against the future. Time is on our side. The great social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty, and which the tumult of our debates does not for a moment impede or disturb—those great social forces are against you."

Here Gladstone touched the crux of the question of finality in politics. But unfortunately for his practical conclusiveness, futile as must be any fight against the future, it still remains that the keenest foresight is often at fault to determine the course of the great social forces. It is open to doubt whether Gladstone himself, as he in that impassioned moment predicted "perhaps not an easy, but a certain, and a not distant victory," did not speak rather with the confidence of impelling enthusiasm than with the warrant of an assured faith. The dénouement reads like the familiar story of the idealist forcing the situation for the opportunist, who by the clever intuition of a Disraeli foresees and forestalls the inevitable outcome-perhaps selfishly, perhaps patriotically, and perhaps both selfishly and patriotically. It is

in no sense depreciation of the great service of the idealist, in life acknowledged by the world as it affects the "other fellow," and in death universally honored, to recognize also the practical service of the opportunist, who divines when and how best to reach a working agreement on a disturbing question. To justify some anomalies, even abuses, in order to secure the abolition of others, is doubtless to be counted as politics and not statesmanship. So at least seems to be classed that representative and best-abused of opportunists, Lord Macaulay, who, in the debate on the great Reform Bill of 1832, opposed uniform representation and, through "distrust of all general theories of government," praised the ministry "for not effacing the old distinction between the towns and the counties." But in so far as Macaulay thus contributed to the passage of the bill which gave England a partial settlement for thirtyfive years, quieting a contention that threatened revolution, he deserved the tribute paid to him of supporting "that party which is just enough in advance of the age to be of service to it." This is another word for the party of capacity to give the greatest degree of finality in politics-a party, however, whose effective service can only begin when the agitation of the idealists has done its perfect work.

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The Color Line in Dress

WHEN a few months ago I read a graceful tale, the moral of which turned upon whether a blue ribbon or a white ribbon best became an ochreyellow cat with turquoise eyes, it seemed to me an omen of promise, a pale forecast of greater attention on the part of novelists and story-tellers to the question of color in dress. The modern heroine of fiction suffers from a limitation of wardrobe hardly less extreme than her sister of Thackeray's day and Trollope's, when a simple white muslin, with now and then a touch of heavenly blue to emphasize its symbolism, did service upon all sentimental occasions. Who can forget the satiric vision of Rebecca appearing for the first time in the Sedley dining-room in a pure white gown. With this and her white shoulders, Thackeray sadly comments, she was "the picture of youth, unprotected innocence, and humble virgin simplicity." And it was in white muslin that Amelia won the unsophisticated heart of Dobbin, and even the tall and slender figure enshrining Ethel Newcome's sapient individuality is constantly enveloped in clouds of filmy white with azure ribbons floating over them.

Mr. Henry James, among Thackeray's worthy successors, has followed somewhat slavishly in Thackeray's steps through this one corner of his extended field of observation, and his lack of originality is the more marked that in rooms and gardens and environments determined by the taste of man his color schemes are the most distinguished to be found in modern literature. His effects have the delicately tinted, dim, and tremulous tone of Corot's pictures, save in his less vital works, where they deaden into the flat blues and pinks and creamy whites of the old pastellists. But his first favorite in color for women's dress is that of the conventional masculine author. He riots in the débutante's snowy draperies, and he signalizes the return to the world of his beautiful Madame de Cintré by clothing her in white with a blue cloak hanging to her feet, its silver clasp combining with its hue to suggest vaguely and entrancingly the heavens adorned by the crescent moon. He has, however, his moments of illumination. His Milly Theale in her diaphanous mourning, with her red hair and translucent skin, makes a Whistler portrait of that master's best period, and his "reduced gentlewomen" in sober grays are touching examples of feminine renunciation.

It requires a poetic soul to draw from gray and black æsthetic inspiration, but the loveliest heroine of all modern fiction subdues her loveliness to such a sober setting. I wonder if any one who ten years ago read "Peter Ibbetson" has forgotten the black dress trimmed with gray, the black and gray hat, and the scent of sandal-wood, all vividly associated with the dream-life of Mimsey, the Duchess of Towers? There is an appreciable artistic merit in the contrast between the solemn sentiment of the garb and the tender human passion of the duchess to which readers alert to impressions of pictorial quality immediately assent.

