The same instinct which led Verestchagin to take the Pyramid of Skulls as the apotheosis of the glory of war, led him to seize the story of the great Retreat as an opportunity of showing the world War itself. All war, Verestchagin

is

fond of declaring, is essentially the same; there may be a little more or less horror in one war than another, but essentially all wars are alike. The retreat from Moscow was but the supreme type of war, and, true to his instinct, Verestchagin has painted us a series of pictures in which, with one exception, there is

no actual fighting. In this he acts upon the theory which he laid 'down long ago. War, he maintains, has hitherto been painted almost entirely from the point of view of the actual clash of contending armies. The artist seizes the supreme moment when the decisive delivered, or when the last attack is victoriously repelled. On the canvas, as we may see by the acre at Versailles, you have all that is most heroic and exciting in the culminating moment of a campaign crowded

charge is

blazing suns, in clouds of dust, or in toiling through mu while the rains drench you to the skin. War mean hunger, thirst, sickness, the pain of wounds, privations all kinds a reversion to the conditions of savage exis

tence. All thes things last for days, for week for months, whi the time that i passed in actua fighting is but few hours. Wh then," he aske | long ago, "shou. we, in paintin. war, devote o attention exch sively to to thes moments of e citement and i nore the du grim realities the make up the I of a soldier o campaign?" S. in this score o paintings, whic not only illustrate but illuminate with the sunligh of a penetrating genius the greatest of all military tragedies, he avoids, with one exception, showing the troops engaged in actua combat. There is one, and only one picture in which we see the clash of arms, and realise that the Russians played any serious part in overwhelming the invader of the country. It was not Russians, but Russia, that crushed Napo leon. Russian patriots have wfound vehement

fault with Verestchagin for thus entirely eliminating the heroic part that was often played by the peasant levies, whose patient valour in resisting invasion extorted the admiration of the invaders, and whose dogged, relentless pursuit finished what the snow and the frost had begun; but the Russian artist is as positive as Mr. Ruskin in laying down the canons of his art and in abiding by them. What he had to do was to show Napoleon and exhibit the Grand Army as it went to pieces, and this he has done; and to

do it it was necessary, according to him, to leave the existence of the pursuing Russians very largely to the imagination. They are in the background-you see them not; but only once or twice do they emerge-as, for instance, in the significant but simple figure of the Russian peasant standing hidden in the forest with his long spear, waiting amid the falling snow for the opportunity of avenging his country's wrongs. That is a sombre touch, but, beyond this, the existence of the Russians is left very much to the imagination.

It is a mistake, however, to think that in Verestchagin's pictures of Napoleon in 1812 he has given us a mere shambles or a panorama of horrors. His pictures, indeed, justify the assertion which he constantly makes in reply to his critics who complain that his pictures are too terrible, and that he merely dwells upon the most horrible and terrible of the horrors of war. He replies that he does no such thing. The worst things in war are so bad as to be unpaintable on canvas. They dwell on his mind as a shuddering memory of unspeakable horror, but he has never attempted to paint them. In this procession of canvases we see the progress or descent of Napoleon from his triumph at the Kremlin to his escape with a handful of his magnificent army across the frontier, but we have none of the more ghastly episodes of the retreat. At Wilna, according to the guide-books, there died no less than 70,000 unfortunate soldiers, who perished in hospital or dropped down dead, frozen and starved on their homeward march. They were dragged together and piled in heaps, even as lumberers pile logs one on the top of the other, until they became great corpse-mountains terrible to look at, and even now to think of. Verestchagin has painted no such episodes, and yet there were many such. Only by the protrusion of the nose, or the face, or the frozen hand of the soldier who has fallen by the way, does he suggest the great horror of which even now mankind speaks with bated breath. His object is to depict Napoleon, not as an aureoled God of War, the majestic and idealised hero of French legend, but the man as he actually was when confronted by the extremities of cold and the searching ordeal of defeat. "I always," said Verestchagin, "seek first for the man, to find him, to know him as he is, to paint him-that is my task. Afterwards I put on his clothes, but they are the mere trappings. The man himself is what the artist should depict." Still the clothes, although trappings, are very significant, and it is natural that the French artists who set themselves to glorify their hero should represent him as wearing in the depth of winter an altogether impossible costume, because it better agreed with their conventional idea of the great commander. In reality he was dressed as Verestchagin paints him— with a warm cap covering his head and ears, and a long overcoat reaching down to his feet. Compare Verestchagin's Napoleon in retreat with the figure that appears in the famous picture in the Louvre, and you will see the difference between war as it is and war as it pleases the artistic flatterers of the God of War to repre

sent it.

