Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, November, 1878

In the English section are plenty of old acquaintances: we have seen them at Philadelphia, in London and I know not where besides. Frith's Railway Station and Derby Day we all remember, so badly realistic and modern, and the Casual Ward of Fildes—pictures that have gained in England the popularity and success due to veritable works of art, and in Paris the sort of praise we should give to a large colored photograph—if it were well done. This English school is hardly to our taste: Leslie, Leighton, Millais, Orchardson, the painters most in vogue in their own country, have not succeeded in overcoming the cold indifference of the public, who pass through the galleries without caring even to stop. Whence comes the strange disregard for art in a country which lavishes such vast sums for the encouragement of artists? Here are canvases which have been covered with gold, but Parisian criticism treats them as contemptuously as if they were mere chromo-lithographs. The English school is severely condemned for its inharmonious colors, which are either too violent or too cold; for its drawing, which is without what we call distinction; and for that unaccountable light which seems to shine through their figures from within, giving many of the heads the appearance of lanterns. Naturally, Professor Ruskin comes in for his share of this harsh criticism—which, I beg my readers to observe, is not ventured as my own, but is only the echo of the opinion of competent authorities, members of the Institute of France—and the veteran apostle of Pre-Raphaelism is accused of an affected simplicity, and, at the same time, of an offensive and coarse realism, of a mongrel combination of the styles of Courbet and of the old missals, of a want of perspective, and, in short, of all the faults which mark the contemporary English school.

It was only at the last moment that Germany decided to exhibit, and it would be hardly fair to judge of the art of that country by the small number of examples on the walls. There are some paintings by M. Knauss and his followers, however, in whom, if we may accept the opinion of certain connoisseurs, is to be found the true representation of the genius of the land beyond the Rhine. The subjects are invariably peasants or children, rendered according to the monotonous processes of this school, the shape clearly projected upon a dull and sombre ground, the attitudes correct and the gestures faultless, but there is an absence of everything brilliant or striking. No one of the attributes which go to make up a good picture is allowed to assert itself above another: there is an equalization of many talents, sure of themselves, and as incapable of weakness or failure as of telling strokes of genius. One cannot fail to look with curiosity at the Furnace of M. Menzel, a picture of much celebrity in Germany, representing an immense foundry with its massive framework of iron, its machinery and furnaces, the powerful glare of light from a melted casting vividly illuminating the faces and figures of the workmen. Worthy of mention too are the portraits of men by the Bavarian Lembach, and Richter's fine portrait of the beautiful princess Karolath-Beuthen in a ball-dress of white satin, seated by the chimney with an enormous house-dog at her feet. Nor must we omit the Baptism after the Death of the Father by M. Hoff, the chief of the Realistic school, and the landscapes of the two Achembachs and of Breudel and Munthe.

One of the greatest successes of the Exposition has been achieved by Spain. M. Pradilla's remarkable composition representing a passage from the national history—the mad queen Joanna watching by the corpse of her husband, Philip the Handsome—has received a medal of honor. This important painting, which was exhibited at Philadelphia, has attracted so much attention at Madrid during the past two years that the Chambers voted a sum for its acquisition by the state. MM. F. and R. de Madrazzo, father and son, who are well known in America, are also represented, the former (who is director of the Museum of Madrid) by some admirable portraits, one of which is especially noticeable. In a large arm-chair covered in red reclines a very young girl, whose dress, of a light rose-color, is nearly of the same tint as her own delicate complexion, while the red carpet at her feet, the carnations and red geraniums upon the table, all thrown out boldly upon a background of intense blue, produce a strange but wonderfully harmonious effect of color. M. Madrazzo's eldest daughter was the wife of the young and lamented Fortuny, and her bright and lovely face reappears in many, if not in most, of the compositions of her gifted husband.

