or statue, to the memory of Maryland’s contingent of Confederate and
Federal soldiers who lost their lives on the battle-field of Antietam.
The idea of such a memorial does great credit to the magnanimity of the
American people, and offers another convincing proof to the world at
large that we are again a truly united and broadminded nation. The lofty
patriotism that suggests and makes practicable the erection of a monument
of this description is beyond all praise and cannot be commended too
highly: There is, however,—if a recent experience teaches us anything—an
unfortunate element of danger that, no matter what noble-minded motives
may have originally inspired this projected tribute to our brave dead,
its artistic side may actually leave much to be desired; and that in
the next century, when we shall have at length become a truly artistic
people, we may turn our heads aside and blush for it, as we do now for
the hideous Firemen’s Tablet and the Lord Baltimore of Cathedral street.
There is no reason but ignorance for the existence of such a state
of things. Nothing is easier than to get expert judgment on those
architectural and sculptural plans that may be submitted to the committee
in charge of the erection of this monument. There is a very common, and
most erroneous, idea that trained technical and artistic knowledge is
unnecessary in such cases, whereas no task is in reality more difficult.
To be able to choose correctly, from the many rough little wax and clay
suggestions huddled momentarily together, the project which will produce,
when it is thrown up on a large scale and carefully finished, the most
beautiful and inspiring work of art, requires an experience that is
almost invariably lacking in the persons so thoughtlessly given the power
to say which theme is to be adjudged the best.
In the recent case to which we have referred, a committee of laymen
apparently judged the sketches submitted to them solely from the point
of view of finish,—a most immaterial matter in a sketch, as every artist
knows,—and consequently one of our great national heroes, instead of
being eternally honored as was intended by many of his admirers, is
compelled to rest under a mediocre pile of stone and bronze that, while
far from being as good as it ought to be, is just good enough to insure
its remaining where it is for many years to come. Is this sort of thing
fair to the art-loving people who contribute to the building of our
public monuments, or to posterity that must receive and preserve them, or
to those heroes themselves in whose memory and to whose glory we would
like to erect enduring proofs of our love and admiration?
The Theatrical Trust has at last met with a well merited rebuke for its
peculiar methods of business. The BALTIMORE NEWS took it in hand the
other day and told it some very plain truths. It seems that the local
representative of the Trust went to the NEWS office with a proposition to
publish a half-page “ad” every Saturday providing a local “ad-writer”,
who thinks himself an authority on things theatrical, was allowed to
polish up the swell front advance notices. The NEWS not only declined the
proposition but exposed the whole affair. The Academy took its “ad” out
immediately, and published for a few days, “We do not advertise in the
News.” Foolish mistake! What is the use of flinging mud at a man who owns
a mud-machine?
We heartily commend the NEWS for the action it has taken in this
matter. It is an outrage that a few men should attempt to control this
business. They made every effort to close the doors of the very popular
Lyceum, and leave Mr. Albaugh to starve if he saw fit, but the energy
and perseverance of his son Jack were entirely successful in defeating
their purpose, and the good people of Baltimore have fully shown their
appreciation of his pluck. Now the Trust is measuring steel with the
Fords, but in spite of giving them the worst of it in the way of
attractions, the Fords are making more money than the Academy. Ford and
Albaugh are the names that represent everything theatrical in Baltimore.
Years and years ago these two men had firmly established themselves with
Baltimoreans, and it will take more than a theatrical trust to inspire
hostility where there has always existed confidence and good-will.
* * * * *
There can be no doubt as to the precarious condition of music in
Baltimore at the beginning of the year eighteen hundred and ninety-nine;
but there is much that can be done to improve its really sad plight.
In other words, its state, while deplorable in the extreme, is not
altogether hopeless. It is deeply to be regretted that the recent manager
of the Peabody Institute, a man of great and acknowledged musical
ability, having had the chance to make Baltimore the recognized musical
centre of America, should have failed so utterly to add that distinction
to the metropolis of the South.
