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THE BROOK, PROUDEST OF ALL MY POSSESSIONS
leaves, discarded dust-cloths, old rubber
shoes, bits of brick pounded to fit on the
long-suffering bank, broken glass and china.

years to come. Once a child newly dressed
for a party climbed the old willow, which
carelessly broke down after enduring
shocks of time. So both went as far as
possible into the widest part of the brook,
and the child, going to her party in second-
best garments, bore it a grudge for a day.
An arbor crosses the stream, and above
its stepping-stones supports a great twisted
wild grapevine that blossoms in June with
the rarest sweetness on earth. Other vines
may be as great, but this is glorious.
When spring floods subside, the water
falls from the top of the bank to an eight-
inch depth, and knows no more rest till
vacation days come and mountains and
seashore beckon. It is bridged, dammed,
waded in. Stones are
painfully pried out of
the original retaining
wall-good, solid boul-
ders and used as
stepping-stones, made
into dams chinked with
mud and grass, twigs,

The innocent stream gurgles on faint and fainter until a pond is made; and here, day by day, the procession of boats is hilariously guided up and down and around the edges, led by strings, coaxed by sticks and the garden broom. A toy sled, a celluloid soap-dish, a wooden plate, tin cans, paper boxes, and small discarded saucepans make up the fleet. Never until vacation days come will the long-suffering and then mosquito-y brook pause to take breath. When the last boy and girl disappear, man comes to release it from its bonds. Then it is hoed out, raked out, all its toy utensils and tenpins that did bank duty as marines are carried back to the playhouseonce-a-stable, andgrass seed is sown in the approach under the

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66 THE SPRING... FOR JOY, IF NOT FOR FAME, IT WAS ON A PAR WITH THE PIERIAN ONE"

arbor that is like nothing so much as a buffalo wallow, oozy and tramped out of all shape by shoes and bare feet of many sizes. The boulders go back to their original intent; the stepping-stones are reset, taking the utmost strength of a man, who wonders at that of the children; the dam is broken down to let the brook clear itself. Such a thread of a stream for eternal remembrance !

A brook for hostile fleets and peaceful commerce: by turns river and sea and the ocean of life itself. A pygmy thing, but how it looms !

And some lint-haired laddie may look back to it with glistening eyes when the Great Story is first unfolded to him, and as he reads of the tall ships-the beaked ships that went up unto Ilios-say with a thrill, "And I too with Odysseus was!"

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F

By William M. Chase

An Interview with Walter Pach

So

OR thirty years and more, before audiences of many kinds, Mr. William M. Chase has been speaking on art-its import and its philosophy. many thousands have heard him, and he speaks with such clearness, conviction, and authority, that we may safely say that the words of no other artist or critic have had so much influence on America's idea of art. During the past winter his utterances attracted especial notice on two occasions when he addressed the MacDowell Club and at the opening of his own retrospective exhibition. Let us now consider ourselves invited to the studio which has witnessed the production of this remarkable group of pictures (though, to be sure, the landscapes were not done there, but always in the open air), and as it is not strange that a man should be willing to talk on the thing which has been the great enthusiasm of his lifetime, we are likely to get some ideas worth remembering.

Studios are interesting places, for they reflect the quality of mind of their inhabitants more fully than any other sort of room. Even artists may have some indifference to the objects which surround them in their dwellings; but when it comes to the place where the great effort is made to throw open every inlet and outlet of the mind, where each impression is at its maximum, then the artist is careful as to what he has about him. Rodin has nothing at all on his walls; he wants to keep his attention entirely for his model and his work. Sargent has made it his practice to retain his best pictures whenever possible, and it is these which hang in his studio-a reminder that he has a standard to live up to, or to surpass when he can. But what sort of mind do we deduce from the varied contents of the big studios we enter now? They are hung with pictures and tapestries. On old carved cupboards are Korean bowls, Italian statuettes, and Japanese lacquers. In corners we get a sumptuous gleam of brass, suggest

ing Russia or Spain. Behind the modelstand is an ancient and wonderful Chinese screen partly covered by a dim-toned old velvet that has been thrown across it. In a passageway sits a Buddha in contemplation-of a volume of reproductions of Degas's works apparently. On one wall is a primitive Italian altarpiece with a Madonna and saints against a gold background. Not less golden, though from the quality of its paint, instead of metal, is a masterpiece-probably the masterpiece of Vollon. In a quiet corner is a small picture which in its gleam of light against shadow seems to declare itself a Rembrandt. If you ask Mr. Chase about it, he will say that he admired the art in the work-which was what he bought it for, not its name.

