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countries, but woman has not in many even made the first step. When woman has been educated, then mankind will throw off much of the animal."

I asked Verestchagin which countries he considered led the van in this matter of the evolution of the woman from the female animal.

He said, "In Russia some of our women are very intellectual, very highly cultured, very civilised, but they are few. In England there are more who have emerged, but I do not know if there is so much culture as among the few Russians. In Germany perhaps less; in France, generally speaking, the woman is a pendulum which oscillates between the toilet and the church; dress and superstition make up the whole of their lives. Naturally I do not speak of exceptions; they exist everywhere."

"I don't know America. I only know New York; but there it does

not seem to me that the progress is very great. The women, no doubt, have privileges, but the principal privilege is still that of demanding money from their husbands, in order that they may pursue the great business shopping, shoppingalways shopping." "What about American men ?" I asked.

"American

"It must be remarked apropos that those who, like myself, looked for other social conditions in America are disappointed. The American worker is in better conditions than in Europe, only because of some essentially palliative means, as, for instance, the high tariff, prohibition of cheap workmen, etc. But the measure which I consider as the first step towards the reasonable

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VERESTCHAGIN AND HIS FAMILY.

men?" said he meditatively. "Out West they may be different, but in New York the standard by which they judge everything is peculiar. The worth of a man is there reckoned by the dollars which he has in his pocket. Another strange thing," said he, "is that they use different words to describe the same thing. For instance, there is something which here we call swindling, but there they call it business. It is curious: the word is so different, but the thing is the same.

socialism-the recognition of the right of the work、 man to a share of the benefits of the capital is not yet acknowledged. Only a few original men are daring to do this, but again as exceptions."

"Now that we are on the national characteristics," I said, "what are the besetting sins of the English?"

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First," he said, "a little hypocrisy or what

you call cant. Oh! have I not seen it in India? On Sundays, when you call upon the Sahib, he must not bedisturbed because he is reading his Bible, and your see him through the window; he has the Bibleupon his knee,. no doubt, but his head droops over his shoulder, and you listen and you hear the good. man snore. Sleep. is such a good thing that it can be openly called sleep and not Bible reading." "And after cant?" I asked. "Their pride,' he said. "The English haughti- . ness, the disdain

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ful way in which they treat their fellow creatures as if they were dirt beneath their feet. It is terrible to a Russian. I had a great friend when I was in India; he was an Englishman, and a charming official, full of all kinds of culture and of grace; but the way he treated the natives, the way in which they salaamed to him, while he never deigned even to acknowledge their salute, made me ask him one time, Are you a God, or are you a man? For the way in

which you treat these people implies that you are something divine! In Russia we have our faults, no doubt, but there is no gulf between our highest officials and the poorest Tartar who roams the Steppes.' You are dreadful as a whole nation, but you are charming individually. Then there is no other country which contains so many real gentlemen, gentlemen of word; and," he added, with a smile, there is no other nation where there are so many beautiful women."

Over the religions of the world Verestchagin looks with the eye of a philosopher. They are all but so many attempts to jog human nature more rapidly along the slow spiral by which he is destined to crawl æon after æon nearer the ideal. "Mussulmans," he said, "I have found; Christians I have not found. A Mussulman is told by his prophet to do so and so; he does it, and he is a good Mussulman. The Christian ideal is so much higher; he never lives up to it. Hence it is that there are many Christian churches, no Christians."

Verestchagin's conception of Christianity is very different from that of the orthodox. When he was in Vienna, the exhibition of his pictures created such a storm that one of the papers congratulated him that he had been born in the nineteenth century, otherwise he would probably have shared the fate of John Huss. The head and front of his offending was a small picture entitled "The Holy Family." In this Joseph and Mary were represented as the parents of a family consisting of Jesus -and his brethren. Verestchagin stoutly believed that he had sound scriptural grounds for his belief that the Blessed Virgin after the birth of Christ became the happy mother of several children, who are spoken of in several parts of the Gospels as the brethren of Jesus. It is one thing, however, to read about the brethren of Jesus in the Gospels, and another thing to see them painted as if they actually existed in the family circle of Joseph and Mary. The appearance of this picture in the Gallery at Vienna created a great storm in the ecclesiastical teacup. Society was profoundly disturbed; the clergy fulminated against the sacrilegious blasphemer, and at least one zealous Catholic procured a pot of vitriol and discharged its contents over four of the offending pictures of the Russian rationalist. He mutilated the picture of the Resurrection so much that it had to be destroyed; the picture of the Holy Family was saved by its frame; three other pictures suffered more or less from the vitriol of the zealous Catholic. Verestchagin's picture of John the Baptist as a fakir, whose head, he maintained, must have swarmed with vermin, like that of all men who lived in the desert on locusts and wild honey, was another of his offences for which he had to pay dearly.