As all the town will be talking about these Napoleon pictures, it is not necessary to do more than briefly refer to one or two of the more notable. The first of the series represents Napoleon watching the triumphal entry of his troops into Moscow. The second shows the horses of the French cavalry stabled in the quaint cathedral which, perhaps, of all buildings in Russia, most aptly represents the immense difference between the life of Russia and that of Western nations. Then we have the departure

of Napoleon from the burning city. The canvas is heavy with the smoke-cloud, and lurid with the flames of the burning city. When the pictures were exhibited at Vienna, the Emperor of Austria asked Verestchagin how on earth he had succeeded in so making his canvas, as it were, reek with the smoke of the burning city. The artist replied that he painted it, like everything else, from fact. A great conflagration broke out some years ago at the city of BrestLitopsk. The moment the news of the conflagration reached Moscow, Verestchagin packed up his paints and hastened off with his easel and his canvas to the burning city. There he painted the scene exactly as it was,, and afterwards found no difficulty in reproducing the lurid glow of the conflagration on the canvas devoted to the burning of Moscow. Leaving behind him the blazing city, Napoleon entered upon the long and dolorous way that led him back to France. Without dwelling upon the intermediate scenes, we pass at once to the last of the series, which represents Napoleon leaning upon a stick, walking through the snow, followed by his staff, in the long line of his dwindling army. Verestchagin says that most of the last stages of the retreat were covered by Napoleon on foot; the weather was too cold for him to ride, and the soldiers were too savagely angry to tolerate the spectacle of Napoleon riding in luxury in a carriage while they were perishing in the bitter cold. So Napoleon had even to trudge it with the best of them. And in the last picture we see him tramping along, stick in hand, through the desolate landscape, white with snow, through which peeped here and there the ghastly relics, reminding us that the few figures which we see are but a miserable handful of survivors, while hundreds of thousands of their fellows have perished beneath the winding-sheet of the Russian winter.

When these pictures were exhibited in France, they affected some patriots to tears, while others exclaimed that never before had they adequately realised the immense human pathos that underlies the Imperial tragedy. The pictures have run the gauntlet of the criticism of the best experts in Europe, including among others the German Emperor, who, with his wife, visited the Gallery and eagerly discussed with the painter the various characteristics of the pictures.

"The German Emperor, when he saw the pictures," said Verestchagin, "assured me that, as he had heard, Napoleon wore a huge handkerchief about his head. Why not? Commonsense was his forte; and, as he was a native of Southern Europe, the cold almost froze the blood in his veins."

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"Pictures like these," said the Kaiser, are our best guarantee against war." After looking long and earnestly at the Napoleon on tramp in the snow, he turned away with the remark, "And, in spite of that, there will still be men who want to govern the world. But they will all end like this."

Besides the Napoleonic pictures there are many others, which although subsidiary to the great canvases describing the drama of 1812, will well repay the attention of those who are interested in Russian art. But the chief point about Verestchagin for us at this juncture is that he is, above all things, a Russian, a realist, and a man who, having looked into the glazing eye of the soldier as he dies on the field of battle, interprets the whole terrible anguish of the battle-field in syllables of colour and in pictures that speak.

III.

It is twelve years since Verestchagin was in London, but he has changed wondrously little. He is still the same man that he was, for even in outward appearance he is as he was; while in his ideas, in his aims, in his doctrines, he is the same. In the technicalities of his art he may have changed. He told me he was not particularly pleased with many of his earlier pictures, and that some of them ought to be destroyed. But these are differences which would only be noticeable under the microscope. To the ordinary observer he is the same, a prophet in his way quite as much as Count Tolstoi, and an apostle of peace quite as much in earnest as his Imperial ruler. First impressions are often the most lasting as well as the freshest and the best, and, therefore, I will reproduce here an article in which I described in the Pall Mall Gazette, at the time of my first visit to Verestchagin's Gallery, the impression left upon my mind. The article was written at the time when we were all brimming over with excitement over Trafalgar Square. It appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette a few days before Bloody Sunday, an event which at least banished into irrecoverable oblivion the second part of the article, for the appearance of which the painter looked in vain. Here, however, is what I said of the pictures then, and I see no word to alter now :

A RUSSIAN REALIST ON RELIGION AND WAR ROUND THE GROSVENOR WITH M. VERESTCHAGIN.

