atory defense was hardly needed. It points out the coincidence with Mr. Bennett's novel, "The Glimpse," and pleads that the resemblance was involuntary and anticipative. As a matter of fact, the resemblance is superficial. Mr. Bennett uses the interval of disembodiment as a psychological experiment; Mr. Vachell's purpose is of the missionary order. He is out to save his hero from worldliness, as Browning does in his incomparable "Karshish," and Dickens in "A Christmas Carol." But when all is said and done, "The Other Side" is inferior to "The Face of Clay," which in many essential respects I take to be Mr. Vachell's masterpiece in the region of pure romance. One feels disposed to set this novel back among the stories of Race and Travel, but its figures are better than its background and folklore, and Téphany has no superior in the whole range of the author's work. Rumor deponeth that he awards the laurels to his latest book "The Triumph of Tim," apart from the usual enthusiasm of a writer for his youngest-born; and "Tim" certainly has undeniable claims from its dips into autobiography, and the finished roundness of its structure. Again, Daphne Rokeby is a new and lovable Penelope, without flaw or reward, but a certain elaboration of form robs the book of half its naturalness, and "Tim" must stand or fall by certain passages. These are instinct with courage and the "rougher strain" of truth; they belong to the downright school of Fielding; but the divisioning of the book distracts one by its cleverness. We cannot help feeling that Mr. Vachell is too thorough to remain a slave to mere finesse.

A word remains to be said of the plays, though by right they deserve an essay to themselves, and I have no space at all for "Life and Sport on the Pacific Slope." Mr. Vachell owns not

only to five or six plays that the public has honored, but to nine others which will never see the light. He admits this novitiate of failure was good for him, certainly better than the early success which awaited his novels and in consequence delayed his real arrival. But he has won his stage spurs with something more than perseverance. With his faculty for hitting the public taste; it is to his credit that he has given it only his best; thank goodness, he has not, as so many other dramatists have done, yielded to the temptation:

to deliver

Sweet, sweet, sweet poison to the age's tooth.

So far he has produced healthy and individual work, nor has he descended from the high standard of his literary ideals. His stage heroes need not fear or disdain a gallery triumph so long as they talk and act on the level of the novels. Napier's driving force in "The Case of Lady Camber" is all the more effective at the last for having been latent till then; but the Paladin he deposes, as in the novel, is the more finished piece of drawing. Somehow the tall talk that suits Sir Bedford Slufter is inappropriate in the hero, but the last act redeems this and other faults with a superb and restrained culmination, nailed up and caulked, like a good chess problem, until the key-move lets in the light. The integral action of "Jelf's" is impaired by dependence on a loud and adventitious "bookie," and Dick in the fourth act loses grit after his two fine outbursts in the third. But the characterization is true to life, and Dick was not at Harrow for nothing, or in California either. Blaine, the dominant force in "Searchlights," is too adamantine to be welcome outside the City area; but the hero of "Quinney's" would conquer anywhere. At one point he gives a dangerous opening, where

he taunts Posy with not knowing a "fake" when she sees one; this lays him open to the retort of heredity, for he has just convicted himself of this very defect. Perfect in all else, "Quinney's" remains Mr. Vachell's summit of theatrical achievement, none the less so because the wife and daughter are a marked advance on his stage heroines hitherto. He has qualified in drama as he took years to do in fiction. He has mastered feminine character and made it workable on level terms with his men. I know no higher praise.

There is internal evidence that Mr. Vachell's writings are rapidly produced, or else that when he revises, if ever, he does it with an eye more to the purport than the text. Taste resents the meaningless christening of a trivial American in "The Face of Clay" with a name like Johnnie Keats, and there are touches in certain of the other The Bookman.

books likely to yield to a corrective pen. But in the main, Mr. Vachell's style is like his heroes, rapid, masterful, resourceful, and more than equal to the situation. It will grace many a twentieth-century anthology of English prose. It would be hard to improve upon it as a vehicle for that temperamental appetite for action which I conceive to be the main characteristic of the man. Like Kipling and Masefield, he interprets British nature faithfully because he graduated early in the school of travel, observation, tenacity. Only in this way can you get what the savants call the geodetic curve. Mr. Vachell appreciates England-especially his beloved Sussex and Hampshire-because he has earned her approval by the sweat of his brow under fiercer skies. It is no bad cue for the training of a writer, and it has certainly proved its value in Mr. Vachell's case.

J. P. Collins.

H. G. Wells has held it up to the novelist as no less than his duty to depict faithfully his own times; but, far-reaching dogmatist that he is, he has not yet preached to the painter the gospel of gowns; he has not exhorted him to consider amongst his obligations the truthful transference to the canvas of contemporary costume. There seems little hope that Mr. Wells will ever now repair this omission, for he harbors a suspicion, voiced in "What is Coming," that no serious account should be taken of fashion, which will float away to absurdity. Just as if absurdity is like to annihilate fashion, when it has so often proved its mainstay. What else, indeed, could excuse the frank unbecomingness of the tight hobble-skirt, beneath which the "altogether" was a secret of Polichinelle; or account for the patronage of the

extinguishing hat; or justify the faroff farthingale in its widest and most prodigious moments?