The throwing of vitriol over his pictures, if it did not convert him from the error of his ways, at least taught him that there were limits to the toleration of personal convictions. "You must not pump spring water unawares upon a gracious public full of nerves," and since that time he has walked more warily, and has abstained from affronting the prejudices of the public. "It is a pity," he said, "that I was much blamed, but nobody converted me."

V.

The chief interest of Verestchagin to the British public at the present moment is the service which he has rendered in portraying war as it actually is. For this he has every qualification which man can possess. He has been through several wars both as a spectator and as a combatant. He has slaughtered his fellow-men, has narrowly escaped being slaughtered by them, he has been wounded in battle, he has seen action both on

water and on dry land. One of his brothers was killed and another wounded in the assault on Plevna. He himself was besieged for several weeks by an overwhelming host of Bokhariots in Central Asia, and he went through the Bulgarian campaign as the friend and the intimate companion of Skobeleff, the man who more than any other was in our time the supreme incarnation of the God of War. No painter has seen more both of the seamy and the glorious side of war. He saw the attack at Plevna, standing by the side of the Emperor Alexander II. He crossed the Balkans with Skobeleff, and was always permitted to go everywhere and see everything. They used to ask me,” he said, "Why do you poke your nose in everywhere? You will get it knocked off some day." I said always I wished to see everything in order that I might paint everything. So I went everywhere and saw everything as much as any one can."

Keenly as he recoils from war, and vividly as he depicts and, still more, suggests the horrors with which it is inevitably accompanied, no man is more removed from the unsympathetic cast-iron pedant on the subject. On the contrary, Verestchagin, who is a very human man, ¦ has shared to the full the fierce joy of strife which has in every age lured men to mutual slaughter. He wrote on one occasion: "I confess that among all the means and expedients for cutting down human life the most intelligible for me is war. War has all the excitement of a well-organised and very dangerous sport. The capable general makes his dispositions in the same spirit and with the same calculations as the experienced chasseur disposes all his men in order to inflict slaughter upon the game. I have killed people myself in battle, and I can say from experience that the excitement, and even the feeling of satisfaction in killing a man, is the same as when you bring down game in hunting. For man as he is, war, it can be said without exaggeration, is a very attractive business."

"Then you have fought?" said I to Verestchagin.

"Oh, yes, many times. I was on one occasion with a company of five hundred in Central Asia, when we were suddenly surrounded in a fortress by twenty thousand Bokhariots. We fought for several days like demons holding them at bay, fighting for our lives. Oh, yes, I have fought."

"How did it end?" I asked.

"Oh! the General returned and raised the siege. I also took part in the Bulgarian war. I was engaged in the blowing up of the Turkish Monitor in the Danube, when I was wounded. I have suffered from war, I know what it is, and yet I tell you that as a sport personally it appeals to me. There is an excitement which stirs the blood of the tiger which flows in all our veins. I cannot say that I admire the morality as much as I enjoy the excitement of war, and I think that in the days that are to come it will disappear, but not until in the slow process of the ages the human organism has been more adapted to peaceful life than it is at present. You see," he said, you can only change a man's character as you can change his bones. The great carnivore will devour, but when you can build up his front head and thin down his jaws, he will be a much more manageable person, and will not feel that mad lust for slaughter which is natural to those who have but recently emerged from savagery. We shall get rid of war some time, but it will be many a long year yet. As for humanising war, that I don't believe in. People talk as if there were two kinds of war-a big and a bad one, and a small and charming one à l'eau de

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Cologne. There is only one kind of war. War is the antithesis of all morality, of all humanity. There never has been but one kind of war since the beginning of the world, that is the war in which you endeavour to kill or inflict as much suffering upon the enemy as possible, seize as much of his property as possible, and wound, kill, and take as many prisoners as possible. It maddens me even to listen to the observations made by drawingroom critics as to my pictures of war. It is not from real soldiers who have seen war that such criticisms come. I have been through everything, believe me, in my determination to see everything and to know everything connected with warfare. I have taken part in almost every kind of operation. I have charged with infantry, and I have even led soldiers on to the assault. I have taken part in cavalry skirmishes, and when I was wounded on the Danube, I was acting with sailors who were blowing up the Turkish Monitor.