One general conclusion we may arrive at from our hasty survey: the man who chooses to live in the atmosphere of such things is one who sees beauty in very differing manifestations. Many of his treasures come down from the past. But he is not one who dwells in the past, as you will see by the modern pictures he has. At his house are works by Manet, Michel, and Monticelli, or perhaps it is the picture by some young American which has just been refused at the Acad emy.

So we expect to hear him speak hopefully on the painting of to-day, and we are not disappointed.

"In my student days at Munich I was much impressed by a prophecy of my teacher, Piloty, who said that the next great school of art would arise in America. At the same time my interest was turned from the painting of historical scenes (which was the fashion at the time) to the representation of the people and things that I knew. I was convinced that the great masters gave every sanction to the art that I contemplated. Take Veronese's Triumph of Alexander,' in the National

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Gallery of London. Forget that the subjects are supposed to be Greeks and Persians, and you still have, even more clearly, the essential idea of the picture: the glory and splendor of Venice in the sixteenth century. But another thought took more and more forcible hold on methat the subject, whether the apparent or the real one, would never have made the picture the great work we find it to-day had not the producer's deepest interest lain in the quality of the art with which he glorifies that stretch of canvas. Accordingly I set myself to learn my trade— I am not ashamed of the phrase-and I made up my mind that if I was ever to do anything, it would be through making myself a master of the medium, as the great men of the old time were. I set to work to find out how to begin a picture an important and neglected step; too many are hurrying on to give what is called 'finish' before they have grounded their work in the truth which must inform and uphold the entire structure.

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"I studied the works of the masters in many cities to which I traveled, and made copies after Hals, Velasquez, Rembrandt, and others. But, in my great desire to build my art on the eternal principles which govern theirs, I fell almost unavoidably into an error. This was brought home to me in striking fashion by Alfred Stevens, who said to me, after seeing my picture at the Salon: Chase, it is a good work, but don't try to make your pictures look as if they had been done by the old masters.' I saw the truth of his remark; modern conditions and trends of thought demand modern art for their expression. I saw in a new light the sublime example of Velasquez. One reason he seems so near to us is that he, like ourselves, journeyed to a country where great art was to be seen, and studied and copied there. But what was so important for me just at this time was that Velasquez-with all his acquirement from the masters who had gone before him-felt the need of choòsing new forms and arrangements, new schemes of color and methods of painting, to fit the time and place he was called on to depict.

"I make sure that the marks of confidence I have received from my portrait sitters and from my students would never

have been accorded me without my recognition of the need for an ever-new outlook on the questions of art.

"What are the conditions in America to-day? We are a new people in a new country. Watch the crowds along Piccadilly or the Champs Elysées-you spot the Americans among them almost as easily as if they wore our flag in their buttonholes. It means that already a new type has appeared, the offspring, as we know, of European stock, but which no longer resembles it. An Englishman in a portrait by Gainsborough or Reynolds, a Dutchman by Rembrandt, or an Italian by Titian is clearly the ancestor of the Englishman, the Dutchman, or the Italian of to-day. But though the American may have some of the blood of these very individuals (quite likely of all of them), we feel that somehow he has broken away from the steady channel of heredity. just as his look and character are different, so his art must be different.

And

"Please observe that of the masters I have just mentioned each was a member of the nation which he has recorded, and that theirs is the characterization of the people which we know to be the true one. I could extend the list so that it would include almost every case. Van Dyck's might seem to be one of the few exceptions, but at the exhibition of his works this winter it was the portraits of Snyders and his wife-Flemings like the man who painted them-that were the best, and by far the best, however well he did in his pictures of the Genoese.

"We know how far mistaken many of the books are which Europeans write about our country; but if they mistake the external phases of which such works are largely composed, how much more must they go wrong in painting portraits of our people, where the very essence of the work is an intimate comprehension of the sitter's nature. No, the great record of America must come from Americans themselves.

"I would not have you understand that I am claiming superiority for our artists over those of other countries. I do no such thing. Yet in Whistler we had one of the great men of the last century; to-day we have Sargent, Weir and Wiles, Winslow Homer and Albert

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