Fortuny, who sold his first picture to a costermonger in Madrid for a bag of peas, is represented at the Champ de Mars by several canvases, the smallest of which would bring forty thousand francs. His best works are in France. The Wedding at the Vicarage, his chef-d'œuvre, belongs to Madame de Cassin; M. André owns his Serpent-Charmer; and the well-known Choice of a Model and The Judgment-Hall at Granada are in the possession of M. Stewart, the painter's intimate friend, whose collection of Fortuny's works is worth, at the current prices of the day, not less than six hundred thousand francs. Fortuny's painting is indescribable. It has the sparkle of diamonds and rubies and emeralds in the brilliant light of a ball-room. His figures are small, and as minutely elaborated and as highly finished as those of Meissonier himself, whose cherished pupil he was; and I could not but smile, while examining them, at the notion of an enthusiastic young Philadelphian, an almost idolatrous worshipper of Fortuny, that he could imitate this incomparable work by a rapid and free sort of sketching, and all on the faith of two pictures of the master which he had had the happiness to see at an exhibition in Broad street. The immense influence of Fortuny upon the younger contemporary painters of Spain is very apparent in the Exposition. MM. Rico, Simonetti, Domingo, Melida, Casanova vie with each other in their imitation of his manner, but, excellent artists as they are, they are doing so at the expense of originality. The qualities of Fortuny belonged to the nature and temperament of this extraordinary artist, and are not to be acquired by any amount of labor or by any effort of will.

My favorite corner at the Champ de Mars is here before the sparkling little canvases of the Spanish master. But this prodigality of color will sometimes dazzle and fatigue the eye, and turning from it one sees, framed by the heavy red curtains which enclose the Spanish gallery, the immense canvas of the Austrian Hans Makart. This is the Entry of Charles V. into Antwerp. The emperor is surrounded by nearly nude women, who in the midst of horsemen and men-at-arms are offering him flowers and wreaths. These figures, with those of ladies upon balconies gay with flags, and the vast architecture, fill this enormous canvas, which is much larger than even the Catharine Cornaro with which the Philadelphia Exhibition made Americans familiar. The nudity of the women mingled with clothed personages in the streets of a city of the sixteenth century has naturally called forth much adverse criticism, and people have fancied that they saw in it an unworthy attempt to achieve a popular success by means of the scandal; but M. Makart replies that he has respected the truth of history if we are not to disbelieve a contemporary letter of Albert Dürer to Melanchthon. Be this as it may, this great effort receives the applause of the public, notwithstanding the monotonous amber tint which pervades this picture as it did the Catharine Cornaro. Another Austrian, the historical painter Matejko, has received a medal of honor for pictures full of energy, truth and character, though marred by that unaccountable scattering of the light which is a peculiar eccentricity of Austrian painters.

L. Lejeune.

DESERTED

"WHAT a glorious, all-satisfying country this Nevada desert would be if one were only all eyes, and had no need of food, drink and shelter! Wouldn't it, Miss Dwyer? Do you know, I've no doubt that this is the true location of heaven. You see, the lack of water and vegetation would be no inconvenience to spirits, while the magnificent scenery and the cloudless sky would be just the thing to make them thrive."

"But what I can't get over," responded the young lady addressed, "is that these alkali plains, which have been described as so dreary and uninteresting, should prove to be in reality one of the most wonderfully impressive and beautiful regions in the world. What awful fibbers or what awfully dull people they must have been whose descriptions have so misled the public! It is perfectly unaccountable. Here, I expected to doze all the way across the desert, while, in fact, I've grudged my eyes time enough to wink ever since I left my berth this morning."

"The trouble is," replied her companion, "that persons in search of the picturesque, or with much eye for it, are rare travellers along this route. The people responsible for the descriptions you complain of are thrifty business-men, with no idea that there can be any possible attraction in a country where crops can't be raised, timber cut or ore dug up. For my part, I thank the Lord for the beautiful barrenness that has consecrated this great region to loneliness. Here there will always be a chance to get out of sight and sound of the swarming millions who have already left scarcely standing-room for a man in the East. I wouldn't give much for a country where there are no wildernesses left."

