his trade and voiced accurately the current opinion." There is more in the same colorless vein. Mr. Dannat is thereby disposed of, roughly speaking, but I wonder if any reader unfamiliar with his work would gather a correct notion of just where he belongs in our artistic hierarchy from what Mr. Isham says about him.

The want of grasp in the second half of this book is to be deplored for two reasons. To begin with, Mr. Isham is, as I have said, the first to write a history of American painting on a generous scale, and with modern research. Secondly, he had a unique opportunity to modify the tendency, previously mentioned, to err in criticism on the side of kindness. No school is ever the worse for the application of the highest standards in the appraisal of its productions. What Americans have lacked in willingness to buy pictures executed by their countrymen, they have made up in printed, postprandial, and other fervid amiabilities, which, if not unforgivable on some grounds, are at any rate harmful in that they retard the growth of the power of discrimination in the public mind. I rejoice in Mr. Isham's praise of some of his fellow painters, but I would have greater confidence in his book if I could find in it the bitter truth about this or that painter, characterizations of poor work as poor, with the critic's reasons for his severity. By this

process he would accustom the readers in schools, who will form a large part of his audience, to look at pictures with a livelier curiosity and a sharper intelligence. In the history of art a painter must be candidly and rigorously treated, both as a link in a chain, and as an individual. Not otherwise can his rank be fixed.

In some of the current monographs analysis of the individuality of an artist is carried so far as to destroy all sense of proportion: the writer loses his hold on critical principles in a rapture of admiration. This is notably the case with M. Camille Mauclair, whose Auguste Rodin: the Man, his Ideas, his Works, is almost

a good book. The interpretation of the French sculptor is helpful at many points, but in the long run it bewilders the reader through its reckless eulogy. I mention this book, in fact, chiefly for the sake of the specimens it contains of Rodin's talk. They are full of interest as giving us momentary, half-formed glimpses into the workings of his mind. It is worth wading through M. Mauclair's delirious periods to get at the suggestive reflections which he has quoted from his adored master. A very capable biographer is M. Auguste Bréal, who has written in his Velasquez 2 just the handbook to the Spanish painter which the tourist needs. Some day, I hope, there will be a pocket edition of Mr. Ricketts's book on the Prado. While we are waiting for it M. Bréal promises to hold the field. He has plenty of enthusiasm in his heart, but he writes with moderation, and his little book forms an almost ideal introduction to the study of Velasquez. It appears in the Popular Library of Art, a series of small illustrated volumes in which English and foreign critics have been writing on great subjects in brief and simple fashion. The series is one of the best produced by the recent movement in art lit

erature.

To another, the Library of Art, a more ambitious venture, which I have dealt with before, there have lately been added several good monographs. Mr. Basil de Selincourt's Giotto 3 surveys the painter's works with thorough-going system, and it is rational in criticism. I like especially the way in which the author has shown that care for what he calls Giotto's “religious earnestness of purpose" is not incompatible with scientific methods of research. Mr. T. Sturge Moore shows a similar freedom from Morellian pedan1 Auguste Rodin: The Man, his Ideas, his Works. By CAMILLE MAUCLAIR. Translated by CLEMENTINA BLACK. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1905.

2 Velasquez. By AUGUSTE BREAL. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1905.

3 Giotto. By BASIL DE SELINCOURT. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1905.

2

try in his Albert Dürer,1 contributed to the same series. He does not attempt to overhaul questions of minute scholarship, but wreaks himself on a broad interpretation of Dürer's genius; the book is, indeed, simply a long essay, and an essay richly colored throughout by the author's own temperament. Mr. Moore has ideas as well as insight, and from time to time he strikes fire from his theme. In a series like the Library of Art the best books. are those which are the most provocative, which do most to rouse in the reader an interest in the subject in hand. Such a book is Mr. Moore's. The reader must go elsewhere for a full and formal narrative of Dürer's career, but Mr. Moore will take him close to the secret of the German master's art. Mr. M. Henderson's Constable is a creditable piece of routine composition, but there is more of the inspiring quality which we have found in the Dürer in Mr. G. F. Hill's Pisanello. This is the first book to be written in English about the Italian painter and medalist, and the author has made the most of his chance. Pisanello is a simple and yet a complex type. His style has the purity characteristic of early Italian art; but while in some of his paintings, like the portrait of Ginevra D'Este in the Louvre, or in some of his drawings, his draughtsmanship has a flower-like delicacy, his medals rise to a plane of antique austerity and force. At one moment he recalls the subtle, evanescent charm of Botticelli; at another it is the grandeur of Mantegna that he brings to mind. Mr. Hill paints his portrait and interprets his art with a skill worthy of the theme. In all this collection of monographs there is nothing better than this learned but flexibly written book, and there are only two or three of its companions that are so good.