I am an ignoramus about art; but I know when a picture speaks to me. If in a whole gallery there be one such picture I am content with my visit. Imagine then my delight and surprise at finding myself in the presence of the Russian pictures now on view in the Grosvenor Gallery. From the press notices I had imagined that this was but a gallery like the rest, and turned listlessly from the jargon of the critics, which treated the Russian's work as if it had been a mere matter of pigment daubing, like most of our modern painting-no more important than signboards, and about as interesting. But the moment I found myself in the Grosvenor Gallery I found out my mistake. M. Verestchagin is no mere painter. He is a man of genius, and a man of genius who is also a seer.

There are inspiration, enthusiasm, genius-all that is highest in man-in this Russian who for the time honours the Grosvenor by exhibiting on its walls the canvas into which he has painted his soul. It is a marvellous exhibition; nor have I ever seen anything like it for force, for brilliance, for effect. Whether or not it is the highest form of art, or whether it is art at all, I know not, nor do I care. It is a great presentation of the most tragic aspects of religion and of history-a wonderfully realistic rendering of the scenes of the Gospel, and a grimly vivid picture of the horrors of war.

I had the immense advantage of going round the gallery with the painter himself, who was an object of far more interest to me than any paintings could be. Long ago, I waited with breathless interest for the result of his gallant attempt as a torpedoist to blow up the Turkish gunboats in the Danube, little dreaming that in after years I should be honoured by his acquaintance, and discuss in a London Art Gallery the issues of that great campaign. Almost as I entered he took me to the three great canvases which hang at the end of the large room.

"I was there," said Veresichagin, pointing to the place in St. Petersburg where the Nihilists were executed for the assassination of the Tsar. The great gaunt gallows stand up distinct through the falling snow, two tall posts and a crossbeam, from which the doomed were to swing. Around the gallows stood a great crowd. Who are these, then?" "Officers for the most part, eager to obtain a shred of the rope after the execution was over. It brings good luck, they say."

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"Did the condemned speak?" "If they tried, the drums rolled; not a word could be heard." And the people there, Kraieffsky told me he

did they say anything?" "Very little.

had heard they filled the air with imprecations on the Nihills It is not true. I was there. I only heard one man cry cut, Hang them, hang them all!' and instantly on either sidewoman cried, Hush! How dare you say anything! TE have now to answer to God alone.'"' The gallows looms spectral through the snow, the flakes fall heavy outside on tr soldiers' helmets, and on the shoulders of the crowd. Another moment the Children of Despair will have perished, choke 'mid the roll of drums and the murmur of the crowd. It ! terrible milestone of history--a human sacrifice, casting gloomy shadow across the threshold of the new reign.

After the execution of the Nihilists the Crucifixion! A such a crucifixion! You may see painted conceptions of the scene on Calvary by the hundred in all the picture galleries Europe, but nothing like this. The associations of worsh with which Christendom has surrounded the Cross render difficult for us to realise the gallows character of the Cross That comes out clear and strong in Verestchagin's work. The crosses just beyond the wall of Jerusalem, which towers ha and high behind the crowd that watches the spectacle, are th gallows of the time.

And the central figure is no glorified divinity, but a pocr. haggard, long-haired, bleeding wretch, as no doubt He appeare when all His disciples forsook Him and fled, and the men of Law and order, and the constituted authorities of the day, congratalated themselves upon having effectually suppressed what was threatening to be a dangerous nuisance. "I chose," sai Verestchagin, "the moment just after the elevation of the cross when the crowd gathers to see the spectacle. After a while th novelty passes, and all these people will go away, and no one w remain but the Mother and Mary and a few soldiers. Then the Mother will approach the foot of the Cross, but at this moment she is weeping at a distance. Mary the Magdalen is near her. But clos to the Cross at first are only the two priests and the Roman officer." There is a wonderful combination of strange and striking figures in the group that gaze with eager interest at the three crosses. Bedouins from the desert, Roman soldiers, Jewish priests. merchants with their curious flat hats like those of Russian priests, each figure distinct in itself, every face a study of real life, and the whole group intensely lifelike. The old painters destroyed the Incarnation in their efforts to represent it. Here at least is the hard-hit Man of Sorrows, who was wounded an bruised and hanged gallows high amid the mockings of a curicas and savage crowd. Verestchagin may not have realised the Crucifixion. He has at least painted a scene which is possible, and done something to bring us back to the actual presence of the Jesus who was put out of the way as a disreputable vagabon and blasphemer in the days of Tiberius.

