
+The following trait is as characteristic of his heart as of his whole
+personality. One day, while in Rome, there came a poor countryman to
+him, an artisan, who had long been ill. He came to say farewell, and
+to thank him for the money that he and others of his countrymen had
+subscribed together, with which he was to reach home.
+
+"But you will not walk the whole way?" said Thorwaldsen.
+
+"I am obliged to do so," replied the man.
+
+"But you are still too weak to walk--you cannot bear the fatigue, nor
+must you do it!" said he.
+
+The man assured him of the necessity of doing so.
+
+Thorwaldsen went and opened a drawer, took out a handful of _scudi_
+and gave them to him, saying, "See, now you will ride the whole way!"
+
+The man thanked him, but assured him that his gift would not be more
+than sufficient to carry him to Florence.
+
+"Well!" said Thorwaldsen, clapping him on the shoulder, as he went a
+second time to the drawer and took out another handful. The man was
+grateful in the highest degree, and was going. "Now you can ride the
+whole way home and be comfortable on the way," said he, as he followed
+the man to the door.
+
+"I am very glad," said the man. "God bless you for it! but to ride the
+whole way requires a little capital."
+
+"Well, then, tell me how great that must be," he asked, and looked
+earnestly at him. The man in a modest manner named the requisite sum,
+and Thorwaldsen went a third time to the drawer, counted out the sum,
+accompanied him to the door, pressed his hand, and repeated, "But now
+you will ride, for you have not strength to walk!"
+
+Our artist did not belong to the class of great talkers; it was only
+in a small circle that he could be brought to say anything, but then
+it was always with humor and gayety. A few energetic exclamations of
+his are preserved. A well-known sculptor, expressing himself one day
+with much self-feeling, entered into a dispute with Thorwaldsen, and
+set his own works over the latter's. "You may bind my hands behind
+me," said Thorwaldsen, "and I will bite the marble out with my teeth
+better than you can carve it."
+
+Thorwaldsen possessed specimens in plaster of all his works; these,
+together with the rich marble statues and bas-reliefs which he had
+collected of his own accord, without orders, and the number of
+paintings that he every year bought of young artists, formed a
+treasure that he wished to have in his proper home, Copenhagen.
+Therefore, when the Danish government sent vessels of war to the
+Mediterranean, in order to fetch the works that were ready for the
+palace or the churches, he always sent a number of his own things with
+them. Denmark was to inherit these treasures of art; and, in order to
+see them collected in a place worthy of them, a zeal was awakened in
+the nation to build a museum for their reception. A committee of his
+Danish admirers and friends sent out a requisition to the people, that
+everyone might give their mite; many a poor servant-girl and many a
+peasant gave theirs, so that a good sum was soon collected. Frederick
+VI. gave ground for the building, and the erection thereof was
+committed to the architect, Bindesbol.
+
+Thorwaldsen, in 1838, had attained universal fame. The frigate Rota
+was dispatched to bring a cargo of his works to Copenhagen, and he was
+to arrive at the same time, perhaps to remain in Denmark. Close to
+Presto Bay, surrounded by wood-grown banks, lies Nysoee, the principal
+seat of the barony of Stampenborg, a place which, through Thorwaldsen,
+has become remarkable in Denmark. The open strand, the beautiful beech
+woods, even the little town seen through the orchards, at some few
+hundred paces from the mansion, make the place worthy of a visit on
+account of its truly Danish scenery. Here Thorwaldsen found his best
+home in Denmark; here he seemed to increase his fame, and here a
+series of his last beautiful bas-reliefs were produced.
+
+Baron Stampe was one of nature's noblest-minded men; his hospitality
+and his lady's daughterly affection for Thorwaldsen opened a home for
+him here, a comfortable and good one. A great energetic power in the
+baroness incited his activity; she attended him with a daughter's
+care, elicited from him every little wish, and executed it. Directly
+after his first visit to Nysoee, a short tour to Moen's chalk cliffs
+was arranged, and during the few days that were passed there, a little
+_atelier_ was erected in the garden at Nysoee, close to the canal which
+half encircles the principal building; here, and in a corner room of
+the mansion, on the first floor facing the sea, most of Thorwaldsen's
+works, during the last years of his life, were executed: "Christ
+Bearing the Cross," "The Entry into Jerusalem," "Rebecca at the Well,"
+his own portrait-statue, Oehlenschlaeger's and Holberg's busts, etc.
+Baroness Stampe was in faithful attendance on him, lent him a helping
+hand, and read aloud for him from Holberg. Driving abroad, weekly
+concerts, and in the evenings his fondest play, "The Lottery," were
+what most easily excited him, and on these occasions he would say many
+amusing things. He has represented the Stampe family in two
+bas-reliefs: in the one, representing the mother, the two daughters,
+and the youngest son, is the artist himself; the other exhibits the
+father and the two eldest sons.
+
+All circles sought to attract Thorwaldsen; he was at every great
+festival, in every great society, and every evening in the theatre by
+the side of Oehlenschlaeger. His greatness was allied to a mildness, a
+straightforwardness, that in the highest degree fascinated the
+stranger who approached him for the first time. His _atelier_ in
+Copenhagen was visited daily; he therefore felt himself more
+comfortable and undisturbed at Nysoee. Baron Stampe and his family
+accompanied him to Italy in 1841, when he again visited that country.
+The whole journey, which was by way of Berlin, Dresden, Frankfort, the
+Rhine towns, and Munich, was a continued triumphal procession. The
+winter was passed in Rome, and the Danes there had a home in which
+they found a welcome.
+
+The following year Thorwaldsen was again in Denmark, and at his
+favorite place, Nysoee. On Christmas eve he here formed his beautiful
+bas-relief, "Christmas Joys in Heaven," which Oehlenschlaeger
+consecrated with a poem. The last birthday of his life was celebrated
+here; the performance of one of Holberg's vaudevilles was arranged,
+and strangers invited; yet the morning of that day was the homeliest,
+when only the family and the author of this memoir, who had written a
+merry song for the occasion, which was still wet on the paper, placed
+themselves outside the artist's door, each with a pair of tongs, a
+gong, or a bottle on which they rubbed a cork, as an accompaniment,
+and sung the song as a morning greeting. Thorwaldsen, in his morning
+gown, opened the door, laughing; he twirled his black Raphael's cap,
+took a pair of tongs himself, and accompanied us, while he danced
+round and joined the others in the loud "hurra!"
+
+A charming bas-relief, "The Genius of Poetry," was just completed; it
+was the same that Thorwaldsen, on the last day of his life, bequeathed
+to Oehlenschlaeger, and said, "It may serve as a medal for you."
+
+On Sunday, March 24, 1844, a small party of friends were assembled at
+the residence of Baron Stampe, in Copenhagen. Thorwaldsen was there
+and was unusually lively, told stories, and spoke of a journey that he
+intended to make to Italy in the course of the summer. Cahn's tragedy
+of "Griseldis" was to be performed for the first time that evening at
+the theatre. Tragedy was not his favorite subject, but comedy, and
+particularly the comedies of Holberg; but it was something new that he
+was to see, and it had become a sort of habit with him to pass the
+evening in the theatre. About six o'clock, therefore, he went to the
+theatre alone. The overture had begun; on entering he shook hands with
+a few of his friends, took his usual seat, stood up again to allow one
+to pass him, sat down again, bent his head, and was no more! The music
+continued. Those nearest to him thought he was only in a swoon, and he
+was borne out; but he was numbered with the dead.
+
+The mournful intelligence of his death soon spread through the country
+and through all lands; funeral dirges were sung and funeral festivals
+were arranged in Berlin and Rome; in the Danish theatre, whence his
+soul took its flight to God there was a festival; the place where he
+sat was decorated with crape and laurel wreaths, and a poem by Heiberg
+was recited, in which his greatness and his death were alluded to.
+
+The day before Thorwaldsen's death the interior of his tomb was
+finished, for it was his wish that his remains might rest in the
+centre of the court-yard of the museum; it was then walled round, and
+he begged that there might be a marble edge around it, and a few
+rose-trees and flowers planted on it as his monument. The whole
+building, with the rich treasures which he presented to his
+fatherland, will be his monument; his works are to be placed in the
+rooms of the square building that surrounds the open court-yard, and
+which, both internally and externally, are painted in the Pompeian
+style. His arrival in the roads of Copenhagen and landing at the
+custom-house form the subjects depicted in the compartments under the
+windows of one side of the museum. Through centuries to come will
+nations wander to Denmark; not allured by our charming green islands,
+with their fresh beech-woods alone--no, but to see these works and
+this tomb.
+
+There is, however, one place more that the stranger will visit, the
+little spot at Nysoee where his _atelier_ stands, and where the tree
+bends its branches over the canal to the solitary swan which he fed.
+The name of Thorwaldsen will be remembered in England by his statues
+of Jason and Byron; in Switzerland, by his "recumbent lion;" in
+Roeskilde, by his figure of Christian the Fourth. It will live in
+every breast in which a love of art is enkindled.
+
+
+
+
+JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET[6]
+
+         [Footnote 6: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(1814-1875)
+
+
+[Illustration: Jean-Francois Millet.]
+
+We read that on one occasion, when a picture by some Dutch artist,
+representing peasants at their sports, was shown to Louis XIV., he
+angrily exclaimed, "Take away those vermin!" Such subjects had never
+been chosen by French artists, nor indeed had they been seen anywhere
+in Europe before the Dutch artists began to paint them in the
+seventeenth century. The Italian painters of the early and the later
+Renaissance, working almost exclusively for the churches, or for the
+palaces of pleasure-loving princes, did not consider the peasant or
+the laboring man, by himself, a proper subject for his art. If he were
+introduced at any time into picture or bas-relief, it was only as a
+necessary actor in some religious story, such as "The Adoration of the
+Shepherds," or in the representations of the months or the seasons, as
+in the Fountain of the Public Square at Perugia, where we see the
+peasant engaged in the labors of the farm or vineyard: cutting the
+wheat, gathering in the grapes, and treading out the wine, and, in
+the later season, dressing the hog he has been killing; for in those
+less sophisticated times, Art, no more than Poetry, despised the ruder
+side of rustic life.
+
+The German artists of the sixteenth century introduced peasants and
+peasant-life into their designs whenever the subject admitted. Albert
+Duerer was especially given to this, and it often gives a particular
+savor, sometimes a half-humorous expression, to his treatment of even
+religious subjects; as where, in his design, "The Repose in Egypt," he
+shows Joseph, the foster-father of Jesus, making a water-trough out of
+a huge log, and a bevy of cherub-urchins about him gathering up the
+chips. Mary, meanwhile, as the peasant mother, sits by, spinning and
+rocking the cradle of the Holy Child with her foot.
+
+But these examples only serve to make clearer the fact that in the
+earlier times there was no place found in art for the representation
+of the laboring man, whether in the field or in the shop, except as an
+illustration of some allegorical or religious theme. Nor in the Dutch
+pictures that Louis XIV. despised, and that our own time finds so
+valuable for their artistic qualities, was there anything outside of
+their beauty or richness of tone or color to redeem their coarseness
+and vulgarity. There was no poetry in the treatment, nor any sympathy
+with anything higher than the grossest guzzling, fighting, and
+horseplay. The great monarch, who, according to his lights, was a man
+of delicacy and refinement, was certainly right in contemning such
+subjects, and it is perhaps to his credit that he did not care enough
+for "Art for Art's sake" to excuse the brutality of the theme for the
+sake of the beauty of the painting.
+
+The next appearance of the peasant in art was of a very different
+sort, and represented a very different state of social feeling from
+the "peasants" of the Dutch painters. In the Salon of 1850 there
+appeared a picture called "The Sower" and representing a young peasant
+sowing grain. There was nothing in the subject to connect it
+particularly with any religious symbolism--not even with the Parable
+of the Sower who went forth to sow; nor with any series of
+personifications of the months. This was a simple peasant of the
+Norman coast, in his red blouse and blue trousers, his legs wrapped in
+straw, and his weather-beaten hat, full of holes. He marches with the
+rhythmic step made necessary by his task, over the downs that top the
+high cliffs, followed by a cloud of crows that pounce upon the grain
+as he sows it. At first sight there would seem to be nothing in this
+picture to call for particular notice; but the public, the artists,
+the critics, were with one accord strongly drawn to it. Something in
+the picture appealed to feelings deeper than mere curiosity, and an
+interest was excited such as did not naturally belong to a picture of
+a man sowing a field of grain. The secret was this: that a man born
+and bred in the midst of laboring people, struggling with the hard
+necessities of life--himself a laborer, and one who knew by experience
+all the lights and shades of the laborer's life--had painted this
+picture out of his own deep sympathy with his fellows, and to please
+himself by reproducing the most significant and poetical act in the
+life of the farmer.
+
+The painter of this picture, the first man of our time to give the
+laborer in the fields and on the farm a place in art, and to set
+people to thinking about him, as a man, not merely as an illustration
+of some sacred text, or an image in a book of allegories, was
+Jean-Francois Millet, known as the peasant painter of peasants.
+
+He was born at Gruchy, a small hamlet on the coast of Normandy, where
+his family, well known in the region for several generations, lived by
+the labor of their hands, cultivating their fields and exercising the
+simple virtues of that pastoral life, without ambition and without
+desire for change. This content was a part of the religion of the
+country and must not be looked upon as arguing a low state of
+intelligence or of manners. Of their neighbors we have no account, but
+the Millet household contained many of the elements that go to sustain
+the intellectual no less than the spiritual life. If there was plain
+living, there was high thinking; there were books and of the best, and
+more than one member of the circle valued learning for its own sake.
+Millet owed much to his grandmother, a woman of great strength of
+character and of a deeply religious nature. As his godmother she gave
+him his name, calling him Jean, after his father, and Francois, after
+Saint Francis of Assisi. As is usual in Catholic countries, the boy
+was called after the name of his patron saint, and in the case of
+Millet, Saint Francis, the ardent lover of nature, the friend of the
+birds and of all the animate creation, was well chosen as the guardian
+of one who was to prove himself, all his life, the passionate lover of
+nature.
+
+The boyhood of Millet was passed at home. He had no schooling except
+some small instruction in Latin from the village priest and from a
+neighboring curate, but he made good use of what he learned. He worked
+on the farm with his father and his men, ploughing, harrowing, sowing,
+reaping, mowing, winnowing--in a word, sharing actively and
+contentedly in all the work that belongs to the farmer's life. And in
+the long winter evenings or in the few hours of rest that the day
+afforded, he would hungrily devour the books that were at hand--the
+"Lives of the Saints," the "Confessions of Saint Augustine," the "Life
+of Saint Jerome," and especially his letters, which he read and
+re-read all his life. These and the philosophers of Port Royal, with
+Bossuet, and Fenelon, with the Bible and Virgil, were his mental food.
+Virgil and the Bible he read always in the Latin; he was so familiar
+with them both that, when a man, his biographer, Sensier, says he
+never met a more eloquent translator of these two books. When the time
+came, therefore, for Millet to go up to Paris, he was not, as has been
+said by some writer, an ignorant peasant, but a well-taught man who
+had read much and digested what he had read, and knew good books from
+bad. The needs of his narrow life absorbed him so seriously that the
+seeds of art that lay hid in his nature found a way to the light with
+difficulty. But his master-passion was soon to assert itself, and, as
+in all such cases, in an unexpected manner.
+
+Millet's attempts at drawing had hitherto been confined to studies
+made in hours stolen from rest. He had copied the engravings found in
+an old family Bible, and he had drawn, from his window, the garden,
+the stable, the field running down to the edge of the high cliff, and
+with the sea in the horizon, and he had sometimes tried his hand at
+sketching the cows and sheep in the pasture. But he was now to take a
+step in advance. Coming home one day from church, he walked behind an
+old man bent with age and feebleness, painfully making his way. The
+foreshortening and the movement of the man's figure struck the boy
+forcibly, and in a flash he discovered the secret of perspective and
+the mystery of planes. He ran quickly home, got a pencil and drew from
+memory a picture of the old man, so lively in its resemblance that as
+soon as his parents saw it, they recognized it and fell a-laughing.
+Talk with his boy revealed to the father his son's strong desire to be
+an artist; but before such a serious step could be taken, it was
+necessary to consult with some person better able to judge than any
+one in the Millet household. Cherbourg, the nearest large town, was
+the natural place where to seek advice; thither Millet and his father
+repaired, the boy with two drawings under his arm that he had made for
+the occasion, and these were submitted to the critical eye of Mouchel,
+an old pupil of David, who eked out the scanty living he got by
+painting by giving lessons in drawing. When the two drawings made by
+young Millet were shown him he refused to believe they were the work
+of the lad of fifteen. The very subjects chosen by the boy showed
+something out of the common. One was a sort of home idyl: two
+shepherds were in a little orchard close, one playing on the flute,
+the other listening; some sheep were browsing near. The men wore the
+blouse and wooden shoes of Millet's country; the orchard was one that
+belonged to his father. The other drawing showed a starry night. A man
+was coming from the house with loaves of bread in his hand which he
+gave to another man who eagerly received them. Underneath, in Latin,
+were the words from St. Luke: "Though he will not rise and give him
+because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise
+and give him as many as he needeth." A friend of Millet's, who saw
+these drawings thirty years after, said they were the work of a man
+who already knew the great significance of art, the effects it was
+capable of, and what were its resources.
+
+Mouchel consented to receive Millet as a pupil, but, as it proved, he
+could do little for him in the way of direct teaching. He left the boy
+free to follow his own devices. He said to him: "Do whatever you wish;
+choose whatever model you find in my studio that pleases you, and
+study in the Museum." This might not be the course to follow with
+every boy, but Mouchel had the artist's penetration and knew with whom
+he had to deal.
+
+The death of Millet's father interrupted his studies and he returned
+home for awhile to help his mother on the farm. But it was thought
+best that he should keep on with the work he had begun. The
+grandmother urged his return: "My Francois," she said, "we must accept
+the will of God. Thy father, my son, Jean-Louis, said that you were to
+be a painter; obey him, and go back to Cherbourg."
+
+Millet did not need persuasion from his family. Friends in Cherbourg
+urged him to come back, promised him commissions, and assured him a
+place in the studio of Langlois, a painter of a higher grade than
+Mouchel, who had recently set up his easel in the town. Once more
+established at Cherbourg Millet continued his studies after the same
+easy fashion with Langlois as with his former master. Langlois, who
+was as much impressed by his pupil's talent as Mouchel had been and
+willing to serve him, made a personal appeal to the mayor and council,
+asking that Millet, as a promising young artist and one likely to do
+credit to the town, might be assisted in going to Paris to study under
+better advantages than he could enjoy at home.
+
+On the strength of this appeal, the council of Cherbourg agreed to
+allow Millet an annuity of four hundred francs, equal to eighty
+dollars. With this small sum, and the addition of two hundred francs
+given him at parting by his mother and grandmother, making one hundred
+and twenty dollars in all, Millet left his quiet life in Normandy
+behind him and set out for Paris, where, as his biographer, Sensier,
+says, he was to pass as a captive the richest years of his life.
+
+Millet was twenty-two years old when he went first to Paris and he
+remained there, with occasional visits to Gruchy and Cherbourg, for
+the next thirteen years. Paris was, from the first, more than
+distasteful to him. He was thoroughly unhappy there. Outside the
+Louvre and the studios of a few artist-friends, he found nothing that
+appealed to what was deepest in him. His first experiences were
+unusually bitter. The struggle with poverty was hard to bear, but
+perhaps a more serious drawback was his want of an aim in art, of a
+substantial reason, so to speak, for the profession he had chosen,
+leading him to one false move after another in search of a subject.
+Unformed and unrecognized in his mind lay the desire to express in art
+the life he had left behind him in Normandy; but it was long before he
+arrived at the knowledge of himself and of his true vocation. He seems
+to have had no one in Paris to guide or direct him, and he rather
+stumbled into the studio of Delaroche, than entered it deliberately.
+He made but a brief stay there, and although he won the respect of his
+master, who would willingly have retained him as pupil and assistant,
+he was conscious that he learned nothing from Delaroche; and
+accordingly, in company with another pupil, Marolles, who had taken a
+great liking to him, he left the studio without much ceremony; and the
+two friends improvised a studio and a lodging for themselves in a
+garret in a poor quarter of the city, and began their search for a
+means of pleasing the public. But the way was not opened to either of
+them; they could not sell what they painted, and they were reduced to
+serious straits. It was not the fault of the public. Marolles was but
+an indifferent painter at any time, and Millet would not have blamed
+the public for its indifference to subjects in which he himself took
+no real interest.
+
+Millet was at a loss what to do for bread. His mind ran back
+continually to his rural life at Gruchy. "What if I should paint men
+mowing or winnowing?" he said to Marolles; "their movements are
+picturesque!" "You could not sell them," replied his friend. "Well,
+then, what do you say to fauns and dryads?" "Who in Paris cares for
+fauns and dryads?" "What shall I do, then?" said Millet in despair.
+"What does the public like?" "It likes Boucher's Cupids, Watteau's
+Pastorals, nudities, anecdotes, and copies of the past." It was hard
+for Millet, but hunger drove him. He would not appeal to his family,
+life was as difficult for them as for him. But before yielding he
+would make one more trial, painting something from his own fancy. He
+made a small picture representing "Charity"--a sad-faced woman
+cherishing three children in her arms. He carried it to the dealers:
+not one of them would buy it. He came back to Marolles. "Give me a
+subject," he said, "and I will paint it."
+
+To this time belong the pictures for which Millet has been much
+criticised by people who did not appreciate his position. Some of them
+recall Watteau, others Boucher, but they have a charm, a grace of
+their own; they are far from being copies of these men. Others were
+fanciful subjects to which Marolles gave names likely to attract the
+notice of picture-buyers in search of a subject. But all was in vain.
+The dealers were obstinate: the public unsympathetic. The highest
+price that was offered was never above twenty francs, or five dollars.
+Yet with this in his pocket, Millet deemed himself already on the high
+road to fortune, and saw the day not distant when he could paint at
+his pleasure the rustic subjects, memories of his home, that had
+always been in his mind.
+
+Several times in the course of this hard novitiate, Millet had escaped
+from Paris for a visit to his own country. At one time he had remained
+for a year at Cherbourg, where he painted portraits for such small
+sums as he could get, and here he and one of his sitters, a young girl
+of Cherbourg, falling in love with one another, were married. The
+marriage only added, as might have been foreseen, to Millet's
+troubles: his wife's health was always delicate; after her marriage it
+became worse, and she died four years after in Paris. Not long after
+her death Millet married again, and this proved a fortunate venture.
+His wife came with him to Paris, and the struggle with life began
+anew. The turning-point in the long period of Millet's uncertainties
+and disappointments with himself came in 1849, when the political
+troubles of the time, and the visit of the cholera, combined to drive
+him and his family from Paris. They took refuge at Barbizon, a small
+hamlet on the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau, and here, in
+the place that was to be forever associated with his name and work,
+Millet passed, with few interruptions, the remaining years of his
+life.
+
+The phrase so often heard to-day, "The Barbizon School," is rather
+wider than a strict interpretation would warrant, since Millet and
+Rousseau were the only ones of the group who lived in the village.
+Corot was not acquainted with Millet. Decamps was never in Millet's
+house except as a rare visitor to his studio. Diaz lived in Paris.
+Jacque, the painter of sheep, was a friend of Millet, and for a time
+at least lived at Barbizon in the house where he lodged before he
+procured a home of his own. The artistic relationship between these
+artists is slight, except in the case of Rousseau and Diaz, and even
+there it is only occasionally to be detected. All these men, with
+Dupre, Courbet and Delacroix, were counted heretics in art by the
+Academy and the official critics, and as Millet was the most marked
+figure in the group and was greatly admired and respected by all who
+composed it, it was perhaps natural that they should be considered by
+the public as disciples of the peasant painter of Barbizon.
+
+Here, then, at Barbizon, Millet lived for the remaining twenty-seven
+years of his life, dividing his day between the labors of his farm in
+the morning hours, painting in his studio in the afternoon--he always
+preferred the half-light for painting--and in the evening enjoying the
+society of his wife and children and of such friends as might join the
+circle. Occasional visits to Paris, to the galleries, and to the
+studios of his artist-circle, kept him in touch with the world to
+which he belonged. His books, too, were his unfailing companions,
+though he never cared to stray far beyond the circle of his youthful
+friendships, Homer, and Virgil, and especially the Bible, which he
+looked upon as the book of painters, the inexhaustible source of the
+noblest and most touching subjects, capable of expression in the
+grandest forms.
+
+But it was in the rural life about him, the life in which he actively
+shared, that he found the world wherein he could pour all his
+thoughts, feelings, and experiences with the certainty of seeing them
+emerge in forms answering to his conception. It was not until he came
+to Barbizon that he began truly to live the artist-life as he
+understood it, where the work is a faithful reflection of the only
+things a man really cares for--the things he knows by heart. In the
+pictures painted at Barbizon, and in the multitude of slight sketches
+for subjects never painted, with finished drawings and pastels, Millet
+has composed a series of moral eclogues well worthy of a place with
+those of Virgil and Theocritus. All the world knows them; all the
+world loves them: the "Mother Feeding Her Children," "The Peasant
+Grafting," "The First Step," "Going to Work," "The Sower," "The
+Gleaners," "The Sheep-Shearing," "The Angelus"--even to name them
+would carry us far beyond our limits. They made the fame of Millet
+while he still lived, although the pecuniary reward of his labors was
+not what they deserved nor what it would have been had he earlier
+found his true way or had his life been prolonged to the normal limit.
+He died in 1875 at the age of sixty-one. Since his death more than one
+of his pictures has been sold at a price exceeding all that he earned
+during his whole lifetime. Seen from the world's side, there was much
+in his life that was sad and discouraging, but from the spiritual side
+there was far more to cheer and uplift. His private life was honorable
+and happy, his friends were many and among the chosen ones of the
+time, and he had the happiness of seeing his work accepted and rated
+at something like its true worth before he left it.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+MEISSONIER[7]
+
+         [Footnote 7: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(1813-1891)
+
+
+[Illustration: Meissonier.]
+
+Among the many beautiful paintings collected in the Metropolitan
+Museum of Art of New York, there is one that always attracts a crowd,
+on the free-days and holidays when the general public finds admission.
+This is the picture called simply, "Friedland: 1807," and representing
+the soldiers of Napoleon saluting the emperor at the battle of
+Friedland. It was painted by Jean Louis Meissonier for the late A. T.
+Stewart, of New York, who paid for it what seemed a very large sum,
+$60,000; but when Mr. Stewart died, and his pictures were sold at
+auction, this painting brought the still larger sum of $66,000,
+showing that a great many people admired the work, and were willing to
+pay a good price for it. The picture was bought by Judge Hilton, of
+New York, and was presented by him to the Metropolitan Museum as a
+memorial of the long friendship that had existed between himself and
+Mr. Stewart. No doubt the facts of the high price paid for the
+picture, and that a gift of such value should be made to the Museum,
+have caused a great many people to look at the painting with more
+interest than they would, had the circumstances been less uncommon.
+But a great many more people find this picture interesting for its own
+sake; they are moved rather by the spirited way in which it tells its
+story, and find their curiosity excited by the studious accuracy shown
+by the artist in the painting of every detail.
+
+The scene of the action is a field that has been planted with grain
+which now lies trampled under the feet of men and horses. The
+turning-point in the battle has been reached, and in the joy of coming
+victory, the body-guard of the emperor, spurring their jaded horses to
+the hillock where he sits on his white charger surrounded by his
+mounted staff, salute him with loud cries as they rush madly by him.
+Napoleon, calm and self-possessed, returns the salute, but it is plain
+his thoughts are busier with the battle that is raging in the distance
+than with these demonstrations of his body-guard's loyalty. This
+picture was the favorite work of the artist; he calls it, "the life
+and joy of my studio," and he is said to have worked on it at
+intervals during fifteen years.
+
+[Illustration: Meissonier's Atelier.]
+
+Somebody has said that "genius" means nothing but "taking pains." In
+that case, Meissonier must have been a man of genius, for, with
+whatever he painted, were it small or great, he took infinite pains,
+never content until he had done everything in his power to show things
+exactly as they were. Thus, in the picture we have just been
+describing, we may be sure that we know, from looking at it, exactly
+how Napoleon was dressed on the day of Friedland, and also how each
+member of his military staff was dressed; not a button, nor a strap,
+nor any smallest detail but has been faithfully copied from the thing
+itself, while every head in the group is a trustworthy portrait. When
+it was not possible to get the actual dress worn by the person he was
+painting, Meissonier spared no pains nor money to obtain an exact
+copy. How it was in the case of the "Friedland," we do not know, but
+when he painted the "March to Paris," Meissonier borrowed from the
+Museum, in Paris, where relics of all the kings of France are kept
+(the _Musee des Souverains_), the famous "little gray riding-coat"
+worn by Napoleon at the battle of the Pyramids and in other
+engagements. This coat, Meissonier had copied by a tailor, with the
+minutest accuracy, and it was then worn by the model while he was
+painting the picture. The same pains were taken with the cuirassiers
+who are dashing across the front of the picture in the "Friedland." As
+will be seen on looking closely, one model served for all the men in
+the front rank, but as the uniform was the same it was only necessary
+to vary the attitude. The uniform and all the accoutrements were
+carefully reproduced by workmen from originals of the time, borrowed
+by Meissonier for the purpose, and the model was then mounted on a
+jointed wooden horse and made to take the attitude required: the
+action of the horse was as carefully studied from that of the living
+animal. By the time that Meissonier came to paint this picture, he was
+so famous an artist, and had gained such a place in the world, that he
+could have almost anything he asked for to aid him in his work. So,
+when, with the same desire for accuracy that he had shown in painting
+other parts of the picture, he came to paint the trampled grain, the
+Government, or so we are told, bought the use of a field of ripe grain
+and lent Meissonier the services of a company of cuirassiers who were
+set to dashing about in it until they had got it into proper
+condition. We can see that the cost of all this accuracy would, in the
+end, amount to a considerable sum, and when we reckon the time of an
+artist so distinguished as Meissonier, it is not so surprising as it
+may have appeared at first, that his picture should have brought so
+much money.
+
+Of course, Meissonier did not come all at once to fame and prosperity.
+The rewards he gained were such as are earned only by hard and
+constant labor. When he came to Paris about the year 1832, from Lyons,
+where he was born, he was about nineteen years old. His parents were
+in humble circumstances, and would seem to have been able to do
+nothing to advance the lad, who arrived in Paris with little money in
+his pocket, and with no friends at hand. He had, however, the
+materials out of which friends and money are made: health, a generous
+spirit, energy, and a clear purpose, and with these he went to work.
+We do not hear much about his early life in Paris. When he first
+appears in sight, he is working in the same studio with Daubigny, the
+landscape-painter, the two painting pictures for a dollar the square
+yard, religious pictures probably, and probably also copies, to be
+sent into the country and hung up in the parish churches. Although
+this may have seemed like hardship at the time, yet there is no doubt
+it was good practice, for among artists we are told it is an accepted
+doctrine that in order to paint on a small scale really well, you must
+be able to paint on a larger. And it is said that Meissonier was in
+the habit all his life of making life-size studies in order to keep
+his style from falling into pettiness. So, after all, the painting of
+these big pictures may have been a useful ordeal for the artist who
+for the next sixty years was to reap fame by painting small ones.
+
+While he was earning a scanty living by this hack-work, Meissonier
+found time to paint two pictures which he sent to the Salon of 1836.
+One of these attracted the attention of a clever artist, Tony
+Johannot, who introduced him to Leon Cogniet, with whom he studied for
+a time, but from whom he learned but little. The mechanism of his art
+he had pretty well mastered already, as was shown by the Salon
+accepting his early pictures, and the chief advantage he gained from
+his stay in Cogniet's studio was a wider acquaintance with the world
+of artists; for Cogniet was a favorite teacher, and had a great many
+pupils, not a few of whom became distinguished painters. But his style
+of painting was not one to attract Meissonier, who was ambitious to
+paint like the old Dutch artists, Terburg, Metzu, Mieris, and others,
+who have the charm that their pictures are finished with the most
+exquisite minuteness, and yet treated in such a large way that, after
+awhile, we forget the microscopic wonder of the performance and think
+only of the skill the artist has shown in painting character.
+Meissonier was the first artist to bring back into favor the Dutch
+school of painting of the seventeenth century. Louis XIV., who set the
+fashion in everything in his day, had set the fashion of despising the
+Dutch painters, and the French people had never unlearned the lesson.
+It was Meissonier who brought back the taste, and taught the public to
+admire these small panels where interest in the subject is for the
+most part lost in the exquisite beauty of the painting and where the
+Dutch painters of similar subjects are successfully met on their own
+ground and equalled in every respect except in the charm of color.
+
+There is an old saying: "Imitation is the sincerest mode of flattery;"
+and Meissonier's immediate success with the public was the signal for
+a bevy of imitators to try to win a like success by like methods. Some
+of these artists were very clever, but an imitator is but an imitator
+after all, and is more apt to call attention to his model than to
+himself. It must be admitted that Meissonier himself has suffered
+somewhat in the same way: the evident fact that his methods of
+painting were inspired by the study of the Dutch masters has led to
+his being called an imitator, and his pictures are often compared, and
+not to their advantage, with those of his models. Meissonier is,
+however, very much more than an imitator; he was inspired by the Dutch
+painters, but he soon found a way of his own, and he has put so much
+of himself into his work, that the charge of imitation long since
+ceased to be brought against him.
+
+While he was still not much known to the public, the Duke of Orleans
+bought of him, for six hundred francs, a picture that to-day is worth
+thirty thousand francs. As is usual in such affairs, the purchase was
+made, not by the duke in person, but by an agent: in this case, it was
+his secretary, M. Adaline, who bought the picture from Meissonier, who
+as an acknowledgment of the service gave the secretary a water-color
+drawing which, to-day, like everything coming from the hand of
+Meissonier, would bring the owner a good round sum if offered for
+sale.
+
+In 1865, Meissonier's son Charles, himself a very good painter, went
+to a costume-ball dressed like a Fleming of the seventeenth century
+and looking as if he had stepped out of a picture by Terburg. The
+costume had been made with the greatest accuracy, and Meissonier was
+so pleased with his son's appearance that he made a study and sold it
+for two thousand francs. Twenty years after, in 1884, hearing that it
+was to be sold at auction, and desiring, out of affection for his son,
+to have the study back again, he asked his friend, M. Petit, to buy it
+for him, at whatever cost. A rich Parisian, M. Secretan, who had a
+collection of pictures since become famous--it was to him that
+Millet's "L'Angelus" belonged--and who had such an admiration for
+Meissonier and his work that he had paid no less than four hundred
+thousand francs for his picture "Les Cuirassiers," hearing from M.
+Petit of Meissonier's desire for the portrait of his son, bought the
+picture for twenty-five thousand francs and presented it to the
+artist. These stories are told only as illustrations of the growth of
+Meissonier's reputation and of the increased number of people who
+desire to have an example of his work. The rise in value of a small
+sketch of a single figure, from $500 to $5,000, in fifteen years, is
+no greater in proportion than has happened in the case of every one of
+Meissonier's pictures, drawings, studies, and even his slight
+sketches, on some of which originally he would have placed no value at
+all. Yet everything he left behind him, even unconsidered trifles, are
+found to be of value, and the sale of the contents of his studio just
+ended in Paris brought nearly five hundred thousand francs, although
+the collection contained not a single finished picture of importance,
+but was made up almost entirely of unfinished studies and of sketches.
+
+Meissonier's industry was constant and untiring. It is told of him
+that he rarely had the pencil or the brush out of his hand when in the
+house, and that when he called at a friend's house and was kept
+waiting he used the spare minutes in sketching upon the first piece of
+paper that he found at hand. One of his friends, who knew of this
+habit, collected in the course of many visits he received from the
+artist enough of these scraps to fill a small album; while it is told
+of another of his friends that he instructed his servant to put beside
+Meissonier's coffee-cup after dinner a number of bits of paper of the
+size of cigarette-papers but of better quality on which Meissonier in
+his absent way would fall to drawing as he chatted with his
+companions. After dinner these jottings remained as a valuable
+memorial of his visit. Perhaps if they were all collected, these
+slight affairs might bring enough at auction to pay for all the
+dinners to which the prudent host had invited the artist.
+
+The world of subjects included in Meissonier's art was a very narrow
+one, and was not calculated to interest men and women in general. The
+nearest that he came to striking the popular note was in his Napoleon
+subjects, and beside the excellence of the painting, these pictures
+really make a valuable series of historical documents by reason of
+their accuracy. But the greater number of the pictures which he left
+behind him are chiefly interesting from the beautiful way in which
+they are painted: we accept the subject for the sake of the art. The
+world rewarded him for all this patient labor, this exquisite
+workmanship, by an immense fortune that enabled him to live in
+splendor, and to be generous without stint. From the humble lodgings
+of his youth in the Rue des Ecouffes, he passed, in time, to the
+palace in the Place Malsherbes where he spent the latter half of his
+long life in luxurious surroundings: pictures and statues, rich
+furniture, tapestries and armor and curiosities of art from every
+land. But the visitor, after passing through all this splendor, came
+upon the artist in a studio, ample and well lighted indeed, but
+furnished only for work, where, to the end of his life, he pursued his
+industrious calling with all the energy and ardor of youth. He died in
+1891, and was buried by the government with all the honors that
+befitted one of her most illustrious citizens.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+ROSA BONHEUR[8]
+
+         [Footnote 8: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(BORN 1822)
+
+
+A girl of something over ten, of sturdy build, with a dark complexion,
+deep blue eyes, and strong features crowned by a head of clustering
+curls, is sitting in the window of a plainly furnished room, high up
+in an apartment-house in Paris. In a cage at her side is a parrot,
+which, with its head on one side, is gravely calling out the letters
+of the alphabet, while the child as gravely repeats them, interrupting
+the lesson every now and then by a visit to the other side of the
+room, where a pet lamb greets its young mistress with a friendly
+bleat.
+
+This is our first glimpse of Rosalie, known now to all the world as
+Rosa Bonheur, the painter of "The Horse Fair" and of many another
+picture, which have earned for her the distinction of the best
+animal-painter of her time.
+
+Her father's family belonged to Bordeaux. Raymond Bonheur had gone up
+as a youth to Paris to study art. After the usual apprenticeship to
+privation which art exacts from her servants, he had become moderately
+successful, when the condition of his parents, now old and
+poorly-off, moved him to return to Bordeaux and do what he could to
+make their life easier. As the chances for a professional artist were
+small, he adopted the modest employment of drawing-teacher. His skill
+soon brought him pupils; among them a young lady from Altona, between
+whom and her teacher a mutual interest sprang up which led to their
+marriage. Raymond Bonheur brought his wife home to his father's house,
+where she was welcomed as a daughter, and for the brief term of her
+life all went well. What the husband earned by his drawing-lessons,
+the wife supplemented by her lessons in music; but this happiness was
+not to last. The parents of Raymond Bonheur died, and then, after not
+more than twelve years of marriage, the wife died, leaving behind her
+four children, Rosalie, Francois-Auguste, Jules-Isidore, and Juliette.
+
+[Illustration: Rosa Bonheur.]
+
+Rosalie is the best known of these four children of Raymond Bonheur;
+but each of them has honorably connected his name with the art of
+modern France. Francois-Auguste has a reputation as an animal-painter
+almost equal to that of his sister Rosa. A fine picture painted by
+him, "Cattle in the Forest of Fontainebleau," was once the property of
+the late A. T. Stewart. His merit secured him the Cross of the Legion
+of Honor in 1867. He died in 1880. The other brother, Jules-Isidore,
+has gained distinction as a sculptor of animals; most of his work is
+on a small scale, but he has designed some large pieces that decorate
+his sister's chateau near Fontainebleau. Juliette Bonheur married a M.
+Peyrol, and joining her family-name to his, is known in the art-world
+as Mme. Peyrol Bonheur. It is thus she signs her pictures, mostly
+still-life and animal subjects, which have gained for her a good
+position among the minor artists of France.
+
+Rosa, the eldest of the family, born in 1822, was ten years old when
+her mother died. Not long after, Raymond Bonheur decided to leave
+Bordeaux and to return to Paris, where the chances for professional
+success were better than in a provincial town, and where there were
+greater opportunities for the education of his young children. The
+change proved very distasteful, however, to the little ones.