"The wound, which nearly cost me my life, enabled me to study hospital life, and to understand better the sufferings of those who are mangled in war. Although I have been through so many battles, and had to sketch, sketch, sketch all the time while bullets were whistling round and shells bursting close to where I was standing, I never could overcome the horrid consciousness that I was going to be killed. I always felt death near, and when I heard every minute the swift whizz of the shell as it hissed past, or the rattling of the bullets against the wall, it seemed as if some one was hammering repeatedly all about my head. Of course, in the moment of charge you forget everything in the mad exhilaration of the moment in which overcharged excitement finds vent in delirious shouting." "Do soldiers always shout when charging?" I asked.

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Always; so much so, that at the close of battle you find every man quite hoarse. The excitement and the stress of it are very great, for when a battle is in progress every moment presents some new and unexpected feature. I used to be very much ashamed of feeling so cowardly under fire, but I was reassured when I spoke on the subject to Skobeleff. No one ever displayed more absolute indifference to danger than did Skobeleff. He would walk backwards and forwards calmly pulling his long beard, while the bullets were spitting all round him, and men were falling dead on every side. No one ever exhibited more recklessness, and yet he seemed to bear a charmed life. Only once during the whole war was he struck, and then it was a mere scratch on the wrist by a passing bullet. Nothing is more strange in war than this. A man like Skobeleff will stand in the forefront of the hottest fire for hours and never get a scratch, while another man who just puts his nose out for one second from behind a breastwork, in that second will be struck by a bullet. Yet Skobeleff, the brave, invincible, fearless Skobeleff, who seemed to mind the bursting of a shell as little as the striking of a match, said to me that no man could be more of a coward at heart than himself. So far from not fearing death, I fear it so much,' said he, that for a time, whenever the firing began, I used to say to myself," It is for to-day," but never will I bow my head to shot or shell, for when once you begin to duck there is no knowing when it will stop. Now I take my cowardice in my hands, and with an iron will crush it into silence.' If Skobeleff felt like that," said Verestchagin, "I felt I did not need to feel so much ashamed of my own dread."

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The element of personal bravery or the capacity to

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overcome that natural cowardice of which Skobeleff speaks is a decisive element in the winning of battles. Verestchagin described in a lively fashion the different way in which different officers conduct themselves in battle. "Wherever you have good officers you have good men; that is the rule. But where your officers are afraid to lead, you will usually find the soldiers are very much afraid to follow. Men will always follow when they are well led."

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'Another thing which is universal in armies,” said Verestchagin, "is the extent to which every one feels justified in lying concerning his own deeds when the battle is over. It is a universal epidemic which affects

the soldier in action. Nations also dislike the truth in military matters. I once painted a picture called 'The Retreat,' which represented a Russian regiment in retreat. It was an incident which happens to all armies and to all regiments, for you cannot always be advancing; but it was very much condemned on the ground that Russian soldiers are never even in a picture to be made to show their backs, so in sheer disgust I burnt it. I burnt two or three pictures for similar reasons. One was the picture Forgotten.' It represented a dead Russian soldier in Turkestan, forgotten by his comrades and by his officers. He is left in the Steppe, while around him wild birds of prey are hovering impatient to begin their meal. A third picture which I also burnt," said Verestchagin, “was that representing the Russian soldiers smoking their pipes in the midst of the bodies of the dead. This, although perfectly true to life, was regarded as a desecration, so I burnt it also."

"Do you often burn your pictures?" I asked.

"Sometimes," he said. "There was one that Alexander III., as heir apparent, wished to buy, representing a Kirghiz scene in the mountains, which I burnt. That I burnt because I did not like it-it did not please me. The other three of which I have spoken I burnt because of the prejudice which they excited against me in Russia. The Resurrection,' which I also burnt, had been partially burnt for me by the people who threw vitriol. A picture which I did not burn, but which led to much complaint, was that which showed the Emperor Alexander II. sitting on a camp-stool surrounded by his staff watching the attack on Plevna. It was regarded as a kind of lèse majesté to show the Emperor as sitting on a camp-stool, instead of painting him seated on a charger. I painted what I actually saw, and that did not satisfy them. But I knew very well that the Old Guillaume used to sit down in battles." Another picture that he got into a little trouble about was that which I saw in the Moscow Gallery, and which represented Skobeleff riding down the lines of his men after the great victory over Vessel Pasha at Shipka. It is a very lifelike picture. Skobeleff on his white horse, followed by his staff, is instinct with the passion and energy of war. His men or those of them who were left alive-are flinging their caps into the air. Underneath it was the inscription, "I thank you in the name of your country and in the name of the Tsar." It was an innocent inscription to our Western thinking, but poor Skobeleff was much put out. "He came to me," said Verestchagin, "and implored me to alter the inscription. He said it would do him no end of harm if it could be shown that he had put the country before the Emperor in thanking his troops. He should have said, 'In the name of the Tsar and of the country.' 'But,' said I, 'what you actually said was what I put.' 'True,' said he, ‘but in such a moment one forgets.' 'What I have written I have written,' said I. But that is just the way with every