The third picture is hard and mechanical compared with the others. It represents the familiar scene of the execution of the revolted Sepoys during the Mutiny. There may or may not be anachronisms-a button wrong here, a victim wrongly posed there. These are details. The central fact is the loaded cannon, the writhing victim, and the soldier in uniform, erect and stolid as an automaton, wailing the word of command to blow his helpless captive into a thousand fragments. The strong bright glare of the Eastern sun brings the horrid group into clear relief. Another moment and the motionless man in our uniform will pull the string, and- Says M. Verestchagin," Strange how many English people resent my having painted this. Some say it never happened. Others that it is far past, and will never recur. False, false! You did do it, and you will do it again. It is because you do that that you are able to remain. If you will no longer do that, then you must go. How many are there of you in India? 50,000 or 60,000 English soldiers. And how many natives?--three hundred millions! How long would the three hundred millions tolerate the authority of the 60,000 bu: for that? You can choose. There is your last word. If you dare not speak it, then make up your mind and depart. But of course you will do it again, and do it as often as three hundred millions object to your rule. It is the condition of your power --not only to kill, but after death to follow with your punishment the soul of the rebel."

The three pictures form a wonderful trio. The gallows, the cross, and the cannon, the most ignominious death conceivable,

is being inflicted by the Executive Government of the day. And one of the victims was Jesus Christ. In the other pictures it

was the Christians who were the executioners.

Leaving these three notable pictures, the eye is dazzled by a great white mountain top of eternal snow. The expanse bewilders, the brilliance dazzles. It is a Himalayan scene. "I have climbed these hills," said M. Verestchagin.

"Do you

At the

see that?" and far away in the blue sky he pointed out a mere speck of brown, the hovering vulture. "I have seen him, and knew if I slipped my foot he would make a meal off my corpse. He is on the outlook. But, come, we shall see him again." So saying, M. Verestchagin led me to the second of this third trilogy of Himalayan paintings. Again, there is a great expanse of snowy mountain top; but this time the vulture, no longer poised high in the heavens, is sailing below the summit. "He is seeking; and then, turning to the central picture-" there," said he, "he has found." It is an impressive scene. bottom of a mountain gorge, lying on his back, with his head towards us, is a British soldier dead. On one side lies the rifle he will use no more. By his side hovers the vulture, and above the air is full of these obscene birds, mustering fast to feast off the dead. "It is ever so," said Verestchagin. painted one like this of a Russian soldier, which caused so much offence I burned it. But English or Russian makes no difference the common soldier who wins the glory for others goes himself to the vultures. He pays for all; it is everywhere the same."

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At the end of the room hangs the immense painting of the Prince of Wales entering an Indian city on an elephant. The Prince of Wales, who has been at the Grosvenor, declared it was wonderful, and I hope this memento of the Prince's visit to India will not be allowed to leave our shores. The pomp, and glory, and splendour of the East glow on the spacious canvas. In the India Office, or at Marlborough House, it would find a. fitting resting-place, and enable the dwellers in this sombre and foggy island to understand something of the glow of colour that is possible under an Indian sun. "It is poor work painting Princes for one who is capable of painting the Crucifixion; how long did it take you to paint it?" "About eight months. I painted entirely in the open air. I was present when the Prince entered, as you see him there, but I finished the painting in Paris. He gave me a sitting there, but the light was so different. I had purposed painting a series to illustrate the history of India. The first was to have been the arrival of the English Envoys in the audience chamber of the Great Mogul at Agra, when they cam humbly to crave the favour of opening a trading factory on the seaboard of his dominions. The entrance of the Prince was to have been the last of the series. But I never worked out the idea."

"Step back here," he continued, walking into the passage that led into another room; "this is the best place to see the next picture, The Interior of the Mosque of the Moguls at Agra.' I often come and look at it myself, for the sake of the light." I could well understand the painter's pride in his work. The lights, the shade, the cool white interiors, and the kneeling

worshippers transported you far away from noisy Bond Street to cities where the Muezzin's call to prayer is heard from the lofty minaret.

IV.

From the days of Trafalgar Sunday until the Saturday after Peace Sunday in St. James's Hall I had never seen Verestchagin. Imagine, then, my delight when I was interrupted in the middle of my preparations for the Peace Crusade by the arrival of the painter himself at Mowbray House. Nothing could have been more fortunate. Here, at the very moment when an International agitation was beginning in favour of the Peace Conference summoned by the Russian Emperor, there arrived the Russian painter who, of all living men, has preached most eloquently with his brush the vanity and the horror of war. We were very soon deep in a discussion concerning his pictures and their lessons and the European situation and the thousand and one other topics which naturally spring to the lips when you meet such a man on such an occasion.