+Accustomed to the comparative freedom of the town in which they had
+been brought up, and where their family had been so long rooted that
+their circle of friends and relatives gave them playmates and
+companions in plenty, they found themselves very lonely in Paris,
+where they were reduced for a good part of the time to such amusement
+as they could find in the narrow quarters of their rooms on the sixth
+floor of an apartment-house. It is not the custom in Paris for the
+children, even of the poor, to make a playground of the street, and
+our little ones had nobody to walk out with them but an old servant
+who had come with them from Bordeaux, and who was ill-fitted, for all
+her virtues, to take a mother's place to the children. She was honest
+and faithful, but like all of her class, she liked routine and order,
+and she could make no allowances for the restlessness of her
+bright-minded charge. Rosa was her especial torment; the black sheep
+of the brood. Household tasks she despised, and study, as it was
+pursued in the successive schools to which her despairing father sent
+her, had no charms for her. Her best playmates were animals; the
+horses and dogs she saw in the streets and which she fearlessly
+accosted; the sheep that found itself queerly lodged on the top floor
+of a city house; and the parrot which, as we have seen, was not only
+her playmate but her schoolmaster.
+
+There came a time when the charge of such a child, so averse to rules
+and so given to strange ways of passing her time, became too much for
+the old servant with her orthodox views of life, and she persuaded
+Rosa's father to put her as a day-scholar with the nuns at Chaillot, a
+small suburb of Paris. How it happened that she was allowed to go back
+and forth alone, between home and school, we do not know; but it is
+not to be wondered at if she were irregular in her hours; if, one day,
+she set the nuns wondering why she did not appear at school-opening,
+and another day put the old servant into a twitter because she did not
+come home in season. The truth was, she had found that there was
+something better in Paris than streets and shops and tall houses; she
+had discovered a wood there, a veritable forest, with trees, and pools
+of water, and birds, and wild flowers, and though this enchanted spot
+which citizens called the Bois de Boulogne--not then a formal park as
+it is to-day--was off the road to Chaillot, yet it was not so far that
+she need fear getting lost in going there or in coming back. No
+wonder, then, if, once this way discovered of escape from tiresome
+school duties, it was travelled so often by Rosalie, and that her
+school-work became in consequence so unsatisfactory that at length the
+patient nuns remonstrated. They advised Rosa's father, since she
+neither would nor could learn anything from books, that it would be
+better to put her to some useful trade by which she might earn her
+living; and the good sisters suggested--dressmaking! The wisdom of
+these ladies, who could not see that they were dealing with the last
+woman in the world to whom dressmaking could be interesting, was
+matched by that of the father, who showed himself so blind to the
+character of his daughter that he resolved to act at once upon the
+advice of the nuns; and without consulting the wishes of poor Rosalie
+he apprenticed her straightway to a Parisian dressmaker. The docile
+girl allowed the yoke to be slipped over her head without complaint,
+but the confinement wore upon her health and spirits, and after a
+short trial the experiment had to be abandoned. Her father yielded to
+her entreaties and took her home.
+
+[Illustration: Rosa Bonheur.]
+
+The girl was long in coming to a knowledge of herself. Although she
+was to be, in time, a famous artist, the familiar legend of the
+biographers is wanting in her case; we read nothing about scribbled
+books or walls defaced by childish sketches, nor does she appear to
+have handled a pencil or a brush until she was a girl well grown.
+Her father's means were not sufficient to give Rosa or his other
+children an education such as he could wish; but an expedient
+suggested itself in his perplexity over this latest experiment in
+providing for his eldest daughter: he proposed to the principal of a
+young ladies' school where he taught drawing, that his services should
+be accepted in payment of Rosa's education. The offer was accepted,
+and in the regular course of study Rosa became a member of her
+father's drawing-class. It was not long before she surpassed all her
+school-fellows in that department, and found herself for the first
+time in her life in possession of the key to that happiness which
+consists in knowing what we can do, and feeling the strength within us
+to do it. Some of the biographers of Rosa's life speak of unhappy days
+at this school: the richer girls made sport of the dress of the
+drawing-master's daughter, and of her independent, awkward ways. Her
+progress in drawing, too, was counterbalanced by her slowness in her
+other studies; in fact her new accomplishment was such a delight to
+her, that in her devotion to it she became less and less interested in
+her books; and as for dress--that it should be clean and suited both
+to her means and to the work she was doing, was all that concerned
+her, then or since!
+
+At the end of her first year in school, Rosa obtained her father's
+permission to give up her other studies and to enter his studio as
+pupil and assistant. From that time, though as yet she had not found
+the reason of her vocation, yet her true life had begun. She worked
+diligently under the direction of a master she loved, and her father,
+in his turn, delighted at the discovery of a talent so long hid,
+redoubled his efforts to advance his pupil and to make up for lost
+time.
+
+Rosa worked for some months at copying in the Louvre, but though she
+worked with such diligence and skill as to win the praise of the
+director, she came, after a time, to feel that the mere copying of the
+works of other men, however great, was not the goal she was striving
+after; so one day she took a sudden determination, left the Louvre,
+packed up her painting materials, and started off for one of the rural
+suburbs of Paris, where she sat herself down to sketch from nature.
+Her love of animals, hitherto an aimless pleasure, now took on a new
+phase as she saw her beloved cows and sheep in their place in nature
+giving life and animation to the landscape.
+
+In the winter season, when work out-of-doors was no longer pleasant or
+profitable, Rosa made what use she could of the few opportunities
+Paris had to offer for the study of animals. She spent what time she
+could spare from work at the horse-market; she visited the
+slaughter-houses, and the suburban fairs where cattle and horses,
+sheep and pigs compete for prizes, and in these places she filled her
+portfolios with sketches.
+
+In 1840 she sent her first picture to the Salon, and as it was
+accepted and well received, she continued to send her work every year;
+but, up to 1849, her pictures were small, and had little more interest
+than belongs to simple studies from nature; 1849 was a memorable year
+to her, as it was to France. In this year her father died of cholera,
+just as he had been appointed director of the School of Design for
+Young Girls. Rosa was appointed to succeed him with the title of
+Honorary Directress, and her sister Juliette was made a teacher in the
+school. In the same year she exhibited the picture that may be said to
+have made her reputation with the artists and amateurs, as well as
+with the general public. This was her "Oxen of Cantal," a picture that
+combined with no little feeling for landscape the most admirable
+painting of cattle in repose. Its high qualities were immediately
+recognized. Horace Vernet, in the name of the Provisional Government,
+presented her with a handsome vase of Sevres porcelain, and the gold
+medal for painting. In 1851, the jury selected for exhibition at the
+World's Fair in London another picture by Rosa, "Ploughing in the
+Nivernais," which made the artist's name known to England, where the
+national love of animals secured for her no end of praise and of
+substantial reward. In 1856 Rosa painted her most popular picture,
+"The Horse Fair," now in the Metropolitan Museum. This painting went
+from Paris to London, where it was bought for rising L1,500, and
+created such an interest in the artist's personality as would have
+turned the head of any ordinary woman; but Rosa Bonheur's whole life
+proves her no ordinary woman.
+
+For many years Mlle. Bonheur lived in Paris in a house surrounded by a
+large garden where she kept a number of animals, partly for the
+pleasure of their companionship, partly for the opportunity it gave
+her of studying their habits, and using them as models. She now
+resides in the Chateau By, near Fontainebleau, where she leads the
+same industrious life in her advancing years that she did in the
+beginning of her career. She rises early, and works at her painting
+all day, and often spends the evening in drawing: for she takes but
+little interest in what is called society, and cares only for the
+companionship of her intimate friends, which she can enjoy without
+disarranging her life, or neglecting the studies she loves. She
+dresses with great simplicity at all times, and even when she accepts
+invitations, makes no concessions to the caprices of fashion. In her
+student-days, when visiting the abattoirs, markets, and fairs, she
+accustomed herself to wear such a modification of man's dress as would
+permit her to move about among rough men without compromising her sex.
+But, beside that her dignity was always safe in her own keeping, she
+bears testimony to the good manners and the good dispositions of the
+men she came in contact with. Rosa Bonheur has always been an honor to
+art and an honor to her sex. At seventy-two she finds herself in the
+enjoyment of many things that go to make a happy life. She has a
+well-earned fame as an artist; an abundant fortune gained by her own
+industry and used as honorably as it has been gained; and she has
+troops of friends drawn to her by her solid worth of character.
+
+Of the great number of pictures Rosa Bonheur has painted, by far the
+most are of subjects found in France, but a few of the best were
+painted in Scotland. She has received many public honors in medals and
+decorations. In 1856, after painting the "Horse Fair," the Empress
+Eugenie visited her at her studio and bestowed upon her the Cross of
+the Legion of Honor, fastening the decoration to the artist's dress
+with her own hands. When the invading army of Prussia reached Paris,
+the Crown Prince gave orders that the studio of Rosa Bonheur should be
+respected. But though she, no doubt, holds all these honors at their
+worth, yet she holds still more dear the art to which she owes, not
+only these, but all that has made her life a treasury of happy
+remembrances.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+GEROME[9]
+
+         [Footnote 9: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(BORN 1824)
+
+
+[Illustration: Gerome.]
+
+In the Paris Salon of 1847, a small picture appeared, representing a
+Greek boy and girl stirring up two game-cocks to fight. Although it
+was the work of an unknown painter, and had to contend with an
+unusually brilliant display of pictures, many of them by men already
+famous, yet it strongly attracted the general public, partly by the
+novelty of the subject, and partly by the careful and finished manner
+of the painting. It delighted the critics as well, and one of the most
+distinguished of them, Theophile Gautier, wrote: "A new Greek is born
+to us, and his name is Gerome!"
+
+This picture, which was to prove the first leaf in a laurel-crown to
+be awarded the painter in his lifetime, and not, as is so often the
+case, by the tardy hand of Death, was the work of Jean-Leon Gerome, a
+young man of twenty-three. He had been for six years under the
+teaching of Paul Delaroche, part of the time in Italy, but most of it
+in Paris. He was born at Vesoul, a small, dull town in the Department
+of Haute-Saone, in 1824. His father was a goldsmith, who, like most
+French fathers in his rank of life, had hoped to bring up his son to
+succeed him in his business. The boy did for a time, we believe, work
+in his father's shop, but he had a stronger natural bent for painting;
+something perhaps in the occupation fostered, or even created, this
+taste--for not a few distinguished painters have been apprenticed to
+the goldsmith's trade--and his father, like a wise man, instead of
+opposing his son's wishes, did what he could to further them. He
+bought him painting-materials; and instead of sending him to a "school
+of design," or putting him under the tutelage of some third-rate
+drawing-master, such as is commonly found in country towns, he bought
+him a picture by Decamps, an artist since become famous, but then just
+in the dawn of his fame, and put it before his son as a model. Young
+Gerome made a copy of this picture, and an artist from Paris, who
+happened to be passing through Vesoul, saw it, and discerning the
+boy's talent, gave him a letter to Paul Delaroche, encouraging him to
+go to Paris and there to take up the study of art as a profession. At
+seventeen years of age, with his father's consent and $250 in his
+pocket, Gerome went up to Paris, and presenting his letter to
+Delaroche, was well received by him, and entered the School of Fine
+Arts (Ecole des Beaux-Arts) as his pupil.
+
+He had been with Delaroche three years and had proved himself one of
+the most loyal and diligent of his pupils, when an event occurred,
+insignificant in itself, but which was to have an important influence
+upon his life and give a new direction to his talent.
+
+French studios are not as a rule very orderly places. The young men
+who frequent them are left pretty much to themselves, with no one to
+govern them or to oversee them. The artist they are studying under
+makes, at the most, a brief daily visit, going the round of the
+easels, saying a word or two to each pupil, although it often happens
+that he says nothing, and then departs for his proper work, leaving
+his pupils to their own devices. The students are for the most part
+like young men everywhere, a turbulent set, full of animal spirits,
+which sometimes carry them beyond reasonable bounds. It was a
+boisterous outbreak of this sort, but far wilder than common, that
+occurred in the studio of Delaroche, and which brought about the
+crisis in Gerome's life to which we have alluded. Fortunately for him,
+the incident took place while Gerome was on a visit to his parents at
+Vesoul, so that he was in no way implicated in the affair. He came
+back to find the studio closed; Delaroche, deeply disturbed, had
+dismissed all his pupils and announced his intention to visit Italy.
+His studio was to be taken during his absence, by Gleyre, and he
+advised those of his pupils in whom he took a personal interest, to
+continue their studies under his successor. Gerome was one of those to
+whom he gave this advice, but Gerome was too much attached to his
+master to leave him for another, and bluntly announced his purpose of
+following him to Rome. A few of the other pupils of Delaroche were of
+the same mind, and they all set out for Italy together. Arrived in
+Rome, Gerome, always a hard worker, threw himself energetically into
+his studies; drawing the ancient buildings, the Capitol, the
+Colosseum; sketching in the Forum and on the Campagna; copying the
+pictures and the statues, saturating his mind in the spirit of antique
+art, and schooling his hand in its forms, until he had laid up a rich
+store of material for use in future pictures. On his return to Paris
+he worked for a while in Gleyre's studio, but when Delaroche came back
+from Italy, Gerome again joined him and renewed his old relation as
+pupil and assistant--working, among other tasks, on the painting of
+"Charlemagne Crossing the Alps," a commission given to Delaroche by
+the Government, for the _Grande Galerie des Batailles_ at Versailles:
+a vast apartment lined with pictures of all the victories of the
+French from Soissons to Solferino.
+
+Such work as this, however, had little interest for Gerome. His mind
+at this time was full of the Greeks and Romans; his enthusiasm for
+Napoleon, which later was to give birth to so many pictures, had not
+yet awakened; nor did he care for the subjects from the histories of
+France and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that
+had provided his master, Delaroche, with so many tragic themes for his
+pencil: "The Death of the Duke of Guise," "The Children of Edward,"
+the "Death of Queen Elizabeth," "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey,"
+"Cromwell at the Coffin of Charles I.," and others of the same strain.
+
+Gerome's visit to Italy had awakened in him a strong interest in the
+life of the antique world, and this would naturally be strengthened by
+all that he would hear and see of the growing interest of the public
+in the same subject: an interest kindled by the discoveries of
+archaeologists in classic soil: in Greece and Italy, in Assyria and
+Egypt. These discoveries had filled the museums and the cabinets of
+private collectors with beautiful and interesting fragments
+illustrating the external life of the past, and illuminating its
+poetry; and it is no wonder that some of the younger artists rejoiced
+in the new world of anecdote and story that opened so richly before
+them.
+
+However it came about--whether his own interest in the antique life
+communicated itself to his fellows, or whether they, all together,
+simply shared in the interest taken in the subject by the world about
+them--Gerome and some of his companions in Delaroche's studio showed
+such a predilection for classic themes, that they were nicknamed by
+the critics "The New Greeks." Among Gerome's fellow-pupils were two
+young men, Hamon and Aubert, who later gained no small applause by
+their playful and familiar way of treating classic themes. They are
+well known to us by engravings from their pictures, which are in all
+our shops. Hamon's "My Sister is not at home," and Aubert's various
+pretty fancies of nymphs and cupids, while they are not great works of
+art, are reasonably sure of a long life, due to their innocent
+freshness and simplicity.
+
+Delaroche's pupils were working all together in friendly competition
+for the grand Roman prize which was to give the fortunate one the
+right to four years' study in Rome at the expense of the state.
+Gerome's studio was shared by his friends Picou and Hamon. Hamon,
+writing in later years about his youthful days, says: "Companions and
+rivals at the same time, we were all working together for the Grand
+Prix de Rome. Gerome inspired us all with the love of hard work, and
+of hard work to the accompaniment of singing and laughing."
+
+But in the intervals of his hard work for the prize, Gerome was also
+working on a picture which he hoped to have accepted for the Salon.
+This was the picture we spoke of in the beginning of this notice: "Two
+Young Greeks stirring-up Game-cocks to fight." When it was finished
+Gerome showed it to his master with many misgivings; but Delaroche
+encouraged him to send it to the Salon. It was accepted, and as we
+have seen, won for Gerome a great success with the public. The next
+year, 1848, he again exhibited, but the impression he made was less
+marked than on the first occasion. His former picture had a subject
+such as it was, of his own devising. The "Cock-fight" was not an
+illustration of any passage in Greek poetry, and in spite of its
+antique setting, it had a modern air, and to this, no doubt, its
+popularity was largely due. But in 1848 he essayed an illustration of
+the Greek poet, Anacreon, translating into picture the poem that tells
+how, one winter evening, sitting by his fire, the old poet was
+surprised by a sound of weeping outside his door, and opening it,
+found Cupid wet and shivering and begging for a shelter from the cold.
+The man takes the pretty, dimpled mischief to his bosom, warms his
+feet and hands at the fire, dries his bow and arrows, and lets him sip
+wine from his cup. Then, when Cupid is refreshed and warmed, he tries
+his arrows, now here, now there, and at last aims one straight at his
+benefactor's heart, and laughing at the jest, flies out at the open
+door. Gerome's picture was in three panels. The first showed the poet
+opening the door to the sobbing Cupid, with his bedraggled wings and
+dripping curls; in the next, the rosy ingrate wounds his benefactor;
+in the third, the poet sits disconsolate by his hearth, musing over
+the days when Love was his guest, if but for an hour. As the story was
+an old one, so many an artist before Gerome had played with it as a
+subject for a picture. Jean-Francois Millet himself, another pupil of
+Delaroche, though earlier than Gerome, had tried his hand at
+illustrating Anacreon's fable before he found his proper field of work
+in portraying the occupations of the men and women about him, the
+peasants among whom he was born and bred.
+
+Gerome's picture did nothing to advance his fortunes with the public.
+1848 was a stormy time in France and in all Europe, and people were
+not in the mood to be amused with such trifles as Anacreon and his
+Cupid. The pictures in that year's Salon that drew the public in
+crowds about them were Couture's "The Romans of the Decline of the
+Empire," in which all Paris saw, or thought it saw, the
+handwriting-on-the-wall for the government of Louis-Philippe; and the
+"Shipwrecked Sailors in a Bark," of Delacroix, a wild and stormy scene
+of terror that seemed to echo the prophecies of evil days at hand for
+France with which the time was rife.
+
+Gerome's next picture, however, was to bring him once more before the
+public, and to carry his name beyond his native France even as far as
+America. Leaving for the nonce his chosen field of antiquity, where
+yet he was to distinguish himself, he looked for a subject in the
+Paris of his own day. "The Duel after the Masquerade" opens for us a
+corner of the Bois de Boulogne--the fashionable park on the outskirts
+of Paris--where in the still dawn of a winter's day, a group of men
+are met to witness a duel between two of their companions who have
+quarrelled at a masked ball. The ground is covered with a light fall
+of snow; the bare branches of the trees weave their network across the
+gray sky, and in the distance we see the carriages that have brought
+the disputants to the field. The duel is over. One of the men, dressed
+in the costume of Pierrot, the loose white trousers and slippers, the
+baggy white shirt, and white skull-cap, falls, mortally wounded, into
+the arms of his second: the pallor of coming death masked by the
+white-painted face. The other combatant, a Mohawk Indian (once a
+staple character at every masked-ball in Paris: curious survival of
+the popularity of Cooper's novels), is led wounded off the field by a
+friend dressed as Harlequin. Gerome in this striking picture showed
+for the first time that talent as a story-teller to which he is so
+largely indebted for his reputation. Whatever his subject may be, it
+is always set forth in the clearest manner, so that everyone may
+understand the story without the need of an interpreter.
+
+Leaving out of view the few pictures he painted illustrating passages
+in Napoleon's career, it may be said that Gerome's taste led him away
+from scenes of modern life; for even his many oriental subjects so
+relate to forms of life belonging in reality to the past, that they
+make no exception to the statement. He did not therefore follow up
+"The Duel" with other comments on the follies of modern society--for
+in the temper of that time this picture, like Couture's "Roman Orgie"
+and Millet's "Man with the Hoe," was looked upon as a satire and a
+warning, and owed its popularity as much to this conviction on the
+part of the public as to its pictorial merits--but returned to antique
+times, and showed in his treatment of themes from that source an
+equal, if not a greater power to interest the public.
+
+Gerome's two pictures, the "Ave Caesar! Morituri te Salutant," "Hail,
+Caesar! Those about to die, salute Thee," and "The Gladiators," are so
+universally known as to need no description. Whatever criticism may be
+made upon them, they will always remain interesting to the world at
+large; from their subject, from the way in which the discoveries of
+archaeology are made familiar, and, not least, from the impression they
+make of the artist's own strong interest in what he had to say. In
+both pictures he succeeded in showing the Colosseum as no longer a
+ruin, but as, so to speak, a living place peopled by the swarm of the
+Roman populace, with the emperor and his court, and the College of the
+Vestal Virgins, and, for chief actors, the hapless wretches who are
+"butchered to make a Roman holiday." Another picture that greatly
+increased Gerome's reputation, was his "Death of Julius Caesar," though
+it must be confessed there was a touch of the stage in the arrangement
+of the scene, and in the action of the body of senators and
+conspirators leaving the hall with brandished swords and as if singing
+in chorus, that was absent from the pictures of the amphitheatre.
+There was also less material for the curiosity of the lovers of
+archaeology; no such striking point, for instance, as the reproduction
+of the gladiators' helmets and armor recently discovered in
+Herculaneum; but the body of the dead Caesar lying "even at the base of
+Pompey's statue" with his face muffled in his toga, was a masterly
+performance; some critic, moved by the grandeur of the lines, said it
+was not a mere piece of foreshortening, it was "a perspective." Gerome
+made a life-size painting of the Caesar in this picture. It is in the
+Corcoran Gallery at Washington.
+
+Gerome painted several other pictures from classic subjects, but none
+of them had the interest for the general public of those we have
+described. In 1854 he exhibited a huge canvas, called "The Age of
+Augustus," a picture suggested, perhaps, by the "Hemicycle" of his
+master Delaroche, on which he himself had painted. It represented
+heroes, poets, sages, of the Augustan age, grouped about the cradle of
+the infant Christ; it procured for Gerome the red ribbon of the Legion
+of Honor, and is now, as the artist himself jestingly says, "the
+'greatest' picture in the Museum of Amiens." In the same year Gerome
+went to Egypt for the first time; since then he has more than once
+visited it, but it is doubtful if he could renew the pleasure of his
+youthful experience. "I set out," he says, "with my friends, I the
+fifth, all of us lightly furnished with money, but full of youthful
+enthusiasm. Life was then easy in Egypt; we lived at a very moderate
+rate; we hired a boat and lived four months upon the Nile, hunting,
+painting, fishing by turns, from Damietta to Philae. We returned to
+Cairo and remained there four months longer in a house in the older
+part of the town, belonging to Soleman Pasha. As Frenchmen, he treated
+us with cordial hospitality. Happy period of youth, of freedom from
+care! Hope and the future opened bright before us; the sky was blue!"
+
+Gerome's pictures of Eastern life make a gallery by themselves. A few
+of them are historic, such as his "Cleopatra visiting Caesar," but the
+most of them are simply scenes and incidents drawn from the daily life
+of the modern inhabitants of Cairo and the desert, illustrating their
+manners and customs. The mere titles would fill up a large part of our
+space. Many of the best of them are owned in this country, and all
+have been reproduced by engraving or by photography.
+
+In another field Gerome won great distinction, painting scenes from
+the history of France in the reign of Louis XIV.; subjects drawn from
+what may be called the high comedy of court-life, and treated by
+Gerome with remarkable refinement and distinction. Among these
+pictures the best known are: "Moliere Breakfasting with Louis XIV.,"
+illustrating the story of the king's rebuke to his courtiers who
+affected to despise the man of genius; "Pere Joseph," the priest who
+under the guise of humility and self-abnegation reduces the greatest
+nobles to the state of lackeys; "Louis XIV. Receiving the Great
+Conde," and "Collaboration," two poets of Louis XIV.'s time working
+together over a play. Among his accomplishments as an artist we must
+not forget the talent that Gerome has shown as a sculptor. He has
+modelled several figures from his own pictures, with such admirable
+skill as to prove that he might easily have made sculpture a
+profession had he not chosen to devote himself to painting.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI[10]
+
+         [Footnote 10: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By EDMUND GOSSE
+
+(1828-1882)
+
+
+[Illustration: Dante Gabriel Rossetti.]
+
+Those whose privilege it was to meet the late Mr. Gabriel Rossetti, at
+once in the plenitude of his powers and in the freshness of their own
+impressions, will not expect to be moved again through life by so
+magnetic a presence. In his dealings with those much younger than
+himself, his tact and influence were unequalled; he received a shy but
+ardent youth with such a noble courtesy, with so much sympathy yet
+with no condescension, with so grand an air and yet so warm a welcome,
+that his new acquaintance was enslaved at the first sentence. This
+seems to me to have been in a certain sense the key-note of the man.
+He was essentially a point of fire; not a peripatetic in any sense,
+not a person of wide circumference, but a nucleus of pure imagination
+that never stirred or shifted, but scintillated in all directions. The
+function of Gabriel Rossetti, or at least his most obvious function,
+was to sit in isolation, and to have vaguely glimmering spirits
+presented to him for complete illumination. He was the most prompt in
+suggestion, the most regal in giving, the most sympathetic in
+response, of the men I have known or seen; and this without a single
+touch of the prophetic manner, the air of such professional seers as
+Coleridge or Carlyle. What he had to give was not mystical or
+abstract; it was purely concrete. His mind was full of practical
+artistic schemes, only a few of which were suited to his own practice
+in painting or poetry; the rest were at the service of whoever would
+come in a friendly spirit and take them. I find among his letters to
+me, which I have just been reading once again, a paper of delightful
+suggestions about the cover of a book of verse; the next youth who
+waited upon him would perhaps be a painter, and would find that the
+great genius and master did not disdain the discussion of
+picture-frames. This was but the undercurrent of his influence; as we
+shall see more and more every year as the central decades of this
+century become history, its main stream directed the two great arts of
+painting and poetry into new channels, and set a score of diverse
+talents in motion.
+
+But, as far as anything can be seen plainly about Rossetti at present,
+to me the fact of his immovability, his self-support, his curious
+reserve, seems to be the most interesting. He held in all things to
+the essential and not to the accidental; he preferred the dry grain of
+musk to a diluted flood of perfume. An Italian by birth and deeply
+moved by all things Italian, he never visited Italy; a lover of ritual
+and a sympathizer with all the mysteries of the Roman creed, he never
+joined the Catholic Church; a poet whose form and substance alike
+influenced almost all the men of his generation, he was more than
+forty years of age before he gave his verse to the public; a painter
+who considered the attitude of the past with more ardor and faith than
+almost any artist of his time, he never chose to visit the churches or
+galleries of Europe. It has been said, among the many absurd things
+which his death has provoked, that he shrank from publicity from
+timidity, or spurned it from ill-temper. One brilliant journalist has
+described him as sulking like Hector in his tent. It used to be
+Achilles who sulked when I was at school; but it certainly never was
+Gabriel Rossetti. Those who only knew him, after his constitution had
+passed under the yoke of the drug which killed him, cannot judge of
+his natural reserve from that artificial and morbid reserve which
+embittered the last years of his life. The former was not connected
+with any objection to new faces or dislike of cordial society, but
+with the indomitable characteristic of the man, which made him give
+out the treasures of the spirit, and never need to receive them. So
+far from disliking society, it is my impression that he craved it as a
+necessity, although he chose to select its constituents and narrow its
+range.
+
+He was born in 1828. The story of his parentage is well known, and has
+been told in full detail since his death. He was born in London and
+christened Gabriel Charles Rossetti; it was not, I am told, until he
+was of age to appreciate the value of the name that he took upon
+himself the cognomen which his father had borne, the Dante by which
+the world, though not his friends, have known him. Living with his
+father in Charlotte street, with two sisters and a brother no less
+ardently trained in letters than himself, he seems to have been turned
+to poetry, as he was afterward sustained in it, by the interior flame.
+The household has been described to me by one who saw it in 1847: the
+father, titular professor of Italian literature, but with no
+professional duties, seated the livelong day, with a shade over his
+eyes, writing devotional or patriotic poetry in his native tongue; the
+girls reading Dante aloud with their rich maiden voices; Gabriel
+buried here in his writing, or darting round the corner of the street
+to the studio where he painted. From this seclusion he wrote to the
+friend who has kindly helped me in preparing these notes, and whose
+memories of the poet extend over a longer period than those of any
+survivor not related to him.
+
+Mr. W. B. Scott, now so well known in more arts than one, had then
+but just published his first book, his mystical and transcendental
+poem of "The Year of the World." This seems to have fallen under
+Rossetti's notice, for on November 25, 1847, he wrote to the author, a
+perfect stranger to himself, a letter of warm sympathy and
+acknowledgment. Mr. Scott was living in Newcastle, and, instead of
+meeting, the young poets at first made acquaintance with each other by
+correspondence. Rossetti soon mentioned, of course, his own schemes
+and ambitions, and he sent, as a sample of his powers, his poems of
+"The Blessed Damozel," and "My Sister's Sleep," which he had written
+about eighteen months before.
+
+Mr. Scott tells me that his first feeling on receiving these poems,
+written in English by an Italian boy of eighteen, was one of
+amazement. I cannot wonder at it. If the "Blessed Damozel," when it
+was published a quarter of a century later, seemed a masterpiece to
+those who had, in the meanwhile, read so much that was vaguely
+inspired by it, what must it have been in 1846? Certain pieces in
+Tennyson's "Poems," of 1842, and a few fragments of Browning's "Bells
+and Pomegranates" were the only English poems which can be supposed to
+have given it birth, even indirectly. In its interpretation of
+mystical thoughts by concrete images, in its mediaeval fervor and
+consistence of fancy, in its peculiar metrical facility, it was
+distinctly new--original as few poems except those by the acknowledged
+masters of the craft can ever be.
+
+  "The sun was gone now; the curled moon
+     Was like a little feather
+   Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
+     She spoke through the clear weather.
+   Her voice was like the voice the stars
+     Had when they sang together."
+
+This was a strange accent in 1846. Miss Barrett and Mr. Tennyson were
+then the most accepted poets. Mr. Browning spoke fluently and
+persistently, but only to a very little circle; Mr. Horne's "Orion"
+and Mr. Bailey's "Festus" were the recent outcomes of Keats and
+Goethe; the Spasmodic School, to be presently born of much unwise
+study of "Festus," was still unknown; Mr. Clough, Mr. Matthew Arnold,
+and Mr. Patmore were quite unapparent, taking form and voice in
+solitude; and here was a new singer, utterly unlike them all, pouring
+out his first notes with the precision and independence of the
+new-fledged thrush in the woodland chorus.
+
+In painting, the process was somewhat different. In this art, no less
+than in poetry, Rossetti understood at once what it was that he wished
+to do himself, and what he desired to see others doing; but the
+difficulties of technique were in his way. He had begun to write in
+childhood, but he had taken up design late in his youth, and he had
+undergone no discipline in it. At the present day, when every student
+has to pass a somewhat stringent examination in design, Rossetti, at
+eighteen, could not have entered the schools of the Royal Academy. He
+did so, however, yet without ever advancing to the Life School. The
+soul of art, at this early period, interested him far more than the
+body, especially such a substance as he found under the presidency of
+Sir Martin Shee and the keepership of George Jones. Let us not forget,
+meanwhile, that it is easy to sneer at the incompetence of mannered
+old artists, and yet hard to over-estimate the value of discipline in
+a school, however conventional. Rossetti was too impatient to learn to
+draw, and this he lived to regret. His immediate associates, the young
+men whom he began to lead and impress, were better draughtsmen than
+he. His first oil picture, I believe, was a portrait of his father,
+now in possession of the family. But, as far as can be now made out,
+he did not begin to paint seriously till about January, 1848, when he
+persuaded another Royal Academy student, W. Holman Hunt, to take a
+large room close to the paternal house in Charlotte street, and make
+it their studio. Here Mr. Scott visited them in the early spring of
+that year; he describes to me the large pictures they were struggling
+upon, Hunt, on his "Oath of Rienzi," and Rossetti, on his "Girlhood of
+Mary Virgin." The latter was evidently at present but poorly equipped;
+the painting was timid and boyish, pale in tone, and with no hint or
+promise of that radiant color which afterward became Rossetti's main
+characteristic. But the feeling was identical with that in his far
+more accomplished early poems. The very pulse and throb of mediaeval
+adoration pervaded the whole conception of the picture, and Mr.
+Scott's first impression was that, in this marvellous poet and
+possible painter, the new Tractarian movement had found its expositor
+in art. Yet this surely was no such feeble or sentimental echo as had
+inspired the declared Tractarian poets of eight or nine years earlier;
+there was nothing here that recalled such a book as the "Cherwell
+Water Lily" of Father Faber. This contained the genuine fleshly
+mysticism, bodily presentment of a spiritual idea, and intimate
+knowledge of mediaeval sentiment without which the new religious fervor
+had no intellectual basis. This strong instinct for the forms of the
+Catholic religion, combined with no attendance on the rites of that
+church, fostered by no study of ecclesiastical literature or
+association with teachers or proselytes, but original to himself and
+self-supported, was at that time without doubt the feature in
+Rossetti's intellectual character which demands our closest attention.
+Nor do I believe that this passion for the physical presentation of a
+mystical idea was ever entirely supplanted by those other views of
+life and art which came to occupy his maturer mind. In his latest
+poems--in "Rose Mary," for instance--I see this first impulse
+returning upon him with more than its early fascination. In his youth,
+however, the mysticism was very naive and straightforward. It was
+fostered by one of the very few excursions which Rossetti ever took--a
+tour in Belgium in October, 1849. I am told that he and the
+painter-friend who accompanied him were so purely devoted to the
+mediaeval aspect of all they saw, that, in walking through the
+galleries, they turned away their heads in approaching modern
+pictures, and carefully closed their eyes while they were passing
+Rubens's "Descent from the Cross." In Belgium, or as the result of his
+tour there, Rossetti wrote several curious poems, which were so harsh
+and forced that he omitted them from his collection when he first
+published his "Poems," in 1870.
+
+The effort in these early pieces is too marked. I remember once
+hearing Rossetti say that he did not mind what people called him, if
+only they would not call him "quaint." But the fact was that, if
+quaintness be defined as the inability to conceal the labor of an art,
+there is no doubt that both his poems and his designs occasionally
+deserved this epithet. He was so excessively sincere an artist, so
+determined not to permit anything like trickiness of effect or
+meaningless smoothness to conceal the direct statement of an idea,
+that his lack of initial discipline sometimes made itself felt in a
+curious angular hardness.
+
+And now it would be necessary, if I were attempting a complete study
+of Gabriel Rossetti's intellectual career, to diverge into a
+description of what has so much exercised popular curiosity, the
+pre-Raphaelite movement of 1848. But there is no reason why, in a few
+notes on character, I should repeat from hearsay what several of the
+seven brothers have reported from authoritative memory. It is
+admitted, by them and by all who have understood the movement, that
+Gabriel Rossetti was the founder and, in the Shakespearian sense,
+"begetter" of all that was done by this earnest band of young artists.
+One of them, Mr. Millais, was already distinguished; two others, Mr.
+Holman Hunt and Mr. Woolner, had at that time more training and
+technical power than he; but he was, nevertheless, the brain and soul
+of the enterprise. What these young men proposed was excellently
+propounded in the sonnet by "W. M. R.," which they prefixed to their
+little literary venture, the "Germ," in 1850. Plainly to think even a
+little thought, to express it in natural words which are native to the
+speaker, to paint even an insignificant object as it is, and not as
+the old masters or the new masters have said it should be painted, to
+persevere in looking at truth and at nature without the smallest
+prejudice for tradition, this was the whole mystery and cabal of the
+P. R. B. They called themselves "preraphaelite," because they found in
+the wings of Lippi's angels, and the columbines of Perugino's gardens
+that loving and exact study of minute things which gave to them a
+sense of sincerity, and which they missed in the breadth and ease of
+later work. They had no ambition to "splash as no one splashed before
+since great Caldasi Polidore;" but they did wish to draw a flower or a
+cloud so that it should be a portrait of that cloud or flower. In this
+ambition it would be curious to know, and I do not think that I have
+ever heard it stated, how far they were influenced by Mr. Ruskin and
+his "Modern Painters." I should not expect to find Rossetti influenced
+by any outside force in this any more than in other instances, but at
+all events Mr. Ruskin eagerly accepted the brotherhood as practical
+exponents of the theories he had pronounced. None of them, I think,
+knew him personally when he wrote the famous letter to the _Times_ in
+1851, defending Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt from the abuse of
+ignorant critics, who, he said, had failed to perceive the very
+principles on which these "two young men" were proceeding. Somebody
+wrote to him to explain that there were "three young men," and Mr.
+Ruskin wrote a note to Gabriel Rossetti, desiring to see his work, and
+thus the acquaintance of these two remarkable men commenced.
+
+Meanwhile, although the more vigorous members of the brotherhood had
+shown no special sympathy for Rossetti's religious mysticism, a
+feebler artist, himself one of the original seven, had taken it up
+with embarrassing effusion. This was the late James Collinson, whose
+principal picture, "St. Elizabeth of Hungary," finished in 1851,
+produced a sort of crisis in Rossetti's career. This painting
+out-mystified the mystic himself; it was simply maudlin and
+hysterical, though drawn with some feeling for grace, and in a very
+earnest spirit. Rossetti, with his strong good sense, recognized that
+it would be impossible ever to reach the public with art of this
+unmanly character, and from this time forth he began to abandon the
+practice of directly sacred art.
+
+For some little time after abandoning the directly sacred field in
+painting, Rossetti seems to have passed through a disconsolate and
+dubious period. I am told that he worked for many months over a large
+picture called "Kate the Queen," from some well-known words by
+Browning. He made no progress with this, seemed dissatisfied with his
+own media, felt the weight of his lack of training, and passed, in
+short, through one of those downcast moods, which Shakespeare has so
+marvellously described in "Tired with all these," and which are
+incident, sooner or later, to every man of genius. While his touch in
+poetry grew constantly more sure and masterly, his power as a
+draughtsman threatened to leave him altogether. He was to have drawn
+one of the frontispieces in the "Germ," but, although he toiled with a
+design, he could not make it "come right." At last a happy accident
+put him on the true track, and revealed his proper genius to himself.
+He began to make small drawings of poetical subjects in
+water-colors--most of those which I have seen are not more than twenty
+inches by twelve--over which he labored, and into which he poured his
+exquisite sense of color, inspired without doubt by the glass of
+mediaeval church windows. He travelled so very little, that I do not
+know whether he ever saw the treasures of radiant jewel-work which
+fret the gloom of Chartres or of Bourges; but if he never saw them, he
+divined them, and these are the only pieces of color which in the
+least degree suggest the drawings of this, Rossetti's second period.
+As far as one can gather, his method was, first, to become
+interpenetrated with the sentiment of some ballad or passage of
+emotional poetry, then to meditate on the scene till he saw it clearly
+before him; then--and this seems to have always been the difficult and
+tedious part--to draw in the design, and then with triumphant ease to
+fill in the outlines with radiant color. He had an almost insuperable
+difficulty in keeping his composition within the confines of the paper
+upon which he worked, and at last was content to have a purely
+accidental limit to the design, no matter what limbs of the _dramatis
+personae_ were sheered away by the frame. It would not be the act of a
+true friend to Rossetti's memory to pretend that these drawings, of
+which for the next ten or fifteen years he continued to produce a
+great number, were without faults of a nature which any coxcomb could
+perceive, or without eccentricities which an untrained eye might
+easily mistake for faults; but this does not in the least militate
+against the fact that in two great departments of the painter's
+faculty, in imaginative sentiment and in wealth of color, they have
+never been surpassed. They have rarely, indeed, been equalled in the
+history of painting. A Rossetti drawing of this class hung with
+specimens of other art, ancient or modern, simply destroys them. I do
+not mean that it is better or worse than they are, but that it kills
+them as the electric light puts out a glow-worm. No other man's color
+will bear these points of ruby-crimson, these expanses of deep
+turquoise-blue, these flagrant scarlets and thunderous purples. He
+paints the sleeve of a trumpeter; it is such an orange as the eye can
+scarce endure to look at. He paints the tiles of a chimney-corner;
+they are as green as the peacock's eyes in the sunshine.
+
+The world is seldom ready to receive any new thing. These drawings of
+Rossetti's were scarcely noticed even by those who are habitually on
+the watch for fresh developments in art. But when the painter next
+emerges into something like publicity we find him attended by a
+brilliant company of younger men, all more or less influenced by his
+teaching and attracted by his gifts. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
+had been a very ephemeral institution; in three years, or four at the
+most, it had ceased to exist; but its principles and the energy of its
+founder had left their mark on the whole world of art. In 1849
+Rossetti had exhibited his picture, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," at
+the Portland Gallery, an exhibition in rivalry of the Royal Academy,
+which existed but a very short time. As far as I can discover, he did
+not exhibit again in London until 1856, when he and his friends opened
+a collection of their pictures at 4 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. We
+would rather have seen that little gallery than see most of the
+show-exhibitions of Europe. In it the fine art of the Anglo-Saxon race
+was seen dawning again after its long and dark night. Rossetti himself
+was the principal exhibitor, but his two earliest colleagues, now
+famous painters, Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt, also contributed.
