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served silence, others began to minimise the extent of the depression. The stock quotations did not agree with the reassuring articles, but no one ventured to point out the discrepancy. Two weeks passed, and mild articles about the depression again found their way into print. This episode suggests the query, What do the Russian papers print generally? The answer is, A great deal of foreign news. The Russian reader knows everything that occurs in England, France, Austria, America. He is intimately acquainted with the affairs of Roumania, Servia, Greece, Portugal and Monaco. In most papers the "leader" deals with some foreign subject-a speech in the British Parliament, the racial troubles in Austria-Hungary, the Spanish monetary troubles, and what not. Criminal trials are reported at length, and such "safe" topics as educational reform, agricultural banks, the need of capital to build up Russian industry, and the Russification of Poland are always available. Popular science, literature, the drama, music and art receive much attention, and history is a favourite study. The Russian journalists feel that the "past is secure," and they never weary of reviewing and re-reviewing the events of former days.

In appearance Russian newspapers resemble the Continental ones. The art of telling and magnifying news in headlines is unknown, or neglected. Columns of despatches on the first page record the foreign happenings, and no despatch has even a one-line caption. The domestic news are given either in letters from other

places or in a long chronique, without the slightest attempt at display.

The interview is also unknown to the Russian papers. This is obviously due to the political conditions, but it might be introduced in departments other than political. The feuilleton is, however, a popular and prominent feature. Each paper employs several feuilletonists, and suitable contributions from occasional correspondents are used as feuilletons.

The "circulation" of the papers is small. The Novoye Vremya boasts of the largest-about 33,000, while 10,000 is considered a good circulation. This is scarcely surprising, since illiteracy is the rule and literacy the exception, save in the great cities. Over 75 per cent. of the recruits cannot read or write, and recruits are twenty-one years old. Peasants, labourers and small merchants do not read newspapers, which are published for the comparatively small educated class. The style, owing to this fact, is generally good, though a few so-called "street sheets" are wretchedly written.

The earnings of the journalists are necessarily scanty, but the old feeling of contempt for them on the part of the magazine philosophers and economists has almost disappeared. The august "authors" appreciate the power of the daily press and are glad to use it. Still, for a decade or more there has been absolutely no progress in Russian journalism. The political and literary stagnation has naturally been reflected in that mirror of life-the daily paper.

V. S. Y.

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AMERICAN ILLUSTRATION

IV The Typists: McCarter, Yohn, Glackens, Shinn and Luks

Some one has facetiously indicated the unfamiliarity of the obvious, yet the recognition of the obvious is, in its truthful succinctness, the selection of a type. We have gone so far away from nature, have become so conventionalised and over-cultured, that the primitive and natural refuse to be seen and the essential is no longer apparent. Now and then an artist arises who has the rare faculty of perceiving the obvious, and he promptly excites the comments of exaggeration; he is said to be either (by the unknowing), in the vernacular of the day, a freak or (by the too appreciative) a genius. Let us hope that he is neither the one nor the other, but simply conclude, what is really the truth, that he has planted himself upon his own convictions and accordingly has exercised the conceit of his individual expression rather than followed the traditions of his forbears in art. He, the typist, is the eternal pioneer in art who transcribes the life about him in his own particular and definite way, not caring, perhaps, to be hailed as a genius any more than he likes to be dubbed a freak. For if a radical, he is radically right in his directness and simplicity, and surely to him, of all followers of art, the badge of sincerity belongs.

No one, however, would call the work of Mr. Henry McCarter radical; it has far too much aplomb to come under such a head, but it may be said to typify essences, for it is far and away from the conventional and academic. Its tendencies refuse to be localised by reason of the varied expression his delicate insight and broad execution obtain for him. Unlike most typists, he does not so much suggest a pronounced individuality as he conveys a pervasive identity, a conscious medium of nature and life. Mr. McCarter began expressing himself as an illustrator when a boy student at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the Century and the Magazine of Art accepting his first work. While studying at this institution, he was the pupil of Thomas Eakins, and in a later course of instruction in Paris he came under the influence

