and vivid. The chloroformed patient is surrounded by surgeons and students whose interest is strictly scientific, his mother who is in an agony of fear and grief, and the operator who holds a life in his hand and is yet lecturing as quietly as if the patient were a blackboard. Very little in American painting has been done to surpass the power of this drama. But if the essence of fine-art be poetic, an operation in practical surgery can hardly be said to be related to fine-art at all. Many persons thought this canvas, we remember, both horrible and disgusting; the truth is that it was simply unpoetic. The tragedy was as vivid as that of a battle-field, but it was, after all, a tragedy from which every element of ideality had been eliminated. The same thing is true, with obvious differences of degree, of most of Mr. Eakins's work. He is distinctly not enamored of beauty, unless it be considered, as very likely he would contend, that whatever is is beautiful.

Mr. Currier's pictures are another instance of what can be done in art without poetry

even with the negation of poetry. The watercolors he sent here in the winter of 1878-79 made a sensation. They became the subject of endless discussion and may almost be said to have divided "art circles" into two hostile parties. It was contended on the one hand that they were wonderful examples of the way in which an impressionist, nobly careless of details and bent only on the representation of the spirit of nature rather than of her botanical forms, can succeed in the truest fidelity. On the other it was argued that nothing could be made out of them, that they were mere daubs, and that the only landscape which could in the faintest way resemble them was that of which one caught glimpses from the window of an express train. The ayes "had it" very clearly, in our view. Mr. Currier's "impressions were masterly in technical qualities and very real at a proper distance. The fatal trouble with them was that they were horribly ugly. That is the difficulty with all of Mr. Currier's work; it is the difficulty with his genius. Painters such as

he, who emulate the vigor and vividness of Franz Hals, forget that vigor and vividness are not the only nor the sufficient elements of a picture, and were never yet so deemed by any master even of the Dutch school. An exquisite and almost caressing art there is in the most intensely real Velasquez or in the most superficially ugly Franz Hals. Mr. Duveneck and Mr. Chase are in another category, though we suspect they are to be ranked as warm admirers of Mr. Currier. Mr. Duveneck atones for his absence of poetry not only by his power, and Mr. Chase by his extraordinary facility and swiftness, so to speak, but both by their sense of character of what is pictorially impressive, by their feeling in a word for picturesqueness. Nothing could be more picturesque than the Spanish-like portrait Mr. Duveneck sent to the Academy last year, and at the same time it was powerfully and subtly painted; and nothing more so than Mr. Chase's best work. His canvases have a life, an élan, a movement and an artistic interest in the highest degree noteworthy; we do not remember one of them which relies on beauty. They attract, stimulate, provoke a real enthusiasm at times for their straightforward directness, their singleness of aim, their absolute avoidance of all sentimentality, --but they have not charm. Mr. Shirlaw

inclines more to things poetic; we remem ber a very charming picture of a sleeping girl; his "Gooseherd was a by no means prosaic expression of jollity; and in portraiture he loses nothing of the sweetness and grace of an attractive subject. In the main, however, it is to be said that his strongest leaning is toward pure picturesqueness, and that in a measure he compromises a natural bent in essaying sentiment, however well he may handle it.

Of the qualities of Mr. Swain Gifford's work there should by this time be no need to speak; he is not a "new man," but his sympathy for the aims and character of the new men, in contradistinction from the character and aims for the most part current before their advent, renders his association with them pertinent. Mr. Dielman is a new man and has done excellent work, and though none of it is of large importance, it has the evident qualities of both skill and simplicity. Mr. George Inness, Jr. came honestly by his talent; more than any of the younger painters, perhaps, his progress within the past four or five years has been noticeable, and, apparently, from a clever amateur with a fondness for painting animals he has become one of the painters who count. He has a fondness for color and for "solidity of handling" that is on many accounts pleasant

to see, despite the fact that it is somewhat ingenuously evident; and he can make a picture with more elements of interest, better associated, than a great many who are both more deft by nature and more experienced; as may be seen from the engraving of his "Returning from the Brook." Mr. F. S. Church has been drawing and painting in New York for a number of years, and yet so curiously are grotesquerie and wholesomeness combined in him, that it is, perhaps, more difficult to speak with anything like satisfactory precision of him than of any of the painters we have referred to. He has done a great deal of a kind of work which neither he nor any one else would regard as serious, and which, indeed, is generally very justly regarded as tending to unfit one for serious work. But to see how really subordinate the purely humorous side of his talent is, and how easily he frees himself from its shackles when he chooses, one has only to glance at his "After the Rain," here reproduced, or at any of the work he has been doing of recent years. It is impossible not to see in such a picture as "After the Rain" a good deal of grace and a genuine and refined sentiment; to our mind there is something very agreeable in its nice compromise between the conventionality ordinarily inseparable from such a subject, and the painter's unmistakable individuality—or, better a graceful conces

sion of the latter to the former. It is unlikely that Mr. Church will ever carry this too far, we should say, and there can be no need to fear that his work will not always keep something very individual about it. Perhaps he could not do better than to rid himself of all anxiety concerning the result of his sturdiness becoming even more softened than it is. But his absolute sincerity and almost awkward dread of anything like sentimentality, added to his clear bent toward painting and the technical skill with which his steady work has been rewarded-witness his Sandy Hook landscapes and his contribution to the last Water-Color Exhibition-make him one of the younger painters whose constant progress is a guarantee of the fulfillment of their promise.