Verestchagin is a very remarkable man. Educated with a view to entering the navy, he developed such a talent with his pencil that he abandoned his destined profession and devoted himself to art. While still a young man he began to travel, and spent several years in wandering throughout Asia. He speaks English excellently, and found himself at home in India. To these circumstances we owe some of his most wonderful pictures of Indian life and scenery; but for the most part he dwelt among his own people in Russian Turkestan, although he travelled far and wide in the debateable borderland which lies between the Chinese Empire and the Russian possessions. This discipline of the desert may be regarded as the curriculum through which he passed to educate him for the mission to which he has devoted his life. There, in the heart of the Central Asian wilderness, he experienced the extremities of heat and of cold, and familiarised himself with savagery in its most extreme forms. It was his fortune to be one of the first Europeans to penetrate into the province of Ili very soon after the suppression of the Mussulman revolt by the Chinese army. The awful story of that devastation has never been adequately realised by the Western world. The struggle between the revolting Mussulmans and the Chinese lasted for many years. In its early stages the Mussulmans were successful and massacred with a free hand which even the Turks themselves would have envied, but after a time the slow but powerful spring of Chinese energy uncoiled itself and literally swept the insurgents from the face of the earth. Verestchagin described how he entered city after city absolutely depopulated. In the streets there were scattered in confusion all sorts of furniture and utensils mingled with the scattered coffers of their currency which there was no one to gather up. One of these towns left a very vivid impression upon his mind. It was the city of Tchougutschak. It was a literal Golgotha, or Place of a Skull, and not of one skull only, but of many skulls. Skulls and bones lay along the walls through which the besiegers had forced their way, while below, where the bodies of the massacred garrison had been flung, there lay literally heaps of skulls. The whole neighbourhood of the city was sown white with similar grisly relics of the great slaughter. Verestchagin said that in the neighbouring villages, streets and courts were similarly banked up with skulls and skeletons, and in the surrounding fields, so far as the eye could reach you saw everywhere skulls, skulls, skulls! The bones were all clean picked by crows and wolves, clean washed by winter rains

and bleached by summer suns. The only living inhabitants of the city of Tchougutschak were two young jackdaws, while the deserted streets were occasionally visited by wild goats from the desert. He saw many such cities, and his friends who were with him, who penetrated further into Chinese territory, declared that they came upon much larger cities, some of which had at one time as many as 200,000 inhabitants, almost depopulated. That revolt, he calculates, cost from twenty to twenty-five million lives. From this skullsown desert, Verestchagin made a collection of skulls, the collection, indeed, which forms the base of his philosophy of life. By comparing the skulls of the various tribes he was much impressed with the evidence which they afforded of progressive development. The frontal skull, which is very low among the Mongolians, attains quite respectable dimensions among the more highly developed races. The cheek and jawbones diminish, while the teeth, hands and feet shrink. The huge carnivorous animal seemed to him to be manifestly on a march towards a higher type of intelligent existence; and, if you can develop the Caucasian out of the Mongol, there might be, he concluded, good reason for hoping that from the Caucasian in time something superior might be developed. Progress, however, though steady, is very slow, and Verestchagin soon acquired an absolute distrust of short cuts. The processes of Nature are slow but sure. Attempts to hurry the pace only result in a disastrous recoil.

"Look at France," cried Verestchagin. "A hundred years ago they made a Revolution which was to force the arrival of the millennium, and now to-day look at France, and ask what has been gained by the revolutionary rush. They call me a 'red' in Russia, but in reality I am one of the most conservative of men. All my observations teach me that you can do nothing by violence, by attempting to force things. You must co-operate with the forces which are making for progress, and rejoice exceedingly if so be you are able to help forward the movement even by one little inch. This Peace Conference, for instance, if it is supported will do some good, not much, but some, and it is enough. Better do some good that lasts than grasp at a greater good which will not stay. It will be the first step, which is very important, because without it the second is impossible. Yes, I believe in progress," said Verestchagin-" certainly that is a fact, but it is a slow progress, and there is an immense ground to be covered yet. There is time enough in the eternity of the future for endless advance ; but although we must never despair, neither must we be impatient. The process which took away the massive force from the jaws of the Mongol and built up the frontal bone of the civilised man is still at work, but there is much to be done, especially for the women," said he. "I sometimes say," he remarked, "that men are everywhere the same. They are all animals, combatant, pugnacious, murderous animals. There is the tiger in every man; it is in his jaws and in his hands, which are but tiger's claws, which love to rend and slay. All peoples everywhere are fundamentally animal; scratch them a little and you will always come upon the foundation. If men are animals, women are even more so. Over great areas of this world the woman is doomed purely to animal functions. She is not educated, she is not expected to have any ideas, she must bring forth her children, suckle them, feed them, and look after the lair of her mate and her young. But culture, humanity, intellect-these things are to them unknown. Man has begun to be civilised in almost all