portant to-day, and every idea applicable to present emergencies. Abraham Lincoln, the political heir of Webster, must have known that speech by heart.

"Twice Thirty" is selling like sixty. And the reason is not to be found in the vast and well-deserved success of the former book, "The Americanization of Edward Bok." The author, a born raconteur, had his wits sharpened by journalism, and knows exactly how to tell a story. He purposely omitted some of the best from his earlier work, and here we may enjoy them. The conversations with Wilson and Roosevelt are thrilling; the story of Vladimir de Pachmann is the best anecdote of that bizarre genius that I have seen.

The resignation of Dean L. B. R. Briggs from Harvard is a matter of national importance, for his friends-and I never saw any one who knew him who was not his friend-are in every section of the United States. Professor Briggs is one of the greatest productive scholars in America-he has produced so much goodness and usefulness and honesty in the minds of thousands of young men. His acts of kindness are innumerable, of which I will mention one. After I had been a graduate student at Harvard for a few months, Professor Briggs asked me if I wanted a fellowship, to which question he received a natural answer. It was a bitter winter day, the sidewalks covered with snow and slush, and Professor Briggs in his chronically bad health; he spent the entire afternoon visiting various professors-there were no telephones -urging them to support me for a fellowship. After I came to know him better, I found that kindness and unselfishness had become with him his only besetting sins. As he looks back over fifty years of service, he ought to be both proud and happy; but while he may be happy, he

could not be proud, for he is quite unaware of his sainthood. Yet in the hearts of thousands he is already canonized.

The sensationally sudden death of Walter Camp was a terrible shock not only to his friends, but to the American public. No one has had a better influence on sport, because while he loved to have his teams win, he always put honor and health above victory. In his later years he became not merely an authority on sport, but a kind of household physician, with several million patients. He devoted his energies not to making athletes, but to keeping the middle-aged and the venerable in working health. There was another side to him, which the public was not altogether aware of; Walter Camp was exceedingly well-read in good literature, and his conversation was not only delightful but intellectually stimulating.

The eternal quarrel between the older and the younger generation is once more illustrated in a new book by W. B. Trites, called "Ask the Young." It deals with Gibraltar, marriage, and birth control, and is provocatively original in manner and style. About twenty-five years ago there appeared in Germany (I saw it) a play called Jugend von Heute "Young People of To-day"-in which the youths were ridiculed for their contempt of classics like Schiller, for their general irreverence, for their ignorance and conceit. The comedy had an enormous vogue. Some three hundred years ago, George Chapman wrote a play in which occurs the phrase, "Young men think old men are fools, but old men know young men are fools." Yesterday I received a contribution to this immortal theme from Thomas Sergeant Perry: "The old know a little about the past but nothing about the future; the young know nothing about the past, but everything about the future.'

T

HE annual art season in Paris or London is a strenuous business, and, of course, there are in both places, at the Salon and at the Royal Academy, prodigious quantities of paintings to be seen. We have no such extensive "picture fairs" in our period of exhibitions, say from October to May. On the other hand, I have never known in either of the cities mentioned a more portentous flood of works of art than that which pours into the galleries of New York, nor is the average of interesting things any higher abroad than it is here. I realize this very vividly as I make a retrospective survey of the season of 1924-25. The exigencies of magazine publication render it impossible to take note in this place of the exhibitions as they occur. But it is worth while to look back over them, they have been so good. They have covered all phases of the subject-painting, sculpture, prints, and, even as I write, architecture, and they have been drawn from every imaginable source. We have seen some of the greatest of the old masters. The work of modern foreigners has been abundantly illustrated. And the American school has been constantly and effectively to the fore. Indeed, this last-mentioned circumstance is perhaps the most significant which I have to record.

THE 'HE key for a demonstration of the qualities of native art was auspiciously set by the Metropolitan Museum when its American Wing was opened last fall. One conviction beyond all others emerges from study of that remarkable assemblage of the things fashioned by our forefathers-interiors, furniture, and decorations. It is that we were launched upon a practice of good craftsmanship, and that we went on cultivating it under the influence of good taste. We have steadily adhered to that path ever since. It is the outstanding lesson of the exhibitions organized by the National Academy of Design, one in the winter and one in the

spring. It is the fashion in some quarters and especially among the artists of the younger generation, who are inordinately proud of their "liberalism," to disparage those exhibitions. In fact, they are often dismissed out of hand as merely negligible. This is unjust, and I think the injustice proceeds from a disposition to look at the matter in a false perspective. It is assumed that if the exhibitions are not brilliant it is the fault of the Academy and of the academic idea. The truth is, of course, that the academic idea has never hurt a genuine talent and that the Academy has been persistently hospitable to men of gifts. It has an opportunity to prove this next fall, when it will open at the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, an exhibition later to be seen in New York, in commemoration of its hundredth anniversary. It ought to prove its case then by the simple process of showing the works of most of the best men who have made American art for a century. They have been allied with the Academy, some of them very closely, and I believe biographical data would show that many of them were encouraged to enter academic exhibitions very early in their careers. No, the Academy has not been inimical to youth, to budding genius, and it is merely stupid to say it has been so because, in maintenance of a decent standard, it has turned the cold shoulder to freakishness and incompetence masquerading as originality and independence. The trouble with its exhibitions is easily to be diagnosed on other grounds. They are, to begin with, enormously weakened by the competition of the one-man show. That is prevalent to an extent that may be inferred from the fact that I have sometimes had to reckon with fifteen or twenty exhibitions of this kind in a single week. I remember a long talk that I once had with the late Kenyon Cox on this subject. We had been strolling together through an Academy show, and I couldn't conceal my disappointment with it from that Academician. He asked me what I con

