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"THE SPIRIT THAT WINS." The gunners of an American battery, though reduced to two wounded men, keep the gun in action through a gas attack until reserves arrive.

VOL. LXIV

OCTOBER, 1918

NO. 4

SKETCHES OF QUEBEC

BY HENRY VAN DYKE

U. S. N. R. F.

IF you love a certain country, for its natural beauty, or for the friends you have made there, or for the happy days you have passed within its borders, you are troubled and distressed when that country comes under criticism, suspicion, and reproach.

It is just as it would be if a woman who had been very kind to you and had done you a great deal of good were accused of some unworthiness. You would refuse to believe it. You would insist on understanding before you pronounced judgment. Memories would ask to be heard.

That is what I feel in regard to French Canada, the province of Quebec, where I have had so many joyful times, and found so many true comrades among the voyageurs, the habitants, and the coureurs de bois.

People are saying now that Quebec is not loyal, not brave, not patriotic in this war for freedom and humanity.

Even if the accusation were true, of course it would not spoil the big woods, the rushing rivers, the sparkling lakes, the friendly mountains of French Canada. But all the same, it hurts me to hear such a charge against my friends of the forest.

Do you mean to tell me that François and Ferdinand and Louis and Jean and Luart and Iside are not true men? I am not ready to credit that. I want to hear what they have to say for themselves. And in listening for that testimony certain little remembrances come to me-not an argument-only a few sketches on the wall. Here they are. Take them for what they are worth.

I

LA GRANDE DÉCHARGE
September, 1894

N one of the long stillwaters of the mighty stream that rushes from Lac Saint Jean to make the Saguenaybelow the Ile Maligne and above the cataract of Chicoutimi-two birch-bark canoes are floating quietly, descending with rhythmic strokes of the paddle, through the luminous northern twilight. The chief guide, Jean Morel, is a coureur de bois of the old type-broad-shouldered, red-bearded, a fearless canoeman, a good hunter and fisherman-simple of speech and deep of heart: a good man to trust in the rapids.

"Tell me, Jean," I ask in the comfortable leisure of our voyage which conduces to pipe-smoking and conversation, "tell me, are you a Frenchman or an Englishman?"

"Not the one, nor the other," answers Jean in his old-fashioned patois. "M'sieu' knows I am French-Canadian."

A remarkable answer, when you come to think of it; for it claims a nationality which has never existed, and is not likely to exist, except in a dream.

"Well, then," I say, following my impulse of psychological curiosity, of which Jean is sublimely ignorant, "suppose a war should come between France and England. On which side would you fight?"

Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved.

were. The stone pews, set among ferns and grasses, are festooned with "traveller'sjoy." The small altars, for solitary petitioners, are fashioned of laurel and saplings and bright with wild roses and the flowering raspberry.

Pillars, tall and shapely, rise from the blossoming floor. Capitals of rounded oak, spreading chestnut, pendant elm and twinkling poplar make shade for the worshipper and lead his gaze upward to the blue sky, touched to deeper hue by white cloud billows. The aisles are bordered with meadow-rue, flaming lilies, blue harebells, and goldenrod. The high altars mark the horizon; like the stars, too distant to come to us, they invite us. Though we know that we never shall reach them, we hearken to their call and, now and then, seem to draw nearer them. In certain moods we must lift our eyes to them; no lesser will suffice. But on most days we worship at the small, familiar altars. We wander from one to another, gathering flowers, searching out birds' nests, tasting spicy berries and fragrant leaves, drinking from cool springs, watching lambs and calves-innocently, wonderingly beginning their short span of life, following the proud mothers of the fields-and we are content. We live it all -love, creation, flowering into the perfect form, joy made alive.

The air of the church is sweet with incense swung by invisible censer-bearerswild grape, field strawberry, sweet fern, roses the subtle perfume of everything green, blossoming and earthy, stirred by the wind. Against the high altars rise curling threads of smoke, touching our hearts for those who may not come forth into the great outdoor church but must keep incense burning on homely hearths; for invalids who, having only the memory of the great cathedral, have built a sanctuary within themselves; for the very aged, beginners of life again. We must remember that they are waiting within and carry home to them what beauty we can capture,

while we wonder when He who has made the earth altogether lovely will bring it to pass that every soul shall be free to go out into it and feel himself a part of it, rest in it, and live.