+And here were all the new talents whom Rossetti had attracted around
+him during the last seven years: Mr. Madox Brown, with his fine genius
+for history; Mr. J. D. Watson, with his strong mediaeval affinities;
+Mr. Boyce, with his delicate portraiture of rustic scenes; Mr. Brett,
+the finest of our students of the sea; Mr. W. B. Scott himself;
+besides one or two others, Mr. Charles Collins, Mr. Campbell, Mr.
+Halliday, Mr. Martineau, whom death or adverse fortune removed before
+they had quite fulfilled their promise. Gabriel Rossetti contributed
+to this interesting and historic exhibition five or six of those
+marvellous drawings of which mention has just been made. "Dante's
+Dream," the famous vision of June 9, 1290, with its counterpart, "The
+Anniversary of the Dream," in 1291, were the most prominent of these.
+A "Mary Magdalene" was perhaps the most moving and exciting. This
+extremely original design showed the Magdalene pursued by her lovers,
+but turning away from them all to seek Jesus in the house of Simon the
+Pharisee. The architecture in this drawing was almost childish; the
+wall of Simon's house is not three inches thick, and there is not room
+for a grown-up person on the stairs that lead to it; but the tender
+imagination of the whole, the sweet persuasiveness of Christ, who
+looks out of a window, the passion of the awakened sinner, who tears
+the roses out of her hair, the curious novelty of treatment in the
+heads and draperies, all these combine to make it one of those works,
+the moral force and directness of which appeal to the heart at once.
+Perhaps the most brilliant piece of color at the Russell Place Gallery
+may have been Rossetti's "Blue Closet," a picture which either
+illustrated or, as I should rather suppose, suggested Mr. Morris's
+wonderful poem published two years later.
+
+The same year that displayed him to the public already surrounded by a
+brilliant phalanx of painter-friends, discovered him also, to the
+judicious, as a centre of poetic light and heat. The circumstances
+connected with Rossetti's visit to Oxford a little earlier than this
+are too recent, are fresh in the memories of too many living persons
+of distinction, to be discussed with propriety by one who was not
+present. But certain facts are public, and may be mentioned. The
+Oxford Union still shows around the interior of its cupola strange,
+shadowy frescoes, melting into nothingness, which are the work of six
+men, of whom Rossetti was the leader. These youths had enjoyed no
+practical training in that particularly artificial branch of art,
+mural painting, and yet it seems strange that Rossetti himself, at
+least, should not have understood that a vehicle, such as yolk of egg
+mixed with vinegar, was absolutely necessary to tempera, or that it
+was proper, in fresco-painting, to prepare the walls, and paint in the
+fresh wet mortar. They used no vehicle, they fixed their colors in no
+coat of plaster, but they threw their ineffectual dry paint on the
+naked brick. The result has been that their interesting boyish efforts
+are now decayed beyond any chance of restoration. It is impossible,
+however, to ascend the gallery of the Oxford Union and examine the
+ghostly frescoes that are fading there, without great interest and
+even emotion. Of the young men who painted there under Gabriel
+Rossetti's eye, all have become greatly distinguished. Mr. Edward
+Burne-Jones, Mr. William Morris, and Mr. Spencer Stanhope were
+undergraduates at Oxford. Mr. Valentine Prinsep and Mr. Arthur Hughes,
+I believe, were Royal Academy students who were invited down by
+Rossetti. Their work was naive and queer to the last degree. It is
+perhaps not fair to say which one of them found so much difficulty in
+painting the legs of his figures that he drew an impenetrable covert
+of sunflowers right across his picture, and only showed the faces of
+his heroes and heroines between the golden disks.
+
+The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which also dates from the year
+1856, is a still more notable expression of budding genius than the
+dome of the Oxford Union. It was edited by Mr. Godfrey Lushington, all
+its articles were anonymous, and it contrived to exist through twelve
+consecutive monthly numbers. A complete set is now rare, and the
+periodical itself is much less known than befits such a receptacle of
+pure literature. It contains three or four of Rossetti's finest poems;
+a great many of those extraordinary pieces, steeped in mediaeval
+coloring, which Mr. William Morris was to collect in 1858 into his
+bewitching volume, called "The Defence of Guenevere;" several
+delightful prose stories of life in the Middle Ages, also by Mr.
+Morris, which, like certain prose romances by Mr. Burne-Jones, have
+never been publicly claimed or reprinted by their author; and not a
+little else that was as new as it was notable. A little later Mr.
+William Morris's first book was dedicated "To my Friend Dante Gabriel
+Rossetti, Painter," and in 1860 Mr. Swinburne followed with a like
+inscription of his first-fruits, his tragic drama of "The
+Queen-Mother." Thus in the course of a little more than ten years,
+Rossetti had become the centre and sun of a galaxy of talent in poetry
+and painting, more brilliant perhaps than any which has ever
+acknowledged the beneficent sway of any one Englishman of genius.
+
+But all this while the world outside knew nothing of the matter. One
+by one the younger men stepped forward on the public stage and secured
+the plaudits of the discerning, and ascended the slow incline of
+general reputation. But Rossetti remained obstinately recluse, far
+preferring to be the priest and confessor of genius to acting himself
+a public part. To this determination several outward things engaged
+him still further. He married quite early in life; and his wife, who
+was herself an artist of rare, if somewhat wild and untrained talent,
+bore him a son who died at birth, and then shortly after died herself.
+During his brief married months Rossetti had collected the MSS. of his
+poems, and thought to publish them; but when he lost his wife, in a
+paroxysm of grief he placed the sheets of his poems in her coffin, and
+would hear no more a suggestion of publication. In 1861 he presented
+the world with a very learned and beautiful anthology of early Italian
+poetry, and proposed as early as that year to print his original
+poems. It was his scheme to name the little volume "Dante in Verona,
+and other Poems;" but it came to nothing. About 1867 the scheme of
+publication again took possession of him. I have been told that a
+sudden sentiment of middle age, the fact that he found himself in his
+fortieth year, led him to conquer his scruples, and finally arrange
+his pieces. But he was singularly fastidious; the arrangement would
+never please him; the cover must be cut in brass, the paper at the
+sides must bear a special design. These niceties were rarer twelve
+years ago than they are now, and the printers fatigued him with their
+persistent obstinacy. It was not till early in 1870 that the "Poems"
+in stately form first appeared, and were hailed with a shout of
+admiration which was practically universal.
+
+It was about Christmas in that same year, 1870, that he who writes
+these lines was first presented to Gabriel Rossetti. The impression on
+my mental eye is as fresh as if it had been made yesterday, instead of
+twelve years ago. He was a man of average height, commonly loosely
+clad in black, so as to give one something of the notion of an abbe;
+the head very full, and domed like that of Shakespeare, as it was then
+usual to say--to my thinking more like that of Chaucer--in any case a
+head surcharged with imagination and power, strongly Italian in color
+and cast. The eyes were exceedingly deep set, in cavernous sockets;
+they were large, and black, and full of a restless brilliance, a
+piercing quality which consoled the shy novice by not being
+stationary. Lastly, a voice of bell-like tone and sonority, a voice
+capable of expressing without effort every shade of emotion from rage
+and terror to the most sublime tenderness. I have never heard a voice
+so fitted for poetical effect, so purely imaginative, and yet, in its
+absence of rhetoric, so clear and various, as that of Gabriel
+Rossetti. I retain one special memory of his reading in his own
+studio the unfinished MS. of "Rose Mary," in 1873, which surpassed in
+this direction any pleasure which it has been my lot to enjoy; and on
+various occasions I have listened to his reading of sonnets, his own
+and those of others, with a sense that his intonation revealed a
+beauty in the form of that species of verse which it had never been
+seen to possess before. I have already spoken of his wonderful
+courtliness to a new acquaintance, his bewitching air of sympathy; on
+a closer intimacy this stately manner would break up into wild fits of
+mirth, and any sketch of Rossetti would be incomplete that did not
+describe his loud and infectious laughter. He lived very much apart
+from the every-day life of mankind, not ostentatiously, but from a
+genuine lack of interest in passing events. An old friend tells me
+that during the French Revolution he burst into Rossetti's studio with
+the incredible news, "Louis-Philippe has landed in England!" "Has he?"
+said Rossetti, calmly. "What has he come for?" That certain political
+events, in which he saw a great symbolic significance, could move him
+deeply, is easily proved by such sonnets as the noble "On the Refusal
+of Aid between Nations," and "Czar Alexander II." But such glances out
+of window into the living street were rare, and formed no
+characteristic part of his scheme of life.
+
+As a poet in these great years he possessed rare gifts of passionate
+utterance, and harmony of vision and expression. Mr. Swinburne has
+characterized these qualities in words which leave no later
+commentator the chance of distinguishing himself. But it would be
+totally unjust, even in so cursory and personal a sketch as this, to
+allow the impression to go undisputed that Rossetti preferred the
+external form to the inward substance of poetry. This charge was
+brought against him, as it has always been brought against earnest
+students of poetic art. I will rather quote a few words from a letter
+of Rossetti to me, written in 1873, when he was composing his own
+_magnum opus_ of "Rose Mary." I have always felt them to be very
+salutary, none the less because it is obvious that the writer did not
+at all times contrive, or perhaps desire, to make them true in his own
+work:
+
+"It seems to me that all poetry, to be really enduring, is bound to be
+as _amusing_ (however trivial the word may sound) as any other class
+of literature; and I do not think that enough amusement to keep it
+alive can ever be got out of incidents not amounting to events, or out
+of travelling experiences of an ordinary kind however agreeably,
+observantly, or even thoughtfully treated. I would eschew in writing
+all themes that are not so trenchantly individualized as to leave no
+margin for discursiveness."
+
+During the last eight years of his life, Rossetti's whole being was
+clouded by the terrible curse of an excitable temperament--sleeplessness.
+To overcome this enemy, which interfered with his powers of work and
+concentration of thought, he accepted the treacherous aid of the new
+drug, chloral, which was then vaunted as perfectly harmless in its
+effect upon the health. The doses of chloral became more and more
+necessary to him, and I am told that at last they became so frequent and
+excessive that no case has been recorded in the annals of medicine in
+which one patient has taken so much, or even half so much, chloral as
+Rossetti took. Under this unwholesome drug his constitution, originally
+a magnificent one, slipped unconsciously into decay, the more stealthily
+that the poison seemed to have no effect whatever on the powers of the
+victim's intellect. He painted until physical force failed him; he wrote
+brilliantly to the very last, and two sonnets dictated by him on his
+death-bed are described to me as being entirely worthy of his mature
+powers. There is something almost melancholy in such a proof of the
+superior vitality of the brain. If the mind had shared the weakness of
+the body, the insidious enemy might perhaps have been routed in time to
+secure the elastic rebound of both. But when the chloral was stoutly met
+at last, it was too late.
+
+So at the age of fifty-four we have lost a man whom we should have
+retained, in the nature of things, for twenty years longer in the
+plentitude of his powers, but for a mistake in hygiene--a medical
+experiment. His work of inspiring the young, of projecting his fiery
+originality along the veins of others, was perhaps completed; it is
+doubtful whether this can ever be continued with advantage through
+more than two generations. The prophet is apt at last to become a
+tyrant, and from this ill apotheosis Rossetti was spared. But there
+was no reason why he should not, for at least a score of years, have
+produced noble pictures and have written gorgeous poems, emphasizing a
+personal success which he would have extended, though he hardly could
+have raised it. Yet he was always a melancholy man; of late years he
+had become almost a solitary man. Like Charles of Austria, he had
+disbanded his body-guard, and had retired to the cloister. Perhaps a
+longer life would not have brought much enjoyment with it. But these
+are idle speculations, and we have rather to call to our remembrance
+the fact that one of the brightest and most distinguished of our race,
+a man whose very existence was a protest against narrowness of aim and
+feebleness of purpose, one of the great torch-bearers in the
+procession of English art, has been called from us in the prime of
+life, before the full significance of his genius had been properly
+felt. He was the contemporary of some mighty names older than his, yet
+there scarcely was to be found among them all a spirit more thoroughly
+original; and surely, when the paltry conflicts of passing taste are
+laid to rest forever, it will be found that this man has written his
+signature indelibly on one of the principal pages of the register of
+our intellectual history.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+GUSTAVE DORE[11]
+
+         [Footnote 11: Reprinted by permission, from the "Nation."]
+
+By KENYON COX
+
+(1832-1883)
+
+
+[Illustration: Gustave Dore.]
+
+It is now eleven years since Gustave Dore died. He was an officer of
+the Legion of Honor, had attained considerable wealth, and was
+probably more widely known than any other artist of his day. His name
+was a household word in two continents. Yet he died a disappointed and
+embittered man, and is proclaimed by his friends as a neglected and
+misunderstood genius. He was known the world over as the most
+astonishingly prolific illustrator of books that has ever lived; he
+wished to be known in France as a great painter and a great sculptor,
+and because the artists and critics of France never seriously
+recognized his claims to this glory, he seems to have become a victim
+of the mania of persecution, and his naturally sunny nature was
+over-clouded with moroseness and suspicion. Hailed by some as the
+emulator and equal of the great names of the Italian Renaissance, and
+considered a great moral force--a "preacher painter"--by others he has
+been denounced as "designer in chief to the devil," and described as a
+man wallowing in all foulness and horror, a sort of demon of frightful
+power. Both these extreme judgments are English. The late Blanchard
+Jerrold, an intimate friend and collaborator of the artist, takes the
+first view. Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Hamerton have taken the second. Dore's
+own countrymen have never accepted either. Just where, between them,
+the truth lies, as we see it, we shall endeavor to show in this
+article.
+
+The main facts of Dore's life may be dismissed very briefly. He was
+born with a caul on January 6, 1832, in the Rue Bleue at Strasbourg,
+near the Cathedral. About 1841 his father removed to Bourg, in the
+Department of Ain, where he was chief government engineer of the
+department. These two residences of the young artist are supposed to
+account for the mastery of Gothic architecture and of mountain scenery
+which his admirers find in his mature work. He showed very early in
+life a passion for drawing, and, as a small child, had always a pencil
+in his hand, which he begged to have "sharpened at both ends," that he
+might work longer without interruption. His father intended him for an
+engineer, but he was determined from the first to be an artist. He was
+of a gay and jovial disposition, given to pranks and practical jokes,
+and of an athletic temperament. Theophile Gautier afterward called him
+a "gamin de genie." In 1847, when he was fifteen years old, being in
+Paris with his parents, he called upon Phillippon, the publisher, and
+showed him some of his sketches. M. Phillippon looked at them, and
+sent a letter to Dore's parents, persuading them to allow the boy to
+remain in Paris, and promising them to begin using his work at once
+and to pay for it. Thus, without any study of art whatever, he began
+his career, and in a few years had produced a prodigious quantity of
+work, and was a celebrated man before he was twenty. No one knows how
+many drawings he made. He "lived like an Arab," worked early and late,
+and with astonishing rapidity made thousands of drawings for the comic
+papers, besides early beginning the publication of independent books.
+One estimate, which Mr. Jerrold thinks excessive, credits him with
+having published forty thousand drawings before he was forty! Mr.
+Jerrold himself reckons two hundred and sixty-six drawings done in one
+year. His "Labors of Hercules" was brought out in 1848, when he was
+sixteen, and before he was twenty-seven he had published his "Holy
+Russia," his "Wandering Jew," his illustrations to Balzac's "Contes
+Drolatiques," to Rabelais, and many other authors. His best work was
+done at an age when most artists are painfully acquiring the rudiments
+of their art. We all know the books that followed.
+
+Meanwhile he was determined to be known as a great painter, and, while
+flooding the market with his countless illustrations, was working at
+great canvases of Biblical subjects, which, though the French would
+not accept them, were hugely admired in the Dore Gallery of London.
+Later he tried sculpture also, and his last work was a monument to
+Alexandre Dumas, which he made at his own expense, and presented to
+the city of Paris. He died in the beginning of the year 1883, worn out
+with excessive production--a great name, but an unsatisfied man.
+
+Mr. Jerrold has divided his book into two parts, dealing first with
+Dore the illustrator, and then with Dore the painter and sculptor. It
+is an eminently natural arrangement, and, in our effort to arrive at
+Dore's true position in art, we cannot do better than to follow it.
+
+Dore's earliest work was frankly that of a caricaturist. He had a
+quick eye, no training, and a certain extravagant imagination, and
+caricature was his inevitable field. He was, however, as Mr. Jerrold
+himself remarks, "a caricaturist who seldom raises a laugh." Not
+hearty fun, still less delicate humor, was his. In the higher
+qualities of caricature his contemporaries, Daumier and Gavarni, were
+vastly his superiors. An exuberance of grotesque fancy and a
+recklessness of exaggeration were his dominant notes. His earlier
+work, up to and including the Rabelais, is not really funny--to many
+minds it is even painful--but it is unmistakably caricature of a
+dashing, savage sort. To our mind it remains his best work, and that
+by which he is most likely to live. At least it is the work that
+formed him and fixed his characteristics, and an understanding of it
+is essential to any judgment of him. The qualities and the defects of
+his later work--that which is most praised and most blamed in his
+production--are inherent in the work of this period, and are best
+explained by a reference to the latter.
+
+Take, for instance, what has been denounced as his love of horrors and
+of foulness, his delight in blood and massacre. He is scored for this
+as if he were one of that modern French school, beginning, perhaps,
+with Regnault, who have revelled in the realistic presentation of
+executions and battles, and have sought to effect by sheer
+sensationalism what they could not by gentler means. It is surprising
+that his critics have not seen that Dore's battles are always, even to
+the end, the battles of a caricaturist. His decapitated trunks, cloven
+heads, smoking hearts, arms still fighting though severed from their
+bodies, are simply a debauch of grim humor. There is never the
+slightest attempt to realize carnage--only to convey, by the
+caricaturist's exaggeration, an idea of colossally impossible
+bloodthirstiness. One may not enjoy this kind of fun, but to take it
+seriously, as the emanation of a gloomy and diabolic genius, is
+absurd.
+
+The same test is equally destructive of much of the praise Dore has
+received. He is constantly spoken of, even by severe critics of his
+painting, as a great illustrator who identified himself with the minds
+of one great writer after another. But Dore identified himself with no
+one; he was always Dore. Even in these early drawings he cannot keep
+to the spirit of the text, though the subjects suited him much better
+than many he tried later. There is a great deal of broad gayety and
+"Gallic wit" in the "Contes Drolatiques," but it was not broad enough
+for Dore, and he has converted its most human characters into
+impossible grotesques.
+
+Another thing for which Dore is praised is his wonderful memory. Mr.
+Jerrold repeats more than once Dore's phrase, "I have lots of
+collodion in my head," and recounts how he could scarcely be induced
+to make sketches from nature, but relied upon his memory. He also
+speaks of Dore's system of dividing and subdividing a subject, and
+noting the details in their places, so that he could reproduce the
+whole afterward. This question of work from memory is one of the most
+vital for an understanding of Dore, and one of general interest in all
+matters of art, and is worth attention. Of course, a man who made
+hundreds of drawings every year could not work much from nature, and
+came to rely upon his memory. But what is the nature of artistic
+memory, and how does it perform its task? We think the truth is, that
+the artist who habitually works from memory, fills in his details, not
+from memory of the object, but from memory of the way he has formerly
+drawn similar objects. He reverts to a series of formulae that he has
+gradually accumulated. This man must have a cloak. This is the way a
+cloak is done. A hand? Nothing can be easier; the hand formula is
+ready. The stock in trade of the professional illustrator and
+caricaturist is made up of a thousand such formulae--methods of
+expression that convey the idea readily enough to the spectator, but
+have little relation to fact. So it is that Dore never learned, in the
+true sense, to draw. He had made for himself a sort of artistic
+shorthand, which enabled him to convey his superabundant ideas quickly
+and certainly to his public, but his drawing is what is called
+mannered in the extreme. It is not representation of nature at all,
+but pure formula and chic. He is said to be a master of drapery, but
+he never drew a single fold correctly. He is said to show great
+knowledge of Gothic architecture, but he never drew well a single
+column or finial. In his later years he studied anatomy with great
+perseverance, and advocated the necessity of dissection, saying, "Il
+faut fourrer la main dedans" (You must stick your hand in it); but the
+manner was formed, and he never drew a leg with a bone in it.
+
+With this equipment he illustrated Don Quixote, Dante, the Bible. Is
+it strange that he shows no sympathy with the grand simplicity of
+Dante, or the subtle humor of Cervantes, and that we can only be
+thankful that he never completed his projected illustrations to
+Shakespeare? Dore, the illustrator, was fecund beyond precedent,
+possessed a certain strange drollery, had a wonderful flow of ideas,
+but was superficial, theatrical, and mannered, and as far from
+expressing real horror as from expressing real fun. What shall we say
+of Dore the painter and sculptor?
+
+Mr. Jerrold reports a discussion between Dore and Theophile Gautier,
+in which the roles of artist and man of letters are strangely
+reversed. "Gautier and Dore," he says, "disagreed fundamentally on the
+aims and methods of art. Gautier loved correctness, perfect form--the
+technique, in short, of art; whereas Dore contended that art which
+said nothing, which conveyed no idea, albeit perfect in form and
+color, missed the highest quality and raison d'etre of art." What is
+plain from this is, that Gautier was an artist and cared first of all
+for art, while Dore was never an artist, properly speaking, at all,
+and never understood the artist's passion for perfection. To Dore,
+what was necessary was to express himself anyhow--who cared if the
+style was defective, the drawing bad, the color crude? The idea was
+the thing. His admirers can defend him only on this ground, and they
+adopt of necessity the Philistine point of view. The artists of Dore's
+time and country were very clear in their opinion. "The painters,"
+says Mr. Jerrold, "said he could not paint."
+
+The sculptors admitted that he had ideas in his groups, but he was not
+sculpturesque. His friends protest against this judgment, and
+attribute it, _ad nauseam_, to "malevolence" and "envy." What if his
+technique was less brilliant than that of Hals, they say; what if his
+shadows are less transparent than those of Rembrandt (and they will
+make no meaner comparison)? He is "teeming with noble thoughts," and
+these will put his work "on a level with the masterpieces of the
+Italian masters of the sixteenth century." It is the conception, the
+creation--not the perfect painting of legs and arms and heads, the
+harmonious grouping, the happy and delicate combination of color--by
+which the observer is held spell bound. All these qualities, which
+his admirers grudgingly admit that Dore had not, are classed as "mere
+dexterity," and are not considered worth a second thought.
+
+This is the true literary gospel of art, but it is one that no artist,
+and no critic who has any true feeling of art, has ever accepted or
+will ever accept. Thoughts, ideas, conceptions, may enhance the value
+of a work of art, provided it is first of all a piece of beautiful art
+in itself, but they have never preserved, and never will preserve from
+oblivion bad painting or bad sculpture. The style is the artist, if
+not the man; and of the two, beautiful painting with no idea at all
+(granting, for the sake of argument, that it exists), will ever be
+infinitely more valuable to the world than the lame expression of the
+noblest thoughts. What may be the real value of Dore's thoughts is
+therefore a question with which we have no concern. As painter and
+sculptor, his lack of education and his great technical
+imperfections--his bad drawing, false light and shade, and crude
+color--relegate him forever to a rank far below mediocrity. Such
+reputation as he has is the result of the admiration of those
+altogether ignorant of art, but possessed of enough literary ability
+to trumpet abroad their praises of "great conceptions," and will as
+surely fade away to nothing as the reputation of such simple painters
+as Van Der Meer or Chardin will continue to grow, while painting as an
+art is loved and understood.
+
+
+
+
+COMPOSERS
+
+
+
+
+HANDEL
+
+By C. E. BOURNE
+
+(1685-1759)
+
+
+George Frederick Handel, of whom Haydn once reverently said, "He is
+the master of us all," was born at Halle, in Lower Saxony, on February
+23, 1685. His father was a surgeon, and sixty-three years of age at
+the time of his birth--a terribly severe old man, who, almost before
+his son was born, had determined that he should be a lawyer. The
+little child knew nothing of the fate before him, he only found that
+he was never allowed to go near a musical instrument, much as he
+wanted to hear its sweet sounds, and the obstinate father even took
+him away from the public day-school for the simple reason that the
+musical gamut was taught there in addition to ordinary reading,
+writing, and arithmetic.
+
+But love always "finds out the way," and his mother or nurse managed
+to procure for him the forbidden delights; a small clavichord, or dumb
+spinet, with the strings covered with strips of cloth to deaden the
+sound, was found for the child, and this he used to keep hidden in the
+garret, creeping away to play it in the night-time, when everyone was
+asleep, or whenever his father was away from home doctoring his
+patients.
+
+[Illustration: Handel.]
+
+But, at last, when George Frederick was seven years of age, the old
+man was compelled to change his views. It happened in this way. He set
+out one day on a visit to the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels,
+where another son by a former marriage was a page. George Frederick
+had been teasing his father to let him go with him to see his elder
+brother, whom he had not yet met, but this was refused. When old
+Handel started by the stagecoach the next morning, the persistent
+little fellow was on the watch; he began running after it, and at
+length the father was constrained to stop the coach and take the boy
+in. So, though at the expense of a severe scolding, the child had his
+way and was allowed to go on to Saxe-Weissenfels. When there, the
+chapel, with the beautiful organ, was the great attraction, and George
+Frederick, as indomitable then as he was in after-life, found his way
+into the organ loft, and when the regular service was over, contrived
+to take the organist's place, and began a performance of his own; and
+strange to say, though he had not had the slightest training, a melody
+with chords and the correct harmonies was heard. The duke had not left
+the chapel, and noticing the difference in style from that of the
+ordinary organist, inquired as to the player, and when the little boy
+was brought to him he soon discovered, by the questions he put, the
+great passion for music which possessed the child. The duke, a
+sensible man, told the father it would be wrong to oppose the
+inclination of a boy who already displayed such extraordinary genius;
+and old Handel, either convinced, or at any rate submitting to the
+duke's advice, promised to procure for his son regular musical
+instruments. Handel never afterward forgot the debt of gratitude he
+owed to the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels for this intercession.
+
+On his return to Halle he became the pupil of Zachau, the organist of
+the cathedral there. This man was an excellent teacher and a sound
+musician. Before the pupil was nine years old his instructor used to
+set him to write fugues and motets as exercises, and before long the
+boy was allowed to play the organ at the cathedral services on Sunday,
+whenever the elder musician was inclined to linger over his breakfast
+or to take a holiday. At last, when young Handel was nine years old,
+the master honestly confessed that his pupil knew more music than he
+himself did, and advised that he should be sent to Berlin for a course
+of further study there. Thither he accordingly went in the year 1696.
+
+In Berlin the boy of eleven years was soon recognized as a prodigy.
+There he met two Italian composers of established reputation,
+Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti, both of whom he was to encounter in
+after-life, though under very different circumstances, in London.
+Bononcini, who was of a sour and jealous disposition, soon conceived
+a dislike for the gifted little fellow, and attempted to injure him by
+composing a piece for the harpsichord full of the most extraordinary
+difficulties, and then asking him to play it at sight. The boy,
+however, at once executed it without a mistake, and thus the malicious
+schemer was foiled by his own device. Attilio was of a different
+disposition; he praised the young musician to the skies, and was never
+weary of sitting by his side at the organ or harpsichord, and hearing
+him improvise for hours. The Elector of Brandenburg also conceived a
+great admiration for the boy's talents, and offered to send him to
+Italy. On old Handel being consulted, however, he pleaded that he was
+now an old man, and wished his son to remain near him. In consequence
+of this, probably much to the boy's disappointment, he was brought
+back to Halle, and there set to work again under his old master,
+Zachau.
+
+Soon after this return his father died, in 1697, leaving hardly
+anything for his family, and young Handel had now to seriously bestir
+himself to make a living. With this object he went to Hamburg, where
+he obtained a place as second violin in the Opera-house. Soon after
+arriving there, the post of organist at Luebeck became vacant, and
+Handel was a candidate for it. But a peculiar condition was attached
+to the acceptance of the office; the new organist must marry the
+daughter of the old one! And, as Handel either did not approve of the
+lady, or of matrimony generally (and in fact he never was married), he
+promptly retired from the competition. At first, no one suspected the
+youth's talents, for he amused himself by pretending to be an
+ignoramus, until one day the accompanyist on the harpsichord (then the
+most important instrument in an orchestra) was absent, and young
+Handel took his place, astonishing everybody by his masterly touch.
+Probably this discovery aroused the jealousy of some of his
+brother-artists, for soon afterward a duel took place between him and
+Matheson, a clever composer and singer, who one night, in the midst of
+a quarrel on leaving the theatre, gave him a box on the ear; swords
+were drawn, and the duel took place there and then under the portico
+of the theatre. Fortunately Matheson's weapon was shivered by coming
+in contact with a metal button on his opponent's coat. Explanations
+were then offered, and the two adversaries became friends--indeed,
+close friends--afterward. "Almira, Queen of Castile," Handel's first
+opera, was brought out in Hamburg in 1705, and was followed by two
+others, "Nero," and "Daphne," all received with great favor, and
+frequently performed.
+
+[Illustration: Handel's River-Concert for George I.]
+
+But the young musician determined to visit Italy as soon as possible,
+and after staying in Hamburg three years, and having, besides the
+money he sent his mother, saved two hundred ducats for travelling
+expenses, he was able to set off on the journey, then one of the great
+events in a musician's lifetime. He visited Florence, Venice, Rome,
+and Naples, in almost every city writing operas, which we are told
+were produced with the most brilliant success. At Venice an opera was
+sought for from him, and in three weeks he had written "Agrippina."
+When produced, the people received it with frantic enthusiasm, the
+theatre resounding with shouts of "Viva il caro Sassone!" (Long live
+the dear Saxon!) The following story illustrates the extraordinary
+fame he so quickly acquired in Italy. He arrived at Venice during
+the middle of the carnival, and was taken to a masked ball, and there
+played the harpsichord, still keeping on his mask. Domenico Scarlatti,
+the most famous harpsichord player of his age, on hearing him,
+exclaimed, "Why, it's the devil, or else the Saxon whom everyone is
+talking about!" In 1709 he returned to Hanover, and was appointed by
+the Elector George of Brunswick, afterward King George I., of England,
+his Court Capellmeister.
+
+Handel's wanderings next led him to England, where he was treated with
+so much honor that he showed no great hurry to return to Hanover, and,
+in fact, he remained in England and coolly ignored his engagement as
+Capellmeister. But an awkward piece of retribution was at hand. The
+Elector of Hanover, on the death of Queen Anne, came to England as the
+new king, and Handel, his delinquent Capellmeister, could hardly
+expect to receive any share of the royal favor in future. With the
+help of a friend of his, Baron Kilmanseck, he determined, however, to
+make an attempt to conciliate the king, and accordingly he wrote
+twenty-five short concerted pieces of music, and made arrangements for
+these to be performed by musicians in a boat following the royal barge
+on the Thames, one day when the king went on an excursion up the river
+for a picnic. The king recognized the composer at once by his style,
+and spoke in terms of approbation of the music, and the news was
+quickly conveyed by his friend to the anxious musician. This is the
+story of the origin of the famous "Water Music." Soon afterward the
+king allowed Handel to appear before him to play the harpsichord
+accompaniments to some sonatas executed by Geminiani, a celebrated
+Italian violinist, and finally peace was made between them, Handel
+being appointed music-master to the royal children, and receiving an
+additional pension of L200. In 1726 a private Act of Parliament was
+passed, making George Frederick Handel a naturalized Englishman.
+
+In the year 1720 a number of noblemen formed themselves into a company
+for the purpose of reviving Italian opera in London, at the Haymarket
+Theatre, and subscribed a capital of L50,000. The king himself
+subscribed L1,000, and allowed the society to take the name of the
+Royal Academy of Music, and at first everything seemed to promise the
+most brilliant success. Handel was appointed director of the music.
+Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti, his old acquaintances in Berlin, were
+also attracted by this new operatic venture to London, and their
+arrival was followed by a competition of a very novel character. The
+libretto of a new opera, "Muzio Scaevola," was divided between the
+three composers. Attilio was to put the first act to music, Bononcini
+the second, and Handel the third. We need hardly wonder that the
+victory is said to have rested with the last and youngest of the trio,
+although at this time the cabals against him, which afterward were to
+do him such grievous harm, had already commenced.
+
+Handel still clung to the operatic speculation; and when he had to
+leave the Haymarket Theatre, which was given up to another Italian
+company with the famous Farinelli, from Lincoln's Inn Fields,
+undauntedly he changed to the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, and there
+commenced again. More operas were produced, with the one unvarying
+tale of fiasco, and at last, in 1737, having lost the whole of his
+hardly earned money, Handel was compelled to close the theatre, and,
+worse than all, to suspend payment for a time. Happily he now turned
+his thoughts to oratorio. "Saul" and "Israel in Egypt" were composed
+in quick succession; the last gigantic work being written in the
+almost incredibly short space of twenty-seven days. How great it is
+everyone now knows, but, at the time the colossal choruses were
+actually considered a great deal too heavy and monotonous; and Handel,
+always quick in resource, at the second performance introduced a
+number of operatic songs to make them go down better, and after the
+third performance the piece was withdrawn altogether. Fortunately,
+opinions have changed since then. These works were followed by his
+fine setting of Dryden's "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day," and Milton's
+"L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso;" but it cannot be said that his
+pecuniary affairs were materially improved by their production.
+
+The first performance of his greatest oratorio, the "Messiah," took
+place at Neale's Music Hall, in Dublin, on April 18, 1742, at mid-day,
+and, apropos of the absurdities of fashion, it may be noticed that the
+announcements contained the following request: "That ladies who honor
+this performance with their presence, will be pleased to come without
+hoops, as it will greatly increase the charity by making room for more
+company." The work was gloriously successful, and L400 were obtained
+the first day for the Dublin charities. Handel seems always to have
+had a special feeling with regard to this masterpiece of his--as if it
+were too sacred to be merely used for making money by, like his other
+works. He very frequently assisted at its performance for the benefit
+of the Foundling Hospital, and he left the score as a precious gift to
+the governor of that institution. This work alone brought no less a
+sum than L10,299 to the funds of the hospital. In this connection a
+fine saying of his may be repeated. Lord Kinnoul had complimented him
+on the noble "entertainment" which by the "Messiah" he had lately
+given the town. "My Lord," said Handel, "I should be sorry if I only
+entertained them--I wish to make them better." And when someone
+questioned him on his feelings when composing the "Hallelujah Chorus,"
+he replied in his peculiar English, "I did think I did see all heaven
+before me, and the great God himself." What a fine saying that was of
+poor old George III., in describing the "pastoral symphony" in this
+oratorio--"I could see the stars shining through it!"
+
+The now constant custom of the audience to rise and remain standing
+during the performance of this chorus, is said to have originated in
+the following manner: On the first production of the work in London,
+"the audience were exceedingly struck and affected by the music in
+general; but when that chorus struck up, 'For the Lord God Omnipotent'
+in the 'Hallelujah,' they were so transported that they all together,
+with the king (who happened to be present), started up and remained
+standing till the chorus ended." "This anecdote I had from Lord
+Kinnoul." So says Dr. Beattie, the once famous poet, in one of his
+letters.
+
+The "Messiah" was commenced on August 22, 1741, finished on September
+12th, and the orchestration filled up two days afterward--the whole
+work thus being completed in twenty-three days. Handel was fifty-six
+years old at the time.
+
+The next ten years of the life of the "Goliath of Music," as he has
+been called, are marked by some of the most splendid achievements of
+his genius. "Samson," the "Dettingen Te Deum," "Joseph," "Belshazzar,"
+"The Occasional Oratorio," "Judas Maccabeus," "Joshua," "Solomon,"
+and, "Theodora," being composed by him during this time, when, already
+an old man, it might have been thought that he would have taken some
+repose after the labors of so toilsome and troubled a life. But,
+oak-like, he was one of those who mature late; like Milton, his
+greatest works were those of his old age.
+
+But a terrible misfortune was approaching--his eyesight was failing.
+The "drop serene," of which Milton speaks so pathetically, had fallen
+on his eyes, and at the time when, in February, 1752, he was composing
+his last work, "Jephtha" (the one containing "Deeper and Deeper
+Still," and "Waft her, Angels"), the effort in tracing the lines is,
+in the original MS., very painfully apparent. Soon afterward he
+submitted to three operations, but they were in vain, and henceforth
+all was to be dark to him. His sole remaining work was now to
+improvise on the organ, and to play at performances of his oratorios.
+There is a pathetic story told of an incident that occurred on one
+occasion, when "Samson" was given. While the magnificent air,
+
+  Total eclipse! no sun, no moon!
+  All dark, amidst the blaze of noon.
+  O glorious light! no cheering ray
+  To glad my eyes with welcome day.
+  Why thus deprived thy prime decree?
+  Sun, moon, and stars are dark to me--
+
+was being sung by Beard, the tenor, the blind old man, seated at the
+organ, was seen to tremble and grow pale, and then, when he was led
+forward to the audience to receive their applause, tears were in the
+eyes of nearly everyone present at the sight. It was like the scene
+that is described in Beethoven's life on the occasion of that
+composer's appearance, when almost totally deaf, to conduct his great
+Choral Symphony at Vienna.
+
+One night, on returning home from a performance of the "Messiah" at
+Covent Garden, Handel was seized with sudden weakness and retired
+hurriedly to bed, from which he was never to rise again. He prayed
+that he might breathe his last on Good Friday, "in hope of meeting his
+God, his sweet Lord and Saviour on the day of his resurrection." And
+strangely enough his wish was granted, for on Good Friday, April 13,
+1759, he quietly passed away from this life, being then seventy-four
+years of age. His remains were laid in Poets' Corner in Westminster
+Abbey, and the place is marked by a statue by Roubilliac, representing
+him leaning over a table covered with musical instruments, his hand
+holding a pen, and before him is laid the "Messiah," open at the
+words, "I know that my Redeemer liveth."
+
+
+
+
+MOZART
+
+By C. E. BOURNE
+
+(1756-1791)
+
+
+[Illustration: Mozart.]
+
+Leopold Mozart was a violinist in the band of Archbishop Sigismund,
+the reigning Prince of Salzburg, and it was probably in compliment to
+his master that he bestowed on the youngest of his seven children the
+name of Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Sigismundus. Born
+on January 27, 1756, this child was destined to make the name of
+Mozart famous wherever music is known; and surely no more beautiful
+life--beautiful in itself and in the works of immortal beauty which in
+its short course were produced--has ever been lived by anyone of those
+to whom the crown of inspired singers and an enduring monument in the
+temple of art has been given. "Look around," was the epitaph on a
+great architect. "Listen," is the most fitting tribute to the
+wonderful genius of a Mozart.
+
+Infant prodigies very often turn out to be nobodies in after-life. But
+Mozart was an exception; and though he might well have been called
+"the marvellous boy," his latest works--and he died at the early age
+of thirty-five--were undoubtedly his grandest and most perfect. He
+began very early to compose. One of these first attempts was a
+concerto so difficult that no one could play it; but the child
+undauntedly said, "Why, that's the very reason why it is called a
+concerto; people must practise it before they can play it perfectly."
+
+Wolfgang and his sister, Nannerl, as he used to call her, had been
+taken by their father, in 1762, to Vienna, where the children played
+the piano before the Empress Maria Theresa and her husband. Little
+Wolfgang was here, as everywhere, perfectly at his ease, with a
+simplicity and childish grace that won every heart. When he had been
+playing for some time, he jumped without ceremony on the lap of the
+empress, and kissed her heartily for being so good to him. Little
+Marie Antoinette, her daughter, afterward the ill-fated wife of Louis
+XVI., and then about the same age as Wolfgang, he treated in almost
+the same way. He had slipped on the polished floor, to which he was
+unaccustomed, and the little princess had hurried forward to raise him
+up, on which he promptly said, "You are good; I will marry you." The
+empress asked why he wished this, to which he answered, "Out of
+gratitude; she was kind, while her sister took no notice of me" (she
+had not come forward to help him). After returning to Salzburg,
+Leopold Mozart, in the spring of 1763, took his children on a more
+lengthy tour to Munich, Paris, London, and The Hague, and everywhere
+their playing, especially Wolfgang's performances on the organ, which
+he had now learned, were listened to with delight and astonishment. At
+Heidelberg the priest of the Church of the Holy Ghost engraved on the
+organ the boy's name and the date of his visit, in remembrance of
+"this wonder of God," as he called the child. At London, old Mozart
+says, they were received, on April 27th, by King George III. and Queen
+Caroline, at the palace, and remained from six to nine o'clock. The
+king placed before the boy compositions of Bach and Handel, all of
+which he played at sight perfectly; he had also the honor of
+accompanying the queen in a song. "On leaving the palace," the careful
+father says, "we received a present of 24 guineas."