His successor, a young man of education, of refinement, and of apparent
ambition, although undoubtedly handicapped by the legacy of sterile
contentions and discouragements left him by his predecessor, has still a
very brilliant opportunity before him. Will he succeed ultimately where
his master has so conspicuously failed? We sincerely hope so, and trust
that some few of our misgivings, arising from what we fear is a tendency
to cultivate the noisy and pretentious few at the expense of the more
modest, but by far the more musical, majority may prove after all to be
groundless.
* * * * *
Nothing so forcibly illustrates the inability of even educated persons
to distinguish between the good and the bad as the family portrait.
How seldom one sees in houses otherwise marked by refinement and good
taste this really necessary and, to future generations, valuable
object characterized by sufficient artistic merit to insure to it one’s
attention for five minutes. And how often it is a mere caricature of the
person whose portrayal has been attempted. What man dare call himself
educated who has not sufficiently acquainted himself with the elements of
drawing and color to know when he, or some member of his family, is being
transferred to canvas for no better purpose than to afford amusement for
persons of greater knowledge and judgment. It is true all of us cannot
spare the time to acquire even the elements of an art education, but
then it is equally true that the upper class of Americans is not truly
a cultivated class, is not possessed of the culture of the same class
in Europe. This is lamentable; but sadder still is the knowledge that
the egotism (widely known as the American spirit) of the average man of
refinement will preclude for a long time to come a betterment of the
situation.
Baltimore, among other cities noted for their educated class, has
been, and still is, an easy victim to the artist of the solar-print.
Nothing more thoroughly delights the heart of a Baltimorean of average
development than to come into possession of one of those family portraits
that exhibit all the rotundity of objects turned on a lathe, the burnish
(in the high lights) of excessively polished metal-ware, and the finish
of a miniature done under the glass of a microscope. In such work the
ideal of portrait painting is reached—for the Baltimorean of average
development. The revered canvas is given the place of honor in the most
prominent room of the house and there left for the adoration of all who
enter—no one daring to call down upon his head, for adverse criticism,
the pitying scorn of the deluded family. “It is a speaking likeness
rendered with unusual technical skill.” One often wishes, as a relief
for tortured eyes, that painters could do without technique altogether,
and might be allowed to indulge the wildest flights of imagination
conceivable in depicting the features of beloved relatives and friends.
But little can be said in defense of the “artist” who produces this
class of work. It is the result of either a base commercial spirit or of
untalented affrontery that trades on the ignorance of those who should
blush for their little knowledge. In many instances these painters
have had every opportunity for study at home and abroad, and yet seek
to degrade a profession they can in no wise benefit. Have the patrons
of these men concluded that honesty has lost its worth, and that a bad
painter is more useful that a good photographer? An almost hopeless
ignorance of art is, in these cases, the true explanation of why this
phase of brush-work has not long since disappeared from among intelligent
people. As long as men are found willing to pay for a bad thing the
parodists of art will continue to flourish. That it is not the ignorant,
or unscrupulous, painter who needs to be educated is easily seen.
Baltimore, with its unusually large number of thinking people, is not
altogether hopeless of improvement in its ideas of art. Fortunately
there are here a few families that have true judgment in such matters,
and whose influence, although at present but little felt, has a tendency
to create a future favorable to good work. May that happy epoch not be
synchronous with the Millennium.
* * * * *
[Illustration: BOOK REVIEWS]
MR. JAMES TURNS THE SCREW.
Mr. Henry James is perhaps the one anomaly of American art. True, we
have Howells at his heels, some people may say at his head, but Howells
is by no means an inexplicable product, and he is as far from being like
James as James is far from being the counterpart of Turgeneff, the master
inspiration of them both. One may not like Mr. James—and there are many
who will simply not face his difficulties—but one must concede that he
is literature. He is indeed so emphatically literature that he is not
always life as well. It is not a little to say of an author on the shady
side of his prime that he still reserves for his public the quality of
continual surprise. Long ere this, one is minded to assert, judging
on general principles, Mr. James must have declared his reach. Such
utterances are, however, always contradicted by his latest book. And his
latest books, especially in the last few years, have been a succession
of surprises—shocks would be a better word, it may be—that uproot
presumptions. “What Maizie Knew,” for example, was a glance of Mr. James’
brilliancy from quite a new angle. It was such an extraordinary ray of
his art that it has not yet ceased to leave a green spot of bewilderment
on the vision of the critic. With the cry caused by “In a Cage” still in
the air, comes his very newest volume, “The Two Magics” (New York: The
Macmillan Co.,) as unprecedented a composition as any of his repertory.