body-they never want to have put down just what was said or what was done, but they always want to alter it a little to make it suit the expectations of other people."

One of the best known of Verestchagin's pictures is that which is called "All Quiet at Shipka." It represents three stages in the career of the Russian soldier. In the first he is standing knee-deep in snow, keeping a look-out at his post in the Shipka Pass. In the second the snow is rising above his knee, his head is bowed, he no longer keeps the look-out. In the third the cold has done its work. He has become unconscious, and he no longer stands upright; he reclines still clasping his rife in the sleep of death. The loss of life in that severe winter was excessive. In some companies only ten men were left.

Several of the artist's battle pictures allude to the various attacks on Plevna, of which he was an eye-witness, In one of these two of his brothers were actively engaged. one was killed, the other was wounded. It was not til long afterwards that Verestchagin was able to make his way to the place where his brother was buried. Three months after the surrender of Plevna, he went to the place where he was told he would be able to discover his ¦ brother's remains. It was full of skeletons lying in al manner of different positions with some scanty remains of skin and clothing on the bones. In some the hands were stretched in the air, as if in the last agony. one skeleton to another he passed, seeking in vain for some clue which would enable him to identify the remains. Is not this one," cried his guide, "who shuts his teeth and points his finger upwards, as if giving a rendezvous, he whom you are seeking?" Alas! who could say? "Tears suffocated me," said Verestchagin. "I wept as a child. I made a study of the place, with the intention of representing the scene, but even two years afterwards, when I attempted to reproduce this field of death on the canvas, the same emotion paralysed me. I have never painted that picture-no, not even to this day."

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From

The day after the great battle of Plevna the scene was terrible beyond description. Provision had been ordered to be made in the Russian ambulances for three or four thousand persons. The wounded in reality exceeded thirteen thousand. The result was that many of the wounded remained for days unattended. Nothing is sadder," said Verestchagin, “in all the campaign than visiting these wounded who are doomed to die. They lie in long files inside the ambulance tent, some very pale, others red from fever; few of them realise how near their end is. 'How are you to-day?' said the doctor, one time when I was there to a short, red-faced man. 'Better, much better now,' was the reply; with God's help, I hope to recover soon and return home.' 'He will not survive this day,' said the doctor in French. And you?' he said, turning to the next. 'I think I am a little better now, doctor. Here it is all well, but a little higher up there seems to be something.' The gangrene is rising,' said the doctor, he will be dead in a few hours.'

"In dry weather the patients in the field ambulances were comparatively comfortable. But when it rained, as it often did after a battle, they lay chilled in pools of mud and water. In the midst of all this carnage and murder the heroism of the Sisters of Mercy stood out in bright and clear relief. No wound was too horrible, no operation too hideous for them to shrink from their duty. remember one soldier who had five or six wounds whom the doctor himself did not care to approach without a strong cigar between his lips. The Sister of Mercy

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attended him constantly, cleaned, and washed, and bandaged his wounds from early morning till late at night."

As for the poor prisoners of war, they suffered worse. No wounded prisoner was attended to until all the wounded on the side of the victors had been seen to. Few scenes in the war left so painful an impression upon Verestchagin's mind as the scene in the Turkish hospital at Plevna, and the still more terrible scenes which were witnessed on the road by which the Turkish prisoners were driven northward to Russia. In the Turkish

hospital at Plevna there were as many as thirty sick men in each house, the living groaning among the dead. The air was foetid with filth, and in some houses every one seemed to be dead until, on looking more closely, some sign of life was visible in a body lying among a heap of corpses. The road from Plevna to the

Danube was strewn with the bodies of wounded and frozen Turks. The frost set in so suddenly and with such severity that the Turkish prisoners, worn out with the privations of the stage, dropped by ones and twos along the road and were frozen to death. Again and again, Verestchagin said, some of these poor fellows were set upon their feet, but they were so enfeebled that they fell down, never to rise again. As Verestchagin passed along the road he examined the faces of those dead men who were lying in every conceivable position in the snow, and convinced himself that every face bore the impress of deep suffering.