+
+A great delight was now before him, for his father had resolved on a
+journey to Italy, then far more than now the land of music. How much
+this visit did for the young maestro it is impossible to say; he has
+not, like Mendelssohn, left us an "Italian Symphony," recording the
+impressions which that sunny spot of classic beauty had made upon him,
+but there can be little doubt of the great influence it had on the
+whole of his after-life. There are some significant words which he
+wrote eight years later to his father from Paris: "You must faithfully
+promise to let me see Italy again in order to refresh my life. I do
+entreat of you to confer this happiness upon me." In Mantua, Milan,
+Bologna (where he had the good fortune to meet the learned Padre
+Martini, one of the soundest musicians of his age, and for whom he
+ever afterward maintained a warm attachment), Florence, Rome, and
+Naples, the young genius was received everywhere with enthusiasm by
+the crowds who came to hear him. In Naples the superstitious people
+believed that there was magic in his playing, and pointed to a ring on
+his left hand as the cause of his wonderful dexterity; and it was only
+when he had taken this off, and gone on playing just the same, that
+they had to acknowledge it was simply the perfection of art.
+
+There is something sad in contrasting these brilliant early days with
+the anxious times that came later on, when the great Mozart was
+compelled to wait in the ante-chambers of the great, dine with their
+lacqueys, give lessons to stupid young countesses, and write begging
+letters to his friends; yet, in reality, those later days, when "Don
+Giovanni," "Die Zauberfloete," and the "Requiem," were composed, were
+the truly brilliant ones. And it may be that the very greatness came,
+in some measure, from the sorrow and pain; that Mozart, like so many
+others of the world's great singers, "learnt in suffering what he
+taught in song."
+
+On his return to Munich, after composing a comic opera in the Italian
+style, "La Finta Giardiniera," which had a great success, young
+Mozart, who had been very shabbily treated by Archbishop
+Hieronymus--of whose spiteful conduct we shall hear more
+hereafter--the successor of Sigismund, determined to resign his
+situation in the court band, and to set out on his travels again,
+giving concerts from place to place, and everywhere looking out for
+some suitable appointment that might afford him a permanent income.
+This time his father was refused permission to travel, and, as on his
+exertions depended the support of the whole family, he remained
+behind, while Frau Mozart, the mother, accompanied young Wolfgang. In
+1777, now a young man of twenty-one, he set out upon his second great
+artistic tour, buoyant with hope, and with all the beautiful audacity
+of young genius determined to conquer the world. This time it was not
+the infant prodigy whom men listened to, but the matured musician and
+the composer of melodies sweeter than men had ever listened to before.
+But the tale is changed now. True, there are triumphs to be spoken of,
+flattery from the great, and presents sent in recompense for his
+marvellous playing (he tells one day of his chagrin in receiving from
+a certain prince a gold watch, instead of money that he sorely
+wanted--and, besides, he had five watches already!); but rebuffs,
+intrigues, and all sorts of petty machinations against him, make the
+tale a sadder one; and so it continued to be to the end.
+
+From Munich--where it had been hoped that the elector would have given
+him an appointment at court, but he was only told to go to Italy and
+become famous, "it was too early yet to think about becoming a
+Capellmeister"--he went to Augsburg, spending some pleasant days there
+in the society of a cousin, Marianne, nicknamed by him Baesle, a merry,
+open-hearted girl of nineteen.
+
+Thence, he went on to Mannheim, a town that is memorable as the place
+where he first met the Webers, and made the acquaintance of Herr
+Cannabich, the director of the music at the elector's court, and one
+who proved a stanch friend through everything to the young composer.
+Cannabich had a daughter named Rosa, a girl of thirteen, exceedingly
+pretty and clever, and Wolfgang appears to have admired her very much,
+and perhaps for a time to have flirted and been in love with her. He
+wrote her a sonata, and was delighted with the way in which she played
+it; the andante, he said, he had composed to represent her, and when
+it was finished he vowed she was just what the andante was. But this
+little love affair, if it existed, soon was forgotten in a more
+serious one with Aloysia Weber. Her father was a theatre copyist in
+poor circumstances. There were a number of children, and she was a
+beautiful girl of fifteen, with a magnificent voice. She was cousin,
+by the way, to Weber, afterward composer of the "Freischuetz." Mozart
+was so charmed with her voice that he undertook to give her lessons,
+and we soon hear of him composing airs for her and meditating a
+concert tour in Italy in company with her, and her father and sister.
+In writing of it to his own father he sets out the advantages to be
+gained by co-partnership, and very prosaically says: "Should we stay
+long anywhere, the eldest daughter [Josepha, afterward Frau Hofer, for
+whom Mozart wrote the part of Astrafiammente in the "Zauberfloete"]
+would be of the greatest use to us; for we could have our own menage,
+as she understands cooking." But papa Mozart decidedly objected. "Your
+proposal to travel about with Herr Weber--N. B., two daughters--has
+driven me nearly wild," and he straightway orders his son off to
+Paris, whither, with a parting present of a pair of mittens knitted
+for him by Mlle. Weber, he reluctantly sets out in company with his
+mother.
+
+His stay in Paris during the next year was not very eventful, and a
+symphony produced at the Concerts Spirituels seems to have been his
+most successful work at this time. It was clever and lively, full of
+striking effects, and was most warmly applauded. He says: "The moment
+the symphony was over I went off in my joy to the Palais Royal, where
+I took a good ice, told my beads, as I had vowed, and went home, where
+I am happiest and always shall be happiest." A great sorrow came to
+him here in the death of his mother. Owing to the great expense of
+living in Paris, they had been compelled to live together in a small,
+dark room, so cramped for space that there was not even room for the
+indispensable piano. Here she was taken ill, and though for fourteen
+days Wolfgang most devotedly attended to her wants, she died in his
+arms. The letters in which he breaks the news to his father and sister
+are full of the most beautiful tenderness and forgetfulness of his own
+grief in solicitude for theirs. Things did not indeed prosper with him
+in Paris; he tried to give lessons, but the ladies whom he taught paid
+him very shabbily, and the labor of getting from one part of the city
+to another to teach was so great that he found it difficult to give
+the time he wished to composition.
+
+Music in Paris, just then, was at a low ebb. Vapidly pretty Italian
+operas were in fashion, and Piccinni was the favorite composer. It was
+some years afterward that the great contest between the Piccinnists
+and Gluckists culminated in the victory of the latter, though
+"Alceste," had already been produced, and "Iphigenia" was soon to
+follow. Mozart was a fervent admirer of Gluck, and the music of the
+older master had evidently an important influence on that of the
+younger and more gifted composer.
+
+Once more his thoughts were turned to Salzburg, for two of the leading
+musicians there having died, the Archbishop Hieronymus offered their
+posts to the Mozarts, father and son, at a salary of a thousand
+florins for the two. The father anxiously entreated his son to return
+and accept this offer, mentioning as a further bait, that Aloysia
+Weber would probably be engaged to sing in Salzburg. Much as Wolfgang
+hated Salzburg, or rather the people living there, his love for his
+father and sister prevailed over his aversion; and though with no
+pleasure at all in the prospect of seeing the hateful archbishop
+again, he set out from Paris, travelling to Salzburg in very leisurely
+fashion via Strasbourg, Mannheim, and Munich. At Strasbourg he was
+induced to give several concerts, but they were not pecuniary
+successes, and he did not make by any one more than three louis d'or.
+But how the artist peeps out in every line of the letters in which he
+describes these! After saying how few were present, and how cold it
+was, he proceeds: "But I soon warmed myself, to show the Strasbourg
+gentlemen how little I cared, and played to them a long time for my
+own amusement, giving a concerto more than I had promised, and at the
+close extemporizing. It is now over, but at all events I gained honor
+and fame."
+
+At Munich a great shock awaited him. He visited the Webers, and being
+in mourning for his mother, wore, after the French fashion, a red coat
+with black buttons. When he appeared, Aloysia hardly seemed to
+recognize him, and her coldness was so marked, that Mozart quietly
+seated himself at the piano, and sang in a loud voice, "Ich lass das
+Maedchen gern das mich nicht will" (I gladly give up the girl who
+slights me). It was all over, and he had to bear the loss of the
+fickle girl as best he might. There is a significant line in one of
+his letters at this time to his father: "In my whole life I never
+wrote worse than I do to-day, but I really am unfit for anything; my
+heart is so full of tears." After two years' absence he returned home
+to Salzburg, where he was warmly welcomed back. Here he remained for a
+little while, and wrote his first serious opera, "Idomeneo," to the
+text of an Abbe Varesco, a Salzburger. This opera Beethoven thought
+the finest of all that Mozart wrote. It was brought out at Munich in
+January, 1781, and was brilliantly successful. In the March following,
+an order was received from the archbishop to follow him to Vienna,
+where he wished to appear with all the full pomp and brilliant retinue
+of a prince of the church; and as one of this retinue Mozart had to
+follow him, little thinking at the time that he should never return to
+Salzburg, but that Vienna henceforth was to be his home.
+
+In Vienna he found that he had to live in the archbishop's house, and
+was looked upon there as one of the ordinary servants. He says, "We
+dine at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, unluckily rather too early an
+hour for me. Our party consists of the two valets, the comptroller,
+Herr Zetti, the confectioner, the two cooks, Cecarilli, Brunetti (two
+singers), and my insignificant self. N. B.--The two valets sit at the
+head of the table. I have, at all events, the honor to be placed above
+the cooks; I almost believe I am back to Salzburg."
+
+Mozart was a true gentleman, with no foolish false pride, but with the
+honorable self-respect that every gentleman must possess, and it was
+very galling to him to have to suffer such odious treatment from the
+mean-spirited archbishop. Indeed, it was only for his father's sake
+that he submitted to the continued contumely and petty slights to
+which the archbishop delighted in subjecting him. At last the open
+rupture came. The archbishop called him a knave and dissolute fellow,
+and told him to be off; and when Mozart waited upon Count Arco, the
+principal official, to obtain the regular dismissal that was
+necessary, the fellow poured abuse upon him, and actually kicked him
+out of the room. Poor Mozart was in a state of violent excitement
+after this outrage, and for some days was so ill that he could not
+continue his ordinary work. But now at least he was free, and though
+his father, like a timid, prudent old man, bewailed the loss of the
+stipend which his son had been receiving, Mozart himself knew that the
+release was entirely for the best.
+
+In 1782 appeared "Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail," his first really
+important opera, full of beautiful airs, which at once became
+enormously popular with the Viennese. The Emperor Joseph II. knew very
+little about music, but, as frequently happens in such cases,
+considered that he possessed prodigious taste. On hearing it he said,
+"Much too fine for our ears, dear Mozart; and what a quantity of
+notes!"
+
+The bold reply to this was, "Just as many notes as are necessary,
+your Majesty."
+
+Much of the delight which Mozart felt in the success of the opera
+arose from the fact that it enabled him seriously to contemplate
+marriage. Aloysia Weber had been faithless to him, but there was
+another sister--with no special beauty save that of bright eyes, a
+comely figure, and a cheerful, amiable disposition--Constanze, whom he
+now hoped to make his wife. His father objected to all of the Weber
+family, and there was some difficulty in obtaining the paternal
+consent; but at last the marriage took place, on August 4, 1782. How
+truly he loved his wife from first to last, his letters abundantly
+show; her frequent illnesses were afterward a great and almost
+constant source of expense to him, but he never ceased to write to her
+with the passionate ardor of a young lover. He says: "I found that I
+never prayed so fervently, or confessed so piously, as by her side;
+she felt the same." And now for some time everything went smoothly in
+the modest little menage in Vienna. Mozart had plenty of lessons to
+give, but none of the commissions for operas which he would have
+wished.
+
+Passing over a visit to Leipsic--where he studied with the keenest
+delight a number of the unpublished works of the great Sebastian
+Bach--and to Berlin, he returned to Vienna, and at once set to work
+upon some quartets which the King of Prussia had ordered from him.
+"Cosi fan tutte," a comic opera, with the beautifully flowing music
+that only Mozart could write, but with a stupid plot that has
+prevented its frequent repetition in later times; and the glorious
+"Zauberfloete," written to assist a theatrical manager, Schikaneder,
+were his next works. At this time a strange melancholy began to show
+itself in his letters--it may be that already his overwrought brain
+was conscious that the end was not far distant. Such lines as these,
+pathetic and sad in their simple and almost childlike expression,
+occur in a letter he wrote during a short absence from his wife, at
+Frankfort, in 1790: "I am as happy as a child at the thought of
+returning to you. If people could see into my heart I should almost
+feel ashamed--all there is cold, cold as ice. Were you with me, I
+should possibly take more pleasure in the kindness of those I meet
+here, but all seems to me so empty." On his return to Vienna pecuniary
+want was rather pressingly felt; his silver plate had to be pawned,
+and a perfidious friend, Stadler, made away with the tickets, and the
+silver was never redeemed. On one occasion Joseph Deiner, the landlord
+of the "Silberne Schlange," chanced to call upon him, and was
+surprised to find Mozart and his wife Constanze dancing round the
+room. The laughing explanation was that they had no firewood in the
+house, and so were trying to warm themselves with dancing. Deiner at
+once offered to send in firewood, Mozart promising to pay as soon as
+he could.
+
+That grand work, the "Zauberfloete," had just been completed when a
+strange commission was given him. One day a tall, haggard-looking man,
+dressed in gray, with a very sombre expression of countenance, called
+upon Mozart, bringing with him an anonymous letter. This letter
+contained an inquiry as to the sum for which he would write a mass for
+the dead, and in how short a time this could be completed. Mozart
+consulted his wife, and the sum of fifty ducats was mentioned. The
+stranger departed, and soon returned with the money, promising Mozart
+a further sum on completion, and also mentioned that he might as well
+spare the trouble of finding out who had given this commission, for it
+would be entirely useless. We now know that the commission had really
+been given by Count Walsegg, a foolish nobleman, whose wife had died,
+and who wanted, by transcribing Mozart's score, to pass it off as his
+own composition--and this he actually did after the composer's death.
+Poor Mozart, in the weak state of health in which he now was, with
+nerves unstrung and over-excited brain, was strangely impressed by
+this visit, and soon the fancy took firm possession of him that the
+messenger had arrived with a mandate from the unseen world, and that
+the "Requiem" he was to write was for himself. Not the less did he
+ardently set to work on it. Hardly, however, was it commenced than he
+was compelled to write another opera, "La Clemenza di Tito," for which
+a commission had been given him by the Bohemian Estates, for
+production on the occasion of the Emperor Leopold's coronation in
+their capital. This was accomplished in the short space of eighteen
+days, and though it does not contain the best music, yet the overture
+and several of the numbers are full of a piquant beauty and liveliness
+well suiting the festival of a people's rejoicing. But a far greater
+work, the "Zauberfloete," was produced in Vienna shortly afterward. It
+did not take very well at first, but subsequent performances went
+better.
+
+[Illustration: Mozart Singing his Requiem.]
+
+His labors in bringing out the "Zauberfloete" over, Mozart returned to
+the "Requiem" he had already commenced, but while writing he often had
+to sink back in his chair, being seized with short swoons. Too plainly
+was his strength exhausted, but he persisted in his solemn work. One
+bright November morning he was walking with Constanze in the Prater,
+and sadly pointing out to her the falling leaves, and speaking of
+death, with tears in his eyes, he added; "I well know I am writing
+this 'Requiem' for myself. My own feelings tell me that I shall not
+last long. No doubt some one has given me poison--I cannot get rid of
+this thought." With these gloomy fancies haunting his mind, he rapidly
+grew worse, and soon could not leave his room. The performances of the
+"Zauberfloete" were still going on, and extraordinarily successful. He
+took the greatest interest in hearing of them, and at night would take
+out his watch and note the time--"Now the first act is over, now is
+the time for the great Queen of Night." The day before his death he
+said to his wife, "Oh, that I could only once more hear my 'Flauto
+Magico!'" humming, in scarcely audible voice, the lively bird-catcher
+song. The same day, at two o'clock in the afternoon, he called his
+friends together, and asked for the score of his nearly completed
+"Requiem" to be laid on his bed. Benedict Schack sang the soprano; his
+brother-in-law, Hofer, the tenor; Gerl, the bass; and Mozart himself
+took the alto in a weak but delicately clear voice. They had got
+through the various parts till they came to the "Lacrymosa," when
+Mozart burst into tears, and laid the score aside. The next day
+(Sunday), he was worse, and said to Sophie, his sister-in-law, "I have
+the taste of death on my tongue, I smell the grave, and who can
+comfort my Constanze, if you don't stay here?" In her account of his
+last moments, she says: "I found Suessmayer sitting by Mozart's bed.
+The well-known 'Requiem' was lying on the coverlet, and Mozart was
+explaining to Suessmayer the mode in which he wished him to complete
+it after his death. He further requested his wife to keep his death
+secret until she had informed Albrechtsberger of it, 'for the
+situation of assistant organist at the Stephen Church ought to be his
+before God and the world.' The doctor came and ordered cold
+applications on Mozart's burning head.... The last movement of his
+lips was an endeavor to indicate where the kettledrums should be used
+in the 'Requiem.' I think I still hear the sound."
+
+
+
+
+HAYDN
+
+By C. E. BOURNE
+
+(1732-1809)
+
+
+[Illustration: Haydn.]
+
+No composer has ever given greater or purer pleasure by his
+compositions than is given by "papa" Haydn; there is an unceasing flow
+of cheerfulness and lively tone in his music, even in the most solemn
+pieces, as in his Masses, the predominant feeling is that of gladness;
+as he once said to Carpani: "At the thought of God my heart leaps for
+joy, and I cannot help my music doing the same." But it is not alone
+as the writer of graceful and beautiful music that Haydn has a claim
+on our remembrance; he has been truly called the "father of the
+symphony." Mozart once said: "It was from Haydn that I first learned
+the true way to compose quartettes;" and "The Creation," which must
+ever be counted one of the masterpieces of oratorio music, was his
+work.
+
+His family were of the people, his father being a master wheelwright
+at Rohrau, a small Austrian village on the borders of Lower Austria
+and Hungary and his mother having been employed as a cook in the
+castle of Count Harrach, the principal lord of the district. Joseph
+Haydn was born on March 31, 1732 the second child of his parents; and
+as ten brothers and sisters afterward came into the world, it can
+easily be understood that his lot was not a very luxurious one. His
+parents were simple, honest people of the laboring class, very
+ignorant, but, like most German peasants, with a certain love for and
+facility in music, not quite so common in this country. Haydn's father
+had a good voice, and could sing well, accompanying himself on the
+harp, though he did not know a single note of written music. Then
+there was the village schoolmaster, who could actually play the
+violin, and whom little Joseph watched with wondering eyes, extracting
+those marvellously sweet sounds from his wooden instrument, until,
+with the child's spirit of imitation, as his parents sang their
+"Volkslieder," the little fellow, perched on a stone bench, gravely
+handled two pieces of wood of his own as if they were bow and fiddle,
+keeping exact time, and flourishing the bow in the approved fashion of
+the schoolmaster. From this very little incident came an important
+change in his life; for a relation, Johann Mathias Frankh, of
+Hainburg, happened to be present on one occasion, and, thinking he saw
+an aptitude for music in the boy, offered to take him into his own
+school at Hainburg, where accordingly young Haydn went at the age of
+six years.
+
+There he remained for two years, making rapid progress in singing and
+in playing all sorts of instruments, among others the clavier, violin,
+organ, and drum. He said afterward, with the unaffected piety, far
+removed from cant, that was characteristic of him: "Almighty God, to
+whom I render thanks for all his unnumbered mercies, gave me such
+facility in music that, by the time I was six years old, I stood up
+like a man and sang masses in the church choir, and could play a
+little on the clavier and violin." Of Frankh, a very strict, but
+thorough and most painstaking teacher, he also said afterward: "I
+shall be grateful to that man as long as I live for keeping me so hard
+at work, though I used to get more flogging than food;" and in Haydn's
+will he remembered Frankh's family, leaving his daughter a sum of
+money and a portrait of Frankh himself, "my first instructor in
+music."
+
+For some years he seems to have lived a miserable, struggling life,
+giving lessons, playing the organ in churches, and studying when and
+where he could. He had a few pupils at the moderate remuneration of
+two florins a month, and he had contrived to obtain possession of an
+old worm-eaten clavier, on which he used diligently to practise in the
+garret in the Kohlmarkt, where he lived. A pitiable description is
+given of the lodging he then occupied. It was on the sixth story, in a
+room without stove or window. In winter his breath froze on his thin
+coverlet, and the water, that in the morning he had to fetch himself
+from the spring for washing, was frequently changed into a lump of ice
+before his arrival in that elevated region. Life was indeed hard; but
+he was constantly at work, and, having made a precious "find" on an
+old bookstall one day of Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum," in a very
+dilapidated condition, but very cheap, he was ardently preparing
+himself for the life--he now vowed should be his--of a composer.
+
+About this time Haydn received a commission from Felix Kurz, a comic
+actor of the Stadt-Theatre, to put a farce of his, "Der neue krumme
+Teufel," to music. This farce, of which the words still remain, though
+the music has been lost, was very successful, and was played in
+Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and a number of other towns. The well-known
+story of Haydn's "Tempest Music" is connected with this. In one part
+of this piece a terrible storm was supposed to be raging, and the
+accompanying music must of course be suitably descriptive; but the
+difficulty was that Haydn had never seen the sea: therefore had not
+the slightest notion of what a storm at sea was like. Kurz tries to
+describe the waves running mountains high, the pitching and tossing,
+the roll of thunder, and the howling of the wind; and Haydn produces
+all sorts of ugly, jerky, and noisy music, but none of it is in the
+remotest degree like a storm at sea, or anywhere else. At last, after
+Kurz had become hoarse with his nautical disquisitions, and Haydn's
+fingers were tired of scrambling all over the piano, the little
+musician in a rage crashed his hands down on the two extremes of the
+instrument, exclaiming: "Let's have done with this tempest!"
+
+"Why, that's it; that's the very thing!" shouted the clown, jumping up
+and embracing him; and with this crash and a run of semitones to the
+centre of the piano this troublesome tempest was most satisfactorily
+represented.
+
+When, many years afterward, Haydn was crossing the Straits of Dover to
+England, amid his sufferings he could not help laughing at the
+ludicrous recollections of this early experience of his.
+
+Things still went on improving, and Haydn, who was always lucky in the
+patrons he secured (at least according to the notion about patrons
+that then prevailed), was invited to the country-house of Herr von
+Fuernberg, a wealthy amateur, to stay there and compose quartettes for
+him--a style of music for which von Fuernberg had an especial liking.
+To his prompting it is that we owe the lovely series of quartettes
+which Haydn wrote--still as fresh and full of serene beauty as when
+first tried over by the virtuosi of Weinzirl. The next piece of good
+fortune was Haydn's appointment as director of the band and composer
+to Count Ferdinand Morzin at Lukaver near Pilsen; and here, in 1759,
+his first symphony was written. His salary was very small, only 200
+florins a year (or L20), with board and lodgings; but on the strength
+of it he unfortunately determined on the serious step of embarking in
+matrimony. A barber, named Keller, is said to have been very kind to
+him in the days of his poverty, and out of gratitude Haydn gave
+music-lessons to his daughters. One of them, the youngest, was very
+pretty, and Haydn fell in love with her. But she became a nun; and the
+father then prevailed upon Haydn to marry the elder one, who was three
+years older than he--a sour-tempered, bigoted, and abominably selfish
+woman, who contributed little to the happiness of his life, and was
+always bringing priests and friars to the house and worrying her
+good-tempered husband to compose masses and other church music for
+these men.
+
+Count Morzin was compelled to give up his band in 1761; but Haydn did
+not remain long without employment, as Prince Esterhazy, who had heard
+his symphonies at Morzin's house, engaged him to assist Werner, his
+Capellmeister. As director of Prince Esterhazy's band, Haydn was fated
+to remain for many years living at Esterhaz, the prince's
+country-seat, composing there nearly all his operas and songs, and
+many of his symphonies.
+
+In 1785 Haydn received a commission which showed the wide reputation
+he had then gained. The Chapter of Cadiz Cathedral requested him to
+write some instrumental music for performance on Good Friday. "The
+Seven Words of our Saviour on the Cross" was in consequence written by
+him.
+
+Several invitations had been sent from England for Haydn to pay a
+visit there; but it was only after Prince Esterhazy was dead that he
+was prevailed on by Salomon to cross the sea. A characteristic
+conversation between him and Mozart--which took place before he
+undertook this, in those days, really formidable journey--is recorded.
+
+"Papa," said Mozart, "you have no training for the great world, and
+you speak too few languages."
+
+Haydn replied: "My language is understood by all the world."
+
+He set out on December 15, 1790, and did not return to Vienna till
+July, 1792. In London, where he wrote and conducted a number of
+symphonies for Salomon, he was the "lion" of the season, being in
+constant request for conducting concerts and paying visits to the
+nobility. Of these symphonies Salomon once said to him: "I am strongly
+of opinion that you never will surpass this music."
+
+"I never mean to try," was the answer.
+
+But this must not be taken to mean that Haydn had given up striving
+after the truest perfection in his art, and it probably meant no more
+than that for the time he was satisfied with his work. Far more like
+the genuine expression of the feeling of the great artist was his
+utterance, just before he died, to Kalkbrenner: "I have only just
+learned in my old age how to use the wind-instruments; and now that I
+do understand them, I must leave the world."
+
+[Illustration: Haydn Composing his "Creation."]
+
+Great as the work accomplished in his youth and early manhood
+unquestionably was, it remained for his old age to accomplish his
+greatest work, and that by which he is best known--the oratorio of
+"The Creation." It is said that the first ideas for this came to him
+when, in crossing the English Channel, he encountered a terrific
+storm. Soon after his leaving London, where the words had been given
+him by Salomon, Haydn set about composing the music. "Never," he says,
+"was I so pious as when composing 'The Creation.' I knelt down every
+day and prayed God to strengthen me for my work." It was first
+produced on March 31, 1799, his 67th birthday, at the National
+Theatre, Vienna, and was at once accorded an extraordinary share of
+popular favor. There is a pathetic story of the last performance of
+the work, at which Haydn, in extreme old age, in 1808, was present,
+when Salieri conducted. He was carried in an arm-chair into the hall,
+and received there with the warmest greeting by the audience. At the
+sublime passage, "And there was light!" Haydn, quite overcome, raised
+his hand, pointing upward and saying, "It came from thence." Soon
+after this his agitation increased so much that it was thought better
+to take him home at the end of the first part. The people crowded
+round him to take leave, and Beethoven is said to have reverently
+kissed his hand and forehead. After composing "The Creation," Haydn
+was prevailed upon to write another work, of somewhat similar
+character, to words adapted from Thomson's poem, and entitled "The
+Seasons." This, though containing some fine descriptive music and
+several choruses of great beauty, is not at all equal to the earlier
+work, though at the time its success was quite as complete. But the
+exertion of writing two such great works, almost without rest between
+them, was too great, and he himself said: "'The Seasons' gave me the
+finishing stroke." The bombardment of Vienna by the French in 1809
+greatly disturbed the poor old man. He still retained some of his old
+humor, and during the thunder of the cannons called out to his
+servants: "Children, don't be frightened; no harm can happen to you
+while Haydn is by!" He was now no longer able to compose, and to his
+last unfinished quartette he added a few bars of "Der Greis," as a
+conclusion:
+
+  "Hin ist alle meine Kraft:
+  Alt und schwach bin ich.
+                --JOSEPH HAYDN."
+
+"Gone is all my strength: old and weak am I." And these lines he
+caused to be engraved, and sent on a card to the friends who visited
+him. The end was indeed now near. On May 26, 1809, he had his servants
+gathered round him for the last adieus; then, by his desire, he was
+carried to the piano, where he played three times over the "Emperor's
+Hymn," composed by him. Then he was taken to his bed, where five days
+afterward he died.
+
+
+
+
+BEETHOVEN
+
+By C. E. BOURNE
+
+(1770-1827)
+
+
+[Illustration: Beethoven.]
+
+In one of his letters to Frau von Streicher, at Baden, Beethoven
+writes: "When you visit the ancient ruins, do not forget that
+Beethoven has often lingered there; when you stray through the silent
+pine-forests, do not forget that Beethoven often wrote poetry there,
+or, as it is termed, composed." He was always fond of claiming the
+title "Ton-dichter, poet in music;" and surely of all the great
+geniuses who have walked the earth, to none can the glorious name of
+"poet" more truly be given than to Ludwig von Beethoven.
+
+He was born at Bonn, on December 17, 1770. His father, Johann von
+Beethoven, was a tenor singer in the Electoral Chapel of the
+Archbishop of Cologne, at Bonn, and his mother, Maria Magdalena, was a
+daughter of the head cook at the castle of Ehrenbreitstein. The
+Beethoven family originally came from Louvain, in Belgium; but the
+composer's grandfather had settled in Bonn, first as a singer, and
+afterward as Capellmeister to the court. Musicians were not held of
+much account in those days, and the marriage of a singer with the
+daughter of a cook was not at all considered a mesalliance. Johann was
+a sad drunken scapegrace, and his poor wife, in bringing up her family
+upon the small portion of his earnings which she could save from being
+squandered at the tavern, had a pitiably hard and long struggling life
+of it.
+
+Johann soon discovered the extraordinary musical endowments of his
+child and at once set to work to make a "prodigy" of him, as Handel,
+Bach, and Mozart had been before; for in this way the father hoped to
+secure a mine of wealth and lazy competence for himself. So the boy,
+when only a few years old, was kept for long weary hours practising
+the piano, and one of the earliest stories of his life is of the
+five-year-old little child made to stand on a bench before the piano
+laboring over the notes, while the tears flowed fast down his cheeks
+at the cold and aching pain, from which his hard taskmaster would not
+release him. Besides his father, a clever musician who lodged in the
+house, Pfeiffer, an oboist at the theatre, gave him lessons. Beethoven
+used afterward to say that he had learnt more from this Pfeiffer than
+from any one else; but he was too ready to abet the father in his
+tyranny, and many a time, when the two came reeling home late at night
+from drinking bouts at the tavern, they would arouse the little fellow
+from his sleep and set him to work at the piano till daybreak.
+
+His next instructor was Neefe, the organist of the Archbishop's
+private chapel, a really skilful and learned musician, who predicted
+that the boy would become a second Mozart. Under him Beethoven studied
+for several years, and in 1782, when he was hardly twelve years old,
+we find him acting as organist in Neefe's place during the absence of
+the latter on a journey. The next year three sonatas composed by young
+Beethoven, and dedicated to the Elector in fulsome language, which was
+probably his father's production, were printed. Soon afterward the boy
+obtained the appointment of assistant-organist to the Elector, with a
+salary of a hundred thalers, no inconsiderable addition to the
+resources of his poor mother, who, with her family of three children,
+Ludwig, Carl, and Johann, and the more and more frequent visits of her
+ne'er-do-well of a husband to the tavern, was often grievously hard
+put to it for money. Young Ludwig had little play time in his life,
+and little opportunity for education; but amid his hard work some
+indications of a mischievous boyish spirit are to be found.
+
+In the year 1791, the Elector, as head of the Teutonic Order, had to
+be present at a grand conclave at Mergentheim, and thither he resolved
+to take his musical and theatrical staff. Two ships were chartered to
+convey these gentlemen down the Rhine and Maine, and a very pleasant
+excursion, with all sorts of frolics and high revellings, they had of
+it. Lux, a celebrated actor, was chosen king of the expedition, and we
+find Beethoven figuring among the scullions.
+
+In the autumn of the year following, a visit was paid by Haydn to Bonn
+on his return from his second journey to London. The musicians of the
+town gave a breakfast at Godesberg in his honor, and here Beethoven
+summoned up courage to show the veteran musician a cantata which he
+had recently composed. This was warmly praised by Haydn, and probably
+about this time arrangements were made for Beethoven to be received
+as a pupil by the older master. It is in this period that we must
+place a well-known anecdote. The young musician, already famous in his
+own neighborhood, was composing, as his custom was, in the wood
+outside the city, when a funeral cortege passed him. The priest,
+seeing him, instantly checked the dirge which was being chanted, and
+the procession passed in solemn silence, "for fear of disturbing him."
+In the beginning of November, 1792, the young musician left Bonn for
+Vienna, and, as it happened, he never afterward returned to the
+familiar scenes of his birthplace.
+
+Beethoven was never a very easy man to get on with, and his
+intercourse with Haydn, who used to call him the "Great Mogul," does
+not seem to have been the most friendly. He was dissatisfied with the
+instruction given him, and suspicions were awakened in his mind that
+the elder musician was jealous of him, and did not wish him to
+improve. These thoughts were strengthened by the result of a chance
+meeting one day, as he was walking home with his portfolio under his
+arm, with Johann Schenk, a scientific and thoroughly accomplished
+musician. Beethoven complained to him of the little advance he was
+making in counterpoint, and that Haydn never corrected his exercises
+or taught him anything. Schenk asked to look through the portfolio,
+and see the last work that Haydn had revised, and on examining it he
+was astonished to find a number of mistakes that had not been pointed
+out. It is difficult to understand Haydn's conduct in this matter, for
+the perfidious treatment suspected by Beethoven is quite at variance
+with the ordinarily accepted character of the old man, and I cannot
+help fancying that the only foundation for Beethoven's suspicion was
+that Haydn did not quite understand the erratic genius of the youth
+till some time afterward. Beethoven dedicated his three pianoforte
+sonatas, Op. II., to Haydn, and when the latter suggested that he
+should add on the title page "Pupil of Haydn," the "Great Mogul"
+refused, bluntly saying "that he had never learnt anything from him."
+After Haydn, Albrechtsberger and Salieri were for a time his teachers,
+but Beethoven got on no better with them, and Albrechtsberger said,
+"Have nothing to do with him; he has learnt nothing, and will never do
+anything in decent style." Perhaps not in your pedant's style, O great
+contrapuntist!
+
+Beethoven cannot be said to have been unfortunate in his friends. He
+had many true and faithful ones throughout his life, and though he
+suffered from pecuniary troubles, caused by the conduct of his
+brothers, he was never in such a state of grinding poverty as some
+other artists, such as Schubert, have been--never compelled to waste
+precious years of his life in producing "pot-boilers"--working not for
+art so much as for mere food and shelter. In 1794 Prince Karl
+Lichnowski, who had been a pupil of Mozart, and who, as well as his
+wife Christiane, was _fanatico per la musica_, proposed that Beethoven
+should come and live at his palace. They had no children; a suite of
+rooms was placed at the musician's disposal; no terms were proposed;
+the offer was the most delicate and friendly imaginable, and was
+accepted by Beethoven in the spirit in which it was made. For ten
+years he resided with the Lichnowskis, and these were probably the
+years of purest happiness in the great composer's life, although early
+in their course the terrible affliction of deafness began to be felt
+by him. He at this time freely frequented the salons of the Viennese
+nobility, many of whom were accomplished virtuosi themselves, and were
+able to appreciate the great genius of the new-comer, rough and
+bearish as oftentimes he must have appeared to them--a great contrast
+to the courtly Haydn and Salieri, who might be seen sitting side by
+side on the sofa in some grandee's music-room, with their swords,
+wigs, ruffles, silk stockings, and snuff-boxes, while the
+insignificant-looking and meanly dressed Beethoven used to stand
+unnoticed in a corner. Here is a description of his appearance given
+by a Frau von Bernhard: "When he visited us, he generally put his head
+in at the door before entering, to see if there were any one present
+he did not like. He was short and insignificant-looking, with a red
+face covered with pock-marks. His hair was quite dark. His dress was
+very common, quite a contrast to the elegant attire customary in those
+days, especially in our circles.... He was very proud, and I have
+known him refuse to play, even when Countess Thun, the mother of
+Princess Lichnowski, had fallen on her knees before him as he lay on
+the sofa to beg him to. The Countess was a very eccentric person....
+At the Lichnowskis' I saw Haydn and Salieri, who were then very
+famous, while Beethoven excited no interest."
+
+It was in the year 1800 that Beethoven at last was compelled to
+acknowledge to himself the terrible calamity of almost total deafness
+that had befallen him. He writes to his friend Wegeler, "If I had not
+read somewhere that man must not of his own free will depart this
+life, I should long ere this have been no more and that through my own
+act.... What is to be the result of this the good God alone knows. I
+beg of you not to mention my state to any one, not even to Lorchen
+[Wegeler's wife]. But," he continues, "I live only in my music, and no
+sooner is one thing completed than another is begun. In fact, as at
+present, I am often engaged on three or four compositions at one
+time."
+
+[Illustration: An Anecdote about Beethoven.]
+
+But at first all was not gloom; for Beethoven was in love--not the
+love of fleeting fancy that, like other poets, he may have experienced
+before, but deeply, tragically, in love; and it seems that, for a time
+at least, this love was returned. The lady was the Countess Julia
+Guicciardi; but his dream did not last long, for in the year 1801 she
+married a Count Gallenberg. Hardly anything is known of this love
+affair of Beethoven's. A few letters full of passionate tenderness,
+and with a certain very pathetic simple trustfulness in her love
+running through them all--on which her marriage shortly afterward is a
+strange comment; the "Moonlight Sonata," vibrating, as it is
+throughout, with a lover's supremest ecstasy of devotion, these are
+the only records of that one blissful epoch in the poor composer's
+life; but how much it affected his after life, how it mingled in the
+dreams from which his loveliest creations of later years arose, it is
+impossible now to say. In a letter to Wegeler, dated November 16,
+1801, he says, "You can hardly realize what a miserable, desolate life
+mine has been for the last two years; my defective hearing everywhere
+pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear a
+misanthrope; and yet no one in reality is less so! This change [to a
+happier life] has been brought about by a lovely and fascinating
+girl who loves me and whom I love. After the lapse of two years I
+have again enjoyed some blissful moments, and now for the first time I
+feel that marriage can bestow happiness; but alas! she is not in the
+same rank of life as myself.... You shall see me as happy as I am
+destined to be here below, but not unhappy. No, that I could not bear.
+I will grasp Fate by the throat; it shall not utterly crush me. Oh, it
+is so glorious to live one's life a thousand times!" No misanthropy
+this, surely; he could not always speak the speech of common men, or
+care for the tawdry bravery of titles or fine clothes in which they
+strutted, but what a heart there was in the man, what a wondrous
+insight into all the beauty of the world, visible and invisible,
+around him! The most glorious lovesong ever composed, "Adelaide," was
+written by him; but Julia Guicciardi preferred a Count Gallenberg,
+keeper of the royal archives in Vienna, and Beethoven, to the end of
+his days, went on his way alone.
+
+It was at this time that he composed his oratorio, "The Mount of
+Olives," which can hardly be reckoned among his finest works; and his
+one opera--but such an opera--"Fidelio." The greater part of these
+works was composed during his stay, in the summer months, at
+Hetzendorf, a pretty, secluded little village near Schoenbrunn. He
+spent his days wandering alone through the quiet, shady alleys of the
+imperial park there, and his favorite seat was between two boughs of a
+venerable oak, at a height of about two feet from the ground. For some
+time he had apartments at a residence of Baron Pronay's, near this
+village; but he suddenly left, "because the baron would persist in
+making him profound bows every time that he met him." Like a true
+poet, he delighted in the country. "No man on earth," he writes,
+"loves the country more. Woods, trees, and rock give the response
+which man requires. Every tree seems to say, 'Holy, holy.'"
+
+In 1804 the magnificent "Eroica" symphony was completed. This had
+originally been commenced in honor of Napoleon Bonaparte, then First
+Consul, who, Beethoven--throughout his life an ardent Republican--then
+believed was about to bring liberty to all the nations of Europe. When
+the news of the empire came the dream departed, and Beethoven, in a
+passionate rage, tore the title page of the symphony in two, and, with
+a torrent of imprecations against the tyrant, stamped on the torn
+fragments.
+
+"My hero--a tyrant!" he shrieked, as he trampled on the poor page. On
+this page the inscription had been simply, "Bonaparte--Luigi v.
+Beethoven". For some years he refused to publish the work, and, when
+at last this was done, the inscription read as follows: "Sinfonia
+Eroica per festigiari il sovvenire d'un grand' uomo" (Heroic symphony,
+to celebrate the memory of a great man). When Napoleon died, in 1821,
+Beethoven said, "Seventeen years before I composed the music for this
+occasion;" and surely no grander music than that of the "Funeral
+March" was ever composed for the obsequies of a fallen hero. This is
+not the place to enter into a description of the marvellous succession
+of colossal works--symphonies, concertos, sonatas, trios, quartets,
+etc., culminating in the "Choral Symphony," his ninth, and
+last--which, through those long years of a silent life, imprisoned
+within himself, the great master put forth. His deafness prevented his
+appearing in public to conduct, although, with the natural desire of a
+composer to be present at the production of his own work, he long
+struggled to take his part in the first performances of symphonies and
+concertos.
