"And you, too, Mrs. Wedner," said Larry "all stand clear of the main entrance. Perhaps you'd all better go up a flight-yes, two flights, up out of the way -everybody!" And he began shooing us all toward the stairs. "Why, Larry Trench!" I cried"you'd think you'd been seeing us every day for the last year, instead "Don't be silly," said Nan's mother. "He is right. Ladies, I think we would all do well to follow Lieutenant Trench's instructions." And she always did look the born leader-all we women followed her when she led the way up-stairs. But we did not go up any two flights. At the head of the grand staircase we stopped, and there waited to see what would happen next. us, turned to Larry. But auntie and Nan and Larry were already strolling over to the row of palmettos, at which Carmen Whiffle, tossing her head and swaying her waist like every Carmen of every Carmen opera I ever saw, walked over to where Podesta had sat down at a table by himself. "Will you tell me," I asked Ned on our way up-stairs, "how Larry ever came to know Carmen Whiffle?" "If there is a young officer in port who doesn't know Carmen Whiffle, I have not met him. She takes care of that." "But he didn't have to talk with her by the hour-and dance with her." "In the service, Nettie," said Ned, "we sometimes have to find out things that have nothing to do with the main engine or the turret guns. And Carmen Whiffle knows General Podesta very well. And Larry, if somewhat young and innocent, is not without brains. Now don't ask any more. And I did not; but I went on to tell Ned how I had planned the balcony interview. Ned could not keep it to himself— he told auntie. It soon happened. A man looked through between the tables and chairs of the portales. Larry invited him in. He was one of Podesta's officers, and he came in with a pistol in his belt, but very polite; and Larry just as much so. They talked, and were still talking, when we heard the tramping of men in shoes outside in the plaza, and then-I couldn't believe my eyes-when I took another look there was "Yes," said auntie, when he had finmy own Ned in uniform; and he stepped ished, "it was very clever. Nettie always past the chairs and tables to where Larry is. My door was ajar when I saw Neddo and the native officer were; and there running for down-stairs, and I stopped was a palavering all around. And I felt him to learn what in the world he was dopretty proud the way Ned could talk the ing. And he told me the secret that I lingo with so many looking on. wasn't to tell Nan." "Ned, Ned!" I called out; and he heard me, but he gave me a sign to be quiet with his hand behind his back. And by and by Ned and Larry and the native officer marched out, and then we rushed to the windows of the rooms opening on the plaza, and we saw General Podesta order his men to march off; and as they did our bluejackets and marines stacked arms in the plaza, and then we knew everything was going to be all right. And Ned came back into the hotel with Larry to tell us that we need have no further fear-that Podesta's men were to leave the city; and Podesta came back and bowed to us, and said it was so. And we came running down the stairs, and some of those women there acted as if they would kiss Ned, but I soon let them know who I was, especially Carmen Whiffle, who, after looking in surprise at She is the most annoying woman. "If you knew so much, why didn't you stop it?" I asked. "Why should I stop it?" she answered, with the most exasperating calm. "I always wanted Nan and Larry to marry. But I always believed in a little discipline, too. When young people have merely to cry for a thing to get it-it doesn't do them any lasting good." To escape the quizzical eyes of auntie, I looked back down the stairs; and if there weren't Carmen Whiffle and General Podesta sitting at a table and the fat majordomo himself opening a bottle of wine for them! "Well!" I gasped to Ned. "Yes," said Ned. "The rumor is that she may be the Señora Podesta any time she pleases. And if she had learned from Ned or some other indiscreet young or old officer that we were to land to-night-it would have saved Podesta from making a rather ridiculous entry into the city, wouldn't it?" "What a schemer!" I cried. "Yes," smiled Ned-"everybody schemers but our own selves." "I spoke a word to the flag-lieutenant to-dayhe's a classmate-to put in a word for me for the landing party to the Old Man." "Your courage and your brains," I began "or was it your knowledge of the language "The fleet," interrupted Ned, "is crowded with officers of courage and brains. And I am not alone on the language end of it. But I was the only officer with a wife and two children ashore. And, as we hadn't seen each other for a year, the Old Man thought it mightn't be a bad idea for me to come ashore and have an eye out for them." By this time Nan and Larry had passed onto the latticed balcony, and Nan's mother to her room; and Ned was hugging Neddo and Anna together. "Perhaps," I said, "I'm not such a strategist after all!" "Nettie," said Ned, "cheer up. You have your share of brains. I, your husband, say it. And if your husband admits it, it must be so. But, Nettie dear, don't forget that here with the children is your bidding suit. Lead the play up to the children, Nettie, and they will sure have to hold some cards to set you." "I haven't seen you in a year-go ahead and laugh at me," I said. But I didn't care he was my own Ned, and I had him, and told him so. "And haven't I you!" said Ned-and swept me with the children into his arms. And Nan and Larry were sitting out on the balcony-I could hear their murmuring voices through an open window; and from the patio below I could make out the tinkle of a fountain and some kind of a native instrument, and a voice chantingnot of pride or glory or riches, but of love human, humble, eternal love. And before I even knew I was crying Ned was kissing the tears from my eyes. AFTER READING "LAVENGRO" I HAVE been still enough; time it is to wander, I have dreamed in sun and shade but now I'm going yonder, Many a happy mile of mine shall wind among the valleys; For I shall sing the dream-songs I made before my going- And I shall meet a young child, and I shall know new faces, Yea, with my wallet and my staff, I now must go a-questing, I'll