"But I really think it is rather hard to say in just what the beauty of the desert consists," said Miss Dwyer. "It is so simple. I scribbled two pages of description in my note-book this morning, but when I read them over, and then looked out of the window, I tore them up. I think the wonderfully fine, clear, brilliant air transfigures the landscape and makes it something that must be seen and can't be told. After seeing how this air makes the ugly sagebrush and the patches of alkali and brown earth a feast to the eye, one can understand how the light of heaven may make the ugliest faces beautiful."

The pretty talker is sitting next the window of palace-car No. 30 of the Central Pacific line, which has already been her flying home for two days. The gentleman who sits beside her professes to be sharing the view, but it is only fair I should tell the reader that under this pretence he is nefariously delighting in the rounded contour of his companion's half-averted face as she, in unfeigned engrossment, scans the panorama unrolled before them by the swift motion of the car. How sweet and fresh is the bright tint of her cheek against the ghastly white background of the alkali-patches as they flit by! Still, it can't be said that he isn't enjoying the scenery too, for surely there is no such Claude-Lorraine glass to reflect and enhance the beauty of a landscape as the face of a spirituel girl.

With a profound sigh, summing up both her admiration and that despair of attaining the perfect insight and sympathy imagined and longed for which is always a part of intense appreciation of natural beauty, Miss Dwyer threw herself back in her seat and fixed her eyes on the car-ceiling with an expression as if she were looking at something at least as far away as the moon.

"I'm going to make a statue when I get home," she said—"a statue which will personify Nevada and represent the tameless, desolate, changeless, magnificent beauty and the self-sufficient loneliness of the desert. I can see it in my mind's eye now. It will probably be the finest statue in the world."

"If you'd as lieve put your ideal into a painting I will give you a suggestion that will be original if nothing else," he observed.

"What's that?"

"Why, having in view these white alkali-patches that chiefly characterize Nevada, paint her as a leper."

"That's horrid! You needn't talk to me any more," she exclaimed emphatically.

With this sort of chatter they had beguiled the time since leaving San Francisco the morning of the day before. Acquaintances are indeed made as rapidly on an overland train as on an ocean steamship, but theirs had dated from the preceding winter, during which they had often met in San Francisco. When Mr. Lombard heard that Miss Dwyer and Mrs. Eustis, her invalid sister, were going East in April, he discovered that he would have business to attend to in New York at about that time; and oddly enough—that is, if you choose to take that view of it—when the ladies came to go it turned out that Lombard had taken his ticket for the selfsame train and identical sleeping-car. The result of which was that he had the privilege of handing Miss Dwyer in and out at the eating-stations, of bringing Mrs. Eustis her cup of tea in the car, and of sharing Miss Dwyer's seat and monopolizing her conversation when he had a mind to, which was most of the time. A bright and congenial companion has this advantage over a book, that he or she is an author whom you can make discourse on any subject you please, instead of being obliged to follow an arbitrary selection by another, as when you commune with the printed page.

By way of peace-offering for his blasphemy in calling the Nevada desert a leper, Lombard had embezzled a couple of chairs from the smoking-room and carried them to the rear platform of the car, which happened to be the last of the train, and invited Miss Dwyer to come thither and see the scenery. Whether she had wanted to pardon him or not, he knew very well that this was a temptation which she could not resist, for the rear platform was the best spot for observation on the entire train, unless it were the cowcatcher of the locomotive.

The April sun mingled with the frosty air like whiskey with ice-water, producing an effect cool but exhilarating. As she sat in the door of the little passage leading to the platform she scarcely needed the shawl which he wrapped about her with absurdly exaggerated solicitude. One of the most unmistakable symptoms of the lover is the absorbing and superfluous care with which he adjusts the wraps about the object of his affections whether the weather be warm or cold: it is as if he thought he could thus artificially warm her heart toward him. But Miss Dwyer did not appear vexed, pretending indeed to be oblivious of everything else in admiration of the spectacle before her.