+
+When the great choral symphony was first performed he attempted to
+conduct, but in reality another conductor was stationed near him to
+give the right time to the band. After the majestic instrumental
+movements had been played came the final one, concluding with
+Schiller's "Hymn to Joy." The chorus breaks forth, thundering out in
+concert with all the instruments. At the words "Seid umschlunger,
+Millionen," the audience could no longer restrain their excited
+delight, and burst into tremendous applause, drowning the voices of
+singers and the sounds of strings and brass. The last notes are heard,
+but still Beethoven stands there absorbed in thought--he does not know
+that the music is ended. This was the first time that the people
+realized the full deprivation of hearing from which he suffered.
+Fraulein Unger, the soprano, gently takes his arm and turns him round
+to front the acclaiming multitude. There are few in that crowd who,
+while they cheer, do not feel the tears stealing down their cheeks at
+the sight of the poor lonely man who, from the prison-house of his
+affliction, has brought to them the gladness of thought so divine.
+Unmoved, he bowed his acknowledgment, and quietly left the building.
+
+His later years were embittered with troubles about his nephew Carl, a
+youth to whom he was fondly attached, but who shamefully repaid the
+love of the desolate old man. Letters like the following, to the
+teacher in whose house the boy lived, show the constant thought and
+affection given to this boy: "Your estimable lady is politely
+requested to let the undersigned know as soon as possible (that I may
+not be obliged to keep it all in my head) how many pairs of stockings,
+trousers, shoes, and drawers are required, and how many yards of
+kerseymere to make a pair of black trousers for my tall nephew."
+
+His death was the result of a cold which produced inflammation of the
+lungs. On the morning of March 24, 1827, he took the sacrament and
+when the clergyman was gone and his friends stood round his bed, he
+muttered. "_Plaudite amici, comedia finita est._" He then fell into an
+agony so intense that he could no longer articulate, and thus
+continued until the evening of the 26th. A violent thunder-storm
+arose; one of his friends, watching by his bedside when the thunder
+was rolling and a vivid flash of lightning lit up the room, saw him
+suddenly open his eyes, lift his right hand upward for some
+seconds--as if in defiance of the powers of evil--with clenched fist
+and a stern, solemn expression on his face; and then he sank back and
+died.
+
+
+
+
+PAGANINI
+
+(1784-1840)
+
+
+[Illustration: Paganini.]
+
+Nicolo Paganini, whose European fame as a violinist entitles him to a
+notice here, was born at Genoa in 1784. His father, a commission-broker,
+played on the mandolin; but fully aware of the inferiority of an
+instrument so limited in power, he put a violin into his son's hands,
+and initiated him in the principles of music. The child succeeded so
+well under parental tuition, that at eight years of age he played three
+times a week in the church, as well as in the public saloons. At the
+same period he composed a sonata. In his ninth year he was placed under
+the instruction of Costa, first violoncellist of Genoa; then had lessons
+of Rolla, a famous performer and composer; and finally studied
+counterpoint at Parma under Ghiretti and the celebrated maestro Paer. He
+now took an engagement at Lucca, where he chiefly associated with
+persons who at the gaming-table stripped him of his gains as quickly as
+he acquired them. He there received the appointment of director of
+orchestra to the court, at which the Princess Elisa Bacciochi, sister of
+Napoleon I., presided, and thither invited, to the full extent of her
+means, superior talent of every kind. In 1813 he performed at Milan;
+five years after, at Turin; and subsequently at Florence and Naples. In
+1828 he visited Vienna, where a very popular violinist and composer,
+Mayseder, asked him how he produced such new effects. His reply was
+characteristic of a selfish mind: "_Chacun a ses secrets_" In that
+capital, it is affirmed, he was imprisoned, being accused of having
+murdered his wife. He challenged proofs of his ever having been married,
+which could not be produced. Then he was charged with having poignarded
+his mistress. This he also publicly refuted. The fact is that he knew
+better how to make money than friends, and he raised up enemies wherever
+his thirst for gold led him. Avarice was his master-passion; and, second
+to this, gross sensuality.
+
+The year 1831 found Paganini in Paris, in which excitable capital he
+produced a sensation not inferior to that created by the visit of
+Rossini. Even this renowned composer was so carried away, either by
+the actual genius of the violinist or by the current of popular
+enthusiasm, that he is said to have wept on hearing Paganini for the
+first time. He arrived in England in 1831, and immediately announced a
+concert at the Italian Opera House, at a price which, if acceded to,
+would have yielded L3,391 per night; but the attempt was too
+audacious, and he was compelled to abate his demands, though he
+succeeded in drawing audiences fifteen nights in that season at the
+ordinary high prices of the King's Theatre. He also gave concerts in
+other parts of London, and performed at benefits, always taking at
+these a large proportion of the proceeds. He visited most of the great
+towns, where his good fortune still attended him. He was asked to play
+at the Commemoration Festival at Oxford, in 1834, and demanded 1,000
+guineas for his assistance at three concerts. His terms were of course
+rejected.
+
+Paganini died at Nice, in 1840, of a diseased larynx ("phthisie
+laryngee"). By his will, dated 1837, he gave his two sisters legacies
+of 60,000 and 70,000 francs; his mother a pension of 1,200; the mother
+of his son Achillino (a Jewess of Milan) a similar pension; and the
+rest of his fortune, amounting to 4,000,000 francs, devolved on his
+son. These and other facts before related, we give on the authority of
+the "Biographie Universelle."
+
+Paganini certainly was a man of genius and a great performer, but
+sacrificed his art to his avarice. His mastery over the violin was
+almost marvellous, though he made an ignoble use of his power by
+employing it to captivate the mob of pretended amateurs by feats
+little better than sleight-of-hand. His performance on a single
+string, and the perfection of his harmonics, were very extraordinary;
+but why, as was asked at the time, be confined to one string when
+there are four at command that would answer every musical purpose so
+much better? His tone was pure, though not strong, his strings having
+been of smaller diameter than usual, to enable him to strain them at
+pleasure; for he tuned his instrument most capriciously. He could be a
+very expressive player; we have heard him produce effects deeply
+pathetic. His arpeggios evinced his knowledge of harmony, and some of
+his compositions exhibit many original and beautiful traits.
+
+[Illustration: Paganini in Prison.]
+
+
+
+
+MENDELSSOHN
+
+By C. E. BOURNE
+
+(1809-1847)
+
+
+Mendelssohn's lot in life was strikingly different from that of all
+the musicians of whom I have hitherto written; he never knew, like
+Schubert, what grinding poverty was, or suffered the long worries that
+Mozart had to endure for lack of money. His father was a Jewish banker
+in Berlin, the son of Moses Mendelssohn, a philosopher whose writings
+had already made the name celebrated throughout Europe. The composer's
+father used to say, with a very natural pride, after his own son had
+grown up, "Formerly I was the son of my father, and now I am the
+father of my son!"
+
+Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was born on February 3, 1809. His
+parents were neither of them trained musicians, though both
+appreciated and loved music, and it was from his mother that young
+Felix received his first music-lessons. When he had made some advance,
+Ludwig Berger became his tutor for the piano, and Zelter, a very
+learned and severe theorist, for counterpoint. At the age of nine
+years Felix had attained such proficiency that we find him taking the
+pianoforte part in a trio at a public concert of a Herr Gugel's, and
+when twelve years old he began to compose, and actually wrote a trio,
+some sonatas, a cantata, and several organ pieces. His home life was
+in the highest degree favorable to his musical development. On
+alternate Sundays musical performances were regularly given with a
+small orchestra in the large dining-room, Felix or his sister Fanny,
+who also possessed remarkable musical gifts, taking the pianoforte
+part, and new compositions by Felix were always included in the
+programme. Many friends, musicians and others, used to be present,
+Zelter regularly among their number, and the pieces were always freely
+commented on, Felix receiving then, as indeed he did all his life, the
+criticisms expressed, with the utmost good-natured readiness.
+
+[Illustration: Mendelssohn.]
+
+In 1824 Moscheles, at that time a celebrated pianist, and residing in
+London, visited Berlin, and was asked to give Felix music-lessons.
+This is the testimony of Moscheles, an excellent and kind-hearted man,
+and a thoroughly skilled musician, after spending nearly every day for
+six weeks with the family: "It is a family such as I have never known
+before; Felix, a mature artist, and yet but fifteen; Fanny,
+extraordinarily gifted, playing Bach's fugues by heart and with
+astonishing correctness--in fact, a thorough musician. The parents
+give me the impression of people of the highest cultivation;" and on
+the subject of lessons he says: "Felix has no need of lessons; if he
+wishes to take a hint from me as to anything new, he can easily do
+so." But it is very pleasant to find Mendelssohn afterward referring
+to these lessons as having urged him on to enthusiasm, and, in the
+days in London when his own fame had far outstripped that of the older
+musician, acknowledging himself as "Moscheles's pupil." The elder
+Mendelssohn was by no means carried away by the applause which the
+boy's playing and compositions had gained, and in 1825 he took his son
+to Paris to obtain Cherubini's opinion as to his musical abilities,
+with a view to the choice of a profession; for he had by no means made
+up his mind that Felix should spend his whole life as a musician.
+However, the surly old Florentine, who was not always civil or
+appreciative of budding genius (_teste_ Berlioz), gave a decidedly
+favorable judgment on the compositions submitted to him, and urged
+the father to devote his son to a musical career. And, indeed, on
+listening to the pieces which were dated this year, especially a
+beautiful quartet in B minor, an octet for strings, the music to an
+opera in two acts, "Camacho's Wedding," and numerous pianoforte
+pieces, it is difficult to realize that the composer was then only
+sixteen years of age, or that anyone could question the artistic
+vocation that claimed him. But the next year a work was written, the
+score of which is marked "Berlin, August 6, 1826," when it must be
+remembered that he was seventeen years of age, which of itself was
+sufficient to rank him among the immortals--the overture to the
+"Midsummer Night's Dream." Full of lovely imaginings, with a wonderful
+fairy grace all its own, and a bewitching beauty, revealing not only
+the soul of the true poet, but also the musician profoundly skilled in
+all the art of orchestral effect, it is hard to believe that it is the
+work of a boy under twenty, written in the bright summer days of 1826,
+in his father's garden at Berlin.
+
+Passing over the intermediate years with a simple reference to the
+"Meeresstille," "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," which was then
+composed, and a fine performance of Bach's "Passion Music," for which
+he had been long drilling the members of the Berlin Singakademie, the
+next event is a visit to England in 1829, where he was received with
+extraordinary warmth, playing at the Philharmonic Concerts, conducting
+his C minor Symphony, which he dedicated to the Philharmonic Society,
+they in their turn electing him one of their honorary members; going
+to dinners, balls, and the House of Commons, and enjoying himself most
+hugely. His letters from England at this time are brimming over with
+fun and graphic description; there is one especially amusing, in which
+he describes himself with two friends going home from a late dinner at
+the German Ambassador's, and on the way buying three German sausages,
+going down a quiet street to devour them, with all the while joyous
+laughter and snatches of part songs. There is also a little incident
+of this time showing the wonderful memory he possessed. After a
+concert on "Midsummer Night," when the "Midsummer Night's Dream" had
+very appropriately been played, it was found that the score had been
+lost in a hackney-coach as the party were returning to Mr. Attwood's.
+"Never mind," said Mendelssohn, "I will make another," which he did,
+and on comparison with the separate parts not a single difference was
+found in it.
+
+At the beginning of December he was at home again, and that winter he
+wrote the "Reformation Symphony," intended to be produced at the
+tercentenary festival of the "Augsburg Confession" in the following
+June. This symphony, with which Mendelssohn was not entirely
+satisfied, was only once performed during his lifetime, but since his
+death it has frequently been performed, and though not one of his most
+perfect works, is recognized as a noble monument in honor of a great
+event. The next spring he again set out on his travels, this time
+southward to Italy.
+
+In 1833 Mendelssohn accepted an official post offered him by the
+authorities of Duesseldorf, by which the entire musical arrangements of
+the town, church, theatre, and singing societies were put under his
+care. Immermann, the celebrated poet, being associated with him in the
+direction of the theatre. Things, however, did not go on very smoothly
+there. Mendelssohn found all the many worries of theatrical
+management--the engagement of singers and musicians, the dissensions
+to be arranged, the many tastes to be conciliated--too irksome, and he
+did not long retain this appointment; but the life among his friends
+at Duesseldorf was most delightful, and the letters written at this
+time are exceedingly lively and gay. It was here that he received the
+commission from the Caecilia-Verein of Frankfort for, and commenced,
+his grand oratorio "St. Paul." The words for this, as also for the
+"Elijah" and "Hymn of Praise" afterward, he selected himself with the
+help of his friend Schubung, and they are entirely from the Bible--as
+he said, "The Bible is always the best of all." Circumstances
+prevented the oratorio being then produced at Frankfort, and the first
+public performance took place at the Lower Rhine Festival at
+Duesseldorf, in May, 1836.
+
+But his visits to Frankfort had a very important result in another
+way. Mendelssohn there met Mademoiselle Cecile Jeanrenaud, the
+daughter of a pastor of the French Reformed Church, and, though he had
+frequently indulged in the admiration of beautiful and clever
+women--which is allowable, and indeed an absolute necessity for a
+poet!--now for the first time he fell furiously in plain unmistakable
+and downright love. But it is more characteristic of the staid Teuton
+than the impulsive musician, that before plighting his troth to her he
+went away for a month's bathing at Scheveningen, in Holland, for the
+purpose of testing the strength of his affection by this absence. On
+his return, finding his amatory pulse still beating satisfactorily, he
+proposed to the young lady, and, as it must be presumed that she had
+already made up her own mind without any testing, he was accepted. On
+March 28, 1837, they were married, and the wedded life that then began
+was one of pure, unclouded happiness to the very end. Cecile
+Mendelssohn was a beautiful, gentle-hearted, and loving wife, just the
+one to give a weary and nervous artist in the home-life, with herself
+and the children near him, the blessed solace of rest and calm that he
+so needed. It is thus that Edward Devrient, the great German actor,
+and one of Mendelssohn's most intimate friends, describes her: "Cecile
+was one of those sweet womanly natures whose gentle simplicity, whose
+mere presence, soothed and pleased. She was slight, with features of
+striking beauty and delicacy; her hair was between brown and gold, but
+the transcendent lustre of her great blue eyes, and the brilliant
+roses of her cheeks, were sad harbingers of early death. She spoke
+little, and never with animation, in a low, soft voice. Shakespeare's
+words, "My gracious silence," applied to her no less than to the wife
+of Coriolanus."
+
+After giving up his official position at Duesseldorf, in 1835,
+Mendelssohn was invited to become the conductor of the now famous
+Gewandhaus concerts at Leipsic, a post which he gladly accepted, and
+which, retained by him for many years, was to be one of the greatest
+delights of his artistic life. Not only was he loved and appreciated
+in Leipsic--far more than in Berlin, his own city--but he had here an
+opportunity of assisting many composers and _virtuosi_, who otherwise
+would have sought in vain for a hearing. Thus, after Liszt, when
+visiting the town, had been first of all received with great coldness,
+owing to the usual prices of admission to the concerts having been
+raised, Mendelssohn set everything straight by having a soiree in his
+honor at the Gewandhaus, where there were three hundred and fifty
+people, orchestra, chorus, punch, pastry, Meeresstille Psalm, Bach's
+Triple Concerto, choruses from St. Paul, Fantasia on Lucia, the Erl
+King, the Devil and his Grandmother, the latter probably a mild
+satirical reference to Liszt's stormy and often incoherent playing. It
+is also pleasant to find how cordially Mendelssohn received Berlioz
+there, as told in the "Memoirs" of the latter, spending ungrudgingly
+long days in aiding in rehearsals for his "Romeo et Juliette," though
+Mendelssohn never sympathized much with Berlioz's eccentric muse.
+
+The "Lobgesang," or "Hymn of Praise," a "symphonie-cantata," as he
+called it, was his next great work, composed in 1840, together with
+other music, at the request of the Leipsic Town-Council, for a
+festival held in that town in commemoration of the invention of
+printing, on June 25th. None who have heard this work can forget the
+first impression produced when the grand instrumental movements with
+which it commences are merged in the majestic chorus, "All men, all
+things, praise ye the Lord," or the intensely dramatic effect of the
+repeated tenor cry, "Watchman, will the night soon pass?" answered at
+last by the clear soprano message of glad tidings, "The night is
+departing, the day is at hand!" This "watchman" episode was added some
+time afterward, and, as he told a friend, was suggested to the
+composer during the weary hours of a long sleepless night, when the
+words, "Will the night soon pass?" again and again seemed to be
+repeated to him. But a greater work even than this was now in
+progress; the "Elijah" had been begun.
+
+In 1841 began a troublesome and harassing connection with Berlin, a
+city where, except in his home life, Mendelssohn never seems to have
+been very fortunate. At the urgent entreaty of the king, he went to
+reside there as head of the new Musical Academy. But disagreements
+arose, and he did not long take an active part in the management. The
+king, however, was very anxious to retain his services, and a sort of
+general office seems to have been created for him, the duties of which
+were to supply music for any dramatic works which the king took it
+into his head to have so embellished. And, though it is to this that
+we owe the noble "Antigone," "Oedipus," "Athalie," "Midsummer Night's
+Dream," and other music, this work to dictation was very worrying, and
+one cannot think without impatience of the annoyances to which he was
+subjected. The king could not understand why he shrank from writing
+music to the choruses of AEschylus's "Eumenides." Other composers would
+do it by the yard, why not he?
+
+Passing rapidly over the intervening years filled with busy work, both
+in composition and as one of the principals of a newly started
+Conservatorium in Leipsic, we come to 1846, when his great work
+"Elijah" was at last completed and performed. On August 26th, at the
+Birmingham Festival, the performance went splendidly. Staudigl took
+the part of the prophet, and a young tenor, Lockey, sang the air,
+"Then shall the righteous," in the last part, as Mendelssohn says, "so
+very beautifully, that I was obliged to collect myself to prevent my
+being overcome, and to enable me to beat time steadily." Rarely,
+indeed, has a composer so truly realized his own conception as
+Mendelssohn did in the great tone-picture which he drew of the Prophet
+of Carmel and the wilderness.
+
+"I figured to myself," he says, "Elijah as a grand, mighty prophet,
+such as might again reappear in our own day, energetic and zealous,
+stern, wrathful, and gloomy, a striking contrast to the court
+myrmidons and popular rabble--in fact, in opposition to the whole
+world, and yet borne on angel's wings!" Nothing can be finer than
+this, with that exquisite touch in the last words, "_in opposition to
+the whole world, and yet borne on angel's wings_."
+
+After returning to Germany he was soon busily employed in recasting
+some portions of "Elijah" with which he was not satisfied; he had also
+another oratorio on even a grander scale, "Christus," already
+commenced; and at last, after all his life-long seeking in vain for a
+good libretto for an opera, he had begun to set one written by Geibel,
+the German poet, "Loreley," to music. But his friends now noticed how
+worn and weary he used oftentimes to look, and how strangely irritable
+he frequently was, and there can hardly be a doubt that some form of
+the cerebral disease from which his father and several of his
+relations had died, was already, deep-seated and obscure, disquieting
+him. The sudden announcement of the death of his sister, Fanny Hensel,
+herself a musical genius, to whom he was very fondly attached, on his
+return to Frankfort from his last visit to England in May, 1847,
+terribly affected him. He fell to the ground with a loud shriek, and
+it was long before he recovered consciousness.
+
+Indeed, it may be said that he never really recovered from this shock.
+In the summer he went with his wife and children, and in company with
+his brother Paul and his family, on a tour in Switzerland, where he
+hoped that complete idleness as regards music, life in the open air,
+sketching, and intercourse with chosen friends, might once more give
+strength to his enfeebled nerves. And for a time the beauty of the
+mountains and the lakes seemed to bring him rest, and again he began
+to work at his oratorio "Christus;" but still his friends continued
+anxious about him. He looked broken down and aged, a constant
+agitation seemed to possess him, and the least thing would often
+strangely affect and upset him.
+
+In September he returned to Leipsic; he was then more cheerful, and
+able to talk about music and to write, although he could not resume
+the conductorship of the Gewandhaus concerts. He again had projects in
+view. Jenny Lind was to sing in his "Elijah," at Vienna, whither he
+would go and conduct, and he was about to publish some new songs. One
+day in October he went to call upon his friend, Madame Frege, a gifted
+lady who, he said, sang his songs better than anyone else, to consult
+her about some new songs. She sang them over to him several times, and
+then, as it was getting dark, she went out of the room for a few
+minutes to order lights. When she returned he was lying on the sofa,
+shivering with cold, and in agonizing pain. Leeches were applied, and
+he partially recovered; but another attack followed, and this was the
+last.
+
+
+
+
+FRANZ LISZT
+
+By Rev. HUGH R. HAWEIS, M.A.
+
+(1811-1886)
+
+
+[Illustration: Liszt.]
+
+Franz Liszt was born in 1811. He had the hot Hungarian blood of his
+father, the fervid German spirit of his mother, and he inherited the
+lofty independence, with none of the class prejudices, of the old
+Hungarian nobility from which he sprang. Liszt's father, Adam, earned
+a modest livelihood as agent and accountant in the house of Count
+Esterhazy. In that great musical family, inseparably associated with
+the names of Haydn and Schubert, Adam Liszt had frequent opportunities
+of meeting distinguished musicians. The prince's private band had
+risen to public fame under the instruction of the venerable Haydn
+himself. The Liszts, father and son, often went to Eisenstadt, where
+the count lived; there they rubbed elbows with Cherubini and Hummel, a
+pupil of Mozart.
+
+Franz took to music from his earliest childhood. When about five years
+old he was asked what he would like to do. "Learn the piano," said the
+little fellow. Soon afterward his father asked him what he would like
+to be; the child pointed to a print of Beethoven hanging on the wall,
+and said, "Like him." Long before his feet could reach the pedals or
+his fingers stretch an octave, the boy spent all his spare time
+strumming, making what he called "clangs," chords and modulations. He
+mastered scales and exercises without difficulty.
+
+Czerny at once took to Liszt, but refused to take anything for his
+instruction. Salieri was also fascinated, and instructed him in
+harmony; and fortunate it was that Liszt began his course under two
+strict mentors. He soon began to resent Czerny's method--thought he
+knew better and needed not those dry studies of Clementi and that
+irksome fingering by rule--he could finger anything in a half-a-dozen
+different ways. There was a moment when it seemed that master and
+pupil would have to part, but timely concessions to genius paved the
+way to dutiful submission, and years afterward the great master
+dedicated to the rigid disciplinarian of his boyhood his "Vingt-quatre
+Grandes Etudes" in affectionate remembrance.
+
+Such a light as Liszt's could not be long hid; all Vienna, in 1822,
+was talking of the wonderful boy. "_Est deus in nobis_," wrote the
+papers, profanely. The "little Hercules," the "young giant," the boy
+"virtuoso from the clouds," were among the epithets coined to
+celebrate his marvellous renderings of Hummel's "Concerto in A," and a
+free "Fantasia" of his own. The Vienna Concert Hall was crowded to
+hear him, and the other illustrious artists--then, as indeed they have
+been ever since forced to do wherever Liszt appeared--effaced
+themselves with as good a grace as they could.
+
+It is a remarkable tribute to the generous nature as well as to the
+consummate ability of Liszt, that, while opposing partisans have
+fought bitterly over him--Thalbergites, Herzites, Mendelssohnites
+_versus_ Lisztites--yet few of the great artists who have, one after
+another, had to yield to him in popularity have denied to him their
+admiration, while most of them have given him their friendship.
+
+Liszt early wooed, and early won Vienna. He spoke ever of his dear
+Viennese, and their resounding city. A concert tour on his way to
+Paris brought him before the critical public of Stuttgart and Munich.
+Hummel, an old man, and Moscheles, then in his prime, heard him and
+declared that his playing was equal to theirs. But Liszt was bent upon
+completing his studies in the celebrated school of the French capital,
+and at the feet of the old musical dictator, Cherubini. The Erards,
+who were destined to owe so much to Liszt, and to whom Liszt
+throughout his career owed so much, at once provided him with a
+magnificent piano; but Cherubini put in force a certain by-law of the
+Conservatoire excluding foreigners, and excluded Franz Liszt.
+
+This was a bitter pill to the eager student. He hardly knew how little
+he required such patronage. In a very short time "_le petit Liszt_"
+was the great Paris sensation. The old _noblesse_ tried to spoil him
+with flattery, the Duchesse de Berri drugged him with bonbons, the
+Duke of Orleans called him the "little Mozart." He gave private
+concerts, at which Herz, Moscheles, Lafont, and De Beriot, assisted.
+Rossini would sit by his side at the piano, and applaud. He was a
+"miracle." The company never tired of extolling his "nerve, fougue et
+originalite," while the ladies who petted and caressed him after each
+performance, were delighted at his simple and graceful carriage, the
+elegance of his language, and the perfect breeding and propriety of
+his demeanor.
+
+He was only twelve when he played for the first time at the Italian
+Opera, and one of those singular incidents which remind one of
+Paganini's triumphs occurred. At the close of a _bravura cadenza_, the
+band forgot to come in, so absorbed were the musicians in watching the
+young prodigy. Their failure was worth a dozen successes to Liszt. The
+ball of the marvellous was fairly set rolling. Gall, the inventor of
+phrenology, took a cast of the little Liszt's skull; Talma, the
+tragedian, embraced him openly with effusion; and the misanthropic
+Marquis de Noailles became his mentor, and initiated him into the art
+of painting.
+
+In 1824 Liszt, then thirteen years old, came with his father to
+England; his mother returned to Austria. He went down to Windsor to
+see George IV., who was delighted with him, and Liszt, speaking of him
+to me, said: "I was very young at the time, but I remember the king
+very well--a fine, pompous-looking gentleman." George IV. went to
+Drury Lane on purpose to hear the boy, and commanded an encore. Liszt
+was also heard in the theatre at Manchester, and in several private
+houses.
+
+On his return to France, people noticed a change in him. He was now
+fourteen, grave, serious, often pre-occupied, already a little tired
+of praise, and excessively tired of being called "le petit Liszt." His
+vision began to take a wider sweep. The relation between art and
+religion exercised him. His mind was naturally devout. Thomas a Kempis
+was his constant companion. "Rejoice in nothing but a good deed;"
+"Through labor to rest, through combat to victory;" "The glory which
+men give and take is transitory," these and like phrases were already
+deeply engraven on the fleshly tablets of his heart. Amid all his
+glowing triumphs he was developing a curious disinclination to appear
+in public; he seemed to yearn for solitude and meditation.
+
+In 1827 he again hurried to England for a short time, but his father's
+sudden illness drove them to Boulogne, where, in his forty-seventh
+year, died Adam Liszt, leaving the young Franz for the first time in
+his life, at the early age of sixteen, unprotected and alone. Rousing
+himself from the bodily prostration and torpor of grief into which he
+had been thrown by the death of his father, Franz, with admirable
+energy and that high sense of honor which always distinguished him,
+began to set his house in order. He called in all his debts, sold his
+magnificent grand "Erard," and left Boulogne for Paris with a heavy
+heart and a light pocket, but not owing a sou.
+
+He sent for his mother, and for the next twelve years, 1828-1840, the
+two lived together, chiefly in Paris. There, as a child, he had been a
+nine days' wonder, but the solidity of his reputation was now destined
+to go hand in hand with his stormy and interrupted mental and moral
+development. Such a plant could not come to maturity all at once. No
+drawing-room or concert-room success satisfied a heart for which the
+world of human emotion seemed too small, and an intellect piercing
+with intuitive intelligence into the "clear-obscure" depths of
+religion and philosophy.
+
+But Franz was young, and Franz was poor, and his mother had to be
+supported. She was his first care. Systematically, he labored to put
+by a sum which would assure her of a competency, and often with his
+tender genial smile he would remind her of his own childish words,
+"God will help me to repay you for all that you have done for me."
+Still he labored, often woefully against the grain. "Poverty," he
+writes, "that old mediator between man and evil, tore me from my
+solitude devoted to meditation, and placed me before a public on whom
+not only my own but my own mother's existence depended. Young and
+over-strained, I suffered painfully under the contact with external
+things which my vocation as a musician brought with it, and which
+wounded me all the more intensely that my heart at this time was
+filled entirely with the mystical feelings of love and religion."
+
+[Illustration: Franz Liszt.]
+
+Of course the gifted young pianist's connection grew rapidly. He got
+his twenty francs a lesson at the best houses; he was naturally a
+welcome guest, and from the first seemed to have the run of high
+Parisian society. His life was feverish, his activity irregular, his
+health far from strong; but the vulgar temptations of the gay capital
+seemed to have little attraction for his noble nature. His heart
+remained unspoiled. He was most generous to those who could not
+afford to pay for his lessons, most pitiful to the poor, most
+dutiful and affectionate to his mother. Coming home late from some
+grand entertainment, he would sit outside on the staircase till
+morning, sooner than awaken, or perhaps alarm, her by letting himself
+in. But in losing his father he seemed to have lost a certain method
+and order. His meals were irregular, so were his lessons; more so were
+the hours devoted to sleep.
+
+At this time he was hardly twenty; we are not surprised anon to hear
+in his own words, of "a female form chaste, and pure as the alabaster
+of holy vessel," but he adds: "Such was the sacrifice which I offered
+with tears to the God of Christians!"
+
+I will explain. Mlle. Caroline St. Cricq was just seventeen, lithe,
+slender, and of "angelic" beauty, with a complexion like a lily
+flushed with roses, open, "impressionable to beauty, to the world, to
+religion, to God." The countess, her mother, appears to have been a
+charming woman, very partial to Liszt, whom she engaged to instruct
+Mademoiselle in music. The lessons went not by time, but by
+inclination. The young man's eloquence, varied knowledge, ardent love
+of literature, and flashing genius won both the mother and daughter.
+Not one of them seemed to suspect the whirlpool of grief and death to
+which they were hurrying. The countess fell ill and died, but not
+before she had recommended Liszt to the Count St. Cricq as a possible
+suitor for the hand of Mademoiselle.
+
+The haughty diplomat, St. Cricq, at once put his foot down. The
+funeral over, Liszt's movements were watched. They were innocent
+enough. He was already an _enfant de la maison_, but one night he
+lingered reading aloud some favorite author to Mademoiselle a little
+too late. He was reported by the servants, and received his polite
+dismissal as music master. In an interview with the count his own
+pride was deeply wounded. "Difference of rank!" said the count. That
+was quite enough for Liszt. He rose, pale as death, with quivering
+lip, but uttered not a word. As a man of honor he had but one course.
+He and Caroline parted forever. She contracted later an uncongenial
+marriage; he seems to have turned with intense ardor to religion. His
+good mother used to complain to those who came to inquire for him that
+he was all day long in church, and had ceased to occupy himself, as he
+should, with music.
+
+It was toward the close of 1831 that Liszt met Chopin in Paris. From
+the first, these two men, so different, became fast friends. Chopin's
+delicate, retiring soul found a singular delight in Liszt's strong and
+imposing personality. Liszt's exquisite perception enabled him
+perfectly to live in the strange dreamland of Chopin's fancies, while
+his own vigor inspired Chopin with nerve to conceive those mighty
+Polonaises that he could never properly play himself, and which he so
+gladly committed to the keeping of his prodigious friend. Liszt
+undertook the task of interpreting Chopin to the mixed crowds which he
+revelled in subduing, but from which his fastidious and delicately
+strung friend shrank with something like aversion.
+
+From Chopin, Liszt and all the world after him got that _tempo
+rubato_, that playing with the duration of notes without breaking the
+time, and those arabesque ornaments which are woven like fine
+embroidery all about the pages of Chopin's nocturnes, and lift what in
+others are mere casual flourishes into the dignity of interpretative
+phrases and poetic commentaries on the text.
+
+People were fond of comparing the two young men who so often appeared
+in the same salons together--Liszt with his finely shaped, long, oval
+head and _profil d'ivoire_, set proudly on his shoulders, his stiff
+hair of dark blonde thrown back from the forehead without a parting,
+and cut in a straight line, his _aplomb_, his magnificent and courtly
+bearing, his ready tongue, his flashing wit and fine irony, his genial
+_bonhomie_ and irresistibly winning smile; and Chopin, also, with dark
+blonde hair, but soft as silk, parted on one side, to use Liszt's own
+words, "An angel of fair countenance, with brown eyes from which
+intellect beamed rather than burned; a gentle, refined smile, slightly
+aquiline nose; a delicious, clear, almost diaphanous complexion, all
+bearing witness to the harmony of a soul which required no commentary
+beyond itself."
+
+Nothing can be more generous or more true than Liszt's recognition of
+Chopin's independent support. "To our endeavors," he says, "to our
+struggles, just then so much needing certainty, he lent us the support
+of a calm, unshakable conviction, equally armed against apathy and
+cajolery." There was only one picture on the walls of Chopin's room;
+it hung just above his piano. It was a head of Liszt.
+
+It is no part of my present scheme to describe the battle which
+romanticism in music waged against the prevalent conventionalities. We
+know the general outcome of the struggle culminating, after the most
+prodigious artistic convulsions, in the musical supremacy of Richard
+Wagner, who certainly marks firmly and broadly enough the greatest
+stride in musical development made since Beethoven.
+
+In 1842 Liszt visited Weimar, Berlin, and then went to Paris; he was
+meditating a tour in Russia. Pressing invitations reached him from St.
+Petersburg and Moscow. The most fabulous accounts of his virtuosity
+had raised expectation to its highest pitch. He was as legendary even
+among the common people as Paganini. His first concert at St.
+Petersburg realized the then unheard-of sum of L2,000. The roads were
+crowded to see him pass, and the corridors and approaches to the Grand
+Opera blocked to catch a glimpse of him. The same scenes were repeated
+at Moscow, where he gave six concerts without exhausting the popular
+excitement.
+
+On his return to Weimar he accepted the post of Capellmeister to the
+Grand Duke. It provided him with that settled abode, and above all
+with an orchestra, which he now felt so indispensable to meet his
+growing passion for orchestral composition. But the time of rest had
+not yet come.
+
+In 1844 and 1845 he was received in Spain and Portugal with incredible
+enthusiasm, after which he returned to Bonn to assist at the
+inauguration of Beethoven's statue. With boundless liberality, he had
+subscribed more money than all the princes and people of Germany put
+together, to make the statue worthy of the occasion and the occasion
+worthy of the statue.
+
+The golden river which poured into him from all the capitals of
+Europe now freely found a new vent in boundless generosity. Hospitals,
+poor and needy, patriotic celebrations, the dignity and interests of
+art, were all subsidized from his private purse. His transcendent
+virtuosity was only equalled by his splendid munificence; but he
+found--what others have so often experienced--that great personal
+gifts and prodigious _eclat_ cannot possibly escape the poison of envy
+and detraction. He was attacked by calumny; his gifts denied and
+ridiculed; his munificence ascribed to vainglory, and his charity to
+pride and ostentation; yet none will ever know the extent of his
+private charities, and no one who knows anything of Liszt can be
+ignorant of the simple, unaffected goodness of heart which prompted
+them.
+
+Still he was wounded by ingratitude and abuse. It seemed to check and
+paralyze for the moment his generous nature. Fetis saw him at Coblenz
+soon after the Bonn festival, at which he had expended such vast sums.
+He was sitting alone, dejected and out of health. He said he was sick
+of everything, tired of life, and nearly ruined. But that mood never
+lasted long with Liszt; he soon arose and shook himself like a lion.
+His detractors slunk away into their holes, and he walked forth
+victorious to refill his empty purse and reap new laurels.
+
+His career was interrupted by the stormy events of 1848. He settled
+down for a time at Weimar, and it was then that he began to take that
+warm interest in Richard Wagner which ended in the closest and most
+enduring of friendships.
+
+He labored incessantly to get a hearing for the "Lohengrin" and
+"Tannhaeuser." He forced Wagner's compositions on the band, on the
+grand-duke; he breasted public opposition and fought nobly for the
+eccentric and obscure person who was chiefly known as a political
+outlaw and an inventor of extravagant compositions which it was
+impossible to play or sing, and odiously unpleasant to listen to. But
+years of faithful service, mainly the service and immense _prestige_
+and authority of Liszt, procured Wagner a hearing, and paved the way
+for his glorious triumphs at Bayreuth in 1876, 1882, and 1883.
+
+I have preferred to confine myself in this article to the personality of
+Liszt, and have made no allusion to his orchestral works and oratorio
+compositions. The "Symphonic Poems" speak for themselves--magnificent
+renderings of the inner life of spontaneous emotion--but subject-matter
+which calls for a special article can find no place at the fag-end of
+this, and at all times it is better to hear music than to describe it.
+As it would be impossible to describe Liszt's orchestration intelligibly
+to those who have not heard it, and unnecessary to those who have, I
+will simply leave it alone.
+
+I saw Liszt but six times, and then only between the years 1876 and
+1881. I heard him play upon two occasions only, and then he played
+certain pieces of Chopin at my request and a new composition by
+himself. I have heard Mme Schumann, Buelow, Rubenstein, Menter, and
+Esipoff, but I can understand that saying of Tausig, himself one of
+the greatest masters of _technique_ whom Germany has ever produced:
+"No mortal can measure himself with Liszt. He dwells alone upon a
+solitary height."
+
+
+
+
+RICHARD WAGNER
+
+By FRANKLIN PETERSON, Mus. Bac.
+
+(1813-1883)
+
+
+[Illustration: Wagner.]
+
+Richard Wagner's personality has been so overshadowed by and almost
+merged in the great controversy which his schemes of reform in opera
+raised, that his life and character are often now sorely
+misjudged--just as his music long was--by those who have not the time,
+the inclination, or the ability to understand the facts and the
+issues. Before briefly stating then the theories he propounded and
+their development, as shown in successive music dramas, it will be
+well to summarize the story of a life (1813-83) during which he was
+called to endure so much vicissitude, trial and temptation, suffering
+and defeat.
+
+Born in Leipsic, on May 22, 1813, the youngest of nine children,
+Wilhelm Richard was only five months old when his father died. His
+mother's second marriage entailed a removal to Dresden, where, at the
+Kreuzschule, young Wagner received an excellent liberal education. At
+the age of thirteen the bent of his taste, as well as his diligence,
+was shown by his translation (out of school hours) of the first twelve
+books of the "Odyssey." In the following year his passion for poetry
+found expression in a grand tragedy. "It was a mixture," he says, "of
+Hamlet and Lear. Forty-two persons died in the course of the play,
+and, for want of more characters, I had to make some of them reappear
+as ghosts in the last act." Weber, who was then conductor of the
+Dresden opera, seems to have attracted the boy both by his personality
+and by his music; but it was Beethoven's music which gave him his real
+inspiration. From 1830 to 1833 many compositions after standard models
+are evidence of hard and systematic work and in 1833 he began his long
+career as an operatic composer with "Die Feen" which, however, never
+reached the dignity of performance till 1888--five years after
+Wagner's death. After some time spent in very unremunerative routine
+work in Heidelberg, Koenigsberg, and Riga (where in 1836 he married),
+he resolved, in 1839, to try his fortune in Paris with "Rienzi," a new
+opera, written on the lines of the Paris Grand Opera and with all its
+great resources in view. From the month's terrific storm in the North
+Sea, through which the vessel struggled to its haven, till the spring
+of 1842, when Wagner left Paris with "Rienzi" unperformed, heartsick
+with hope deferred, his lot was a hard and bitter one. Berlioz, in
+similar straits, supported himself by singing in the chorus of a
+second-rate theatre. Wagner was refused even that humble post. In 1842
+"Rienzi" was accepted at Dresden, and its signal success led to his
+appointment as Capellmeister there (January, 1843). In the following
+year the "Flying Dutchman" was not so enthusiastically received, but
+it has since easily distanced the earlier work in popular favor. The
+story was suggested to his mind during the stormy voyage from Riga;
+and it is a remarkable fact that the wonderful tone-picture of
+Norway's storm-beaten shore was painted by one who, till that voyage,
+had never set eyes on the sea. In 1845 his new opera, "Tannhaeuser,"
+proved at first a comparative failure. The subject, one which had been
+proposed to Weber in 1814, attracted Wagner while he was in Paris, and
+during his studies for the libretto he found also the first
+suggestions of "Lohengrin" and "Parsifal." The temporary failure of
+the opera led him to the consideration and self-examination which
+resulted in the elaborate exposition of his ideal (in "Opera and
+Drama," and many other essays). "I saw a single possibility before
+me," he writes, "to induce the public to understand and participate in
+my aims as an artist." "Lohengrin" was finished early in 1848, and
+also the poem of "Siegfried's Tod," the result of Wagner's studies in
+the old Nibelungen Lied; but a too warm sympathy with some of the aims
+of the revolutionary party (which reigned for two short days behind
+the street barricades in Dresden, May, 1849) rendered his absence from
+Saxony advisable, and a few days later news reached him in Weimar that
+a warrant was issued for his arrest. With a passport procured by Liszt
+he fled across the frontier, and for nearly twelve years the
+bitterness of exile was added to the hardships of poverty. It is this
+period which is mainly responsible for Wagner's polemical writings, so
+biting in their sarcasm, and often unfair in their attacks. He was a
+good hater; one of the most fiendish pamphlets in existence is the
+"Capitulation" (1871), in which Wagner, safe from poverty (thanks to
+the kindness of Liszt and the munificence of Ludwig II., of Bavaria),
+and nearing the summit of his ambition, but remembering only his
+misfortunes and his slights, gloated in public over the horrors which
+were making a hell of the fairest city on earth. There is excuse at
+least, if not justification, to be found for his attacks on Meyerbeer
+and others; there are considerations to be taken into account while
+one reads with humiliation and pity the correspondence between Wagner
+and his benefactor, Liszt; but it is sad that an affectionate, humane,
+intensely human, to say nothing of an artistic, nature, could so
+blaspheme against the first principles of humanity.