1 Albert Dürer. By T. STURGE MOORE. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1905.

2 Constable. By M. HENDERSON. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1905.

3 Pisanello. By G. F. HILL, M. A. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1905.

Italian art does not loom large in the books of the year. Save for Mr. Hill's Pisanello, nothing has been published worthy to be named with Kristeller's Mantegna, for example. A work of which much was expected, Professor Charles Herbert Moore's Character of Renaissance Architecture, has turned out a sad disappointment. The same author's Development and Character of Gothic Architecture, first published fifteen years ago, was so well written that it had not seemed possible that he could write a dull book on Renaissance. It would seem, however, as if Professor Moore's devotion to Gothic had dried up any sympathies he may ever have had for the architecture of the Renaissance in Italy. He has traveled about amongst the beautiful buildings of the South, chiefly bent upon proving that men like Alberti, Brunelleschi, Michael Angelo, Bramante, and so on, used classical motives in ways to violate the sanctity of architectural principle, and the result is a book of nearly three hundred captious, irritating pages. There is something comic about the pedagogical gravity with which Professor Moore summons before his tribunal the men of genius who forgot to consult the rules when they were planning their masterpieces, admonishes them with pathetic earnestness, puts black marks against their names, and dismisses them with a caution. Prejudice could no farther go. But happily, while Professor Moore is reiterating his charges, the architecture of the Renaissance will endure, and those who know a beautiful thing when they see it will go on delighting in Brunelleschi and Bramante. One recalls the words Matthew Arnold supposed himself, in a famous preface, to address in certain circumstances to a portly jeweler from Cheapside. "The great mundane movement," he said, "would still go on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled, dividends would still be paid at

4 Character of Renaissance Architecture. By CHARLES HERBERT MOORE. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1905.

the bank, omnibuses would still run, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street." Likewise I feel that Renaissance architecture will survive Professor Moore's disapproval. Through allowing his tale of its departures from academic correctness to obscure the record of its splendors, he has discounted the legitimate weight of his argument, and given to what ought to have been a work of impersonal scholarship an atmosphere of carping provinciality.

The few books that remain for consideration form themselves into two groups. One is composed of volumes relating to museums. M. Salomon Reinach's Répertoire de Peintures du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance,1 the first volume of which has lately been published in Paris, is a book which students, critics, and historians everywhere will find a precious boon. It gives in well-drawn outlines the essentials of hundreds of paintings, classified according to subject; and the notes not only locate every picture, but give the different attributions where the doctors have disagreed, and other information. A more practical work of reference in its field could not be invented. Paintings of the Louvre: Italian and Spanish,2 by Dr. Arthur Mahler, Carlos Blacker, and W. H. Slater, is a judicious handbook to the schools named in the French museum. The small but fairly clear illustrations add a good deal to this volume, which, by the way, is to be followed by one treat1 Répertoire de Peintures du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance (1280-1580). Par SALOMON REINACH. Paris: Ernest Leroux. 1905.

2 Paintings of the Louvre: Italian and Spanish. By DR. ARTHUR MAHLER, in collaboration with CARLOS BLACKER and W. A. SLATER. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1905.

3

ing of other schools. M. Gustave Geffroy's lavishly illustrated quarto, The National Gallery, is a book of intelligent and pleasant talk. Printed in handier form and with better illustrations,—most of the photogravures and half-tones in this volume are of a distinctly inferior quality,

it would make a first-rate popular guide; but under the circumstances it is unlikely to deprive Mr. Edward T. Cook's well-known volume of its vogue. A meritorious contribution to museum literature is Sir Walter Armstrong's account of The Peel Collection and the Dutch School of Painting, in the familiar series of Portfolio Monographs. The illustrations might be better, but they are pretty good, and the text provides a really valuable description of a signally important group of paintings in the National Gallery. Lastly I have to refer to three volumes intended more especially for the collector. In the Connoisseur's Library, a series of handsomely made volumes, Mr. Alfred Maskell's Ivories, Mr. Dudley Heath's Miniatures, and Mr. Frederick S. Robinson's English Furniture, have appeared since I last touched upon the enterprise. All are written with authority, and contain the numerous facts which the collector needs.

3 The National Gallery. By GUSTAVE GEFFROY. With an Introduction by SIR WALTER ARMSTRONG. New York: Frederick Warne & Co. 1905.

4 The Peel Collection and the Dutch School of Painting. By SIR WALTER ARMSTRONG. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1905.

5 Ivories. By ALFRED MASKELL, F. S. A. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1905. 6 Miniatures. By DUDLEY HEATH. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1905.

7 English Furniture. By FREDERICK S. ROBINSON. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1905.

BOOKS THAT STAY BY

I HAVE never discovered just how to classify them. With me, at all events, and in this corner we are privileged, I take it, to talk of personal experience and impression, leaving formality and eloquence to our betters in the more public parts of the magazine, with me such books seem not to be restricted to any special, recognizable class. I could go to my shelves and pick them out, with more or less of hesitation and fumbling, not without some indecisive takings down and puttings back again, probably; but when all was done they would look, I apprehend, like a rather motley crew, as if the chooser's taste had been more freakish than catholic. Even so, however, they would have at least one thing in common: they would be mostly books that I did not fall in love with early. As between man and man, meaning also, but not exclusively, as between man and woman, I am a believer in love at first sight; that is to say, I think I am. At all events, I am not a disbeliever, although if I were put to it, and compelled to rake my memory over, I fear I should have to confess that, according to the sum of my observation and experience, love at first sight does not always turn out to be the poet's

"ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken." My own youthful bookish affections, certainly, have shifted under far less stress of weather than such language seems to figure. The truth is, no doubt, that in this respect, as in others, we are all parts of the whole, and subject to the general law. It would be a bold man who should boast of standing still (though some theologians have seemed to do it, we must admit), with all the rest of creation on the move about him. So I take no shame to myself for having neither fixity of taste

nor fixity of opinion. Even the poet, in his highest flight, makes the child to be only the father of the man.