As the long march continued a fresh horror was added to the snow when the carts and tumbrils began to drive over the dying and the dead. Their bodies were crushed into the snow, and helped to make a pavement of the road along which the survivors drearily plodded onward. "I remember a party of eight to ten thousand prisoners at Plevna overtaken by a snowstorm. They extended along the high road for a great distance, and sat closely huddled together with heads bent down, and from all this mass of human beings there arose a dull moaning from thousands of voices as they slowly and in measure repeated' Allah, Allah!' The snow covered them, the wind blew through their chilled forms; no fire, no shelter, no bread. When the word of command to start was given, I saw some of the older venerable Turks, probably fathers of families, crying like children, and imploring the escort to let them go as far as the town to dry their clothes, warm themselves, and rest; but this was strictly forbidden for fear of contagious sickness, as there were such numbers of them, and only one answer was returned to all their supplications — ' Forward, forward!' All these scenes that I witnessed enabled me to paint Napoleon's 'Retreat.""

"War is very horrid," said Verestchagin. "There is very little that is picturesque about it, and when men fall dead by the wayside, they lie like dull, sodden mushrooms, earthy and squalid. As I have seen it, so I have painted it. And that I have paid so much attention to war is due to the fact that nothing impressed me so much through all my various travels as the fact that, even in our time, people kill one another under all possible pretexts and by all possible means. The impression became so deep in my mind that, after much thinking of the matter over, I set myself to paint war as it is. I have not treated the subject in a sentimental fashion. For, having myself killed many a fellow-creature in

different wars, I have not the right to be sentimental. But the sight of heaps of human beings slaughtered, shot, beheaded, hanged under my eyes in all that region extending from the frontier of China to Bulgaria, has not failed to impress itself vividly upon the imaginative side of my art. I have examined war in its different aspects and transmitted them faithfully. The facts laid upon canvas without embellishment speak most eloquently for themselves."

Of the immediate outlook Verestchagin is not very sanguine. France, he thinks, is still snuffing the remains of the Empire. Boisdeffre and others are relics of the Empire, and many officers succumb to the temptation of pocketing the secret-service money which they profess is being expended solely for the secret service of the State.

As to the Peace Conference, he doubted whether it could do more than take the first step, but he was quite sure that the Emperor desired its success. Of him he had heard nothing but good. As for the Crusade, it impressed him as a marvellous idea, and one which if energetically carried out could not fail to produce excellent results in the way of removing man slaughtering from the programme of life.

"There is no prophet in his own country," he said, "and I should not be much surprised if this high movement will be more appreciated abroad than in some English circles. But I say deliberately if something good and worthy comes out of the first great peace conference, history will say that the honour belongs as much to the Tsar's initiative as to the glorious support of the English Liberals-liberals, not only by the name of the 'Firm,' but in the real sense of the word. Let some people say Humbug!'-they will be drowned by the Bravos!' of millions of human beings from all parts of the civilised world, tired with man slaying in the name of the Lord of Mercy. War will always exist between the peoples, but war of competition. Remove the bloodshed from Europe, which begins to be ripe for this great evolution; the turn of the other continents will come later."

"Verestchagin himself," said a critic in the Daily News many years ago, "is the very Homer of pictorial realism. His battles are fought out of doors, in the warm sunlight or in the blinding white of the snow, and his fighters, when they are wrought to the point, exhibit every fiendish passion of human nature. Meissonier was so profoundly impressed with the realism of the Russian that he is said to have left his 'Napoleon at a Review' unfinished after what he saw of Verestchagin's 'Skobeleff.'"

One more quotation and I have done. It is taken from Madame Novikoff's review of the "Autobiographical Sketches," which were published by Bentley and Son in 1887. She says: "Verestchagin is the Count Tolstoi of painters; the same genius, the same fearlessness, the same craving for what they think-sometimes wronglyto be the truth, and perhaps occasionally the same exaggerated touch of realism. Both are glorious products of Russian life of whom their country may be proud."

Verestchagin's pictures are likely to be the great attraction of the spring this season in London, and after that it is probable that they will be transferred to a picture gallery in one of the great provincial citiesManchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, or elsewhere. Certainly they cannot be too widely known.

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