But I doubt whether the painter can be justly accused of any neglect of fashion, whatever its faults, though I admit that the critic, who is always with us, has shown some tendency to cavil at him who deals too accurately with the clothes of his sitter. As a mere fashion-plater he may be dismissed with contempt from artistic consequence, even while the commission given has demanded exactitude in unessentials. The story told by W. J. Locke may be characteristic of the plutocratic patron.

"I don't see why you need have painted his trousers; why not have made him half-length?" says Tommy to Clementina Wing, who replies:

"Because he is the kind of cheesemonger who wants value for his money.

If I cut him off at the waist he would think he was cheated. He pays to have his hideous trousers painted, and so I paint them."

Also in this cause there is on record the civic dignitary who commented adversely upon his presentation portrait:

"Those waistcoat buttons are too far apart"!

There is one acknowledged expert in fashion-drawing who knows every intimacy of dress through the breadwinning means of the weekly ladies' papers, yet takes deliberately the hospitality of Burlington House to exhibit the nude figure. He prides himself upon the patent psychology which beams from the countenances of his natural models, and follows thus the invariable rule which persuades the comedian to be quite certain that he would have made an excellent tragedian. It is easy to guess, and even to applaud, the hazard, that Monna Lisa's smile would induce him to greater reverence than Monna Vanna's cloak, however well expressed in all pomp and circumstance of textile sumptuousness.

But the greatest of the latter-day painters, James McNeil Whistler, had considerable respect for clothes, and his painting of the crinoline gives most just excuse to compare him with Velasquez, who, amongst a few other items, immortalized the hoop, Infantas included; to say nothing of the precise ebullience of Isabella of Bourbon in black, bordered with gold leaves, flaunting a headdress of black, whitefeathered, against a pink drapery. Recently Sir Philip Burne-Jones has justified the crinoline in collaboration with the daughter of the Duke of Rutland, who assumed its beautiful burden to honor a carnival. "The Ladies of the Crinoline" have, while I write, an exhibition all to themselves, by kind assistance of Victor de Veysy, who is, however, concerned more closely with LIVING AGE, VOL. III, No. 135.

polychromatic patterns than with personality or elegance.

When Whistler, in his famous Ten o'Clock, held forth that costume is not dress, and that the wearers of wardrobes may not be doctors of taste, he was tempted to such stricture by the prevailing cult of the so-called æsthetic, the green and yellow amorphous raiment which came in with Oscar Wilde and went out before he did. This fashion the master declared a "disgrace in the name of the Graces," but he diplomatically compromised, as was not his habit, that "the painter beneath your travestied awkwardnesses has trouble to find your dainty selves," which courteous remonstrance should have been inducement enough in itself to banish the offending styles from the pedestal of popularity.

There are three important points to intrigue the painter who would present fashion as it is: the fabric, the outline, and the details of trimming. The expert, according to his caprice, holds much or little store by these, but I have heard it avowed by the well-initiated that the painting of a lady in white satin which was achieved by W. Graves, faithful pupil and follower of Whistler, should be written down amongst the modern surface triumphs.

Velvet is the easiest fabric to paint, and many have most faithfully demonstrated this. Some of Alma-Tadema's and Albert Moore's achievements owe their success to the skilful dealing, not alone with marble and color and disposition, as generally accepted, but with Oriental carpets and silks and gauzes of multi-hues. They could well have taken a lesson, and maybe they did, from the details of a portrait by an anonymous Persian painter, shown at the second National Loan Exhibition, of a woman gesticulating with scarletgloved fingers and adorning with supreme grace a black mantle intersected with measured ornaments of gold over

a highly-colored petticoat of floral design; not an item, flower, leaf or tinsel twig, is in doubt.

Many of the early Italian painters, who devoted so much of their talents to minute particulars of architectural design have also bestowed some trouble on meticulous patterns on garments, but in few of these is it possible to recognize stuffs, maybe because these were limited, so that a sort of nondescript softness served alike for the vestments of dame and priest and beggars. But, while texture was disregarded, care was liberally expended upon color and line.

And "those Dutch chaps" omitted nothing from interior or exterior, so that the eye of the connoisseur as surely leaps to the quality of Delft and pewter as to every thread of gold and description of bead and jewel which adorns, for example, the stiff magnificence of Holbein, whose collars and coifs and gay braids sternly attend to their decorative duties, whose sleeves are monuments of industry, and whose chemisettes speak volumes for the painter's experience. The Italian Zuccaro failed in no detail with the jeweled splendors of Queen Elizabeth, which were engraved, too, with minute intricacies by William Rogers, and by Crispin Van de Passe from the miniature of Isaac Oliver. And, since to the credit of Elizabeth go three thousand embroidered and begemmed gowns with ruffles stiffened by the "devil's liquor," to quote from Malcolm Salaman, who gives this as a contemporary description of starch, it is small wonder that she did inspire one or two, if not more, artists of her day with an affectionate appreciation for generous elaboration in clothes.