As a reader, then,-I confess it frankly, for all the natural piety that has bound my days together, I have altered as I alteration found, and bent with the remover to remove. My condition, in short, is not dissimilar to that of another "reader," with whose curiously naïve confessions (my thanks to him) we were recently favored in this place.

Carlyle and Macaulay, for example, friendly as I once was with them both, are now for the most part mere stayers upon the shelf,-pensioners, so to speak, enjoying an otium cum indignitate, serving a use, such as it is, as reminders of a good time (and what a good time it was!) now far removed.

Emerson, a considerably later favorite, is more frequently invited down. He long counted for so very much with me many times more than Carlyle and Macaulay together - that it must be I shall still find him companionable, I say to myself; but alas! the experiment is more likely than not to end in failure. There is a world of lofty thought and feeling between those faded maroon covers; no one has better reason than I to know it; but somehow, for better or worse (it is my fault, if anybody's, but I suspect it is nobody's), the noble sentences no longer stir me as they used to do. Perhaps the tide will turn again, perhaps not. Possibly I have read the books so much (few, if any, ever did more for me) that whatever of nutriment and stimulus they once contained for my particular need was some time ago exhausted. For my particular need, I say; for as no author ever put into his book all that his best readers get out of it, so no one reader, however faithful and competent, ever gets out of a book all that the author put into it. There

is no such thing, in other words, as mind answering perfectly to mind.

Thoreau, up to this date, lasts better with me than his so-called master. Some wiser head than mine can possibly tell me why. Perhaps, although he was a younger man, he wrote for older readers. He seems to me rather more concrete, more nutty, to use a word of his own. He is more provocative, and oftener gives me a useful nudge. Sometimes, too, serious humorist that the man was, he makes me laugh, at him or at myself, a pretty sound benefit, better and better esteemed by most of us, I think, as years lengthen and desire begins to fail.

Matthew Arnold, again, with whom I have faithfully served my time, is no longer quite what in the old days I found him. To tell the unhappy truth (I speak of his prose), he is beginning to seem to me like an old story, a "back number," - if it is n't too free an expression, a sucked orange. I fed much upon him, but while I acknowledge my debt with all thankfulness, it is with no very fervent yearnings for a second course. Is it, I wonder, that I feel a something too much of the schoolmaster in him, as if the rest of us were to him but so many boys on the bench?

Lowell keeps a better place, though I still see, as I have always done, some of his shortcomings. These, fortunately, are not of the nagging, unendurable sort, and, after all, we do not let books go so often for their faults as for their deficiencies. If he sometimes permits a metaphor to run away with his discretion, I have only to skip a few lines. If he is unpleasantly smart once in a while, as I am sure he is, that is a failing that leans to virtue's side, and withal is not amazingly common. It annoys me, now and then, to think how much better he might have done with a more patient revision, but on the whole the best of his prose is still an invigoration to me. I can read it in those hours, known to all bookish people, when I feel the need of something that is familiar and yet as good as new.

And so I might go on; but Club talk must not degenerate into monologue, and really I had no thought of compiling a list. Let the names I have cited be taken as examples merely, not the best, of necessity, but such as came first to hand. My concern is not so much with the case of this or that author as with the general question of the quality or qualities by virtue of which any author retains his hold upon us. Why is it, I say, that Stevenson wears with me so much better than some whom my critical judgment (for I am supposed to have one) settles upon as larger men? Somehow the best of his work (the best to me) bears a fresh reading most remarkably well. At times, indeed, I question whether he really was a smaller man; whether his highly finished style has not caused him to pass for a less substantial thinker than he actually was. Clear water, I remind myself, is sometimes deeper than it looks. I will not presume to judge. One thing, nevertheless, I am bound to say: that I am often finding stimulation and help in him, choice and (even yet) unexpected turns of phrase through which a new light breaks in upon the mind. He pleases me greatly by these flashes. Taking times together, few things are more to my liking. My attention is kept awake, now and then I have a thought of my own, or what seems to be my own (an extraordinary piece of fortune), and when I lay the book down I am conscious of a feeling of elation, expansion, uplifting, as if I had been breathing pure air and looking at a wide prospect. As long as any books do this for me, so long I shall love to read them.

So it is with Montaigne, dear old Montaigne. I seldom feel like being with him a great while at once, but I never wish to be long without at least a rambling page or two of his wise garrulity. Perhaps I am naturally something of a gossip myself. My occupation at the present minute may be held to indicate as much. That I like the personal note is certain. Who is there that does n't? When I read a book