Page images
PDF
EPUB

the little Syrian children who tend them.

It is usual to leave the Sea of Galilee by way of Samach, which is reached, with a favorable breeze, in an hour from Tiberias; though as a rule the wind falls dead about half-way, and anyone with a train to catch will be well advised in allowing twice the time. Samach is an unpretentious station on the line which runs from Haifa to Damascus. Those with time will doubtless pay a visit, if only a flying one, to the Syrian capital, which is more typically Muhamadan than any other city in the Holy Land, while the mosque of the Ommayedes, which contains, among other treasures, the head of John the Baptist, is perhaps the most splendid of its kind in the country. Otherwise it is but a short journey by train to Haifa, whence the tourist may re-embark. Should his time be drawing to a close, he will probably elect to return as he came, by way of Egypt, but with leisure he may do

The Outlook.

worse than proceed up the cost, by way of Smyrna and the Dardanelles, to Constantinople.

As for Constantinople, it is many things to many men. There is a dream of fairyland in the first sight of its minarets and palaces seen from the deck of a steamer swinging in the swift currents off Seraglio Point. Its springtime is brief, yet in the second week of April the wild flowers should be ablaze on the steep sides of the Bosphorus like the glory of a Turkey carpet. And before the tourist takes his seat in the Orient Express, or his cabin in the Messageries steamer, he will surely feel a little regret, for he will not wholly have escaped the spell of the crumbling land walls, of caïques dancing over the little waves of the Golden Horn, of the holy peace of San Sofia, with its worshippers and its praying-carpets, and of the kaleidoscopic life that he has seen daily on the most wonderful bridge in the world. F. G. Aftalo.

OUR SHARE IN THE RENAISSANCE.

One most lamentable consequence of the total divorce between art and life at the present day is that it seldom occurs to any of us that art and life were ever really united. It seldom occurs to any of us that art, now the serious plaything of a few experimentalists and professional critics, can ever have been the mouthpiece of the rough, popular, prevalent instincts of the populace of a nation. Not seeing art in this connection with life we ignore a chief interest it possesses for us. Architecture is that branch of art which has expressed the spirit of its age most completely, and which, in its creative epochs, has received into itself most of the national life. It is therefore the art which has most of human interest to communi

cate. But if the reader will examine any of the books on architecture, of which a large number are published annually, all by professional architects, he will discover that this art never is treated as a record and embodiment of life, that changes of style never are explained as arising out of similar changes in the spirit of their age. No, architecture to the professors of the art is, what all other arts are to their specialists, entirely a matter of art. The explanation of all the modifications it undergoes are to be sought in the material is uses and the laws of construction it obeys. From these sources of inspiration are developed, by an inevitable process of "evolution," the various styles which have come

down to us.

Those styles account for themselves. What the vault was yesterday dictates what it must be to-day and will have to be to-morrow. The whole process is a natural growth proceeding from within and producing forms of which the recurrence is inevitable. I know of no kind of reasoning more fatal to all human interest in the subject, or which in fact has had more to do with the drying up of that interest among the public at large.

Let us see now if, taking a single transition among English styles and treating it not as a matter of structural evolution but as a change adapted at every phase to a corresponding change in thought and life, we can arrive at some idea of the kind of interest which is to be found in this subject. Let us take the transition from pointed Gothic to flat Gothic, or, as it is usually called, Tudor. The Tudor style is often regarded with a kind of negligent disfavor as the last phase in the decrepitude of Gothic. The tame, flat-headed arches and vaults, to which, by the sixteenth century, the fiery Gothic point had sunk, are to all appearance representative of the collapse of the mediæval inspiration. Such a style might, we think, be apt enough for domestic convenience or civic display, and the manor houses and guildhalls of the period are admittedly good of their kind; but that there can be any vigor or promise of originality in what looks so like a change from energy to lassitude we are slow to imagine. Yet there is this to be said for the incoming style, that it proceeds with all the assurance and steady coherence of a movement that is sure of its own purpose. It does not, as is the way of a decadence, dissipate itself in a variety of fitful impulses, but, on the basis of one or two radical alterations, works out the characteristic features of a style. The arch and vault were the features in which all that was essential

in Gothic took shape. With these Tudor dealt. It took the tall Gothic arch and forcibly widened it out, bending down the sides of it exactly as a hedger bends down ash saplings to form the framework of his hedge, until, instead of soaring upward, the lines of the arch spread almost horizontally and its flat curve approached more nearly to the form of an architrave than an arch. The vault was dealt with in the same way. Its giddy height was relaxed and the soaring ribs lowered until its whole character was altered and a lateral ideal was substituted for a vertical one. These are bold measures. What is the aim in view? The spacious proportions of Tudor interiors, resulting necessarily from the substitution of flat for pointed ceilings, answer the question. The aim is

to introduce into architecture the qualities belonging to the horizontal line in the place of those belonging to the vertical line.