The country stretched flat and bare as a table for fifty miles on either side the track—a distance looking in the clear air not over one-fifth as great. On every side this great plain was circled by mountains, the reddish-brown sides of some of them bare to the summits, while others were robed in folds of glistening snow and looked like white curtains drawn part way up the sky. The whitey-gray of the alkali-patches, the brown of the dry earth and the rusty green of the sagebrush filled the foreground, melting in the distance into a purple-gray. The wondrous dryness and clearness of the air lent to these modest tints a tone and dazzling brilliance that surprised the eye with a revelation of possibilities never before suspected in them. But the mountains were the greatest wonder. It was as if the skies, taking pity on their nakedness, had draped their majestic shoulders in imperial purple, while at this hour the westering sun tipped their pinnacles with gilt. In the distance half a dozen sand-spouts, swiftly-moving white pillars, looking like desert genii with too much "tanglefoot" aboard, were careering about in every direction.

But as Lombard pointed out the various features of the scene to his companion, I fear that his chief motive was less an admiration of Nature that sought sympathy than a selfish delight in making her eyes flash, seeing the color come and go in her cheeks, and hearing her charming unstudied exclamations of pleasure—a delight not unmingled with complacency in associating himself in her mind with emotions of delight and admiration. It is appalling, the extent to which spoony young people make the admiration of Nature in her grandest forms a mere sauce to their lovemaking. The roar of Niagara has been notoriously utilized as a cover to unlimited osculation, and Adolphus looks up at the sky-cleaving peak of Mont Blanc only to look down at Angelina's countenance with a more vivid appreciation of its superior attractions.

It was delicious, Lombard thought, sitting there with her on the rear platform, out of sight and sound of everybody. He had such a pleasant sense of proprietorship in her! How agreeable—flatteringly so, in fact—she had been all day! There was nothing like travelling together to make people intimate. It was clear that she understood his intentions very well: indeed, how could she help it? He had always said that a fellow had shown himself a bungler at lovemaking if he were not practically assured of the result before he came to the point of the declaration. The sensation of leaving everything else so rapidly behind that people have when sitting on the rear platform of a train of cars makes them feel, by force of contrast, nearer to each other and more identified. How pretty she looked sitting there in the doorway, her eyes bent so pensively on the track behind as the car-wheels so swiftly reeled it off! He had tucked her in comfortably. No cold could get to the sweet little girl, and none ever should so long as he lived to make her comfort his care.

One small gloved hand lay on her lap outside the shawl. What a jolly little hand it was! He reached out his own and took it, but, without even a moment's hesitation for him to extract a flattering inference from, she withdrew it. Perhaps something in his matter-of-course way displeased her.

To know when it is best to submit to a partial rebuff, rather than make a bad matter worse by trying to save one's pride, is a rare wisdom. Still, Lombard might have exercised it at another time. But there are days when the magnetisms are all wrong, and a person not ordinarily deficient in tact, having begun wrong, goes on blundering like a schoolboy. Piqued at the sudden shock to the pleasant day-dream, in which he had fancied himself already virtually assured of this young lady—a day-dream which she was not really accountable for spoiling, since she had not been privy to it—what should he do but find expression for his mingled vexation and wounded affection by reminding her of a previous occasion on which she had allowed him the liberty she now denied? Doubtless helping to account for this lack of tact was the idea that he should thus justify himself for so far presuming just now. Not, of course, that there is really any excuse for a young man's forgetting that ladies have one advantage over Omniscience, in that not only are they privileged to remember what they please, but also to ignore what they see fit to forget.

"You have forgotten that evening at the California Theatre," was what this devoted youth said.

"I'm sure I don't know to what you refer, sir," she replied freezingly.

He was terrified at the distant accent of her voice. It appeared to come from somewhere beyond the fixed stars, and brought the chill of the interstellar spaces with it. He forgot in an instant all about his pique, vexation and wounded pride, and was in a panic of anxiety to bring her back. In a moment more he knew that she would rise from her chair and remark that it was getting cold and she must go in. If he allowed her to depart in that mood he might lose her for ever. He could think of but one way of convincing her instantaneously of his devotion; and so what should he do but take the most inopportune occasion in the entire course of their acquaintance to make his declaration? He was like a general whose plan of battle has been completely deranged by an utterly unexpected repulse in a preliminary movement, compelling him to hurry forward his last reserves in a desperate attempt to restore the battle.