take my little book of songs-O I have long been still! For here I've dreamed in sun and shade and here my heart's been resting, But now I take the wide road that breaks above the hill! THE GOLDEN AGE OF PAINTING B BY KENYON COX III-DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTING OF THE sterile than that of the Italianized Flemings of the latter part of the sixteenth century has ever been produced. Y the end of the sixteenth century Italian art was rapidly declining, even in Venice; but the influence Rubens, too, was an "Italianizer" and of Italy was spreading into spent many years in Italy, but he had a other countries, and in the great genius for painting, and his instinct seventeenth century the vital art of the led him to find in the Venetians a school world was produced in Flanders, in Hol- sufficiently akin to that which had once land, and in Spain. It was a century of flourished in his native land to be capable painting. These countries had produced of a fertile union with it. The result was the best of which they were capable in ar- an art of immense vitality and fecundity chitecture and in sculpture long before this an art prepotent among all otherstime; now, while they were creating great which filled the seventeenth century with and important schools of painting their its glory and became, in its turn, the anarchitecture was mediocre and their sculp- cestor of the best art, English or French, of ture almost non-existent. the succeeding century. In Flanders there had been an admirable native school of painting in the fifteenth century—a school not unlike the Venetian in some things and one that, by its invention of oil-painting, provided the Venetians with their necessary means of expression. The Flemings, like the Venetians, lived in a moist climate and, like the Venetians, they were a nation of traders with the East. They were fond of color, of material luxury, of rich brocades and splendid materials of all sorts. Even more than the Venetians they were naturalists, accepting life as they saw it and reproducing it as accurately as they were able. What they had not was the Italian love of beauty, the Italian genius for form, and the Italian mastery of ordered arrangement. When intercourse with Italy taught them to perceive this lack they set themselves to studying Italian art, and when Rubens came upon the scene they had been "Italianizing" for near a hundred years with deplorable results. Their imitation of Raphael and Michelangelo had succeeded only in eradicating the native qualities of the school and in substituting for them a ridiculous misunderstanding of the Italian genius. It is doubt ful if any painting more worthless and Peter Paul Rubens is almost, in his proper person, the Flemish school of the seventeenth century. He was surrounded by able men, many of them of his own age or older than he, but his dominant personality reduces them to the rôle of mere satellites, revolving about him and adding to, while they reflect, his splendor. Born almost exactly a hundred years after Titian, he held in his day much such a position as Titian had held a century earlier. His fame was world-wide and his art everywhere in request. Whenever the best man was wanted he was called upon, and he served the little courts of Italy and the great ones of England, France, and Spain as well as that of his native country at Antwerp. He is a splendid figure in history, a cultivated gentleman speaking seven languages, a knight, an ambassador, and a friend of princes, a man occupied with many things besides his art, yet withal a painter of such prodigious industry that he produced more than twenty-two hundred pictures, many of them of huge size. Such an enormous production was made possible only by the systematic use of a corps of pupils and assistants; but while Rubens was the head of a vast manufactory of works of art, he put so much of himself into everything that left his workshop as to maintain its output at an extraordinarily high level, and there are enough works of his own hand extant to provide masterpieces for half a dozen painters of our modern stature. In temper his art is more like that of Veronese than any other; he had much of Veronese's power, his love for the sumptuous, his pride and joy of life. But he is without the Venetian seriousness, without the grave and dignified elegance of Veronese. He is, by comparison, a trifle barbaric, more exuberant, more emphatic, coarser-fibred. Veronese is often at his best in depicting a banquet; Rubens is never more himself than when painting a kermess. His sensuality is franker than that of any Venetian, and where Veronese's female figures are amply classic, Rubens's are pulpy and even baggy. Yet he has an easy, florid, high-worded eloquence that can rise to almost any theme. No one was ever more flowing, more abundant, more vigorous-perhaps no one was ever so skilful. For him difficulties exist only to be conquered with a triumphant facility, yet his virtuosity is never indulged in for its own sake but is kept in subjection to a cool intelligence and a profound learning. For this jovial, ruddy, full-blooded, Flemish giant is in his way a classicist and an eclectic. Everything in his work is calculated and everything is based upon a deep study of the art of the past. He has pondered the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo no less than those of Veronese and Titian; has found time in the midst of his vast productivity to make many copies; has chosen from everything that has been done before him those elements which he can usefully incorporate into his own style and bend to the expression of his own ideals and the ideals of his own time. How thoroughly he did express those ideals is shown by his almost universal popularity. At the close of the wars with Spain, Flanders had remained Catholic and monarchical while Holland had become Protestant and republican. Rubens is the painter of the Catholic and monarchical reaction and his art was of the same kind as that of the Jesuit churches-splendid, a little pompous, without great purity of taste, an art intended to impress and to dazzle rather than to win. His business was to paint great altar-pieces for the churches or great allegorical decorations for royal palaces; and to carry out such tasks one