With the same instinct for felicitous association, William Morris insisted that the visionary but somewhat earthly women of his decorative romances should beautifully embroider their gowns with their own hands in the brightest and most heart-enlivening hues. The effect of color upon the spirits was a feature of his artistic creed, and in his "Land of Nowhere," void of unhappiness, the people, men and women alike, walk in shining garments, making of their thoroughfares perpetual rainbows leading to golden dreams.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps is another writer keenly alive to the psychological aspects of the colors affected by her heroines. In "Avis" the red curtain is made to palpitate to the young girl's fervor of emotion, and in "A Singular Life" Helen's purple conveys the same sympathetic suggestion. The properly responsive reader sees in the first the suffering, and in the second the triumph of love.

By fully utilizing the symbolic value still attached to different colors in certain countries a clever novelist might almost define his plot in advance. White for innocence, blue for fidelity, yellow for jealousy, red for cruelty, black for depression of spirits-many a popular novel has been constructed upon no more complicated lines. And the symbolism might be prettily extended by the

adoption of color names, such as abounded in the Middle Ages. I should like to see such lively cognomens as Vyolet, Goldheu, Bluet, Redheud, Gowlde, and Silver upon the pages of our colorless volumes. Stevenson's John Silver certainly is responsible for some of the vitality in "Treasure Island" and stands for his author's love of pictorial words.

But without resorting to these methods of emphasizing color as an element of literature, the charm of fiction unquestionably could be enhanced by a more liberal sense on the part of writers of the place occupied in human satisfaction by rich hues and harmonious tints. No one lives with soul so dead as to acknowledge no favorite color. That ancient, searching catechism that went by the name of the "Mental Autograph Album" is a faded but authentic testimony to the universality of color preferences in the previous generation which took its introspection so seriously, and I am willing today to confess that Grizel, the heart-breaking child of Barrie's tenderest imagination, is dearer to me because of the little brown jacket with its brown fur collar. She invariably appears to me in a brume but glowing mist, out of which shines the honest kindness of her pure face; the color of her plain garb bringing to my mind the rich depths of shadow in the hair of Rubens's women, the lucent splendors of Cyprian wine, the dusky half-tones of frosted oak leaves.

Surely if the mediæval illuminators could adorn their saints on missal and triptych with all the pagan coloring of splendid nature, the modern novelist can permit his heroines-seldom extraordinary in saintliness a wider range of æsthetic dress than the customary white and blue or chastened gray. One sighs for a second Clara Middleton, accomplished in "the art of dressing to suit the season and the sky," and drifting across the summer day in a ravishing concord of red rose and green and silver and ivory.

WATTS, A PAINTER OF PORTRAITS N pursuance of a custom which obtains on the death of a man conspicuous in the arts, there will doubtless be placed on exhibition, sooner or later, in England, as large a collection as can be got together of the personal output of the late George Frederick Watts. The collection in this case will include imaginative works, many of large size, works in sculpture, and lastly a series of portraits which for personal interest, aside from their artistic merits, will possibly surpass the production of any contemporary painter of portraits that we may call to mind. Not that the confrères of Watts, whose business it has been to paint portraits, may not have numbered among their sitters as many illustrious names as did the painter we are discussing, but it is indeed doubtful if their aggregate work would as inevitably produce the impression of such subtle interpretation of temperament and character as marks these "human documents" left to the nation by Watts. Much has been said and much will be said of the didactic, the literary side of this painter's art,—of his intellectual and moral elevation, of the fact that he was a painter of ideas, that he sought to give expression to thoughts that were more properly the subjects of poetry or prose, a writer's theme treated through the medium of plastic or graphic art. Much in this position may be true criticism and, from certain premises, successfully maintained-but this attitude would require more lines to elucidate, either pro or con, than these to which the present writer is limited. The question is perhaps more properly, did Watts, with his technical inadequacy, impress?—and in what was he most impressive? Here is a man so handicapped by limitations, both in drawing and painting, from the point of view of the skilled workman, the virtuoso, that he seems to this expert most inadequately equipped for the mere business of painting; for actual painting is a handicraft, a business. Watts had not much of this. Where can we recall technical passages of this painter that can compare with the competent charm of

handling and lovely qualities of paint that, to quote another modern, Manet, frequently offered to the connoisseur? I know of none. But, conceding this, conceding inadequate drawing, conceding painfully labored pigment, let us not forget that Watts was something above technique-he was an artist. His compositions, literary if you will, were conceived and carried out with an appreciation that the human mind instinctively demands design in a given space that is to graphically convey an idea; and in drawing, even Watts seemed to possess the essential at times, and produced a sense of power that often moved the spectator. He possessed, too, an instinct for line, and an admirable feeling for quantity in spaces, and balance of light and shade. In color he often left much to be desired, but here also, in his portraits, he was sonorous and tonal to a superb degree. After all, may it not be through his portraits that he will finally make the strongest appeal to the judgment of posterity ?