To say that “The Turn of the Screw” dashes one with amazement is not to
be in the least hyperbolic. It does amaze—it simply takes one’s breath
and keeps it until one has finished the tale. One is amazed at the art,
one is amazed at the substance—and one is amazed at Mr. James himself,
and that, perhaps, most of all. It is an incredible production for a
Bostonian, no matter though he be long acclimated to foreign heaths as
in the instances of the author. We know of no other case where Bostonian
blood has failed so signally to tell.
One is saved from the supreme shock, however, by one thing—the matter of
Maizie. Maizie in “What Maizie knew” was at least an intimation of the
terrible facts of Miles and Flora. These angelic visions of eight and
ten are a twin-birth of horror before which the hideous perspicacity of
Maizie pales to insignificance. They are veritable limbs of Satan not
in any human forgivable sense, but astounding monsters of precocious
sinfulness that give one a positive chill to consider as within the
bounds of possibility. Their portrayal is a slaughter of the innocents
equal to that of Herod. One arraigns Mr. James’ inhumanity in thus
stooping to cast so cruel a stain on the character of childhood. Maizie
was surely enough—much more than enough.
Can the treatment of such abomination be within the pales of art? One
is obliged to admit that it can be, because Mr. James has demonstrated
it—demonstrated it as we hope it will not be demonstrated often. It has,
however, required all the resources of his skill. The marvel is that he
never even falters—makes one false stroke with his brush. As it stands,
“The Turn of the Screw” is a masterpiece; one fails to see how it could
be improved. Its art gives the envelopment to the subject that saves it
superbly. It is the kind of envelopment one finds in the portraits of
Whistler, for instance, and that is perfect.
Far from blurting out the business he may have in hand, Mr. James can
scarcely be said, at least in these latter days of his art, to tell it
at all. Most readers of “What Maizie Knew” must have been struck in
the perusal with the fact that never once did the story for all its
plotless volume state in cold type what the child really did know. And
yet that Maizie knew what she shouldn’t have known was as obvious as
though she had drawn naughty pictures on her slate. The reader knew
what Maizie knew by a more subtle means of intelligence—by a kind of
telepathic communication. The book was a supreme piece of insinuation.
Perfectly proper, indeed, as far as the print was concerned, but what
scandal between the lines! One finds oneself subject to this same sort
of telepathic play in “The Turn of the Screw.” It is all secretive
enough—superficially. The nightmare of children’s little obsessed
souls is not dragged into the light of day, but the horror is there,
nevertheless, patent to the eye and palpable to the touch. Mr. James
turns the screw, indeed! To set down the details of the story would be to
mar its subtle relation of style and substance. It is for the reader to
take or to leave, as he finds it in Mr. James’ volume.
“Covering End,” the other tale, included under the title of “The Two
Magics,” is quite in Mr. James’ usual manner. The “magic” of this
charming comedy is a very white magic, being no more than the brisk spell
exerted by the heroine—a Daisy Miller of later growth—upon the hero, the
owner of an old English “show” country house. “It was magnificent and
shabby, and the eyes of the dozen dark old portraits seemed, in their
eternal attention, to count the cracks in the pavement, the rents in
the seats of the chairs and the missing tones in the Flemish tapestry.”
We have again all the sentiment of “old things” as found in “The Spoils
of Poynton.” The story is the kind of comedy that would “scream” in
the hands of ordinary art. Mr. James’ material is, however, never so
ill-bred. Mrs. Gracedew, widow, “from Missouri Top,” bursts upon all
this faded splendor and question of mortgages with a perfect whirl
of Americanism. Her conversation is a kind of metal skirt-dancing—a
perpetual flash of pink fleshings. She is everywhere in the house at
the same time—“an apparition, a presence requiring announcement and
explanation,” indeed. She covets the house, she covets “the good and
faithful servant”—poor Chivers, whom she calls “Rembrant van Rhyn, with
three stars”; she covets the mortgaged owner, Clement Yule. They are all
“types.” Even Cora Prodmore is a type—“the ‘awfully nice girl’ of all
the English novels, the ‘simple maiden in her flower’ of—who is it?—your
great poet.” It is Daisy Miller with additional assurance of widowhood.