of the most essential qualifications is rapidity of execution. So he became one of the speediest of executants, but his speed is very different from the hasty improvisation of a Tintoretto. His rapidity is simply efficiency. It is perfectly deliberate, and both his style. and his technical methods have been profoundly modified to attain it. His drawing is full of flowing and redundant curves, partly because they are in the taste of the day, partly because such forms are most rapidly and easily executed with the brush; but these curves are not the result of rapid and careless brush-work. They are intelligent modifications, consciously adopted, of the forms of Michelangelo, and they are carefully provided for in his preliminary studies. When one of his patrons-a Frenchman who was, perhaps, influenced by the severer classicism of Poussin-found fault with the bandy legs of some of his figures he gravely defended them as properly drawn according to the best tradition. His composition, his color, his technical method have all received a similar modification. His composition is full of the same emphatic, cursive, S-shaped lines as his drawing. It is restless and full of turbulent movement, but it is rigidly controlled, perfectly lucid, never for a moment out of hand. His color is now rich and sonorous, now coolly brilliant, but it is never carried beyond a certain point of subtlety, and there is always an element of recipe in it. It is neither passionate nor exquisite, but the best color attainable in the time given to the work by a man who knows all that is to be known about color, as about other things, and who has learned just how his effects may be obtained with the least labor. His method of painting is based upon the Venetian, modified by the old Flemish love for thinness of material and smoothness of surface-modified above all by the necessity of speed. Nothing so light, so rapid, so flexible was ever invented, and as he grows older and his mastery of it increases he comes to paint almost with vapor, and there seems to be no solid matter at all on his canvas. The consciously eclectic and almost academic nature of Rubens's art is most clearly seen in the "Descent from the Cross," the first important picture which he painted after his return from Italy. Here the attempt at a synthesis of great qualities is almost as patent as in any of the Bolognese. The composition is largely borrowed from Daniele da Volterra, and the determination to combine Florentine draftsmanship, Venetian color, and the realistic force and sombre light and shade of the Naturalists is selfevident. But the fusion of elements is more conspicuous in this instance only because it is as yet incomplete. The picture is his "masterpiece" only in the original sense of the word-the piece intended to announce and to assure acceptance of his mastery. It is in later works that this style, compounded of many simples, is fully matured and becomes fully his own, so that he speaks through it with perfect ease. How entirely his manner is suited to the matter, and how admirably his painting accords with its natural setting of sumptuous and somewhat over-ornamented architecture may be seen in the "Marie de' Medici" series in the Louvre, now that these pictures are seen together in a room designed to hold them. They are not of Rubens's very best and they contain only here and there his own handiwork, but it is all the more evident how magnificently they are planned. Years ago, when they hung among other pictures in the Long Gallery, they seemed rather pompous and summary, empty and lacking in quality. Now they are seen to be superb decorations which, in the great halls of the Luxembourg Palace for which they were designed, can have lacked nothing of perfect appropriate ness. Such was what one may call the official art of Rubens. Others have created an art that is nobler and purer, more passionate or more delicate and lovely; there is no art that is more intelligent or, in its own way, more admirable, and hardly any from which so much may be learned. But after all, Rubens was a man and not a formula, and so he escapes on all sides from our definition. He had his likes and his loves, which were those of an eminently sane and manly nature, and as he could paint as easily as he could talk these likes and these loves expressed themselves pictorially. He liked hunting and was fond of animals, and he painted beasts as almost no one else has done. He was fond of country life and he became a great landscape-painter, painting a landscape more homely and less stately than that of the Venetians and making distinct advances in truth of light and natural effect. He could even be tenderly poetic now and then, painting one of the most delicate and beautiful representations of moonlight known to art; or romantic, as in that little picture of fighting knights that might have been painted by a Frenchman of 1830. Most of these things are the work of his later years, when he had retired from statesmanship and from the execution of great commissions and painted to please himself. At fifty-three he married his second wife, Helena Fourment, a girl of sixteen, and his love for her inspired a series of portraits and of pictures in which she is ever the central figure, which are among the most delicious things in the world. He painted her in the most splendid costumes his well-furnished purse could buy; he painted her, with singular frankness, in next to nothing at all. Plump and white and blonde, a true Fleming, but radiant with youth and beauty, we know her as a bride, we know her as a young mother, we know her as this or that personage of mythology or of sacred legend. In "The Garden of Love," at Madrid, there seem to be half a dozen Helenas, each lovelier than the other. In such pictures as this last, Rubens descends straight from Giorgione. They are like the "Partie Champêtre," but a little gayer, a little more florid, a little less nobly poetical. A hundred years later Watteau was to take up the theme, to treat it at once more frivolously and more sentimentally, to etherealize its frank and solid humanity, and to find the type of the French eighteenth century. Among the brilliant courtiers of this king of painting, one needs special mention not only for his own merit but for his de |