To recall our conclusions in regard to these, taking them in the mass, and somewhat loosely. They have acquired a strong, if not too flexible or comprehensive, technique; they have a genuine impulse, a natural bent toward painting; and, though as yet they lack style, and seem a little more content to lack it than is quite deferential, and have no noticeable feeling for poetry, they atone for this, to a degree, not only by the qualities just mentioned but by a lively feeling for character and a quick sense for picturesqueness-for what is pictorially impressive.

*

stairs and listened to them nervously until they reached her door and the door was pushed open unceremoniously.

The negro woman Nancy thrust her head into the room.

"Miss Louisianny, honey," she said. "Ye aint up yet?"

"No."

"Ye'd better git up, honey-an' come down-stairs."

But the girl made no movement. "Why?" she asked, listlessly.

"Yer pappy, honey-he's sorter cur'us. He don't seem to be right well. He didn't seem to be quite at hisself when I went to light his fire. He

Louisiana sat upright in bed, her great coil of black hair tumbling over one shoulder and making her look even paler than she

was.

"Father!" she said. "He was quite

"Thar aint no one with him," was the answer. "He's by hisself, honey."

Louisiana was buttoning her wrapper at the throat. Such a tremor fell upon her that she could not finish what she was doing. She left the button unfastened and pushed past Nancy and ran swiftly down the stairs, the woman following her.

The door of her father's room stood open and the fire Nancy had lighted burned and crackled merrily. Mr. Rogers was lying high upon his pillow, watching the blaze. His face was flushed and he had one hand upon his chest. He turned his eyes slowly upon Louisiana as she entered and for a second or so regarded her wonderingly. Then a change came upon him, his face lighted up-it seemed as if he saw all at once who had come to him.

66

Ianthy!" he said. "I didn't sca'cely "I didn't sca'cely know ye! Ye've bin gone so long! Whar hev ye bin?"

But even then she could not realize the truth; it was so short a time since he had bidden her good-night and kissed her at the door.

"Father!" she cried. "It's Louisiana! Father, look at me!"

He was looking at her, and yet he only smiled again.

"It's bin such a long time, Ianthy," he said. "Sometimes I've thought ye wouldn't never come back at all."

And when she fell upon her knees at the bedside, with a desolate cry of terror and anguish, he did not seem to hear it at all, but lay fondling her bent head and smiling still, and saying happily:

"Lord! I am glad to see ye!"

When the doctor came-he was a mountVOL. XX.-2.

natured fellow who had "read a course" with somebody and "'tended lectures in Cincinnatty" he could tell her easily enough what the trouble was.

"Pneumony," he said. "And pretty bad at that. He haint hed no health fer a right smart while. He haint never got over thet spell he hed last winter. This yere change in the weather's what's done it. He was a-complainin' to me the other day about thet thar old pain in his chist. Things hez bin kinder 'cumylatin' on him."

"He does not know me!" said Louisiana. "He is very, very ill!"

Doctor Hankins looked at his patient for a moment, dubiously.

66

Wa-al, thet's so," he said, at length. "He's purty bad off-purty bad!"

By night the house was full of visitors and volunteer nurses. The fact that "Uncle Elbert Rogers was down with pneumony, an' Louisianny thar without a soul anigh her," was enough to rouse sympathy and curiosity. Aunt 'Mandy, Aunt Ca'line and Aunt 'Nervy came up one after another.

"Louisianny now, she aint nothin' but a young thing, an' don't know nothin'," they said. "An' Elbert bein' sich nigh kin, it'd look powerful bad if we didn't go.'

They came in wagons or rickety buggies and brought their favorite medicines and liniments with them in slab-sided, enamelcloth valises. They took the patient under their charge, applied their nostrums, and when they were not busy seemed to enjoy talking his symptoms over in low tones. They were very good to Louisiana, relieving her of every responsibility in spite of herself, and shaking their heads at one another pityingly when her back was turned.

"She never give him no trouble," they said. "She's got thet to hold to. An' they was powerful sot on her, both him an' Ianthy. I've heern 'em say she allus was kinder tender an' easy to manage."

Their husbands came to "sit up" with them at night, and sat by the fire talking about their crops and the elections, and expectorating with regularity into the ashes. They tried to persuade Louisiana to go to bed, but she would not go.

"Let me sit by him, if there is nothing else I can do," she said. "If he should come to himself for a minute he would know me if I was near him."

In his delirium he seemed to have gone back to a time before her existence-the time when he was a young man and there