Pictures Felt

Ne of the aorgrravations of a traveller’s life is the being compelled to give but four days to a gallery that demands as many years. As we hasten through, we feel the fingers of worn artists pulling us back, as much as to say: “Is this the way you look at what it took years of privation and toil to do?” Rembrandt says: “You did not see that wrinkle in the old man’s face. It took me weary hours to sink that!” MuUer says: “You did not notice the twist of straw in that upturned chair!” Delacroix wonders that we pass his river Styx without a tear over the distressed boatmen. Guerin upbraids us for slighting that drapery which he was a

month in hanging. Yet we break away and push on, In a few hours of time passing through a seeming eternity of painstaking.

But, as after days of walking through strange cities, there are only five or six faces among the multitudes that you remember, so we recall only a few of the thousands of pictures along which we have passed.

PAUL VERONESE.

Going through the Louvre at Paris, we were arrested by “The Marriage at Cana.” In two minutes we are one of the guests. We are not looking at representations of faces, but feel the presence of one hundred and twenty people. At first we are crowded, but soon all stand back to their places, and you are undisturbed by the multitude. We cannot doubt that It Is genuine wine; you are sure of the absence of logwood and strychnine. Wine kept twenty years Is a rarity, but Paul Veronese mingled this three hundred years ago, aijd it has Improved by age. How true the stoop of the servant as he pours out the wine from the amphora Into the cup,

his chief feeling one of care, lest the liquid spill. He is not much astonished at the miraculous change that has come on the water. His head is thick through from temple to temple. He would not be surprised if the vessel poured apricots. It is his duty to empty the liquid from the larger to the smaller, and that is all he cares about.

But you look around to see how the guests take it. This one looks incredulously at the glass. He hardly thinks it is wine. He prides himself on the fact that he cannot be deceived. He is ready to admit the transformation. He will keep on tasting it till the cup is emptied once and again, and then will say, “There may be wine in it. Indeed it tastes like it; but I will not commit myself It is a dangerous precedent. After a while we shall have things so mixed up we will not know when we are drinking wine and when water. For my part, when I pour water into a jar, I prefer to pour nothing save water out.”

But here is a guest who has eye and hand lifted toward heaven. He feels that the God of the vineyards and the springs must, with his finger, have stirred the amphora. Here is an abstracted, philosophic face. The man sees not so much the flushed water as the lone line of conclusions that must flow from it. It is not with him a mere question whether his tongue is being laved with the insectiferous water of Galilee, or tingling with a beverage that moment brewed at the door of the banquet-hall. It is with him a question between jugglery and omnipotence. From the rim of that glass radiate the eternities.

There sits a woman waiting for the glass to ‘come up. She simply wants a drink. She is very red. Evidently the wine that had been passed before the miracle was not as good as this. One cup will not do for her. Pass up one of the big ewers. I see now why the first quantum of wine so soon gave out. She looks upon this affair solely as one of supply and demand. I do not like her. I wish that Paul Veronese had not invited her. Notwithstanding her fine dress, she is not fit for this company. Let her go home and guzzle in private. She will be drunk before the night is over, unless the new refreshments are free from intoxicating quality. The biggest fool on earth is a handsome, gayly-dressed woman, when she has taken three glasses too many. At the foot of the picture are a cat, two dogs, and a clown, with parrot and bells. This unseemly fellow is evidently swelling with inflammation of witticism. He feels out of place. He has, amid this miraculous scene, no chance to ply his trade. A professed joker is in Purgatory on a serious occasion. Wit is healthy only when mingled with sense, as. hydrogen is a necessity in pure air, but when alone is poison. The evident idea in the picture is to make a striking contrast; but I can see no good reason for introducing the cat, and the scrawny dogs, and the loathsome clown, save that the clown might be set after the dogs, and the dogs after the cat, and they all become so engaged in the chase they would never come back again.

It seems to us that Paul Veronese has made the accessories of the picture too imposing. You wonder why they allowed the wine to give out in such a sumptuous place. There are the water-jars finely chiselled, and the pillars grandly capitalled, and the walls pretentiously statued. The servants bend as If their backs would break under the burden of viands still coming in. The plates at this late hour in the feast are still nearly full. If all the paraphernalia represented by the painter were true, then the exhaustion of the wine must be either ascribed to paucity of calculation on the part of the host, or extraordinary thirstiness of the oruests. Not willino- to believe either of these, we are disposed to think that the scene of the wedding was really an humble home, and that the provider of the banquet, in inviting so many more than he could feast, only proved that his heart was bigger than his purse.

