thing. After the thing had been over for some considerable time, in their studios, or at any rate far from the scene, they dressed up their hired models and fabricated

the pageant. That some of these set pictures have never been surpassed as passages in paint is quite beside the point. And though Meissonier and his pupils or imitators, Neuville and Dataille, made their prime business the depicting with amazing minuteness and dexterity of anecdotic subjects of the Napoleonic wars, their procedure was the same. On the other hand, while Goya's Horrors of War (or whatever precisely the series of lithographs is called) and Callot's minute and intensely realistic engravings of whole armies certainly convey the effect of direct impressions of the scene, these things were "stunts" in the careers of the artists and present no consistent record of military life.

In fine, while traditionally the artist has been commissioned by states and princes to commemorate their valorous deeds in arms he had never been, as an artist, a soldier. He could, of course, lay down his brush and go fight if he wanted to, otherwise he remained a civilian historian. And in the course of the development of asthetic theory, and the gradual lessening of the subject of war as one of the major concerns of mankind, the theme of war ceased to attract first-rate talent among painters, and fell to the province of lesser craftsmen, the illustrators. We have had in the United States a very creditable little group of men each with a distinctive flair for military magazine-pictures. Those of us brought up on our standard magazines recall with a kind of affection the sterling work in this field of such

entertaining instructors of our youth as T. dé Thulstrup, Howard Pyle, F. C. Yohn and Frederick Remington. With the rise of pictorial journalism, made possible by the introduction of rapid and inexpensive processes of reproduction, there came to pass, too, in the continuance of sporadic outbursts of war, a press figure familiarly known to us all as "our special artist at the front"-a figure of a a figure of a highly popular kind, though, as in the case of H. C. Christy and the Spanish-American War, not infrequently one whose affinity with his subject has not been particularly conspicuous.

The present war is not in anything more unlike any other war than in its relation to art, both the art of literature and that of painting. Most of the authors of the world are now soldiers, and, it is a current witticism to say, most of the soldiers who were not authors before the war are authors now. And the "art artists" (as they have been so aptly described) are not only at the war to-day but in it, the real artists, that is, of England and Europe. There has never been anything at all like the files of L'Illustration since 1914; and a distinguished American painter and critic declared the other day that the pages of this journal gave a better idea of the war than everything else about it put together.

No writer has been able to make those who have not been there actually see the war, as one sees the human scene about him at home. It is beyond the power of the written word to evoke before the eye the mighty, sombre and malign quality of the battle-field landscape as a whole, or the daily life of troops in their habit as they live, down to the last detail of the cut of their coats.

And reams of photographs, we know, cannot with even a distant approach to adequacy tell the tale, because, wonderful as many of the photographs of this war are, the camera cannot feel. Only the artist can show the visible scene in the light of the spirit in which it is lived. Unlike the camera, his is the power to seize upon those things before him the interest of which is universal and eternal, and to let drop away those things which are ephemeral and accidental. He does not merely draw ruined churches and houses, great guns being aimed, guards and lorries, doctors and wounded men. His is the mission of making visible by his art to those remote from the scene and to distant ages the staunchness and patience, the faithful absorption in the next duty, the extraordinary humour, the standards. of comradeship and good nature— all the strains of character and emotion that go to make up the temper of a great army in the field. He does not merely draw armed figures in the act of proceeding across a plain; he paints moments of transfiguration, when all the glow of courage that has been banked down and husbanded through months of waiting and guarding, bursts, at a word of command, into flame.

One of the most fascinating things about the return of first rate art to the subject of war is that it returns shorn of the academic conventions of pomp and panoply characteristic of the old, set battle pieces and stage-set scenes of surrenders. It returns with all the knowledge acquired in its evolution away from the pictorial picture and literary theme and paints not show pageants but, with its new fidelity to visible facts, the actual circumstances of the war.

Men of ability of a very high rank are painting for her France's part in the war. Among the "official" artists with the French armies are François Flameng, Lucien Jonas, Georges Scott, named in the order of their importance, all of whom have done perfectly corking things, of soldiers in action and in portraits of generals. Though doubtless the best known to Americans of the French war artists is Charles Huard, Official Painter to the Sixth Army of France, who has twice been to this country, and whose vivacious. and distinguished illustrations first to the magazine articles and recently to the war books of his wife, Frances Wilson Huard, have had a wide currency among us. Among other French artists who have done notable work of enduring value are Paul Sabatier and Charles Hoffbauer; the latter of whom has lived much in the United States; is a member of the Players Club; and, so the story goes, was down in Virginia, or some other Southern State, painting a decoration for a court house when his call to the colours came, when, so had he kept himself in readiness since his term of military service, the war found him with even his boots greased.

Everybody probably knows and has enjoyed the work of Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, a genius in his way, the Phil May of the war, and of an army that certainly required a Phil May. Among British official artists are Frank Brangwyn Mac Vey, and, particularly worthy of his task, Muirhead Bone, an artist of very considerable power, with a sheer weight of impressiveness that is truly stunning.

At the request of General Pershing for eight artists for the Amer