But now if the reader will glance around at what was taking place at this time over the rest of Europe, he will perceive that this aim of English architecture was a European aim, and that, as manifested by Europe, this aim is what we call the Renaissance. The desire to substitute horizontal for vertical developments, spaciousness for height, summarizes the intention of this Renaissance so far as architecture is concerned, and if we would but concentrate a little less on technical details and a little more on general proportions, we should indeed perceive that the Tudor style, our contribution to the horizontal ideal, is in truth a bit of the Renaissance, differing only from the rest of that movement in the important fact of being of Gothic instead of Latin extraction. Similar though the style is, the idea that prompts Tudor is the idea which is prompting the great architectural metamorphosis on the European scale. I

wish that any one who desires to enter into the oncoming of this idea would first stand in a Gothic church until his own mood is harmonized with the church's mood, and the tall lines of the structure, ascending in an almost visible act of adoration, express his own feelings, and then visit a Renaissance interior, and there too in the same way give himself up to the architecture, until the largeness and calmness of it seem the embodiment of his own mental condition. To do this is to turn what was once a great revolution in the history of thought into a matter of personal experience. It is to live through mediævalism into the modern era. Has he not felt with Gothic architecture all that allies it with the instinct of spiritual adoration, and with the Renaissance style all that makes it so appropriate a lodging, not indeed for fervor and supplication, but for something in its degree also valuable, for quiet thought and a calm intellectual survey, for that mood, in a word, so dear to the lucid-minded Greeks and to all intellectually inclined generations since. No longer will it seem strange to him that classic architecture is so bereft of the best tinge of the vertical tendency, for how should it be there when that which produces it was absent? And no longer will it seem strange that mediæval art was barren of the horizontal tendency since, obviously enough, all that that tendency stands for was lacking in mediæval life. Each style appears in turn when its equivalent in thought dominates life, nor will it seem anything but inevitable to one arrived at this stage, that immediately the old mundane and rational temper, the temper that loves to look not upward but around, revives, the structural proportions which embody it in architecture should revive along with it.

The mental change precedes the structural. Do not let us be put off

by being told that Renaissance arose out of the discovery of classic remains; as though classic odds and ends had not always been lying about, or as though any one could ever discover anything, in the sense of being able to use it rightly, unless he were already close to the invention of it. The nations of Europe revived classic forms when, and in so far as, they approached the classic point of view, and if they had not discovered the classic horizontalism they would have invented one of their own. Italy was making experiments in this direction when she was drawn by the classic influence; France was making them when she was drawn by Italy. But the only nation, thanks to its insular position and to the influence of the Reformation which cut it off from European ideas, to bring its experiments to the fruition of a style was England. In England alone a Gothic horizontal style, owing nothing to Italy or Latin sources; was ensured out of national conditions. It is to be considered in strict relationship to the change which was taking place in the life of the country, the change which was moulding English society on the lines of practical progress it has since adhered to, which was developing such characteristic types as the squire, the tradesman, the lawyer, the city merchant, to the change, in short, from an exaltedly spiritual to a material and mundane point of view. The Tudor style in England is the last word of Gothic; the last word of Gothic, that is to say of democratic art. Whatever may be the exact estimate formed of it, it will be admitted I believe, by all good judges, that its achievements far surpass in purity and sincerity anything that we have since done in the Latin manner. We have never borrowed from the classic to any real purpose. What have we of classic adaptation to set beside King's College Chapel or Trinity Hall, or the Oxford

colleges, or Montacute, or Cobham, or Ingestre? Our English guilds and artisans have given us all we have, not in the vertical manner only, but in the horizontal also.

Such is England's contribution to the Renaissance. It was but a beginning, and yet how promising! A little while and the prevalent Latin fashion swamped it. With it died the democratic theory of art as a national possession and perquisite of labor. The country was inundated with foreign The Eye-Witness.

ideas and professional architects competent to deal with them. We have been assiduous in imitating, reviving, adapting. Yet still it holds good that none of all our achievements of expert knowledge and taste and skill can equal in the qualities that please lastingly the achievements of an artisan in the days of free labor. That to me is a token full of promise. Only the English people can build, and some day the art of building must be by them resumed.