"What have I done, Miss Dwyer? Don't you know that I love you? Won't you be my wife?"

"No, sir," she said flatly, her taste outraged and her sensibilities set on edge by the stupid, blundering, hammer-and-tongs onset which from first to last he had made. She loved him, and had meant to accept him, but if she had loved him ten times as much she couldn't have helped refusing him just then, under those circumstances—not if she died for it. As she spoke she rose and disappeared within the car.

It is certainly to be hoped that the noise of the wheels, which out on the platform was considerable, prevented the recording angel from getting the full force of Lombard's ejaculation.

It is bad enough to be refused when the delicacy and respectfulness of the lady's manner make "No" sound so much like "Yes" that the rejected lover can almost persuade himself that his ears have deceived him. It is bad enough to be refused when she does it so timidly and shrinkingly and deprecatingly that it might be supposed she were the rejected party. It is bad enough to be refused when she expresses the hope that you will always be friends, and shows a disposition to make profuse amends in general agreeableness for the consummate favor which she is forced to decline you. Not to put too fine a point upon it, it is bad enough to be refused anyhow you can arrange the circumstances, but to be refused as Lombard had been, with a petulance as wounding to his dignity as was the refusal itself to his affections, is to take a bitter pill with an asafœtida coating.

In the limp and demoralized condition in which he was left the only clear sentiment in his mind was that he did not want to meet her again just at present. So he sat for an hour or more longer out on the platform, and had become as thoroughly chilled without as he was within when at dusk the train stopped at a little three-house station for supper. Then he went into one of the forward day-cars, not intending to return to the sleeping-car till Miss Dwyer should have retired. When the train reached Ogden the next morning; instead of going on East he would take the same train back to San Francisco, and that would be the end of his romance. His engagement in New York had been a myth, and with Miss Dwyer's "No, sir," the only business with the East that had brought him on this trip was at an end.

About an hour after leaving the supper-station the train suddenly stopped in the midst of the desert. Something about the engine had become disarranged which it would take some time to put right. Glad to improve an opportunity to stretch their legs, many of the passengers left the cars and were strolling about, curiously examining the sagebrush and the alkali, and admiring the ghostly plain as it spread, bare, level and white as an ice-bound polar sea, to the feet of the far-off mountains.

Lombard had also left the car, and was walking about, his hands in his overcoat pockets, trying to clear his mind of the wreckage that obstructed its working; for Miss Dwyer's refusal had come upon him as a sudden squall that carries away the masts and sails of a vessel and transforms it in a moment from a gallant bounding ship to a mere hulk drifting in an entangled mass of débris. Of course she had a perfect right to suit herself about the kind of a man she took for a husband, but he certainly had not thought she was such an utter coquette. If ever a woman gave a man reason to think himself as good as engaged, she had given him that reason, and yet she refused him as coolly as she would have declined a second plate of soup. There must be some truth, after all, in the rant of the poets about the heartlessness and fickleness of women, although he had always been used to consider it the merest bosh. Suddenly he heard the train moving. He was perhaps fifty yards off, and, grumbling anathemas at the stupidity of the conductor, started to run for the last car. He was not quite desperate enough to fancy being left alone on the Nevada desert with night coming on. He would have caught the train without difficulty if his foot had not happened to catch in a tough clump of sage, throwing him violently to the ground. As he gathered himself up the train was a hundred yards off, and moving rapidly. To overtake it was out of the question.

"Stop! ho! stop!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. But there was no one on the rear platform to see him, and the closed windows and the rattle of the wheels were sufficient to render a much louder noise than he could make inaudible to the dozing passengers. And now the engineer pulled out the throttle-valve to make up for lost time, and the clatter of the train faded into a distant roar and its lights began to twinkle into indistinctness.