+
+In 1852 the poem of the "Nibelungen Ring Trilogy" was finished. In
+1854 "Rheingold" (the introduction of "Vorabend") was ready, and "Die
+Walkuere" (Part I.) in 1856. But "tired," as he said, "of heaping one
+silent score upon another," he left "Siegfried" unfinished, and turned
+to the story of "Tristan." The poem was completed in 1857, and the
+music two years later. At last, in 1861, he received permission to
+return to Germany, and in Vienna he had the first opportunity of
+hearing his own "Lohengrin." For three years the struggle with fortune
+seems to have been harder than ever before, and Wagner, in broken
+health, had practically determined to give up the unequal contest,
+when an invitation was sent him by Ludwig II., the young King of
+Bavaria--"Come here and finish your work." Here at last was salvation
+for Wagner, and the rest of his life was comparatively smooth. In 1865
+"Tristan und Isolde" was performed at Munich, and was followed three
+years later by a comic opera, "Die Meistersinger," the first sketches
+of which date from 1845. "Siegfried" ("Nibelungen Ring," Part II.) was
+completed in 1869, and in the following year Wagner married Cosima,
+the daughter of Liszt, and formerly the wife of Von Buelow. His first
+wife, from whom he had been separated in 1861, died at Dresden in
+1866.
+
+A theatre built somewhere off the main lines of traffic, and specially
+constructed for the performance of Wagner's later works, must have
+seemed the most impracticable and visionary of proposals in 1870; and
+yet, chiefly through the unwearying exertions of Carl Tausig (and, after
+his death, of the various Wagner societies), the foundation-stone of the
+Baireuth Theatre was laid in 1872, and in 1876, two years after the
+completion of the "Goetterdaemmerung" ("Nibelungen Ring," Part III.), it
+became an accomplished fact. The first work given was the entire
+"Trilogy;" and in July, 1882, Wagner's long and stormy career was
+magnificently crowned there by the first performance of "Parsifal." A
+few weeks later his health showed signs of giving way, and he resolved
+to spend the winter at Venice. There he died suddenly, February 13,
+1883, and was buried in the garden of his own house, Wahnfried, at
+Baireuth.[12]
+
+         [Footnote 12: Our illustration represents him at Wahnfried in
+         company with his wife Cosima, her father Franz Liszt, who was
+         his lifelong friend, and Herr von Wolzogen.]
+
+Wagner's life and his individuality are of unusual importance in
+rightly estimating his work, because, unlike the other great masters,
+he not only devoted all his genius to one branch of music--the
+opera--but he gradually evolved a theory and an ideal which he
+consciously formulated and adopted, and perseveringly followed. It may
+be asked whether Wagner's premises were sound and his conclusions
+right; and also whether his genius was great enough to be the worthy
+champion of a cause involving such revolutions. Unless Wagner's
+operas, considered solely as music, are not only more advanced in
+style, but worthy in themselves to stand at least on a level with the
+greatest efforts of his predecessors, no amount of proof that these
+were wrong and he right will give his name the place his admirers
+claim for it. It is now universally acknowledged that Wagner can only
+be compared with the greatest names in music. His instrumentation has
+the advantage in being the inheritor of the enormous development of
+the orchestra from Haydn to Berlioz, his harmony is as daring and
+original as Bach's, and his melody is as beautiful as it is different
+from Beethoven's or Mozart's. (These names are used not in order to
+institute profitless comparisons, but as convenient standards;
+therefore even a qualification of the statement will not invalidate
+the case.)
+
+[Illustration: Wagner and his Friends.]
+
+His aim (stated very generally) was to reform the whole structure of
+opera, using the last or "Beethoven" development of instrumental music
+as a basis, and freeing it from the fetters which conventionality had
+imposed, in the shape of set forms, accepted arrangements, and
+traditional concessions to a style of singing now happily almost
+extinct. The one canon was to be dramatic fitness. In this "Art Work
+of the Future," as he called it, the interest of the drama is to
+depend not entirely on the music, but also on the poem and on the
+acting and staging as well. It will be seen that Wagner's theory is
+not new. All or most of it is contained in the theories of Gluck and
+others, who at various periods in the development of opera consciously
+strove after an ideal music drama. But the times were not ripe, and
+therefore such music could not exert its proper influence. The twin
+arts of music and poetry, dissociated by the rapid advance of
+literature and the slow development of music, pursued their several
+paths alone. The attempt to reunite them in the end of the sixteenth
+century was futile, and only led to opera which never needed, and
+therefore did not employ, great poetry. In Germany music was developed
+along instrumental lines until the school arrived at its culmination
+in Beethoven; and when an opera composer stopped to think on the
+eternal verities, the result must always have been such a prophecy of
+Wagner's work as we find in Mozart's letters:
+
+"_October, 1781._--Verse indeed is indispensable for music, but rhyme
+is bad in its very nature.... It would be by far the best if a good
+composer, understanding the theatre and knowing how to produce a
+piece, and a clever poet, could be united in one...."
+
+Other but comparatively unimportant features in the Wagner music drama
+are, _e.g._, the use of the _Leitmotiv_, or leading motive--found
+occasionally in Gluck, Mozart, Weber, etc., but here first adopted
+with a definite purpose, and the contention for mythological rather
+than historical subjects--now largely admitted. But all Wagner's
+principles would have been useless without the energy and perseverance
+which directed his work, the loving study which stored his memory with
+all the great works of his predecessors, and, above all, the genius
+which commands the admiration of the musical world.
+
+Wagner's works show a remarkable and progressive development. "Rienzi"
+is quite in the grand opera style of Meyerbeer, Spontini, etc. The
+"Flying Dutchman" is a deliberate departure from that style, and in
+romantic opera strikes out for itself a new line, which, followed
+still further in "Tannhaeuser," reaches its stage of perfection in
+"Lohengrin." From this time dates the music drama, of which "Tristan"
+is the most uncompromising type, and by virtue of wonderful
+orchestration, and the intense pathos of the beautifully written poem,
+the most fascinating of all. The "Trilogy" ("Walkuere," "Siegfried,"
+"Goetterdaemmerung," with the "Rheingold" as introduction) is a very
+unequal work. It is full of Wagner's most inspired writing and most
+marvellous orchestration; but it is too long and too diffuse. The plot
+also is strangely confused and uninteresting, and fails alike as a
+story and as a vehicle of theories, morals, or religion. "Parsifal,"
+with its sacred allegory, its lofty nobility of tone, and its pure
+mysticism, stands on a platform by itself, and is almost above
+criticism, or praise, or blame. The libretto alone might have won
+Wagner immortality, so original is it and perfect in intention; and
+the music seems to be no longer a mere accessory to the effect, but
+the very essence and fragrance of the great conception.
+
+
+
+
+GIUSEPPE VERDI
+
+(BORN 1813)
+
+
+[Illustration: Verdi.]
+
+Giuseppe Verdi, the last and most widely successful of the school of
+Italian opera proper, was born at Roncole, near Busseto, October 9,
+1813. At ten years he was organist of the small church in his native
+village, the salary being raised after a year from L1 8_s._ 10_d._ to
+L1 12_s._ per annum. At the age of sixteen he was provided with funds
+to prosecute his studies at the Conservatorium at Milan; but at the
+entrance examination he showed so little evidence of musical talent
+that the authorities declined to enroll him. Nothing daunted, he
+pursued his studies with ardor under Lavigna, from 1831 to 1833, when,
+according to agreement, he returned to Busseto to take the place of
+his old teacher Provesi, now deceased.
+
+After five unhappy years in a town where he was little appreciated,
+Verdi returned to Milan. His first opera, "Oberto," is chiefly
+indebted to Bellini, and the next, "Un Giorno di Regno" (which
+fulfilled its own title, as it was only once performed), has been
+styled "Un Bazar de Reminiscences." Poor Verdi had just lost his wife
+and two children within a few days of each other, so it is hardly to
+be wondered at that a comic opera was not a very congenial work, nor
+successfully accomplished.
+
+"Nabucodonosor" (1842) was his first hit, and in the next year "I
+Lombardi" was even more successful--partly owing to the revolutionary
+feeling which in no small degree was to help him to his future high
+position. Indeed, his name was a useful acrostic to the revolutionary
+party, who shouted "Viva Verdi," when they meant "Viva Vittorio
+Emanuele Re D' Italia." "Ernani," produced at Venice in 1844, also
+scored a success, owing to the republican sentiment in the libretto,
+which was adapted from Victor Hugo's "Hernani." Many works followed in
+quick succession, each arousing the enthusiasm of the audiences,
+chiefly when an opportunity was afforded them of expressing their
+feelings against the Austrian rule. Only with his sixteenth opera did
+Verdi win the supremacy when there were no longer any living
+competitors; and "Rigoletto" (1851), "Il Trovatore," and "La
+Traviata" (1853) must be called the best, as they are the last of the
+Italian opera school. "I Vespri Siciliani" (1855) and "Simon
+Boccanegra" (1857) were not so successful as "Un Ballo in Maschera"
+(1859); and none of them, any more than "La Forza del Destino" (1862)
+or "Don Carlos" (1867), added anything to the fame of the composer of
+"Il Trovatore."
+
+Only now begins the interest which the student of musical history
+finds in Verdi's life. Hitherto he had proved a good man, struggling
+with adversity and poverty, a successful composer ambitious to succeed
+to the vacant throne of Italian opera. But the keen insight into
+dramatic necessity which had gradually developed and had given such
+force to otherwise unimportant scenes in earlier operas, also showed
+him the insufficiency of the means hitherto at the disposal of Italian
+composers, and from time to time he had tried to learn the lessons
+taught in the French Grand Opera School, but with poor success. Now a
+longer interval seemed to promise a more careful, a more ambitious
+work, and when "Aida" was produced at Cairo (1871), it was at once
+acknowledged that a revolution had taken place in Verdi's mind and
+method, which might produce still greater results. The influence of
+Wagner and the music-drama is distinctly to be felt.
+
+But Verdi was apparently not yet satisfied. For sixteen years the
+successful composer maintained absolute silence in opera, when
+whispers of a great music-drama roused the expectation of musical
+Europe to an extraordinary pitch; nor were the highest expectations
+disappointed when "Otello" was produced at Milan in 1887. The
+surrender of Italian opera was complete, and Verdi took his right
+place at the head of the vigorous new school which has arisen in
+Italy, and which promises to regain for the "Land of Song" some of her
+ancient preeminence in music. A comic opera by Verdi, "Falstaff," was
+announced in 1892: it has well sustained his previous reputation.
+
+
+
+
+DRAMATIC AND LYRIC ARTISTS
+
+
+
+
+DAVID GARRICK
+
+By SAMUEL ARCHER
+
+(1716-1779)
+
+
+This celebrated actor was the son of Peter Garrick, who had a
+captain's commission in the army, but who generally resided at
+Lichfield. He was born at Hereford, when his father was on a
+recruiting party there, and was baptized in the Church of All-Saints,
+in that city, on February 20, 1716. Young Garrick received part of
+his education at the grammar school there, but he did not apply
+himself to his books with much assiduity. He had conceived a very
+early passion for theatrical representation, from which nothing could
+turn him aside. When he was a little more than eleven years of age, he
+formed the project of getting a play acted by young gentlemen and
+ladies. After he had made some trial of his own and his companions'
+abilities, and prevailed upon the parents to give their consent, he
+pitched upon the "Recruiting Officer," for the play. He assembled his
+little company in a large room, the destined place of representation.
+There we may suppose our young boy distributed the several characters
+according to the merits of the performer. He prevailed on one of his
+sisters to play the part of the chambermaid. Sergeant Kite, a
+character of busy intrigue and bold humor, he chose for himself.
+
+[Illustration: Garrick.]
+
+The play was acted in a manner so far above the expectation of the
+audience, that it gave general satisfaction, and was much applauded.
+The ease, vivacity, and humor of Kite are still remembered with
+pleasure at Lichfield. The first stage attempt of our English Roscius
+was in 1727.
+
+Not long after, he was invited to Lisbon by an uncle, who was a
+considerable wine merchant in that city, but his stay there was very
+short, for he returned to Lichfield the year following. It is imagined
+that the gay disposition of the young gentleman was not very suitable
+to the old man's temper, which was, perhaps, too grave and austere to
+relish the vivacities of his nephew.
+
+However, during his short stay at Lisbon, young Garrick made himself
+agreeable to all who knew him, particularly to the English merchants
+who resided there, with whom he often dined. After dinner they usually
+diverted themselves by placing him upon the table, and calling upon
+him to repeat verses and speeches from plays, which he did with great
+readiness, and much to the satisfaction of the hearers. Some
+Portuguese young gentlemen of the highest rank, who were of his own
+age, were also much delighted with his conversation.
+
+He afterward returned to Lichfield, and in 1737 came up to town in
+company with Samuel Johnson, who was to make so conspicuous a figure
+in the literary world, and of whose life we have already given an
+account.
+
+Soon after his arrival in London, Garrick entered himself at Lincoln's
+Inn, and he also put himself under the tuition of Mr. Colson, an
+eminent mathematician at Rochester. But as he applied himself little
+to the study of the law, his proficiency in mathematics and philosophy
+was not extensive. His mind was theatrically led, and nothing could
+divert his thoughts from the study of that to which his genius so
+powerfully prompted him. He had L1,000 left him by his uncle at
+Lisbon, and he engaged for a short time in the wine trade, in
+partnership with his brother, Mr. Peter Garrick; they hired vaults in
+Durham Yard, for the purpose of carrying on the business. The union
+between the brothers was of no long date. Peter was calm, sedate, and
+methodical; David was gay, volatile, impetuous, and perhaps not so
+confined to regularity as his partner could have wished. To prevent
+the continuance of fruitless and daily altercation, by the
+interposition of friends the partnership was amicably dissolved. And
+now Garrick prepared himself in earnest for that employment which he
+so ardently loved, and in which nature designed he should eminently
+excel.
+
+He was frequently in the company of the most eminent actors; he got
+himself introduced to the managers of the theatres, and tried his
+talent in the recitation of some particular and favorite portions of
+plays. Now and then he indulged himself in the practice of mimicry, a
+talent which, however inferior, is never willingly resigned by him who
+excels in it. Sometimes he wrote criticisms upon the action and
+elocution of the players, and published them in the prints. These
+sudden effusions of his mind generally comprehended judicious
+observations and shrewd remarks, unmixed with that illiberality which
+often disgraces the instructions of stage critics.
+
+Garrick's diffidence withheld him from trying his strength at first
+upon a London theatre. He thought the hazard was too great, and
+embraced the advantage of commencing his noviciate in acting with a
+company of players then ready to set out for Ipswich, under the
+direction of Mr. William Gifford and Mr. Dunstall, in the summer of
+1741.
+
+The first effort of his theatrical talents was exerted as Aboan, in
+the play of "Oroonoko," a part in which his features could not be
+easily discerned. Under the disguise of a black countenance, he hoped
+to escape being known, should it be his misfortune not to please.
+Though Aboan is not a first-rate character, yet the scenes of pathetic
+persuasion and affecting distress in which that character is involved,
+will always command the attention of the audience when represented by
+a judicious actor. Our young player's applause was equal to his most
+sanguine desires. Under the assumed name of Lyddal, he not only acted
+a variety of characters in plays, particularly Chamont, in the
+"Orphan;" Captain Brazen, in the "Recruiting Officer;" and Sir Harry
+Wildair; but he likewise gave such delight to the audience, that they
+gratified him with constant and loud proofs of their approbation. The
+town of Ipswich will long boast of having first seen and encouraged so
+great a genius as Garrick.
+
+His first appearance as an actor in London, was on October 19, 1741,
+when he performed the part of Richard III., at the playhouse in
+Goodman's Fields. His easy and familiar, yet forcible, style in
+speaking and acting, at first threw the critics into some hesitation
+concerning the novelty, as well as propriety, of his manner. They had
+been long accustomed to an elevation of the voice, with a sudden
+mechanical depression of its tones, calculated to excite admiration,
+and to intrap applause. To the just modulation of the words, and
+concurring expression of the features from the genuine works of
+nature, they had been strangers, at least for some time. But after he
+had gone through a variety of scenes, in which he gave evident proofs
+of consummate art and perfect knowledge of character, their doubts
+were turned into surprise and astonishment, from which they relieved
+themselves by loud and reiterated applause. They were more especially
+charmed when the actor, after having thrown aside the hypocrite and
+politician, assumed the warrior and the hero. When news was brought to
+Richard that the Duke of Buckingham was taken, Garrick's look and
+action, when he pronounced the words
+
+  "----Off with his head!
+   So much for Buckingham!"
+
+were so magnificent and important, from his visible enjoyment of the
+incident, that several loud shouts of approbation proclaimed the
+triumph of the actor and satisfaction of the audience. Richard's dream
+before the battle, and his death, were accompanied with the loudest
+gratulations of applause.
+
+Such was the universal approbation which followed our young actor,
+that the more established theatres of Drury Lane and Covent Garden
+were deserted. Garrick drew after him the inhabitants of the most
+polite parts of the town: Goodman's Fields were full of the splendor
+of St. James' and Grosvenor Square; the coaches of the nobility filled
+up the space from Temple Bar to Whitechapel. He had so perfectly
+convinced the public of his superior accomplishments in acting, that
+not to admire him would not only have argued an absence of taste, but
+the grossest stupidity. Those who had seen and been delighted with the
+most admired of the old actors, confessed that he had excelled the
+ablest of them in the variety of the exhibitions, and equalled them
+all in their must applauded characters.
+
+Alexander Pope was persuaded by Lord Orrery to see him in the first
+dawn of his fame. That great man, who had often seen and admired
+Betterton, was struck with the propriety and beauty of Mr. Garrick's
+action; and as a convincing proof that he had a good opinion of his
+merit, he told Lord Orrery that he was afraid the young man would be
+spoiled, for he would have no competitor.
+
+Mr. Garrick shone forth like a theatrical Newton; he threw new light
+on elocution and action; he banished ranting, bombast, and grimace;
+and restored nature, ease, simplicity, and genuine humor.
+
+In 1742 he entered into stated agreements with Fleetwood, patentee of
+Drury Lane, for the annual income of L500. His fame continued to
+increase at the royal theatre, and soon became so extended that a
+deputation was sent from Ireland, to invite him to act in Dublin
+during the months of June, July, and August, upon very profitable
+conditions. These he embraced, and crossed the seas to the metropolis
+of Ireland in June, 1742, accompanied by Mrs. Woffington.
+
+[Illustration: Garrick as Richard III.]
+
+His success at Dublin exceeded all imagination, though much was
+expected from him; he was caressed by all ranks of people as a prodigy
+of theatrical accomplishment. During the hottest days in the year the
+play-house was crowded with persons of fashion and rank, who were
+never tired with seeing and applauding the various essays of his
+skill.
+
+The excessive heat became prejudicial to the frequenters of the
+theatre; and the epidemical distemper, which seized and carried off
+great numbers, was nicknamed the _Garrick fever_. Satisfied with the
+emoluments arising from the summer campaign, and delighted with the
+generous encouragement and kind countenance which the nobility and
+gentry of Ireland had given him, and of which he always spoke in the
+strongest terms of acknowledgment and gratitude, he set out for
+London, to renew his labors and to receive the applause of the most
+critical, as well as most candid, audience in Europe.
+
+Such an actor as Garrick, whose name when announced in the play-bill
+operated like a charm and drew multitudes to the theatre, of
+consequence considerably augmented the profits of the patentee. But at
+the time when all without doors was apparently gay and splendid, and
+the theatre of Drury Lane seemed to be in the most flourishing
+condition, by the strange and absurd conduct of the manager the whole
+fabric was absolutely running into certain destruction.
+
+His behavior brought on a revolt of the principal actors, with Mr.
+Garrick and Mr. Macklin at their head, and for some time they seceded
+from the theatre. They endeavored to procure a patent for a new
+theatre, but without success; and Garrick at length accommodated his
+dispute with the manager, Mr. Fleetwood, by engaging to play again for
+a salary of six or seven hundred pounds.
+
+In 1744, Garrick made a second voyage to Dublin, and became
+joint-manager of the theatre there with Mr. Sheridan. They met with
+great success; and Garrick returned again to London, in May, 1746,
+having considerably added to his stock of money. In 1747 he became
+joint-patentee of Drury Lane Theatre with Mr. Lacy. Mr. Garrick and
+Mr. Lacy divided the business of the theatre in such a manner as not
+to encroach upon each other's province. Mr. Lacy took upon himself the
+care of the wardrobe, the scenes, and the economy of the household;
+while Garrick regulated the more important business of treating with
+authors, hiring actors, distributing parts in plays, superintending of
+rehearsals, etc. Besides the profits accruing from his half-share, he
+was allowed an income of L500 for his acting, and some particular
+emoluments for altering plays, farces, etc.
+
+In 1749, Mr. Garrick was married to Mademoiselle Violetti, a young
+lady who (as Mr. Davies says), to great elegance of form and many
+polite accomplishments, joined the more amiable virtues of the mind.
+In 1763, 1764, and 1765, he made a journey to France and Italy,
+accompanied by Mrs. Garrick, who, from the day of her marriage till
+the death of her husband, was never separated from him for twenty-four
+hours. During his stay abroad his company was desired by many
+foreigners of high birth and great merit. He was sometimes invited to
+give the company a taste of that art in which he was known so greatly
+to excel. Such a request he very readily consented to, for indeed his
+compliance cost him nothing. He could, without the least preparation,
+transform himself into any character tragic or comic, and seize
+instantaneously upon any passion of the human mind. He could make a
+sudden transition from violent rage, and even madness, to the extremes
+of levity and humor, and go through the whole circle of theatric
+evolution with the most surprising velocity.
+
+On the death of Mr. Lacy, joint patentee of Drury Lane with Mr.
+Garrick, in 1773, the whole management of that theatre devolved on Mr.
+Garrick. But in 1776, being about sixty years of age, he sold his
+share of the patent, and formed a resolution of quitting the stage. He
+was, however, determined, before he left the theatre, to give the
+public proofs of his abilities to delight them as highly as he had
+ever done in the flower and vigor of his life. To this end he
+presented them with some of the most capital and trying characters of
+Shakespeare; with Hamlet, Richard, and Lear, besides other parts which
+were less fatiguing. Hamlet and Lear were repeated; Richard he acted
+once only, and by the king's command. His Majesty was much surprised
+to see him, at an age so advanced, run about the field of battle with
+so much fire, force, and agility.
+
+He finished his dramatic race with one of his favorite parts, with
+Felix, in "The Wonder a Woman Keeps a Secret." When the play was
+ended, Mr. Garrick advanced toward the audience, with much palpitation
+of mind, and visible emotion in his countenance. No premeditation
+whatever could prepare him for this affecting scene. He bowed--he
+paused--the spectators were all attention. After a short struggle of
+nature, he recovered from the shock he had felt, and addressed his
+auditors in the following words:
+
+"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: It has been customary with persons under my
+circumstances to address you in a farewell epilogue. I had the same
+intention, and turned my thoughts that way; but indeed, I found myself
+then as incapable of writing such an epilogue, as I should be now of
+speaking it.
+
+"The jingle of rhyme and the language of fiction would but ill suit my
+present feelings. This is to me a very awful moment; it is no less
+than parting forever with those from whom I have received the greatest
+kindness and favors, and upon the spot where that kindness and those
+favors were enjoyed." [Here he was unable to proceed till he was
+relieved by a shower of tears.]
+
+"Whatever may be the changes of my future life, the deepest impression
+of your kindness will always remain here" (putting his hand on his
+breast) "fixed and unalterable. I will very readily agree to my
+successors having more skill and ability for their station than I
+have; but I defy them all to take more sincere, and more uninterrupted
+pains for your favor, or to be more truly sensible of it, than is your
+humble servant."
+
+After a profound obeisance, he retired, amid the tears and
+acclamations of a most crowded and brilliant audience.
+
+He died on Wednesday morning, January 20, 1779, at eight o'clock,
+without a groan. The disease was pronounced to be a palsy in the
+kidneys. On Monday, February 1st, the body of David Garrick was
+conveyed from his own house in the Adelphi, and most magnificently
+interred in Westminster Abbey, under the monument of his beloved
+Shakespeare. He was attended to the grave by persons of the first
+rank; by men illustrious for genius, and famous for science; by those
+who loved him living, and lamented his death.
+
+
+
+
+EDWIN FORREST[13]
+
+         [Footnote 13: Reprinted by permission of The Cassell
+         Publishing Company, from "Actors and Actresses of Great
+         Britain and the United States."]
+
+By LAWRENCE BARRETT
+
+(1806-1872)
+
+
+[Illustration: Edwin Forrest.]
+
+Edwin Forrest was born in the city of Philadelphia, March 9, 1806, his
+father, a Scotchman, having emigrated to America during the last year
+of the preceding century. The boy, like many others of his profession,
+was designed for the ministry, and before the age of eleven the future
+Channing had attracted admiring listeners by the music of his voice
+and the aptness of his mimicry. His memory was remarkable, and he
+would recite whole passages of his preceptor's sermons. Perched upon a
+chair or stool, and crowned with the proud approval of family and
+friends, the young mimic filled the hearts of his listeners with
+fervent hopes of his coming success in the fold of their beloved
+church. These hopes were destined to be met with disappointment. The
+bias of the future leader of the American stage was only faintly
+outlined as yet; his hour of development was still to come.
+
+He must have learned early the road to the theatre, permitted to go by
+the family, or going, perhaps, without the knowledge or consent of his
+seniors in the overworked household; for, before he had passed his
+tenth year, our young sermonizer was a member of a Thespian club, and
+before he was eleven he had made his appearance at one of the regular
+theatres in a female character, but with most disastrous results. He
+soon outgrew the ignominy of his first failure, however, and again and
+again sought to overcome its disgrace by a fresh appearance. To his
+appeals the irate manager lent a deaf ear. The sacred portal that
+leads to the enchanted ground of the stage was closed against young
+Forrest, the warden being instructed not to let the importunate boy
+pass the door. At last, in desperation, he resolved to storm the
+citadel, to beat down the faithful guard and to carry war into the
+enemy's camp. One night he dashed past the astonished guardian of the
+stage entrance just as the curtain fell upon one of the acts of a
+play. He emerged before the footlights, eluding all pursuit, dressed
+as a harlequin, and, before the audience had recovered from its
+astonishment at this scene not set down in the bills, the baffled, but
+not subdued, aspirant had delivered the lines of an epilogue in rhyme
+with so much effect that, before he could be seized by the astounded
+stage-manager and hurled from the theatre, he had attracted public
+notice, successfully won his surprised audience, and not only secured
+immunity from punishment for his temerity, but actually gained that
+respect in the manager's estimation which he had so long and so vainly
+striven to acquire.
+
+At last Forrest was promised an appearance at the Walnut Street house,
+then one of the leading theatres of the country. He selected Young
+Norval in Home's tragedy of "Douglas," and on November 27, 1820, the
+future master of the American stage, then fourteen years of age--a boy
+in years, a man in character--announced as "A Young Gentleman of this
+City," surrounded by a group of veteran actors who had for many years
+shared the favor of the public, began a career which was as auspicious
+at its opening as it was splendid in its maturity. At his entrance he
+won the vast audience at once by the grace of his figure and the
+modest bearing that was natural to him. Something of that magnetism
+which he exercised so effectively in late years now attracted all who
+heard him, and made friends even before he spoke.
+
+He was allowed to reappear as Frederick in "Lovers' Vows," repeating
+his first success; and on January 8, 1821, he benefited as Octavian in
+the "Mountaineers," a play associated with the early glories of Edmund
+Kean. In this year, also, he made his first and only venture as a
+manager, boldly taking the Prune Street Theatre, Philadelphia, and
+giving a successful performance of "Richard III.," which not only
+pleased the audience, but brought him a few dollars of profit. He made
+many attempts to secure a regular engagement in one of the Western
+circuits, where experience could be gained; and at last, after many
+denials, he was employed by Collins and Jones to play leading juvenile
+parts in their theatres in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Lexington.
+Thus, at the age of sixteen or eighteen, Edwin Forrest enrolled
+himself as a regular member of a theatrical company, and broke loose
+from trade forever.
+
+Of his professional progress here we have but poor accounts. He seems
+to have been very popular, and to have had an experience larger than
+he had heretofore enjoyed. He played with the elder Conway, and was
+affected by the grandeur of that actor's Othello, a study which served
+Forrest well when in late years he inherited the character.
+
+Jane Placide, who inspired the first love of Edwin Forrest, was an
+actress who combined talent, beauty, and goodness. Her character would
+have softened the asperities of his, and led him by a calmer path to
+those grand elevations toward which Providence had directed his
+footsteps. Baffled in love, however, and believing Caldwell to be his
+rival and enemy, he challenged him; but was rebuked by the silent
+contempt of his manager, whom the impulsive and disappointed lover
+"posted."
+
+The hard novitiate of Edwin Forrest was now drawing near its close.
+Securing a stock engagement with Charles Gilfert, manager of the
+Albany Theatre, he opened there in the early fall, and played for the
+first time with Edmund Kean, then on his second visit to America. The
+meeting with this extraordinary man and the attention he received from
+him were foremost among the directing influences of Forrest's life. To
+his last hour he never wearied of singing the praises of Kean, whose
+genius filled the English-speaking world with admiration. Two men more
+unlike in mind and body can scarcely be imagined. Until now Forrest
+had seen no actor who represented in perfection the impassioned school
+of which Kean was the master. He could not have known Cooke, even in
+the decline of that great tragedian's power, and the little giant was
+indeed a revelation. He played Iago to Kean's Othello, Titus to his
+Brutus, and Richmond to his Richard III.
+
+In the interval which preceded the opening of the Bowery Theatre, New
+York, Forrest appeared at the Park for the benefit of Woodhull,
+playing Othello. He made a pronounced success, his old manager sitting
+in front, profanely exclaiming, "By God, the boy has made a hit!" This
+was a great event, as the Park was then the leading theatre of
+America, and its actors were the most famous and exclusive.
+
+He opened at the Bowery Theatre in November, 1826, as Othello, and
+made a brilliant impression. His salary was raised from $28 to $40 per
+week. From this success may be traced the first absolute hold made by
+Edwin Forrest upon the attention of cultivated auditors and
+intelligent critics. The Bowery was then a very different theatre from
+what it afterward became, when the newsboys took forcible possession
+of its pit and the fire-laddies were the arbiters of public taste in
+its neighborhood.
+
+An instance of Forrest's moral integrity may be told here. He had been
+approached by a rival manager, after his first success, and urged to
+secede from the Bowery and join the other house at a much larger
+salary. He scornfully refused to break his word, although his own
+interests he knew must suffer. His popularity at this time was so
+great that, when his contract for the season had expired, he was
+instantly engaged for eight nights, at a salary of two hundred dollars
+a night.
+
+The success which had greeted Forrest on his first appearance in New
+York, was renewed in every city in the land. Fortune attended fame,
+and filled his pockets, as the breath of adulation filled his heart.
+He had paid the last penny of debt left by his father, and had seen a
+firm shelter raised over the head of his living family. With a
+patriotic feeling for all things American, Forrest, about this time,
+formed a plan for the encouragement or development of an American
+drama, which resulted in heavy money losses to himself, but produced
+such contributions to our stage literature as the "Gladiator," "Jack
+Cade," and "Metamora."[14] After five years of constant labor he felt
+that he had earned the right to a holiday, and he formed his plans
+for a two years' absence in Europe. A farewell banquet was tendered
+him by the citizens of New York, and a medal was struck in honor of
+the occasion. Bryant, Halleck, Leggett, Ingraham and other
+distinguished men were present. This was an honor which had never
+before been paid to an American actor.
+
+         [Footnote 14: Of Forrest's performance of Metamora, in the
+         play of that name, W. R. Alger says, "Never did an actor more
+         thoroughly identify and merge himself with his part than
+         Forrest did in 'Metamora.' He was completely transformed from
+         what he appeared in other characters, and seemed Indian in
+         every particular, all through and all over, from the crown of
+         his head to the sole of his foot."]
+
+He had been absent about two years when he landed in New York in
+September, 1836. On his appearance at the Walnut Street Theatre,
+Philadelphia, he was received with unprecedented enthusiasm. He gave
+six performances only, on this occasion, and each saw a repetition of
+the scene at the beginning of the engagement. The receipts were the
+largest ever known in that house.
+
+On September 19, 1836, Forrest embarked once more for the mother
+country, this time with serious purpose. After a speedy and uneventful
+passage he reached England, and at once set about the preliminary
+business of his British engagement, which began October 17, 1836. He
+was the first really great American actor who had appeared in London
+as a rival of the English tragedians; for Cooper was born in England,
+though always regarded as belonging to the younger country. His
+opening part was Spartacus in the "Gladiator." The play was condemned,
+the actor applauded. In Othello, in Lear, and in Macbeth, he achieved
+instant success. He began his engagement October 17th and closed
+December 19th, having acted Macbeth seven times, Othello nine, and
+King Lear eight. A dinner at the Garrick Club was offered and
+accepted. Here he sat down with Charles Kemble and Macready; Sergeant
+Talfourd was in the chair.
+
+It was during this engagement he met his future wife, Miss Catherine
+Sinclair. In the latter part of June, 1837, the marriage took place in
+St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden. Mr. and Mrs. Forrest soon after
+embarked for America. The tragedian resumed his American engagements
+November 15, 1837, at the old Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia.
+Presented to his friends, his wife at once made a deep and lasting
+impression. Her native delicacy of mind and refinement of manners
+enchanted those who hoped for some such influence to be exerted in
+softening the rough vigor and democratic downrightness of the man.
+Domestic discord came too soon, however, and in an evil hour for
+himself, in an evil hour for his art and for the struggling drama in
+America, Edwin Forrest threw open the doors of his home to the
+scrutiny of the world, and appealed to the courts to remove the
+skeleton which was hidden in his closet. With the proceedings of that
+trial, which resulted in divorce, alimony, and separation, this memoir
+has nothing to do.
+
+[Illustration: Forrest as Metamora.]
+
+Edwin Forrest, leaving the court-room a defeated man, was instantly
+raised to a popularity with the masses beyond anything even he had
+before experienced. He began an engagement soon after at the Broadway
+Theatre, opening as Damon. The house was crowded to suffocation. The
+engagement of sixty nights was unparalleled in the history of the
+American drama for length and profit. But despite the flattering
+applause of the multitude, life never again had for him the smiling
+aspect it had so often worn before. The applause which filled his
+ears, the wealth which flowed in upon him could not improve that
+temper which had never been amiable, and all the hard stories of his
+life belong to this period.
+
+On September 20, 1852, he reappeared at the Broadway Theatre, New
+York. In February, 1853, "Macbeth" was produced in grand style, with
+new scenery and appointments. The tragedy was played on twenty
+consecutive nights, then by far the longest run of any Shakespearean
+play in America. The cast was very strong. It included Conway, Duff,
+Davenport, Pope, Davidge, Barry, and Madame Ponisi.
+
+On September 17, 1860, after an absence of nearly four years, Edwin
+Forrest appeared again on the stage. He was engaged by James Nixon,
+and began his contract of one hundred nights at Niblo's Garden, New
+York, in the character of Hamlet. The long retirement only increased
+the curious interest which centred round his historic name. Upon his
+opening night the seats were sold at auction. His success in
+Philadelphia rivalled that of New York. In Boston the vast auditorium
+of the grandest theatre in America was found too small to contain the
+crowds he drew.
+
+Severe attacks of gout were beginning to tell upon that herculean
+form, sapping and undermining it; and in 1865, while playing Damon at
+the Holiday Street Theatre, in Baltimore, the weather being very cold
+and the theatre open to draughts, he was seized with a sudden illness,
+which was followed by very serious results. Suffering the most intense
+agony, he was able to get to the end of the part; but when his robes
+were laid aside and physicians summoned, it was found to his horror
+that he had suffered a partial paralysis of the sciatic nerve. In an
+instant the sturdy gait, the proud tread of the herculean actor was
+forever gone; for he never regained complete control of his limb, a
+perceptible hobble being the legacy of the dreadful visitation. His
+right hand was almost powerless, and he could not hold his sword.
+
+In 1866 he went to California, urged by the manager in San Francisco.
+His last engagement in New York took place in February, 1871. He
+played Lear and Richelieu, his two greatest parts. On the night of
+March 25, 1872, Forrest opened in "Lear" at the Globe Theatre, Boston.
+"Lear" was played six nights. During the second week he was announced
+for Richelieu and Virginius; but he caught a violent cold on Sunday,
+and labored sorely on Monday evening through the part of Richelieu. On
+Tuesday he repeated the performance, against the advice of friends and
+physicians. Rare bursts of his old power lighted up the play, but he
+labored piteously on against his illness and threatened pneumonia.
+When stimulants were offered he rejected them, declaring "that if he
+died to-night, he should still be his old royal self."
+
+Announced for Virginius the following evening, he was unable to
+appear. A severe attack of pneumonia developed itself. He was carried
+to his hotel, and his last engagement was brought to an abrupt and
+melancholy end. As soon as he was able to move, he left Boston for his
+home in Philadelphia, resting on his way only a day in New York. As
+the summer passed away, the desire for work grew stronger and
+stronger, and he decided to re-enter public life, but simply as a
+reader of the great plays in which he had as an actor been so
+successful. The result was a disappointment. On December 11, 1872, he
+wrote to Oakes his last letter, saying sadly, but fondly: "God bless
+you ever, my dear and much-beloved friend."
+
+When the morning of December 12th came, his servant, hearing no sound
+in his chamber at his general hour of rising, became alarmed, opened
+his master's door, and found there, cold in death upon his bed, the
+form of the great tragedian. His arms were crossed upon his bosom, and
+he seemed to be at rest. The stroke had come suddenly. With little
+warning, and without pain, he had passed away.
+
+The dead man's will was found to contain several bequests to old
+friends and servants, and an elaborate scheme by which his fortune, in
+the hands of trustees, was to be applied to the erection and support
+of a retreat for aged actors, to be called "The Edwin Forrest Home."
+The idea had been long in his mind, and careful directions were drawn
+up for its practical working; but the trustees found themselves
+powerless to realize fully the hopes and wishes of the testator. A
+settlement had to be made to the divorced wife, who acted liberally
+toward the estate; but the amount withdrawn seriously crippled it, as
+it was deprived at once of a large sum of ready money. Other legal
+difficulties arose. And thus the great ambition of the tragedian to be
+a benefactor to his profession was destined to come almost to naught.
+Of this happily little he recks now. He has parted with all the cares
+of life, and has at last found rest.
+
+Forrest's greatest Shakespearean parts were Lear, Othello, and
+Coriolanus. The first grew mellow and rich as the actor grew in years,
+while it still retained much of its earlier force. His Othello
+suffered with the decline of his faculties, although his clear
+conception of all he did was apparent to the end in the acting of
+every one of his parts. Coriolanus died with him, the last of all the
+Romans. He was greatest, however, in such parts as Virginius, William
+Tell, and Spartacus. Here his mannerisms of gait and utterance were
+less noticeable than in his Shakespearean characters, or were
+overlooked in the rugged massiveness of the creation. Hamlet, Richard,
+and Macbeth were out of his temperament, and added nothing to his
+fame; but Richelieu is said to have been one of his noblest and most
+impressive performances. He was in all things marked and distinctive.