March Phillips.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Dainty and charming as an old print, fascinating and readable, is "The Luck of Rathcoole," by Mrs. Jeanie Gould Lincoln. The romance is laid in the time of Washington's first administration, and the scene is old New York with all its picturesqueness. Washington's Inauguration, a masked ball, coaches and four, bandits, the shops of the old city, are all parts of the vivid pageant. The "fair women and brave men," who appear in the pages are extremely life-like, and command an involuntary admiration from the beginning. Intrigue, sorrow, joy and good fortune are woven about the fate of a strange jewel which meets with adventures on both sides of the ocean. At last it comes to its own, as the mysterious hero of the romance reveals his identity and wins the inimitable "Miss Moppet." Unlike so many historical novels, this story is never heavy, but it is swiftly moving, sprightly and of unflagging interest. Houghton Mifflin Co.

Since the days of Mr. Paul Leicester Ford's success in constructing a story on the foundation of a contemporary statesman's life, the "favorite son" has

been a shining mark for the novelist, and Mr. Henry Russell Miller's "His Rise to Power" has had so many predecessors that its author can hardly assert that his hero is a novel personage. On the other hand, his heroine is as brave as Elizabeth Tudor's self as she stoops to conquer, and she does her wooing right royally. The vicissitudes through which the hero passes on his way from distinction for simple honesty to the highest office in the gift of his fellow-citizens are artistically interwoven with more than one career familiar to students of contemporary history, and now and then occur scenes not to be read without a decided thrill. Such are those in which the hero's townsmen greet his return to them in the full flush of political triumph, and that in which the defeated financier tells his daughter of his ill-fortune. Mr. Miller has in this book far surpassed "The Man Higher Up." The Bobbs-Merrill Co.

A certain class of fiction does not attempt to give a cross section of life, with characters whose universality startles and pleases. Rather, in some novels, the main purpose is to depict

great emotions or currents of feeling, and the characters are interesting only as human expressions of elemental forces. "Love Like the Sea," by J. E. Patterson, belongs to this latter class. It would be difficult to find another book where the theme is so apparent upon every page, in every sentence. "A problem story of life among the lowly," it has been called, and the author's purpose is to show the similarity between love and the sea. We doubt somewhat if most human beings find the way even of love and sorrow so unmixed as did Mary and Derreck of the story. In real life, humor, and the hold of familiar custom and habit keep people from dwelling forever, without respite upon the plane of emotion. The chief value of the book is its remarkable treatment of the sea, its pictures of shipwreck, storm and calm. Here is the touch of one who knows whereof he speaks, and whose appeal will be felt by all who love the sea. Geo. H. Doran Company.

A story without a villain, without a tragedy, without a single "tense" situation or unpleasant suggestion, T. R. Sullivan's "The Heart of Us" (Houghton Mifflin Co.) makes its appeal to the reader by its clever analysis and vivid portrayal of feminine moods, its keen discernment, and its unfailing good humor. Old Bostonians will find in it an added charm in that it is the Boston of a generation ago which furnishes its setting.-Beacon Hill, the "Avenue," the Common and the Garden. even the "Autocrat" himself, walking briskly down the "long path" and finding the seat under the ginkgo tree preempted. Very likely the Bostonians aforesaid will imagine that they can identify the Temple Theatre, Jarvis and even the blithe Miss Colt. There is a faint suggestion of a long-ago romance which runs through the story like an almost undistinguishable

thread; but the interest centres in a real romance which turns upon the perfectly intelligible but variant moods of a very charming girl, with just a vague suggestion of a third romance which might have been but was not. If this seems enigmatical it is so only that the reader may follow the plot for himself, without any unkind foreshadowings of it to diminish his interest. The story is extremely well told; and it is one which, in these days of perfervid fiction, was well worth telling.

Henry Edward Krehbiel's "Chapters of Opera," first published in 1908, is presented by Henry Holt & Co. in a new, third edition, brought down to the present time by appendices summarizing the performances at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in the seasons 1908-9, 1909-10, and 1910-11, and the seasons at the Manhattan Opera House 1908-9 and 1909-10. As the musical critic of the New York Tribune for more than thirty years Mr. Krehbiel has enjoyed unusual opportunities for close study of his subject. From the stall which he has occupied in the Metropolitan Opera House from its opening in 1883 he has watched the changes in fashions and fads, the coming and going of singers and impresarios, and the rivalries and strifes of competing managements. Of all this and a great deal more he writes with keen critical discrimination and unfailing good sense and good humor. Not the least interesting and diverting chapters are those in which he reviews the history of opera in America from the first English ballad opera at about the middle of the eighteenth century down to the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House. The book is illustrated with more than seventy portraits of singers and pictures of opera houses.

« PreviousContinue »