agreed with me that the successful Academician owed something in his prime to the institution that had backed him when he was young, giving him, perhaps, medals and money prizes and letting him tack "N. A." onto his name. I have had that thought hundreds of times since. But I had in my turn to agree with Cox.

We talked of the conditions, some of them economic, that in the nature of things could not but exert a paramount influence. They count as heavily now as they counted then. An artist must do the best that he can for himself, and when he reaches a certain point in his life there can be no question of the value to him of the one-man show. It does much to make and to sustain his market. The dealer who exposes his work does everyVOL. LXXVII.-48

able explanation one on which it is possible to argue. This is the crushing circumstance-well to put bluntly, like all crushing things-that the body of really resplendent painters is always slim, anywhere and at any time, in our modern world. After all, can the malcontent say, hand on heart, that the Royal Academy or the Salon ever immeasurably enriches his artistic experience? There are never enough great men to go around. Our National Academy, at any rate, fulfils a valuable function in keeping alive the tradition of good taste and honest craftsmanship. I felt this at the winter and spring exhibitions in the season just closed, and was regretful but not exactly scandalized because once more I found nothing brilliant about them. Moreover, on both

Europa.

occasions you were bound to find first-rate things in them if you only took the pains to search. It is an interesting point to me that my liveliest memories of work at the Academy in the winter and the spring are of work done by women. In the first show it was Lilian Westcott Hale's "Nancy" that forged to the front, a portrait that shared the honors only with one other piece, a decorative composition by Eugene Savage. Again, at the spring Academy I saw nothing with quite the distinction and charm of Cecil Clark Davis's "Miss d'H," a portrait of Holbeinesque gravity. Both Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Davis succeed because, in addition to seeing their subjects beautifully, they are good technicians and know especially how to draw. I note the fact that they are women, yet as I do so I realize how completely they demonstrate the truth that art has no sex, that a good artist is simply a good artist. I was reminded of that when in March I saw the excellent exhibition made by the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. It con

tained fully as large a proportion of meritorious works as could be found in a collection brought together by the same number of men.

There were in the season, of course, several other exhibitions like these, miscellaneous and organized on a fairly generous scale. The water-colorists made their usual display with a little more than their usual effectiveness. They always make me sigh a little for the old days of the American Water-Color Society, when Edwin Abbey and others of his mood used

to paint more or less diverting pictures. Nowadays the artist in either oil or in water-color is generally disposed to neglect the lure of design; he does not take thought, he looks, and the things he sees are not invariably thrilling. I yield to no one in appreciation of the American scene, but there are times when I feel that the fishing-boats in Gloucester harbor, the tawny rocks on the Maine coast, and the white houses in our villages have somehow lost the freshness of their charm. There are times when I would give them all for a painting embodying a new idea. Well, the water-colorists disclosed, to tell the truth, never the ghost of an idea.

The Fighter.

But they functioned, as I have said, to exceptionally good purpose in that they manifested remarkable control of a medium as treacherous as it is enchanting. The dazzling virtuosity of a man like Robert Blum, for example, may be in abeyance, but the number of artists who work with sincerity and skill in water-color is nothing less than amazing. Turning to other organizations, I recall the sixth annual exhibition of the New Society, a body supposed to be more progressive than the Academy, as of only middling interest. It contained some good things, especially by Van Deering Perrine, and in general illustrated a wholesome concern for problems of technique. But it didn't as a whole quite justify the critical expectations formed when it was founded. At the big show arranged by the Society of Independent Artists for their ninth annual appearance on the roof of the WaldorfAstoria, the vagaries of modernism were not quite so much in evidence as on previous occasions. It was the best exhibition the Society had given. But that is not saying much. The trail of the amateur was over it all.

past season. They revealed over and over again the personal force which means so much in works of art. Eugene Savage began the tale as far back as last November with about a dozen compositions at

"Miss d'H."

IF any confirmation were needed of the point I have suggested as to the oneman show and the way in which it deprives the Academy of a good deal that would benefit the latter, it is to be had in the merest list of certain incidents of the

the Ferargil Gallery. He has romantically poetic things to say, a vein of authentic invention, and a fine technical equipment. He is the only man we have who belongs in the same category with Arthur B. Davies. Like Davies, he deals with ideas, and, like Davies again, he deals with them imaginatively. Technically they are quite unlike one another, but they are akin inasmuch as they both have creative power. Later in the winter, at the same place, Davies himself had an important exhibition, one of water-colors drawn from architectural subjects in