She “grabs” the whole situation with all the prompt enterprise of
Missouri Top. “I’m here,” she announces to “the lawful heir,” “for an act
of salvation—I’m here to avert a sacrifice!” That she will avert it the
reader never questions. It is all delightfully spirited and worthy of Mr.
James. It is quite as much a masterpiece of subtlety and finished style
as “The Turn of the Screw,” if not so new a note in conception. After the
horror of this latter tale it is more than a matter of refreshment—it has
the virtue of salvation.
A GERMAN MASTERPIECE.
The interest of the Anglo-Saxon public in German fiction has always been
languid compared with the avidity with which it devours the works, good,
bad and indifferent, of French authors. Mrs. Wister, Clara Bell, and a
few other translators, suffice to supply the English-speaking market with
all it demands in literature from the land of Goethe and Schiller, while,
on the other hand, hundreds can scarcely fill the publishers’ orders
for translations from the French. It may be that German novels are too
limited in their appeal—too intrinsically German and hearth-centered—too
largely lacking in that modern “finish” for which English authors so
frantically strive and French authors so frequently attain; too deficient
in what we are pleased to regard as the saving sense of “smartness.”
German novels as a rule have more soul than smartness, and that is almost
unforgivable in an age when genius like the reformed pirate is expected
to do fancy work.
It is perhaps because of this characteristic “high seriousness,” to use a
favorite phrase of Matthew Arnold’s, of Hermann Sudermann’s pen that he
has remained so little known to us in spite of his rare force. He belongs
to the brainy band of modern novelists which can almost be told off on
the fingers; of which in England Geo. Meredith is the lone Pompey’s
Pillar; Balzac, in France, the pyramid; and in Russia Turgeneff, the
sardonic sphinx. Sudermannn first reached our transatlantic consciousness
through the success of Duse’s portrayal of Magda in “Home”, a tragedy
full of fierce psychic value and human pathos.
In “Regina or The Sins of Fathers,” translated by Beatrice Marshall
(London and New York, John Lane) Sudermann has given us in the heroine a
character of such stuff as Magdas are made of—a Magda in the raw, a Magda
unintellectualized. The story treats of man’s honor and truth to himself
as in “Home” the author treats of woman’s. The main difference is that in
“Regina,” Boleslav’s self-trust comes too late for happiness. It is only
as the story closes he echoes Arnold’s
“Ah! love, let us be true
To one another—”
in a burst of passionate insight; but the chance had passed, Regina’s
lifeless, blood-smeared body lay under the Cats’ Bridge, where her
imbecile father had hurled it. Her fate is not unlike Ophelia’s. She
is piteously involved in the misfortunes of a hero burdened with a
performance as harsh as it was akin to that of Hamlet’s. The novel is a
virile work, deep-voiced, full of dramatic color and agitating some vital
moral questions. Acrid to the taste it is in many respects, but absorbing
throughout in its appeal.
Boleslav is pursued by the curse of his father’s treason with a good deal
of that grimness with which a hero of the Greek tragedies is harrowed
by the Eumenides. One lash of the furies’ whip provokes another until
life seems a madness scarcely to be borne. His friends and sweetheart
forsake him; the false name under which he enters the German Array fails
to protect him from the ignominy of the paternal crime; he is ostracised
by the whole world. We find him as the story opens returning to the
ruined home of his ancestors, where lies the dead body of his traitor
sire, denied the last offices of the church. It is there he meets Regina,
the mistress of the deceased, a wild and beautiful peasant girl, to
the portraiture of whom the story owes its chief interest. Regina is a
magnificent, unforgettable creature—one of those rich chords that nature
but rarely strikes upon the harp of being; she reverberates through one’s
senses with a rough sweetness that represents a real experience. Her
mould is Homeric; she is a creation of primal days and primal passions.