of Rixens, Bonnat and Alexander Harrison. The Lourdes of Zola was the beginning of his important book illustrations, and another to which he brought a peculiar sympathy of subtility and mysticism of beauty was the poems of Paul Verlaine, to which he furnished the notable drawings. Mr. McCarter seems essentially equipped for the pictorial interpretation of poetry; he has the most sentient appreciation of both delicacy and strength and a love of nature that is almost archaic. To these qualities he adds a psychology of beauty that is vividly real, and through them all he gets the dramatic and forceful with still a persuasive grace and elusiveness. Most of Mr. McCarter's recent work has appeared in Scribner's Magazine, and it has embraced a wide interpretation. His method of obtaining effects is largely a matter of eclecticism; he will employ a line as abrupt and quaint as a Japanese etching; or to procure a more intimate result, he will stipple his design with infinite detail. Whatever he does is performed in the manner that suggests its peculiar characteristics, its physiognomy of type, and with a serenity and poise that insures its permanence. Mr. McCarter is a colourist of exquisite clarity of tone, the value of which is apparent in his black and white medium. He has executed some mural decorations that perhaps more truly represent him than do his illustrations; these, however, are not so much a matter of public opportunity as the drawings which are widely circulated in book and magazine form. The interchange of colour work with drawing certainly gives tonal value to the less sensitive art, although Mr. McCarter does not find the transition an easy one. A large panel for a

Philadelphia drawing-room is the latest commission which he has done in colour. The sketch portrait of Mr. McCarter which accompanies this text was a rapidly executed poster-study of the artist by Mr. Sergeant Kendall, whose clever work in portraiture has attracted many noted subjects to his easel.

. Mr. F. C. Yohn has the picturesque

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POSTER SKETCH OF HENRY M'CARTER. BY SERGEANT KENDALL.

some five years, making his début when a youth of nineteen in the pages of the Harper periodicals. He had come from his home in Indianapolis to New York to study at the Art Students' League, where he was a pupil of Mr. Siddons Mowbray. He very shortly found that a career had opened for him in the leading magazines as an illustrator. His work was of such singular merit that he was selected to supply the drawings that accompanied the frontier sketches of Theodore Roosevelt, and the opportunity to further establish himself in the art world came in the closely following commission to contribute most of the drawings for Mr. Cabot Lodge's Story of the American Revolution, which he did with a series of stirring compositions. To prepare himself for these drawings, he went to Chickamauga Park, where a large number of soldiers were stationed in preparation for the Cuban war purposes. These battle pictures, although appearing in the pages of a magazine to elucidate a text, were almost individually notable and distinct. They belonged to the story, but they existed as independent pictures, nevertheless.

His most recent work has been the

Cromwell drawings for the Life which the Scribners are publishing, and for which Mr. Yohn has spent the past year in England, making studies and drawings on the ground. Mr. Yohn's ultimate purpose is to paint battle pictures, but in illustrations he prefers to do character work. It is the soldier type, however, that has so far identified him-the massing of men in violent action, the individual tensity or movement, or the isolated drama of a solitary figure with the grouping in the background. In this he is particularly happy in effect, making the story-telling quality of a picture easily felt in his composition, and projecting his motive with admirable appeal.

The work of Mr. W. J. Glackens does not suggest any one so much as it does itself; it is distinct and decidedly radical in its purport and inception. He may not altogether please the general public, but he has won the unstinted appreciation of his confrères in art and of those who value originality and forceful thought. In the estimation of Mr. Henry McCar

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ter, he is the first of illustrators from the American standpoint; and the art editor of Scribner's has made his work a feature of the past year in the magazine's pages. Mr. Glackens early set out to be a revolutionist in art. A Philadelphian by birth and residence, he was sent to the Academy of Fine Arts at that place, but he determined that he did not believe in art schools, and he quickly turned his back. on that estimable institution. After that he went abroad, not to study, but to visit the galleries of Europe and to see life. His association with Paris convinced him that its art schools were worse than ours, and he merely lived there to study its street scenes and types. When he returned to this country, he made sketches and drawings for the Herald for a time, until magazine commissions took him. away from newspaper art. The McClures sent him to Cuba during the war with Spain, and have used his illustrations to other material. Mr. Glackens seeks for

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MOTHER AND CHILD. STUDY BY HENRY M'CARTER.

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the expression of an idea, for the depiction of life in all its teeming naturalness, and the treatment of his subject is not considered. Truthfully and tersely to transcribe what he sees and to make his pictures a real definition and record are the ends of his aim. Mr. Glackens says that the old masters were the only ones who really knew how to draw, and that the present-day artists have nothing to say in their work, but spend their endeavours in a struggle toward an effective expression. He says that the academic tendency is so universal that when one goes boldly and directly to express an idea he is at once assailed as clumsy. While he himself works rapidly, he is often dissatisfied with the results he obtains, and will sometimes do a drawing over seven or eight times before he will use it. His types are often the growth of an idea. Most of them he finds from street observations, using a model only for the actual drawing. He wants to do "big work," he says-portraits and mural and church. decorations. He considers Whistler and Manet as the great artists of this century, and esteems Du Maurier for his real values and originality. Charles Keene and Raffaelli he also warmly admires.

Mr. Glackens's short but important career before the public as an illustrator, who is above all a painter, has been almost

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