+His obtrusive personality often destroyed the harmony of the portrait
+he was painting; but in his inspired moments, which were many, his
+touches were sublime. He passed over quiet scenes with little
+elaboration, and dwelt strongly upon the grand features of the
+characters he represented. His Lear, in the great scenes, rose to a
+majestic height, but fell in places almost to mediocrity. His art was
+unequal to his natural gifts. He was totally unlike his great
+contemporary and rival, Macready, whose attention to detail gave to
+every performance the harmony of perfect work.
+
+This memoir may fitly close with an illustrative anecdote of the great
+actor. Toward the end of his professional career he was playing an
+engagement at St. Louis. He was very feeble in health, and his
+lameness was a source of great anxiety to him. Sitting at a late
+supper in his hotel one evening, after a performance of "King Lear,"
+with his friend J. B. McCullough, of the _Globe-Democrat_, that
+gentleman remarked to him: "Mr. Forrest, I never in my life saw you
+play Lear so well as you did to-night." Whereupon the veteran almost
+indignantly replied, rising slowly and laboriously from his chair to
+his full height: "Play Lear! What do you mean, sir? I do not play
+Lear! I play Hamlet, Richard, Shylock, Virginius, if you please, but
+by God, sir, I _am_ Lear!"
+
+Nor was this wholly imaginative. Ingratitude of the basest kind had
+rent his soul. Old friends were gone from him; new friends were but
+half-hearted. His hearthstone was desolate. The public, to whom he had
+given his best years, was becoming impatient of his infirmities. The
+royalty of his powers he saw by degrees torn from his decaying form.
+Other kings had arisen on the stage, to whom his old subjects now
+showed a reverence once all his own. The mockery of his diadem only
+remained. A wreck of the once proud man who had despised all weakness,
+and had ruled his kingdom with imperial sway, he now stood alone.
+Broken in health and in spirit, deserted, forgotten, unkinged, he
+might well exclaim, "_I am Lear!_"
+
+
+
+
+CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN
+
+By DUTTON COOK
+
+(1816-1876)
+
+
+[Illustration: Charlotte Cushman.]
+
+The Pilgrim Fathers figure in American pedigrees almost as frequently
+and persistently as Norman William and his followers appear at the
+trunk of our family-trees. Certainly, the Mayflower must have carried
+very many heads of houses across the Atlantic. It was not in the
+Mayflower, however, but in the Fortune, a smaller vessel, of
+fifty-five tons, that Robert Cushman, Nonconformist, the founder of
+the Cushman family in America, sailed from England, for the better
+enjoyment of liberty of conscience and freedom of religion. In the
+seventh generation from Robert Cushman appeared Elkanah Cushman, who
+took to wife Mary Eliza, daughter of Erasmus Babbit, Jr., lawyer,
+musician, and captain in the army. Of this marriage was born Charlotte
+Saunders Cushman, in Richmond Street, Boston, July 23, 1816, and other
+children.
+
+Charlotte Cushman says of herself: "I was born a tom-boy." She had a
+passion for climbing trees and for breaking open dolls' heads. She
+could not make dolls' clothes, but she could manufacture their
+furniture--could do anything with tools. "I was very destructive to
+toys and clothes, tyrannical to brothers and sister, but very social,
+and a great favorite with other children. Imitation was a prevailing
+trait." The first play she ever saw was "Coriolanus," with Macready in
+the leading part; her second play was "The Gamester." She became noted
+in her school for her skill in reading aloud. Her competitors
+grumbled: "No wonder she can read; she goes to the theatre!" Until
+then she had been shy and reserved, not to say stupid, about reading
+aloud in school, afraid of the sound of her own voice, and unwilling
+to trust it; but acquaintance with the theatre loosened her tongue, as
+she describes it, and gave opportunity and expression to a faculty
+which became the ruling passion of her life. At home, as a child, she
+took part in an operetta founded upon the story of "Bluebeard," and
+played Selim, the lover, with great applause, in a large attic chamber
+of her father's house before an enthusiastic audience of young people.
+
+Elkanah Cushman had been for some years a successful merchant, a
+member of the firm of Topliffe & Cushman, Long Wharf, Boston. But
+failure befell him, "attributable," writes Charlotte Cushman's
+biographer, Miss Stebbins, "to the infidelity of those whom he trusted
+as supercargoes." The family removed from Boston to Charlestown.
+Charlotte was placed at a public school, remaining there until she was
+thirteen only. Elkanah Cushman died, leaving his widow and five
+children with very slender means. Mrs. Cushman opened a boarding-house
+in Boston, and struggled hard to ward off further misfortune. It was
+discovered that Charlotte possessed a noble voice of almost two
+registers, "a full contralto and almost a full soprano; but the low
+voice was the natural one." The fortunes of the family seemed to rest
+upon the due cultivation of Charlotte's voice and upon her future as a
+singer. "My mother," she writes, "at great self-sacrifice gave me what
+opportunities for instruction she could obtain for me; and then my
+father's friend, Mr. R. D. Shepherd, of Shepherdstown, Va., gave me
+two years of the best culture that could be obtained in Boston at that
+time, under John Paddon, an English organist and teacher of singing."
+When the English singer, Mrs. Wood--better known, perhaps, as Miss
+Paton--visited Boston in 1835 or 1836, she needed the support of a
+contralto voice. Charlotte Cushman was sent for, and rehearsed duets
+with Mrs. Wood. The young beginner was advised to prepare herself for
+the operatic stage; she was assured that such a voice would "lead her
+to any height of fortune she coveted." She became the articled pupil
+of Mr. Maeder, the husband of Clara Fisher, actress and vocalist, and
+the musical director of Mr. and Mrs. Wood. Instructed by Maeder, Miss
+Cushman undertook the parts of the Countess in "The Marriage of
+Figaro" and Lucy Bertram in the opera of "Guy Mannering." These were
+her first appearances upon the stage.
+
+Mrs. Maeder's voice was a contralto; it became necessary, therefore,
+to assign soprano parts to Miss Cushman. Undue stress was thus laid
+upon her upper notes. She was very young, and she felt the change of
+climate when she went on with the Maeders to New Orleans. It is
+likely that her powers as a singer had been tried too soon and too
+severely; her operatic career was brought to a sudden close. Her voice
+failed her; her upper notes departed, never to return; she was left
+with a weakened and limited contralto register. Alarmed and wretched,
+she sought counsel of Mr. Caldwell, the manager of the chief New
+Orleans theatre. "You ought to be an actress, and not a singer," he
+said, and advised her to take lessons of Mr. Barton, his leading
+tragedian. Her articles of apprenticeship to Maeder were cancelled.
+Soon she was ready to appear as Lady Macbeth on the occasion of
+Barton's benefit.
+
+The season ended, she sailed for Philadelphia on her way to New York.
+Presently she had entered into a three years' engagement with Mr.
+Hamblin, the manager of the Bowery Theatre, at a salary of twenty-five
+dollars a week for the first year, thirty-five for the second year,
+and forty-five for the third. Mr. Hamblin had received excellent
+accounts of the actress from his friend, Mr. Barton, of New Orleans,
+and had heard her rehearse scenes from "Macbeth," "Jane Shore,"
+"Venice Preserved," "The Stranger," etc. To enable her to obtain a
+suitable wardrobe, he became security for her with his tradespeople,
+deducting five dollars a week from her salary until the debt was
+satisfied. All promised well; independence seemed secure at last. Mrs.
+Cushman was sent for from Boston; she gave up her boarding-house and
+hastened to her daughter. Miss Cushman writes: "I got a situation for
+my eldest brother in a store in New York. I left my only sister in
+charge of a half-sister in Boston, and I took my youngest brother with
+me." But rheumatic fever seized the actress; she was able to act for a
+few nights only, and her dream of good fortune came to a disastrous
+close. "The Bowery Theatre was burned to the ground, with all my
+wardrobe, all my debt upon it, and my three years' contract ending in
+smoke." Grievously distressed, but not disheartened, with her family
+dependent upon her exertions, she accepted an engagement at the
+principal theatre in Albany, where she remained five months, acting
+all the leading characters. In September, 1837, she entered into an
+engagement, which endured for three years, with the manager of the
+Park Theatre, New York. She was required to fulfil the duties of
+"walking lady" and "general utility" at a salary of twenty dollars a
+week.
+
+During this period of her career she performed very many characters,
+and toiled assiduously at her profession. It was then the custom to
+afford the public a great variety of performances, to change the plays
+nightly, and to present two and sometimes three plays upon the same
+evening. The actors were forever busy studying new parts, and, when
+they were not performing, they were rehearsing. "It was a time of hard
+work," writes Miss Stebbins, "of ceaseless activity, and of hard-won
+and scantily accorded appreciation." Miss Cushman had no choice of
+parts; she was not the chief actress of the company; she sustained
+without question all the characters the management assigned to her.
+Her appearance as Meg Merrilies (she acquired subsequently great favor
+by her performance of this character) was due to an incident--the
+illness of Mrs. Chippendale, the actress who usually supported the
+part. It was in the year 1840; the veteran Braham was to appear as
+Henry Bertram. A Meg Merrilies had to be improvised. The obscure
+"utility" actress was called upon to take Mrs. Chippendale's place.
+She might read the part if she could not commit it to memory but
+personate Meg Merrilies after some sort she must. She had never
+especially noticed the part; but as she stood at the side scene, book
+in hand, awaiting her moment of entrance, her ear caught the dialogue
+going on upon the stage between two of the gypsies, "conveying the
+impression that Meg was no longer to be feared or respected--that she
+was no longer in her right mind." This furnished her with a clew to
+the character, and led her to present it upon the stage as the weird
+and startling figure which afterward became so famous. Of course, the
+first performance was but a sketch of her later portrayals of Meg
+Merrilies, yet she made a profound impression. "I had not thought that
+I had done anything remarkable," she wrote, "and when a knock came at
+my dressing-room door, and I heard Braham's voice, my first thought
+was, 'Now what have I done? He is surely displeased with me about
+something.' Imagine my gratification, when Mr. Braham said, 'Miss
+Cushman, I have come to thank you for the most veritable sensation I
+have experienced for a long time. I give you my word, when I saw you
+in that first scene I felt a cold chill run all over me. Where have
+you learned to do anything like that?'"
+
+During her visits to England, Miss Cushman personated Meg Merrilies
+more often than any other character. In America she was also famous
+for her performance of Nancy, in a melodrama founded upon "Oliver
+Twist;" but this part she did not bring with her across the Atlantic.
+She had first played Nancy during her "general utility" days at the
+Park Theatre, when the energy and pathos of her acting powerfully
+affected her audience, and the tradition of her success in the part
+long "lingered in the memory of managers, and caused them, ever and
+anon, as their business interests prompted, to bring great pressure to
+bear upon her for a reproduction of it." Mr. George Vandenhoff
+describes Nancy as Miss Cushman's "greatest part; fearfully natural,
+dreadfully intense, horribly real."
+
+In the winter of 1842 Miss Cushman undertook the management of the
+Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, which was then in rather a fallen
+state. Under her energetic rule, however, the establishment recovered
+its popularity. "She displayed at that day," writes Mr. George
+Vandenhoff--who "starred at the Walnut Street Theatre for six nights
+to small audiences"--"a rude, strong, uncultivated talent. It was not
+till after she had seen and acted with Mr. Macready--which she did the
+next season--that she really brought artistic study and finish to her
+performances." Macready arrived in New York in the autumn of 1843. He
+notes: "The Miss Cushman, who acted Lady Macbeth, interested me much.
+She has to learn her art, but she showed mind and sympathy with me--a
+novelty so refreshing to me on the stage." She discerned the
+opportunity for study and improvement presented by Macready's visit,
+and underwent the fatigue of acting on alternate nights in
+Philadelphia and New York during the term of his engagement at the
+Park Theatre. Her own success was very great. She wrote to her mother
+of her great reception: of her being called out after the play; of the
+"hats and handkerchiefs waved to me; flowers sent to me," etc. In
+October, 1844, she sailed for England in the packet-ship Garrick. She
+had little money with her. A farewell benefit taken in Boston, her
+native city, had not proved very productive, and she had been obliged
+"to make arrangements for the maintenance of her family during her
+absence." And with characteristic prudence she left behind her a
+certain sum, to be in readiness for her, in case failure in England
+should drive her promptly back to America.
+
+No engagement in London had been offered her; but she received, upon
+her arrival, a letter from Macready, proposing that she should join a
+company then being formed to give representations in Paris. She
+thought it prudent to decline this proposal, however, so as to avoid
+entering into anything like rivalry with Miss Helen Faucit, the
+leading actress of the troupe. She visited Paris for a few days, but
+only to sit with the audience of the best French theatres. She
+returned to her dull lodgings in Covent Garden, "awaiting her
+destiny." She was fond, in after years, of referring to the struggles
+and poverty, the hopes and the despair, of her first sojourn in
+London. Her means were nearly exhausted. Sally, the dresser, used to
+relate: "Miss Cushman lived on a mutton-chop a day, and I always
+bought the baker's dozen of muffins for the sake of the extra one, and
+we ate them all, no matter how stale they were, and we never suffered
+from want of appetite in those days." She found herself reduced to her
+last sovereign, when Mr. Maddox, the manager of the Princess's
+Theatre, came to her with a proposal. The watchful Sally reported that
+he had been walking up and down the street for some time early in the
+morning, too early for a visit. "He is anxious," said Miss Cushman. "I
+can make my own terms." He wished her to appear with Forrest, the
+American tragedian, then visiting the London stage for the second and
+last time. She stipulated that she should have her opportunity first,
+and "alone." If successful, she was willing to appear in support of
+Forrest. So it was agreed.
+
+Her first appearance upon the English stage was made on February 14,
+1845; she assumed the character of Bianca, in Dean Milman's rather
+dull tragedy of "Fazio." Her triumph was indisputable. Her intensity
+and vehemence completely carried away the house. As the pit rose at
+Kean's Shylock, so it rose at Charlotte Cushman's Bianca. She wrote to
+her mother in America: "All my success put together, since I have been
+upon the stage, would not come near my success in London." The critics
+described, as the crowning effort of her performance, the energy and
+pathos and abandonment of her appeal to Aldabella, when the wife
+sacrifices her pride, and sinks, "huddled into a heap," at the feet of
+her rival, imploring her to save the life of Fazio. Miss Cushman,
+speaking of her first performance in London, was wont to relate how
+she was so completely overcome, not only by the excitement of the
+scene, but by the nervous agitation of the occasion, that she lost for
+the moment her self-command, and was especially grateful for the
+long-continued applause which gave her time to recover herself. When
+she slowly rose at last and faced the house again, the spectacle of
+its enthusiasm thrilled and impressed her in a manner she could never
+forget. The audience were standing; some had mounted on the benches;
+there was wild waving of hats and handkerchiefs, a storm of cheering,
+great showering of bouquets.
+
+Her second character in London was Lady Macbeth, to the Macbeth of
+Edwin Forrest; but the American actor failed to please, and the
+audience gave free expression to their discontent. Greatly disgusted,
+Forrest withdrew, deluding himself with the belief that he was the
+victim of a conspiracy. Miss Cushman's success knew no abatement. She
+played a round of parts, assisted by James Wallack, Leigh Murray, and
+Mrs. Stirling, appearing now as Rosalind, now as Juliana in "The
+Honeymoon," as Mrs. Haller, as Beatrice, as Julia in "The Hunchback."
+Her second season was even more successful than her first. After a
+long provincial tour she appeared in December, 1845, as Romeo at the
+Haymarket Theatre, then under the management of Mr. Webster, her
+sister Susan assuming the character of Juliet. She had sent for her
+family to share her prosperity, and had established them in a
+furnished house at Bayswater.
+
+Her success as Romeo was very great. The tragedy was played for eighty
+nights. Her performance won applause even from those most opposed to
+the representation of Shakespeare's hero by a woman. For a time her
+intense earnestness of speech and manner, the passion of her
+interviews with Juliet, the fury of her combat with Tybalt, the
+despair of her closing scenes, bore down all opposition, silenced
+criticism, and excited her audience to an extraordinary degree. She
+appeared afterward, but not in London, as Hamlet, following an
+unfortunate example set by Mrs. Siddons; and as Ion in Talfourd's
+tragedy of that name.
+
+In America, toward the close of her career, she even ventured to
+appear as Cardinal Wolsey, obtaining great applause by her exertions
+in the character, and the skill and force of her impersonation. But
+histrionic feats of this kind trespass against good taste, do violence
+to the intentions of the dramatists, and are, in truth, departures
+from the purpose of playing. Miss Cushman had for excuse--in the first
+instance, at any rate--her anxiety to forward the professional
+interests of her sister, who, in truth, had little qualification for
+the stage, apart from her good looks and her graces of manner. The
+sisters had played together in Philadelphia in "The Genoese"--a drama
+written by a young American--when, to give support and encouragement
+to Susan in her personation of the heroine, Charlotte undertook the
+part of her lover. Their success prompted them to appear in "Romeo and
+Juliet." Other plays, in which both could appear, were afterward
+selected--such, for instance, as "Twelfth Night," in which Charlotte
+played Viola to the Olivia of Susan--so that the engagement of one
+might compel the engagement of the other. Susan, however, quitted the
+stage in 1847, to become the wife of Dr. Sheridan Muspratt, of
+Liverpool.
+
+[Illustration: Charlotte Cushman as Mrs. Haller.]
+
+Charlotte Cushman called few new plays into being. Dramas, entitled
+"Infatuation," by James Kenny, in 1845, and "Duchess Elinour," by the
+late H. F. Chorley, in 1854, were produced for her, but were summarily
+condemned by the audience, being scarcely permitted indeed a second
+performance in either case. Otherwise, she did not add to her
+repertory. For many years she led the life of a "star," fulfilling
+brief engagements here and there, appearing now for a term in London,
+and now travelling through the provinces, playing some half a dozen
+characters over and over again. Of these Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine
+and Meg Merrilies were perhaps the most frequently demanded. Her fame
+and fortune she always dated from the immediate recognition she
+obtained upon her first performance in London. But she made frequent
+visits to America; indeed, she crossed the Atlantic "upward of sixteen
+times," says her biographer. In 1854 she took a house in Bolton Row,
+Mayfair, "where for some years she dispensed the most charming and
+genial hospitality," and, notably, entertained Ristori on her first
+visit to England in 1856. Several winters she passed in Rome,
+occupying apartments in the Via Gregoriana, where she cordially
+received a host of friends and visitors of all nations. In 1859 she
+was called to England by her sister's fatal illness; in 1866 she was
+again summoned to England to attend the death-bed of her mother. In
+1860 she was playing in all the chief cities of America. Three years
+later she again visited America, her chief object being to act for the
+benefit of the Sanitary Commission, and aid the sick and wounded
+victims of the civil war. During the late years of her life she
+appeared before the public more as a dramatic reader than as an
+actress. There were long intervals between her theatrical engagements;
+she seemed to quit her profession only to return to it after an
+interval with renewed appetite, and she incurred reproaches because of
+the frequency of her farewells, and the doubt that prevailed as to
+whether her "last appearances" were really to be the "very last." It
+was not until 1874, however, that she took final leave of the New York
+stage, amid extraordinary enthusiasm, with many poetic and other
+ceremonies. She was the subject of addresses in prose and verse. Mr.
+Bryant, after an eloquent speech, tendered her a laurel wreath bound
+with white ribbon resting upon a purple velvet cushion, with a
+suitable inscription embroidered in golden letters; a torchbearers'
+procession escorted her from the theatre to her hotel; she was
+serenaded at midnight, and in her honor Fifth Avenue blazed with
+fireworks. After this came farewells to Philadelphia, Boston and other
+cities, and to these succeeded readings all over the country. It is to
+be said, however, that incessant work had become a necessity with her,
+not because of its pecuniary results, but as a means of obtaining
+mental relief or comparative forgetfulness for a season. During the
+last five or six years of her life she was afflicted with an incurable
+and agonizing malady. Under most painful conditions she toiled
+unceasingly, moving rapidly from place to place, and passing days and
+nights in railway journeys. In a letter to a friend, she writes: "I do
+get so dreadfully depressed about myself, and all things seem so
+hopeless to me at those times, that I pray God to take me quickly at
+any moment, so that I may not torture those I love by letting them see
+my pain. But when the dark hour passes, and I try to forget by
+constant occupation that I have such a load near my heart, then it is
+not so bad." She died almost painlessly at last on February 18, 1876.
+
+Charlotte Cushman may assuredly be accounted an actress of genius in
+right of her originality, her vivid power of depicting emotion, the
+vehemence and intensity of her histrionic manner. Her best successes
+were obtained in tragedy, although she possessed a keen sense of
+humor, and could deliver the witty speeches of Rosalind or of Beatrice
+with excellent point and effect. Her Meg Merrilies will probably be
+remembered as her most impressive achievement. It was really, as she
+played it, a character of her own invention; but, in truth, it taxed
+her intellectual resources far less than her Bianca, her Queen
+Katherine, or her Lady Macbeth. Her physical peculiarities no doubt
+limited the range of her efforts, hindered her advance as an actress,
+or urged her toward exceptional impersonations. Her performances
+lacked femininity, to use Coleridge's word; but in power to stir an
+audience, to touch their sympathies, to kindle their enthusiasm, and
+to compel their applause, she takes rank among the finest players. It
+only remains to add that Miss Stebbins' fervid and affecting biography
+of her friend admirably demonstrates that the woman was not less
+estimable than the actress; that Charlotte Cushman was of noble
+character, intellectual, large and tenderhearted, of exemplary conduct
+in every respect. The simple, direct earnestness of her manner upon
+the mimic scene, characterized her proceedings in real life. She was
+at once the slave and the benefactress of her family; she was
+devotedly fond of children; she was of liberal and generous nature;
+she was happiest when conferring kindness upon others; her career
+abounded in self-sacrifice. She pretended to few accomplishments, to
+little cultivation of a literary sort; but she could write, as Miss
+Stebbins proves, excellent letters, now grave, now gay, now
+reflective, now descriptive, always interesting, and altogether
+remarkable for sound sense and for force and skill of expression. Her
+death was regarded in America almost as a national catastrophe. As
+Miss Stebbins writes, "The press of the entire country bore witness to
+her greatness, and laid their tributes upon her tomb."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following letter of good counsel from Miss Cushman to young Mr.
+Barton is reprinted, by permission of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
+from the "Life and Letters of Charlotte Cushman."
+
+"I think if you have to wait for a while it will do you no harm. You
+seem to me quite frantic for immediate work; but teach yourself quiet
+and repose in the time you are waiting. With half your strength I
+could bear to wait and labor with myself to conquer _fretting_. The
+greatest power in the world is shown in conquest over self. More life
+will be worked out of you by fretting than all the stage-playing in
+the world. God bless you, my poor child. You have indeed trouble
+enough; but you have a strong and earnest spirit, and you have the
+true religion of labor in your heart. Therefore I have no fears for
+you let what will come. Let me hear from you at your leisure, and be
+sure you have no warmer friend than I am and wish to be."
+
+
+
+
+RACHEL
+
+By DUTTON COOK
+
+(1821-1858)
+
+
+[Illustration: Rachel.]
+
+It is told that Rachel Felix was born on March 24, 1821, at Munf, near
+the town of Aarau, in the Canton of Aargau, Switzerland; the
+burgomaster of the district simply noting in his books that upon the
+day stated, at the little village inn, the wife of a poor pedler had
+given birth to a female child. The entry included no mention of
+family, name, or religion, and otherwise the event was not registered
+in any civil or religious record. The father and mother were Abraham
+Felix, a Jew, born in Metz, but of German origin, and Esther Haya, his
+wife. They had wandered about the continent during many years, seeking
+a living and scarcely finding it. Several children were born to them
+by the wayside, as it were, on their journeyings hither and thither:
+Sarah in Germany, Rebecca in Lyons, Dinah in Paris, Rachel in
+Switzerland; and there were other infants who did not long survive
+their birth, succumbing to the austerities of the state of life to
+which they had been called. For a time, perhaps because of their
+numerous progeny, M. and Madame Felix settled in Lyons. Madame Felix
+opened a small shop and dealt in second-hand clothes; M. Felix gave
+lessons in German to the very few pupils he could obtain. About 1830
+the family moved to Paris. They were still miserably poor. The
+children Sarah and Rachel, usually carrying a smaller child in their
+arms or wheeling it with them in a wooden cart, were sent into the
+streets to earn money by singing at the doors of cafes and estaminets.
+A musical amateur, one M. Morin, noticed the girls, questioned them,
+interested himself about them, and finally obtained their admission
+into the Government School of Sacred Music in the Rue Vaugirard.
+Rachel's voice did not promise much, however; as she confessed, she
+could not sing--she could only recite. She had received but the
+scantiest and meanest education; she read with difficulty; she was
+teaching herself writing by copying the manuscript of others.
+Presently she was studying elocution under M. St. Aulaire, an old
+actor retired from the Francais, who took pains with the child,
+instructing her gratuitously and calling her "ma petite diablesse."
+The performances of M. St. Aulaire's pupil were occasionally witnessed
+by the established players, among them Monval of the Gymnase and
+Samson of the Comedie. Monval approved and encouraged the young
+actress, and upon the recommendation of Samson she entered the classes
+of the Conservatoire, over which he presided, with Michelot and
+Provost as his co-professors.
+
+At the Conservatoire Rachel made little progress. All her efforts
+failed to win the good opinion of her preceptors. In despair she
+resolved to abandon altogether the institution, its classes and
+performances. She felt herself neglected, aggrieved, insulted.
+"Tartuffe" had been announced for representation by the pupils; she
+had been assigned the mute part of Flipote, the serving-maid, who
+simply appears upon the scene in the first act that her ears may be
+soundly boxed by Madame Pernelle. To this humiliation she would not
+submit. She hurried to her old friend, St. Aulaire, who consulted
+Monval, who commended her to his manager, M. Poirson. She entered into
+an engagement to serve the Gymnase for a term of three years upon a
+salary of 3,000 francs. M. Poirson was quick to perceive that she was
+not as so many other beginners were; that there was something new and
+startling about the young actress. He obtained for her first
+appearance, from M. Paul Duport, a little melodrama in two acts. It
+was called "La Vendeenne," and owed its more striking scenes to "The
+Heart of Midlothian." After the manner of Jeanie Deans, Genevieve, the
+heroine of the play, footsore and travel-stained, seeks the presence
+of the Empress Josephine to implore the pardon of a Vendean peasant
+condemned to death for following George Cadoudal. "La Vendeenne,"
+produced on April 24, 1837, and received with great applause, was
+played on sixty successive nights, but not to very crowded audiences.
+The press scarcely noticed the new actress. The critic of the _Journal
+des Debats_, however, while rashly affirming that Rachel was not a
+phenomenon and would never be extolled as a wonder, carefully noted
+certain of the merits and characteristics of her performance. "She was
+an unskilled child, but she possessed heart, soul, intellect. There
+was something bold, abrupt, uncouth about her aspect, gait, and
+manner. She was dressed simply and truthfully in the coarse woollen
+gown of a peasant-girl; her hands were red; her voice was harsh and
+untrained, but powerful; she acted without effort or exaggeration; she
+did not scream or gesticulate unduly; she seemed to perceive
+intuitively the feeling she was required to express, and could
+interest the audience greatly, moving them to tears. She was not
+pretty, but she pleased," etc. Bouffe, who witnessed this
+representation, observed: "What an odd little girl! Assuredly there is
+something in her. But her place is not here." So judged Samson also,
+becoming more and more aware of the merits of his former pupil. She
+was transferred to the Francais to play the leading characters in
+tragedy, at a salary of 4,000 francs a year. M. Poirson did not
+hesitate to cancel her agreement with him. Indeed, he had been
+troubled with thinking how he could employ his new actress. She was
+not an _ingenue_ of the ordinary type; she could not be classed among
+soubrettes. There were no parts suited to her in the light comedies of
+Scribe and his compeers, which constituted the chief repertory of the
+Gymnase.
+
+It was on June 12, 1838, that Rachel, as Camille, in "Horace," made
+her first appearance upon the stage of the Theatre Francais. The
+receipts were but seven hundred and fifty francs; it was an
+unfashionable period of the year; Paris was out of town; the weather
+was most sultry. There were many Jews in the house, it was said,
+resolute to support the daughter of Israel, and her success was
+unequivocal; nevertheless, a large share of the applause of the night
+was confessedly carried off by the veteran Joanny, who played Horace.
+On June 16th Rachel made her second appearance, personating Emilie in
+the "Cinna," of Corneille. The receipts fell to five hundred and fifty
+francs. She repeated her performance of Camille on the 23d; the
+receipts were only three hundred francs! the poorest house, perhaps,
+she ever played to in Paris. She afterward appeared as Hermione in
+"Andromaque," Amenaide in "Tancrede," Eriphile in "Iphigenie," Monime
+in "Mithridate," and Roxane in "Bajazet," the receipts now gradually
+rising, until, in October, when she played Hermione for the tenth
+time, six thousand francs were taken at the doors, an equal amount
+being received in November, when, for the sixth time, she appeared as
+Camille. Paris was now at her feet. In 1839, called upon to play two
+or three times per week, she essayed but one new part, Esther, in
+Racine's tragedy of that name. The public was quite content that she
+should assume again and again the characters in which she had already
+triumphed. In 1840 she added to her list of impersonations Laodie and
+Pauline in Corneille's "Nicomede" and "Polyeucte," and Marie Stuart in
+Lebrun's tragedy. In 1841 she played no new parts. In 1842 she first
+appeared as Chimene in "Le Cid," as Ariane, and as Fredegonde in a
+wretched tragedy by Le Mercier.
+
+Rachel had saved the Theatre Francais, had given back to the stage the
+masterpieces of the French classical drama. It was very well for
+Thackeray to write from Paris in 1839 that the actress had "only
+galvanized the corpse, not revivified.... Racine will never come to
+life again and cause audiences to weep as of yore." He predicted:
+"Ancient French tragedy, red-heeled, patched, and beperiwigged, lies
+in the grave, and it is only the ghost of it that the fair Jewess has
+raised." But it was something more than a galvanized animation that
+Rachel had imparted to the old drama of France. During her career of
+twenty years, her performances of Racine and Corneille filled the
+coffers of the Francais, and it may be traced to her influence and
+example that the classic plays still keep their place upon the stage
+and stir the ambition of the players. But now the committee of the
+Francais had to reckon with their leading actress, and pay the price
+of the prosperity she had brought them. They cancelled her engagement
+and offered her terms such as seemed to them liberal beyond all
+precedent. But the more they offered, so much the more was demanded.
+In the first instance, the actress being a minor, negotiations were
+carried on with her father, the committee denouncing in the bitterest
+terms the avarice and rapacity of M. Felix. But when Rachel became
+competent to deal on her own behalf, she proved herself every whit as
+exacting as her sire. She became a _societaire_ in 1843, entitled to
+one of the twenty-four shares into which the profits of the
+institution were divided. She was rewarded, moreover, with a salary of
+forty-two thousand francs per annum; and it was estimated that by her
+performances during her _conge_ of three or four months every year she
+earned a further annual income of thirty thousand francs. She met with
+extraordinary success upon her provincial tours; enormous profits
+resulted from her repeated visits to Holland and Belgium, Germany,
+Russia, and England. But, from first to last, Rachel's connection with
+the Francais was an incessant quarrel. She was capricious, ungrateful,
+unscrupulous, extortionate. She struggled to evade her duties, to do
+as little as she possibly could in return for the large sums she
+received from the committee. She pretended to be too ill to play in
+Paris, the while she was always well enough to hurry away and obtain
+great rewards by her performances in the provinces. She wore herself
+out by her endless wanderings hither and thither, her continuous
+efforts upon the scene. She denied herself all rest, or slept in a
+travelling carriage to save time in her passage from one country
+theatre to another. Her company complained that they fell asleep as
+they acted, her engagements denying them proper opportunities of
+repose. The newspapers at one time set forth the acrimonious letters
+she had interchanged with the committee of the Francais. Finally she
+tended her resignation of the position she occupied as _societaire_;
+the committee took legal proceedings to compel her to return to her
+duties; some concessions were made on either side, however, and a
+reconciliation was patched up.
+
+The new tragedies, "Judith" and "Cleopatre," written for the actress
+by Madame de Girardin, failed to please, nor did success attend the
+production of M. Romand's "Catherine II.," M. Soumet's "Jeanne d'Arc,"
+in which, to the indignation of the critics, the heroine was seen at
+last surrounded by real flames! or "Le Vieux de la Montagne" of M.
+Latour de St. Ybars. With better fortune Rachel appeared in the same
+author's "Virginie," and in the "Lucrece" of Ponsard. Voltaire's
+"Oreste" was revived for her in 1845 that she might play Electre. She
+personated Racine's "Athalie" in 1847, assuming long white locks,
+painting furrows on her face, and disguising herself beyond
+recognition, in her determination to seem completely the character she
+had undertaken. In 1848 she played Agrippine in the "Britannicus" of
+Racine, and dressed in plain white muslin, and clasping the
+tri-colored flag to her heart, she delivered the "Marseillaise" to
+please the Revolutionists, lending the air strange meaning and passion
+by the intensity of her manner, as she half chanted, half recited the
+words, her voice now shrill and harsh, now deep, hollow, and
+reverberating--her enraptured auditors likening it in effect to
+distant thunder.
+
+To the dramatists who sought to supply her with new parts, Rachel was
+the occasion of much chagrin and perplexity. After accepting Scribe's
+"Adrienne Lecouvreur" she rejected it absolutely only to resume it
+eagerly, however, when she learned that the leading character was to
+be undertaken by Mademoiselle Rose Cheri. His "Chandelier" having met
+with success, Rachel applied to De Musset for a play. She was offered,
+it seems, "Les Caprices de Marianne," but meantime the poet's
+"Bettine" failed, and the actress distrustfully turned away from him.
+An undertaking to appear in the "Medea" of Legouve landed her in a
+protracted lawsuit. The courts condemned her in damages to the amount
+of two hundred francs for every day she delayed playing the part of
+Medea after the date fixed upon by the management for the commencement
+of the rehearsals of the tragedy. She paid nothing, however, for the
+management failed to fix any such date. M. Legouve was only avenged in
+the success his play obtained, in a translated form, at the hands of
+Madame Ristori. In lieu of "Medea" Rachel produced "Rosemonde," a
+tragedy by M. Latour de St. Ybars, which failed completely. Other
+plays written for her were the "Valeria" of MM. Lacroix and Maquet, in
+which she personated two characters--the Empress Messalina and her
+half sister, Lysisca, a courtesan; the "Diane," of M. Augier, an
+imitation of Victor Hugo's "Marion Delorme;" "Lady Tartuffe," a comedy
+by Madame de Girardin; and "La Czarine," by M. Scribe. She appeared
+also in certain of the characters originally contrived for
+Mademoiselle Mais, such as La Tisbe in Victor Hugo's "Angelo," and the
+heroines of Dumas's "Mademoiselle de Belle Isle" and of "Louise de
+Lignerolles" by MM. Legouve and Dinaux.
+
+The classical drama of France has not found much favor in England and
+America. We are all, perhaps, apt to think with Thackeray
+disrespectfully of the "old tragedies--well-nigh dead, and full time
+too--in which half a dozen characters appear and shout sonorous
+Alexandrines for half a dozen hours;" or we are disposed to agree with
+Mr. Matthew Arnold, that their drama, being fundamentally insufficient
+both in substance and in form, the French, with all their gifts, have
+not, as we have, an adequate form for poetry of the highest class.
+Those who remember Rachel, however, can testify that she breathed the
+most ardent life into the frigid remains of Racine and Corneille,
+relumed them with Promethean heat, and showed them to be instinct with
+the truest and intensest passion--When she occupied the scene, there
+could be no thought of the old artificial times of hair powder and
+rouge, periwigs and patches, in connection with the characters she
+represented. Phedre and Hermione, Pauline and Camille, interpreted by
+her genius, became as real and natural, warm and palpitating, as
+Constance or Lady Macbeth could have been when played by Mrs. Siddons,
+or as Juliet when impersonated by Miss O'Neill. Before Rachel came, it
+had been thought that the new romantic drama of MM. Hugo and Dumas,
+because of its greater truth to nature, had given the _coup de grace_
+to the old classic plays; but the public, at her bidding, turned
+gladly from the spasms and the rant of "Angelo" and "Angele," "Antony"
+and "Hernani," to the old-world stories, the formal tragedies of the
+seventeenth century poet-dramatists of France. The actress fairly
+witched her public. There was something of magic in her very presence
+upon the scene.
+
+None could fail to be impressed by the aspect of the slight, pallid
+woman who seemed to gain height by reason of her slenderness, who
+moved toward her audience with such simple natural majesty, who wore
+and conducted her fluent classical draperies with such admirable and
+perfect grace. It was as though she had lived always so attired in
+tunic, peplum, and pallium--had known no other dress--not that she was
+of modern times playing at antiquity, she was the muse of Greek
+tragedy in person. The physical traditions of her race found
+expression or incarnation in her. Her face was of refined Judaical
+character--the thin nose slightly curved, the lower lip a trifle full,
+but the mouth exquisitely shaped, and the teeth small, white, and
+even. The profuse black-brown hair was smoothed and braided from the
+broad, low, white, somewhat over-hanging brow, beneath which in shadow
+the keen black eyes flashed out their lightnings, or glowed luridly
+like coals at a red heat. Her gestures were remarkable for their
+dignity and appropriateness; the long, slight arms lent themselves
+surprisingly to gracefulness; the beautifully formed hands, with the
+thin tapering fingers and the pink filbert nails, seemed always
+tremblingly on the alert to add significance or accent to her
+speeches. But there was eloquence in her very silence and complete
+repose. She could relate a whole history by her changes of facial
+expression. She possessed special powers of self-control; she was
+under subjection to both art and nature when she seemed to abandon
+herself the most absolutely to the whirlwind of her passion. There
+were no undue excesses of posture, movement, or tone. Her attitudes,
+it was once said, were those of "a Pythoness cast in bronze." Her
+voice thrilled and awed at its first note: it was so strangely deep,
+so solemnly melodious, until, stirred by passion as it were, it became
+thick and husky in certain of its tones; but it was always audible,
+articulate, and telling, whether sunk to a whisper or raised
+clamorously. Her declamation was superb, if, as critics reported,
+there had been decline in this matter during those later years of her
+life, to which my own acquaintance with Rachel's acting is confined. I
+saw her first at the Francais in 1849, and I was present at her last
+performance at the St. James' Theatre in 1853, having in the interval
+witnessed her assumption of certain of her most admired characters.
+And it may be true, too, that, like Kean, she was more and more
+disposed, as the years passed, to make "points," to slur over the less
+important scenes, and reserve herself for a grand outburst or a
+vehement climax, sacrificing thus many of the subtler graces,
+refinements, and graduations of elocution, for which she had once been
+famous. To English ears, it was hardly an offence that she broke up
+the sing-song of the rhymed tirades of the old plays and gave them a
+more natural sound, regardless of the traditional methods of speech of
+Clairon, Le Kain, and others of the great French players of the past.
+
+[Illustration: Rachel as the Muse of Greek Tragedy.]
+
+Less success than had been looked for attended Rachel's invasion of
+the repertory of Mlle. Mars, an actress so idolized by the Parisians
+that her sixty years and great portliness of form were not thought
+hindrances to her personation of the youthful heroines of modern
+comedy and drama. But Rachel's fittest occupation and her greatest
+triumphs were found in the classical poetic plays. She, perhaps,
+intellectualized too much the creations of Hugo, Dumas, and Scribe;
+gave them excess of majesty. Her histrionic style was too exalted an
+ideal for the conventional characters of the drama of her own time; it
+was even said of her that she could not speak its prose properly or
+tolerably. She disliked the hair-powder necessary to Adrienne
+Lecouvreur and Gabrielle de Belle Isle, although her beauty, for all
+its severity, did not lose picturesqueness in the costumes of the time
+of Louis XV. As Gabrielle she was more girlish and gentle, pathetic,
+and tender, than was her wont, while the signal fervor of her speech
+addressed to Richelieu, beginning, "Vous mentez, Monsieur le Duc,"
+stirred the audience to the most excited applause.
+
+Rachel was seen upon the stage for the last time at Charleston on
+December 17, 1856. She played Adrienne Lecouvreur. She had been
+tempted to America by the prospect of extravagant profits. It had been
+dinned into her ears that Jenny Lind, by thirty-eight performances in
+America, had realized seventeen hundred thousand francs. Why might not
+she, Rachel, receive as much? And then, she was eager to quit Paris.