With incense rising and the music hushed to an accompaniment begins the lesson of the day. No priest is seen to mount the lectern but a thousand voices cry: "Let the heaven and the earth praise Him," for "in wisdom has He made them all; the earth is full of riches." "He causes the grass to grow"; "the strength of the hills is His also." He who "hangeth the earth upon nothing," "holds in His hand the soul of every living thing." Both from "the field of the slothful," ruined by beautiful pests, and the "lilies of the field," we hear the voice of Him "who walketh upon the wings of the wind." The "green pastures," the "tree of the Lord . . . full of sap," "the hills. . . joyful together," "the flowers . . . on the earth, . . . the singing birds,” all say: "The hand of the Lord has done this." Ask now the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee"; "speak to the earth and it shall teach thee." We hear "the heavens rejoice . . . the earth be glad . . . the field be joyful and all the trees of the wood rejoice." Then why do not we? us be "in league with the stones of the field," drop our burdens and open our souls to the flood of pure happiness which pours in like sunshine. It is our right. The happy earth proclaims it. Here endeth the lesson.

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There is no need for a sermon, though it be written "in stones," in tree, mountain, field, and sky. Hark! The cattle come tinkling home from the pasture. They do not fear the night. Why should we? It will come and it may be starless. But there is the day to remember and another dawn to await in confidence. And, though we cannot even catch a glimpse of it, there is something beyond-something as far transcending the earth that we know as its great, free out-of-doors transcends any part of it which men have confined within walls.

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part, in painting and sculpture, has been felt in other fields also-etching, wood-engraving, lithography, and the graphic arts generally. These, in a certain sense, have long been the strongholds of conservatism; and, though it has been seen how so modern a master as the Englishman Augustus John has carried over the ideals of his painting to the copper-plate, it might be possible, if we confined our survey to the English field alone, with its Camerons, McBeys, and Bones, to regard him merely as an isolated instance. It is the same with American etching, where men like Davies and Marin

linear technics is not really surprising when we consider the aims of modern art and the means by which it seeks their attainment. For these involve a wholly new insistence upon the function and significance of line, and thus offer a complete contrast to those of the preceding, or Impressionist, period, when line, or anything else that sought to limit, circumscribe, or even define an object, was summarily rejected in the interest of luminosity and "atmosphere." But the appeal of the plastic is always bound, sooner or later, to reassert itself; and it was inevitable that, in due course, an artist should

arise in revolt against this narrowing of the aims of art. Such an artist was Cézanne, who, without insisting any less than his predecessors upon the claims of light and color-indeed, he alone among modern artists had a profound metaphysic of these elements-sought to restore to things their

By Pablo Picasso.

essential forms, to nature its mass, volume, and organic structure. To accomplish this he naturally was obliged to have recourse to line, which, in his work, becomes extraordinarily powerful and expressive. While the two colored lithographs by Cézanne hardly represent the great qualities of his painting in oil they come closer to his water-colors in this respect-they have a very great beauty of their own and bring out at least one aspect of his art, often overlooked under the apparent coarseness and heaviness of his facture on canvas-its singular subtlety

and delicacy. Most of the exquisite harmonies that make these two prints, with their blending and balanced blues and greens and grays, with ghostly warmer tones of red and yellow, would be lost in black-and-white reproduction. There is something of a more robust Blake, of a

really pagan Puvis, in his boys of a heroic build and stature, these young demiurges made in the image of man yet purged of his imperfections and impurities.

The fact that Cézanne too experimented with. lithography is not the only thing that connects him with Corot. In spite of the profound difference that separates the two artists in most respects, they have also this in common-that they both admired, even worshipped, the "classic" style of painting, and sought, each in his own way, to be classic themselves. If what Corot wanted above all else was to emulate the serenity and the limpid radiance of Claude's atmosphere, what especially appealed to Cézanne was the strength, solidity, and massive grandeur of Poussin's design. Indeed, he once declared that all the artist had to do to-day was to repaint Poussin with his eye on nature. This is what he himself tried to do in the latter years of his life, and it was this return to a synthetic, or purely pictorial, method of painting, on the part of one who had carried analysis and scientific research to their extreme limits, that constituted the principal source of Cézanne's peculiar influence upon the rising artists of the younger generation, of which Henri Matisse was the leader.

Matisse, more than any one else, is the father of the modern movement in art. He, the founder of "Les Fauves," was the

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