For insight, differentiation of character, noble attitude of mind in the presence of his sitter-a quality most to be desired in a portrait painter-Watts may be rated highI should say very high. In the notable series of portraits which, in 1884, was placed on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the qualities above mentioned were conspicuous with, in addition, a pervading sense of powerful and harmonious color. This is much. He has left priceless records of men who have made Victorian England illustrious. Happy the nation that possesses such an artist, and happy the nation that has the good judgment to perpetuate her sons through the medium of art while they are still living and producing-an example that other countries might profitably follow. England was proud of Watts, and honored him—a baronetcy he would not accept, but the gift to the nation of practically the work of his lifetime is the legacy of the artist to the country that recognized his greatness and sought in the conventional way to acknowledge it.

FRANK FOWLER.

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PRECIATION

PEAKING of Watts, "He makes me forget," remarked an artist, "that I am looking at a picture; I find myself inquiring what kind of life I have been living lately. As an artist, I may be at odds with him sometimes upon technical points, but first and foremost I forget that I am an artist, and only know myself a man in presence of illumination and noble intention."

It is a convenient statement with which to preface an appreciation of Watts, because, while it emphasizes the ethical side of his work, as he himself did, it also brings into view the technical, by which, as an artist, he is bound to be estimated. He is known to the world as a painter of ideas, and, while multitudes have been thankful for the fact, others have found in it a two-fold condemnation: the broadly sweeping one that painting is not concerned with ideas but with certain technical problems, and the more personal one that his particular techique is objectionable. A man's work should be judged from the point of view which he himself deliberately selects, and Watts regarded himself as a painter with a message for humanity. He used to say that if he had had the gift of words, in which, by the way, he was far from being deficient, he would have reached the world through writing; as it was, he could paint, and that gift he cultivated, not for anything in itself that seemed desirable, but as a servant for the conveyance of his message. Then what of the latter?

It is not as fanciful, as it may appear at first sight, to couple Watts with Hogarth. If we except Blake, as being more an illustrator than a painter, these two stand out, with Turner, the most original, quite possibly the only truly original, artists that the English school has produced. Each believed himself to have a mission, and in both cases it was ethical; a product in Hogarth's of the Puritan conscience, in Watts's of that suave austerity that marked the higher agnosticism of the mid-nineteenth century. Think of Hogarth, on the one hand, audaciously tilting at the pseudo-idealism which had survived from the decadence of Italian art with his sharp satirical realism; on the other, publishing, under the respectable indorsement of acts of Parliament, pictorial sermons bristling with dogmatisms, the dogmatism of facts of condemnation. Then

many of the finest intellects had shaken themselves free of dogma and were openly avowing agnosticism, but agnosticism of that nobler kind, which, while it admitted it did not know, was as far as possible from asserting that it did not care; was, indeed, in a condition of doubting faith, but also of faithful doubt. To the materialism which accompanied an age of machinery he held up a lofty idealism; to the indifferentism that characterized in commoner minds the loss of fixed beliefs a noble avowal of the essential seriousness of life. Add that the loftiness of his idealism included the manner of representation as well as the quality of the idea, and, knowing his admiration for the great Venetian masters, we may picture him to our comprehension as having much of Tintoretto in his artistic soul, in his man-soul not a little of the spirit of Cato.

For there is nothing of asceticism in Watts's work, neither the Puritan form of it nor the more general Christian kind that appears in the work of the Italian Primitives and reappears in Burne-Jones. Austere he is, but always with a gracious gravity; with something of the opulence of nature, its bigness, its perennialness and magnificent aloofness.

For, as it has been well said, he had adopted, consciously or unconsciously, for his own purpose that splendid paradox of Christianity, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." A man of beautiful humility, he had yet the staunchest belief in himself and in the righteousness of his view of art; and the latter involved not only the general axiom that art should tend to the uplifting of mankind, but the further postulate that his particular art should be of the kind which would appeal to people of all degrees of culture and ignorance and of every age. No man ever worked more deliberately for posthumous and enduring recognition. While most men with more or less consciousness reflect the spirit of their own age, Watts steadily searched out and essayed to represent those truths of life and love and death which are constant and inescapable, and in such a way as to be universally and perpetually intelligible.

Briefly, Watts's eminence in the region of idealistic painting consists in this, that he created new types, based not upon local or temporal accidents, but upon the everlasting relationship of man with nature; and