+There had been strange worship there of Madame Ristori, even in the
+rejected part of Medea. But already Rachel's health was in a
+deplorable state. Her constitution, never very strong, had suffered
+severely from the cruel fatigues, the incessant exertions, she had
+undergone. It may be, too, that the deprivations and sufferings of her
+childhood now made themselves felt as over-due claims that could be no
+longer denied or deferred. She forced herself to play, in fulfilment
+of her engagement, but she was languid, weak, emaciated; she coughed
+incessantly, her strength was gone; she was dying slowly but certainly
+of phthisis. And she appeared before an audience that applauded her,
+it is true, but cared nothing for Racine and Corneille, knew little of
+the French language, and were urgent that she should sing the
+"Marseillaise" as she had sung it in 1848! It was forgotten, or it was
+not known in America, that the actress had long since renounced
+revolutionary sentiments to espouse the cause of the Second Empire.
+She performed all her more important characters, however, at New York,
+Philadelphia, and Boston. Nor was the undertaking commercially
+disappointing, if it did not wholly satisfy expectation. She returned
+to France possessed of nearly three hundred thousand francs as her
+share of the profits of her forty-two performances in the United
+States; but she returned to die. The winter of 1856 she passed at
+Cairo. She returned to France in the spring of 1857, but her
+physicians forbade her to remain long in Paris. In September she moved
+again to the South, finding her last retreat in the villa Sardou, at
+Cannet, a little village in the environs of Cannes. She lingered to
+January 3, 1858. The Theatre Francais closed its doors when news
+arrived of her death, and again on the day of her funeral. The body
+was embalmed and brought to Paris for interment in the cemetery of
+Pere la Chaise, the obsequies being performed in accordance with the
+Jewish rites. The most eminent of the authors and actors of France
+were present, and funeral orations were delivered by MM. Jules Janin,
+Bataille, and Auguste Maquet. Victor Hugo was in exile; or, as Janin
+announced, the author of "Angelo" would not have withheld the tribute
+of his eulogy upon the sad occasion.
+
+
+
+
+EDWIN BOOTH[15]
+
+         [Footnote 15: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(1833-1893)
+
+
+[Illustration: Edwin Booth.]
+
+The great actor who has lately left the world furnished, in his own
+remarkable character and shining career, a striking exception to the
+popular tradition that men of genius are the fathers of ordinary sons.
+The father of Edwin Booth was in his time one of the glories of the
+English and American stage; but, even in his case the strict rule
+wavered, for his father, though not a genius, was yet a man of
+exceptional character; one who marked out a clear path for himself in
+the world, and walked in it to the end.
+
+How far back the line of the family can be traced, or what was its
+origin, we do not know; but it has lately been said that the family
+was of Hebrew extraction, and came into England from Spain, where it
+had been known by the Spanish name, Cabana. The branch of the family
+that left Spain to live in England translated the name into the
+language of their new home, and from "Cabana," a shepherd's cabin,
+made the English equivalent, Booth.
+
+However it may have been in this case, it was quite in the order of
+things that this change of name should be made. It has been done
+everywhere in Europe since very early times, and is doing to-day in
+this country by new comers from all parts of the old world.
+
+The first of the Booths we read of in England was a silversmith,
+living in Bloomsbury, London, in the latter half of the last century.
+He had a son, Richard, who was bred to the law, but who was so imbued
+with the republican ideas rife at the time that he actually came to
+America to fight in the cause of Independence! He was taken prisoner,
+and carried back to England, where, not without some struggles, he
+again applied himself to the practice of the law, and in time made a
+fortune. He did not, however, forget America, and we are told that he
+had, hanging in his house, a portrait of Washington, which he expected
+all his visitors to salute.
+
+One of the ways in which the republicans of that time showed where
+their sympathies lay, was in naming their children after the heroes of
+Greece and Rome; and accordingly we find Richard Booth calling his
+eldest son, Junius Brutus Booth, after the Roman patriot. This son was
+born in London, in 1796. His father was a man of scholarly tastes, and
+gave the boy a classical education, but it was long before he showed a
+marked inclination for any particular walk in life. He tried his hand
+at painting, sculpture, and poetry; and for a while studied law with
+his father. But, when the time came to choose, he gave his voice for
+the navy, and would have joined the brig Boxer, then fitting out for
+Nova Scotia. But, as war threatened between England and America, he
+was induced, by the strong persuasions of his father, not to run the
+risk of being forced to fight against America. He then decided to go
+upon the stage, and, in spite of his father's remonstrances, carried
+out his purpose. After some unimportant essays he at last succeeded in
+attracting public attention, and before long showed such unmistakable
+ability in dealing with difficult parts, that the public, till that
+time undivided in its enthusiasm for Kean, awoke to the fact that a
+dangerous rival threatened the security of their idol's throne. In the
+midst of his successes, however, Booth married and left England with
+his wife for a honeymoon trip to the West Indies. He had intended to
+return at once to England, but he was persuaded to prolong his journey
+and to visit New York. After playing a successful engagement there he
+went to Richmond, where he was no less prosperous. He next visited New
+Orleans and acquired such facility in speaking French that he played
+parts in French plays more than acceptably, and distinguished himself
+by acting Orestes in Racine's "Andromaque," to the delight of the
+French-speaking population. His accent is said to have been remarkable
+for its purity. Returning to New York, he acted Othello to Forrest's
+Iago; but, in the midst of his successes, the death of two of his
+children produced a temporary insanity, and this was made worse by the
+news of the death of his favorite son, Henry Byron, in London, of
+small-pox. This grievous loss was, however, to be made up to him by
+his son, Edwin, in whom he was to find the counterpart of himself,
+softened, refined, ennobled, while between father and son was to grow
+a strong attachment, a bond of mutual affection to last as long as
+life should endure.
+
+Edwin Thomas Booth was born at Bel Air, Maryland, November 12, 1833.
+He was named Edwin, after his father's friend, Edwin Forrest, and
+Thomas, after Thomas Flynn, the actor, whom the elder Booth had known
+intimately in London. His son dropped the name of Thomas, later in
+life, and was only known to the public by the name of Edwin Booth.
+Owing to his father's wandering life Edwin had few advantages of
+education, but he made the most of his opportunities, and indeed was a
+student of good letters all his life, turning the light of all he
+learned from books and experience upon his art. His youth is described
+as reticent, and marked by a strong individuality, with a deep
+sympathy for his father, early manifested; his father, a much
+enduring, suffering man, strongly in need of sympathy, knowing to
+repay it, too, in kind.
+
+Edwin Booth made his first appearance on the stage in 1849 at the
+Boston Museum in the youthful part of Tressil, in Colley Cibber's
+version of Shakespeare's "Richard III." It had been against his
+father's wishes that he had adopted the stage as a profession; but,
+as his father had done in a like case before him he persevered, and
+soon had the satisfaction of convincing his parent that he had decided
+wisely. He did not at once come to New York after his success in
+Boston, but went to Providence and to Philadelphia, acting Cassio in
+"Othello," and Wilford in the "Iron Chest," a part he soon made his
+own and in which he made his first appearance in New York, playing at
+the National Theatre in Chatham Street, in 1850. The next year he
+played Richard III. for the first time, taking the part unexpectedly
+to fill the place of his father, who was suddenly ill. In 1852 he went
+out with his father to San Francisco, where his brother, Junius Brutus
+Booth, Jr., was the manager of a theatre; and the father and his two
+sons acted together. At Sacramento, we are told that the incident
+occurred which led Edwin Booth to think of acting Hamlet, a part which
+was to become as closely associated with his name as that of Richard
+III. was with his father. He was dressed for the part of Jaffier in
+Otway's play, "Venice Preserved," when some one said to him "You look
+like Hamlet, why not play it?" It was, however, some time before he
+ventured to assume the part. In October, 1852, the father and son
+parted, not to meet again. The elder Booth went to New Orleans, and
+after playing for a week took passage in a steamboat on the
+Mississippi, and catching a severe cold succumbed after a few days'
+illness and died. For a while after his father's death Edwin suffered
+greatly from poverty and from the hardships of his precarious life,
+unsustained as he now was by the affection and encouragement of a
+father who, with all his faults, and in all the misfortunes brought on
+by serious ill-health and some aberrations that were the effect of
+ill-health had always been an affectionate and true friend. But a
+talent such as Edwin Booth possessed, united to a high character, and
+to a dauntless spirit, could not long be hid, and in a short time his
+name began to be heard of as that of one destined to great ends. In
+1854 he went to Australia as a member of Laura Keene's company. He had
+made a deep impression in California, acting such parts as Richard
+III., Shylock, Macbeth, and Hamlet, and on returning there from
+Australia that first impression was greatly strengthened. On leaving
+San Francisco he received various testimonials showing the high esteem
+in which his acting was held by the educated part of the community;
+but throughout Edwin Booth's career, the interest he excited in the
+vast audiences that followed him was by no means confined to the
+self-styled "best people." Though he never "played to the gallery,"
+the heart of the gallery was as much with him as the heart of the
+boxes, and he knew the value of its rapt silence as well as of its
+stormy voices.
+
+In Boston, in 1857, he played Sir Giles Overreach, in Massinger's "A
+New Way to Pay Old Debts," and the profound impression he made in it
+confirmed him in his purpose to devote himself to tragic acting. The
+story of an actor's life is seldom eventful, and Mr. Booth's history,
+after his first assured success, is the record of a long line of
+triumphs without a failure. The most remarkable of these triumphs was
+at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, where he acted Hamlet to
+large and ever-increasing audiences for over one hundred successive
+nights, that is, from November 21, 1864, to March 24, 1865. On this
+occasion a gold medal was presented to the actor by friends and
+admirers in New York; the list of subscribers including the names of
+many well-known citizens. The Winter Garden Theatre was managed by
+Booth and his brother-in-law, the clever actor, J. S. Clarke, until
+Booth bought out Clarke and assumed the entire management himself. In
+1865 the terrible tragedy occurred which blighted Booth's whole
+after-life, and for a time drove him from the stage. He did not act
+again until 1866; in 1867 the theatre was destroyed by fire, and in
+1868 the corner-stone of a new building, to be known as Booth's
+Theatre, was laid, and in a short time New York was in possession, for
+the first time, of a thoroughly appointed, comfortable, and handsome
+theatre. This building was made famous by a number of Shakespearian
+revivals that for beauty, magnificence, and scenic poetry have, we
+believe, never been equalled. We doubt if "Hamlet," "Julius Caesar," or
+"Romeo and Juliet," have ever been presented with more satisfying
+completeness to the eye and to the imagination than in this theatre by
+Mr. Booth and his company. Although the theatre was in existence for
+thirteen years, from 1868 to 1882, when it was finally closed, Mr.
+Booth's management lasted only about half that time. The speculation
+was not a fortunate one for the actor; the expenses ate up all the
+profits, and Mr. Booth was bankrupted by his venture. He paid all his
+debts, however, and went bravely to work to build up a new fortune. He
+made a tour of the South, which was one long ovation, and in a season
+of eight weeks in San Francisco he took in $96,000.
+
+In 1880 he went to England and remained there two years. In 1882 he
+visited Germany, acting in both countries with great success, and in
+1883 he returned home and made a tour of America, repeating everywhere
+his old triumphs, and winning golden opinions from all classes of his
+countrymen.
+
+Edwin Booth died in New York, June 7, 1893, at the Players' Club,
+where he had lived for the last few years of his life. This was a
+building erected by his own munificence, fitted up with luxurious
+completeness, and presented to a society of his professional brethren
+for the use and behoof of his fellow-artists, reserving for himself
+only the modest apartment where he chose to live, in sympathetic touch
+with those who still pursued the noble art he had relinquished.
+
+Mr. Booth was twice married. By his first wife, Miss Mary Devlin, who
+died in 1863, he had one child, a daughter; by the second, Miss
+McVicker, he had no children. She died in 1881.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH JEFFERSON[16]
+
+         [Footnote 16: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
+
+By CLARENCE COOK
+
+(BORN 1829)
+
+
+[Illustration: Joseph Jefferson.]
+
+Joseph Jefferson, distinguished, among his other brilliant successes
+as an actor, as the creator for this generation of the character of
+Rip Van Winkle in the play dramatized from the story in Washington
+Irving's "Sketch Book," was the third of his name in a family of
+actors. The first of the three was born at Plymouth, England, in 1774.
+He was the son of Thomas Jefferson, a comedian of merit, the
+contemporary and friend of Garrick, and came to this country in 1795,
+making his first appearance in New York on February 10, 1796, in the
+part of Squire Richard in "The Provoked Husband." Dunlap says that,
+young as he was, he was already an artist, and that among the men of
+the company he held the first place. He lived in this country for
+thirty-six years, admired as an actor and respected as a man. He died
+at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1832.
+
+Joseph Jefferson, the second, was born in Philadelphia in 1804. He
+inherited the laughing blue eyes and sunny disposition of his father,
+but he had not his talent as an actor; he is said to have been best in
+old men's parts. His taste, however, led him to scene-painting rather
+than to acting; yet his skill in either direction was not enough to
+win success, and, in spite of well-meant efforts, he lived and died a
+poor man: ill luck pursuing him to the end of his days, when he was
+carried off by yellow fever at Mobile in 1842, just as his
+unprosperous skies were brightening a little. His son bears
+affectionate witness to the upright character of the man and to his
+indomitable cheerfulness in the most adverse circumstances. He spared
+no pains in bringing up his children in good ways, and he was
+earnestly seconded by his wife, a heroic figure in her humble sphere,
+whose tact and courage not seldom saved the family bark when it was
+drifting in shoal water. Mrs. Jefferson came of French parents, and
+was a Mrs. Burke, a widow with one child, a son, when she married Mr.
+Jefferson. Her son tells us that she had been one of the most
+attractive stars in America, the leading prima donna of the country;
+but she bore her changed fortune, as the wife of an unsuccessful actor
+and manager, with no less dignity on the stage of real life, where no
+applause was to be had but what came from those who loved her as
+mother, wife, and friend.
+
+This, then, was the family circle in which our Joseph Jefferson
+passed his earliest years, the formative period of his life. There
+were the kind-hearted, easy-going father, the practical, energetic
+mother, a sister, and the half-brother, Charles Burke, whose
+after-reputation as an actor lives in the pages of Jefferson's
+autobiography enshrined in words of warm but judicious appreciation.
+"Although only a half-brother," says Jefferson, "he seemed like a
+father to me, and there was a deep and strange affection between us."
+Nor must mention be forgotten of one other member of the family: Mary,
+his foster-mother, as Jefferson affectionately calls her, "a faithful,
+loving, truthful friend, rather than a servant, with no ambition or
+thought for herself, living only for us, and totally unconscious of
+her own existence."
+
+Joseph Jefferson, the third of the name, and in whom the talent of his
+grandfather was to reappear enriched with added graces of his own, was
+born in Philadelphia in 1829. He tells us that his earliest
+recollections are connected with a theatre in Washington. This was a
+rickety, old, frame-building adjoining the house in which his father
+lived as manager, the door at the end of the hall-way opening directly
+upon the stage; and as a toddling little chap in a short frock he was
+allowed full run of the place. Thus "behind the scenes" was his first
+playground; and here, "in this huge and dusty toy-shop made for
+children of a larger growth," he got his first experience. He was
+early accustomed to face an audience; for, being the son of the
+manager and almost living in the theatre, he was always pressed into
+the service whenever a small child was wanted, and "often went on the
+stage in long clothes as a property infant in groups of happy
+peasantry." His first dim recollection of such a public appearance is
+as the "child," in Kotzebue's play, "Pizarro," who is carried across
+the bridge by Rolla. His next appearance was in a new entertainment,
+called "Living Statues," where he struck attitudes as "Ajax Defying
+the Lightning," or "The Dying Gladiator." At four years of age he made
+a hit by accompanying T. D. Rice, the original "Jim Crow," as a
+miniature copy of that once famous character, and the first money he
+earned was the sum of $24 thrown upon the stage in silver from pit and
+gallery, to reward his childish dancing and singing on that occasion.
+
+Thus early wedded to the stage, Jefferson followed the fortunes of his
+family, and led with them a wandering life for many years, growing, by
+slow degrees and constant, varied practice, to the perfection of his
+prime. In 1838 his father led the flock to Chicago, just then grown
+from an Indian village to a thriving place of two thousand
+inhabitants, where he was to join his brother in the management of a
+new theatre, then building. Jefferson's account of the journey is a
+striking picture, at once amusing and pathetic, of the changes that
+have been wrought by fifty years. The real privations and hardships of
+the trip are veiled in the actor's story by his quiet humor and his
+disposition to see everything in a cheerful light. Always quizzing his
+own youthful follies, he cannot conceal from us by any mischievous
+anecdotes his essential goodness of nature, his merry helpfulness, his
+unselfish devotion to the welfare of the others, or the pluck with
+which he met the accidents of this itinerant life. From Chicago, where
+their success was not brilliant, the family went by stage to
+Springfield, where, by a singular chance, they were rescued from the
+danger that threatened them in the closing of the theatre by a
+municipal law trumped up in the interest of religious revivalists, by
+the adroitness of a young lawyer, who proved to be none other than
+Abraham Lincoln. In Memphis, when bad business had closed the theatre,
+young Jefferson's pluck and ready wit saved the family purse from
+absolute collapse. A city ordinance had been passed, requiring that
+all carts, drays, and public vehicles should be numbered; and the boy,
+hearing of this, called at the mayor's office, and, explaining the
+situation that had obliged his father to exchange acting for
+sign-painting, applied in his name for the contract for painting the
+numbers--and obtained it! The new industry furnished father and son
+with a month's work, and some jobs at sign-painting helped still
+further to make life easier.
+
+From Memphis the family went to Mobile, where they hoped to rest after
+their long wanderings, and where it was also hoped the children,
+Joseph and his sister, might be put to school. But the yellow fever
+was raging in Mobile, and they had been in the city only a fortnight
+when Mr. Jefferson was attacked by the disease and died. In Mobile,
+too, the good Mary died, and Mrs. Jefferson was left alone to care for
+herself and her children as she could. She had no longer a heart for
+acting, and she decided to open a boarding-house for actors, while
+Joseph and his sister earned a small stipend by variety work in the
+theatre.
+
+More years of hardship followed--the trio of mother and children
+wandering over the country, south and west: in Mississippi and Mexico,
+seeing life in all its phases of ill luck and disappointment, with
+faint gleams of success here and there, but meeting all with a spirit
+of such cheerful bravery as makes the darkest experience yield a
+pleasure in the telling. Surely, it might soften the heart of the
+sourest enemy of the stage to read the spirit in which this family met
+the long-continued crosses of their professional life.
+
+[Illustration: Joe Jefferson as Bob Acres.]
+
+Joseph Jefferson tells the story of his career so modestly, that it is
+hard to discover just when it was that success first began to turn a
+smiling face upon his efforts. Yet it would seem as if, for himself,
+the day broke when he created the part of Asa Trenchard in "Our
+American Cousin." He says that up to 1858, when he acted that part, he
+had been always more or less a "legitimate" actor, that is, one who
+has his place with others in a stock company, and never thinks of
+himself as an individual and single attraction--a star, as it is
+called. While engaged with this part, it suddenly occurred to him that
+in acting Asa Trenchard he had, for the first time in his life on the
+stage, spoken a pathetic speech; up to that time all with him had been
+pure comedy. Now he had found a part in which he could move his
+audience to tears as well as smiles. This was to him a delightful
+discovery, and he looked about for a new part in which he could repeat
+the experiment. One day in summer, as he lay in the loft of a barn
+reading in a book he well calls delightful, Pierre Irving's "Life and
+Letters of Washington Irving," he learned that the great writer had
+seen him act the part of Goldfinch, in Holcroft's "Road to Ruin," and
+that he reminded him of his grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, "in look,
+gesture, size, and make." Naturally pleased to find himself
+remembered and written of by such a man, he lay musing on the
+compliment, when the "Sketch Book" and the story of Rip van Winkle
+came suddenly into his mind. "There was to me," he writes, "magic in
+the sound of the name as I repeated it. Why was not this the very
+character I wanted? An American story by an American author was surely
+just the thing suited to an American actor."
+
+There had been three or four plays founded on this story, but
+Jefferson says that none of them were good. His father and his
+half-brother had acted the part before him, but nothing that he
+remembered gave him any hope that he could make a good play out of
+existing material. He therefore went to work to construct a play for
+himself, and his story of how he did it, told in two pages of his
+book, and with the most unconscious air in the world, reveals the
+whole secret of Jefferson's acting: its humor and pathos subtly
+mingled, its deep humanity, its pure poetry--the assemblage of
+qualities, in fine, that make it the most perfect as well as the most
+original product of the American stage.
+
+Yet the play, even in the form he gave it, did not satisfy him, nor
+did it make the impression in America that he desired. It was not
+until five years later that Dion Boucicault, in London, remade it for
+Jefferson; and it was in that city it first saw the light in its new
+form, September 5, 1865. It was at once successful, and had a run of
+one hundred and seventy-five nights.
+
+With his Asa Trenchard and his Rip van Winkle will ever be associated
+in the loving memory of play-goers his Bob Acres in Sheridan's
+"Rivals," thought by many to be his capital part--a personification
+where all the foibles of the would-be man-of-the-world: his
+self-conceit, his brag, his cowardice, are transformed into virtues
+and captivate our hearts, dissolved in the brimming humor which yet
+never overflows the just measure, so degenerating into farce.
+
+Between the two productions of Rip van Winkle in New York and in
+London, Jefferson had had many strange experiences. His wife died in
+1861, and he broke up his household in New York, and leaving three of
+his children at school in that city, he left home with his eldest son
+and went to California. After acting in San Francisco, he sailed for
+Australia, where he was warmly received; thence went to the other
+British colonies in that region, touched on his return at Lima and
+Callao and Panama, at which place he took a sailing-packet for London,
+and after his great success in that city returned to America in 1866.
+In 1867 he married, in Chicago, Miss Sarah Warren, and since that time
+his life has flowed on in an even stream, happy in all its relations,
+private and public, crowned with honors, not of a gaudy or brilliant
+kind, but solid and enduring. His art is henceforth part and parcel of
+the rich treasure of the American stage.
+
+[Signature of the author.]
+
+
+
+
+ADELINA PATTI
+
+By FREDERICK F. BUFFEN
+
+(BORN 1843)
+
+
+[Illustration: Adelina Patti.]
+
+A consensus of opinion places this distinguished artiste at the head
+of all her compeers, for it may be truly said that she is the
+brightest star which has dazzled the musical firmament during the past
+half century, and, is still in the very zenith of her noonday
+splendor.
+
+Regardful of the transcendent beauty of her voice, enhanced as this is
+by her other natural and attractive attributes, one might almost
+believe that nightingales have surrounded the cradle presided over by
+Euterpe, for never has bird sung so sweetly as the gifted subject of
+my memoir, and while the Fates smiled on the birth of their favorite,
+destined to become the unrivalled Queen of Song throughout the
+civilized world, fanciful natures might conceive a poetical vision,
+and behold Melpomene with her sad, grave eyes breathing into her the
+spirit of tragedy, and Thalia, with her laughing smile, welcoming a
+gifted disciple by whose genius her fire was to be rekindled in the
+far future.
+
+In the year 1861 there arrived in England a young singer who,
+accompanied by her brother-in-law, took apartments in Norfolk Street,
+Strand. The young lady, then only seventeen, sought Mr. Frederick Gye,
+who was the lessee of the Royal Italian Opera, for his permission to
+sing at his theatre, volunteering to do so _for nothing_. The offer
+was at first absolutely declined, but subsequently the young artiste
+succeeded, and made her first appearance on May 14, 1861, as Amina in
+Bellini's opera of "La Sonnambula." Unheralded by any previous notice,
+she was then totally unknown to the English public. Not a syllable had
+reached that country of her antecedents or fame. I remember being
+present on the occasion when this youthful cantatrice tripped lightly
+on to the centre of the stage. Not a single hand was raised to greet
+her, nor a sound of welcome extended to encourage the young artiste.
+The audience of Covent Garden, usually reserved, except to
+old-established favorites, seemed wrapped in more than their
+conventional coldness on that particular evening. Ere long, however,
+indeed before she had finished the opening aria, a change manifested
+itself in the feelings of all present. The _habitues_ looked round in
+astonishment, and people near me almost held their breath in
+amazement. The second act followed, and to surprise quickly succeeded
+delight, for when in the third act she threw all her vocal and
+dramatic power into the melodious wailing of "_Ah non credea_," with
+its brilliant sequel, "_Ah non giunge_," the enthusiasm of the
+audience forgot all restriction, and burst into a spontaneous shout
+of applause, the pent-up fervor of the assembly exploding in a ringing
+cheer of acclamation rarely heard within the walls of the Royal
+Italian Opera House. The heroine of the evening was Adelina Patti, who
+thenceforward became the idol of the musical world. When I left the
+theatre that evening, I became conscious that a course of fascination
+had commenced of a most unwonted nature; one that neither time nor
+change has modified, but which three decades have served only to
+enhance and intensify.
+
+At the conclusion of the performance, Mr. Gye went on to the stage
+full of the excitement which prevailed in the theatre, and he
+immediately concluded an engagement with Mlle. Patti on the terms
+which had been previously agreed between them; these being that Mlle.
+Patti was to receive at the rate of _L_150 a month for three years,
+appearing twice each week during the season, or at the rate of about
+_L_17 for each performance. Mr. Gye also offered her the sum of _L_200
+if she would consent to sing exclusively at Covent Garden.
+
+Patti repeated her performance of Amina eight times during the season,
+and subsequently confirmed her success by her assumption of Lucia,
+Violetta, Zerlina, Martha, and Rosina.
+
+Having met with such unprecedented success throughout the London
+season, Mlle. Patti was offered an engagement to sing at the Italian
+Opera in Paris, where unusual curiosity was awakened concerning her.
+Everyone is aware that the Parisians do not admit an artist to be a
+celebrity until they have themselves acknowledged it. At Paris, after
+the first act, the sensation was indescribable, musicians, ministers,
+poets, and fashionable beauties all concurring in the general chorus
+of acclamation; while the genial Auber, the composer of so many
+delightful operas, and one of the greatest authorities, by his
+experience and judgment, on all musical matters, was so enchanted that
+he declared she had made him young again, and for several days he
+could scarcely talk on any other subject but Adelina Patti and opera.
+The conquest she had achieved with the English public was thus
+triumphantly ratified by the exacting and critical members of musical
+society in Paris.
+
+Adele Juan Maria Patti, according to her own statement, which she
+related to the Queen Isabella of Spain, was born at Madrid, on
+February 19, 1843, and is the youngest daughter of two famous Italian
+singers, Signor Salvatore Patti and Signora Patti-Barili. The signor
+having placed her two sisters--Amalia, who subsequently married
+Maurice Strakosch, the well-known impresario, and Carlotta, also a
+vocalist of remarkable powers--in a boarding-school at Milan, went to
+New York with his wife and daughter, where they remained until Adelina
+reached sixteen.
+
+Adelina Patti had barely reached the age of three years when she was
+heard humming and singing the airs her mother sang.
+
+The child's voice was naturally so flexible that executive
+difficulties were always easy to her, and, before she had attained her
+ninth year she could execute a prolonged shake with fluency. Her
+father not being prosperous at the time, it became a necessity for
+him to look for support to his little Adelina, who had shown such
+remarkable promise; and, accordingly, she began to take singing
+lessons--not, as is stated in Grove's "Dictionary of Musicians," from
+Maurice Strakosch, but from a French lady, subsequently studying with
+her step-brother, Ettore Barili, who was a famous baritone singer; but
+nature had been so prodigal of her gifts to the child that she never
+undertook a serious course of study, but, as she herself says, her
+real master was "le bon Dieu." At a very early age she would sing and
+play the part of Norma, and knew the whole of the words and music of
+Rosina, the heroine of Rossini's immortal "Il Barbiere di Seviglia."
+She sang at various concerts in different cities, until she reached
+the age of twelve and a half, when her career was temporarily
+interrupted, for Maurice Strakosch, observing the ruinous effect the
+continuous strain upon her delicate voice was working, insisted upon
+her discontinuing singing altogether, which advice she happily
+followed. After this interval of two years' silence, and having
+emerged from the wonder-child to the young artiste, she recommenced
+her studies under M. Strakosch, and very soon afterward was engaged to
+sing on a regular stage. Strakosch travelled with her and Gottschalk,
+the pianist, through the United States, during the tour giving a
+number of concerts with varying financial results; ultimately
+returning to New York in 1859, where she appeared at a concert of
+which _The New York Herald_ of November 28th gives the following
+notice: "One of the most remarkable events in the operatic history of
+the metropolis, or even of the world, has taken place during the last
+week at the Academy of Music. Mlle. Patti sang the mad scene from
+Lucia in such a superb manner as to stir up the audience to the
+heartiest demonstrations of delight. The success of this artiste,
+educated and reared among us, has made everybody talk of her." In the
+following year, Strakosch considered the time had arrived for her to
+appear in Europe. He accordingly brought his young protegee to
+England, with the result I have already attempted to describe.
+
+After singing in London and Paris, Patti was engaged to appear at
+Berlin, Brussels, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, at which latter city
+enthusiasm reached its climax, when on one occasion she was called
+before the curtain no fewer than forty times. One who was with her
+there during her last visit, writes: "Having been witness of Adelina's
+many triumphs and of outbursts of enthusiasm bordering upon madness, I
+did not think that greater demonstrations were possible. I was
+profoundly mistaken, however, for the St. Petersburg public far
+surpassed anything I have seen before. On Adelina's nights
+extraordinary profits were made. Places for the gallery were sold for
+ten roubles each, while stalls were quickly disposed of for a hundred
+roubles each. The emperor and empress, with the whole court, took part
+in the brilliant reception accorded to Patti, and flowers to the
+amount of six thousand roubles were thrown at her."
+
+That she has been literally worshipped from infancy upward is only a
+natural consequence of her unsurpassable gifts, and nowhere has this
+feeling manifested itself to such an extent as in Paris, and by none
+more so than by the four famous composers, Auber, Meyerbeer, Rossini,
+and Gounod. Auber, after hearing her sing Norina, in Donizetti's "Don
+Pasquale," offered her a bouquet of roses from Normandy, and in answer
+to her questions about her diamonds, said, "The diamonds you wear are
+beautiful indeed, but those you place in our ears are a thousand times
+better." Patti was the pet of the gifted composer of "Guillaume Tell,"
+and no one was ever more welcome at Rossini's beautiful villa at
+Passy, well known as the centre of a great musical and artistic
+circle. The genial Italian died in November, 1868, and Patti paid her
+last tribute of respect to his memory by taking part in the
+performance of his immortal "Stabat Mater," which was given on the
+occasion of Rossini's burial service.
+
+Gounod, always enthusiastic in his remarks upon her, said, "that until
+he heard Patti, all the Marguerites were Northern maidens, but Patti
+was the only Southern Gretchen, and that from her all future singers
+could learn what to do and avoid."
+
+Although it is not the custom to bestow titles or honorific
+distinctions upon artists of the fair sex, yet, in lieu of these, to
+such an extent have presents been showered upon Adelina Patti, that
+the jewels which she has been presented with from time to time are
+said to be of the enormous value of _L_100,000. In the year 1885, when
+she appeared in New York as Violetta, the diamonds she wore on that
+occasion were estimated to be worth _L_60,000. One of the handsomest
+lockets in her possession is a present from Her Majesty, Queen
+Victoria, and a splendid solitaire ring which she is in the habit of
+wearing was given to her by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Of no less
+than twenty-three valuable bracelets, one of the most costly is that
+presented by the committee of the Birmingham festival. A magnificent
+comb, set with twenty-three large diamonds, is the gift of the Empress
+Eugenie. The emperors of Germany, Austria, and Russia have vied with
+each other in sending her jewels of the rarest value.
+
+When singing in Italy, King Victor Emmanuel each night visited the
+opera for the purpose of hearing her; and at Florence, where the
+enthusiastic Italians applauded to the very echo, Mario, prince of
+Italian tenors, leaned from his box to crown her with a laurel wreath.
+A similar honor was bestowed upon her by the Duke of Alba at Madrid,
+who presented her with a laurel crown. At the opera house in that city
+numbers of bouquets and poems were to be seen whirling through the air
+attached to the necks of birds. Queen Isabella of Spain, gave a large
+amethyst brooch surrounded by forty enormous pearls, and the Jockey
+Club of Paris presented her with twelve laurel crowns. The citizens of
+San Francisco, upon the occasion of her last visit, presented her with
+a five-pointed star formed of thirty large brilliants, and from the
+Queen of Portugal she received a massive locket containing Her
+Majesty's portrait, enriched by an enormous oriental pearl encrusted
+in brilliants; and even at the present time scarcely a day passes
+without the "Diva" receiving some acknowledgment in recognition of her
+transcendent powers.
+
+Adelina Patti's first husband was Henri, Marquis de Caux, an equerry
+to the Empress Eugenie, from whom she was separated and subsequently
+divorced; and, on June 10, 1886, she married Ernesto Nicolini, the
+famous tenor singer.
+
+In appearance, Patti is still youthful, and really seems destined to
+rival the celebrated French beauty, Ninon de l'Enclos, who was so
+beautiful at sixty that the grandsons of the men who loved her in her
+youth adored her with equal ardor. Patti's figure is still slim and
+rounded, and not a wrinkle as yet is to be seen on her cheeks, or a
+line about her eyes, which are as clear and bright as ever, and which,
+when she speaks to you, look you straight in the face with her old
+winning smile.
+
+During her career Patti has earned upward of half a million sterling,
+and the enormous sums paid to her at the present time more than double
+the amounts which Jenny Lind received, and which in that day were
+regarded as fabulous.
+
+On a natural plateau, surrounded by picturesque vales, and situated in
+the heart of the very wildest and most romantic part of South Wales,
+between Brecon and Swansea, and at the base of the Rock of the Night,
+stands the Castle of Craig-y-nos. This is the nightingale's nest. The
+princely fortune which Patti has accumulated has enabled her so to
+beautify and enlarge her home, that it now contains all the luxuries
+which Science and Art have enabled Fortune's favorites to enjoy; and
+so crowded is it with curios and valuables that it may best be
+described as "the home of all Art yields or Nature can decree."
+
+Here, in picturesque seclusion, surrounded by a unique splendor
+created by her own exertions, lives this gifted and beautiful
+songstress. She is the "Lady Bountiful" of the entire district,
+extending many miles around the castle, over which she presides with
+such hospitable grace. The number of grateful hearts she has won in
+the Welsh country by her active benevolence is almost as great as is
+the legion of enthusiastic admirers she has enlisted by the wonderful
+beauty of her voice and the series of artistic triumphs, which have
+been absolutely without parallel during the present century.
+
+
+
+
+SARAH BERNHARDT
+
+By H. S. EDWARDS
+
+(BORN 1844)
+
+
+A little girl, as Sarcey relates, once presented herself at the Paris
+Conservatoire in order to pass the examination for admission. All she
+knew was the fable of the "Two Pigeons," but she had no sooner recited
+the lines--
+
+  "Deux pigeons s'aimaient d'amour tendre,
+   L'un d'eux, s'ennuyant au logis"--
+
+than Auber stopped her with a gesture. "Enough," he said. "Come here,
+my child." The little girl, who was pale and thin, but whose eyes
+gleamed with intelligence, approached him with an air of assurance.
+"Your name is Sarah?" he said.
+
+"Yes, sir." was the reply.
+
+"You are a Jewess?"
+
+"Yes, sir, by birth; but I have been baptized."
+
+"She has been baptized," said Auber, turning to his colleagues. "It
+would have been a pity if such a pretty child had not. She said her
+fable of the 'Two Pigeons' very well. She must be admitted."
+
+[Illustration: Sarah Bernhardt.]
+
+Thus Sarah Bernhardt, for it was she, entered the Conservatoire. She
+was a Jewess of French and Dutch parentage, and was born at Paris in
+1844. Her father, after having her baptized, had placed her in a
+convent; but she had already secretly determined to become an actress.
+In her course of study at the Conservatoire she so distinguished
+herself that she received a prize which entitled her to a _debut_ at
+the Theatre Francais. She selected the part of Iphigenie, in which she
+appeared on August 11, 1862; and at least one newspaper drew special
+attention to her performance, describing her as "pretty and elegant,"
+and particularly praising her perfect enunciation. She afterward
+played other parts at the Theatre Francais, but soon transferred
+herself from that house to the Gymnase, though not until she had made
+herself notorious by having, as was alleged, slapped the face of a
+sister-actress in a fit of temper.
+
+The director of the Gymnase did not take too serious a view of his new
+actress, who turned up late at rehearsals, and sometimes did not turn
+up at all. Nor did her acting make any great impression at the
+Gymnase, where, it is true, she was only permitted to appear on
+Sundays. At this theatre she lost no time in exhibiting that
+independence and caprice to which, as much as to her talent, she owes
+her celebrity. The day after the first representation of a piece by
+Labiche, "Un Mari qui Lance sa Femme," in which she had undertaken an
+important part, she stealthily quitted Paris, addressing to the author
+a letter in which she begged him to forgive her.
+
+After a tour in Spain, Sarah returned to Paris, and appeared at the
+Odeon. Here she created a certain number of characters, in such plays
+as "Les Arrets," "Le Drame de la Rue de la Paix," and "Le Batard," but
+chiefly distinguished herself in "Ruy Blas," and in a translation of
+"King Lear." Already she had riveted the attention of the public and
+the press, who saw that a brilliant future lay before her.
+
+At the end of 1872 she appeared at the Comedie Francaise, and with
+such distinction that she was retained, first as a pensionnaire, at a
+salary of six thousand francs, and afterward as a _societaire_. Her
+successes were rapid and dazzling, and whether she appeared in modern
+comedy, in classic tragedy, or as the creator of characters in
+entirely new plays, the theatre was always crowded. Her melodious
+voice and pure enunciation, her singularly varied accents, her
+pathos, her ardent bursts of passion, were such that her audience, as
+they hung upon her lips, forgot the caprices and eccentricities by
+which she was already characterized in private life. It seemed,
+however, that Sarah's ambition was to gain personal notoriety even
+more than theatrical fame; and by her performances of one kind or
+another outside the theatre make herself the talk of society. She
+affected to paint, to chisel, and to write; sent pictures to the
+Salon, published eccentric books, and exhibited busts. She would
+receive her friends palette in hand, and in the dress of a male
+artist. She had a luxurious coffin made for her, covered with velvet,
+in which she loved to recline; and she more than once went up in a
+balloon.
+
+Her caprice, whether in private or public, was altogether unrestrained.
+In 1880 Emile Augier's admirable comedy, "L'Aventuriere," was revived at
+the Comedie Francaise, and the author confided the part of Clorinde to
+Sarah Bernhardt. After the first representation, however, she was so
+enraged by an uncomplimentary newspaper criticism that she sent in her
+resignation to M. Emile Perrin, director of the theatre, quitted Paris,
+and went to England, where she gave a series of representations, and,
+appearing there for the first time, caused a veritable sensation in
+London society. Meanwhile, M. Perrin instituted against her, in the name
+of the Comedie Francaise, a lawsuit for breach of contract, with damages
+laid at three hundred thousand francs. It was at this juncture that
+Sarah accepted the offers of an enterprising manager for a tour in
+America, where she achieved no less phenomenal successes than in Europe.
+
+A sensational account of this American tour was afterward published by
+one of her associates, Mlle. Marie Colombier, under the title of
+"Sarah Bernhardt en Amerique." This was followed by a second volume
+from the same pen, entitled "Sarah Barnum." The latter book, as its
+title suggests, was not intended as a compliment; and Sarah Bernhardt
+brought an action against the writer, by which she was compelled to
+expunge from her scandalous volume all that was offensive.
+
+The rest of Sarah's career is too recent to be traced in detail. Nor
+can the life of an actress of our own time be dealt with so freely as
+that of a Sophie Arnould or an Adrienne Lecouvreur.
+
+From America Sarah returned to Paris, where she revived all her old
+successes, and where, in 1888, at the Odeon, she produced a one-act
+comedy from her own pen, entitled "L'Aveu," which met with a somewhat
+frigid reception. She has appeared in several of Shakespeare's plays
+with great success, but her most ambitious and perhaps most admirable
+productions of late years have been her Cleopatra, first produced in
+Paris in 1890, and her Joan of Arc.
+
+Among her numerous eccentricities, Mlle. Bernhardt once got married;
+London, by reason of the facilities it affords for this species of
+recreation, being chosen as the scene of the espousals. The hero of
+the matrimonial comedy, which was soon followed by a separation, to
+which, after many adventures on the part of both husband and wife, a
+reconciliation succeeded, was M. Damala, a Greek gentleman, possessed
+of considerable histrionic talent, who died in 1880.
+
+
+
+
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