But this picture lifts itself up royally in the Louvre, bidding back into forgetfulness many of the statues, bas-reliefs, Apollos, and Dianas that were best looked at about midnight without a candle. One of the great wants of Parisian art-galleries is more fig-leaves. But this picture stands out pure and exalted. Blessed are the eyes that see it! Marriage is no more a carousal, but a sacrament. Bidding back all the shadows of his own life,

Christ sits here th*;. King of banqueters. And while we see the glowing beverage passed around, we catch a glimpse of the time when the wine-cup carried down into the Babylon of dissipation shall be brought back, and set upon our tables, and there shall no more be the eyeball of death in the bubble on the top, nor the sting of adders wriggling in the dregs at the bottom.

THOMAS WEBSTER.

To this painter there was given a revelation of boys. Between six and fourteen years of aofe the masculine nature is a mixture of mischief, and sensitiveness, and spunk, and fun, and trouble, and pugnacity, that the chemistry of the world fails to analyze. A little girl is definable. She laughs when she is pleased, cries when she feels badly, pouts when she is cross, and eats when she is hungry. Not so with a boy. He would rather go a-nutting than to eat, forgets at the fish-pond he has not had his di iner, often laughs when he feels badly, and looks submissive to an imposition practised ipon him till he gets the perpetrator

PICTURED FELT. 42/

alone in the middle of the road, and tumbles him into the dirt till eyes and mouth and nose are so full the fellow imagines that, before his time, he has returned to dust. A boy, under a calm exterior, may have twenty emotions struggling- for ascendency.

After a boy has been tamed by hard discipline, and wears a stock, and has learned to walk down street without any temptation to “skip-skop,” and sees only nonsense in leap-frog, and enjoys Calvin’s Institutes above Robinson Crusoe, and feels feathers on the elbows premonitory symptoms of cherub, he ceases to be a mystery. But Thomas Webster, in “The Dame School” in Kensington Museum, London, gives us the unperfected boy such as we more frequently see him, namely, boy in the raw. This creature is somewhat rough, and uncertain as to where he will break out, superlatively susceptible to tickle, is bound to lose his hat, and comes in red in the face from just having swallowed his slate-pencil.

Thomas Webster, in this picture, manages boys and girls perfectly. There he places the spectacled old schoolmistress. I remember her perfectly well, although I have not seen her since I was eight years old, and yet I would have known her anywhere by her nose. Fifty hot summers have dried up all the juices of her nature. Her countenance is full of whack and thump, and the gad she holds in her hand is as thick at one end as the other, not moderating into any mercy of thinness. It would never be mistaken for the rod that budded. Boys studying “Rule of Three” look round at her to study rule of one, and, in multiplying the sum of school troubles, carry nine when they ought to carry nothing. How sharp her eyes are! The boys sitting on the opposite side of the room feel her look on their back clear through the fustian.

There is the cracked and peeling wall. There are the hats, and bonnets, and satchels. There is a little girl threading a needle. She will have to twist tighter the end of the thread or she will never get it through that fine head. She will soon be able to hem handkerchiefs, and to take stitches for her mother. May she never have to sew for a living, sorrow and anguish and despair bigger than a camel going through the eye of her needle! Here is a boy prompting another in the recitation, telHng him wrong, I am certain. There always was some fellow to get us into trouble with geography, grammar, or arithmetic lesson, telling us that the capital of Virginia is Texas, and that baboon is a personal pronoun, and that in every whole there are three halves and six quarters.

There is a little girl crying over her lesson. Why cannot somebody show her? Napoleon getting his ammunition wagons over the Saint Bernard pass had nothing to do compared with the tug of a little child making her first trial at spelling ‘’bakery The alphabet to many has been twenty-six tortures. Here stands a little girl with her finger in her mouth. The schoolmistress has not seen it, or she would put an end even to that small consolation. School is no place for a bee to suck honey out of a flower. A boy is looking through a sheet of paper, which he has rolled into a scroll like a telescope — he is probably an astronomer in the early stages.

Here is a plodding boy, prying away at his books. He suffers many impositions from his comrades. Away! you young scamps with those sticks with which you are annoying him! When a joke is told, and the children laugh, he will turn around with a bashful and bewildered look, imagining himself the victim of the satire, but next day will cackle out in the quiet of school-time at the sudden discovery of the meaning of the witticism. But he may yet outstrip them all. When a boy’s head is so thick it is hard for knowledge to get in, the same thickness prohibits its departure. Give him thirty years, and he will make a dictionary.

There a boy makes faces, and the whole school is in danger of runninof over with giggle. It is an awful thing for a child not to dare to laugh when the merriment rises, and wells up till the jacket gets tight, and the body is a ball of fun; and he knows that if out of one of the corners of his compressed lips a snicker should escape, all the boys would go off in explosion. I remember times when I had at school such responsibility of repression resting on me, and proved unfaithful.

There! to severely correct them, a boy and girl are placed beside each other — a style of punishment greater at that age than ever after. Here is a boy making way with an apple behind his lifted book. I expect some one will cry out, “John Greed is eating an apple!” for it is a peculiarity of children under ten years of age (?) that they do not like others to have that which they themselves cannot get. Whether it be right or wrong, in their estimation, depends on whether themselves or somebody else has the apple.