Students hold forth that Ochtervelt had supreme success with satin surfaces, as had Terburg, the great Dutchman of the seventeenth century; and they protest that Cronach was most

famous for his impressive reds; but there is a very small picture-which without the prejudice induced by knowledge I would assert as super-excellent-by Frans van Mieris, showing a lady feeding a parrot, and wearing rosered velvet bordered with ermine so sincere that you could fancy stroking the glowing folds and smoothing the fur consciously glad of no misplaced tails.

Muffs have played useful parts in many pictures, and never, perhaps, has fur been better interpreted than by Jacob Van Oost in his picture of a boy in a dark cloth suit trimmed with sable obviously of Canadian birth. No cause here for the damning complaint, "Pigment, sir, not paint, the brush of the house-painter, not of the artist," which is favored of the up-to-date faultfinder with no leaning towards the method of the impressionist, and scant appreciation for trick or tool, or hasty splodge of more convincing quantity than quality.

There was once upon a time an artist who lived in Italy in the full of the insect season, and procured the best perspective for his foliage by the primitive means of catching fleas in his brush. and burying them to their immortal honor on his canvas.

The Futurists, Cubists, and Vorticists of these immediate moments do not incline towards the glorification of garments, although one of the London group, Sylvia Gosse, has found beauty in a man's high hat, permitting its shining formality to assert itself as central interest in a picture. She is the exception to the rule of these societies who deny the attractive in costume, and since the few available sitters seem to have been afflicted with at least one wall eye, a nose of blue and a triangular chin, they could not be relied upon to form valuable adjuncts to the dress of today, or any day. We can spare their portraits while we accept patiently the phenomena of each simple social meet

ing an orgy, every town and city earthquaked complexion, the hedge of heliotrope, the tree a melon or a gibbet, and the cottage slanting in purple patches to utter ruin.

Earlier periods have encouraged the painter to smile sympathetically upon the fripperies of fashion. Sir Peter Lely, who was the chief portrait painter of the Restoration, reveled in frivolous fancies, in ringlets and confections of ribbon which fluttered around to enhance the beauty of those women whose charms adorned the Royal circle, and now smile upon us from the walls of Hampton Court. Kneller also did the Court beauties proud, while Vandyck had earlier placed some dozens of portraits of English nobility to his credit, deserving and obtaining well by Charles I, in many circumstances admitting of that lace collar, which gave him, amongst other inestimable prizes, the joy of standing for all time as sponsor to the Vandyked edge.

Regarded as representations of fashion, the padded Stuart stump pictures are comic, and while there can be no possible doubt as to the materials employed in the frocks, there is like to be some confusion in the manufacture of the features and the fitting of the faces. "Her pencil's part her needle played" with some monotony on the tapestry panels which adorn our ancestral halls by kind permission of Messrs. Duveen, or the gracious limits of an exacting Government.

1

Hollar, the Anglo-Bohemian in the seventeenth century, etched fashions deliberately, and his work is a valuable lesson in the history of dress. Later, Hogarth might have preached, amongst other gospels of morality, the road to ruin in the best dress circles; all his pictures give the costume due attention, and he did justice to this most conclusively when he illustrated the scenes from "The Beggar's Opera." To Hogarth we owe Lavinia Fenton as Polly

Peachum, now bravely becoming the walls of the National Gallery in olive green with sienna hems and tassels.

The stage favorite has always attracted the painter, but for the most part he has chosen to immortalize her in some stage character. Mrs. Jordan sat for Hoppner, amongst many others, and he painted her as Hippolyta in Colley Cibber's comedy, "She Would and She Would Not." She sat in white muslin blue-sashed to Romney as Peggy in "The Country Girl." To Sir Thomas Lawrence we owe Miss Farren, an unforgettable figure running off with her cloak and carelessly dropping her muff. Not much trouble, if any, was bestowed upon the black dress of Mrs. Siddons by this same artist, to whom we can be more grateful for Caroline, Duchess of Richmond, in her white satin eveningdress with large sleeves tapering to the wrists, and blue bows upon her shoulders. Peg Woffington, in the character of Mrs. Ford, dared the incongruous hoop under the brush of Haytley, who emphasized the perfection of the charm of her laced bodice and pointed net collar.

Amongst the modern pictures of actresses, Sir John Collier's of Mrs. Kendal and Ellen Terry in "The Merry Wives" bears comparison with the best of them, and in this, brocades and velvets and veils and jewels are given their just values; while in a more poetic catalogue may be put the portrait by Mrs. Jopling Rowe of Lady Tree as Ophelia, and J. J. Shannon's accomplishment with Lily Elsie, whose plaid hairribbon terminating in red blossoms is in unusual contrast with saxe blue and sable brown. Solomon J. Solomon did well by modern dress in a portrait he executed of Mrs. Patrick Campbell as "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," and we render eternal thanks to Sargent for the resplendence of his Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth in beetle-wing embroideries with a diadem of gems. The influence of the French artist on