To blame her is to quarrel with nature itself. Regina becomes the refuge
of the stricken man whose noble motive of life is to redeem his father’s
name from shame, to rebuild the homestead of his race, to face unmerited
dishonor with manly dignity.
His heart still harbors the image of his early love, and for long he
cannot overcome the repugnance he feels for the sturdy pariah who with
pathetic self-denial and endurance becomes his slave in the maintenance
of the dreary rat’s hole in the ruined castle where the two live. His
ideal of womanhood is the simpering Helene who obeys her papa. It takes
him a long time to realize that dangerous maxim of Nietzche’s: “Passions
become evil when they are held to be evil.” And Regina’s passions are as
clear-eyed as were the children of Eden before they picked the apple of
Original Sin. As he realizes the fact, the girl’s character gradually
usurps his soul. A powerful scene is where they struggle together—the
master and the slave—for domination; the man’s strength against the
peasant’s Boadicean sinew. It is like the contest of sex in the African
jungle. There is no sense of masculine meanness in the contest. One
recognizes some deep inner justification in it: that this fierce strife
is the materialization of what is really heart warfare. It is a spiritual
imbroglio. In the midst of the contest, as they pant together defiantly,
Boleslav suddenly kisses the girl on the mouth; and a moment after he is
fleeing from himself into the snowy night. The scene is infinitely human.
In it Sudermann bares the strange mystery of the human heart as only
genius can.
In spite of this flash of soul-knowledge of Boleslav’s, the pair do
not become lovers. The man’s self-restraint still worships at Helene’s
shrine. He finds that altar clay at last. In the agony of disillusion he
lets his soul fly toward its true magnet, but the fortunes of the two
have reached a tragic pass. It is Regina’s dead lips that fate now alone
offers Boleslav. Under the charred rafters of his ancestral home that the
peasants had burned in their patriotic fury, clasping the girl’s cold
body, his mind shivers amidst the phantasmagoria of human existence. The
world’s conventions seem to shrivel like a consuming scroll. Nothing
remains but ashes and the conviction that Regina was “one of those
perfect, developed individuals such as nature created before a herding
social system, with its paralyzing ordinances, bungled her handiwork,
when every youthful creature was allowed to bloom, unhindered, into the
fullness of its power, and to remain, in good and in evil, part and
parcel of the natural life.”
Sudermann does not set his seal to the sophistries that Boleslav’s
despair formulates in these gloomy moments as he scoops out the frozen
ground nearby the pedestal of a broken statue of Diana, as a resting
place for his drowned Ophelia,—buried “with pagan rites.” His point of
view is that of the philosophic spectator of the world’s strifes and
follies, who sees in bold-browed convention its justifications, but
also its flaws, its misreadings of nature, its littleness, its lack of
large mercifulness. Over Regina, as over Margaret, the voice of higher
reason pronounces the verdict of exoneration, Boleslav in his struggles
with fell destiny offers a strengthening exemplar of manliness. He is
portrayed by the author with a discriminating realism that couples
weakness with might in a human way which wins for the hero our sympathy,
as the character of Regina compels our admiration.
—_Edward A. Uffington Valentine._
[Illustration: EXCHANGES]
THE LE-O-PARD.
[Illustration]
This is the Le-o-pard, my child;
His tem-per’s anything but mild.
The Le-o-pard can’t change his spots,
And that—so say the Hot-ten-tots—
Is why he is so wild.
Year in, year out, he may not change,
No mat-ter how the wea-ther range,
From cold to hot. No won-der, child,
We hear the Le-o-pard is wild.
—_“A Child’s Primer of Natural History,” by Oliver Herford._
TURNING A NEW LEAF.
Twelve months again have rolled around,
The time has come, in brief,
When chaps like me are duty bound
To turn another leaf.
So, meditating thus, I find
’Tis needful that I stop
And designate within my mind
What habits I shall drop.
I will not smoke. Won’t I? Let’s see.
This surely’s not the worst
Of all my faults. Accordingly
I’ll take the others first.
I couldn’t stop it anyhow—
I’ve failed to times galore.
Perhaps I’d better tackle now
A job not tried before.