Just outside the school-room door is a boy showing his strength. As he turns up his arm in the light, he says, through the art of the painter, “Do you see that muscle?” He is good at a wrestle, can run round all the bases at one stroke of the bat, can take the part of a wronged urchin, and I fear, if the schooldame comes too suddenly at him with the stick, she may lose the glass out of her spectacles. There will be no Sunday-school books made about him, although out of his brawn of body, and mind, and soul, there may yet come an Oliver Cromwell, or a Martin Luther.

Thank Thomas Webster for taking us back to school by his painting! It is the only way we should like to go back. We had rather be almost anything than a boy, the world so little understands him.

ROSA BONHEUR.

We owe not more to the painters than to the engravers, although for the most part we let them sit, with worn fingers and half-extinguished eyes, begrudging them the few shillings we pay them for their expensive work. They are mediators between us and the great pictures of the world. They popularize art. The people, through drinking these lighter wines, feel the taste for pictures growing on them, till they must have the stronger and intoxicating potions of art, mixed by a Rembrandt or Claude-Lorraine. And so we can see Raphael’s “Transfiguration” without going to Rome; Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” without going to Milan; Angelo’s “Three Fates” without a-oino- to Florence; and Rosa Bonheur’s “Horse Fair” without going to London.

But there are many of the best pictures that have never attracted the eng-raver s art, and, for the most part, the world is ignorant of them. In Luxembourg Gallery, at Paris, hanging in a very poor light, or rather first-rate darkness, is a hay - gathering scene, by Rosa Bonheur. After for hours looking upon helmets, and swords, and robes, and prim parterres, where grass does not grow without asking the gardener, and there are impossible horses on impossible roads, carrying impossible riders, I came upon this country-scene, in imagination threw myself down on the grass, and unbuttoned my shirt-collar to let the air of the fields strike the skin clear down to the chest. The weather is showery. It will rain in twenty minutes. The men, aware of this, are hastening in the load. The hair of this workman is soaked with sweat, and hangs in strings, as if just out of a dripping bath. The women work so awkwardly you feel that the place for them is the house. The one on the load is evidently not so anxious to pack the hay as to save her own neck, in case the oxen should start. She feels it a risky business on an uneven field to

Stand on a rocking load. A rosy, white-capped maiden, of seventeen years, standing with rake in hand, does not work very fast. She is at an age when maidens are apt to take it somewhat easy. She does not think it will hurt the hay much if it does get wet. Besides that, the shower may pass around. A workman is looking at her bright face. He, too, has forgotten the showery weather. No use, my dear fellow! You are too old for her. From her absent look, I know she is thinking now of the nightfall, and of some one who will come in clean smock, tying his horse at the gate. The oxen stand waiting for orders to go on, calm, stupid, honest, sinewy-necked, a skein of foam hanging from their lower lip.

On this ox’s back a fountain of sweat starts, but is dissipated in the thick gloss. In this dark ox, the night of the face is dawning Into light beyond the hill of the shoulder. They look like the yoke that answered our own command of “• Whoa! haw! gee!” needing to have the language translated by an occasional stroke of the goad, determined to get Into the shadow of a tree though the load upset, taking plenty of time, with the exception of some very uncertain starts In fly -time, hardly ever so resigned as when It Is their duty to stand still.

Oxen were only intended for very good people to drive, for It demands grace to do It. The man who excused himself from going to the king’s feast because he had bought a yoke of oxen, gave a more plausible excuse than the others; for I suppose the new team had balked, or upset the wagon, or had really started for the king’s house, but came with so lazy a gait that their master was not In time for the entertainment.

But we say nothing against these faithful creatures. They do heavy work for small compensation — a few carrots and a forkful of hay. They pant in the heat and shiver in the cold, and, shutting their eyes and dropping their horns aslant, they press through the hailstorm. The Bible says that God takes care for oxen.

The next best thing to being in the country is to have Rosa Bonheur, in a picture-gallery, plunge us Into a hay-field. The stroke of a reaper’s rifle on the scythe is to me a reveille. The past comes back, and in a moment I am a boy, with a basket of luncheon, on the way to the men in the harvest-field, finding them asleep under the trees, taking their “nooning.” Their appetites were sharper than their whetted scythes. Those men are still taking their nooning under the trees, but it is a sounder sleep. Death has ploughed for them the deep furrow of a grave.

I forgive Rosa Bonheur that she smokes cigarettes, and wears a rowdy hat, and is fond of lounging about slaughter-houses, now, as I stand before this picture of the hay - scene. Like the bewitched workman who looked into the maiden’s face, we forget it is showery weather, until it is four o’clock, and the guard of the gallery, with cocked hat, and red sash, and flaming sword, comes round to drive us out of Paradise.